While the vast majority perishes in quiet anonymity, a tour of any national monument quickly reveals countless names carved into stone. These names generally identify three classes of people; scribe, conquered and conqueror. Indeed, if anything, life is an endless series of contests, large and small, but these stone-graven records typically ignore the latter for the former. Too often, history overlooks the struggles of mundanity, which perhaps better define those who endure. Pause a reflective moment to ponder the future - anticipate all the boastful elite to be immortalized there. Seeking grandeur in concrete, granite and marble, they will tell. Of dystopias that replace individual freedoms with rigid social order; of government games in assassinations, abandonment, and espionage; of demented human beings living ordinary lives and of ordinary citizens forced into acts of depravity; of wars waged through time and space within the confines of a tormented human mind; such twisted threads weave life's strange tapestry. Of mortal contests, here find many illustrations, and of victors, few.