Prologue: The River of a Thousand Teeth
They came in the night of the new moon, carried on the wind, deadly leaves that were among us before anyone could react. All colors of skin and all manner of sex, no one knew who they were or why they had come. Claws and teeth, spear and ax they hacked their way through our skulls and breasts. Men were gutted and castrated, women split open from ass to skull and their bodies dragged off into the woods. All was chaos; around me were more of these demons than any of the faces I had grown familiar with. My father was castrated by a naked woman's teeth and then she took him into the woods. Through the cacophony I could not make out his screams from the others. A large man knocked me down and squeezed my throat, surely seeking my life. But then there were new men, one black as the night and one white as a moon and they killed the man, showering his blood on my face. His death throws tore away my skirts but my tunic still covered me. Strange, I was near death, my father surely dead,