Merchants of Deceit

They were watching...
Listening Ever patient awaiting the time.
For they knew it would come it has always been so.
Thus, forward they came...
An appeal to the heavens, spoken an age ago.
Pleading for answers, offering all that was possessed.
Shaman: scholars of the time close to the answer,
Incapable of reaching perfect enlightenment -
Yet, help they would receive, at a price so immense, ambitious and selfish...
A mistake they should not have made.
Our ancestors- our past has become our demise.
Our ancestral representatives celebrated the arrival
The visitors from the sky...
Joyous with the knowledge that their appeal had been answered.
These visitors - describing themselves as celestial gatherers, traders, explorers.
A half truth.
Masking the deception beneath.
Offering answers...
Knowledge and Truth...
But at a price, A fair exchange...
They requested life...
Aghast...
Apprehensive...
The forefathers refused.
Negotiating; the travellers explained that it would not be their lives;
Not those of the present era.
It Would be the future populous: An age away: An age beyond imagination...
Our age.
Nervously an agreement was made.
The celestial ones prepared to reveal their knowledge with the select few to do with as they saw fit.
The chosen, schooled by the visitors from the sky not foreseeing the knowledge that lag ahead
Not foreseeing the knowledge they would learn...
Unable to be purged from their mind...
Irreversible.
Departing, the travellers were seen no more.
The selected were left with knowledge unimaginable.
Disturbed, overwhelmed - no choice but to cease their own existence.
Their lives had become futile, with their infinite comprehension.
Lives forfeit by their own trembling hands.
Blood spilled instead of answers...
Long forgotten...
Unaware that we must uphold this pact...
A deal that exists despite the weakest of principals
They will fulfil a bizarre religious crusade.
We belong to the celestial ones: The harvesters of the foolish...
Traders and gatherers they are: cunning in their methods.
Exchanging what is required fur their spiritual needs our lives...
Any life unworthy...
Must be halted.
Sustaining their faith.
The unworthy are those who mishandle true insight.
Betraying their future our planet, placed in total stasis...
With no meaningful continuation.
Like countless before, and endless to come.
This is how it will continue...
To save their own being.
Giving a function, a purpose to their all-knowing lives.
This is their belief... to weed out the feeble in the cosmos
Those who do not learn should not progress...
Those without understanding should not continue...