I won’t lie to you, there was a centaur in the loam fields who watched us as we passed. “You don’t come back from there,” he said. “Unless you come back as bodies, still and unbreathing, and I will pull you from yourself and dock your heads and ribs and skullcages on pikes and ride you through the soft low forests; and we shall sing your praises oh us satyrs; and we shall devour what is left of you and there will be nothing of left of you, that I grant you: and I shall plant your leavings in my garden and you will fertilize the flowers that grow for me, and I will weave those flowers into the hair of my mistresses, and when I mount them I shall smell the little pieces of you that is all that is left of you, and no one shall miss you elsewhile little children; you will not even be ghosts, glowing; you will’nt.” 

And we laughed at him for he was only a skinny, rotting centaur whose belly caved beneath his breast, and who stank of peat and sewer. No one listened to the old centaurs, who could not even walk like men; their time was so long past and even we only wanted to lay down deep. We left him there, calling after us, and we disappeared beneath, and as they walked ahead of me I turned and glinted quickly at him, and he would stay stone and no one misses him, and when I mounted my mistresses I would not think of him, no; no…