He moved secretly and in the dark to a higher perch for a better vantage from which to see the eternal city. The name was a mockery. A final pathetic painful joke told by those who never really knew her. She was not what she used to be. It was like looking at a well preserved corpse that drunken people tried to animate in their own horrific stupidity. An attempt to claim that life was still somehow within. But it was a corpse all the same and the people who lived in her were eating her alive…slowly decomposing her until there would be nothing left. Roma had died a long time ago, betrayed by her own children and left to the ravishing hands of the Huns, Visigoths and Vandals. The rampaging darkness from the north had raped her and stolen her beauty while the strange exotic Mohamadians had stormed up from the south to finish her off. Together they washed away her children and left these lost vagabonds in control. There was only one true Roman left in all the world to mourn her death but there were no tears in him. He could stand here and look out over the pale moonlit bones of his mother and yearn for older days, better days…but they were not to be. Nothing was the same any more and he was as dead as she was…perhaps moreso.