Raving Metropolis

They arrived from overseas to build their city on the river's banks. Dark waters filled by defeated enemy corps soon, which sank into the muddy floor. The plains northwards by the river, covered by a huge forest, were deprived of them trees. Huge firs, majestic oaks and imposing beeches and hornbeams fell off under axe beats, becoming combustible and yielding the land to new buildings. The hills southwards by the river were fortified, horsemen in armour settled in towered castles.

The city grew, got old, filthy streets closed among majestic buildings. It became a metropolis pushed by an unceasing industry. Sub-humans and new Inhuman races members migrated into its suburbs. To become slaves in the factories the weaker ones, soldiers to build an empire the fiercest ones. Just one race, cold and calculating, born in places hidden by mists, ruled ruthless the city and its possessions.

Concrete and stone got the place of forests, a new petrified forest which held, like a casket, jewels made of ancient groves and gardens of dark beauty, place of peace and cemeteries, endless tracts of gravestones and distorted tired trees. And into its meanders inhabited by rats and decayed humanity, a new entity was growing, a Demon, voracious and never sated, fed with the remains of ancient Spirits who had lived the virgin forests and the blood of the flow of new migrant people.

The city grew, sprawling and swallowing the smaller satellite towns up, transforming in a huge organism whose skeleton were dark tunnels used by militia to maintain a iron control even on the derelict outskirts. Century by century, the ruling race shut itself away from the people into always more inaccessible buildings, making just well programmed public appearances, while new forms of control were experimented on the unaware population. A creeping standardization spread slowly street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, from the most ancient city core, until the latest modern outskirts which were quickly built to support the different social classes. As time goes by, all the streets looked alike, while all the buildings assumed alike appearance. The old ones changed, the new ones were built similar the old ones, what couldn't be changed was hidden with neon signs of shop chains having all the same name. Standardized clothes were imposed to the inhabitants. Who tried to hold independent thinking was slowly and without clamour excluded by every chance to improve his condition. Standard minded supervisors were collocated in key positions. Every access to the Knowledge, the true one, was deftly prevented, till the various populations living in the metropolis were reduced to only one people without the capacity to liberate itself.

And while the Pale Lords, bond to every fighting form and violence, just able to fight because not able to feel love and passion to anything else, grew in power and wealth, the poverty grew amongst the subdued populations. The nations conquered by their hordes, stripped and impoverished, became a voluntary slaves basin, attracted by the hope of a better future. Future which, in the beginning, smiled to many people, since the slave wealth made the masters richer. But when things changed in the world, when new wars devastated every land overseas, it was needed to change the exploiting system, since the Demon born from the fusion of bones and metal, dung and blood, which were the metropolis basement and its skeleton, was regularly fed and didn't revolt against those whose sombre minds had been bred. So new masses of slaves were brought to the metropolis, imprisoned in its meanders, exploited to build colossal major work, to take back what had given to their fellow creatures, tortured and slain to the sadistic pleasure of few, and in the end their flesh used to feed the Demon.

Looking at the metropolis from outside, from an hypothetical and suspend point in its sky, it looked unvaried and homogeneous, with streets looking alike laid to surround the magnificent monuments erected to Pale Lords' vainglory. Instead its population was various, the many races different for height and colour painted the roads. Black and red skins, bristly and flowing hair, skinheads, bodies covered by tattoos, fleshes pierced by bones and metals, grown up in symbiosis with electronic devices, bodies weak or strong, obtuse tartars, long-limbs creatures as thin as paper sheet or overloaded by fat masses, gorgeous, deformed, agile and quick, or slow and powerful. But as different their bodies were, all their minds were the same, all their minds were equal, all their minds were, in one or another way, under control.

And in the centre of the whole, and at the same time extended everywhere through the dark tunnels, the Demon, idiot and malicious, laughed and raved and fed himself, growing bigger and bigger inside his shell which was the city itself. And pushing, haunting the inhabitants' waking and sleep, the Demon started to make feel his still incubated strength in flashes of violence, in pure madness triggered by crazy crowds, which pillaging and burning on the streets, or in the gloomy recesses where corrupt cruelty was committed like a wounded wild beast's meal. Someone, amongst the Pale Lords, started fearing it took matters into their hands.

The Demon, raving, is still growing now, fed by sorrow, till he'll break the shell, spreading and poisoning everything will touch.