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The blade of Kronmorr swung out fast as a viper’s-eye, parting the head of the degenerate, leering, gibbering cultist from his misshapen body, which – missing its wits but slightly – fought on blindly for some three breathes before collapsing in a sullen slump. The sound of its crude adze tumbled from its slackened grip with a clatter was loud in the room, for even after slaying two dozen drooling half-human wretches the breath of Kronmorr was unfettered by civilized man and remained steady and deep, a bellows powering an unstoppable engine.

A small gasp broke the silence: an irrepressible outburst from the extremely damsel chained to the altar. A mix of lingering fear, happy surprise, and growing awe. “You killed them all,” she whispered in a voice like candied honeysuckle. “The cult of the turtle-eater will surely seek vengeance.”

“They will fare no better,” said Kronmorr in his cold-stone voice. His blade flashed again and the chains fell apart with implausible ease, bronze cleaved like cheese by the steel he had claimed by conquest from the cambion-king’s crypt.

“Then might I accompany you for a time, my hero,” purred the damsel like a big sweaty languorous cat, stretching her freed limbs with liquid relief, “to share in your protection?”

In that moment, a peculiar thing happened: Kronmorr did not sigh.

But he did think about it.

Instead he nodded grimly, raised his steel, and hacked a path through the ghouls of the secret passage, out into the gullets of the beast-birds haunting the hidden cliffside staircase, and into the thick of the fish-gaunts gurgling at the ruins of the ancient docks, where he and the damsel boarded a small skiff and he rowed them twenty miles downriver to the relative safety of the harbours of the rancid city Faek-namm in great speed, for his muscles were unfettered by civilized man. There they found an inn and spent the night peacefully, until two in the morning where the damsel attempted to put a witch-blade between Kronmorr’s ribs.

“I was to be granted highest honour,” she hissed as she tugged fruitlessly against his grip on her blade-hand, uncaring of cuts and scratches and kicks. “I was to be the True Turtle of this year, to be enshrined and ascended unto his left claw!”

In that moment, a peculiar thing happened: Kronmorr did not shut his eyes.

But he did think about it.

Instead, he sprained her wrist, took the witch-blade, and sold it to get out of town in a hurry, only to wake and find the caravan he was in under siege by raiders. His blade swung out fast as a viper’s-eye, but after killing a mere sixteen of them single-handedly he was ensnared by nets and brought to meet their beautiful and deadly chieftess, who decreed he would either serve her or be fed to the Hoongrbees.

“What say you, slave?” she sneered at him from atop her gilded throne and her equally gilded outfit.

In that moment, a peculiar thing happened: Kronmorr did not say “I’m sick of this.”
But he did think it.

And after the Hoongrbees was slain and he’d stolen the emeralds from the throne and escaped into the dark with a new sword already stained with the watery blood of three dozen more hominids, he thought it again; and after a market-maid saw his sword and thought him a raider and he was imprisoned and sentenced to hang, he thought it again; and after he cut through the whole city guard and dispatched the corrupted and venal Bloat-Duke of Bloolubbar, he thought it again; and after he departed the burning city with a single horse carrying him, the Bloat-Duke’s beautiful daughter, and as much of the treasury as possible, he thought it again; and when he woke up and the Bloat-Duke’s beautiful daughter and the horse and the treasure were missing he said it aloud.

“I’m sick of this.”

And once he said it aloud, there was no taking it back. Not from the air, not from his mind. So he took his unhorsed feet and his already-worn-down raider sword and he strode down a path he remembered from so long ago.

It took sixteen days and nights without food and with the only water acquired from sucking on damp stones, but Kronmorr was unfettered by civilized man and so suffered these minor privations with ease. And when those sixteen days and nights were done, he stood before that place his mind ached to recall. Where the great loop of his life had begun, and where he had brought himself in return, as the fish might to its spawn

To the tower of the sorcerer.

***

It was tall, tall, tall – sixteen stories if it were an inch – and crafted from dark and dirtied brick. Metal spiderwebs clung to its skull-cap and its side; many windows jutted from its furrowed brows, and from one of them far away a distant clack, clack sounded, cold and dead. Its door lay open and unbarred, for who would dare enter the dwelling of a sorcerer without permission?

Kronmorr had no permission and asked for none, from the sorcerer, from anyone, from the world itself. The open door was no obstacle. No door would be an obstacle.

What was some difficulty was the moat.

It lay wide but shallow, a drifting reef of shattered sheets of paper, each crumpled and torn and scrawled on. They shuffled like leaves in a wind, but there was no wind, and they surrounded the tower of the sorcerer in a perfect ring with no drawbridge in sight.

Kronmorr did not take a deep breath, for as mentioned previously the breath of Kronmorr was always unflinchingly steady and deep. He prowled to the edge of the moat, sword in hand, and he dove with the perfect arc of a leaping salmon.

Instantly, he was buried, and though he did not sink as in water the paper nevertheless sought to draw him down. The leaves were cold and smeared with a foul blackened ink that sought to cling to skin, but Kronmorr’s hide was unfettered by civilized man and the gnawing toxic teeth of the sorcerer’s-brew found no purchase against his leathered back. The leaves were sharp at the edges and sliced and chewed at his limbs, but Kronmorr’s sinew and muscles were unfettered by civilized man and no matter how shallow and cruelly long the carving of his skin, his strokes did not falter. The leaves were endless and vision failed, but Kronmorr’s will was unfettered by civilized man and he did not slow, did not despair, did not halt, did not think. He only acted, and it may have taken ten minutes or a thousand for him to reach the other side and it did not matter which, only that he did.

He stood there for an instant at the threshold. Listening.

It was not silent. Whatever awaited him did not fear him. Life stirred within the tower of the sorcerer.

So be it. Kronmorr did not fear life either. And so, loins not even bothered to be girded, he plunged into the dim light. Down flickering halls trod the feet of Kronmorr; past endless rows of doors and murmuring voices of madness. Two staircases confronted him: one deep and dark and smelling of dungeon and rot; the other high and rickety and with steps half-broken-loose to show clear (dim, damp) air underfoot.

Kronmorr ascended. He remembered this. He remembered the squeaky floorboards on the landings, and sprang lithely over them to avoid alerting the rats. He remembered the Forbidden Third Floor and simply climbed over the bannister and leapt past it. He remembered the missing step on the sixth floor; the missing two steps on the eighth floor; the staircase ending suddenly at the tenth floor and the subsequent hunt for the new staircase, and then the eleventh floor was before him and Kronmorr knew he was almost there. He recognized the sickly bile-green of the carpeting that clung, lichenlike, to the bare soles of his feet. He recognized the lack of light; the enshrouded and dust-coated window at the end of the hallway. He recognized the door at the end of the hall.

What he didn’t recognize was the guard-beast that lurked there. It was ten feet tall and had six heads and each head had two mouths and each mouth had three forked tongues and every head was pressed against the door Kronmorr sought, whispering profane insinuations. This permitted him to remove the first two heads with very little trouble.

The beast sprang up with a roar and a tumult, but a roar is not a bite and thus Kronmorr claimed two more heads. The last were the canniest and many a blow was struck, but in the end the thing was slowed by pain and shock and self-doubt while Kronmorr was unfettered by civilized man, and so the shape of the end was itself unsurprising.            

The door was wooden and warped; its principal resistance coming as much from its water-swollen frame as its lock, which Kronmorr removed with a careless nudge of his foot. He

forced his way through, into the sanctum of the building. A powerful reek of old milk and laundry assailed his keen senses, but he cared not for such things. For in the center of the room lay the forge of the sorcerer.

***

It was black, cold black, and of a metal alien to him, turned in hard square shapes and with gaping maw. From that maw jutted a hundred little insect-like arms in array, and each arm brandished a tiny plate emblazoned with a foul arcane sigil, and as each was depressed and released they barked out a sharp, brutal CLACK, CLACK, CLACK-CLICKETY-CLACK. Atop its skull roiled a sheaf of paper, scarred and torn by runes and scrawlings.

Behind the forge sat the sorcerer. He was short and balding and wore metal frames with glass in them over his eyes, perched against his nose. He was totally unarmed and hadn’t bothered to look up.

“Sorcerer,” said Kronmorr, his bare sword jutting forth like the accusatory finger of a lesser man, “it is time for us to exchange words.”

“Can’t,” said the sorcerer shortly. His voice was raspy with a tinge of mucus to it; unused, unpleasant. “Got a deadline.”

“So do I. It stretches the breadth of this blade’s edge and you will meet it if you should choose to ignore me one second longer.”

The sorcerer chuckled at that, but it was as absent as his gaze. His mind was elsewhere. “Listen, Kronmorr, whatever you want, I promise I don’t have time for it.”

“You will make time, or you will die. I wish to be free.”
“Free from what?”
“This… curse. This THING you’ve done to me. I cannot lose a fight, unless it is to render me captive and thereby bring me to a more exciting fight, which I cannot lose. I cannot find affection, only the insinuation of it that ends in inevitable betrayal. I cannot greet an old friend without them turning on me or perishing. I cannot have a moment’s rest, but that it will pass in a blur and I find myself once again on some mad quest.” The words spilled out of him like a hole had been carved into his trachea. “It extends to even the most base facts of my being. I cannot walk – I stride, or prowl, or charge. I cannot eat, only feast or gnaw. I cannot sleep – I wake with catlike reflex. I cannot enjoy a single thing; only stare with granite eyes and a grim set to my jaw. I do not have a LIFE, sorcerer, only an EXISTENCE. And it is an intolerable one. Remove your curse from me, or I will end you as surely as I slew your guard-beast.”

“Uh-huh. Well, that’s real sad, but truth is? It’s not happening. Ever.”

It was wrong. It was all wrong. The sorcerer was smiling – yellowed, bent-toothed, inescapable. The keen eyes of Kronmorr could see something brown caught in between his incisors. “That beast you slew outside my door? That wasn’t my guardian, Kronmorr. It was my JAILER. My edot’tarr. And now that he’s gone? I, too, am unfettered by civilized man.”
“No,” said Kronmorr. But it came out all wrong; stuttered and whispered and afraid, deeply afraid.

“Oh yes, buddy,” said the sorcerer. He was nodding now, nodding from the glee that could no longer be contained within his smile, letting it roll out from him and spill over the rest of his body. “It’s you and me and nothing between us now, and you best believe the ride ain’t stopping anytime soon because I have bills to pay and a whole-new-ball-game of inspiration is flowing. The vault is open and the security guard is dead and the money is pouring out into the streets. Every damsel you meet is going to be even more nubile, Kronmorr, and they’ll leave you even faster. Every foe you battle will be half-again more degenerate. Your sword is going to swing TWICE as fast as a viper’s-eye now, Kronmorr, and you’re going to swing it five times more often!”

“No…” begged Kronmorr, and oh god that was the only word, the only word to describe the way he spoke. Please no. Please, please, anything but that.

“Get ready for names to have a lot more apostrophe’s, Kronmorr. You’re going to visit cities like Jang’mar. You’re going to meet people like Che’koll’dor’oc. Every’one. Ev’ery’thi’ing.”
“No!” and it was louder but even more desperate – sputtered, a whimpering verging on a wail.

“And Kronmorr, old buddy, old pal, my old friend, my gravy train without brakes,” the terrible, awful voice dipped a little – conspiratorial, gleeful, filled with the camaraderie of the torturer to his guest – “you can kiss your muscles and sinews goodbye. Because now? Now we’re talking thews.”

“NOOOOOOOO!” screamed Kronmorr, a cry not of the enraged berserk, but of a soul torn past its bonds, and lo, his sword swung twice as fast as a viper’s-eye, only it struck naught but empty air and he was left alone with only the dust of an empty room and the memory of a gleeful, snot-ridden chuckle and the distant, inescapable, all-consuming clack-clack-clack-clickety-clack of the awful, terrible sorcerer’s machine.

The hills had been raised up and the valleys dug low. The sky was set up and the sun bob-a-link bobbed-a-long through it, burning bright. The seas were deep and wide and bright and dark.

It had been a busy week for the Maker. They’d dug and piled and breathed and sweat for any amount of time and now they were exhausted. Time didn’t exist yet – that was next week’s project – but it was time for time off.

So they were inventing tea. Pretty simple stuff; leaves go in water, tea comes out. The tricky bit was twofold.

First, the Maker needed manipulative capabilities. So they were going bipedal for the moment, for the vantage point and angles of mobility. They’d been a quadruped and a hexapod and had no limbs at all for a lot of the recent work, so in theory this was a refreshing change. In practice, it made them wobbly.

Second, the tea wasn’t coming out. All they had were leaves in water, floating in a little clay depression.

The Maker poked the leaves in water. Tea still didn’t come out.

“Well, I’m all out of ideas,” they said to themselves. “Better do the usual thing instead.”

So the Maker reached down to the ground and picked up a little stone in their beak and rolled it around six times – back to front and side to side and back again – and when they were done it was hot, red hot, so hot it scorched their beak black against their blue-and-white plumage, and they spat it out into the leaves in water with a loud, raucous yell of indignation.

“SHIT!” they added. And then: “oh, it’s working!” And of course: “I meant to do that.”

And indeed, and it was, and they hadn’t, and that was fine. Most of the Maker’s best work happened when they didn’t mean to do something.

When the leaves in water were gone and there was nothing but tea, the maker dipped their beak in and swallowed it all down, gulp gulp gulp, hot hot hot, until the tea was gone and all that remained was a clay depression with a little cracked stone in it.

“Not bad,” said the Maker. And they went away, because in the span of a drink of tea they’d had so many new ideas come to their head and none of them were real yet.

The clay depression sat there.

The little stone sat there in there clay depression.

And then, all at once and all on its own, it realized it was still steaming. Something was making that heat stay inside it, even after it had spilled out into the Maker’s beak and the water with leaves in it and the tea. Something was making it hiss and spark and glow.

It didn’t like it. It didn’t like it one bit.

Someone should know about that.

***

It wasn’t hard to find the person the little stone so wanted to inform of their new feelings. They were right up in the middle of the sky, making fat, puffy, wispy, gloriously sunny clouds. They looked as soft and comfortable as a grandmother’s love and the little stone felt the heat inside it boil even higher at the sight.

Oh, it didn’t like the clouds, and it didn’t like love, and it didn’t like the sky, and most of all it didn’t like the Maker up there. And it itched and steamed and burned inside – especially where its crack ached – and tore up the ground in a big fuss.

That gave it an idea. An idea on how to communicate its feelings to the Maker.

So the little stone tore up the ground even harder, a hundred times harder – a thousand, a million – and it rent it away until where the ground had been there was only a gaping hole. Then it covered it with some branches and shouted.

“Hey! Hey you up there! In the clouds! Hey you! Here! Down here! Come here!”
And the Maker heard the little stone very quickly because although clouds were wonderful you could get bored of them eventually, and so they also came down to the little stone very quickly, and because they were doing all of this so very quickly and not very carefully at all they rushed over the hole in the ground and fell through the branches with a crack and a thud.

“Oh!” said the Maker with great happiness. “Did you mean to show me this? How wonderful! But I think there’s room for more, yes there is. I wonder what water would do if you poured it in here?” And they breathed in deep and hard and spat a long stream of water that carved deeper into the ground and melted away great pockets in the earth carved into the rock, with stone fangs dripping from the ceiling and piling on the floor.

“I bet bats would like this,” said the Maker thoughtfully. “Oh! I should make bats! Thank you, little stone!” And they left in a great hurry.

The little stone lay there on the ground, unmoving to a casual eye. A more professional one would’ve seen the dirt begin to steam around it.

***

After sitting there and steaming for some time, the little stone realized it had lost sightt of the Maker, which only made its feelings stronger. It rolled off on their trail, following the path of new things and older things made new again, and it did so even as the path grew steep and stony and brittle. The Maker was in the high places of the world again, making lichens and pikas; crafting dwarf pines and lonely eagles, and although they could move through those places as easily as they pleased with wings and many legs and quick feet it was a difficult, awkward, endless climb for a little stone, fraught with tumbles and backtracking.. It took the little stone a long while to find them again, and when it did it realized its mistake: it had overshot them and crawled near to the very peak of the mountain – a hard grey flat edge under a hard grey flat sky – while the Maker had dawdled below in a small vale, creating some sort of yellow flower.

The little stone looked at the maker and looked at the flowers and it felt the feeling in its innards grow all out of control until it shook and rocked and knocked against the stone beneath it, over and over and over until the mountain groaned along with it.

Then grumbled.

Then crumbled.

Then fell down, down, down in a hail of stones, a torrent, a river, a glacier of rolling rubble and rock that shot down towards the Maker. At its vanguard soared the little stone, so filled with surprise and speed and power that it forgot everything else. For an instant, just an instant, it was a part of the biggest thing to ever happen.

Then gravity won.

When the little stone stopped rolling its crack was twice as large as before, it was covered in dust, and it could hear the Maker loudly talking right above it.

“Dancing from rock to rock is very difficult! Having rocks bounce off your head is even MORE difficult! But this all makes me think it’s doable, yes it is – oh! What if I did it like this, and this, and this –” and so on and so on until four dainty hooves click-clacked around the little stone, and the first bighorn hopped away over the boulder-strewn surface of the meadow.

“That was good luck!” said the Maker. And this made the little stone scream.

“Hello?”
“YOU!” screamed the little stone. “YOU!”
“Me?” said the Maker.

“PICK ME UP,” seethed the little stone.

The Maker did so. “What now?”
“Now BASH YOUR HEAD IN WITH ME!” said the little stone. “PAINT THOSE FLOWERS RED! SPATTER THE LANDSCAPE! KEEP GOING UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT BUT CALCIUM FRAGMENTS AND STRAY BITS OF HAEMOLYMPH!”

The Maker furrowed their brow. “Oh. OH! Using pieces of the environment as a device to make things happen, like exerting force or shaping others! Yes. Yes! But more complicated than that. What if-”

The little stone screamed again. This time it didn’t stop until it passed out.

***

When it woke up, it was sitting in a little grass-woven pouch dangling from the Maker’s side and the air was warming. They were downslope of the mountains again, probably in a valley.

“Hello,” said the Maker. “Do you feel a little better?”
“No,” said the little stone.

“That’s fair. Do you feel different?”
“Yes,” said the little stone. “I was steaming and heated and couldn’t sit still before and I wanted you to be very badly hurt. Now I just feel tired and awful.”
“It’s my fault,” said the Maker, contritely. “I didn’t see what you were doing. You’ve made something new, haven’t you?”
“I haven’t made anything,” said the little stone morosely. “You made my pit-trap into caves. You made my avalanche into bighorns. You made my murder attempt into tools. You even made this crack in my side that’s made me all this way.”
“I did do all those things,” said the Maker. “But I did it without paying attention to what you managed: you took that crack in your side that my carelessness put in you, and you made a whole new way of feeling. You have made anger, and I had no idea at all. Thank you for showing me this.”
“I don’t think I have it anymore,” said the little stone.

“It’s pretty exhausting to keep it up all the time, I’ll bet,” said the Maker. “But nobody says you need to make only things that last forever. For instance, would you like me to do something about that crack?”
“Please.”

“Alright. I’ll show you what I’ve learned since you taught me about tools.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the Maker. “Most of our best work happens when we don’t mean to do something.”

The little stone remembered that. It remembered that as the Maker chipped away at its side and turned that crack into a facet and the chips into flakes that followed at its heels as it rolled away home.

***

A week after that – just after time had been invented – the Maker went for a walk and stubbed their toe so hard they swore six species of parasitic wasp into existence.

The little stone never mentioned it to anyone.

Very pointedly.

And smugly.

There was one day Frances didn’t set her alarm clock for and it was this day and she woke up on time anyways.

She ignored this and tried to go back to sleep, only to find that sleep was a rude asshole and refused to return her calls, show read on her messages, or acknowledge her emails. Ten million years passed before she next lifted her head from the pillow, squinted at her phone, and saw that it had been fifteen minutes and she was more awake than before.

“Fine,” she said, and peeled herself off the pillow, then her pillow off the chandelier. She slid to the ground with a soft thump.

She had to start tidying anyways. Thank god this only happened once a year.

***

Before the first things, or even the first things first, came the primordial need. Egg, some horrible things from the cabinet, and some other horrible things from the fridge. Mixed in a shot glass. Inadvisably consumed in two gulps, because the first swallow tried to cancel itself halfway down. It wasn’t great or good or fine or okay, but it made the hangover look better by comparison, and that was like making it go away.

First things first was cleaning up the perishable consumables. Any of the food still littering the table that was temperature-agnostic was returned to its original packaging (if salvageable); anything plausibly re-refrigeratorable was placed in plastic containers and bags and consigned to a hopeful crisper drawer for later consideration; anything probably salmonella-riddled was given a combined ten seconds of silence before being returned to the earth via the compost bucket except for a single piece of antiquated salmon which was delivered to the cat so she could ignore it.

The pizza was outside all of these categories. It was consumed in one hand while Frances loaded the dish washer with the other, eaten cold and unheated like the frail plant life outside the kitchen window.

Next came the beverages. Bottles that were open were resealed. Cans that were open were dumped down the sink and placed in the cardboard box doing emergency substitution work in place of a second recycling bin. Boxed wine was separated into wine bag and wine box and placed in the corresponding third and fourth substitute recycling bins (another cardboard box and a dented wastebasket). Every remaining Dr. Pepper in the house was opened and poured down the toilet to consecrate the dawn and anoint it in glory, as was the custom.

After the sustenance, came vice. The ashtrays were emptied into the garbage. The stray butts and loose leaves were emptied into the garbage. The suspicious residues were scraped off the floor and tables with the side of a gross and marginally used plastic fork and a paper towel and emptied into the garbage. And the spot on the floor where Murray McCooey had leaned over and leaned over and leaned way way over and let some of his ballast slip loose was scrubbed with the house’s most undesirable cloth and soap and water and more water until it was rendered beyond hope and consigned into the garbage, forced desperately down into the depths with one hand to bury it beyond all chance of sight or smell.

Frances stopped and washed her hands after that. Like three times. Four? Five. To be safe. And once more.

Then she made coffee, badly. And drank it, slowly. And realized it wasn’t hers, it was Grace’s decaf. The second cup was made badly AND quickly and she drank it so fast she burned her mouth.

And then, after that break, came the real work.

***

The surfaces needed a more thorough cleaning, and for that the laundry needed tallying. Socks were retrieved from lampshades. Shoes were retrieved from bookshelves. Shirts were retrieved from coathooks. Coats were retrieved from the shirt drawer. Pants were retrieved from the yard. Underwear was missing and presumed dead. And one entirely unidentifiable piece of fabric was wrapped around the stove’s right back burner and wouldn’t be parted from it until Frances very very slowly and strategically severed it into six even more unidentifiable pieces with a steak knife. She tried to arrange them into something more familiar, failed six different ways, then realized she was currently down one kitchen cloth and had been given the opportunity to be up five kitchen cloths instead.

The surfaces were easy. Gross, but easy. Frances let her eyes wander, dragging her mind after them over the remaining devastation. Making plans and discarding them, not caring too much.

Once the surfaces were done, she woke the sleepers. Gently shook shoulders for those who needed quiet; poked cheeks for those that lurked too deep; put her mouth near an ear and yelled “WAKEY WAKEY, EGGS AND BAKEY!” for Kimberly East, who had it coming.

“Whuh? Where?”
“In the kitchen, waiting for you to make them.”

“Fugoff.”

“WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY WAKEY WAK-”

Kim sat up and took a swing at her, inadvertently preventing a return to sleep. Sucker. People were moving frying pans, cracking eggs, distributing clothing from the collection Frances had amassed on the dining room table. Someone was feeding the cat breakfast.

Not her business, she’d already had pizza. Besides, she was nowhere near done. She had to catch Marcus’s lizard. Little bastard had been on the living room wall near the painting of a bowl of vegetables, but he was missing again. Five minutes of quick thinking and a net was all she needed, but she had to fish the net out of the turtle tank, which reminded her she had to find the turtle (under the couch, sulking).

The lizard was returned to Marcus, who she found sitting on the patio with the reverse-stripper, negotiating for his coat back.

“Show’s not over,” she told him stubbornly. Five shirts three coats and a dozen pairs of socks kept her warm as toast even in the drizzle.

“But it’s COLD out.”
“Nobody’s paid me yet.”

Frances paid her. Marcus’s coat was retrieved, along with half her sock drawer. And then she looked up at the back yard and sighed.

“Fuck. I forgot about the circus.”

***

It was a little one-ring setup. Nothing fancy. A clown full of cars, two acrobats, and a small elephant. It was amazing they’d all fit in the tent, but it was good for warmth.

“Especially for the elephant,” the ringmaster explained as Frances counted bills. “You’ve got to keep her warm or she’ll catch cold. Unlike SOME operations I could mention, we care about our animal performers here in Circe de Burke.”

“Good. Do you want an irritating little lizard?”
“No thanks,” said the ringmaster with a comically large wink. “We’ve already got Richie. Eh? Eh??? EH????”

A clown of Richielike appearance smacked the back of her noggin without looking.

“Art is pain,” she told Frances solemnly.

“Yep,” said Frances. She surveyed the rest of the yard. Damnit, she’d been hoping to forget about the rest of this too.

The collapsible hot tub was easy, she set it to drain while she got to work on the real problem: coaxing the reindeer back into their crate from the temporary paddock. They were reluctant until she gave up and rhinoplasty’d the snowman gallery, tempting them with a fresh harvest of crisp and crunchy ruddy-orange noses. And once they were all back (only one inadvertent finger-nip to her name), the hot tub wasn’t done, so she free-climbed the two trees and the telephone pole in the front yard to take down the fixed-lines from the abseiling competition. And when that was finished the hot tub still wasn’t done, so she cleaned the tinsel waterfalls out of the gutters with a rake tied to a broom handle. And when that was clear and the eaves ran sluggish liquid again the hot tub STILL WASN’T DONE so she did a lap around the house cleaning up loose reindeer stool and discarded clown props and bent climbing pitons and reclaiming her scarf from its entirely unauthorized location around the neck of a snowman.

The hot tub still wasn’t done. She went indoors and fed the cat breakfast and tried not to think about it. This turned out to be the perfect time for that to happen, because that was when the thumping started up from the basement door.

***

The bacon smell had woken them from their crashes: the under-people, the hard partiers, the Sleepers Below. They groaned up from the basement, bleary and groping for grease and caffeine, trembling with unspeakable weight.

“Basement’s flooding,” muttered Mortimer to Frances as he descended on the coffeepot and lifted it like a giant mug, ignoring the blistering of his palms.

“Fuck.”
And he was right. It looked like someone had dug into the wall with a pickaxe at some point, probably during the Minecraft LARP. They’d found two painted styrofoam diamonds and apparently the base of the gravel bed the hot tub was draining into.

Frances counted to six, ran up the staircase, stopped draining the hot tub, realized the hot tub was finally actually empty, screamed a raw and primal word she couldn’t identify even as it left her throat, punched the hot tub (causing it to collapse), ran back downstairs, threw the pick axe at the hole, sat down with her head in her hands, left a single minimalist text with the local water damage people, screamed a raw and primal word she couldn’t identify even as it left her throat (but quietly and under her breath this time), and broke out the mop. And the mop bucket, where she found Ritchie’s lizard had left a present.

She brought them upstairs and dumped them in his lap with the mop.

“Your eggs, your mop job,” she said. She ignored the noises he made, fed the cat breakfast, and was interrupted by a scream from upstairs. By the sound of it, Beverly had gone to use the bathroom and had completely forgotten about the mime.

***

When the mime had been placated and paid and evicted from their nesting-place in the tub (and Frances had retrieved her sheets), she found herself at loose ends. Half the guests had left with Beverly to get her jangled, mimed nerves a hair of the dog. Half of the rest had left to avoid being recruited into the basement cleanup. All that remained was Frances, the cat, and the distant, tragic schlop of a mop bucket.

The cat meowed.

Frances pulled out a bowl and a kibble bag, then squinted as something new floated across the inside of her head. .
“Hang on. How many times have you had breakfast today?”
The cat blinked slowly and smugly at her.

Frances fed her anyways. It was lunchtime. By now she was probably overdue to call the mayor’s office and apologize for the noise violations. And the fireworks. And the tree catching on fire. And getting the fire truck crew roped into the party. And painting new lines on the street. Using the mayor’s car.

Yeah, they’d overdone it a little. Yeah, the cleanup was a lot of work. But you know what? Your cat only got a birthday once a year.

There are certain sentences in one’s life that are fraught with inevitable danger, yet are redolent with temptation nonetheless. “Come on, just one more drink.” “Oh, what’s the harm?” “Who’s going to know any differently?” “Just between you and me…” “What the hell are you looking at?”

But there is one that is held with a wariness and a fear greater than any other, and that is why when, on a crisp morning in late autumn where the few brave birds sang and the air was clear, young St Mantleroy Throebark Jr., Esq. said “I think it is time that I found myself a wife!” it was not completely unjustified for his companion, Robert Basspluck, to spit the contents of his drink across the table.

“Oh Rob, REALLY,” said St Mantleroy in fond admonishment.

“Don’t you ‘Rob’ me, Barky!” snapped Robert, swabbing furiously at his dampened shirt. “Barking mad, more you are! Come on! You’re still young! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you! Don’t throw it all away on some damned fool chase!”
“Better to gamble now when I’m still young and have some strength to my limbs and heart than to chance the field when I’m old and slow and fearful,” shot back St Mantleroy. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
“Nothing ventured, nothing dismembered and left in a ditch for the corbies,” snarled Robert. “You’ll be chewed up and spat out! You’ll be gouged and trampled! You’ll be wrecked and cast on the rocks!”
“My mind is complete, and I will not be swayed from it,” said St Mantleroy with the serene patience of the indescribably pig-headed. “I will do this thing alone if I must, and make no complaints to any other nor to myself of your bravery.”
“Oh to hell with that,” said Robert. “If you’re signing yourself up for getting murdered I’m right there alongside you, and don’t you dare argue with me!”
It is no slight to master Robert’s Basspluck’s character that he did, just a little, wish that St Mantleroy Throebark Jr., Esq., who had been his best friend since they were children in the garden arguing over the merits of slugs and spiders, had argued with him about that. Because despite that, he still didn’t take his word back.

He just really, really, really wanted to.

***

“There are many things that must be done in preparation, of course,” said St Mantleroy as he and Robert set out for town. “But there is one that is of the utmost urgency.”

“A ring, surely,” said Robert.

“Hah, yes, that too. But no – I refer to spreading the word, my good friend. It’s of no manner to a woman if I wish to marry, should she never know that fact in the first place. So we travel to where we shall make this missive known.”

“And how are you planning to do that?”
“We shall be stopping by Mr. Morgutroth’s print shop and commissioning a short-yet-informative notice for the society bulletins.”

“Stuff and nonsense. Save your money: there’s a far cheaper AND faster way to get word onto the wind for this sort of thing. Steer us by Crobbly’s tavern and give me money for a half-dozen pints.”
“Oh really, this is hardly the time-”

“Trust me, Barky.”

St Mantleroy’s hands dithered in that way that meant he wasn’t really happy about what was going on but was resigned to it, and so his carriage deposited Robert (“a little ways off, please, so they don’t know you’re here – and wait for me”) and he spent an anxious half-hour considering the precise wording of the notice he was told he should not commission. Then at once a fist banged on the carriage door.

“Job’s done,” said Robert as he hauled himself back in. “I pinched my cheeks pink, stumbled in, bought a pint, and let slip to the bartender that I’d just been out for drinks with the young Throebark squire to lend fortune to his oncoming hunt for a wife. Then I drank half my pint, spilled the other half, and bought a round for the bar. They’ll know what you’re up to from London to Rome by this evening.”
“You’re a marvel, Robert,” said St Mantleroy with tears of gratitude in his eyes. “Will you do me one more small favour and come shopping with me?”
“For the ring?”
“Not yet, not yet – I have a notion in my head of what it must be, you see, and I wish to fill it out more before I bring it into contact with reality. No, no, no. What we must do now is seek for wedding supplies.”

Robert scanned the proffered list with dismay. “Oh for god’s sake, we’ll be at this all week. Here, you take half the screed and I’ll take the other half.” And with a rip, he made it so.

“You’re a blessing in a cruel world, Rob,” said St Mantleroy. “We’ll recoup at the evening’s end.”

***

“…and of course, a well-managed goatherd will be necessary, yes sir, yes sir.”
St Mantleroy blinked rapidly in a desperate attempt to clear the fog from his mind. “Oh yes, yes. Err, of course. Yes. Why?”
The overcoated creature before him nodded amiably. It continued to nod amiably. It had done nothing less than nod amiably since they’d been introduced; St Mantleroy was beginning to wonder if it was in fact a man at all or some kind of bobbing toy bird grown large and gifted with overlarge and overworn boots. “Well, you see, cattle will do very well for day in day out, yes sir. But for a bit of sport they’re nothing akin to a goat – oh they’re canny creatures, they’ll give her much sport yes sir, yes they will, yes sir.”
“Right. Yes, of course. Well I know that. Thank you. Indeed. I shall make payment promptly. You can speak with my man at the estate, of course.”
“Oh I shall, yes sir, yes sir.”

***

“Twelve feet should suffice,” said the gardener, squinting over his pipe and squinting his most critical eye. “Wrought iron. Mmm.”
“Won’t it obstruct the view of the rose bushes?” asked St Mantleroy plaintively.

“Well, we could go down lower if you were to construct a haha on the manor side, but that would cut into the far flower beds. Nothing doing if you want to preserve the integrity of the gardens.” The words were spoken without question or fear of gainsay: the gardener had been employed first by St Mantleroy’s grandfather, and knew full well that the day the integrity of the gardens was not placed as first priority by the head of the estate would only come after he was placed in a casket.

“Right, yes. Twelve feet.”
“Wrought iron. And make sure it’s thick too.”

***

The edges of the estate resembled an anthive disturbed when St Mantleroy retired to his study with a glass of something warming: a furious rustle of viciously quick productivity. There he sighed into his second-favourite chair, only to then realize he’d chosen it because his favourite chair was already occupied.

“Robert!”
“Back so soon, Barky?” replied the man in question, much paler and more haggard than he’d been that morning. “And here I was barely on my third glass.”
“Oh, don’t play-act at it,” groaned St Mantleroy, flinging his arm across his brows. “I’ve been to half the stock-herders in town, and the ironworkers, and the masons, and I’ve had to commission an architect from London, and the chef has been notified, and by all that is holy I had no notion that getting married was to be so much WORK!”

“Cheer up, it gets worse after the wedding,” said Robert into his third glass. “Well, I made my rounds pretty solidly today. The gunsmith’s on notice – cost a pretty penny, but I wouldn’t ask for anything less than the best for you – and I’ve put a few coins in pockets with the local game wardens to ensure when the word comes it comes speedily. I’ve spoken with the apothecary and procured the necessities for the engagement; I’ve sent for a tutor to educate her – you know how tricky that can be, but my cousin knows the right sort and gave me a reference for a proper man of letters; and I’ve written excuses to all your brothers and cousins and uncles explaining why you’ll be absent for the season. Even used extra-pretty words for your cousin Sammy, since I know he’s such an absolutely temperamental little beast.”

“Rob,” declared St Mantleroy from halfway through his first glass, which deserved better, “I could almost kiss you.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Robert, fetching his fourth. “Your wife will be jealous.”

***

There was a heart-stopping moment that lasted weeks. The finger on the pulled trigger; the leap into the sea; the silence after the speech; the fork beginning to remove itself from a mouth, destined for an empty plate. A pause that went on and on and on and was never filled, not by the conclusion of the construction; not by the anxious watching of the post; not by the browsing of the very densest and eldest naturalist’s tomes in the library; not even by the careful and thorough ransacking of the cellar bottle-by-bottle under the guidance and whim of Robert Basspluck

But then came the call: an unmarried woman had been sighted just out of town, on the road to Shorewood, and there was no more time left to hesitate or prevaricate or prepare or think, but only to do.

“Here we are,” said St Mantleroy, as he hauled himself into the carriage one more time. His throat felt tight.

“Here we go,” said Robert. He was grinning. He hadn’t stopped grinning since the notice had rushed into the dining room that morning. It was stuck on his face like honey on bread. “Feeling excited?”
“Yes.”
“Feeling nervous?”
“Yes.”
“Feeling like you must have forgotten something?”
“Yes. No. Yes. No, no no no.”
“That can’t be right, there’s always something. Oh!” and Robert slapped his forehead with outsized force. “The ring! We never went shopping for a ring! Oh damn it all-!”

“Oh,” said St Mantleroy guiltily. “I err. Well. I decided I’d use my mother’s. Last week. I forgot to mention it.”
“You’re a sentimental toff, Barky,” said Robert in the most scornful voice capable of conveying his deep affection.

“Thank you,” said St Mantleroy. And the carriage stopped, and they fell silent, and grasped their tools.

***

The woman was not in sight, but there was a stillness in the snowflake-flecked air that bespoke her presence. The driver departed without a word on foot, leaving them alone with their carriage full of supplies and their heads full of hopes and fears, and they preserved that silence, working from plans and dreams formed in the timeless days that had so recently passed them by.

St Mantleroy fashioned a noose from the rope, and –using a small stone with a hole in it as a weight – threw it over a high branch that swung over the road. Then he brought out a fat and somewhat confused lamb, drizzled it with a healthy spurt of still-warm blood fresh from the kitchen, and hung the poor thing by its back legs from the noose, despite its protestations. While he did this, Robert fashioned a small blind of brambles and branches upwind across the way. They met to check the lamb (secure, and very unhappy and loud about it) and shared a quick shot each of liquid courage. And then, at last, they retired to the blind, guns in gloved hands and breaths spaced low and even.

The sky was grey. The air was chill. Scarves kept their misting mouths from giving notice of their position. Every second lasted five hundred years longer than the last, yet neither man dared make a single sound, whether to give conversation or even settle their limbs in a more comfortable position. This was not the time or place for such things. There was only room for one sound.

And then they heard it. A small crackle; an unnoticeable thing in a forest, even a quiet one such as this. But unmistakably the noise of a living thing in motion.

The woman stepped out onto the road and considered the lamb, head cocked in interest. She was a big one.

The barrel of St Mantleroy’s gun swayed slightly – aim adjusting, grip faltering, who could say?

“Almost,” said Robert in a voice so thin it was nearly bone. “Wait until she takes the ring.”

St Mantleroy was a pale man even on the sunniest of summer days, but suddenly his face turned from white to bloodless. “I forgot the ring.”
“What?” The woman stepped closer to the lamb, mouth just-slightly agape.

“It’s still in the carriage.”
“WHAT?”

Several things happened at the same moment, but for the sake of clarity they will be explained in order.

Firstly, St Mantleroy flinched, and his finger slipped. .

Secondly, the woman took one last step forwards and took the lamb into her mouth.

Thirdly, St Mantleroy’s gun went off.

Fourthly, the lamb’s bleating stopped ice-cold.

Fifthly, the woman’s head jerked up and she stared directly across the roadway and made direct eye contact with both of the men simultaneously.

She could manage that. Her eyes were large.

“It’s not on the lamb, it’s still in the carriage,” explained St Mantleroy to her, idiotically. And then she charged them.

“Run!” shouted Robert, and took his advice and St Mantleroy’s arm.

St Mantleroy did not take Robert’s advice. St Mantleroy was frozen stiff as a statue, arm rigid as marble, every muscle seized tight and twisted in place like finely-made ship’s-rigging as one-thousand-stone of woman bore down on him, maw agape, railroad-spike teeth bared and still awash with lamb’s blood.

Robert pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and at last St Mantleroy’s arm moved and he ran, ran, ran as light as a feather for the carriage, for safety, for shelter, for his life, and he was so caught up in running that it took him until nearly halfway there to realize that while St Mantleroy Throebark Jr., Esq.’s arm had indeed come with him the rest of St Mantleroy had, alas, remained behind.

“Shit!” he said with a truly ungentlemanly lack of composure, and threw the arm behind him in a manner he would surely regret for the rest of his life (however long THAT was to be). Then he was at the carriage door, fingers scrabbling so quickly he felt his nails snap, and he was inside it and slamming the door shut and breathing like a rabbit, gasp-gasp gasp-gasp, all wheeze and no air.

The woman reached the carriage, and subsequently the carriage took flight. This did not last long, although the precise time elapsed escaped the notice of Robert, as he swooned for an instant. His eyes were closed and the carriage was aloft, then they opened and it was on its side and the door was splintering inwards and his feet were above his head and his neck was very painful and his arms were caught in something.

The door caved in behind the woman’s snout, blow by blow. Her rhythm was uneven; poor St Mantleroy’s shot must have been true in spite of it all. But she would not go down without fighting, and Robert felt no more capable of combat than a mouse.

His legs wouldn’t move. His shoulders were stiff. But he could free his hands – oh, how the scales tore bloody-loose from his skin in his haste – and as he freed them he saw what they’d been caught in.

Another blow, sluggish and faltering, and the carriage door crashed inwards, splinters digging into everything. Behind it, teeth gnashed, and then they lunged. And oh, as those terrible womanly jaws descended, they met the fierce banded steel and collapsible snare of the ring of St Mantleroy’s mother, and with a quick spring-loaded SNAP they were seized shut tight.

“Got you,” mumbled Robert as she reeled back in shock. And then they both passed out.

***

A winter wedding was an auspicious event, if somewhat cramped and snowy. Everyone and anyone had come out to the old Throebark estate; even the poorer townsfolk had been given tents and hot drinks to celebrate at a polite distance from the folk of quality.

“A most successful engagement, I must say,” said old Curmulleon Throebark, nodding stiffly as he overlooked the bridal paddock. Within it, the lady in question crunched her way through her second cow of the evening, her great scaly tail slowly lashing the air with quiet pleasure.

“Tell that to St Mantleroy,” said Robert moodily, swirling his drink as if it had insulted him. “The poor bastard. One thing. Just one little thing slips his mind, and it was over for him. The poor absent-minded over-fretful bastard. Hell, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be, and don’t be daft either,” said the older man sharply. “You know full well what the casualty rates are like for this kind of thing, and you still went with him and did all you could. That it wasn’t enough to save his life speaks no shame upon his character or yours, and I won’t have you besmirching either of those things on your wedding day, am I clear?”
“Sir,” managed Robert. And Curmulleon passed him a handkerchief and looked the other way for a minute for reasons wholly unrelated to their conversation, as was socially appropriate.

“She’s a grand old beauty for sure,” he remarked. “Forty-five-footer?”
“Forty-six,” said Robert eventually. “And twelve at the shoulder.”

“Gad, I’m shocked one of you made it out of there at all. Well, welcome to the family, the both of you. And cheer up: you’re only getting married, not getting murdered, no matter what the bachelors say. It’s really quite a tolerable life, especially once she learns how to talk.”

Thanks, thanks, glad to be here.  Now give me a second – there, and uh… crap.  How do these things get harder to use every year?  Where’s the power button?  Okay.  Right.  Thanks.  Good.

So, we all know why we’re here – let’s skip the preamble and the happy-to-meet-yous and get right down to business. 

First things first and the most obvious issue: we’ve got a lot of prime land down by the river crying out to be used that’s currently buried in a tangle of uselessly domesticated monoculture crops, where it isn’t slowly slithering out to sea.  We clear that off, we can start putting down succession from the pioneer species onwards – get the weedy little shits in there fast so they can start shading the soil and sinking their greedy fingers into it before it all oozes away.  That’s a good initial step, but I think we can do better: a lot of this terrain is low-lying because it’s drained marshlands.  We can set those up again once there’s enough greenery in place to prevent erosion from sweeping everything in one fell swoop; get things nice and sludgy again and turn this all into a proper filtration plant that can clean up the water for a population of millions. 

Next up, we need a proper downtown.  The good news is we have a great place for it, the bad news is we’ve currently we’ve got a pile of ugly skyscrapers covering it.  I know those things suck to clear, especially the stumps, but there’s no helping it: they’ve got to come down and it’s got to be done.  And it’s not all bad: you can sell the scrap cheap for habitat construction. 

Once we’ve chopped down the buildings and broken up the concrete, you’re looking at prime foundational land for an old growth city core.  Accelerate the succession because it can take it; really burn through those first few years of sun-tolerant ground-coverers, get through the disturbance and start laying the foundations for a place where you’ll have to crane your neck straight back if you want to glimpse the sky because it’ll be wall-to-wall ancient hardwoods.  Transit will be painless: an arboreal traveller will be able to slip straight from one side of the place to the other without ever once touching the ground, and the number of accessible branches per station will be luxurious and affordable.

Speaking of transit, I want to take a moment to address this head-on: yes, we’re incorporating carbon taxes into the basic requirements of our infrastructure.  I won’t mince words, you can’t do modern planning without it, and if you plan to attract good, sturdy woodlands to your area you’ll let them take away your carbon without complaining.  If you don’t want to have your carbon taxed why not ditch society entirely, eat your meals cooked, and go sleep in a suburban duplex like some kind of drooling hominid. 

Right.  So we’ve got our filtration sorted, we’ve got a long-term project for the downtown, and now we need to plan water access.  I’ll be blunt, right now it’s not great: we’ve got a concrete waterfront that totally obstructs commercial and private access to detritus and green algae, and a correspondingly grossly impoverished population of marine life.  We need to get in there and renew things, give them the tools and the space they need to stand on their own fins – ‘give a fish a worm for a day/give a fish access to water filled with wriggling things that fit in their mouth for the rest of their lives’, you know how it is.  So we’ll dredge the landside of the shoreline until we hit dirt and then and start infilling the channel and the harbour until they’ve got a healthy silt layer at the bottom again.  This is something that’ll take time too, but the good bit is that the better our other projects do, the faster it’ll happen: we get the filtration sorted, and no more phosphorus-driven algae blooms.  We get the downtown revitalized, more organic matter is getting dumped into the river and washed into the bay.  And once you’ve given enough to the water, it’ll start giving it back – detritus for beached carcasses; bugs for fish; land nutrient for deepwater sediment.  I cannot overstate the fundamental importance of free and fair current exchange in prosperity. 

Now, I’ve saved your biggest problem for last, but don’t think it’s unsolvable.  Yes, you’ve got a lot of untenable unproductive suburban wastes sprawling around the hinterland.  No, tearing up every single isolated family dwelling, swimming pool, driveway, and garage one-at-a-time would not be a productive use of anyone’s time. Yes, the soil is poor.  No, it won’t be a world center of productivity, look good on a brochure, or be the thing you brag about to your colleagues anytime soon. 

But you know what it can be?  Something goddamned usable, which it isn’t right now.  Plot it out as mixed-use woodland, and stay hands-light – it’ll never be the star of the show, but let the traffic take its way with it and watch what happens and I bet you’ll see potential in there you weren’t aware of.  Parks can turn into copses; lawns can become meadows.  Don’t try to measure the sow’s ear for a silk purse right away, start curing the leather and think about wallets.  Give it half a century and come back to it ready to make a new plan once the lemons have gotten lemonaded. 

So there it is.  You have hundreds of square kilometres of cement-and-rebar wilderness out there right now, yes.  But now you ALSO have the plans and the potential for hundreds of square kilometres of vitalized, energetic, world-class economically-active multi-biome civil society.  You’re welcome. 

Yes, I know this is a lot of work.  Yes, I know it’s going to take ages.  But unurban planning done properly is all about the long term, gentlecritters, and if you’re planning long term you’re either thinking big or you’re screwing up. 

‘What about the hominids?’  What about them?  Go join a preservation society if you want to, that’s not my problem.  Bleeding-heart dogs and cats always asking ‘what about the hominids, what about the hominids’ – if they’re so damned smart and adaptable they’ll tool-use themselves along just fine.  Now let me do my damned job.

Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.

Cindy was watching from the second floor of the house, out her bedroom window. Cindy was waiting for the snowball fight to start.

“You’re too little,” Rob had told her, and he hadn’t meant that.

“You’re a GIRL,” Charlie had told her, and he HAD meant that, and so had Rob.

“It’s for the best,” her father had said, without looking at her (he couldn’t look at her without not looking at the newspaper). “You could get hurt.”
“It’s alright,” her mother had told her, in that specific way that meant it wasn’t, but she understood and was sorry about it. “Snowball fights aren’t much fun anyways. Just slush in your shirt and cold down your neck.”

Cindy had already experienced slush in her shirt and cold down her neck because Rob and Charlie had thrown her in a snowbank before when she was being irritating, and she’d really liked the idea of having a chance at doing that to somebody else.

***

“It’s a very nice… something,” Cindy’s teacher told her. “But it’s not really proper for show-and-tell. It’s just a cereal box.”
“I made it better,” said Cindy. And she’d used scissors and markers and a few leftover stickers from Christmas to do it, too, turning it into a jack-o-lantern mixed with a spiderweb mixed with a snowflake, because Halloween was her favourite but it was winter now. It had taken some careful destructive thought, particularly when her mother had found her using the wrong scissors – the big, sharp kind.

“Well, that’s all well and good, and you’ve done a fine job. But maybe next time you’re making something better, try beginning with a different something.”

“Did I do it wrong?”

“No, no, you did it properly. You did a very good job with your canvas. But I bet you could do an even better job with better materials. A cereal box is just a little… mass-produced.”

***

Cindy had offered her brothers a snowball, as proof of her sincerity and drive.

“This isn’t really a snowball,” said Rob. “It’s all uneven and lumpy.”

“This is garbage,” said Charlie. “Look at how it just falls apart – did you even pack this? She didn’t even pack this. Did you just squeeze a handful of snow until it went hard?”

“You’ve got to roll them – like this, see?” said Rob, polishing the soft snow between his mittens. “Then it’s a proper snowball. Now it’ll hit what you throw it at.”
“Yeah, and it’ll stick together long enough to actually GET to it. This was garbage. Half of it’s just crust – you need to take softer stuff and pack it until it TURNS hard, look! Don’t you know anything?”

And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.

***

“What’s ‘mass-produced’?” she asked her mother that night, as her homework was packed up.

“Oh, it means to make lots of something all at once in a factory, like I did during the war,” said her mother.

“What does it make?”
“I made bomb casings, but mass production can be anything as long as it’s being made in big batches. Like cars, or coats, or those cookies you wanted me to buy last week. As long as there’s lots of them and they’re all the same.”
“Oh. So it’s not special?”
“It’s a way of making things that are… sort of the opposite of special, yes.”

“Oh.”

***

She had gone inside and moved a chair from the dining room (quietly, because she wasn’t supposed to) and stood on it (VERY quietly, because she REALLY wasn’t supposed to) and reached up, up, up into the freezer where her numbing fingers quested and poked and prodded until they touched a slippery, plastic frame, brittle with cold and filled with cold little weights.

Then she brought them up to her bedroom.

And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.

***

Just before bed, when her mother’s hand had just left the switch and the dark was new and fresh, she finally found the question. “Is there a way to make things that are special?”
“Of course,” she said, and Cindy’s eyes could hear her smile.

“How do I do that?”
“You already do it every day, sweet-pea. From everything around you.”

“Everything?”
“Everything.”
Cindy fell asleep fast. The thought followed her into it.

***

And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited, and Cindy AIMED, and just as Rob and Charlie finished shaking hands and turned their backs on each other to walk back to their forts she let fly and dropped a single, perfect, fresh-from-the-freezer ice cube from the cheap little plastic tray at her side directly down the back of Charlie’s neck.

Yes, thought Cindy as the slush flew – along with the odd fist and some VERY odd words – and repainted the back yard in a gorgeous, dizzying swirl of frigid meltwater and bitter acrimony. Yes, given the proper preparation and context, you can make art come from anything. Even from the mass-produced.

The ship is enormous and state of the art and unbearably inexpensive and perfect and it is sinking.

The human next to it is barely worth noticing.  He’s sinking too.  Already the rim of the ice is towering above him, his arms straining to grip its lowermost edge, frictionless and scrabbling.  He’s very good at math, his eyes have been checked many times in his life; he can measure and determine the exact velocity of his doom as it’s swallowing him. 

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

***

The idea was natural.  Nobody worth knowing had been there, and he was worth knowing, so he would go there.  He would go there and learn things and experience danger and come back and be a hero and a bringer of fresh new wisdom that everyone would love and could be used to remove the tawdry old musty wisdom they had lying around the place that nobody liked. 

***

Danger was a word to him back them which implied not problems, but a certain looseness of safety caused by an increase of uncertainty.  An untied shoelace was dangerous.  A dark wood was dangerous.  Forgetting to wear gloves in low temperatures was dangerous.

His current situation is not dangerous.  It’s perilous.  Peril sounds higher-pitched than danger, more alarmed, more immediate.  Piranhas in the pool with you.  A lightning storm outside your airplane.  A close-quarters gunfight.  A close-quarters gunfight in the piranha-filled pool inside your airplane in a lightning storm. 

Peril sounded very distinct back then, something that could be avoided by common sense and good preparation, both separable and distinguishable from the danger that he was to consign himself into.  Now he’s starting to think they’re just points on a gradient, and that he might have misread it.  Yes, peril is in the ice’s creak under his nails.  But it had been creaking for ages before this moment.  Maybe he should’ve listened closer.

***

The planning was beautiful.  A wonder-swirl of dreams sharpened and filed and measured and remeasured and plotted onto files and studied until the construction happened and they became real. 

Having become real, there was no way for the plans to fail.  That was how it worked.  It was simply impossible for it to be any other way. 

***

A deep, heartfelt groan that makes his hands shake and his body slide another unmeasurable too-far distance.  The ship is settling farther.  Sliding deeper.  Listening to gravity.

He really wishes it wouldn’t.  He really wishes he wasn’t.  He really hates gravity, which is something he’s never experienced before.  Feelings this strong about basic physics should belong to professors. 

***

The voyage was miraculous.  Transformational.  Imagine spinning in a little circle, eyes open, and everything you see is new – not just for you, but for anyone.  Nobody else has ever seen it, nobody else has ever known it.  Just you.  Just you. 

Oh, he couldn’t wait for it.  He loved it.  Loved how the cold crackled along the outside of the ship, how with every second more and more of the fingerprints of its makers flaked away and were left in his wake.  Cleaning it.  Making it less theirs, cutting the cords that little bit shorter, stretching the distance that little bit farther.  It was alone now out here, which meant it was also him.  He was enormous and state of the art and unbearably expensive and he wasn’t sinking. 

It wasn’t going to be like that. 

***

The ice isn’t quite as slick anymore underneath the manic grip of his fingers.  That’s because pieces of it are coming off.  The pieces he’s holding onto.  It’s rough and jagged and sharp and his own weight is cutting into his gloves.  Luckily it’s cold enough that the pain is barely there; sucked away the moment it registers in his palms. 

***

The disaster was caused by the same thing as usual: something small and unworthy of attention.  A defect in the ship, but what caused that?  What put it there?  The underpaid, overworked factory employees who sealed it?  The management that refused to pay them or give them free time?  The world that encouraged both of those things in profusion?  The history that made the world?  Small things unworthy of attention. 

Anyways, the ship hit a bump.  And the bump turned into a drag.  And the drag ended in a lurch. And the crew were in the right place at that wrong time and now look what’s happened. 

Small things unworthy of attention. 

***

Which makes it even funnier that he can’t get all of those small things out of his head right now, at this precise moment.  Even as his fingers – without apparent cause – cease functioning. 

Your brain really WILL try anything in an emergency.  He’s almost calm by now. 

And so he slides over the edge with relaxed muscles and slackened grip, into the abyss, off the icy roof of the garage through six feet of cold December air into a wet December slush heap where the plow has piled an entire street’s-worth of grey gunk into a towering monument to hubris – a Christmas tree that finally receives its topping angel.   

His ship goes after him and bounces off his head.  The plastic goes ‘donk’ when it does that.  And it goes ‘crunch’ when it lands. 

“Fuck!” he says very loudly without thinking, at precisely the moment a large, irritated human parent opens his and their front door to see what the fuss is about.

***

And so the expedition went down in infamy and disaster, a warning to all who had not participated in it – a somewhat smug little tale of good judgement’s necessity for those who’d naysaid it from the start; a prudent reminder of pitfalls to be avoided for those who’d felt a bit of wistfulness as they watched it leave safe harbour. 

The sled, alas, was cracked right down the middle.  Totally useless. 

The séance chamber was somber and tasteful.  The chandelier was of beautiful yet not over-ornate design; the table was clothed in a plain black that was workmanlike without being cheap; the curtains were drawn enough to permit spirits but not so tightly as to prohibit eyeballs. 

“Oh my, it’s so kind of you to go to all this trouble, for me, a poor old doddering widow with naught left to comfort her in the loneliness of old age but the cold and lifeless cash of her funds,” wept Mrs. Bagelsly, clutching her purse in tearful gratitude.

“I assure you, it is very little trouble,” said Ms. Cuthspoon with a firm and gracious handshake that turned (with gracefully-disguised awkwardness) into having to support the older woman’s weight on her forearms.  “I am but a simple student of the Lands Beyond and have very little to offer, but I am always moved to action by the plight of the forlorn and grieving.  If you and your man will both take a seat at the table and clasp your palms to mine, we can begin.”

So the circle was shaped with only a little fussing and fidgeting, hand-to-hand, widow-to-manservant-to-medium-to-widow-again, and after no more than a moment of ritual singing, chanting, and calling from Ms. Cuthspoon the darkness that filled the room seemed to grow deeper; the air more turbulent.  The chandelier shook for an instance under an alien weight; something dripped from above that glowed softly.  A faint glow appeared above the table, giving the vaguest impressions of a human face. 

“Charmaine,” spake a guttural voice from Ms. Cuthspoon’s throat.  The black cloth masking the table rippled with its breath.  “Charmaine.  Is that you?  It is very dark here.”

Mrs. Bagelsly quailed in awed delight at the sights and sounds enveloping her.  “Dear Albert,” she whispered.  “My little Alberto.  Is it really you?”
“Indeed,” roiled the voice, thick as pitch. 

Her trembling chin turned rock-solid under a quick and very nasty grin.  “That’s funny.  Because your name was Ezekiel, and you insisted on it in full.”  And with those words her hand shot up from her lap, cold steel in its grip, and swung wildly at arm’s-length over and above the séance table.  The tablecloth ceased its flapping; the chandelier stopped its clatter; there was a number of oddly musical snapping sounds.  

“AHA!” she shouted with the lungs of a much younger woman who was also an opera singer.  “Piano wires under the table, attached to strategic ‘rattle points!’ to simulate the actions of the invisible!”  The knife spun from her fingers with a deft flick, shooting past Ms. Cuthspoon’s ear and exploded in an expensive and fragmented crash.  “Mirrors and lightboxes to craft the illusion of a glimpse of those that have passed beyond the veil!  And ectoplasm crafted from-” here Mrs. Bagelsly dipped a finger in the substance oozing from the chandelier and sniffed it “- a flour base to simulate the material leavings of the immaterial!  Nothing new, nothing new at all.  You are most certainly a fraud preying on the vulnerable and grieving, young woman – and what is more pertinent and insulting, you are an UNORIGINAL fraud!  The nerve!  Book her, Potterridge.”

“The gall!” said Ms. Cuthspoon, drawing herself up in fury (and keeping her hands well away from the set of cuffs Potterridge had procured from his pocket, besides).  “I’ll have you know that I am the one and only true and real medium I know of, capable of calling the dead from their rest!”
“With flour paste and piano wire?” sneered Mrs. Bagelsly.

“That’s to pay the bills,” said Ms. Cuthspoon scornfully.  “They don’t want the real thing; they want what they expect.  Nobody wants the real thing.”
“Oh, and I suppose it’s because it’s too fearful and dreadful for our poor little hearts to take, so you must keep it secret ‘till your dying day and no you WON’T be showing me now no matter how I beg, thank-you-very-much?” said Mrs. Bagelsly in an ever-more-chilling torrent of sarcasm. 

“No, I can do that right now,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  “It’s just that no-one likes it very much because it’s dull and a bit of a let-down.  Would you like to see it?”
Mrs. Bagelsly toyed with a second, equally-discreet knife as she met the medium’s challenge with narrowed eyes.  “Oh, and give you time to prepare a second fake?”

“We can do it wherever you please, right now.  And what, you don’t think you can see through me twice?”
She laughed at that.  “Outside then; the harsh light of day does treat flimflammery so very well.  And make it sharpish!  We don’t want the cuffs to get cold.”

***

It ended up being a little less than sharpish.  Mrs. Bagelsly insisted on holding the second ritual no closer to the estate than the ditch that bordered the property.  “It’s far enough away from the house and dull enough that you won’t have stashed any jiggery-pokery here,” she explained cheerfully.  “Who ever heard of a grand and exalted necromantic feat performed in a ditch?”
“Suits me fine,” said Ms. Cuthspoon dourly.  “And honestly, I expect it’ll make the thing feel right at home.”

“What, are you summoning up the ghosts of frog-hunters?”

“Hah!” said Ms. Cuthspoon – and it was said, not laughed: three letters and one syllable, sharp and derisive.  “I wish.  Now back up a little. Don’t fret; I’m not about to cut a run in a dress when your man there is in pants, but I DO need to focus a little and it’s hard to do that with you and that galoot breathing down my neck.”

“Mind your manners,” said Mrs. Bagelsly primly as she waved back Potterridge. 

“Mind your knife,” muttered Ms. Cuthpsoon.  And with that, she began.

There was no chant or song, and no call.  She did hum a little, in that tuneless sort of way some people do when they’re concentrating and need something to make the rest of the world shut up and go away.  And then she let out a big, long sigh, the sort that gets the air right out of the bottom of your lungs, and clapped her hands hard, and when she opened them something soft and runny and glowing was hanging in midair in the space where her palms had met.

Mrs. Bagelsly exclaimed something very unladylike.

“Quite,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  She kept her arms open wide, fingers half-cupped like she was holding a set of invisible cymbals.  “If you have any questions to ask it, I suggest you do them now.  This is more effort than it looks.”

“Ask it questions?” whisper-shrieked Mrs. Bagelsly.  “It’s a d*mned insect, a, a, half-lobster!  Look at it!  Look at its legs!  Look at its bl**dy antennae!”

“Believe me, I am aware,” said Ms. Cuthspoon through gritted teeth.  “But ask and it WILL answer.  And hurry it up.”

Mrs. Bagelsly took only half a moment to compose herself, experienced in rewriting her attitude as she was, and the other half was spent on the practical matters of communication. 

“What are you?” she demanded.

The spectral thing twitched some of its many little legs at her fretfully.  The message, when it came, did so in the purest form imaginable: direct comprehension without the intermediary confounding of words, of language, of the meaning of meaning.  They were as follows:

ded

Mrs. Bagelsly fought the unladylike urge to stick her finger in her ear and swivel it.  “Is it being funny?”
“No, they just don’t have any imagination,” said Ms. Cuthspoon tersely. 

“Sensible of them; bet they didn’t have any mediums.  What killed you?”

at b fsh

Mrs. Bagelsly eyed the thing’s translucent flippery appendages with interest.  “Yes, I suppose you were.  No accounting for taste, especially among fish.  Can you tell us anything about what lies beyond?”

ded

“Or when you died?”
lng ag

“Or anything at all?”
n

“Well, I suppose that’s more than I expected I’d get,” said Mrs. Bagelsly.  “Just hold on a moment, I have pencil and paper on me somewhere – ah!  Yes, hold it still just a moment longer.”
“Please, there’s no rush,” said Ms Cuthspoon in the most sugary-sweet voice deliverable while biting your own tongue. 

“Hush, you owe me this much. An honest morning’s work won’t kill you – there!  Done.  You can throw it back now.”
Ms. Cuthspoon’s arms dropped, the air didn’t-quite-pop, and the thing went away.  “Satisfied?” she said, rubbing her wrists. 

“Scarcely,” said Mrs. Bagelsly, tapping her pencil against her sketchpad.  “This just raises further questions.  For instance, that all seemed very usual to you: is this what happens every time?”
“Sometimes they’re bigger or smaller.  Not by a lot, but a bit.”
“Well, that answers question two: is-it-just-the-same-one,” said Mrs. Bagelsly.  “Hmm.  Question three then: you’ve never found anything else?  Anyone else?”
“No.  Just these things.”
“Hmmmm.  Well now, it seems our business is concluded for the day.  You have provided me with evidence of supernatural powers beyond the ken of mankind, Ms. Cuthspoon, and in gratitude for this I shall look the other way in the matters of your practice of cruel japery for wanton profit by preying on the hopefulness of the bereaved.  But just this once.”
“Your charity and kindness is beyond all my hopes, Mrs. Bagelsly,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  “Will you at least be paying me?”

No, I think not – the séance was fraudulent and you did this lobster-magic gratis.  Potterridge, go and get the carriage.  Poterridge?  Potterridge!  Oh, it seems he’s taken a turn; I forgot that he never could abide seafood.  Do you have any smelling salts?”

“Ten quid.”

“Three.”
“Done.”

“Poor haggling, young woman.”

“If it gets you out of here faster, it’s a bargain.”

“A fraud, a poor haggler, AND possessed of a rude mouth.  At least you’re sensible.”

***

The second time Mrs. Bagelsly came a-calling to Ms. Cuthspoon’s estate, she did so unannounced and early in the morning, and she left Potterridge in the carriage. 

“I’ve found out who you’re calling up,” she said triumphantly.  “I paid a visit to a naturalist acquaintance of mine, who mentioned an acquaintance of his, who referred me to a colleague of his at the natural history museum.  They all agreed my illustration was of a trilobite.  Look here – I’ve brought along copies.”
Ms. Cuthspoon stared bleary-eyed at her.  “Tea first.  Then trilobites.”
“Oh if you insist.  And toast too, while you’re at it.”

The toast was burned.  Mrs. Bagelsly wasn’t above constructive criticism. 

“So as you can see, they’re remarkably common,” she said through a mouthful of marmalade.  “Plenty of the nasty little things lying around underfoot wherever the rocks are right to hold their bodies.  How many times have you tried to summon the dead exactly?”
Ms. Cuthspoon shrugged.  “One doesn’t keep close track of inconsequentials, particularly when the outcome varies so seldomly.”
“Oh come now.”
“I told you, it’s so damned boring that I never really bothered.  I tried maybe a few dozen times when I started around age sixteen, then on and off a few times a year from then into my mid-twenties.  Doing the same exhausting thing over and over for the same disappointing results is simple madness!”
“And more than that,” corrected Mrs. Bagelsly, “it is statistics.  Now, we can make two possible conclusions from your memory here.  One is that you can only summon deceased trilobites.  This would be simple and William of Ockham would approve of that, but it would be imprudent to accept it without questioning. The other is that you can indeed summon any dead being, but trilobites are simply so common that they are always what you end up with SO FAR.”

“I do not appreciate your emphasis,” said Ms. Cuthspoon, glaring from behind the shelter of her saucer. 

“Well, then you will appreciate its explanation: you are going to summon the dead every day, all day, until we have acquired a better grasp of your abilities,” said Mrs. Bagelsly, briskly mopping her plate with the heel of her toast. 

“Oh surely not!”

“It will keep you too busy to scam, will advance the sum of human knowledge, and will provide us both with the precious chance to learn something new.”
“I shan’t and you can’t make me.”
“I have numerous letters penned and ready to be posted in my absence should I not give word, mused Mrs. Bagelsly aloud, daintily sucking a glob of breakfast from her thumb.  “And their contents are MOST scandalous.  Financially ruinous, I should say.”

Ms. Cuthspoon put her teacup down with bad grace.  “Fine,” she snapped.  “But I’m having a second helping first.  This isn’t a matter for an empty stomach.”

***

“Just a little longer,” said Mrs. Bagelsly.

“It’s sunset.”
“Almost there, hold on.  Just a little longer.”
“I can’t feel my arms.”
“Nearly there.  Nearly.  Just a little longer.”

“Going in three.”
“Just a little longer.”
“Two.”
“Just a little longer.”
“One.”
“Just a, ah that’s it.  All done.”
Ms. Cuthspoon dropped her arms to her sides and her body into an easy chair.  Her eyes, long-since shut, somehow sank deeper into their sockets.  Mrs. Bagelsly by contrast was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but her drawing  hand took a good six seconds of flexion to leave its cramped shape and she was blinking much less than a human ought to. 

“Well,” she said cheerfully.  “I think that’s a sound day’s work.  We have sketches of all varieties, tables listing them by population, age, and cause of death-”

“’At b fsh’,” said Ms. Cuthspoon with faint venom.  “’At b mllsk.’  ‘Sqshd b md.”

“-and we’re beginning to get a better grasp of the big picture.”
“Trilobites, isn’t it?  Nothing but trilobites.  All the way down.”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Bagelsly.  “If it were nothing but trilobites all the way down, what would be eating them?  Keep it up and we’ll find something else.  Which is why I’ll be back bright and early tomorrow morning.  I hope you have more of that marmalade, it was really quite scrumptious.”

“Hate you,” said Ms. Cuthspoon.  And she fell asleep.

***

“Just a little longer.”
“Little longer ever day.”
“That means you’re getting better at this!”
“Three.”
“Just a little longer.”
“Two.”
“Done!”

***

“Just a little longer.”
“Ending early this time?”
“Well, my fingers are stuck.”
“Again?  I’ll get the balm.”
“Would you mind?  It’s just that if I try to walk like this, the whole arm goes numb.”

***

“Alright, we’re done.”
“Oh, just a little longer, surely.”
“You’re starting to nod off.”
“Nonsense!”
“What’ve you got written for our last cause of death?”
“I was going to put it down in a moment.”
“And the one before that?”
“Didn’t I get that one?  It says ‘at b rptl.’”

“That was the one BEFORE that.  We’re done.”

“Oh, really!”
“Besides, I already put the kettle on during your last break.”

“Mm.  Do you have marmalade?”
“You’re eating me out of house and home.”

***

“And how was today?”
“Fine?  No clouds, blue sky, a pleasant breeze-“

“Oh, don’t be like that.  The WORK.  How much did you get done?”
“A dozen more than yesterday.”

“Pish posh, still well below par!”
“’Par’ was set with two of us.  I’m not as fast a sketcher, even if I wasn’t having to stop and start all the time and remember things before I write them down.”

“Well, I’d better get back to it then.”
“Not before the doctor says you can.”
“It’s just a bit of scribbling!  Honestly, you fuss too much.  I could do it right here in bed.”
“You could and you won’t.  Get better first.”
“Oh, I will, you’ll see.  Just a bit longer and I’ll be back to it, show you how it’s done.  Just a little longer first.  Just a little longer.”

***

She expected the invitation to the funeral.  And the grey-faced old men in fine coats speaking to her of how she’d been mentioned in correspondence, such a pleasure to meet her, pity about the circumstances, would she care to ever donate her collection to the museum, oh the specimens looked so lovely in pictures, such a shame, may we all pass in such circumstances.

She didn’t expect the contents of the will.  Well, maybe the bit about demanding she hire on Potterridge because he was too damned stubborn to retire, but certainly not the rest of it. 

And she certainly didn’t expect the first thing she did when she got home to be tidying up the séance room, setting up her notebook and sketchpad, and settling in for the evening’s work.  She’d been paid for it, after all, and the remuneration was going to go farther now that she wasn’t purchasing ruinous amounts of marmalade. 

Six trilobites.  Sixteen trilobites.  Ghostly little arthropods, something far away from crab and spider and distant cousin to both.  She asked and nodded and released and wrote and drew from memory, recent memory, so the older bigger ones stayed away. 

Twenty-eight trilobites.  Twenty-nine trilobites.  Small and large and decorated and plain.  She took a moment to make sure her columns were straight and tidy, corrected a smudge. Things had to be kept tidy. 

Thirty-seven trilobites.  And one more afterwards, and as her palms parted her first thought was ‘that’s not enough legs.’

And it wasn’t enough legs, if you were a trilobite.  Four squat little pillars, jutted fiercely out to the side of a little round-barrel torso, like a cross between a lizard and a small and politely confused hog.  Its earless head looked at her, big eyes curious. 

“What are you?” she asked.  What else could you ask?

Ded.

“What killed you?”

Caght in clod of bad ar.

“When did you die?”
Long tim ago, durng the gret dyings.

“Can you tell me anything about what lies beyond?”

Ded. All ded.

Ms. Cuthspoon’s mouth and arms, so ably acting in her brain’s stead, ran out of muscle memory.  Her hindbrain took up the torch.  “If you see a rude, pushy old woman – human woman, like me – around the place, ask her to stop by.  Please.  Please?”
Oky.

Ms. Cuthspoon closed her arms, made her illustration, recorded her observations. 

Then she cried a bit afterwards.  That, she’d expected.

It wasn’t much.  But it was something new, and that was worth it.

The pickles were deliciously sour; her granddaughter knew her trade better than she’d ever had, at a quarter her age. She’d just popped the first of them in her mouth when the knocking came at her cottage’s door, and so she answered it with maybe a little more force than otherwise reasonable.

“Yes?” she said rudely to the anxious and trembling young man outside.

“O witch, I come on behalf of our town and all people in it, young and old, slight and strong, short and tall, to beg of your aid-”

“Whyfor witch?” she demanded.

“Because you are old and live in the woods and have a stern and cruel look to your mouth,” explained the young man.

“I’d like to see you have a different look if you’d eaten one of my granddaughter’s pickles,” she shot back. “And what aid could you want of me, witch or not?”

“We are suffering,” said he, “under three most terrible and inescapable maladies: a brave and valiant prince; a fair and languishing princess, and – may god save our souls – a wise and just and true king.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, then there’s nothing for it. I will do what I can.”

And so the witch took up her walking stick and her best hat and set out on the long, long road to the town.

With the rest of the pickles, of course.

***

The road through the woods was dark, but the witch was used to it.

The road through the woods was winding, but the witch was used to it.

The road through the woods was very, very, very long, and the witches legs were very, very, very old – and that, alas, she could only grow so used to. Instead she had long cultivated useful spots to stop and rest, such as soft mossy stones, stumps, and in this case a toppled log too lumpy and twisted to make good firewood, half-sunken on the rim of a lily-padded little pond.

The log was occupied when she found it, beseated by the slumping a shining man in shining armour with a shining blade at his side and a large and handsome (if not quite shining) horse at his other side. There was little doubt in her mind as to who this was.

“I apologize for my slothful idleness, good woman,” said the brave and valiant prince, “but you find me in a moment of weakness betwixt quests. Tell me, is there any deed that you need done? A villain vanquished? A beast felled?”

“None come to mind,” said the witch. “I live alone in the woods, and don’t hear tell of much.”
“A witch, maybe?” said the brave and valiant prince. “Or is there a howling beast that torments your goats?”
“I don’t have any goats.”
“Please, please, please, I beg of you,” said the prince, falling onto one knee with a clatter of fine plate and chain. “I’ve been questing dawn ‘til dusk for days uncounted. I delve into dens and caves to stir slumbering creatures to battle; I cross every bridge I encounter thrice until I am stopped by a passerby and may demand a duel; I have vexed every herb-knower and spell-writer for leagues around until they curse’d me and I could take means to lift the curse; I have hunted and harried giants ‘till there be not a living creature with two legs and two arms in these lands that stands taller than six foot two. A brave and valiant prince MUST quest, no matter the cost, no matter what. Please! There must be something I can do for you! Please!”

“Well,” said the witch, “you could find me a new walking stick. This one’s all worn out.” And so filled with desperate joy was the brave and valiant prince to do this that he leapt to his feet and drew his shining blade and hewed a limb from the fallen log he sat upon all at once and in less than a twinkling.

“Oh, no, no, no,” said the witch despairingly. “Not like that, hacking away all messily! You’ll split it. You’ll want a nice sound branch. Look, see mine?”

So saying, she handed the brave and valiant prince her walking stick – which though worn, was still very s turdy and of great size. And while he looked upon it, taking great care to document the precise nature of its craftsmanship, she took the shining sword and threw it into the pond behind them.

“Now,” she told the brave and valiant prince, “we’ll need to go find you an axe.”
“Whyfor, perchance?”
“Because you’ll need something to cut wood PROPERLY with. Come along, come along. Offer me a ride, will you?”

So the brave and valiant prince nobly offered a seat on his large and handsome (if not quite shining) horse as they went down the road, and as the woods became less dark the sun became quite strong and the heat bore down on his shining armour until he was prone to sweat.

“Best put that away for now,” said the witch. “Heatstroke doesn’t improve anyone.” And this was true, and so the brave and valiant prince heeded it and packed up his shining armour and walked in his plain linen until at last they came (at the witch’s direction) to the blacksmith at the edge of town, who she knew because he was her son-in-law’s cousin, and she bid the (still-warm, dog-tired) brave and valiant prince to rest a moment while she did business, which he did with his eyes shut.

“Here,” said the witch, proffering a wood-axe. “It’s yours.”

“A gift? But I have completed no quest.”

“Oh, it’s been paid for – and so has a little house on the edge of town,” said the witch, who knew what a suit of shining armour was worth. “And now you can take quests that don’t bother anyone and that never end. People will always need firewood, or water drawn for their wells, or crops tended. And,” she added, seeing his trepidation and hope at war, “they will never want their woods to become clear-cut, or their wells to run dry, or their fields to deplete and sour. So when you halt your questing, that too will be valuable.”

The brave and valiant prince would’ve had all sorts of fine and noble things to say to that, but he found – much to his excitement – that he wasn’t a brave and valiant prince at all and settled, in lieu of applied custom or experience – to give the witch a hug. Which he did, before he ran back into the woods, axe in hand.

The horse went with him. He’d never treated it poorly, and as it was not quite shining it felt like this new way of questing was not beneath it.

Also, it was sick of jousts and monsters.

***

The town was quieter than the witch remembered it; but then again, she was older and her ears were more stubborn. Perhaps it was as noisy as it had always been in her youth. Perhaps it was noisier.

Then again, the town of her youth hadn’t been buried in the long, long midday shadow of a briar-tangled tower that rose from what had once been a thriving town square, as this one was. Maybe things were just different and exact comparisons would do nothing but oversimplify the complexities of reality.

Those were the things that the witch stopped thinking about as she very, very, very slowly picked her way through a gnarled mass of rose-bedecked briars with needles long and sharp enough to knit a suit of chainmail for an elephant. Her attention was very very specifically focused on the movement of each limb, which thankfully was something she’d gotten used to. When falling down went from embarrassing to life-threatening, you either learned to think about what you were doing, or you learned to heal fast.

The downside of being so focused was that you missed out on other things. For instance, the moment when the witch finally extracted her foot from the last of the briars was when she finally looked up and found herself eye to eye with no fewer than sixteen (she counted twice, very fast) large, scaly, smouldering creatures with goat horns and lion claws and lashing tails. They were piled in a heap two-deep around the heavy door at the base of the tower and were watching her with genuine confusion and something else.

She thought she recognized that something else. It was the expression on her cat’s face whenever he realized she had milk.

Slowly and carefully, the witch put her hand in her bag and drew out the jar of pickles. Their eyes alit on it like flies to rotting meat.

Slowly and carefully, the witch opened the jar of pickles. Sixteen pairs of scaly ears fluttered like moths at lanterns.

Gently and gingerly, the witch tossed a single handful of pickles underarm. Sixteen long, lean, muscled bodies leapt into the air and tried to eat every pickle while yelling at every one of their comrades at once.

“Oh!” cried a voice from far above, floating down the long, long column of the tower’s spiral staircase and threading through the heavy bars of its door. “Oh no! You KNOW it’s not time for dinner! Are you all trying to eat Gustave again? Oh no! Bad! Bad children! Bad!”

At this the ruckus subsided, and soon the heavy and barred door of the tower was flung open, revealing a fair (if somewhat red-cheeked from hurry) and languishing princess, plus her perspiration.

“Naughty!” she scolded, and the dragons all laid their ears back and whined most piteously. “You KNOW you mustn’t eat Gustave, even if he’s smallest! Dinner is roast yams, and you will enjoy it!”

“Pardon me,” said the witch.

“Oh!” said the fair and languishing princess again. “A visitor! Pardon me, I’m so sorry. Are you a knight, or a prince, or a hero, or a youth, or a wayward long-lost royal?”
“None and neither of them all,” said the witch.

“Oh!” said the fair and languishing princess yet again. “You’re a witch. I see. What a relief that is; things are quite untidy right now and I’m not ready at all for any of my expected visitors. Would you like to come upstairs and have some tea?”

“Of course,” said the witch.

But her hip started to pain her halfway up the tower, so she took a rest on a little chair the fair and languishing princess kept there (‘in case one of the dragons gets sick and I need to be close for the night, poor thing’) and the princess brought the tea-tray down from above.

“It’s just so much work, to be properly imprisoned.” she groaned as she poured. “And not just imprisoned – to be really, truly languishing you’ve got to have all manner of curse’d fauna and flora imprisoning you, otherwise it’s not durance vile it’s just boring old jail. And durance vile takes WORK! I’d always thought the first few years were the worst – the briars were too thin and harmless, and by the time I’d gotten them so big and sharp they’d gotten vulnerable to aphids and that almost wiped them out until I managed to encourage our ladybug population to sprout up, and all of that made it so I had almost no time to tend to my vegetable patch which meant thin rations for the dragons – and they were just dragonets back then, and that means regular big meals to grow strong scales and horns! But now – now I think it’s even harder; there’s not as much to be done from scratch but the upkeep is a nightmare! There’s so much weeding to be done, and so much planting to be handled, and the briars keep trying to overgrow the vegetable patch and by now if I need to prune them it takes a gosh-darn halberd to do the job, and when the wretched little beasts aren’t digging up the briars and setting them on fire for fun they keep trying to eat Gustave! He isn’t even that much smaller than the rest of them anymore, it’s nothing but force of habit and sheer – sheer SPITE, that’s what it is! And every time I forget a packet of seeds or a hoe or some medicine it’s all the way up, up, up, UP there, in my bedroom. Which I have to keep neat at all times in case a prince should stop by to rescue me from my languishment, which means everything’s crammed into all the drawers and inside the closet higgledy-piggledy. I can’t help but feel there must be a better way to handle all of this.”

“Well,” said the witch, who’d had time to blow on her tea and listen politely and drink and listen some more and drink again and listen some more and think a little and finish her tea altogether. “What if you made some kennels, with a private space for the runt? And a fence, to keep them out of the briars. And a fence to keep the briars from overgrowing the vegetable patch.”

“Oh,” said the fair and languishing princess. “I’d thought of that before. But there’s nothing to make the fence with; all I’ve got are briar vines and dragon-scutes.”
“You have a whole tower of stone,” said the witch. “And strong arms from weeding and tilling. You can do this.”
“But I’ve never built a fence,” said the fair and languishing princess in a small voice to herself.

“I can show you how my old garden fence was built, when I was younger,” said the witch.

“Oh yes PLEASE.”

And so all day and all night for several days the witch harvested yams for dragons and weeded errant briars while the fair and languishing princess harvested her tower for stone. She began with the roof, then her chambers, then finally the long, long spire, and at last there was nothing left but a free-standing archway (with a barred door, oddly enough), some sturdy and weather-proof dragon kennels, and a set of ordered and divided gardens: vegetable and rose. And standing there amidst them was a sunburnt and vigorous young woman, pouring a bucket of water half over her head and half down her throat.

“Needed that,” she managed. “Not sure which I needed more, but I needed it.”
“All of it, I think,” said the witch.

“Yes,” she agreed, looking the witch dead in the eyes for the first time since they’d met. “I think I agree. You know, I don’t think I can be imprisoned without a tower anymore. Do you know anybody who might want to buy guard-dragons, or thorn-hedges, or roses, or highly nutritious yams?”

“I can give a few names as suggestions for where to start,” said the witch. “And I think you’ll do the rest yourself.”
“Your thinking’s pretty handy,” said the woman.

And she gave the witch a dragon-roasted yam for the road. It wasn’t as tasty as her granddaughter’s pickles, but it was warm from within.

***

The walk up from the town to the king’s castle was short. The drawbridge was down. The guards were well-outfitted and polite to all. The halls were clean and comfortably decorated. And on a well-worn and handsomely-crafted yet simple throne in the room, resplendent in fine (but not showy) robes and crowned in gold (but not extravagantly) sat the wise and just and true king, who was very nearly any ordinary person save for the sharp look in his eyes.

The witch waited while he finished attending court for the day, and his judgments were fair, and faultless, and even-handed, and she knew that this was by far the greatest challenge yet.

“You may now approach, witch” said the wise and just and true king, who had dismissed the rest of the chamber. “The court is now adjourned, and I have some time.”
“How much?” said the witch.

“Not enough,” said the wise and just and true king. “I must manage these lands. I must manage these people. They believe I have the right to do so by birth alone, and that my competence is proof of that belief’s truth. I strive every day to make them happy and safe and to prevent harm done to them and harm done by them, and to do so in a way that they understand and appreciate. I know that if I did not do this, another would, and that other would lack something of mine – being wise and true but not just, or just and wise but not true, or true and just but not wise, or (heaven forbid) lacking two qualities, or even all three! So I sit in court and I rule with a right I do not recognize that I do not dare give up and am loved and beloved and I wish that I could wish that I was dead, I really do, only I cannot because to wish that I were dead would be to wish harm and ruin to come to all who rely on me to do right by them. So instead I wish that I may one day wish for nothing at all.”

The witch acknowledged the truth of all this with a nod. “Your majesty,” she said, “please shut your eyes for one moment, and I promise that I will fix this.”

The wise and just and true king shut his eyes, and with a single sweep of her arm, the witch did so.

“Now you can open them,” she said, and when she did so there was no more king, just a sharp-eyed man in fine robes in an empty hall. Somewhere in a corner of the room, something gold rattled briefly (but not extravagantly) as it spun out of sight.

“Come on,” said the witch. “Change into something more sturdy and let’s go visit town. They elect a new mayor every fall harvest, and I think if you’re well-prepared you’ll stand a good chance, if you want it. If not, good advice is good advice whether it’s from the mayor or a friend, and people are always hungry for it.”

“What of the castle?” asked the sharp-eyed man.

“Let it lie. It’ll be there if someone needs it.”

He looked at her again. “Will they take me in? On the word of a witch alone?”

“Of course they will. What you do is what they love, not who they think you are. And my word walks those same paths. Close your eyes for one more moment.”
The sharp eyes closed.

The witch reached up to her head and for the second time in thirty seconds removed someone’s best hat.

(But more tidily this time; hers was a gift from her son).

“You can look now, mister,” said the old woman. “Now let’s get moving. Time’s wasting.”

***

They did not live happily ever after, of course. Time moves, wasted or not, and there were other kings, and other princes, and other princesses. Here and there and elsewhere.

But then and there they had what they needed, they understood what they wanted, and nobody was hurt. And that was happily enough for anyone.

The TROGG WARS!!!! BY, CORII

Once upon a time my great-grandpa and his friends had cool boats and they rode the cool boats here and they made houses and then they built a really big house but it turned out it was ontop of a trogg mine and it fell into the mine and this started….THE TROGG WARS!!!!

The trogg wars were really hard because troggs live underground and we don’t, so, we had to find them which was hard and they could find us, which was easy. Lots of people died and my great-grandpa said lots of his friends died too and it sucked. But then we found out you can plug up the holes and my great-grandpa’s friend made friends with the birds and my great-grandpa’s other friend made friends with the tree giants and the troggs all lost and we started to win and they tried to trick us by saying timeout but it didn’t work and we won and that is why we’re here and the troggs aren’t. That was the end of the trogg wars.

My great-grandpa said it’s important to never forget what happened to his leg so I don’t because it’s really, really, gross.

***

Improper formatting.

Inadequate wordcount.

Insufficient detail.

Terrible grasp of punctuation.

Extensive reliance on source outside of the textbook.

At least it isn’t plagiarized this time. 20/100.

***

Summary of A History of the First Trogg War

Harvest 17, 1238

Nennifer Grisbit

Since the dawn of time, the Fine Folk have yearned for sights beyond the horizon, and whether by foot, by cart, or by ship they have chased its ever-distant glow. Such wanderlust was eminently rewarded in the year QD (Queen’s Domain) 732, when an unseasonably late summer storm drove a sea-serpent-hunting expedition far off course and onto the shores of a hitherto undiscovered coast. Captain Melepron found refuge in a sheltered bay with plentiful fish and fresh water streams, and upon returning to the Homeland and spreading word of its existence, it was soon populated by a wave of explorers, adventurers, and settlers, who named it Safeharbour. This first foothold grew rapidly, and soon the sheer number of would-be-manses, burgeoning shipyards, and half-tamed parkgrounds necessitated (as it so often does!) the investigation and shaping of further territory. Luckily, the rest of the large isle – now named ‘Melepronnia’ – was equally sumptuously suited to the life of which the Fine Folk have long accustomed themselves to, with the local meadows being suited to unicorn pasturage; the native pines proving eminently susceptible to subordination and obedience under the transplanted boughs of gild-trees; and the beasts of the field being of the common sort and thus easily dissuaded or directed by both Word and deed. Indeed, things were going both marvellously and typically of any new (if exceptionally productive) colony, until the fateful moment when Lord Holbrom ordered the construction of a new hunting manse for himself and his immediate family and companions. Lord Holbrom was a roamer by the standards of nobility, and he desired wilderness in his surroundings – thus, the manse was laid out many leagues from Safeharbour and its constellation of expanding villages, about, atop, and within an appealingly striking rocky crag. It was to his great and unsuspecting misfortune that this peak was already occupied.

Troggs were unknown to the Fine Folk before this encounter, but it likely that the inverse is not the case: the work laid beneath the foundations of Holbrom’s Folly (a name meant in irony, soon proven in tragedy) was patient, slow, and devastatingly premeditated. Only when the final keystone of the manse’s grand hall was placed did the troggish undermining trigger its collapse, murdering in a single fell swoop Lord Holbrom, his entire family, and much of the assembled entourage and partygoers. The only survivor was a young and quick adventurer named Elmar, who had attended only by chance in his explorations of the hinterlands. This alone was the salvation of the colony: Elmar ran day and night without rest, sleeping in trees and eating nothing, and by his warning and counsel the outlying villages were recalled to Safeharbour before Holbrom’s Folly could be replicated in a hundred halls and more. Once scouts confirmed his words, Elmar would prove central to the war-councils of what would be later called the First Trogg War.

The war itself can be divided into three broad phases: a prolonged period of initial skirmishing, in which the troggs would seek to encroach into the colonized wester coastlands and be driven back; an intense period of open warfare conducted in the rugged interior; and the final siege at the Depths of Troggak.

The first phase of the war lasted several years and was broadly inconclusive; the troggs were functionally both undetectable and impervious to assault as long as they remained in their hidden tunnels, but this rendered their offensive capabilities practically nil except for very gradual and careful use of undermining to topple homes, redirect rivers, dry wells, and other such cruelty and general mischief. It was Elmar who tipped the scales of this delicate and terrifying balance; drawing on what little he’d seen as he fought free of Holbrom’s Folly, he discovered the means and ways by which the troggs hid the doors through which they crept about the surface realm at night. Once this was known, the trogg’s tunnels afield were useless: every bird in the sky was already allies of the Fine Folk, and once they were given warning of what a trogg-door looked like they patrolled day and night, dove and owl, until at last the troggs were driven far from the fields of Safeharbour and retreated unto their rocky homes in the far hills.

The second phase of the war was a painful necessity: Elmar knew that the troggs would never stay at bay for long, and pressed most passionately to defeat them today rather than let them attack tomorrow. Despite jealousy and cowardice from his detractors, his wisdom was too great to be ignored, and so the great punitive army was forged and sent into the highlands, where the trogg homes were and they made greater use of the surface to grow their vile crops and vent their reeking forges. Initial battles were in Elmar’s favour, but as days turned to weeks the tide began to turn: the troggs were thick as leaves in the forest and had riddled the ground with such holes as to let them flank from any place they wished any time they chose. The great punitive army, though undaunted, was in danger. It was in this darkest moment before the dawn that the wilderness itself arose to volunteer aid: so tragic was the plight of Elmar that the greatest and tallest of the trees rose from their needled beds and strode down the hillsides to bow before him and volunteer aid and service. The pinelords had also suffered as the Fine Folk did under troggish cruelty, and they proposed a joining of forces: if the great punitive army could protect them, they could provide both knowledge of where to direct its wrath and the means with which to ensure victory.

The series of audacious triumphs that followed led immediately into the third and final phase of the war: an entire grove of pinelords rooted themselves atop the valley that held the troggish capitol of Troggok, and for three days and three nights their roots sang to those of all that grew for leagues, and for three days and three nights the great punitive army saved them from poisonous vapours, from flaming arrows; from fierce axes. And at the dawn of the third day, with the rise of the sun and the sap alike, the pinelords threw up their hands and the roots of all that grew within leagues pulled with them and into the pits of the earths itself sank the Depths of Troggok, where it will never return from. No living thing will grow there now.

Our land is now Elmaroreen, in the name of the one who fought so dearly for its survival. Had he not perished in that final battle, I believe he would have been pleased. So, too, would he have been pleased with our continued vigilance: the Second Trogg War would have been much worse without memory of his warnings, and without the continued assistance of the allies he made so far from home. As long as that vigilance does not falter, and that friendship does not wane, his name and the people that live under it will never end.

***

More-than-adequattely studious, advanced formatting, correct (if smug) conclusions.

Composition is adequate if overwrought.

Heavily penalize for using ‘since the dawn of time.’ If we catch it early enough, she might not insist on using it in university. 70/100

***

Review of A History of the First Trogg War

By Fonrud Furlament, QD 1238

This book is very easy to read, but it doesn’t seem very accurate. I’m going to try and explain.

For one thing, it explains why we moved to Melepronnia, but it doesn’t mention that one of the reasons Safeharbour grew so fast is the Queen was exiling debtors. Lots of people came here because it was new and exciting, but the reason they wanted to go somewhere at all was because they were being sent away.

It also messes up when the troggs found us: they sent messages pretty soon after we started building houses outside of Safeharbour. I think Elmar met them too, but I’m not really sure. This matters a lot because this is one of the BIGGEST mistakes in the book: Lord Holbrom knew that hill was dangerous to build on because the troggs told him there was a ritual cyst-cavern beneath it. He built on it anyways, even when they told him he was putting too much weight on it and hollowing the stone out for cellars. The keystone was the heaviest part and that’s why it sank, and Elmar lived because the troggs pulled him out of the rocks and healed him. It was pretty lousy of him to go home and tell everyone to fight them after that, and it was even lousier when he told them to stuff up their ventilation shafts so they couldn’t breathe in their tunnels (why does the book say he blocked their doors? It says they were undermining us, they wouldn’t need doors for that!), and it was lousiest of all that we kept the birds so busy looking for new trogg airshafts day and night that they all died. My grandma says her favourite bird was the jay. I wish I could see a jay. I wish I had a favourite bird. I wish anyone in my class could have a favourite bird.

Finally, it gets the reasons behind the end of the war all wrong. The pinelords didn’t go to Elmar; he went to them. And nobody knows what he said to them, just that he made them a promise and only told a few friends what it was before he died. The pinelords don’t like the troggs, and they don’t like us, and they don’t like anything that isn’t made of plants, and I don’t know what Elmar promised them but I bet it wasn’t great because none of Elmar’s friends ever told anyone else what he promised either (I wonder if it was about the gild-trees? They all died before the Second Trogg War). I hope nobody else ever promises them anything because if they did that to Troggok I don’t know why they couldn’t do it to Safeharbour.

In the end I don’t think A History of the First Trogg War is a very good book. It doesn’t tell the truth in some very important places and it doesn’t say why it’s doing that. I don’t like it very much.

***

Adequate formatting.

Serviceable composition.

Absolutely intolerable levels of critical thought.

Find out what he’s been reading, where he got it, and who gave it to him, then purge immediately. Inform the local broadsheets that a trogg infiltrator did it. 0/100.