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In the cities they were beginning to tally the cost of victory, gained at last after years of destructive struggle.

Surveyors were already appraising the mutilated buildings, Managers were directing the necessary demolition of building shells that remained precariously upright. Gangs of the brawnier survivors were using rubble to fill the pot-holes in the roads. Some of the labourers working had been drafted in,part of the first deployment of troops awaiting demobilisation now part of the Army Of Reconstruction.

From the city council down, everyone was eager to erase the evidence of a madness, a grotesque mutual insanity that had laid waste to the civilisation of a continent, spawning numberless tribes of orphans.

There were reunions. Grizzled men, who had been living on time borrowed at they knew not what rate of interest, were beginning to return, seeking information about the survivors of their clans and families .These men, who had played their part in the destruction of their defeated enemy's cities, struggled to comprehend a townscape, once familiar, transformed beyond hope of recognition.

They found it hard to believe that such destruction had been accomplished. Even as they bombarded the enemy's citadels, using the might of mechanised artillery, they knew, they had seen the infernal landscape left behind after the the night blooms had flowered, bright as the noonday.

But this was where home once had been, the home they had dreamed of, where their children were loved and nourished,where stoic mother had made the sacrifices necessary to keep their vulnerable off-spring safe..They must have known how fiercely their enemy would retaliate, yet they stubbornly believed in that distant safe haven, that home to which they would return.

Some few of them, already choking on the fruits of victory, learned how their progeny had been crushed and burned on the night of the first surprise attack Could they, they asked them selves, take comfort from the foreign cities that had been destroyed absolutely by weapons as powerful as the benign, yet flaming, distant sun? Those cities would never be reconstructed, the very ground remaining toxic for generations to come.

They knew that the vaporisation of whole populations could do nothing to restore reality to a remembered smile.