The glutton sun will live for one more year. Then I'll dye the skins and soften them with their own lard. Tomorrow they'll make a good supply of pliant sheaths hung on the drying stakes, and when the priests awake to dawn half-dark with soot from charnel fires, they'll glide into my limp, light armory like snakes returning to their castoff scales, and slip into them. First the flaccid feet, and then they'll slip their hands into the supple skin, and snug it tight, and then into the head, joining at the crown with the eyeless dead, and finally they'll be laced up at the back by silent and attentive acolytes, and paint with blood the faces of the ones whose visages they wear, and trace the veins of empty men who've been turned inside out, devoid of muscle, sinew, bone and brain. The smoke-red sun is rising, bloodshot eye above the pits where rats have come to feed on what is left of those who once have been.
Vultures flap away, sullen and patient, to the nearby trees.
Their horn beaks oozing red, their dark unthinking eyes absorbed with the excoriated dead.