Frankfurt bowed down, weighed to the ground under its own ruins. In its way, the gray, ugly city was more to Posleen architectural tastes than were the brighter, homier of the thresh's dwelling places.
But "more" was a far cry from "entirely." Athenalras was not sorry to see his people tearing the place down and rebuilding it in Posleen style. Especially was he not sorry to see the places which armed the threshkreen stripped to bare earth. His clan had suffered greatly, wounds without precedent and without imagining, from their battles with the humans.
"God how I hate the vile abat," muttered the God King lord.
"My lord?" questioned Ro'moloristen.
"I came here, young one, with a bright and shining host. What have I left? Between the threshkreen's radiation weapons, their fighting machines, and their damned artillery and their infantry which refuses to run unless they see an advantage in it, I lead but a pale, bled-out shadow of a clan. The long body of water the thresh call the 'Rhein' is choked to within a few measures of its surface with the bodies of our people. In the east, their rivers Oder and Niesse overflow their banks for all the bodies of the People deposited in them. Their mountains are ringed with our dead. Their fields are carpeted with the remains of the host, sacrilegiously ungathered."
"But my lord . . . we have destroyed them. The Germans reel north and south to barren wastes."
"We have destroyed ourselves. Do not count the humans down, my eson'sora, until the last breeding pair are digested. And that, I fear, we shall never do.
"I wish we had never come to this world," finished Athenalras, lord of the clan.