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Apéritif: red Flamburr, aged in a forty-year furnace, curdled in the hate of myriad scorpions and chilled with glacier hearts.

Appetizer: ground-bone bread, newly formed from the freshest fruit of the Carrion-King’s gallows and married to a dark, troubled stormbran dough. Jams and mustards are provided from a wide variety of innards and traitors.

Soup: a rich Bnos-style cream, thickened with marrow from the gallows and lashed with a full brace of grave-onions.

Main Course: Every unfibrous muscle in a Manglefoot’s body, pulverized with tremendous force and braided into a sinewsage over forty feet in length along with the monster’s spinal cord and small intestines. Served rare.

Salad: clotted tumbleweed hearts from the ghostland of the east, where every inhabitant was buried alive, dressed with a thick pint of drakkblood, sweetened in the innarsyrups of gentle everbees.

Assassination: a tangy cyanide/cyanide-like capsule concealed inside one of the tumbleweed hearts by a furtive, cunning, yet fruitless hope. Clears the palate, provides a light buzz.

Cheese: Gorbeg’s own Griffon Green, aged in the Red Caves under the Blue Mountain in the Black Highlands of the Whitemarches. Includes the still-meandering beetles that are crucial to its fermentation. Served with a plate of ladyfingers, gentlefingers, and childfingers of all types.

Fallback Assassination: six inches of cold keenfolk-gleaned steel to the brisket, delivered two-handed by the waiter to the brisket.

Impromptu Snack: the crushed and mangled remains of the waiter, garnished with much chuckling and delight.

Dessert: desert sands from Tir; shaved ice from Altanorici; cold basalt from the flowfields of Burner’s Eye; all boiled to a scream and frozen into edible glass surrounding the chilled organs of an adorable yet delicious creature of unidentified species. Consumers may guess the dessert’s identity for a prize.

Digestif: Deep dark Glou, soused in its own luminescence and infused with hatred by a Longwhorl master-fumer. Topped with a single marbled-over Salaman’s Grape the size of a golf ball.

Unplanned After-Dinner Treat: the marbled-over Salaman’s Grape three more times (up and down and back again) accompanied with violent coughing, followed by six feet of the Carrion-King’s own esophagus, backwards. Garnished with fatal lack of oxygen to the brain.

On a day in the Terramac exactly like every other, something went very wrong and/or very right. It’s difficult to say which, how, or why – certainly the people of the Terramac would never answer. Their past, much like their future, is irrelevant. They will live with the consequences; everyone else, alas, must settle for dealing with them.
In this case it meant coping with an avalanche of molten mountain that scarred half the Baldy range from peak to peak, spattering across slopes and filling valleys with hot bubbles of squirming, coiling….substance. Not quite solid, close cousin to liquid, never a gas and plasma didn’t recognize it.
Still, it was quite something. And when it hardened, well. Things got weird.
Of course, there is never a lack of folk willing to pay for weird.

That was then. Now, riding into the present on Then’s back, four rucksacks stacked high and coiled about in heavy jackets, the admirable, the determined, the steadfast, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet.
She’d come to town. There wasn’t much other choice, up here in the Baldies. It was either stay in your cabin drinking, trapped by a blizzard; or go into town and get drunk, trapped by a blizzard. And Jun didn’t own a cabin. Jun didn’t own a single thing that wasn’t packed on Then or inside her own skull.
But Jun had a plan, which are a notoriously portable form of wealth. And it started there, in Pultro. A boiled town, that got by on milking the odd recluse or wealthy meditant who wanted to sit in its steam caverns for a few weeks imagining the meaning of life until they could taste it. That and the furs and feathers of small things too stupid to escape traps.
Jun walked into the bar and bought everyone a glass of something until they were all her best friends, which cost her a total of one old half-a-coin. It wasn’t very much, but then she only needed to buy two glasses.
The man in the corner told her she looked just like his little sister, then cried himself to sleep. The bartender was more awake, and less able to dodge eye contact or conversation.
“So, I hear this is a pretty famous place,” said Jun.
“What sonuvabitch told you that lie, I will fight him until he turns ugly,” said the bartender.
“Nobody I can remember. Some kind of scholar. But he said there’s one thing about the place that anyone should be curious about, and that’s figment stones. He showed me one.”
“Never heard of ‘em,” said the bartender.
“Here,” said Jun. And she pulled out a little pebble and rolled it in her palm. It was flat, but didn’t seem happy about it; as if all that it required to get itself up and moving again was a little shove.
“Never seen one before,” said the bartender. “Not around here.”
“He said there used to be a mine out here. That it used to be famous.”
“Never known that either,” said the bartender. “Try the Grey Loop, up by Thickethead. There’s nothing there at all.” Then she finished her drink and passed out, and Jun was forced to take her advice or leave it.

She took it. She took it right out of the bar and back to Then, who’d been patiently drinking from the town’s (under-heated, slightly-minerally, well-boiled) public well. She took it with her eighteen miles out of town, plus another quarter-mile vertical. She took it through a maze of boulders that wedger her fast until she had no choice but to drop two rucksacks, and an interesting encounter with something fast and feathered with too many teeth and not enough caution.
Then she took herself back to Pultro, along with Then, two rucksacks, and a pocketful of extremely sharp and pointy fangs, which bought her a few more supplies and a night somewhere dryish.
“Figment stones,” she asked the hosteler, who was frankly amazed that anyone wanted to stay in town, including himself. “Seen any?”
“Never heard of a thing like that thing,” he told her. “You sure you’re in the right place?”
“Absolutely,” she told him. “Folk pay a mint for these thing, rich idiots. You crush them and inhale them and you see, well, just about anything. Everything. All at once.”
The hosteler scratched his face, hitting his nose by random chance. “You could check the old Mork-Matten mine, down the trail and off the dead lumber track. You won’t find anything there though.”

So the determined, steadfast, and driven Ms. Jun Dolet (and Then) set out again, in the opposite direction. She went down the dead lumber track and found that it forked, and that those forks forked, and those forks also forked. Some of the forks were the same, and others just looked the same, and some of them looked like forks but were actually dead ends where the trees had run out, the rocks had grown too thick, or where a Slibbean Icemaw had set up its breeding den. The last one got Then, but in her haste to lose the beast in a thicket Jun had the good fortune to fall directly into one of the surface tunnels of the old Mork-Matten mine, directly onto the long-lost bones of old Malaster Mork, which still had Dep Matten’s pickaxe buried in its cervical vertebrae.
The pickaxe wasn’t worth much, but the story got her a free stay in the cabin of a twitchy trapper on the way back before she could finish freezing to death.
“Shouldn’t have gone out there,” the trapper told her, eyebrows bouncing like electrified caterpillars. She was six foot and more, but through careful cringing and constant furtiveness had attained a height of half her size. “Bad business out there. It’s too cold. Better stay in, where it’s safe. Safer. Safeish. Did you hear that? It was just the wind, but there’s stuff that sounds like it’s just the wind. Icemaws. You scared up one; it’ll be out there now, looking for food until it’s got it. Us, probably.”
“Figment stones,” said Jun. “Not one in the mine.”
“Well, yeah,” said the trapper. “It was an iron mine. You step on anything in there? Could get lockjaw. I almost got that last winter. Cut off my foot, that fixed it. Got a new one. Want to see it?”
“Sure,” said Jun. “But I need to know where to look for figment stones.”
“Not here,” said the trapper. “None around here I expect. Could look by the Manybends. It’s got lots of stones. Big stones, small stones, medium stones. Creeping stones. Those are stones that creep up on you, while you sleep. Sleep creeps. One of them almost got me five years ago, and I haven’t been back since. It’s how I got this scar.”
Jun looked at the scar and a lot of others and slept late, woke early, and set out for the Manybends river with half the trapper’ provisions, all of her liquor, and a murderous, many-headed hangover.
“Really, taking this stuff off her hands is doing her a favour,” she told herself.

The steadfast and driven Ms. Jun Dolet arrived at the Manybends and found that it exceeded her on all counts. It was faster, steadier, more driven, and considerably rougher and more anxious to get to know her than she was. By the evening of the third day she’d been in and out of it five times, of which only one had been intentional.
(The others, in order:
Bear.
Bear on the opposite bank.
Grand Murderfish – a real record-breaker; luckily it had only caught her coat with its teeth.
While drying herself off, a large stone had crept up on her and pushed her into the rapids)
Two of her toes were near-black, but sufficient whiskey and fire put paid to that and they reluctantly came alive again long enough for her to stumble into town and slouch down in the bar, trading a pack full of fool’s pyrite and a (slightly stabbed) Grand Murderfish eyeball for a lot of extremely bad liquor.
“Figment stones,” she told the bartender, and the bar. “Figment stones. They look like….stones. You seen any? Anywhere?”
“No,” said the bartender. “Go home.”
“Never heard of them,” said the bar. “Not once.”
“No such thing,” said the man in the corner.
“I’m going to piss,” said Jun.

And with much weaving and bobbing, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet harnessed just enough of her willpower to get herself to the outhouse before throwing up.
“Hllorpp,” she burped. No more rucksacks, no Then, one jacket, only the very last spec of determination, and her mouth tasted like pure pine sap – which might’ve been what the local booze was made from. It smelt even worse coming out than it did in; an overwhelming haze of stink was oozing up out of the pits of the privy, strong enough to tear your nose off and eat it.
Jun sniffled a little into her sleeve, which was square remulus purple strong major horse revved turn plonk doze bull chuff.
When she woke up a little, she was on her back with her head on dry pine needles, in cold air. Who knew if she’d have come back at all if she’d stayed in there, with the air so thick with…
Well then.

Jun Dolet dug a little next to the privy. Then next to the bar. Then in the middle of the town square. Then she paced around a little, clearing her head enough to make sure that she wasn’t crazy at the moment, and went back into the bar.
“Hey,” she said to the bartender. “What’s this?”
The bartender looked at the little stone in her palm. “Wood chips,” she hazarded.
“Pinecone,” guessed the bar.
“Scat,” said the man in the corner. “Icemaw, I reckon. Best run away.”
“It’s solid figment stone,” said Jun. “The whole town’s lousy with it. You’re drinking booze made from distilled sap from trees growing on top of it; you’re sleeping in dug-out cabins and shanties surrounded in it, the whole damned cauldron of boiled water this place sits above is pooling inside of it, and not a one of you has ever noticed?”
“Noticed what?” said the bartender.
“This. Figment stone.”
“I don’t see any. Do you see any?”
“What?” said the bar. “I can’t see anything. Ever.”
“You look just like my little sister,” said the man in the corner. Then he cried himself to sleep in two seconds.
“I think I see the problem,” said Jun.

She left town the next morning with four new packs: one filled with figment stone; one filled with provisions; one filled with a few samples of the local soil, water and booze; and one filled with the cashbox from the bar, which she’d persuaded the bartender didn’t exist.
One day, Jun vowed, she’d be back. Or rather, she’d pay someone else to come back for her. Figments were a decent enough indulgence, but the idea of spending that much time in them gave her the willies. You could wind up believing ANYTHING.
Thankfully, the world was full of people who’d pay good money for that.

“For Imaginariumia!” shouted Keith as he nobly clove a goblin in twain.
Eddie hated that. He hated that Keith had breath left in him to shout after that charge; he hated that Keith had dragged them into a wondrous land of magic and adventure where the sun always shone and then gotten them both dressed in chainmail and padded leather; but what he REALLY hated was that Keith was always cleaving goblins in twain, or smiting them, or striking them down. Eddie tried his best, but it always turned out like the goblin in front of him – his sword drove up through the goblin’s torso, shredding organs and spilling out viscera, then wedged hard into its ribcage and stuck fast. There Eddie was, in the middle of a battle for the lives of the Good People against the Evil Horrible Unpeople, noble deeds and heroic valour all around him, and his sword was jammed in gritty cartilage.
And the goblin wouldn’t stop whimpering. It was a nasal sound, probably not helped by the puncturing of one of its lungs by the cold-forged, elf-enchanted, dragonfire-hardened tip of Eddie’s blade, Swiffyfangg. Blood was frothing up its windpipe, and it sounded like wet hiccups.
The sword was still stuck. Eddie’s hands were slick with blood and worse – the goblin’s sphincters had relaxed. His mouth had clenched, gibbered, and clenched again; his teeth were grinding themselves down to meal. Finally, he licked his lips, opened wide, and let loose the foulest curse he knew.
“Let GO, darn you!”
At that moment a screaming goblin with an axe reached Eddie, Eddie’s neck, and his jugular, and he lost consciousness permanently.
*
There was a change in the rumble of the guns. Something undetectable, in a pitch that had noting to do with sound and everything to do with the human pulse.
It’s time, said Tom’s heartbeat.
“It’s time,” Peter whispered to him, crouched in the mud.
“It’s time,” said the nameless corporal.
“GO!” yelled the sergeant, and they were up and over the wire, running and screaming – inside, where it’s always louder – into the grey world with its grey sky and its shockingly dull blood pooling everywhere, arms pumping, packs wobbling, guns ready.
Tom couldn’t see the enemy. He wondered if that was a mistake. Tom couldn’t see the sun. He wondered if that was significant. Tom wondered something else, but just then he was interrupted by the accidental discharge of the rifle clutched in the hands of the nameless corporal, who’d stumbled in a hollow. It tore through Tom’s spinal column at the base of his neck and that was that.
*
A twig snapped.
Sarah froze as still as a statue, as still as an unworked stone, as still as the bedrock that insisted, continental drift or no, it hadn’t ever once moved an inch.
One foot hovered just above the dirt, muscles shrieking. She ignored them.
No more twigs, but the game was up. Something was there, something trying to be quiet in that way that mutes sound but raises hairs. On the other side of the copse, something was waiting with a bloody mouth and a deadened pulse.
Sarah checked the revolver – in the quiet way, with her brain alone.
Two shots fired. Four remained.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Ghostly.
Sarah took a step into the thicket into extremely thin and slightly foggy air, fell six feet down a gulley, and landed headfirst, snapping her neck.
*
Dusk parted in a flash of shadows and moulded muscles. Fred and Bert were snatched up as something drove their heads together with nauseating force, cracking skulls and driving soon-to-be-fatal blood clots into brains.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” enunciated Joe as the caped crimefighter whirled towards him. “It’s Capeman!” He fumbled at his gun with frozen fingers, but the shadowed finger was faster and sent a razor-sharp knife spiralling into his wrist with a contemptuous flick. Joe screamed and involuntarily squeezed the trigger, sending forty-eight bullets through the wall of the bank and out into the general public and three through the central mass of Capeman, where they shredded and pulped several vital organs.
*
Fred Steele crouched in his basement, a smouldering mound of pythons stacked like tyres, surmounted by a grey-eyed glare. In his beef-slab hands he held – with immeasurable care and finesse – the power of Azrael, the angel of death, incarnated as the components of a half-made pipe bomb. He sneezed and blew himself up.
*
Despite his best efforts, Colonel Wagner was eaten by the lion.

“Bergatroyd, m’boy, do you know what the easiest thing in the world is?”
“No, sir. I don’t know anything that you haven’t told me.”
Lloyd Robertson smiled the happy smile of someone explaining something that their conversation partner already knew. “Yes, right, that’s in your contract. Thank you for elucidating as such. It’s money. Money’s dead simple. Bergatroyd, I have one hundred zillion dollars, and if I wish it I could extend my hand and the world would hand me two hundred zillion more. It’s pretty much a snap.”
“Wow, sir.”
“Look, I’ll prove it. Come with me.”
So they walked out of the greenhouse, through the wine fountains, past the marble zoo, through the under-hanger, down the acceleration tubing, and out the front door into the shameful squalor of the world, where Lloyd had Bergatroyd procure a small child.
“Lemme go ya palooka,” said the small child.
“Shut up, small child, and let me do you a favour,” said Lloyd kindly. “I see you have a little piece of straw in your hand. Would you mind trading me that?”
“Sure,” said the child, eyes narrowed with the glint of someone who’d been burned before. “One hundred zillion biggos.”
“Fifty,” said Lloyd.
“One hundred zillion biggos and all your assets.”
“Deal!” said Lloyd, happily. He snatched up the straw quickly before his dupe could change her mind. “Now Bergatroyd, watch how I can make back my fortune with just this piece of – hey, where are you going?”
“He works for me now, Bubba,” sneered the small child. “Now get the hell off my property.”
Lloyd got the hell off her property. A lesser man would’ve been perturbed, but not he! He had a piece of straw, and he knew how to get what he wanted. All he had to do was start small and think forwards.
There, in the park, amongst the stray winter-hardened dog turds and salt-eroded grass. There. There! Opportunity was lurking.
“Hello friend!” said Lloyd to opportunity, grabbing her shoulder and giving it a good friendly shake. “How’s tricks? Say, would you like a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to trade a piece of straw for that sandwich of yours?”
“Mmmfphlg,” said opportunity, through half her sandwich. “Mmmpplgh! Gllrf!”
“Ah, I see, I see. Good move! A wise investment. Here, if you’ll just take this I’ll get that out of your esophagus in a pinch, no worries.”
“HHHHRRRORK!”
“Hey, stop wriggling!”
“HRLP!”
Across the park, on a sunny bench, a policeman pricked up its ears. It stretched, yawned, turned around a few times, then lightly bounded to the pavement and casually strolled over to Lloyd, whereupon it separated him from opportunity by batting at his nose over and over.
“Now, what seems to be the problem here?” it purred, rolling over and over and showing its soft, furry tummy.
“A simple business transaction, we’re all friends here, no need to trouble yourself officer,” said Lloyd, tickling the policeman’s stomach.
The policeman grabbed Lloyd’s hand and rabbit-kicked his arm raw. “I wasn’t talking to you!” it hissed.
“He tried to take my sandwich and give me straw,” said opportunity. “I don’t like straw and the last quarter of my sandwich has his fat dirty fingerprints all over it.”
“I see!” said the policeman, rubbing its side against her leg. “Well, have no fear of that! We’re going to put this creep in the system.”
So the policeman created a criminal record for Lloyd and chased him out of the park with mock charges and a constant, terrifying moaning sound.
“Balls!” said Lloyd four blocks later, once he’d got his breath back. “I dropped my grass! It’s going to be a real pickle recouping my investment without it. I’d better harvest some recoupment stocks to refundate my assetitudinals. Well, that lawn looks good enough.”
It was very good enough. Lloyd decided it was so good enough that he could afford to be choosey, and had picked and discarded seven bushels (‘too short…too long…too coarse…too fine…too dry…too damp…too exuberant’) when the door opened and someone screamed at him for twenty minutes.
“Feel better?” asked Lloyd when they paused for breath.
“Yes,” said the homeowner. “Much. Geez. Thanks. I’ve been really stressed out lately. The mortgage, you know. Still, if you don’t buy now, you’ll be priced out. I’d have been a fool not to invest in a home.”
“Great!” said Lloyd. “I owned a house.”
“How’d that work for you?”
“I traded it to a small child as part of proving a point about how easy it is to make money with a single piece of straw,” said Lloyd. “Which is why I’m taking this straw from you, as soon as I find one I like.”
“How ‘bout that one?”
Lloyd looked. “It DOES look charming. Thank you.”
“Good luck too, seeing as it’s the last one on the lawn.”
“Yes, that was a little closer than I’d like.”
Sirens were roaring. A car pulled up next to the lawn and four or seven policemen fell out, lazily swatting at each other and never making contact.
“I called them before I came out,” said the homeowner. “Woopsy daisy.”
“No harm done,” said Lloyd, just as the policemen all grabbed a different part of his anatomy each and one of them broke his wrist.
“Stop resisting,” the policeman murmured softly into his ear as it put him in a sleeper hold with one arm and broke his wrist with the other.
“Ah!” said Lloyd. “My wrist broke!”
“Stop resisting,” said the policeman who had broken his wrist, who was still holding his broken wrist.
The policemen knocked Lloyd around until he got stuck under the back seat of the squad car. After a few moments spent trying to dig him out they seemed to lose interest and drove back to the station, where they sauntered in and ignored the commissioner making a big fuss over them.

Lloyd woke up the next morning to someone screaming at him again.
“H’lo?” he articulated.
“Oh, ICK, it’s still alive!” said the commissioner. “I can’t believe they left that in my shoe! Ugh. UGH UGH UGH UGH ugh.” He picked up Lloyd in a newspaper and threw him out of the station, back into the world.
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go?” asked Lloyd.
“Don’t come back!” shouted the commissioner, and slammed the door shut. The world was once against Lloyd’s oyster, and he was the sandy irritating grit in its guts.
But when Lloyd set foot on the street a free man once more, he was befuddled greatly. Every lawn was ablaze, the park was an inferno. Firemen were standing by with dry nozzles and empty hoses, expressions as flat and disinterested as Garfield strips.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
A firefighter turned to him. “New rules. No more straw within forty miles of city limits. It’s a very legitimate law that was purchased through legal means today, by a very rich small child who bought the entire city council a new pool.”

Lloyd never did find that straw he needed; Bergatroyd retired in three weeks; the small child nearly lost it all in the recession until they petitioned to receive more money from everyone else; the homeowner foreclosed; and the policemen lived happily until their kidneys failed due to poor diet, at which point the commissioner had them sent to a nice farm out in the country.

Blurt followed the trail.
It was heavy in the gut and wide in the leg; slung-backed and thick-limbed. It crushed through cinderblocks like cinders and waded through crunchy fields of broken wires and rust alike, and it ended up in a tangle of rubble at the bottom of a death-pit filled with broken bones and dead dust.
“Hey, sis” she called down into the tiny opening at the base. “What’s going on?”
“Reading,” came the voice. It was thick with phlegm and vexatation and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth, and it was unmistakable in any way for anyone but Blurt’s sister, Clot. “Go away.”
Thus offered her invitation, Blurt nudged her way inside the gutted basement. There was very little light, but Heloderma spectacular – or the Greater Western Gila Monstrosity – was mostly nocturnal anyways and had pretty decent night vision.
Blurt’s told her that her sister was hunched over a big pile of dead plant matter, most of which had been thrashed into pulp then lightly singed and buried.
“Books?” she said. “You found books?!”
“Oh, a lot more than that,” said Clot. “I’ve found the answer.”
“The what?”
“The answer to all of it,” said Clot, and oh boy was that smugness in her voice thick now. “I know what happened to all of the people.”
“What, you mean uncle Blue and aunt Bop out west? I thought they got eaten by a buffalo.”
“Not US people, dumbass,” said Clot. “I mean the OLD people. HUMAN people.”
That set Blurt hissing for a moment. “Wow,” she said. “Really?”
“Really.”
“All of them?”
“Think so.”
“What d’you mean ‘think’?”
“Alright smartass, you think you know it better than me, you can look at it yourself. Take a peek.”
Blurt accepted a handful of tattered pages, squinted carefully, and began.

Craig Larggcoc sneered down at the undead filling the city through eyes of purestrain chipped blue granite. Greyed flesh, senseless moans, and the meandering will of the mob filled the streets. Not a single human life remained in the city – in basically all the world. In his incredibly accurate and flawless judgment, not much had changed.
The wind was rising; the storm was brewing; the window of opportunity was slowly sliding shut. Garth was whimpering again – his shrill, trembling voice nearly drowned out by the sonorous moans of the zombie hordes – something about going back to search ‘for others.’
“There are no others, Garth,” said Craig, coolly.
Garth stared at him with watery-eyed bewilderment. “What?” he said, vacantly.
“There are no other people,” said Craig, with a sigh. “Those are just cattle. Sheep. Wannabes. Real people? Those are scarce. The shambling mess out there weren’t real even before they started trying to eat us. They always wanted to do that, deep down. They’re just finally being honest about it.”
“But… but people’s lives matter,” whinged Garth, blubbering like the hideous little rat Craig had secretly always suspected him to be.
Something clicked inside his head like the trigger weight on a Messenschole No. 92 (one of the late run models).
“Garth,” said Craig, as rock-steady as the Rockies, “what’s the difference between a clip and a magazine?”
“What?” snivelled Garth.
“Garth, listen to me,” said Craig, voice still steely-calm. “For once in your noxious, wasteful, pointless little ‘life,’ say something useful: what is the difference between a clip and a magazine?”
Garth’s knees knocked together, tick-tock; a clock counting down to inevitability. “I…I…I…don’t knooowww,” he howled senselessly, like the maddened animal he was.
Craig pulled out his gun, which was both his best friend and his lover and he had named Stacy after that no-good bitch that had dumped him in high school for some scumsucking jock named Mel who was doubtlessly dead and drooling down there with the zombies that fucking prick. Stacy was a modified Glorfengummer ’07 with an elongated, silenced barrel and an underslung grenade launcher; a laser scope; camouflage patterning; tactical mesh webbing mesh webbing; an extended magazine; a tactical grip; and a self-lubing barrel for when he was lonely.
“Dumbass,” he sneered. Then he shot him a bunch.

“So… the guns killed people?” asked Blurt.
“No, no, no,” said Clot. “Zombies. See, right at the start – they killed people. All the people. Aren’t you jealous? Mom spent years wondering, and I’ve figured it out. The whole end of humans, all in one book.”
“I mean, sure,” said Blurt. “But you’re being sort of reductive, aren’t you? This is just one book. There must’ve been at least a hundred in here back in the day. Even if not ALL of them were about what killed people, there must’ve been more than just one. Can’t we cross-reference?”
Clot was annoyed. She’d dug through the ruins of half a city block, pulled out untold ancient treasures of what very well could’ve been human knowledge, and now her obnoxious sister was naysaying all her discoveries. “Knock yourself out,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Blurt, deliberately ignoring all context, and she settled down in front of another bookcase, which she immediately began excavating with her powerful forelimbs.
I hope it takes you a hundred years, thought Clot silently. I hope all you find are those little boxes of cereal that taste like Styrofoam gone bad. I hope that
“Found one!” said Blurt.
“Like fuck you did,” said Clot.
“Nope, seriously! Look! Look! It’s a bit slim, and half of it’s fallen out, but there’s a good chunk right here, that’s all about it. Here, read it yourself.”
Blurt picked up the new book with the slow care of a bomb disposal expert and began to read.

“The new fleet’s on schedule,” said Toby.
Peter examined the microscope and saw that it was so. The second-gen nanobots were seven times more powerful than the first batch. It was all down to a childishly straightforward application of Boolean Bayes-frames, immersed in a hyperquantum shell and exposed to nanorelative particles. This unstable mix of physics and chemistry was then probed relentless by Toby with great patience and tiny tools, smaller than an atom’s sneeze. The resulting nanobots were synched to each other’s will using a deceptively simple AI routine based on that of the common cold, which allowed them to piggyback on each other using whip physics like whip scorpions. The upshot of this entire paragraph was that Toby was very smart and that the nanobots would be able to tolerate surface temperatures of over seven trillion parsecs above Kelvin, transforming the hell-surface of New Earth into perfectly tranquil custom-landscapes, adjusted to their every whim and fleeting desire. At least, once they were released into the wild using the delivery system that Peter had developed from scratch. Injected deep into the magmatic chambers of neighboring volcanoes, the ash clouds that belched death into the skies of New Earth would instead sow sweet seeds of man’s genius and innovation.
This procedure was only possible due to the sensathump, a remarkable machine that could, by belching hypersonic signals, probe the interior of the planet much as a bat might an insect in mid-air. It was a very complicated and impressive idea and it was ideas like that which had put Peter in charge of the tiny survival colony of far-thinking people living in what had once been his prudently-constructed bunker before the exploding nebula had turned Earth into New Earth. Vision, that was what separated the real men from the simps and wastes of genetic material. That and a willingness to get your hands dirty. And speaking of which…
“You’ve done frapping good work,” Peter told Toby warmly, “you’re a real trebb, you know that? Hey, stick around for a minute. As you’re well aware, our survival will require a lot of eugenics described in intense yet matter-of-fact detail, and I can’t help but make you aware that your extremely nubile daughter is

“What’s a ‘nebula’?” asked Clot.
“A kind of thing in the sky,” said Blurt. “I think. Mom had a book with pictures once.”
Clot checked the book in her claws. It didn’t have pictures, although the cover had some human’s name on it in incredibly impressive font. “Huh. So… a nebula exploded and killed everyone. That doesn’t make much sense; where’d the zombies come from?”
“The nebula?”
“That’s stupid. Zombies are people, and people are too heavy to fly unless they’re birds. Humans aren’t birds. Probably.”
Blurb thought a little harder. “Maybe the nebula exploding killed a lot of people, and then turned most of the survivors into zombies. That’d make sense.”
“That’s too complicated,” said Clot.
“Real life is usually complicated. Like, remember when we used to think buffalo were good to eat? It seemed really simple for years and years and forever and ever, then the deadwinds changed and it turned out those were just larvae. Boy were we surprised.”
“There’s more-complicated-than-you-think,” said Clot, “and then there’s complicated-to-make—you-feel-clever. And this is that.”
“Which?”
Clot smacked her sister between the eyes and heaved her stunned body across the room. It took Blurt a few minutes to right herself, which Clot spent burrowing in the bookcase.
“Huh,” she said.
“Oh?” asked Blurt, somewhat upright and very breathless. “What is it?”
“Uh. Huh,” said Clot.
“Oh, one of THOSE. Well, am I right or are you?”
“Huh,” said Clot. And she handed Blurt the book.

“It was kind of you to meet with me on such short notice,” said ‘Old’ Nick, warmly. But the coldness in his eye belied the fire in his grin.
“Anything for the Supreme Ruler of the United Nations, Mr. nataS,” said Bradley.
“Ah! You pronounced my name correctly!” said Nick. “So many of you Americans cannot do that, you know. It’s very foreign.”
“I respect the names of all peoples, American or heathen, on God’s green earth,” said Bradley. He saw Nick flinch, and could not hide his own smile.
“Ah,” he hissed as with the forked tongue of the serpent (Genesis 3:15). “It seems the game is up, Pastor Blandford. Behold! I am the Antichrist, and as you are a man your will is now mine! Believe my lies about the dating of igneous rocks using isotopic decay!”
“No I won’t,” said Bradley, nobly. “I believe in my Father, who protects me from that sort of thing. Your cunning disguises avail thee not, tempter! I name thee – ‘Old’ Nicholas Infernus Lucifermaximus nataS – by thy title true: Satan!”
At this Nick nataS roared terribly and turned into a dragon with seventeen heads and each head was wearing a whore and each whore was wearing Babylon, and he vomited up such fire and fury that the whole earth was consumed and every man and woman and child died in that Armageddon.
But Bradley Blandford believed, and so he was okay.
“Take the wheel!” he yelled, and he slapped the Antichrist, and it was the backhand of Christ Slapping Through Him (Revelations 371:0.28). The great dragon yelped in unholy agony as if every Darwinist had screamed at once and

They sat there for a little while, unmoving.
“How’s THAT fit into your theory?” asked Clot.
Blurt tried to talk, realized her tongue was hanging out of her slackened mouth, and tried again.
“So…. It was the sky explosion, which was caused by the Antichrist…dragon…thing, which made zombies,” said Blurt. “The multicausal hypothesis, we can call it? Maybe. Possibly?” She shrank back from her sister’s expression. “Look, it’s a start.”
“I think it might’ve been people,” said Clot at last. “People did it to each other.”
“What? Why?”
“Because if I had to sit around all day looking at this crap, I’d kill someone too. Books are for nerds.  Come on, let’s get going. I stashed half a dead deer next to the river yesterday.”

Duke Robswaffle raised a fork to his mouth, chuckling lightly over the thought of finally landing the foreclosure against the Bluebits. His chuckle rattled in his gullet, and he coughed. Then he wheezed. Finally he choked, gasped, gurgled, and fell down face-first in his own breakfast, all his wicked deeds not even affording him the time to panic. The chambermaid screamed.
Outside, Tolb the sub-under-gardener was running the lawnmower and didn’t hear anything. Five minutes later he finished the lawn, put away his tools, and left the estate just before the officers of the law arrived, completely unaware of any ruckus.
He went to a pub down the way, drank a pint of something, lost five bits on a game of cards with a local pal of his that he’d originally won from her anyways, drank a pint again (this time of something larger and meaner), lost ten bits he probably couldn’t afford, said goodbye as politely as he could, and went home.
Home was small and dirty and cramped and shared with a rotation of others. Tolb had a shot of something in an effort to chase away the sure-to-come hangover, ate a dirty biscuit and surly bread, and fell asleep wishing he had some cheese.
The next day he came to work at the Robswaffle estate and found its gates barred.
“What’s going on?” he asked a passerby.
“The Duke is dead!” they told him. “His vile deeds caught up with him!”
“Oh,” said Tolb. “I guess I’d better find other work.”
And he did, at some point.

Lady Whibsy-Herringbone, fifth knife of her line, missed. She missed with grace and skill. She missed with great alacrity. She missed with élan and panache and maybe even vivacity. But the most important part of all of that was that she missed, and so her stubby little blade thunked past Lord Basil Tonington’s nape and smacked into the bark of a nearby tree instead.
“Aha!” said Lord Basil. He drew his own tiny knife and darted around the tree’s fat, firm trunk.
“Aha!” said the Lady, retrieving her knife and pursuing him about the tree. She caught sight of his heel for an instant, a petty instant, and then he was gone again ‘round the trunk, and she was faced with a dilemma.
Clearly Lord Basil would expect her to double back counter-clockwise around the tree and ambush him. Therefore, he would double-back counter-clockwise and ambush HER. Unless he expected her to expect that, and therefore he would NOT double-back and would ambush her clockwise as she attempted to ambush him clockwise. Unless…
Lady Whibsy-Herringbone shook her head as the implications became clear. There was no end to the implications of this tree, either in logic or real circumference. Therefore it would be simplest to keep chasing him in the same direction – to save time turning about – and trust in chance. She thanked providence for her expensive and elite education, and redoubled her pace.
Lord Basil Tonington, of similar stature, wealth, and schooling, expressed much the same thoughts. And so the pursuit stalled.
Three months later the tree, fatally undermined by the trench their circuit had worn about its roots, fell over and crushed them both.

“I’m afraid to tell you this, ma’am,” said the storysage, “but your daughter was born under an evil sign. She’s going to be very evil. Extremely evil.”
“O!” said the queen, who knew how to pronounce solitary letters. “Storysage, please help this cruel fate come not to pass! Raise my daughter so that she becomes an upstanding and beloved queen, rather than a tyrant! Do this for me.”
“Okay,” said the storysage. But the queen was already dead, so really it was a promise made to nobody in particular.
Still, she stuck by it. It gave her something to do.
The queen’s daughter grew older, became extremely evil, and ravaged the land with her mighty armies and mightier sword. Eventually a handsome princess came to defeat her, and – with the secret aid of the queen’s son, a most beautiful prince – she was cast down through the careful exploitation of her secret weakness: a fondness for almonds.
The storysage realized she’d really fouled up that promise, and was pretty glad nobody had heard her make it. She hung around the court making general predictions and so on for many years, but tried not to volunteer aid in dealing with the situations she warned of. “I just tell ‘em as I see ‘em,” she told them. Eventually she retired and passed on the duties to her apprentice, an undistinguished and straightforward young man that had nearly become a cheesemaker instead.

Sam and Robin looked at each other, surrounded by the ruin of their ambitions, and suddenly realized something important.
“Well, despite how much I hate you, my vengeance wasn’t worth it after all, and seems to have left nobody the victor,” said Sam.
“Yeah. You’ve got that right,” said Robin. “Seems correct, if unsatisfying”
“Indeed.”

Ted sat down. “Boy, I’m glad THAT’S over,” he said.

Herman was stooped. His hands hooked like claws – ugly claws, claws from a half-eaten chicken, not the stout, strong nails you’d find on something like a wolverine or a hawk or anything. His back was a bunch of frightened vertebrae huddling together for shelter and warmth in the shadow of his destroyed spinal column. His arms shook like a dead tree in a high wind, and when he coughed there was real venom and spittle behind it, the kind you find in a plague ward. Each lungful warned the body that there might not be another getting in for a few minutes.
But hey. The driveway was clear.
“A pox upon shovelling!” shouted Herman. And then he bent over, wheezing.
“Fie upon shovelling!” he yelled upon getting his breath back, and so immediately lost it again.
“If I had my ‘druthers, I’d never shovel another flake of snow in my entire life, and if there was a way – any way! – to do so, I’d make a pact with the devil himself and gladly shake his hand!”
“Hi,” said the passerby who’d stopped to hear all of this out of polite interest. “Want to see a trick?”
Herman’s death-rattle indicated acquiescence.
The passerby bent over to the roughly-scraped asphalt, picked up a few odds and ends of loose snow, and rolled them around a little, muttering in something that didn’t sound French.
“Here you go.”
Herman looked at what was being offered. It was a snowball.
“Get thee hence, snow,” he said.
“This one’s special. It doesn’t melt.”
Herman screamed.
“No, listen. Shut up. There, your lungs are empty again. Listen while they fill up, okay? Okay. Whatever temperature this thing’s at? That’s the temperature of your driveway. Presto. No more shovelling. I’m leaving before you start up again. You’re welcome.”
The passerby left. Herman still screamed a little once he’d gotten his breath back, just on principle.
He looked at the snowball, unmelting, sat squat on the ground. It filled him with horror. It filled him with fear. He knew it shouldn’t be, shouldn’t even be dreamed of.
But what if.

So Herman brought the snowball inside, put it in a little dish on his counter, and went to sleep with the roar of the storm coming in outside his window. He ground his teeth a lot that night, and when he woke, he was halfway dressed and out the door, shovel in hand, before he’d even opened his eyes.
The driveway was half-empty. The snow that remained had a sullen, sulky, half-melted look to it. It collapsed into slush at a nudge of his boot.
“Wow,” said Herman. “Yikes. Yippee!” He took off his toque and threw it in the air, and then took off his boots and threw them in the air, and then he ran in circles three times around his driveway laughing and drove to work after spending thirty seconds shoving slush out of the way while whistling.
“Boy!” he said to his co-workers and also everyone else he met all day, without pausing for their input, “I sure do love shovelling now! Never been better! Never been easier! Yes, now I can ignore it! It’s great! I love that a bunch! Yay!”
Then he went home, shoveled the driveway for thirty seconds again, and went to bed.
But he stayed up a little. Half out of excitement, half out of worry.
“What if,” he said to himself, “what if this keeps up? Thirty seconds in the morning, thirty seconds in the evening. That adds up. That’s a minute a day. That’s an hour every two months! That’s a lot of wasted time, oh no no no.”
He frowned, and pursed his lips, and whined a little, and fidgeted.
Then he had an idea and went into the kitchen, put the snowball in the oven on a little baking sheet, turned it on, and went to bed again (a major fire hazard by the way; don’t do this).

The driveway steamed wetly in the feeble grey mist that passed for light on a winter morning. Herman danced the dance of those who care nothing for dignity, the glee-jig, the cackle-flip, the hoky-gloaty.
“THIS is what it’s all about!” he yelled, “THIS! THIS RIGHT HERE! THIS!”
Then he went to work, sang loudly the whole day, and came home.
And it was still clear. His neighbours were toiling, their shoulders were hunched, their minds bent around bent plastic, metal, wood. And HE, HERMAN, was going indoors for hot chocolate and smugness.
In the kitchen, he put on the water to boil and paused for a moment.
It was awful warm in there. And hey, what was that smell?
“Ugh,” he said, and opened the oven. Something crusted to the baking sheet had been burning away by degrees for the past fourteen hours. “Gross.”
He cleaned it off, went to bed, and stayed up late.
Thinking.
Well. Twenty four hours a day, with the gas on. Singeing anything that ever got into the oven. Good lord, the gas bills. They’d take his money, they’d take his life! He’d be crippled and hunched again, this time by fearsome debt.
What could he do? What would be warm enough, what would be consistent enough, what could.
“AHA!”
So Herman walked into the kitchen, turned off his (groaning) oven, removed the snowball, and gently, carefully, patiently tossed it into his furnace.
Then he went to bed happy for the last time in a decade.

When Herman woke up again, he was very surprised. Someone had come in while he was asleep and painted his room white, taken away all his belongings, changed him into a sort of backless gown, strapped him into an IV machine, and then put his bedroom inside a hospital.
Then a doctor came into his house, quite uninvited, and asked him how he was feeling.
“Annoyed,” said Herman. “Is it snowing? Will I need to shovel? Oh god, please tell me I won’t need to shovel.”
“Herman,” said the doctor, “your house burned down. This is your fourth day in the hospital.”
“Yes, yes, yes. Do I need to shovel?”
“See this graph? It looks like your car had its tires melt when your driveway became superheated. The rubber spilled onto your lawn, which then also became superheated, which ignited your house. It kept the firefighters busy for forty hours.”
“Oh NO!” said Herman. “Forty hours! Does this mean it snowed again? I bet it has. The forecast was pretty bad, you know. Brr. Shoveling.”

The snowball was never found again, even when Herman moved back in – not that he could remember it, then or ever. He was more or less in one piece, but a part of him was always a little boiled after that.
Never got cold shovelling again, mind you.

In the month of October, on the proper day, a man wearing a strange hat sat in the middle of a dusty old side-road and sang an even-stranger song five times.
Then he left a little bit of folded paper on the road and walked away.

Ten minutes later, a dragon stepped on the paper and stopped cold.
“Oh fuck,” it thought. “Not AGAIN.”

The sorcerer did a little dance. He’d planned it since the night before and so it both lacked spontaneity and showed (unflattering) insight into his character. Especially the little shuffle at the end with the rapid clapping.
“Ha-hah!” he cackled.
The dragon waited.
“Ha-HA!” elaborated the sorcerer.
The dragon waited a little more.
“Ah-HA, HA HA HA, BWA AHA, HA HA, HA. HEH,” concluded the sorcerer. “Right. Dragon!”
“Yes?”
“Beast of the fiery pit!”
“Sure.”
“Fiend of the higher air!”
“Okay.”
“I command thee-”
“Yeah, if you must.”
“-I command thee to grant me wishes three!”
“Three wishes. You don’t have to be fancy about it. Sure. Release me.”
The sorcerer squinted at the dragon down his nose, which was tricky because it was pretty small and somewhat adorably button-like. “Do you – do thee think me a fool, wyrm? Thine confabulations and deceit shall find no purchase within me! Swear to me by the fire, by the air, and by the blood that make up yourst bits!”
The dragon held up a claw. “Right. I swear. Done. Let me out.”
“Did thou-”
“Cross my hearts and hope to die, pull off my wings just like a fly. And please stop saying ‘thou’ ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ and anything else like that.”
This seemed to annoy the sorcerer.
“Fine, you’re bound. Three wishes are mine! For my first wish I desire…dominion over men and women!”
“’Dominion?’” asked the dragon.
“What?”
“Oh, forget it,” said the dragon, and it flapped its wings and launched from the ground with all four limbs at terrifying speed, kicking up a windburst that sent the sorcerer’s pants over his head and his ass over his teakettle.
An hour later, it returned.
“Climb aboard,” it told the sorcerer. And he did, and it launched again and this time he was there to see the explosion of force from the other side, to gawp in surprise as the whole world became as small and unreal and far away as a picture in a child’s book of bedtime stories.
Then they landed, and he fell off.
“This is Stebs Hill,” said the dragon. “I asked around town for the deed, here it is, you now possess a dominion over the six hundred twenty five men and seven hundred fourteen women of the visible horizon from this point. It was pretty cheap; the soil up here’s garbage and there’s no prospects for mining or quarrying. No wonder everyone else around here lives in the valley.”
“Barf,” said the sorcerer.
“Yes. Barf indeed.”
“You twisted my words!” yelled the sorcerer, hastily scrubbing the bitter juice from the corners of his mouth.
“Me?” asked the dragon. “No. Not really. I just misinterpreted them. I mean, I assume I did, since you’re so angry. Unless you wished for something you hated?”
The sorcerer paced seven mystic circles into the summit of Stebs Hill, chanted some ominous words that sounded suspiciously like swears, and made elaborate, thaumaturgical gestures in the direction of the dragon and the dragon’s friends and family.
“Dragon!” he shouted.
“Well, yes, we already-”
“Worm with wings!”
“It’s got a ‘y’ in i-”
“Carrion-thirster, goat-fucker!” said the sorcerer, with more spittle than words.
“What? And that was just o-”
“DO AS I SAY AND COMMAND,” shrieked the sorcerer, “and GRANT ME WEALTH BEYOND MORTAL UNDERSTANDING!”
The dragon shrugged and took off in the same instance, an economy of motion only available to a very lucky subset of vertebrates. The sorcerer coughed his lungs out for the duration of its absence, a hardship shared by many smokers.
“Climb on again,” said the dragon.
The sorcerer climbed on again. This time he shut his eyes for the entire flight, out of principal, spite, and the suspicion that he was within rights to demand a refund.
Thump.
The sorcerer opened his eyes again. They were standing on the (slightly smouldering) remains of a pea garden, outside a university.
“Their philosophy classes were all fully occupied, and you have no accreddition,” said the dragon, “but I removed a few of the excess students and a few officials and now they’re open to you staying until your degree is complete.”
“wealth,” said the sorcerer, blankly. “grant.”
“It’s SORT of a grant,” said the dragon. “Or maybe more like a fund. Or insurance. Incineration insurance. I guess protection money’s less oblique.”
“Stop,” said the sorcerer, recovering a part of himself that had slipped from his body. “Go. Go away. With me. Now.”
This time the sorcerer watched the clouds in the sky. They looked like faces. They looked like they were laughing at him.
“Why?” he asked the dragon.
“Why what?”
“Why have you done this?!” screamed the sorcerer into the wind. “I’ve asked nothing that wasn’t within your power! I’ve asked only what you could gran – GIFT me, with the barest of efforts! Less effort than your idiotic games have cost you! Why torment me thus – are you so depraved, so wicked, so perverse?!”
“Look,” said the dragon, “here’s the thing: if we’re having problems, it’s because I can barely understand most of this language I’m using – I learned my first when I was eight hundred and nine. I’d never understood the idea of anything else having thoughts. I’d never understood the idea of communicating anything, to anyone, ever. Frankly, it’s amazing I haven’t eaten you yet in a fit of solipsism, spell or no spell. Me and you communicating at ALL is more than you should ask for, and you’re just quibbling over the wording.”
The sorcerer opened his mouth, shut it, opened it, made a hissing sound like a kettle, puffed up like a toad, twittered like a songbird, and slumped over like a man who’d just had his every dream skewered with a sharpened steeple.
“Take me home,” he said.
“Sure thing,” said the dragon. And it dropped him over a volcano.
The sorcerer tried to make a wish on the way down, but the screaming made it very difficult to concentrate and besides it was his fourth anyways, and therefore null and void as all fourth wishes are.
The dragon then made a wish for a nap, settled into the volcano, and worked on fulfilling it. Which it did, although there were a few uncomfortable twists into the second decade, when its leg fell asleep.

“Health card, please.”
The man had been in line for three minutes. The man had seen six people hand over their health card. The man was completely astonished to learn so suddenly that he, too had a health card – and what’s more, somebody might ever want to see it. He scuffled through all his pockets one after another, pulled out a big wad of mashed Kleenexes, checked all his pockets again, pulled out his keys and dropped them and picked them up again, checked all his pockets a third time and found his health card in his wallet in the first pocket he looked, and did all of this while keeping up a running commentary of ‘ohh,’ ‘ahh,’ ‘err,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘I’m sure it was…’
The assistant gave the man a friendly, patient smile that had nothing to do with reality, took the health card, scribbled in a folder, and handed it back carefully instead of throwing it at his head. “Down the hall, to your left. The Waiting Room.”
“Oh, the waiting room.”
“No, the Waiting Room.”
“Oh. My second left?”
“Your first.”
“My left or your left?”
“Yours.”
“Right now, or the way I was when I was facing you?”
“Right now.”
“Right now or left now?”
“Health card, please,” said the assistant to the next person in line.
The man stood there for a little while until he realized he wasn’t getting any more attention, then wandering off. It was on his first left.

It, of course, was the Waiting Room.

The Waiting Room was coloured in beige and boredom, and decorated in soft ‘80s numbness. The air tasted like it hadn’t moved since the 40s, and the floor grumbled angrily when used. A big wooden door at the far end sealed away the doctor, behind oaken sternness and a big overhead bell that looked capable of summoning a most foreboding DING.
There was also a clock, which ticked with the wet, rhythmic firmness of an epiglottis.
The man didn’t notice any of this because he was busy gawping at the room’s inhabitants. Most of them were people like him, except the ones that weren’t.
There was a woman biting her nails. Her hands moved, even as she chewed, so it looked a bit like she was wrestling with her own head.
There was a man with a tie and a truly tremendous amount of sweat, which he was furiously adding to every second. Fresh droplets beaded on his face as if from a shower-head. His flesh appeared to have compensated for all of this by sucking itself as close to his bones as possible, maybe in hopes that it could cling on as the rest of its mass was sweated away.
And there was a small child inside eight layers of blankets, in a basket, screaming. Its parent had submerged their entire face into the basket, and was as invisible as the child itself, if a good deal quieter.
“Gosh,” goggled the man, eyes wide and mouth half-open. His lips glistened, his tongue half-protruded. “Woah,” he said loudly, just to be sure everyone in the room understood where they stood with him and his opinion. “Jeepers!” he said with the fierceness of a curse, and then he sat down in the nearest chair with violent force.
Then he got up, took off his coat, put it on three separate coathangers, and sat down again twice as hard. He made a little tune up in his head and hummed it, in precisely the reverse of that order.
But it couldn’t last.
“Hi!” he said to the sweating man.
The sweating man nodded. This tiny motion caused about half a cup of moisture to splash off his neck and drench his tie, changing every single colour on it to something dank and hideous. He turned pale – even paler.
“Boy! What’re you in for?”
The sweating man mumbled something that included the word ‘fever.’
“Boy that’s tough! Gosh! You know, I had a fever one time. Ate a big salad. Old home remedy. NEVER fails. Ever. You know, it’s because it’s full of vitamins. Good for you, vitamins. Vitamin A’s the best one, a cousin of mine’s a doctor and he did a paper that said-”
The bell above the big wooden door went DING. It sounded like schools and amusement parks and forgotten stovetop timers. It was very foreboding.
The sweating man stood up, mumbled something furiously, and ran away. Every footstep squelched and turned into a sucking, lamprey-tinged gasp.
There was a quiet three seconds.
“Hi!” said the man to the woman biting her nails.
She paused for a moment in her chewing.
“How’re you doing?”
She began again, then accelerated.
“Nervous eh? You know, I was nervous once. But my momma told me a special old family secret. You have to peel an orange and put it in your eyes. Then you blink as hard as you can for five minutes. It gets the vitamin Cs where they should be, you know.”
The woman biting her nails stuffed both hands into her mouth and began to grind her teeth furiously.
“Vitamin C isn’t as good as vitamin A of course – or even vitamin B! – but it’s in the top three. Obviously, since they’re alphabetical. And it’s not all THAT weak either – I remember I drank way too much orange juice once and I got too much vitamin C and I almost poisoned myself, although the doctors said it was water poisoning. They were just trying to keep me calm because I was so little; vitamin C poisoning is scary stuff, my mom told me. That’s why you’ve got to make sure it gets in your eyes and not your ears. Otherwise it can leave you numbed and frostbitten and anti-social, which is bad for anyone – not that I’ve not heard a complaint directed at chatterboxes, mind you! Once I went on for a while and it drove my poor old dad so nuts he had to spank me three ways, one for each cheek and an entirely new one all of his own invention. A bit harsh, but I learned my lesson, and I only talk to strangers now, or at least mostly. Common in my family. Anyways, I tend to go on like that, pardon me for not giving you a word in edgewise. Hey, what’s your favourite colour?”
The woman biting her nails was up to her elbows.
“Sorry, sorry. I’ll wait ‘till you’re through. Don’t want to make you talk with your mouth full. So my aunt once-”
DING.
The woman biting her nails lurched upright, fell over, and furiously rolled through the big wooden door.
“Good luck!” called the man. Then he leaned back and sighed. Then he snorted. Then he started humming again, whistled for a few seconds, hummed some more, yawned, stretched, started to snore, jolted violently awake again (knocking over half a table of magazines) and stared at the parent and their child for four minutes hoping they’d take their head out of the child’s carry-basket for a second and make eye contact.
At last, he didn’t care.
“H-”
“We’re contagious,” said the parent.
“W-”
“One more syllable and you’ll catch it.”
The man shut his mouth. “Golly!” he thought loudly. Then he started to clean his nails by picking them off. Some of the pickings he ate – maybe to see what the woman biting her nails had been up to, experimentally – and some of them he simply flicked to see how far they would fly.
One of them flecked off the bell above the big wooden door, which went ‘ding.’ The parent stood up, grabbed their child, and ran through the door so fast the man had no time to see their face. From somewhere in the distance, someone (the doctor?) shouted something rude.
For want of else to do and absent witnesses, the man began to explore, chart, and conquer the rugged interior of his nostrils. This went on for ten million years.
And then, in the distance, hollow as an empty grave.
DING
The man got up, checked the entire room to make sure he hadn’t forgot anything, and very slowly walked through the big wooden door, accidentally shutting it way too hard and making the paintings on all the walls jump.

Inside the door was a hall.
Inside the hall was another door.
Inside the door was the doctor.
He was a small, furious man with large teeth and a stare that made you flinch. Aside from these traits, he was very unlike a squirrel.
“Hello. Sit down.”
The man was a bit like a dog, and turned around three times before doing so – he wanted to make sure he had time to read all the charts on the walls first. One of them had what looked like a cross-section of an eyeball on it, and he was curious as to what it was.
“Hey, doc, what’s that thing that looks like a cross-section of an eyeball over there?” he asked.
“That’s a cross-section of an eyeball,” said the doctor. “Sit down.”
“Wow. Which side?”
“Left. Sit down.”
“Is it blue? My uncle said blue eyes are built backwards from green eyes.”
The doctor gently but firmly gripped the man’s shoulders and pushed him slowly until he was seated.
“Stick out your tongue.”
“Take off your shirt.”
“Breathe in.”
“Breath out.”
“Look at my finger.”
“Keep looking at my finger.”
“Stop looking at my finger.”
“Any problems eating?”
“Well –”
“Any problems sleeping?”
“You kno-”
“Wonderful. You’re healthy,” said the doctor. He checked his watch. “And my assistant just went home, so, uh, bye. Last one out’s a rotten egg, eh?”
“Y’know, that reminds me of a thing my grand-”
“Excellent. Well, nice to see you, see you later, etc, goodbye, good luck,” said the doctor. His handshake was almost a quick slap, and he left at a dead sprint without putting on his coat.
The man raised an eyebrow. Well, sometimes these things happen. Doctors were busy after all. He shrugged, put on his coat, stepped back into the Waiting Room, and was wholly caught by surprise when it pounced and disemboweled him. He didn’t even manage a yelp before he was swallowed.

The room shook itself three times, like a dog. It curled itself back up into a comfortable three-dimensional space.
And then it went back to waiting. It usually took a few weeks before it was hungry again.

There was a little king. A very little king. A king so little that in normal times he ought to have been a prince, but there had been an accident and an operation and a funeral and somewhere in the chaos his princedom had been amputated and buried.
So there he was. On the throne. And while he was there things were brought to him. Treaties and proclamations and promises and threats and pleasantries and all the colours of the paperwork rainbow (which is beige) passed under his nose and he even signed some of it, when he had to.
He could spell his own name, almost.
But that gets tiring, and a little king’s attention span is no longer than a little prince’s. So now and then, and again, and again, he would dismiss his business and cancel his court and call in the storyteller he knew from his youngest years.
The little king would wave his hand, like this.
Then she’d cough, and cough, and say “once upon a time…”
The hall filled with wolves, and bears, and wizards, and dragons. Princes, too.
And everything would be happy again.

The years wore.
They tore down the mountains inch by inch; they threw up the trees and chopped them to stumps; they ripped the wool off sheep and sewed it back on again. And that’s to say nothing of the weather.
But they beat in vain against the little king. For although they took his youngest teeth – and one of his elder ones, to an unfortunate peach-pit – and they yanked him up to the sky, and they rubbed raw hair and hide all over his little face, they couldn’t keep his mind. And that was as little as it had been the day he was crowned.
The borders were shaky. The neighbours were aggrieved. The queen hadn’t seen him in three months and his children not since the day they were born.
That didn’t concern the little king much, but his storyteller had died recently, and that made him very cross.
So the men went door to door, and they asked around, and they brought up men and women and although none of them quite pleased the king as much as his old storyteller had, they WERE a lot more numerous, and that was of all the pleasure he could ask for, and he went through them like some people went through clothes. A few changes a month.
One would stand there, to his left. One would stand there, to his right. The little king would wave his hand, like this.
Then the first in line would clear their throat and say “once upon a time…”
Lions and tigers, snakes and sorcerers, giants and princesses.
And he’d smile, and remember being happy again.

Years, given time, form decades for mutual protection and defense. They’re human creations, it’s only fitting that they do this. And it works well for them, gluing together time in blocks that stand firm even as mere matter crumbles and rushes against them.
There were no more little kings. There were a half-dozen old princes and princesses, though. Older than the little king had been when he fathered them, the eldest almost the age of his old storyteller back in the days he remembered.
He didn’t remember much else. If it was real, he didn’t want to hear it. Messengers left empty-handed with nobody bothering to even shoot them. Trade had given up and gone home. By and large the country outside the castle ran itself, save for those grim nights when the grey-faced men with halberds came down into the towns to interrogate anyone who might be hiding scraps of narrative. A children’s fable, a hearthside tale, a bedtime story – anything, anything at all. The elderly in particular were beset, and many an older man and woman was short a few fingers; the result of an earnest effort to make sure they weren’t shirking in their duties.
The king’s throne saw in the middle of his hall now. No story was new to him, not in whole nor in part. He’d made up for it for years with stereo, now he’d had to take it a step farther.
A nervous, throat-clearing storyteller at each hand, and one before him.
The little king waved his hand, like this.
And they said, all together and at once, “once upon a time…”

And it was true that once upon a time was a fancy.
It seemed likely than twice upon a time was pleasantry.
Thrice upon a time? That was more than could be held in just one place.

The castle didn’t vanish. Most people were very clear on that. The castle wasn’t gone. It hadn’t been spirited away.
But it wasn’t there anymore.
That isn’t the sort of thing people question. Good fortune was what it was. People shrugged, and peopled moved on, and when the neighbouring kingdoms came together and gently muddled their borders across the fields and towns nobody made a fuss.

And somewhere, far away, locked inside the crushed hours of a thousand compacted daydreams, there is a little king – not really a prince, not really himself – trapped somewhere on an edge, poised above a hundred dragons, a thousand princesses, a million witches. About to fall in, but holding his balance.
With no idea when he is.