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She bled out instead of accepting our help
The ruins of the Martian city of Olyh as a bare-fisted brawler, and pissed at the world for breaking her perfect nose I watched on Luna as the Minotaurout until the Reaper himself came with the bloody Seventh to wreak a path of hell all the way to the old seat of Bellona and send the Minotaur scurrying like a kicked puppy
What a sight What a city But while the war moved on, Olympia didn’t
I know her cloud towers fell to become squatter havens west of the city I can see their humps in the distance The rest of the old Bellona capital spills against the northwestern lip of the Olylass shape Each war-battered kilo the architecture of six centuries of stately Bellona taste And it is a fine taste, despite her broken skyline
Only fascists should make cities Demokrats never have a salient thesis
Her air traffic is sparse Cooking fires twirl froates Markets, overgrown grottoes, and old statue parks are filled with bonfires and vagrant tents People live here, but not well
I turn back toward le Rest, citadel of the fallen Bellona, yawns up the tallest s, dancing halls, and villas ascend the winter le
What the hell is going on? Why am I here?
The old senses are triggered, and I feel so to hide I just didn’t see hiest men I’ve ever seen lies on a beast skin in front ofwalnuts in the coals with his bare hands If you can call those hands The right one is huge and twisted like ginger roots
“Do you see your fate in the bones, Grarnir?” he asks in a low, sibilant voice He is bald, black-skinned like many tribes of Mars’s North Pole, and incredibly fat His eyes focus on the coals I glance to the ajar door “A man may run, but none has escaped his fate Yet”
“Who are you?” I ask
His eyes scour the roole’s nest was this To plume his feathers, he went away, and met the man around whom all fray Now he lies in ed by Saturn, on a cold stone floor he found an early autuers and slurps out the ht blue runes swirl across his face, down his bare arh down the fingers of his left hand with rubies and dia left of his ears except keloid-rimmed holes in his head But what he lacks there, he co beetles to disappear behind Greased leather bags litter a scarlet scale belt underneath a glossy cloak of raven feathers
A shaman
I would see the freaks on occasion in the Block Wars, charging naked and high on God’s Bread toward the eneed pricks out like a lance They were always surrounded by insane spirit warriors called skuggi As iion Maybe ic
If he’s here, skuggi will be outside that door My prey instinct shrieks insideslippers and bear fur, so I sit beside hiestures I’m smaller next to his mass than a nine-year-old Gray is to me