Introduction:
What is *Preludium but a time to reflect on what it is we know;
What has gone before, and how it might shape those things to come?

Preludium, or, what has gone before:
An entire world,
A great big steaming musty living breathing screaming world and-
For all we know-
There’s but two souls that care to fill it:

Sly Squint, our latest hero,
Swinging through his city like t’were a steaming jungle
And him the proverbial Ape,
He crouches in shadows on rooftops,
Directing his lust, forceful! At all
That kneels before him.

Then there’s our mysterious wanderer-
One hell of a sorry, stinking, sulky sort is he.
No Name to claim yet garbed in rags aplenty
Travelling on an endless quest
Towards a dying dusk.

Yet we need to draw a Third.
See, in this strange place we find ourselves, riddled with danger and loss,
We need one who knows some things;
One who is up there;
Better yet, one who helped to shape this world.
Because for now we are clueless, vulnerable, shambling in darkness.
And that will simply not do.

So, with haste, dear reader, with haste,
Let us ride for the one with the answers;
The one with more Names than you can count, even if you had a lifetime in which to do so;

The one who holds all the strings.

Preludium, or, *what has gone before:
A man makes his way, alone,
Through rocky ash and bluff,
His feet a mass of ****** scabs
His throat gruff with rust.
In his savage thirst he sees, delirious,
The City from whence he flees;
The City that stole his Name.

Furious! O righteous hate;
Bubbling! Consuming! Melding with his haze of pain:
Fickle Justice! Intangible Law! Humble Equity!
Alien words for an alien time
That has quickly descended to muck.

But we must leave this Nameless nomad
To his dark visages, for now.
Perhaps we shall return
To plough his tale and groan
To find him drowned in thirst;
In self-pity, the liquid fire.
For now- to the City, we are bound!
And the mind of one so fortunate, as to still call his Name his own.