"The Death of the Centaur" is a short story which is peculiar to "Prayers to Broken Stones". It uses the frame story device: the main story is about the friendship between a literary-inclined teacher (based on Simmons himself) and a poor boy named Terry whom he teaches. The teacher begins telling his class every recess a portion of a fantasy story ("The Story"). This fantasy story is the tale of a centaur named Raul (compare Raul Endymion of "Endymion"), a neo-cat, and a sorcerer-ape who seek to reconnect their world to the "Web of Worlds" by re-connecting a farcaster and seek the humans' help in overthrowing the lizard-ish Wizards who oppress their world. This story is the earliest and first story set in what would become the Hyperion Cantos universe, preceding even "Remembering Siri". Many elements and similarities survived into the later stories (from the name of the centaur Raul, to the concepts of farcasters and the WorldWeb, to the Shrike or the levitation barge or the Sea of Grass). Although the stories did evolve and differ from "The Death of the Centaur" over time there are a number of dissimilarities: in the Cantos, the centaurs of Garden have been exterminated in a genocide by the Hegemony, and the world The Story is set on is "not" cut off from the farcaster network. There are shared elements with other stories in this volume: the neo-cat Gernisavien shows up as regular cat in "Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams".