Terminal Sigma

You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?

The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepend and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be.

For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those white regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds. 

If you could forget about the “interested parties,” a dead body really was something to be disposed of like any other kind of garbage. Garbage was a natural byproduct of human life; and it was nobody else’s business what got thrown away or who did the throwing. Though when the time came, you had to be willing to accept the fact that you, too, would be thrown out with the rest.