With frighteningly fewer options to blame (the last whiteshirts had died childless in their ivory towers) the people soon unearthed a new target, some cousin of Samael, who until very recently had lain decomposing approximately fifty-six metres deep among the red soil of the old hills. He was as tall as an apartment block and had arms as long as telephone poles, and the bones of his wings were showing through his skin like old PVC pipes. When they touched him, he was still warm. He had been rotting under the ground for a very long time.

Well, they trussed him up and hauled him in front of the people's court, which by that time was a raised mound of dirt by the rising sea, upon which the people had once paraded all their hopes and dreams. All the nation was there, all thirty-seven who were left, who were the few and the good and who shared well and ate modestly and took care of the island's crumbling heart.

"You'd started this," cried a people's judge, waving a makeshift gavel in his shrunken, worm-eaten face. "Burnt our old ways out from their zinc roofs and dirt streets, sent us running into our concrete prisons. Look where you've taken us! This mess, these ordealed, tight coils of suffering!"

The angel mumbled and hawed something in a language no one else could speak, for it had been drummed out of them by the radios and circulars from ages long ago. One spectator (not a mere one) jeered that it should stand on its own two feet. The people propping the angel up, they gave it a shove, and the mass of the whole old angel fell in a heap onto the ground, bones snapping and all, and the older ones in the audience gasped at how much he had reminded them of their own fathers. As there wasn't any more sense left to be made of him, they simply left him there to rot, a stationary pile of ash, which is a bit like a reverse Merlion.