Normally Tits doesn’t give a hot fuck what happens in the parks, on account of it’s usually empty words and full cocks, but lately something’s set her city aroil like a nest full of hornets. The poets and the socialists are armed to the teeth and there’s a new one dead every day for a month before she figures she has to step in.
“Look,” she tells the sad-mouthed boy facedown in a fountain, “what the hell goes on here? What’s got you kickin’ up, my breaker of words?” Gurgles, mostly, so she hauls him up by his hair and lets him get one lungful in, two, before she slaps his mouth hard on his teeth. “Talk to me, sweet summer’s child.”
“War,” he grins through a copper jawful of blood. “War and fire and new beginnings. Thursday is coming, and he’ll drag you down, all of you down, to the mud and the snakes and a ruby-bright stone.” Useless chatter, so she pushes him back under water and leaves him there till life comes foaming out of his nose.
War, huh. She’s an old hand at war, the bloody spirit of the times, a walking apocalypse already. Let cities and nations fall: she’ll be riding the cycle with a sword in her mouth.