The metaphor made real – I can see my old cynical teachers nodding at that. Here, among the Tenescowri, there is no obfuscating the brutal truth. Our rulers devour us. They always have. How could I ever have believed otherwise? I was a soldier, once. I was the violent assertion of someone else’s will.

He had changed, not a difficult truth to recognize in himself. His soul torn by the horrors he saw all around him, the sheer amorality born of hunger and fanaticism, he had been reshaped, twisted almost beyond recognition into something new. The eradication of faith – faith in anything, especially the essential goodness of his kind – had left him cold, hardened and feral.

Yet he would not eat human flesh. Better to devour myself from within, to take my own muscles away, layer by layer, and digest all that I was. This is the last remaining task before me, and it has begun. None the less, he was coming to realize a deeper truth: his resolve was crumbling. No, stay away from that thought.

He had no idea what Anaster had seen in him. Toc played the mute, he was the defier of gifted flesh, he offered to the world nothing but his presence, the sharpness of his lone eye – seeing all that could be seen – and yet the First had descried him, somehow, from the multitudes, had dragged him forth and granted him a lieutenancy.

But I command no-one. Tactics, strategies, the endless difficulties of managing an army even as anarchistic as this one – I attend Anaster’s meetings in silence. I am asked for no opinions. I make no reports. What is it he wants of me?

Suspicions still swirled dark and deep beneath the numbed surface. He wondered if Anaster somehow knew who he was. Was he about to be delivered into the hands of the Seer? It was possible – in what the world had become, anything was possible. Anything and everything. Reality itself had surrendered its rules – the living conceived by the dead, the savage love in the eyes of the women as they mounted a dying prisoner, the flaring hope that they would take within them the corpse’s last seed as it fled – as if the dying body itself sought one last chance to escape the finality of oblivion – even as the soul drowned in darkness. Love, not lust. These women have given their hearts to the moment of death. Should the seed take root. . .

Anaster was the eldest of the first generation. A pale, gangly youth with yellow-stained eyes and lank, black hair, leading the vast army from atop his draught horse. His face was a thing of inhuman beauty, as if no soul resided behind the perfect mask. Women and men of all ages came to him, begging his gentle touch, but he denied them all. Only his mother would he let come close; to stroke his hair, rest a sun-darkened, wrinkled hand on his shoulder.