The Millennium Army
Coming north to the city states are the marching boots of The Millennium Army. They drag great machines that conjure the sun itself, and each man carries with him a rifle that roars like a dragon and spews forth hot lead that kills any man or monster. The Knights of the Lake, who long ago lost all humanity, had long ago been twisted into strange forms like nightmares racing in pursuit of a private, inscrutable justice, were shot just the same as any man; so claims the Generalissmo who, moustache bristling, leads the Army. The women of the Red Scarves who work fearsome curses were killed, heads lopped off and left to rot on pikes as a warning that not all should be buried equal. An organism must be productive, the Generalissmo proclaims, and insofar as that production can be quantified a value can be determined: it is this value that decides a rightful burial.
Like time, the Army is inexorable.
Soon it will come to The Ridge and here be tested. Our great city is a bridge to the Sea of Flowers; it is a bastion that guards the city states, a portal between north and south. Our cavaliers ride many handed beasts, our surgeons know how to take one man's limb and change it for another's, so that our soldiers are unkillable, our workers indefatigable. We do not need their machines, nor their rails; where the Red Scarves say all are equal in death, the Millennium Army says all are equal in life, that each man is given the same opportunities. They say they will free both slaves and aristocrats from their burdens and allow them to live honest lives, the same as any other. Yet rain falls first on gilded roofs, then down to those streets below where houses are built into the mountain, to gutters, to sewers. Their machines may howl, may scream, but a machine will never do what a man can do, nor change the station of anyone's birth.
"I am a Natural Man," say the soldiers of the Millennium Army, as if our bodies are changed flippantly. That is wrong: our bodies are changed to reflect that what we are; a miner mines, and when he needs those hands no longer will they be given to another; a beauty may keep her face forever, her smile locked in place so she will always be happy; our lowest slaves will have a chain made of their own bones, and will always rattle and be known; and our Glorious King will live forever, and has heads enough for His wisdom, and hands enough for His work—for it is through Him our city lives. Among our heroes it is only the slave fighter Lido who is a Natural Man, for he was born perfect in himself, and needs no help in being immortalized.
If time is inexorable we have shown that we may be changed, that limbs can be grown like plants and men changed into women; thus we will be changed again, and the Millennium Army will be rebuffed, never to know the beauty and terror of the Sea of Flowers.