I have stood knee deep in mud and bone filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees; I have murdured dissidents where the ground never thaws and starved the masses into faith. A child's shadow burnt into brickwork. A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved. This is your coming century! They will eat them Mandus, they will make pigs of you all and they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will eat your hearts! I lay there and watched the God I had created die. At the end when were cold as the sone we had hewn his body from. When the lights were nearly all extinguished. We heard in the silent distance, the Manpigs singing to one another. Then, as the last lights were gone, and we lay togheter in the deep, they drifted away and all was silent. Such a silence I have never known. And as the dust settled on my open eyes, and we lay togheter embraced forever, I hear, miles above us, the sound of the city turning over in its sleep. A church bell ringing out, and in that moment, the new century was born.
