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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") 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. 

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.