They've gone up into the mountains and built a city that stretches into the clouds. Any stranger who begins the climb will be shot before they get very far. But then we get the news that their leader has been killed. It's very cold, and they must be starving, the old people and the children huddled up in blankets up there. We invade. We bring the future. The future is for the women and those that do good. So we kill them when we find them, men of the past and old women so weathered by hardships they've forgotten how to be soft. Only those who can argue well that they have a place in the kingdoms of tomorrow are left alive and allowed to leave over the ocean.

We judge them worthy by their arguments, and let the Northern Wind live, as he declares himself shaped by Modernity, a figure of speech as much as an old force of nature. It would turn out to be a mistake, of course.