Global Minima

Kazuo wakes ragged and bleeding in squalid alleyways, cursing the dawn's persistence. In tattered finery, he slogs through mud-slicked streets where peasant feet now proudly trample artifacts of his grandeur. Each face passes by unbowed and oblivious, no longer frozen in reverence or terror before his strutting.

This common filth can't fathom his dizzying ascent from gutters darker than theirs. Nor his silken splendor atop gilded palanquin borne on shoulders of genuflecting rivals. HowKazuo savored their envy and outrage masked behind painted smiles and courtesies.

Now libations he once guzzled from jewel-crusted chalices spill down peasant gullets. Their grubby fingerprints smear priceless paintings plundered as trophies. Runt urchins play violent games of palace coup amidst toppled columns that once magnified Kazuo's power for kilometers in every direction.

Seething rage swirls kaleidoscopically behind Kazuo's bleary, bloodshot eyes while broken teeth grind his last opulent feast into digesting anguish. He'd give every useless limb to recover one glorious hour when diamond-studded swords haloed his every pronouncement with invincibility.

Instead this disgraced pariah sleeps among piss and vermin, tormented by phantom echoes of plebian laughter at news of their former lord and tormentor's reversing fortunes. Kazuo now certifies rock bottom is no fable - just an abyss of funk and suffering awaiting any who dare grab heavens, if only briefly, by throat and tongue through merciless climb. In this darkness, vows of resurrection smolder slow but certain.