a great garden appeared , filled with monstrous creatures ; there was a dark city on fire , huge clouds in the shape of mushrooms and bigger than cathedrals or palaces ; an army on the march , but an army unlike any ezio had ever seen or even imagined could exist ; starving people in striped uniforms driven into brick buildings by men with whips and dogs ; tall chimneys belching smoke ; spiralling stars and planets ; men in weird armour rolling in the blackness of space - and there , too , was another ezio , another leonardo , and mario and machiavelli , and more and more of them , the dupes of time itself , tumbling helplessly over and over in the air , the playthings of a mighty wind , which now indeed seemed to roar around the room they were in .