| 0 | A soldier came to us from the army of the Pretender, a deserter - "follow me", it said - "and I will show you where he bleeds" |
| 0 | we followed: as centuries passed, our guns became curse-rifles and our ships turned into demons, yet we turned our backs on war |
| 0 | but in the purple light of the heavy star a blow was struck, and we cursed our hands as they grew into talons, and sang out regret as we choked our enemies with our own entrails |
| 0 | Alongside the battle, those in the twilight nebula sat, watching and biding their time. They were farmers and machinists, midwives and poets; they too knew Death. |
| 0 | It came to be called the War of Accretion; and its violence tore asunder the laws of Gravity itself |
| 0 | and the grief of civilisations rang out into the depths of time |
| 0 | We brooked no heroes, yet they whispered of the Saint who massacred a trillion soldiers on the cusp of Orion |
| 0 | We pursued him on a gossamer thread of stars, through the heart of the dark galaxy, and there impaled him on a spire of crystallized time |
| 0 | Flowers grew along the paths where the bodies of the fallen had sprouted vines to tear apart their enemies |
| 0 | In the emptiness beyond emptinesses, between the galaxies, between the Weight and the Light, the last hunter writes into the ultraviolet rings of the final supernovae: |
| 0 | “An end to endings: a war to end wars: the lie. An ethnography of the vacuum, writ in spinal fluid and dark matter. We have come to know that we are not luminous; only opaque beyond understanding, unending and inevitable" |
| 0 | and at the end of space and time, we flayed the body of the ancient enemy and made his body into food for stars and the birth of new constellations |