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At ten minutes to noon Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, stood on her chanting verandah and murmured the last syllables of a twenty-five minute spell precisely on time. 

“Go,” she said, and with a flick of her fingers the verandah’s voice fell silent and the words echoed and with a fat sucking sound that was almost exactly the opposite of any language she was ripped free from the earth and fell into the sky. 

The sky was a dangerous place to be a human.  The breezes were vicious and the air was harsh and around her she could feel the ill will and tremendous force that was the will of the birds, tugging on her limbs, draining from her heart, adding lead to her bones and gasps to her breath.  Upstart mammal, they hissed into her brain.  Wretched offspring of synapsids, thick-limbed, clumsy-footed, gut-brooding hairy rat.  Know your place below. 

Ar-klazion ignored them, and when that didn’t work anymore she sang to them, a long and mocking song whose simple melodies and blunt noises were offensive to their longminds and crude to their oldest souls, and they reeled away in disgust that overcame their hatred.  She chuckled smugly and banked through a cloud of grudges and seething spite; most of the attitude for dealing with the very old worked across species quite nicely, if not the precise words.  But now her sky was clear and her purpose was sharp and she had work to do.

She had a night to catch. 

***

The night lay far in advance from her, fleeing as it was wont to, and an inexperienced sorcerer or cunningman or witch – flush in their powers and giddy with success – might have hurled themselves pell-mell after it in gleeful haste.  They would scoff at restraint and mock the notion of a challenge greater than that they had already conquered to come here; the defiance of an entire planet’s heavy-handed grasp; the evasion of its ancient and crabbed-taloned rulers; the precisely correct pronunciation of twenty-five minutes of ancient words created by a species that had no actual mouths humans would recognize.  This would be what would get them killed, if not in the next few hours then the next time they did something else significant.  Ambition was a spice; arrogance was a poison. 

So Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, crossed her legs and sat upon an icy scrap of cirrus fibratus, where she began, very intently and very thoroughly, to look at her hands. 

Finger.  Thumb.  Finger.  Finger.  Finger.  Times two. 

She pulled them in and out, tugged on that heartbeat, rolled them back and forth and checked the palms and the knuckles and the tendons and the little scars and the bumps and the hangnails and itchy bits that were part of having a body, and she reached out and gently cupped a handful of ozone and brought it down to her.  It hissed and spat most angrily at being brought low thusly, and she soothed its murmurs with one hand even as her other began to remove its skin before the lowly air could strip it loose. 

Her anvil was her palm; her hammer was her thumb; her tongs were her fingers; her forge was her breath. 

It lay gilded and glowing in her grip, a small knife exactly one inch long and one horizon wide, and she picked it up and swung it and it cut the lesser, lower, rarified air in half with the vicious callousness of an aristocrat overdue for the guillotine.  Where it slashed, the sky bled apart, and where it did, Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, followed. 

***

On the vacuum-path she spun forwards, lungs empty, heart frozen, brain alive with sparkling plans.  Behind her she left a brutish contrail of puzzled oxygen molecules, peeled freshly from both the atmosphere and her ozone-blade and left to quarrel in confusion as oxygen molecules always do.  Far beneath and below rust fell like rain and humans grew light-headed and giddy; cats burst into laughter and dogs wandered in dazes.  A contrail of sparkling, dying metals marked the edges of her passing, and as her speed reached its zenith Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, saw the air begin to dye itself from passionate ocean blue to royal purple bruising. 

She was catching up to the night.  It was arrogant and old and it was used to being the fastest thing in the sky, and she would get very close to it indeed before it bothered to notice her. 

When it did, she knew it.  The moon had been following her for some time now, and when it veered sharply in her direction she was ready.  Bodyguard of the night, wanderer of the late summer skies, it dove at her like a stooping hawk, but it was inelegant in its rush and overconfident in its surprise and she simply banked to one side and let the moon slide by, laughing in disdain as it shaved itself down to a crescent on the sharp edge of her passage.  It gained her some seven high-leagues towards the target before the night even noticed its failure, the eld fool, and still, oh still, oh yet the miserable thing didn’t understand the position it was in.  Stars twinkled in her path and rose in her face to bar her way, but she was ready and carefully cut herself into dimensions that slid between their light like water through a streambed, slipping past the shine and squirming closer, ever closer to that inky black that lay beyond. 

The night was still not alarmed.  Why would it be?  Fail though its guardians may, it was still the earthbound finger of the infinite dark on this world, the touch of the universe running down the spine of the planet to bring it shivering relief from the smothering love of its upstart star-parent. 

It must be remembered, of course, that fingers are very delicate in more than one sense. 

So it was both no surprise that the night itself allowed Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, to come so close to it without much caring, and that when she subsequently brought out a small potted plant and turned its chlorophyll inside-out, dumping a lifetime’s-worth of sunshine out in a very sharp railroad-spike of pure photons, it was immediately, unceremoniously, and painfully nailed to the sky. 

***

The heavens did not scream. 

The night itself screamed.  It was much bigger and older and softer and more arrogant, and so it reacted as shrilly and angrily as any such person does when pain is visited upon them, especially minor, inconvenient, meaningless pain.  Actual agony would freeze them stiff. 

The heavens did not scream.  But at hearing that, they did cower and shrink away.  And so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries was alone in the gap where the sky had been, with the immense vastness of the pinned night and a fraying splinter of purest harvested sunlight. 

There was little time to waste.  She brought out her spade and bucket and alit upon the night’s shores, and there she braced herself, and put her hat between her teeth, and bit down so that when her shovel breached the flesh of the night itself the tremendous and all-consuming nauseated pain and roiling horror wouldn’t make her bite off her tongue because she needed that to get back home alive very very much. 

The night was now coherent enough to get over its shock and stop screaming and begin cursing, so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries stopped up her ears with small scraps of rags and began to hum as loudly and off-kilter as she could, drowning out swearwords and damnable blasphemies with lullabies and nonsense verse and filthy limericks, watering down the infinite with the ultra-finite until it could not wound or touch her.  Her fingers itched with the temptation to reach out and snag a flailing tendril of one of the smaller curses, but no, her self-control won the day.  Some things aren’t meant to be taken, but more common are the things that are up for grabs by anyone but with a nasty tendency to remove the hand that receives them. 

She had a bucket full of something like those now, lighter than air and heavy with portent.  Her arm was buoyed and her soul was weighted, and as she threw aside the dissolving remains of what used to be the idea of her shovel and the little sunlight sliver dissolved and the night began to bloom in hideous wrath all around her, she clicked her tongue three times, coughed, and from memory, yelled a loud and perfect “cock-a-roo-roo!”

And Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries slid vastly, perfectly, endlessly down the slope of above and around and into the small comfortable spaces crowded all around with matter, with ordinary matter, with ordinary things that mattered, and slammed into her chanting verandah with such force that every bone in her body came within a single degree of dislocation. 

She lay there for a few hours trying to work up the energy to scream or cry.  The potted plant comforted her, but greater still was the comfort of the little bucket in her left hand.  It was full of the closest thing anyone on a gravity well can get to the actual universe, and it weighed a stupid amount because weight was a stupid concept to apply to it, like size, like shape, like age. 

“Got you,” she said, a few minutes before dinner. 

Then she screamed for a while until she felt better. 

***

“That’s very nice, dear,” said Hanna, mother of Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries.  She gently turned the bucket in her palms, giving it friendly little pats to soothe its noises.  “But this isn’t what I meant when I asked if you could go get me some nightsoil for my garden.”

“Well what the hell else would you mean?” 

Hanna told her.

“Shitting EUPHEMISMS?!” erupted Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries. 
“Exactly,” said Hanna. 

Twenty-six days, that was how long it took.  Wendell felt that was very reasonable of him.

Twenty-six days since they found the mould in the apartment beneath him (and ONLY that apartment: apparently it had originated from an ambitious fridge slime that had gotten too big for its britches and had made it as far as the microwave before being caught).  Twenty-six days of antiseptics and antibacterial and antimicrobial soaps.  Twenty-six days of feeling like someone had placed a can of ethanol inside one nostril and a bar of soap in the other. 

That was how long it took before Wendell went to see the leprechaun in the building’s basement.

“I’m a brownie,” said the leprechaun. 

“Yeah,” agreed Wendell.  “A leprechaun.”

“I’m closer to a hobgoblin than anything.”
“A leprechaun.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I’ll make you a deal, leprechaun,” said Wendell.  “Can you please, please, please, please, PLEASE take away my sense of smell?  Because it’s worse than death having it.”
The leprechaun scratched his nose in perplexity at this.  There was a lot of nose to scratch, both inside and out – it was not long, but it was broad and possessed a staggering depth to it, emotional and physical.  “Look, leprechauns don’t cut deals.  But brownies can, I s’pose.  Stop calling me a leprechaun and I’ll have that nose off you.”
“Not the nose, just the smell.”
“Why do you care?”
“I like my nose.”
The brownie looked at it critically.

“What?”
“Nothing.  Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“It’s a fine nose, I mean.  Just.  I’ve seen better, that’s all.”
“Take the damn smell,” said Wendell.

“Fine,” said the brownie.  And he did.

***

That night Wendell went to bed early and fell into the true sleep of the blissfully exhausted and drifted too deeply for dreams, until the exact moment someone rear-ended someone else on Queen Street and the sirens and the howling and roaring and mangling and screaming grabbed his hindbrain and hurled it back into the universe in blinking terror. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, and rolled over.

Ten minutes later a couple outside had a proposal turn into a breakup. 

Ten minutes after THAT the tow-truck for the rear-ender got rear-ended. 

Ten minutes after THAT the police showed up.

Wendell walked downstairs to the basement and nearly died sixteen times on the way due to forgetting to open his eyes until the third floor. 

“What’s up?” asked the brownie, who was reading an old magazine of dentist’s-office age and stateliness. 

“Can you do ears too?” asked Wendell. 

The brownie’s eyebrows crinkled into highly disgusted shapes. 

“Hearing.  I mean, can you take my hearing?”
“I only do trades,” said the brownie.  “And thank fuck because listen pal, those ears?  Those are fixer-uppers.  You got wax in there or is that tar?”

Wendell pulled off his right slipper and threw it at him, then went to bed and slept through his alarm clock by six hours. 

***

Wendell’s sheets were tacky.  Not as a matter of taste, but as a matter of sensation. 

Sweat, mostly.  Some dust.  And the thread was bare and coarse enough that it trapped them easily. Now that he was getting a solid eight (minimum) a night, he woke irked from it.  And breakfast wasn’t helping.  Breakfast was oatmeal, same as always.  And it tasted like nothing at all, but a little bit worse. Air tasted like nothing.  Oatmeal tasted like lumps. 

“Hey,” said Wendell to the brownie. 

“Hey,” said the brownie. 

“How can I still hear YOU?”

“You’re not,” said the brownie dismissively.  “Don’t overthink it.  Now what the hell’s your problem this time?”
“I hate my breakfast and I hate my fabrics,” said Wendell.

“Want new sheets?  Some recipe ideas?”
“Can you just take my senses of touch and taste?”
The brownie sighed.  “Sure.  Why not.  What’re you offering?”
“I’ll trade you my sense of touch for taking my sense of taste,” said Wendell, who had thought about this very carefully on the way down sixteen flights of stairs. 

The brownie squinted at him.  “Clever.  Very clever.  Too clever.  Don’t try that shit again.”

Breakfast was peaceful then, aside from when Wendell almost bit his tongue off by mistake and only noticed when the spoon came out of his mouth bright red. 

***

The wall to the left side of Wendell’s computer monitor was his worst enemy. 

It was painted teal, but not really.  It was grey, but not quite.  It was almost the colour of a sullen sky, or maybe some sluggish water.  It was rough from the wall’s texture, or maybe that was because it had been applied slapdashedly.  There was a hole that might have been from hanging a picture or from a careless bump with furniture moving.  A spider was living high up on it, unless that was a smear from something. 

Data entry crawled along so slowly, so slowly because of it.  Hours went by in which Wendell had nothing to do but sit and consider that stupid, stupid, stupid wall. 

“Take my sight, please,” he told the brownie. 

“Why don’t I just paint your wall?” the brownie asked. 

“Take it,” said Wendell firmly, “and I’ll be happy.”

“Oh thank FUCK,” said the brownie.  And although Wendell took some two hours to get back to his apartment and could no longer enter data at all, he felt great relief and comfort. 

***

The next day he went down to the basement, which took only one hour but probably almost wasn’t very safe. 

“You’re a ripoff,” he pouted.  “I gave you my sight and we agreed I’d be happy and I’m not!  I’m miserable!”
“That’s because you’ve been avoiding your problems by ignoring them instead of doing anything to fix them,” said the brownie.  “Did you buy ear plugs?  Do your laundry?  Get a poster?  Visit a friend?  Do anything, ever?  TRY something?”
“This is much easier,” said Wendell.

“Beyond the personal moral implications on your character, it’s also pretty rude to the blind and deaf communities.”

“This is all making me even LESS happy,” complained Wendell.  “Fix it!”
The brownie shut his eyes, counted to six on one hand, and opened his eyes again.

“Alright,” he said. “You want me to fix you being unhappy?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Yes!”
“And-”

“We had a deal and I demand you uphold it.”
“Fine,” said the brownie.

***

Wendell’s hospital bed was coarse, his meals rough, his roommate noisy, his neighbours loud, and his walls painted a dreadful vomit—orange. 

But his brain was in a little jar in a basement in a brownie’s burrow, and so he smiled, and was not troubled. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor woke up. 

It was a sudden sharp surprise to her.  It only took a few weeks. 

The sudden flood of returning senses was the same rush it always was – pitch blackness resolving at her pupils; tingling air on her hide; distant odours eddying through her sinuses – but it arrived without the usual easy comfort.  She felt groggy.  She felt heavy.  She felt tired.  She felt like she wasn’t done sleeping.

And then, after a discombobulated month or so, her brain realized why. 

“Oh,” she said (aloud: there was no WAY she was coherent enough for thought).  “I’m hungry.”

***

Her fridge was empty.  The deep-cave’s ice was bare and slick, not even a bloodstain remaining.  Pure cold ice, satisfying to crunch and utterly useless save to build up emergency steam in the absence of liquid water. 

Damnit.  Sure she’d hunted before torpor?  The memories were surly and slow to arrive, begrudging with details and short-tempered when prodded: yes, she’d hunted; no, she hadn’t bothered to save leftovers; yes, she’d eaten the whole thing, claws, paws, fur and all.  It had only been a young bear, she’d told herself; it wouldn’t even make for a decent midslumber snack; she’d only be angry with herself if she woke up and all she had was a half-consumed half-grown half a bear ass. 

Well, here she was: half-ass-less and exactly as angry as she was worried about anyways.  Maybe she could go get another one?  Was it winter?  Finding hibernaculums was a pain and any inhabitants she could dig out would be half-withered from their own naps.  It smelt like winter.  Damnit. 

Her wings cramped.  Her forelegs burned with the ache of comfiness turned sour with stiffness.  There was an itch precisely between her hips that no amount of twisting would ever let her scratch. 

“Fuck it,” she spoke, slipping into eldwords in her liminal consciousness, intent writing itself into her brain and settling just above the surface of her soul.  “I’ll just make a salad.”

And lo, it was sworn. 

***

The mountain stream was too fast to freeze.  That, combined with its delicious traces of heavy metals, was part of what had led her to select this cavern complex in the first place.  It was nice to not have to play whack-a-mole to find the least-stagnant patch of water underneath the crust and then worry about trying not to inhale too many turtles when half asleep.  That big snapper had sent her into chronic coughing for the rest of the year. 

Steam built up.  Her heart roared into second gear, her body temperature in a few select places skyrocketed, and she creaked and hissed her way downslope; half-flying, half-pouring herself, letting gravity take the wheel.  She eeled her way down to her favourite mineral field and oh!  Oh!  The gall!  Some horrible little pests had gone and nibbled away at it while she was abed, snipping away at the exposed edges and chewing on all the richest veins!  It was practically swiss cheese by now. 

“Fuck,” she said aloud – again, in eldwords, and so bilious emotion slopped out of her mouth and poured across the ground, eating away the scrap rock and slag like soft dirt.  But wait, but wait, there was still a smell of metal, a hint – a more-than-hint, an intoxicating whiff – of appetite.  She tidied away the leavings of the pests and as she cleared the slope of stacked stones and chewed timbers (sending a few stragglers flying in the process, hideous little tetrapodal bodies flailing and squealing) there was a little exposed nest, and in that nest, wonder of wonders, of all the pleasant surprises, against all she knew and hoped, in spite of everything, was a few dozen pounds of near 24-karat gold. 

“Holy shit,” she blurted out, blighting the ground around her with irrecoverable poison, which it looked to be used to.  “Jackpot!”  Who knew the little four-limbed bastards had it in them?

Hmm. 

She looked downslope.  Yes, there were more down there.  They usually preferred the valleys to her peaks, and she could smell the rising cinders from their half-baked little fires, feel the fuzzy and linty edges of their small dreams. 

So she lurched, slipped, and jumped and landed amongst them. 

***

The big nests were the real prizes.  They’d taken the gold and silver and purified it so beautifully, then frustratingly fashioned it into tiny little flat circular fecal pellets.  She stuffed them into her crop as she sifted through the detritus, then alit on something even nicer: a tiny wooden husk holding something that, but for its sparkle, almost looked like diamonds.  Then she sniffed and licked and bit and felt that crunch and grit and knew they WERE diamonds, only the little pests had nibbled away the edges of the gems to make them sparkle.  Magpies they were.  Still, even reduced they were a nice treat. 

Yes, it was all coming together nicely.  And oh, and oh, what was this that she smelt, that she smelt smelting?  On the edge of town a fire that roared sullen-dark, almost like a very sad and tiny version of her own gut.  She upended it and spilled molten goo across the ground – sad tin, dull iron, but mixed within the slag and the slurry was something that hummed JUST right. 

At last.  Perfect. 

***

The gold lay heaped; topped with silver.  The gems blazed.  And threaded throughout it as dressing and binding, the small tickling buzz of a light undertone of molten radium. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor wrapped herself around it three times, coiled tightly as she could, and inhaled the rising fumes from the whole glowing glorious mess in three shuddering breathes. 

Damn, she loved salad. 

And so she went to bed, body aching pleasantly instead of stiffly; stomach full; soul soothed; and she slept there quite content and very happy and ready to awake late in the decade.

Then some little FUCKER rode up to her door on a horse, snuck into her bedroom, and stabbed her side. 

Kenneth was a big, beautiful scorpion – six hundred tons if he was a gram, with a lovely red carapace that made the haemolymph of his opponents splash most attractively against it. Jarleen had ridden him to victory in six races and two grand championships and the noise he made as his mouth foamed and his legs folded under him and his brain shut off was a very small and disappointed ‘thhht,’ more fitting of a distressed dockyard guard-spider than a mighty steed.

“Fuck,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient. “Fuck fuck.” Half a league from the finishing line and down a mount with no backups. “Fuck fuck fuck.”  And the trap had been poison, which had needed time to work its way through Kenneth’s system, which had needed to be timed during a pit stop, which meant the race officials were compromised. “FUCK.”
“Why do you swear as you assault that dead beast so?”
Jarleen looked at her hands and looked at what was in them and looked at the stranger (stocky, squinty, strange) and discovered that she was correct, as entirely without planning to she had seized up her goad and begun thwacking Kenneth in what had formerly been the tenderest section of his exoskeleton.

“I’m a half-hour ahead on a sixteen hour race and some scumfuckering bribetaking pissshitting fuckbitchassmotherwhore killed my mount with doped food,” she explained primly. “Now please stay back because I can’t guarantee my aim at the moment.”

“Oh, you need a new ride?” asked the stranger. She scratched aimlessly at the sun—boils on her arm, which were the ripe round red of someone who’d spent too much time on the old hiways where the sun rolled off the rotted metal roofs of the motorcars. “I sell rides.”
“The Southern Eldland Grand Loop is only open to skyscraper-class scorpions,” said Jarleen.

“And hey, that’s what I sell,” said the stranger, offering her scratching hand – still flaked with dead skin under the nails. “My name’s Moth. Let’s talk titanturkey, shall we?”

***

Moth’s Used Scorpions was a scrap of worn cloth serving as both tent and banner stretched between a pair of Eld-age streetlamps. Underneath it was a rock (her chair) a cooler (her lunch and her safe) and a telescope (for spotting clients).

Moth offered Jarleen half her lunch. It had been a long time since her last meal and a random stranger was at this point less likely to poison her than any of the professionals at the pit stops, so Jarleen took the bottle and drank stale fermented grain as she was shown the first scorpion, lurking patiently in the shadowed and empty-eyed bulk of an Eld building that very nearly stood taller than he did.

“This is Billy. Good shape, gently used, young enough to have tons of energy and not so young as to be thin in the carapace. A bit plain in his patterning, but a working jockey’ll care less about that than results, right?”
“The ‘casters don’t shut up about it, but yes.”

Billy rustled gently beneath them, mandibles flexing, and Jarleen sighed. “Close. Very close. But absolutely not. He’s got no right pincher.”
“And he makes good use of his left!”
“Nine times out of ten that’s the side you get passed on in the last league. He’s as useless to me as if he had no legs. Pass.”
“C’mon, you’re in no position to be choosey,” protested Moth.

“Unless you’ve only got the one scorpion, I suspect I am. Who’s next?”

Next was Newman. He brooded low in the shade of a collapsed overpass, the skeletal remains of his meals delicately picked-dry around his den-mouth.

“Two pinchers, see, that’ll do you,” said Moth, accepting her lunch back and shotgunning the dregs of the bottle with a loud crunching sound. “And believe you me, he’s fierce enough with them. Almost got my leg two days ago.”

“I can deal with feisty,” said Jarleen. “Call him out.”
“Pardon?”
“Let’s see his pace.”
Moth sighed and put her fingers to her teeth and shrieked a harsh note that shook the dust from the deadest windows of the Eld buildings, and Newman bestirred and slowly, gently eeled his way loose to investigate.

Jarleen sighed.

“Hey, he still has two pinchers! I told you!”
“You told me. He also has no legs. You didn’t tell me that.”
“He gets around pretty good for someone with no legs, I’d like to see you do any better.”
“I wouldn’t do worse. And I wouldn’t win this race. Do you have any others?”

Moth shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m a bit light on stock.”
“Anything. Anything at all.”
“Alright, alright.” Moth shrugged once more – a great heave of flexion from shoulder to wrist – and pulled her hand from her pocket.

“That’s a beetle.”
“So it is.”
“That is NOT a scorpion.”
“You said anything at all, what the hell more do you want?”
“A scorpion!” screamed Jarleen. “An honest to god skyscraper-class scorpion that can run a race and defend itself and beyond that I don’t care if it’s on the verge of death or a barely-hatched skitterling with wobbly legs! Hell, at this point I don’t care if all you’ve got is a female – I’d take her so long as she had the restraint to not eat me or the officials until the race is over!”

Moth drew her palm across her brow, smearing fresh dust on old grease. “Alright, alright, alright. Fine. I didn’t want to do this, but fine. I’ve got a personal favourite, see. His name is Tyler and he’s been with me through thick and thin and helped capture half my stock. But you’re in a hurry, and you’re in need, and you know what? The old boy deserves one last moment of glory.”

“We’ll see,” said Jarleen.

***

Tyler stood twenty-two meters at the apex.

Tyler’s pinchers were meticulously honed to razors.

Tyler’s tail was the pleasantly-plump sheen you got when a scorpion was flush with venom.

Tyler’s carapace was a lovely thick black without even so much as flecks or mottles of light – no wonder Moth had caught others with him; on a moonless night, he would be invisible despite all his majesty.

Tyler was also stone dead.

“He was happy as a clam an hour ago,” said Moth in tears. “Ate his cow like a good boy and everything. Oh Tyler! You were old, but I thought we’d have more time together! Oh Tyler! Why?! Anyways that’s the lot, who’ll it be?”
Jarleen swallowed the primal words at the back of her throat. “What?”
“Who’ll you take?”
“Between them all, you have one barely-functioning scorpion.”

“So why not just ride ‘em in turns?” said Moth in that infuriating tone of voice that dared suggest she thought she was being very reasonable.

“One mount per racer,” said Jarleen, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth with perfect care. “Just one at a time. Wait. Wait wait wait.”
“Yeah?”

“Hold on a moment.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you fed your stock today besides Tyler?”
“Yeah?”
“FUCK-“
“No wait no I mean no, sorry. Was just fixing to when you showed up and I got distracted.”

Jarleen stared at Tyler’s big dead body.

“I’ll take all three of them.”

“Which three?”
“The SCORPIONS, YOU-” and then Jarleen thought about it. “All of them. All four of them. Give me that beetle this second; I need to chew on something.”

***

“A beautiful beast,” said the ‘caster into his microphone. “Lovely black carapace on him, quite glorious. And a real bruiser – look at the strain on his skin from all that packed-in muscle and mass; god, he must be about fit to shed soon! You said you found him at a roadside used-scorpion shop?”
“Yes,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient and which she now found herself wishing was more focused on pure bullshitting.

“Quite a lucky find. I wasn’t aware there were any along the Southern Eldland Loop!”
“There aren’t any more,” said Jarleen. “It was a closing-out sale. Just barely made it for exchanging the cost of my old mount.”

“You know,” said the ‘caster thoughtfully into the long, smooth silence, “I’ve never seen a three-pinchered scorpion before.”
“He’s an exotic,” said Jarleeen. “Common in his species.”
“What species?”
“Western Mojave Turrduken.”
The ‘caster waited for an explanation. 

“So,” he said at last, “can we expect to see more of…”

“Tylerbillyman.”
“…Tylerbillyman?”
“Absolutely not.  They- HE – is.  Are.  Very tired.   Elderly and a bit overfed.  HE deserves retirement.”

“Sad to see a dark horse like that leave, but it only adds to the mystique I suppose.  You know, he did the work of three mounts out there today.”
“Yes,” said Jarleen.  And she left, before she admitted anything else. 

There’s a lake out back.

It wasn’t there last week.  We had a puddle last week.  Big ol’ puddle in the backyard, something about the way the ground settled when mom and dad finished building the house years and years back.  It always appeared there every spring and smeared itself between the backyard and the little porch steps like a swampy fence.  Just big enough to do a running jump over if you were eight and ambitious and if you aren’t ambitious you aren’t eight. 

Anyways, we had that puddle last week, just like every other last week for every other April.  But now it’s not there, and neither is the backyard, and the little porch steps lead straight down into four feet of water.  Because there’s a lake out back. 

Not quite sure how that’s happened.

***

It’s not a bad lake, really. 

A bit small and VERY strange, but what there is has all the essentials.  Got a little stretch of beach to wade in from (mud, mostly – no sand, no pebbles, and we’re not close enough to the Shield for a solid rock lakebed).  Got a little cliff near a deepwater dropoff for jumping in from.  Got weeds for pike to hide in; got reeds and marsh nearby for swans to nest in; got a beaver lodge; got a creek coming in on Mr. Morton’s side of the property and a stream running out through Mrs. Jaxton’s herb garden and down the block; got a few small islands in the center with stubborn conifers and a few brave and doomed shrubs that we’ve seen a few idle turtles sunning themselves next to; got a lot of blackflies around its edges in the daytime and a lot mosquitoes around its edges in the evenings and a big ol snapping turtle whose size is impossible to estimate from the enigmatic distance we’ve always sighted them at. 

It’s got just about everything, which is really weird since it’s only about twenty feet across.  We took out the tape measure and everything.  Twenty-three feet four inches, or around seven metres if you’re feeling more sensible.  And yet it – and its contents – remain perfectly proportionate.  The most obvious sign is that the bug bites (and there are a LOT of them) are completely normal-sized, but the next would be that you can dive right in and have a proper swim-around and wade out and swim to one of the islands and back and it’s all a good time instead of you wallowing in a half-inch of muddied water as you wash out the banks from shore to shore. 

Not quite sure how that works. 

***

The lake has attracted visitors. 

Yesterday Mrs. Jaxton and her family had a picnic on the north shore; today Mr. Morton brought some friends and beer and their friends and their beer to fish and drink beer.  They left wrappers and beer cans everywhere until we complained, and then they threw the beer cans into the lake when they thought we weren’t looking.  The cans have become new islands, and I can see turtles sunning themselves on them.  It’s hard to pull them out because they’ve sunk right into the lakebed and also it’s real tiring to swim all the way out there to pull them back into shore.  Guess we’re stuck with Isla Budweiser out there. 

Someone knocked at the door after all that went down.  It’s a surveyor from the city, here to map and chart the lake.  She says to expect a visit from some hydrologists soon too.  There may need to be a study on how the lake and the municipal sewer systems interact.  There are developers out there that need to know more.  There are ecological trusts that require alerting.  A farming conglomerate has demanded that the lake be drained for the growth of corn.  There are many disparate and intricate interests involved. 

Not quite sure how to handle this. 

***

The lake has been purchased by a consortium of developers. 

Waterfront condos are planned which will produce many many many millions of dollars of economic investments and fund at least twelve construction jobs for about a year or so.  The beavers will need to be evicted because they won’t stop stealing the surveying equipment and using it to plug holes in the shoreline.  The turtles are now sunning themselves on the construction equipment.  One of the backhoes backed up too far while hoeing and dropped off the diving cliff and is now buried under thirty feet of water.  Six different firms sent us six different emails and seven different phone calls and thirty different veiled and incomprehensible messages with a thousand different meanings, any of which could be bribes, threats, or both.  We’ve been invited to join a property-owner’s-association and barred from membership for life. 

Not quite sure how this is going to end up. 

***

The lake is gone. 

There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on how it happened, or even when.  We woke up today and we’ve got no lake, just a puddle – not even a big puddle, it’s tapered off a bit because it’s mid-April now and we’ve lost all the snowmelt to erratic evaporation.  A puddle with some Budweiser cans and a backhoe and what appears to be a lot of shed beaver fur and a single really big really really dead pike jammed in it. 

The developers threatened to sue us for breach of contract; the turtles have vanished without a trace; and the surveyor came back to let us know that since the lake’s gone we’re not going to be fined for conducting landscaping without a permit. 

A swan beat the living shit out of Mr. Morton last night.  He’s in the hospital with four broken fingers and a nose that’s been flattened like a tomato on a highway.  He’s said he wants to sue us but there’s no sign of a swan and we don’t have a lake the swan could have been living in so we’re pretty sure he’s got no case. 

Not quite sure about the emotional or fiscal ramifications of any of this in the long-term, but I mean, what else is new?

It was Sunday at Our Deity of the Waters.  Thoom, dum, doom went the church bell, sonorous and fat.  Thoom, doom, duuum.  Its clapper hung loose, its cord swung wildly in the sweaty skinny grasp of Jerry, who always rang it thirty seconds late and panicked every second of it.  Thoom, dum, doooooom. 

Luckily for him nobody had ever noticed or cared, unluckily for him he’d never realized it and never would in a million years; they were too busy chatting and gossiping and lying and mingling amidst the pews and he was too busy filling himself with horror and despair.  Thoom, dum, doooom.  Thoom, boom, dooooooooooooooooom. 

Done. 

Jerry finished panicking and settled back into his normal abyss of desperate self-loathing, while beyond him in the sanctuary – open to the wind and the reeds and the sky – the people shut up and the choir assembled and the organist rolled up her sleeves and the song got cooking, and it went like this:

Oh my God, my gosh, my God

That sure is a lot of God, my gosh, my God.

That’s a hell of a big God, my God, my gosh

Holy shit, holy God, holy fuck

The organist flailed her arms with a last flourish and veryone bowed their heads very solemnly and bubbled ‘amen.’  The minister stood up and adjusted his speedo-robes and cleared his throat of the blockage induced by the ceremonial Coors and spoke, and this is what he spoke:

“AGH!” he spoke.  “Argh, aiee, ow, ow ow, nrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRUUUUhhhhh, uhr hur hur hur hur hur, aaaaaaaaaaagh.  Aaaaaaamen.”
“Amen,” bubbled the congregation. 

“Friends,” said the minister, “it is good to see you all here once again, on this most joyous occasion, to celebrate the day of death and rebirth and redeath of our once-lord and once-saviour, whose name must not be spoken.  Shush that name now and forever hold your piece!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, and raising their left hands, made a simple zipping motion across their firmly-shut lips. 

“My friends, it has been a long and harrowing year,” intoned the minister, face now graven in graveness and gravity.  “We have seen the deaths of several of our flock – some by illness, some by accident, several by acts of God.  Death is a normal part of life, but it is always a pity to see it come so soon and to some so beloved.  Any money placed in the offering plate today will go towards the provision of comfort and succor to the bereaved, and any money they refuse will go directly to our lamb carcass fund so that God’s maw will be stayed from any further wrathful judgments upon our band of fellows.  Amen!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, one hand raised apiece in helpless cowering defense, wobbling irresolutely between fending off wrath from above or teeth from below and settling on neither. 

“For community announcements: Brother Marley has suffered the loss of additional mobility after her stroke last week.  We ask that you gift unto her your thoughts and your prayers and also and more importantly your meat.  Please give brother Marley your meat as she is currently unable to procure her own and will suffer horribly and unspeakably unless assistance is rendered with stark promptness.  Please do it right now, before I finish this service or this sentence – for the love and apathy of God, do it now, now – NOW!”
“Amen,” they bubbled, slimy red tissue grasped in trembling palms over collection vats.  And for good measure, they said it again.  “Amen,” they bubbled, tremendous fear in their hearts. 

“Secondly and less urgently, Brother Tim and Brother Hasham’s child we baptised last week is with us today during this service!  In respect for this, please keep the happy family at the rear of the crowd and do NOT encourage them to approach the God-sump, because we don’t want an accident and we all remember what happened to Brother Wooster’s infant back in ’93, don’t we?”

“Amen,” they bubbled, cringing to an individual, shoulders hunched and faces puckered.

“Excellent, excellent, excellent,” murmured the minister, baritone and soothing, like someone talking to an injured dog.  “You know, every year this season brings me to joyous contemplation.  It’s a time for righting wrongs, a time for the retrieval of hope from the greatest pits of despair, and a time to clearly illuminate the path that lies before you and find true purpose  And accordingly it’s also a time for learning which wrongs are immutable facts, which hopes are idle foolishness, and discovering which paths are loops that lead back unto true realities.  We speak at a time of rebirth and redeath, of promises made and failed and kept.  My fellow congregants,” he enunciated most solemnly, casting back his robes to reveal his fingerless hands and missing leg, “none is more humble of their position than I, whose mortality is most stark and heavy, whose position is closest to God, as was my father, as was his father whose noble unknowing sacrifice during the Holy Riverside Enlightenment sermon of the Easter of ‘72 did reveal unto us the necessities of this world and the greater cosmos surrounding and enfolding it.  Is it not right that on the day when we are most grateful to Him that God would reveal His presence and our purpose in it?  Was it not right that this purpose be revealed to us most viscerally and with much viscera?  And was it not right that the man who spoke for him should speak loudest and truest of all as he departed from this mortal coil on a day when he lied of rebirth and was corrected into a most appropriate and irreversible death?  I beg of you all to ask of God to forgive my grandfather, for in his foolishness he granted us all a great and powerful insight into the world and all its beauty.  Amen.”

“Amen,” they bubbled, eyes and feet scuttling in place like trapped rats. 

“And now, forthwith, without further ado, with all the joyousness and rapture that is His right, the Lord God Omnipotent!  And yeah, he reigneth as the king of kings, the lord of lords-“

“Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, halleluuuuuuuuuuu-jah” screamed the choir rhapsodically. 

“-And he shall reign forever and ever!”

And so speaking, mouth yet agape with the force of his exhalations, the minister was seized abruptly from behind by the great scaled snout of god, who dragged him back with eye-blinking speed into the watery and palm-shrouded pit of the godsump where he was whirled about rapidly into shreds and devoured in spine-shudderingly vast gulps that dyed the ripples violent red. 

“Amen?” bubbled the congregation. 

***

The meat offerings were unwanted that day thanks to the minister, so they took them home instead for an Easter supper.  It was most pleasant and filling and really reminded them of what the season was about and what it all really meant, deep down, right in the marrow and the bone and the flesh and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth and the teeth.  For many of them, it reminded them about 2 AM with sudden sweats and screams. 

And wasn’t that just right and proper?

It was a beautiful bright day outside, good for sunning, bad for hunting.  The sort of day where you could spend sixteen hours straight doing nothing useful and feel good about it too. 

So it was a bit surprising to Slump that she was spending it all on her own.  Not that it was an UNPLEASANT surprise – it meant she had all of the best sunbathing rock to herself, instead of half of it plus whatever she could steal off’ve Grumble’s tail – but it was peculiar.  And maybe just a little insulting. She was gravid right now and wanted a little attention.

So she dragged herself off the big warm sunny slab of concrete that had once been part of what the ancient world had called a ‘bank’ and sidled slowly and comfortably down the wild and boiling way, content in her knowledge that it was too early in the day for the buffalo to be out and that the massacranes were still north for the season, so as to prevent their delicate feathers from burning up at high noon. 

At this time of day, at this time of year, Heloderma Spectacular – the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity – was the apex predator of the land.  For a little while, and that was more than most got. 

Slump found Grumble taking full advantage of his passing time in the sun hiding out of the sun underneath a crude lean-to of boulders, cement, and rusty rebar.  An awful little machine buzzed insolently at her from its place atop a level bed of asphalt, and she hated it immediately. 

“What are you doing and why isn’t it paying attention to me?” she asked Grumble. 

“Learning,” said Grumble distractedly.  He held a small and ridiculous piece of plastic with twiddles and fiddles on it in one massive claw, digits oscillating wildly.  “It’s to help.”
“How?”
“Remember how you found all those old books on motherhood from the old days?”
“Yes,” said Slump.  That had been a rare find; her mother, Mulch, had been adamant that books were for nerds and had personally eaten the bulk of them her family had discovered over her sixteen decades of life before dying of hyperrhea. 

“Well, you know what we didn’t find?  Any books on fatherhood.  And then I found THESE, and they’re full of advice on it.  We’re going to be parents before the acid rains come again, and I don’t want to be unprepared.  You remember what happened to my dad?”
“No, I never met him.”
“Yeah, that’s because my older sister Junk bit off his snout and he bled to death.  If he’d known to feed her more often that wouldn’t have happened.  This sort of information is vital and important, and I need access to it if I want to do the best for our clutch.  Also I don’t want to have my snout bitten off or bleed to death.”

“Wuss.”
“Look, watch.  And be quiet: I can’t learn if you’re talking over the dialogue.”

***

A bearded bear-shaped human stood in a cold storm without a shirt and picked up a sharp stick and hit another human with it over and over until its face was a red smear and wet bone splattered over the snow. 

“Offspring,” he muttered as he paused to change arms, “don’t do this.”
“But you say that about everything!” said the human’s offspring in feeble piping protest.

“That is because you must never be like me,” said the bear-human, who was now using his foot to stomp on the other human’s neck over and over.  “Since your mother, who was good and kind and better than I deserved, is dead, I cannot show you how to be a good person because I’m awful and tragic and doomed and can only do my miserable best against my nature.  So instead I’m showing you all the things I do so you won’t do them.  Now stop talking and pay attention, I need to show you how to not draw and quarter those who oppose you.”

***

“I don’t get it,” said Slump.

“It’s simple: I’m the father, and it is my job to commit war on any who threaten my child.”
“You only have ONE?  Wow, he wasn’t kidding when he said he wasn’t a good father; what happened to the other thirty-six?”
“That’s where the pathos comes from,” argued Grumble.  “Being a father is about being sad because your spouse is dead or gone and your kids are in danger of being dead or gone or they are dead and gone and you find another kid to be sad at about them.

Wait, wait, wait; I don’t understand this,” said Slump.  “How is this father still alive if the mother is dead or gone?  He is clearly frailer and smaller than she is.”

“She left.  That’s part of why he’s sad.”

“If he pissed her off that much, why not eat him?”

“Humans don’t eat each other unless they’re bad people.”

Slump’s tongue rolled around her mouth in shock.  “Oh my god.  No WONDER they all died if they were that wasteful.  Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand it?”
“No, no, no, it’s all here in this other educational game.  I’ll load it.”

***

A bearded, rangy human being stood in a destroyed human city with a ragged shirt and shot another human with a gun and then pistol-whipped them with it over and over until its face was a red smear and puddles of every fluid in the rainbow were seeping into the overgrown dirt that had once been an asphalt highway. 

“Adopted offspring,” he grunted as he paused to kick the other human in the groin, “don’t look at this.”
“But you told me I need to pay attention to learn how to stay alive!” said the human’s adoptive offspring.

“That’s because I’m a liar who refuses to admit I’ve conflated you in my head with my dead prior offspring and it’s my fault she died and I’m a bad person who can’t find meaning in anything anymore but raw survival but now you’ve reawakened my moral impulses and I’m torn between my desire to protect you and my need to see you avoid becoming like me because I’m awful and tragic and doomed and can only do my miserable best against my nature,” said the human, all in one breath.  His beard fluttered in the wind of a ruined world.  “Now c’mere and I’ll show you how to scavenge a corpse.”

***

“Wait, what was that about?” demanded Slump.
“The thing that killed all the humans just happened, I’m the last of dad, and it’s my duty to protect the last of daughter.  Mostly I kill people and weird mushrooms and then I-”
“No, no, no, the ‘scavenging’ thing.  Why were they slapping their hands all over the body and not swallowing it?”
“Humans kept their valuables on their outsides in fake skins instead of storing them in their gular pouches.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Slump.  “These games are going to be a bad influence on our children.”
“They’re not for kids,” said Grumble.  “They’re full of important truths and lessons about being a father.  We can show it to them when they’re planning on being fathers.”
“Important truths and lessons about what?  Whining?”

“It’s really hard, being a father, okay?  You wouldn’t get it.”

“You’re not a father either.  Not yet.”
“You won’t get it.”
“If you mouth off any longer you won’t get a chance to get it either,” said Slump, baring her teeth from her gumline just enough to make her saliva run bright red. 

“Right, right, I’m really sorry please don’t eat my snout PLEASE.”
“Fine.”  Slump’s dorsal scutes settled down to a semblance of calmness.  “I’m surprised at how quickly you folded, even for being stuck in a confined space with me.  Usually you’re less sensible than that.”

“I’m telling you, it’s these fatherhood games.  See, the secret of being a good dad is to admit that you’re the entire problem in every way.  Like this!”

***

A gigantic firearm shot seventeen times, sending massive explosions through a balloon full of armed humans each of who spilled a galloon of blood everywhere as a first-person human bludgeoned them each in the face with a sort of arm-mounted pinwheel hook, opening throats and tearing off jaws and cratering faces. 

“You’re my father,” said the human’s surprise offspring.  “And you’re killing all the people in this awful floating city so horribly.  Also you’re the same person as the evil man who built this awful floating city and who raised me in a tower all by myself.”
“All I do is kill,” said the human.  “I’m a monster who hates myself and if I forgave myself I’d be even worse.”
“I’ll help,” said the human’s surprise offspring, grabbing him by the head and holding him underwater until the bubbles stopped.

***

“I can’t help but notice,” said Slump, “that all of these fathers don’t seem to have partners.  Where are the other parents?  Are they ALWAYS dead or gone?”
“Dead or gone because being a father is very sad.  That’s what biological dad infinite is about.  Fathers are the worst people who ruin everyone’s lives with their mistakes and they show their kids how to not be them so the kids can take their place and feel sad about them.”
“What if you try not being a terrible father anymore?”
“No, it’s just how it works,” said Grumble sadly.  “If you’re a dad, you ruin everything and your partner vanishes or dies and maybe your kids die and then you show them or someone else that you’re very sad, and then you die and they’re very sad.  There’s no escaping it.”
“I can think of one,” said Slump. 

“Oh?” said Grumble, and then she ate the console and the television and the generator and left. 

“Oh,” said Grumble. 

Two minutes later Slump came back and ate him too, just to be safe. 

***

She really didn’t mind having all of the sunning rock to herself all of the time, anyways. 

Behold, the first robin of spring!

She’s a thrush, actually.  American robins aren’t closely related to European robins at all, and are much bigger – and this little cutie’s quite a chunker, at that.  She’s made it here early on the strength of those stout wings and that tough set of muscles, hauling herself all the way from Down There to Up Here after a long winter spent afield.  There’s fresh meltwater on the ground and new green things sprouting from that and new crawling and squirming things thriving among that, and those have her interest, her attention, and her appetite. 

Behold, the first farm cat of spring!

Fresh-grown from a kitten, with a true lithe killer’s body and a sheer maniac’s ears, he’s ready and raring to explore the big scary world he’s walking into.  His body is skinny and his head is too big for it and his ears and too big for his head and his brain will never be this small and useless again in his life.  He is out in a big green wet place and he is powerful and invincible and has long ago departed the Barn He Knew for the Farm He Knows and is not cautiously venturing into The Farm He Knows Not.  There he is looking at something small and feathery and stupidly focused on satiating its appetite and he would like to kill it and maybe eat it and DEFINITELY torture it. 

Behold, the first overeager livestock dog of spring! 

He was born in the barn of the farm across the way, to murder coyotes and kill wolves and slaughter cougars and shred lynx and bully bobcats and the farm cat is none of those but his instincts tell him to do things that his common sense would not, and so – lured by a brief, feathery sqwark and a strong smell of thin blood and feathers – he makes joyous riot after the farm cat, squirming under a fence and over a fence and through a third fence from property to property and back again, jaws snapping and tail wagging in the sheer gleeful purpose of his life, which is violence without regard for his own survival. 

Behold, the first herbs of spring!

Medicinal, consumable, quite very much reliable.  Soft little tender shoots eeling up through moist clods of dark damp soil, beginning to unfurl fresh leaves for a newly—bright sun.   They are frail and beautiful and can make life and death when placed in single pinches into hot water or in generous sprinkles onto bland food, and each and every one of them lie dead and pulverized under a riot of stampeding furry feet and blood. 

Behold, the first gunshot of spring!

It was aimed for an animal that did not belong to the owner of the gun that made it.  It hit, which was a fine act of skill and a grave mistake of judgment.  It has garnered no meat and it has very badly wasted some lives and it has created much consternation on the other side of the laneway, where feet hurry, hurry, hurry towards it, eager in a special kind of panic. 

Behold, the first shouting-match of spring!

It’s new, but its ingredients aren’t.  Every sentence is another old grudge brought back from years ago; each accusation brings an ancient retort; no blame is laid without being placed atop another more ancient, like bricks in a wall.  Oh how it billows, it spirals, it burns!  The fresh clean air is a strong breeze, whipping up grey embers into a fine storm of furious flames!  You’ve Always rubs shoulders with You’ve Never and catches up on That’s What You Said and You Mean To Tell Me That before making way for the furious, stone-cold presence of This Isn’t Over. 

Behold, the first night of spring!

It’s quiet, and it’s peaceful, and in one house there’s a gun under the pillow and in another there’s a shotgun over the mantle and in both of them there’s an owner that’s sitting there smoking a long cigarette and a short temper and watching them both burn down, down, down as they stare across the way and think about nothing but things they shouldn’t. 

And do not behold – for she is several hundred miles south and still making her way closer gyre by gyre, sauntering from one warm air current to the next – the first turkey vulture of spring. 

She’s bald, and prone to chills in her feet, and so is in no rush.  She’ll be there when the cold winds are gone, and no sooner, and no amount of haste will change that.

All good things will come to her as she waits. 

The feast was in metaphorical full swing (literally in the case of Sir Gecko, who had found her way into the chandelier) when the doors to the great hall swung wide and a stranger walked in. 

“Lo!” they called.  And they went unheard, for Sir Crocodile was attempting to drain an entire barrel in one long swallow and the rest of the castle was busy chanting ‘DRINK.  DRINK.  DRINK’ around him.

“Lo!” they repeated.  And they went unheard, for Sir Gecko overcommitted herself and landed in the lap of Sir Tegu with sufficient force to send that distinguished woman falling over backwards into three other seated worthies. 

“LO!” they hollered at the top of their lungs, and when that still did not suffice to penetrate the riotous merrymaking they grasped the poker from the fireplace and hurled it into the great long table of the castle, where it impaled in order a fine roast, a sturdy metal serving-platter, and the table itself with a godawful crunching sound that finally got the attention of one and all.

“Lo,” said the stranger.

“You’ve said that,” replied Sir Crocodile crossly, who had swallowed his entire barrel in surprise and was a bit angry about that. “What d’you mean, intruding upon a humble communal meal among friends and fellows so rudely?  If this wasn’t a solemn occasion of celebration and goodwill I’d pull your head off.”

“Far I have come bearing news of great import,” said the stranger, ignoring all of this, “fit only for the ears of this castle, whose warriors I hear spoken of as the greatest in the world, for they are born from the shell armoured and shielded.”

“That’s us,” said Sir Tegu, who was removing Sir Gecko from her nostril with some difficulty – the CLANG of the poker had greatly startled the smaller knight. 

“Indeed it is true,” agreed Sir Tortoise.

“In my land, far away and over the river and through the woods, there is a great and monstrous injustice: our grandmothers are consumed by wolves, our little girls are robbed of porridge by bears, our little boys are threatened with grinding by giants, our adorable step-children are jailed by witches.  We need heroes like you, with your beautiful scaled and armoured skins, to come and deliver us from evil and so on and so forth so please tarry forth from this place and come to the castle (remember, over the river and through the woods) and issue a challenge to the wicked braggart that dost so cruelly and wickedly and unrightfully rules over the despair and suffering of my kind.  Farewell!”  And so speaking, the stranger turned and hurried out the door. 

There was a long and thoughtful silence as everyone finished chewing that over. 

“I will go,” said Sir Tortoise, rising to his four feet with ponderous dignity.  “I am the oldest of us, and it would be nice to accomplish something in my twilight years.”

“That’s the spirit!” cheered Sir Turtle from under the table.  And they all resumed feasting and drinking and carried on in great spirits for three days, and in moderate spirits for two days, and in nervous and self-conscious spirits for two more before Sir Gecko gave voice to what they were all thinking and said “so, he’s dead, right?”
“Churl,” said Sir Turtle, “that is my cousin you speak of!”

“Your dead cousin.”
“Churl!”

“A correct churl.”
“A correct churl is a churl nonetheless!”

“So we’re agreed then.”
“Silence both of you incredibly tiny people,” sighed Sir Crocodile, hauling himself in ready position.  “I am the largest and strongest of us all, and so seeing as our most august and distinguished brother has been laid low by fate and fortune, it falls to me to vent the terrible wrath of vengeance upon the foul miscreant that has laid him low in his twilight years, few remaining though they may have been.”

“God, you’re talking like he is,” said Sir Tegu.

“It’s a sign of respect,” said Sir Crocodile stiffly.  And he turned on his great tail and walked the crocodile walk out the doors, high-tailed, stiff-limbed, chin-raised, side—to-side, clumsy and steady and not faster than it looks but much, much, much slower than you’d imagine they can run. 

Seven days of increasingly nervous feasting later, everyone was refusing to make eye contact. 

“I can’t go,” said Sir Gecko, from halfway up the hall’s walls.  “I’m too small and wouldn’t be able to help.”

“I can’t go,” said Sir Turtle, drowning his sorrows in a small and very deep pitcher, “I’m in mourning for my cousin, Sir Tortoise.”

“I can’t go,” said Sir Tegu, “I’m allergic.”
“To what?” asked Sir Gecko.
“Death.  It’s fatal to me.”

“I will go,” said the lizard serving-child, who was so tremendously unnoteworthy that they had gone unnoticed and unnamed by everyone including the very narration of the story.
“Who?” asked Sir Tegu.

“You?” asked Sir Gecko.

“Why?” asked Sir Turtle.

“Someone has to,” said the lizard. 

“Fine by me,” all three of them agreed, and so it was that the lizard was ejected from the castle with nothing more than a few crumbs, their own little lizard self, and the poker from the fireplace.

***

The crumbs lasted the lizard until the river, where they sat down in consternation to think: it was deep and wide and fast.  Sir Tortoise would have forded it with stolid weight; Sir Crocodile would have swum it in a trice with great strength.  The lizard was light and slim and weak, and they found themselves wishing most dearly for a bridge, or at least some stepping stones. 

“Hello cousin,” said a piping voice from besides them.  It was a basilisk, long of limb and bright of eye, braced on its long hind limbs.  “What’s eating you?”

“Nothing,” replied the lizard, “but my friends and masters can’t say the same.  Somewhere beyond this river, through the woods, they have been defeated and probably eaten by some sort of gruesome castle—dwelling fiend.”
“Messy business,” said the basilisk.  “Why don’t you go home?”
“Because someone has to do something and nobody else wants to.”
“Determination without effect is just frustration,” said the basilisk.  “How are you planning to cross?”

“You could carry me,” said the lizard.  “You are my cousin, and even if you’re no swimmer, you can run on water like solid ground.”
“That’s because I’m light and fast, and I won’t be either if I’m carrying you, even if you are my cousin and proportioned like it,” said the basilisk. 

The lizard pondered that, and then they pondered harder, and then they gritted their teeth and coughed and hacked and spat and swore and sneezed and wheezed and choked and gasped and groaned and heaved and ejected their entire left lung from their mouth along with its associated cardiovascular structures. 

“Now am I light enough?” they asked.  Or tried to – their voice was withered and small and came out mostly as faint whistles of air. 

“If you weren’t, I don’t think I’d be brave enough to say so,” admitted the basilisk.  And so the lizard was picked up and carried across the water on the limbs of their cousin and deposited on the other side – out of breath, but alive and dry. 

***

Proceeding forwards into the shaded depths of the great woods was awkward in more than one way: not only were there hundreds of trees to meander around, each had hundred of roots to clamber over, and each root had dozens of crooked convolutions in its bark, and each and every rift and gap had been colonized by fungus, ants, woodpeckers, or god knows what else.  The lizard was short of breath and tired of leg to begin with and the sheer amount of nonsense in their way truly bestaggered them – many times they were forced to stop and rest and wait for their strength to return as they pushed on through leaf litter and valley and dale and hill.  Their four crumbs were long-ago memories, burned into fuel to stagger teetering limbs closer to an endless goal at the far end of a terrible and terribly unending trek.  At length they grew too exhausted to move, and so collapsed nigh-insensate on the ground. 

They woke up some time later, in the dark of night, with someone large and hairy chewing on their right hind leg. 

“Ah!” thought the lizard.  “One of the beasts that the stranger must have warned of!  But I’m too tired and hungry to do anything to fight it.  Maybe if I wait it will get bored and leave me alone. 

The beast – who was grey and furry with a little adorable black mask over its eyes – tore off the lizard’s right hind leg, swallowed it, and started gnawing happily on their left hind leg. 

“Well, losing two is as good as losing one,” thought the lizard.  “It’s not as if I’m getting much use out of them on this uneven ground.  And how hungry can this creature be?”
The beast – who had pretty rings around its tail and clever little hands – tore off the lizard’s left hind leg, gulped it down without chewing, and began eagerly tugging on their right foreleg. 

“And losing three is as much as losing two, just moreso,” resigned the lizard to themselves.  “There’s one more to spare yet.”

The beast – who was fairly plump and well—fed itself, with a sleekly padded body that spoke of ripe fatty tissues and rich chunks of muscular development – wrenched the lizard’s right forelimb from its body, pulled off its left foreleg for good measure, and began to chew them up, worrying away every bit of flesh with its sharp little teeth. 
“I fear it won’t be satisfied with just my legs at this rate,” thought the lizard.  “Well, as last meals go, this has been very one-sided.  I’d have loved at least one mouthful before I went.”  And at that thought and the memory of all those missed feasts they’d served back home, the lizard found themselves extremely outraged for the first time in their life, which was just enough strength and energy that when the beast turned its face to them again and plucked them up and held them to its mouth they made a single lunge and a single bite and latched onto its nose. 

The beast shrieked, and the lizard did not let go.  The beast ran, and the lizard did not let go.  The beast whirled and hid and scampered and wailed and spun in circles and clambered up and down trees and up and down walls and finally the lizard came off its nose and its nose came off its face and it ran away howling, leaving the lizard alone in the courtyard of a dark and terrible castle with the nose, which they immediately ate. 

“That’s better,” the lizard said, in the soft and indistinct whisper of their voice. 

***

The castle’s doors were unlocked, but without legs this didn’t matter much – luckily, they were also poorly—fitted, and so they wiggled limblessly beneath them over the threshold of what proved to be a very large and grand dungeon fitted with bars, chains, and locks, inside of which sat the despondent Sir Crocodile.
“Eh?” he asked, and his enormous head swung upright.  “Who is there?”

“It’s me,” whispered the lizard. 

“Eh?  Speak up, you’re awfully quiet.  Or nevermind, don’t – the master of the castle is a sharp-eared little devil.  He tricked me into this awful dank pit and locked the door and he keeps the keys on his belt and he wears his belt to his bed.  He says he wants to make me into boots.  You know, I’m beginning to think he was lying when he told us to come to his house and save everyone.”

“I’ll be right back,” whispered the lizard.

“Eh?”

Under the moonless sky they slithered, up a drainpipe and through a window and beneath billowing curtains, up through tangled sheets and against hairy shin, into a frayed pant leg and up around and coiled along the leather length of a worn belt.

The belt was scaled.  The lizard shuddered even as they took the keys into their mouth, and the man in the bed snorted and rolled over and pinned them to the mattress with his great heavy gut. 

In the short time since they’d lost their legs the lizard had become something of a master at wriggling, but this was truly a new height of challenge.  They squeezed and pulled and yanked and tugged and try as they might and writhe as they could they remained trapped, suffocating under two hundred pounds of mammalian flesh. 

“I pulled my insides outside,” the lizard thought.  “I waited while all of my legs were pulled off one at a time.  I have crawled on my belly to get here.  I will NOT lose now because of something as stupid as my body being stuck, and I will peel off my own skin if I need to.”
And so that’s just what they did.  Inch by inch, but not piece by piece, the lizard skinned themselves free of their captivity, pulling their body free from their own mouth and leaving nothing there but a dull and dusty one-piece full-formed husk as they slid away and down the bedpost. 

***

The keys were heavy, and the lizard’s new skin was soft and sore, and the night had already been long, but at last they found their way down again from the high master bedroom to the low jail, where they began to put keys to locks. 

Snikt went the key.  Thud went the lock on the floor.

“Aha!” said Sir Crocodile, awake again.  “You have returned!  That’s one lock!”

Snikt.  Thud.

“I cannot overstate your bravery my friend.  I haven’t seen hide nor scute of Sir Tortoise since I arrived, but from his plans for me, his belt, and his collection of handsome knives, I can’t think his fate was pleasant.  That’s two!”

Snikt.  Thud. 

“Three!  Three locks down!  Don’t make too much noise, you’re so good at being quiet!  I never was much good at that myself – my voice can carry for miles when I want to, and I confess that I’m oh dear behind you”

Snikt.  Grab. 

“Little SNEAK” hissed the master of the house in the lizard’s face.  It was the stranger, which wasn’t a surprise, and his breathe was rancid and his skin slimily glandular and porous in the most primitive and mammalian way.  His insult was fierce and whole-heartedly and blissfully unreflective in its hypocrisy, beautiful in the purity of its self-ignorance, and after all that the lizard had been and done and lost and suffered it was the last straw.  Its heart overflowed with bitter venom, and so did its mouth, and so did its teeth, which it sunk into the master’s hand. 

“Agh!” he said.  “Argh.  Eegh.  Urgh.  Urk urk urk urk.  Uh.”

Thud.

“So,” said Sir Crocodile at length.  “Mind getting the rest of the locks?”

***

The return trip was probably much shorter, but the lizard wasn’t entirely sure since they spent most of it wrapped around Sir Crocodile’s head, sleeping, awakening only when once more within the warm and cozy walls of home and someone impossibly loud was speaking right next to their head.  .

“…And then I walked back.  Ah, and this is our newest knight,” said Sir Crocodile.  “Too modest to say their name, but I daresay I’ve heard it spoken: they are a little snake.  So Sir Snake you shall be!”

“Hoorah!” shouted everyone, and Sir Snake flicked their tongue out, thought about explaining who they were, and gave up in favour of eating an entire roast ham. 

***

Sir Tortoise returned two weeks after that.  He’d realized that he’d forgotten his sword halfway to the river.   

The spaceship was a mathematically – and thus ultimately – perfect silver sphere, absolute in its adherence to physical laws without regard for fragile aesthetics or insignificant atmospheric efficiencies.  It slid down the planet’s gravity well in a subtle curve that spoke of universal constants and Euclid and the gentle spiral of an ammonite’s shell, of pi without fillage, of the music of the stars and universal constants. 

It parked on top of a lot of grass and trees and some gazebos and the Science Team filed out.  Each and every one of them were men of perfectly irrelevant size and stature whose personalities had been mapped into their fields by cutting—edge psychological science since youngest days, and accordingly possessed the overwhelming confidence and resolution of those who had never not known exactly what they were doing.  Squaredness of jaw and firmness of gaze were unanimous psychologically if not physically. 

“What a magnificent archology,” mused the Captain as he gazed upon the skyscrapers.  “Truly the inhabitants of this planet dream skywards.  Lo, they shall soon slip the earthly bonds of this planet for a destiny among the stars.”

“This is completely inevitable,” agreed the Fiat Historian.  “All data points converge upon them reaching their equivalent of the Lopschnell Epiphany within the century.  Doubtlessly they’ve undergone the Archaemaniacal Retraction at least twice by this point – both preceding and following their sixth nuclear war and the resulting diplomatic exchange of ranking dukes and scholars – leading to the rush for moon dust and centrifugal jugs.  All the math proves it based on our readings of how many microwaves they’ve put into their atmosphere in the last six minutes.”

“Indeed,” replied the Chief Seconder, “as we are all aware, historoloy is a matter of axiomatic fact and scientific data and is not host to any vagaries of so-called ‘interpretation.’”

“Now let’s contact the locals,” said the Captain.  “You there!” he called at a passing cat, “we are here to share our vast knowledge of the cosmos!  We have the knowledge of ALL perfected forms of medicine, machines, government, and social behaviours, and are willing to give them away as is our mutual self-interest.”

The cat stopped, flicked its ears at him, narrowed its eyes briefly, then began to lick its anus with great vigour. 

“A truly advanced people socially, even if their grasp of machinery remains primitive,” marvelled the Fiat Historian.  “See the confidence with which even the average citizen pauses to evaluate their options without fear of appearing weak or indecisive.  These are beings of reason.  Doubtless their eugenics programs are well-developed to produce a superior personality – one saturated with enlightenment and reason, rather than criminal paranoia or superstitious awe.”  The cat switched to licking its upturned leg, and the Fiat Historian’s mouth dropped open in awe.  “Look!  It’s even considering multiple positions on the spot!  Magnificent!”

“I agree,” said the Chief Seconder.  “This is completely sound and reasonable.  All the evidence is in indisputable accord with your arguments.”

The Machine Maker looked up from his tools.  “My machines say that this isn’t the leader,” he announced in his bland voice.  “It is too small.  The leader lies in that direction.”  And he held up a machine that pointed in a direction. 

“I agree with that, since the machines are never incorrect,” said the Chief Seconder.

“I will lead us now,” said the Captain.  And with those words he strode out in the indicated direction into the midst of a flat asphalt path, where a fast—moving metallic object crashed into him and dragged his corpse for dozens of yards.  A fleshy bipedal appliance popped out of it and began making high—pitched warnings in some kind of repeated alert.

“My health machine says that the Captain has died,” said the Machine Maker.

“Curses!” said the Fiat Historian.  “A group without its leader is approximately two hundred percent more likely to suffer catastrophic social dissolution and failure as it breaks down under the whims of its unspecialized and ignorant members!  Since I recognize this is a problem, I’m in charge now.”
“I second that,” agreed the Chief Seconder.  “It makes perfect sense.”
“I only care about machines,” said the Machine Maker.

“Sounds excellent,” said the Fiat Historian.  “We are now going to succeed because we have a leader again, in accordance with Mecklebaum’s Rule.  I will lead us now.  Carefully.”  And with those words he strode out in the indicated direction.  Carefully.

***

Across the path of asphalt (and the corpse of the former Captain, now surrounded by more bipedal appliances, all honking and beeping and wailing their alert—sirens) lay more green grass and trees and some new gazebos that their spaceship hadn’t parked on top of. 

“This is a remarkable achievement,” said the Fiat Historian (and Captain).  “See how the wilderness intrudes violently upon the terrain of the archology in these areas?  Doubtless the foreign material is the result of relativistic kill—bolides deployed by rival powers outside the solar system, seeded with biological weaponry designed to overwhelm and rend asunder technological development.  And yet even with their seemingly—feeble knowledge, behold how they have built failsafes into their environment!  Why, this grass is edged with harsh silica and replicates at astonishing speeds even with little soil or water – yet behold how stoutly this feeble concrete slab resists its encroachment!  Inspiring stuff.”

“It’s amazing,” said the Chief Seconder.  “We will become very famous and respected for discovering this and speaking so confidently and correctly about it.”

“My machine says that the leader is in that direction,” said the Machine Maker, pointing across an odd body of fluid.  “Across that odd body of fluid.  I don’t know what kind of fluid it is because I didn’t pack my fluid describing machine.”

“Simple historical factualism will enlighten us,” chuckled the Fiat Historian (and Captain).  “Logically, this must be simple and wholesome sulphuric acid – any halfway sophisticated civilization that has undergone the Verbotskew  Enlightenment such as this will have recognized its many benefits in industrial and commercial applications, and will have large bodies of it freely available for all to partake and sample.”
“My colour machine says that it’s blue,” said the Machine Maker. 

“What, do you think it’s dihydrogen monoxide?” scoffed the Fiat Historian (and Captain).   “Good gravy, what sort of society would leave something like that lying around where anyone could simply step into it?  Get moving.”
“Yes, we should get moving now,” said the Chief Seconder. 

“I only know what my machines say,” said the Machine Maker.  So he packed up his machines on his back and walked forwards into the liquid where his suit dissolved followed by his entire exoskeleton.

“Dihydrogen monoxide?  How peculiar,” said Fiat Historian (and Captain).  “This makes no sense according to all known laws of historology.”

“Ah, well, nevertheless,” said the Chief Seconder.  “There’s a bridge over here.”

***

The bridge led to a high-security compound.  Dozens of beings watched the brave explorer-scientists from within deluxe suites, shielded from happenstance and harm by an ingenuous combination of bars, fences, gates, moats, and little concrete walls.  Great plaques adorned each office, depicting its inhabitants’ deeds, names, and anatomy. 

“Again, we see the high quality of social character exhibited by this civilization,” pontificated the Fiat Historian (and Captain).  “Behold!  They know that complete transparency of decision-making is necessary for a people’s trust in their leaders to be guaranteed without reservation or misplaced faith.  Witness the small shrieking one dangling from a tree by his tail: he is masturbating, confident that his fellows will judge him dispassionately.”

“A truly naked culture without shame or insincerity,” marvelled the Chief Seconder.  “We can only speculate wildly about the quality and superiority of their leader.  Which is he, anyways?”
“Aha!” shouted the Fiat Historian (and Captain), finger extending boldly forwards.  “Behold!  Alone, without machine aid, fuelled only by the brilliance of our naturally—trained brains, we have discovered him!  He lies before us and a little bit below sprawled on that big rock next to the pond.”

“Aha!” said the Chief Seconder.  “Well done!”
“Indeed!  Now I shall go in to introduce myself.  What does this sign say anyways?”

The Chief Seconder squinted carefully at the sign.  “S I B E R I A N T I G E R,” he relayed promptly. 

“Stirring!  In I go!”

“A wonderful idea!  I will wait”

The Chief Seconder stood at attention for ten minutes, whistling happily and ignoring many loud noises. 

“I am ready!” he shouted, just in case someone was listening.

And later: “I am still waiting!”

Then, much later: “I might wish someone would suggest eating soon.  I’m getting hungry.  I mean, I think I am.  I don’t know for sure until someone tells me.”

***

There may have been survivors, but a passing summer shower late in the afternoon melted the entire ship into a puddle and the point became moot.