8:124) Dirk Flinthart 04-FEB-98 9:46

In days of once-upon-a-time you were most terrible of all. Greyest of rogues, more evil than sorcerors; Mere devils dissolved to nothing at your touch. There were none so strong they might resist your grey-tongued onslaught. More fell than steel, the deadly drone of your dust-dry catechism, pitilessly reasoned genocide.

One by one, or in their numbers banished. Jack himself fell prey when you abolished all his giants, live and dead alike. And Arthur: hauled from unsuspecting glory in far Avalon. Excalibur could not cut your chains.

Whole worlds. Barsoom and Shangri-la Hy-Brasil and Lyonesse the Lost, and O: the towers of Tir na n'Ogth, the golden spires of Atlantis, spurned beneath your heel.

Careless of your conquests, you made no shift to save them, throwing dust across their shattered lovely bodies as you passed, relentless in your massacre of innocents.

One by one, or in their numbers gone forever: bright Dragons, brave tailors, wicked witches, talking beasts. Condemned all frogs everywhere never to become princes Unhorned the unicorn, drowned the mermaids, wrapped everything, cutting corners, edges neatly trimmed, in precise and mathematical shrouds.

And in your wake we picked amongst lathe and tinsel, cut glass and tin, thick-stringed puppets sagging on the tawdry stage. Clockworks, drunken whirring innards splayed. Springs unwinding: tick-tock, tick-tock tik-tok to stillness.