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generator: pandoc
title: '2010-08-29-book'
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This is going to be part of the prologue to the book, and this
is [t](http://burninghotelsdown.tumblr.com/post/468019194/five-oh "prologue")[he
original
passage.](http://burninghotelsdown.tumblr.com/post/468019194/five-oh "Prologue")Â This,
and the rest of the book are going to need massive editing - I've
already begun to pick errors up...
Prologue
I met up with some of my comrades sometime after the war; we all served
in the same battalion. There were six-hundred-and-sixty-six of us in the
6th battalion, none of us died. I remember that our Lieutenant Colonel
was insane, he had an obsession with tapping on window-panes, whenever
he saw them he tapped at them furiously -- he would crawl through rubble
to satiate his obsession with the glass. If we took shelling from the
enemy, he would disappear into the wilderness for several days,
returning dishevelled and incomprehensible. The man slowly went insane,
and we had him replaced with a private sometime during the war, just
after we dissolved the companies within the battalion and began to float
around in a big group. We marched dead south -- as per our vague, poorly
communicated orders -- following the river and then the beaches of the
Great Lake to find enemy secrets. We never found anything, and I
remember we followed that water until we left our country, passing coal
mines, churches, castles and poor people wearing overalls.
Every now and then we encountered massive, wheeled iron beasts that
spewed shells and black clouds into the sky, but whenever things got
tough, another battalion from our brigade would appear and the beast
would roll on by. We met priests who flicked strange water at us that
caused us to experience great indigestion and suffer sleepless nights.Â
When we reached the south sea we turned back and marched home. We
decided to partly march through the desert, and we saw mounds of charred
Jousen corpses outside every commune, and women with children born from
rape. Upon returning two years later, having fought packs of defected
vigilantes intermittently along the way, we found Nela razed to the
ground, four of the enormous iron beasts laying eerily destroyed just
beyond the city's limits.
We had been away long enough for the ruins to have become like hanging
gardens, as the earth had begun to reclaim land it had been severed from
for centuries, sending grass and running vines up every man made
structure still erect. We sifted through the remains of our old city for
less than a week before finding what was left of its inhabitants. Only
around two thousand of its previous millions were then residing in
Nela's north, an ancient area that had been relatively unharmed by
shells, unlike the rest of the place. We thought there would be more
people and city left when we first found them, but the survivors soon
dispelled our doubts. These were the last of our giant city.
Rice paddies and fields of rye had spring up all around the old
industrial districts where pumping stations could still be operated, and
it was now not uncommon to call the old factory next to the plot of land
on which you farmed your home. In places where the war had been more
ruinous, the inhabitants fashioned earthen walls where there were none,
pulling up wood and thatching to replace long-destroyed roofs, and in
some places, at night, neighbourhoods would all share dinner together
either out in the open, or in long rooms that resembled beer-halls.
This was all a far cry from what I remembered of Nela.
Our battalion settled in, picked up shovels and saddles, and turned in
our rifles. I began to work the land for an elderly couple, who grew
tubers for alcohol, and for a time, life seemed blissfully serene, it
seemed like these survivors were catching up on a decade's lost sleep,
and after every sunrise another dark ring was removed from their eyes.
That was, at least, until what happened the month before I was
introduced to Harkoff.