“DANES!!! Danes Danes Danes” a voice screamed in Battuta’s head. He shook himself awake. In those last terrifying moments the Vikings’ swords had shrunk, their terrible beards disappeared, hard calloused hands turning soft and holding… pens? He licked his lips and thought he tasted butter.

The dreams lingered as he prepared coffee from beans flown across a world so different than that of his birth. Bad dreams had been coming clear and steady for several years now, a swirl: bushes burning the homes of others, burning treasured traditions, burning but claiming to build, murderous vice-leaders, towers falling, and now, now… Danes. “Danes. Danes. Danes. Danes,” a thought that slapped against his brain with stupefying regularity like a scratched techno disc. “All madness.”

Madness: the world consuming itself, becoming chaos, as if all Hindu gods had at once become manifest, gods of flight and of war and of destruction, many-handed gods, gods of water and lakes, gods of building. Those gods in particular now lived on this desert plain, this former seabed, this seabed-to-return if the gods of global warmth once again have their way, as it now is certain they will. As the hands of humans turn dirt concrete, pile it ever-higher into spaces newly filled with gaudy idiocy, in the ocean other sentient beings muse their days away, their traffic problems so distant from the daily clash of Sheikh Zayed Road.