???'s POV
Here in the Victorian-style main headquarters of the Fahrenheit 451 sector in Manchester, England, I was giving a speech at the death creatures as young people who wanted to join our forces. I, James Vass, a death creature who was the lead fire chief of the Fahrenheit 451 sector, spoke of Kal's atrocities against the humans and how we were under his spell to "harvest" this world for his nihilistic goals. In the great hall that had the Georgian architecture, there were stained glass portraits of prominent writers like William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Virgil, Tacitus, Homer, Voltaire, and Seneca. And in a bigger stained glass on the main doorway laid a depiction of Kal being burned in the fiery Abyss with the Phoenix in the smoke turning into books.
"We had been deceived by Kal," I spoke to them; my voice was amplified for the hall of this size, "he made you, all of us, think that knowledge is a curse to our existence and society and must burned them. But it was an act of deception that stripped off the intellectual beauty of this world, and it was a foundation for the civilizations of this world across the 3,000 or more years of history. He had corrupted the profession of a fireman and the number 451.
Now that Kal is gone and burning in the Abyss below, we had inherited a world that was free, empty, and hauntingly silent. For 3 years, we had buried our dead victims, tore down the nihilistic brutalist buildings, and rebuilt the traditional beauty of this world and its human societies.
Books are not just folded pieces of paper bound with thread and glue, they are fictional worlds of stories and libraries of all the knowledge the humans gained, discovered, and figured out for thousands of years. They are precious, the language of human thought."
After that, the recruits' first lesson for this morning was to copy books of their choice by hand, either with traditional quills or modern, smudge-free ballpoint pens. The second one happened after lunch, where they were taught about the Phoenix Self-Immolation method our Spanish brothers of the fire had pioneered. They burned each other, in their fireproof fireman suits, with their flamethrowers and regenerated themselves. They saw the Phoenix forming in the smoke and turning into precious books, both modern paperback and traditional hardcover ones.
As I monitored from a balcony on them down the courtyard with Neoclassical columns, I looked at the sky, thinking of the souls of the dead humans, both the ones who were famous pen-wielders (writers and poets) and the ones who were their readers, watching over us.