Who knows exactly where it began, or how? For as much as a century (or as little as a decade: estimates vary) before it made its appearance on the streets, a small group or cabal somewhere in the City had propogated its fundamental tenet – that the appearance of 'reality'is quite false, a counterfeit or artefact of the human senses. How hesitantly they must have crept from alley to alley to confirm one another in their grotesque beliefs! How shy to confide them! And yet: the War had left our spirits as ruinous as the Cispontine Quarter. We were tired. We were hungry. The coming of the Reborn Men was disheartening, unlooked for, punitive. It left us with a sense of having been replaced. How eagerly in the end we clutched at this pitiless, elegant systemization of one simple nihilistic premise!

'The world is not as we perceive it,'maintained the early converts, 'but infinitely more surprising. We must cultivate a diverse view.'This mild (even naive) truism, however, was to give way rapidly – via a series of secret and bloody heretical splits – to a more radical assertion. A wave of murders, mystifying to the population at large, swept the City. It was during this confused period that the Sign itself first came to light, that simple yet tortuous adaptation of the fortune teller's MANTIS symbol which, cut in steel or silver, swings at the neck of each adherent. Ostlers and merchant princess, soldiers and shopkeepers, astrologers and vagabonds, were discovered sprawled stiffly in the gutters and plazas, strangled in an unknown fashion and their bodies tattooed with symbolical patterns, as the entire council of the Sign, elected by secret ballot from the members of the original cabal, tore itself apart in a grotesque metaphysical dispute. A dreadful sense of immanence beset the City. 'Life is a blasphemy,'announced the Sign. 'Procreation is a blasphemy, for it replicates and fosters the human view of the universe.'