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The shark is seventy-three feet long and more than a hundred tons and it looks like a sausage crossed with a subway car crossed with a steakhouse knife cabinet. It is moving with great force and purpose and joy in the bay, just below the water’s surface, fin and back standing proud and tall in the midday sun like some sort of denticle-coated sailboat, the heft and force of it tipping jauntily as its mouth slides gently towards the surface and shatters another yacht at the keel, sending screaming weekenders into the bay. They thrash in fear and desperation, which attracts its interest, followed by its teeth, and some screams stop and some screams start and oh, oh, there is the ferry, crammed with tourists, and there it goes – bam! Right amidships! Look at the list, look at the tilt, see how such a small change in angle and degree makes such a big difference for so many people! Look at how simple and tidy it all looks from here, like a little paper boat sinking on a pond!

Oh, the military are here now. The drones are spotting for the helicopters, the helicopters are spotting for the missile cruisers. Oh, it leaps – a breach fit for a mako, on a body more than a hundred times a mako’s size! It’s in midair, above the deck, mouth open, the bullets all sliding harmlessly past it or tickling across steely skin, mouth open, all the fire and screams in the air, mouth open, the waves are red and churned by its wake, mouth open and Harold woke up in bed with sixteen minutes before the alarm went off. Again.

***

Since he was up early he spent a little more time on the toilet and a little more time brushing his teeth and put together they almost balanced out the a lot more time he spent trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about, and the a lot a lot more time he spent trying to forget about trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about.

Traffic helped. The streets were clogged with the third day of just enough rain to make everyone just a little upset but unable to avoid errands any longer – sorry about your weekend, cheer up, the week’s going to suck too. The bus was a cauldron of angry, damp, uncomfortable humans. Harold’s leg cramped; his shirt was sweatstained; a baby was screaming and someone was screaming at the baby. He was in nirvana.

Then his stop arrived, he walked two blocks in the drizzle, and he went into a building to sit down at a computer and go over the backlog of KRUNCHI data to make sure it wasn’t falling apart in the hands of the tools that were meant to make sure it wasn’t falling apart by checking it against the algorithms that were supposed to inform you if it was falling apart as long as the base code running them hadn’t fallen apart.

Harold’s monitor had a little sticker with a cartoony shark fin on it. Everyone on the team had gotten a pack and been strongly encouraged to use them. It got a little bigger every time he looked at it, which was never, or thought about it, which was every second he was sitting in front of it.

His inbox exploded in fanfares about a quarter of the way into a truly incomprehensible bug report: priority message from the Big Guy. All hands on deck, no slowing down because the weather’s bad and half the city is clogged and the other half is leaking, shape up or ship out, We Get Results or We Go Home, No Excuses, Remember How Badass Your Job Is.

Harold remembered how badass his job was and his arms started shaking a little until he went to the bathroom. Then he finished three-quarters of the next one-quarter of the bug report, took an early lunch, and on the way back – microwaved meal filling his stomach with watery grease – he took the walk by the Pool. Like a kid picking the scab, or poking the bruise.

The Pool was still there, and so was the shark. Encased in glass, swimming its endless, patient laps. Waiting for the Thursday feeding. They fed it variety on Thursdays, pre-vetted for safety but selected for unfamiliarity. To keep it interested.

Harold looked at the glass and wondered how interested it was in testing its thickness. He wondered how much variety it would get from shattering the walls, bursting into the lobby, sliding down the rain-slicked streets all the way to the waterfront. He wondered if the ferry would be there. He wondered if he’d be able to avoid biting his nails all the way back to his monitor and its sticker.

He didn’t, but only because he ground his teeth instead.

***

Another early night, another picture-play of his daytime thoughts. This time the shark is on land; he’d failed to check the bug reports in time and it’s sprouted legs through some kind of godawful reverse-neotenic nonsense, sending it scuttling through the skyscrapers like a centipede through a box of crickets. It flips the streetcars, it tramples the cart vendors, it wades through emergency response teams and tanks and it climbs an old cathedral downtown and heaves air through its gill slits in a deep, booming grunt that sounds like it’s coming from a hog too big for the deepest hells to hold.

Then Harold woke up again, twelve minutes early. So he had a little less time to sit on the toilet.

Fourth day of rain. A little more intense, with occasional pauses for hope. It lashed the windows now and then, to be sure you were paying attention.
He wondered if the shark noticed. It probably could. Megalodon^(™) was mostly C. carcharias in stock, scaled up beyond even the wildest fish-tales or the most Peter Benchley-inspired nightmares, and they had pretty good eyes and liked to check out stuff above water. It probably still had those instincts and abilities. KRUNCHI had added size. Added a ‘more dramatic’ paler colouration; reducing the effectiveness of the fish’s countershading in the process. Made the teeth bigger. Other than that it had mostly contributed a steady flow of bug reports. O. megalodon probably wouldn’t have looked like anything like this, wouldn’t have acted anything like this; but it was what you saw when you looked it up on the internet, and that was always what the Big Guy wanted, so it was what he got.

He wondered if the shark cared. He had no idea. It probably didn’t.

He wondered if he was thinking about the rain or not.

***

Its fins elongate into wings. It soars through the air (that it can’t breathe) and breathes fire (that it really can’t breathe) and it tears the jets from the sky and jukes and dives and rends asunder missiles and fighter-planes alike, a dogfish in a dogfight. It defecates a contrail across the sky; it topples the radio antennas of the tallest towers; it dips its tail in mocking salute as it buzzes the bay one last time and soars away across the water to menace the globe. And twenty minutes before Harold’s alarm was going to go off.  Enough time for toilet and toothbrush AND staring at the ceiling.  Beautiful.

Day five. No raindrops, just eternal mist in coagulated globules that tried to seep into your clothing from the inside out, like alien sweat. The gutters remained full and sullen from yesterday.

Harold finished the bug report. He was informed it was late, and had it explained to him in an automated sort of way that this was bad, and he was also on thin ice because if he wasn’t badass he had no place here, that was just the way evolution and ecology worked.

Harold’s body demanded energy input. Early lunch again, but he dawdled by the Pool until it was merely on time.

Down below, the shark swam. Watching, waiting, whirling.

He ate underdressed salad, for his health, and he worked on a new bug report, for his career, and just as an experiment he filled it with autogenerated genetic lorem ipsum and labelled it complete and then did that three times over and set them up to be handed in one at a time for the next three days and though this was the first time he’d done this since he was a child and stole a jelly bean from a corner store sweet bin he knew in his heart and soul this would not be noticed or caught.

So he worked on a bug report some more, for real, and didn’t look at the shark fin sticker.

And he went home, and he dreamed.

***

It is nuclear powered. It will destroy the world. It is radio-active and cybernetic and genetically modified and powered by generative AI. It is the ultimate organism and it is a big fat fluxing mess squatting on the city, a derivative blob of threatening biological urges. Big hairy body! Big scaly nose! Fangs! Claws! Jaws!

It’s the big bear outside the cave and he doesn’t have a spear there’s no spear big enough.

But then come the jets, pum pum pum go the missiles, and oh they’ve shot it, they’ve shot it and it’s leaking data tables and shoddy algorithms and fabricated bug reports everywhere. It’s leaking, it’s failing, it has so much blood needed to fuel so many organs inside it, it’s just mortal. It’s just an organism. Outnumbered, frail, enmeshed in a reality so much bigger than it is that it can’t even imagine it, let alone defy it, isolated by systems and systemically isolated, a prisoner in a puddle.

So he falls off the city – vulnerable to crude physics, empty, dead – and he woke up in bed with the alarm in his ears.

The rain had stopped. The dawn was soft and yellow. It was a beautiful day, and soon the sun would be shining down into the Pool. By noon it would be the perfect photo op.

So Harold didn’t pack a lunch, but he did pack his best jacket, and he sent his three bug reports early, and went for lunch right on time, in his best jacket. He walked firmly and decisively like he hadn’t since he was six, and he walked past the security on the Pool’s scenic bridge like he paid them, and he walked into the photoshoot, and up to the Big Guy, and he gave him a firm, strong handshake, then a hug, then a hop, then a fall.

Then a splash.

It was a very curious creature, and Thursday WAS variety day. So it moved with great force and purpose and joy

***

The board was divided on the subject.

On the one hand, the project was a money sink. And sunk cost fallacy was a danger.

On the other, to euthanize your advertising campaign seemed a self-inflicted blow. And really, it wasn’t so hard a swerve to sell, was it? Marketing had done more with worse for longer, for less reason.
Sharks were badass. The company was for badasses. And it wasn’t like ‘anti-corpro punk’ was a difficult aesthetic to commercialize, especially when you gave it teeth.

They could put it on stickers.

“Isn’t the sky beautiful today, Bart?”
“Check the fuses.”
“Ah, I did that, I did it – but when I did, well, I looked up and you know what I saw?”
“Check them again.”
“I did, I did – I saw the most beautifully blue sky from horizon to horizon, with just enough wind to keep the grass rustling and the bugs out of our noses, and leave the barest RIPPLES ghosting across the water-”

“Recheck them again. The frogs won’t wait on you.”
“-they’re still there, they’re fine – and I thought what a beautiful place we were standing in, and what a shame it is that we’re going to –”

“Direct order from your corporal: recheck them again.”

“-oh FINE – that we’re going to blow it up, but that really just makes it almost more beautiful doesn’t it? The fragility of it all, the briefness of the lifespan, adds poignancy in depth proportionate to its shortness-”

“Nobody draws portraits of mayflies. Talk less, work more.”
Anthony frowned, which did less than pleasant things to his less than impressive moustache. “Honestly Bart, you never ride Clark like this.”
“Clark does what I ask and doesn’t talk when he does it. Clark, anything to report?”
Clark lowered his binoculars. “Nope.”
“There.”

“Really, am I that unbearable?”
“Private Anthony, you are not the worst case scenario.”

“Oh, you needn’t mince words, Bart – I know I’m the last sort you’d want on your post, but-”

“No you aren’t.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You aren’t the last person I’d want on my post. A romanticist is almost last person I want on explosives duty, but I’d rather have you there than a damned true believer anywhere.”

“Whyever so?”

“You’d only ever get us blown up by mistake. A true believer would do it on purpose and expect a medal. Recheck the fuses again, again.”

“I just did that, I did-”

“Good. Hand them over.  Time for  frog fishing.”
Anthony did so. The little dull grey depth charges sat in Bart’s palm like river rocks, but in the spring sun they shone like diamonds as they arced through the dappled cover of the blooming trees that surrounded the pond, entering the surface with a gentle plop plip plunk, followed by a brief and loud thud and a trio of drearily grey geysers mixed with milky bubbles.

“Pass one complete. Clark, mark time. Anthony, check the next fuses.”

“Already on it, already on it.”
And another handful of unprecious stones went aloft, and landed quietly, and ended loudly.

“It’s just, how can you two not see the poetry in all of this? The emotional qualities? Here we are, in a battle for our future-”

“Next fuses.”

“-and we’re throwing depth charges into a future tailings pond.”
“We don’t question orders, we execute them. Recheck fuses.”
“Yes, and that just adds another layer to the, the futility of the thing-”

“Private Anthony Hastings, you had better not be expressing treason on my watch. That’s a lot of extra work to deal with.”
“What? No! I like the futility. If you think of this entire war as a sandwich – a really BIG sandwich – then our task here is like a spring of thyme. Nobody wants it on its own, but it adds that little bit of something that rounds out the flavour of it all.”
“Have you lost anyone yet, Private Anthony?”
“Half a brother, might lose the other in a month. And of course my aunt’s house was demolished when the Old County got flooded.”
“Well, that gives you the right to your thoughts, but I don’t recommend you share them with others. Could get you in trouble.” Bart straightened up and cricked his back. “Anthony, hand out the wading gear. Clark, mark time.”

***

The wading gear was a thing of contrasts: clammy and yet starched against the skin; keeping all the unpleasant warm sweatiness of the body close and yet forcing a prolonged full-body hug with the chilly depths of the pondwater. It reeked of petrochemicals and rotting plant matter, and it went up just under your armpits, which meant when you got a soaker over the side it went all down your side all the way for good.

Bart put it on, took an entrenching tool, and began probing the shallows.

“Section one, clear. Anthony, check the map.”
“Yes, Section one is clear. Was that a muskrat lodge? We had one of those in the creek near us at home, and-”

“Section two, clear. Mark it.”
“-the juxtaposition of the common word-of-mouth factuality of that lodge’s location among the children against this surveyor’s chart we’re using here is truly astounding, I mean, who’s to say which is actually more true-to-life and representative of the fetid reality of this pond than-”

“Section three – ow! Fuck!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Stabbed my knee on a tree branch,” said Corporal Bart, immediately before the torpedo embedded against his left kneecap detonated, spraying red-hot chunks of tin, rubber, cartilage and bone across the surface of the pond to create a surprisingly delicate series of ripples and a lot of aerosolized red mist.

Bart was screaming. Clark was lowering his binoculars. Anthony, to his surprise, was running down to the water’s edge, reaching for Bart, grabbing his arm, slowing his collapse.

“Hold on it’s all good by god I’ve got you eh don’t worry it’s not your good leg it’ll be-” which was when the acorn-sized incandescent shell landed atop Anthony’s helmet, cracked open like an egg over a frying-pan, and covered much of his (armoured) skull and (unarmoured) face in ‘frog jelly’ incendiaries. This transformed the fatty tissues of Anthony’s features into a grease fire, which he thankfully experienced for only a moment as he inhaled to scream and sucked some of it into his windpipe, choking him and sending him into the pond, which accepted him with the same apathetic lack of prejudice as it had the depth charges.

Bart lay on the bank, wheezing in the foul-smelling air, arms clawing at the reeds for traction. The sun was blocked, an arm reached down. Private Clark’s calm, careful face was over his.

“Hurry,” said Bart.

Clark nodded, reached down, and very gently but firmly turned Bart around and held his face in the pond with one arm until the bubbles stopped. The other arm made a series of careful gestures in the air, a bit like a semaphore, which was what induced the frog subriverine to break cover and rise from the pond’s surface.

It was a little over three feet long, and in profile resembled a pike for purposes of hydrodynamics and camouflage.

“Sub pen’s cleared out of essential personnel,” said the captain from her conning tower, a particularly grizzled amphibian missing an eye and half her jaw (but you didn’t need those to use a periscope anyways). “Should be dismantled within an hour, and we can leave some debris to sell the story of a tough-won fight. But we could’ve done that without you finishing the corporal. Sole survivors are suspicious.”
“Bart was competent,” said Clark. “The cause is safer with him gone. Should I become lost in action? I am prepared to martyr myself, if Frog wills it.”

“Uh. No. That’d give them too many dots to connect in your service history. Just… lay low for a while, alright? More dead drops, less dead bodies. Use the stream point. And hold still for a minute.”

Clark did so as the crew readied the deck gun, then endured a short fusillade to his left arm, riddling it with a light dose of subcutaneous shrapnel.

“There. You escaped under heavy fire after a failed attempt to retrieve the body of your corporal, you are a hero. Now be boring for six months minimum or else.”

Clark saluted and left. The captain stared for a moment – methodically scanning blue sky, retreating spy, blooded pond, and calming water – before retreating belowdecks.

And as the subriverine sunk back below the surface of the pond, the captain – once more shrouded in the comforting brownish blanket of particulate and lukewarm water – shook her head in irritation.

“Damned true believers,” she told Frog, the universe in general, and her first mate. “Always so eager to die and get a medal for it.”

Once upon a time and place there were three brothers. By mean, they were three perfectly moderate men. Unaveraged, they were a little less so.

“My brothers!” cried Fantasist Frank, “I have heard such tales today! Three dragons menace three kingdoms near here! ‘Tis providence! We should go forth and seek our fortunes.”

“Crises mean money,” said Pragmatist Pete. “If it works, it works.”

“Three places claiming to have the same problem?” questioned Realist Ron. “It’s probably one dragon being spotted in three places. If there even is a dragon. What are we working with, eyewitness accounts? Transmitted orally by gossips? Seems unlikely.”

“Farewell!”
“See ya.”
“Goodbye.”

And so the three brothers set forth, with joyous heart, full stomach, and slight headache divided equally unevenly between them.

***

Fantasist Frank took the high road through the dark woods, singing as he strode, and thereby he proceeded to the nearest kingdom with sure steps until he found a dying knight by the roadside.

“Beware the dragon’s venomous breath,” said the knight, “but takes my arms and armour to battle it.”

“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and did so with confidence and haste before returning to the road, which became rougher and rockier as it ventured closer to the wild places. There he heard a faint wicker and lo and behold, there was a horse bearing terrible wounds from sharp teeth and claws, and as he watched it ate the fruit of a lone peach-tree and those wounds were closed.

“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and he saddled and mounted the horse and took a pouch of the fresh peaches with him before returning to the road, which soon ceased to be a road at all and turned into a hellish canyon, and at the base of that canyon was a foul and noxious pool, and in that pool, spouting poison from its maw, wallowed the dragon.

“Aha, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and he charged the dragon three times. Three times it breathed venomous vapors upon him and he nearly died, but was saved from staggering backwards in retreat to sneak a bite of a peach, and on the third he put the peach in his mouth between his teeth when he charged so that when his body weakened he bit down and was refreshed, held his breath, struggled through the mist of death and cut loose the beast’s head.

“Ah, ‘tis providence in truth,” he cried, as he took the beast’s head and heart as a proof to show the king of the land. But the heart was such a tasty-looking thing that he instead roasted and ate it, and no sooner had it passed his lips than he understood all the languages of the birds and beasts, and he overheard the two birds in a tree watching him.

“He knows the king’s going to try to kill him at the wedding, right?” asked one bird.

“Nope,” said the other. “And it’s not like knowing that would do him any good. The king’s a tricky dicky – if the poison in the wine won’t do it, the poison in the meat will; and if the poison in the meat won’t do it, the poison needle in the wedding ring will; and if none of those work he’ll probably ask him to fetch water from the witch-well to clean the church’s steps before the service, which would make god smite him.”

“Wow,” said the first bird. “He’s fucked.”
“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank, and so saying he rode to the king’s castle and presented the dragon’s head, and perceived that the birds had told him no lie: the king was indeed a very crafty and malicious man.

“You shall marry my daughter on the morrow,” said the king. “But first let us toast your heroism!” And so they did, but Frank put a slice of the magical peaches into his cup, and so the poison did nothing to him.

“Now let us feast your bravery!” said the king. And so they did, but Frank ate a bite of meat and then a bite of peach all evening, and so the poison did nothing to him.

“Here is your wedding ring, wear it proudly!” said the king. And Frank thanked him so but begged politely that it would be bad luck to don it before the ceremony, then spent half the evening in his bedroom removing the needle.

The next day the bells at the church were just ringing when the king came running up to Frank in a terrible hurry.

“Oh no oh dear oh no alack alas!” he blurted out all at once. “The steps of the church you are to be wed in are dirty, and will soil my beautiful and kind and true daughter’s feet! You’d better get so water to wash them. Take this bucket and fill it from the well wrought of pure white stone and rinse them quickly!” And Frank took the bucket, but filled it from the common well made of grey stone, which rinsed the steps clean without a single problem. Then he got married and the moment he put the ring on the princess’s finger a bell rang twice, the evil king turned into three ferrets in a crown, and three black birds flew out of the witch-well and pecked out all three of the ferret’s eyes until they were dead.
“Why, ‘tis providence!” cried Frank. And so he was king in that land.

***

Pragmatist Pete took the middle road, which was safest and clearest, and as he did so he kept an eye out until he found a very long and sturdy sapling. He took it with him all the way to the next kingdom, asked around the pubs and taverns where the dragon was, then spent some of the little money he had on paying a blacksmith to make him a very sharp and long and barbed fishing spearhead (which he had fixed on the sapling) and a good tough shovel.

“They’re not pretty, but they’re good tools,” the smith told him.

“Good,” said Pete. “If it works, it works.”

Then he walked to the desolate hillside where the dragon’s cave lurked, found the path the dragon walked (its scaled belly and heavy tread made such a thing no secret to anyone with the slightest eyes), dug a pit, covered it with brush, and sat in there for two days, and at the end of the second day Pete heard footfalls.

He waited. The brush shook overhead.

He waited. A shadow passed between him and the light.

He waited. Something rustled long and low and scaly against the branches, and Pete stopped waiting and slammed the spear upwards with both hands as hard as he could, then let go and retreated to the far end of the pit.

It took an hour of screaming, thrashing, spraying of boiling blood, and wheezing before the dragon tired. When that was done, Pete pried himself loose and looked it in the eye.

“You have won my hoard, murderer,” it wheezed, “but be warned: my gold is cursed, and none may touch it who will not be consumed by it.”
“Okay,” said Pete. And the dragon died.

Pete cut off its head as proof, sliced free its largest and most impressive claws, fangs, and scales, then took them to the blacksmith and asked for some arms and armour and the names of a few clean-nosed local laborers. Then he brought them and some wheelbarrows and a bunch of extremely long-hafted shovels up to the dragons’ den and lo, he brought the wealth back into town, which he only handled to exchange for other coin, and that only with his arms clad in impenetrable dragonmail.

In this way, Pete bought himself a horse, and a retinue, and plenty of armed soldiers. And a good job too, because the kingdom was inexplicably beset with madness and greed, with all the moneychangers Pete had visited coiling their coin in their beds and growing scales and spitting fire from their mouths. He and his men went house to house, saving the townsfolk, killing the infected, confiscating their cursed coins (and the noncursed coins, to be safe), then visiting the next town and very mysteriously finding it suffering from the same sort of outbreak.

“The dragon-slaying hero!” they cheered.

“If it works, it works,” he shrugged. And hired more soldiers.

After Pete had visited every town in the kingdom, taken every coin in the kingdom, and hired every eager –beaver with a spear and a shield and a lust for fighting, he went to visit the king, with the dragon’s head hoist high upon the barbed spear he had killed it with, and the sword carved from the dragon’s peerless and searing fang at his hip, and his army at his back, and bedecked in the armour shaped from the dragon’s impenetrable blade-turning carapace (it hadn’t possessed a plastron, more was the pity for it).

“Hello,” said Pete as he thus stood before the castle gates.

“You know,” said the king, “I was JUST SAYING how I so very badly wanted you to marry my daughter and rule over my lands with my blessings while I spent the rest of my life hunting and not making trouble.”

“If it works, it works,” said Pete. And so he was king in that land.

***

Realist Ron took the low road, since it was the one he actually knew and therefore was least likely to get waylaid on or suffer great accident. There he walked, suffering many blisters in his shoddy shoes from the poorly-laid cobbles and occasionally having to wade through mud, before at last coming to the edges of the kingdom he had lived in, where people quailed and trembled of the dragon.

“It eats maidens,” muttered a drunk in the pub.

“How the hell’s it supposed to know the difference?” said Ron. “Seems unlikely.” And he got a punch in the mouth for his trouble.

“It lurks in the hills beyond a lake of fire, where it spakes blasphemy daily in unholy sermons against the will of god,” warned the priest of the small chapel.

“The only bird I even knew that could talk was one-legged Jim’s pet raven, and it never mentioned the church once,” said Ron. “Seems unlikely.” And so he was chased out of town for his opinion.

“It ate my entire flock last week – wool, bones, hooves and all,” wept a mourning shepherd.

“A whole flock? The size of the one you have right now?” asked Ron incredulously. “Just last week? Seems unlikely. I think it ate your best one and you’re angling for extra sympathy to show off.” And he received a shepherd’s crook to the groin for his hypothesis.

After receiving another half-dozen similar gifts and gratuities, Ron came at last to the village where the dragon had been most recently sighted, where he spent the last of his coin to buy all the rat poison in town and a cheap cow on its last legs, which he took out to the pond where the dragon slumbered and killed humanely by bashing its head in with the sharpest rock he could find.

Then he waited three days, and after the dragon – which resembled nothing more than a big, scaly lizard with a broad snout and a powerful bite – came out and dragged the poisoned cow into the water he waited one more, and then he fished its floating corpse ashore and very, very, very slowly dragged it back into town.

“That’s not the dragon,” everyone told him. “It’s not big enough. And you just poisoned it like a wild dog. That’s not brave enough.”
“Critics, critics, critics,” muttered Ron. “I don’t suppose there’s a reward?  Seems unlikely.”

“Your reward,” said the captain of the king’s guard most grandly, as he and his men picked up the dragon, “is that if you don’t ask for the hand of the king’s daughter in marriage, you can stay for the victory feast tonight and leave with your head attached to your shoulders, even though you are clearly a stranger and a peasant.”

“Seems unlikely,” said Ron, and left in a hurry before anyone could get ahold of him. He travelled home throughout the night without stopping and with many stubbed toes, got home, slept in for three days, and married someone for purely socioeconomic reasons. And so he was not king in that land.

***

And so the three brothers lived, happily, kind of, but not until ever after because there never is an after ever.

Fantasist Frank lived until the age of forty, when his beautiful and kind and true daughter came of age, whereupon he was cursed by a witch, his wife was burned by a dragon, his kingdom was looted by giants, and the day was saved by a hero. He staggered bleary-eyed from his curse’d sickbed and gazed out upon the approaching gallant youth as he crossed his drawbridge, sunshine breaking through the  clouds in his wake.

“Ah fuck me,” he creaked, “‘tis providence.” And lo, he died.

Pragmatist Pete lived until the age of forty-five after many decades of rule by abject terror, profligate bribes, occasional murder, and remorseless executions, when his youngest daughter (age ten), after witnessing her six older siblings perish one after another in failed assassination attempts, snapped and spontaneously shoved him off his castle while they were inspecting the battlements, without a single ounce of forethought or planning. The impact of the fall drove the unbreakable scales of his dragonmail armour (which he never took off, even asleep) through his body and out the other side.

“If it works, it works,” he bubbled absently to himself before he expired.

Realist Ron died in bed age fifty of cancer of the bowels exacerbated by the long-term effects of a life of hard and unforgiving labour with little adequate nutrition, following a decline of statistically reasonable length.

“Yeah,” he whispered to his spouse with his last exhalation. “This seems likely.”

Helen was frowning at the lopsided ruin of her mailbox when fell footsteps came behind her. A subtle rhythm, detectable only to a dedicated student of the village.

“Hi, Louise,” she said without turning around.

“Oh hello yourself Helen how are you doing oh NO what’s happened to your mailbox was it the kids again?”
Who did she think she was kidding? Might as well ask if the sky was blue or green. “Someone’s kids did it, yeah. Clumsy job too – they probably just stuck the bat out the window as they drove by, didn’t even swing or anything. Won’t be hard to fix.”

“Oh yes that’s right that’s right and your daughter how’s she doing?”
You live next door, Louise, why don’t you tell me. “Agnes? Oh she’s fine, fine, fine. Lazy though. Typical teenager.”
“Yes indeedy mostly truly you tell no lie there I tell you what and by the way heard anything about that new neighbour yet?”
And there we go.

“Yeah. He’s a troll. He works with a coal-dark hammer and a red-hot anvil and a set of barbed tongs that could pin a raging bull or pluck the left eyelash from a gnat and he smiths ores and metals into hopes and dreams. I checked his website.”

“Oh my my goodness that’s very impressive very unique very interesting. Is he single?”
“He said he’s married to his forge.”
“Shoot. Well you can’t have everything can you I guess it’s true or at least you can’t always get what you want but then again if you try sometimes you might get what you need are you SURE he isn’t single?”
“Look, you can ask him yourself. I’m going to see him about my lawnmower when I’m done here and I don’t want to give him an excuse to make it run backwards or something. You know how fables go if you piss off the magical folk.”

***

The troll’s home was a hill, hollowed into a hull and shaped into a hall. Windows frowned from under the grass; ventilation ducts and chimneys and exhaust pipes shrugged loose from the loam; a gigantic ironwood door twice the height of a human stood proud in a somber cliff face. It had two doorknobs: one you could barely just reach if you stood on your tippy-toes and jumped, and a second, much smaller one at a more typical height.

A little sign was hanging from the second doorknob. It read “NO SOLICITORS, PRIESTS, REALTORS, OR MARRIAGE PROPOSALS” in firm, mathematically exacting print that looked to have been embossed with considerable force.

Helen knocked, making a sound like slabs rolling loose from sarcophaguses in the most lightless reaches of the deepest tombs.

Then she knocked again.

Then she tried the handle, which was unlocked, and poked her head through and asked “hello?”
“No solicitors,” said the troll. His voice sounded like raw unworked stone with a hint of smouldering cinder, and he had his back to her, hands busy on his work-table with two tools made of iron and glass and a jeweler’s loupe the size of a human head jammed into his left eyesocket.

“I’m not soliciting, I’m here to ask for a commission.”
“Good. One moment.”

Helen waited one moment. While she did that the troll did something unspeakably complex with his fingers – like forming a sushi roll crossed with rolling a coin between his knuckles crossed with some sort of guitar picking – and then put down what he was working on.

It was a very small duckling, made entirely of wire. As Helen watched, it stretched its little wings, flapped twice, took three steps and fell over.

“Done,” said the troll. He picked the duckling up in one hand and deposited it in his apron pocket – where it began to squeak most incessantly – then turned to Helen.

“I need some work done,” she said, deciding that professional was the way to go here.

The troll’s eyes were deep-set caves with a hint of batwing in them. “Yup,” he agreed.

“It’s my lawnmower.”
“Yup.”

“The blades are dull.”
“Yup.”
Helen waited. The troll, too, waited.

She caved first. “And maybe it’s nothing, but my daughter says it’s slow to start.”
“Yup. I’ll get on it right now. Come back tomorrow.” And the troll scooped up the lawnmower in his hands, tucking it under his arm where the duckling began poking at it in hopes it was watercress.

A thought struck Helen as she passed through the door, one hand still on the knob. “How much will this cost?”
The troll looked up from where he was (carefully, discreetly) fussing over the mower like a child with a cranky cat. “You tell me,” he said. And then he refused to say more, and she left to worry a little bit about that and tell herself that she didn’t need to do that and maybe even believe it, if she could.

***

The sun was bright if thin on the morrow’s morning when Helen returned. Outside the door of the troll’s home was a lawnmower fashioned of what appeared to be purest gold and silver, with a pull cord of spun platinum wire and a diamond-carved grip. And on its handle was a small note of plain paper with familiar firm handwriting, reading: Take It.

Helen tried the doorknob first. Locked. Then she tried what the card said.

It was surprisingly light for a piece of landscaping equipment now made entirely of precious metals. Almost lighter than it had been when she towed it over in the first place. And it didn’t rattle, and it didn’t bump as she lugged it across the street, which she discovered as she lugged it over the curb was because it was smoothly and frictionlessly slicing apart every single object that intersected the softly-gleaming blades nestled in its underside.

“Agnes!” she called into the house in general. “Lawnmower’s fixed. Time to go to work”

“Ugh,” said Agnes concisely.

“Go on, it has to get done. You need this more than I do.”
“Fine.”

“And mind the new pull handle; it’s a little stiff. Probably because it’s made of spun platinum wire.”
“Whatever.”

And so Helen went inside, put some tea on, and was just finishing steeping the bag when the door slammed.

“The gas is in the shed, behind the bike rack,” she told Agnes.

“I’m done.”
“No you aren’t. You promised you were going to do the lawn, and you already got a few days abeyance from the mower breaking. You can’t just quit on your commitments like this, people will talk about it and you’ll get a reputation.”

“I finished the lawn.”
“No way you did a good job that fast. You can’t halfass things like this Agnes! It’s how you get fired!”
“Mom. Relax. The mower runs itself. Watch.”

So they went out into the backyard – which was immaculately cut and smelled faintly of grass and vanilla – and Agnes showed her mother how if you pulled the cord like THIS and then turned the knob like THAT and pet the mower gently on its back it would wriggle itself like an excited kitten preparing to pounce and zoom all over the lawn in thirty seconds.

“So yeah,” she concluded. “You’re welcome. Don’t mention it.”
“This was meant to give you a work ethic,” said Helen. Her left arm wouldn’t stop shaking. “So you won’t end up penniless and on the street when I’m too old to do anything to help you because that almost happened to me when your grandmother fucked up when I was little and I dream about you running out of money every month, at least twice, and I feel helpless and terrified that I’m not being a good mother.”

“Mom,” said Agnes. “You’re freaking yourself out. It’s okay; I don’t treat chores my family ask me to do like I would my own professional commitments. My life isn’t going to be financially ruined because I mowed the lawn too fast and didn’t enjoy it. Besides, I do all the coding for cousin Betsy’s streaming setup and she’s already paying me for it. I just never found a good time to tell you.”

They both burst into tears and hugged each other, crying so loudly that across the breadth of their house, lawn, and the road itself the troll had to close his windows and turn up the fans a little so he could focus on carving a living lily out of granite.

***

Louise had her brother Kevin over for coffee the next day.

“And you wouldn’t believe it but Helen said her lawn’s never been cleaner and her and that daughter of hers are actually talking properly again and it’s just amazing really amazing so I’m thinking of maybe looking into visiting and getting something commissioned it’s a real opportunity do you have anything you need done?”

Kevin thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. Then he finished his coffee and walked across the road and knocked on the troll’s door.

Then he knocked again.

Then he opened the door a crack and peered inside and said “hey.”
“No solicitors,” said the troll. He was elbow-deep inside a golden goose’s chest cavity, performing open-heart surgery with a selection of burrs, pliers, and files.

“Got a job.”
“One moment,” said the troll. His hands blurred through something sort of like juggling sort of like polishing a counter and sort of like playing the violin and the goose was sitting up and blinking groggily and honking softly to itself. The troll pet its head gently and slipped it into his apron pocket, where it stared at Kevin with only a lazy echo of the eager animus typical of geese.

“I need a spam blocker,” said Kevin. “Inbox’s overflowing.”
The troll stared at him. “Yup,” he concluded.

“Too many contacts.”
“Yup.”
“Too many promotional offers.”
“Yup.”
“Too many subscriptions to crap.”
“Yup.”
“Staying on top of it sucks.”
“Yup,” said the troll. “I can fix that. Come back tomorrow.” And he walked to his forge and began to pump the bellows with such tremendous force that Kevin had to leave immediately or be scalded hairless.

“Price?” he called back through the door as he hurried out.

“You tell me,” said the troll. And then the handle was too hot to hold and the door slipped shut.

***

It was a misty mild morning when Kevin drove down again to his sister’s place, where he left his car and walked across the road to the shrouded haze of the troll’s hall.

The door was shut fast and locked. But hanging from the doorknob was a sturdy scabbard of dragonhide, descaled but still impervious to harm, and inside the scabbard was a blade so impossibly exact in its proportions that it hurt Kevin’s eyes to look at it even through his contacts. It felt like a little piece of mathematics had fallen from the heavens and intruded onto the messy disproportionate and unmeasured bounds of reality.

A note on the hilt was printed in firm and decisive handwriting: Hold Me And Speak This Word: Defenestrate.

So, feeling somewhat foolish, Kevin drove home with his sword (obeying all the speed limits very carefully, in case he had to explain to a police officer what the hell he was doing), went home, stood in front of his computer, unsheathed the blade, held it aloft, and spoke the word: “Defenestrate.”
The sword leapt from his hand like a salmon through rapids, spun once with dazzling speed, and, with the precision of a cat falling upon a chipmunk, cut his computer into six pieces with a single slice.

Kevin stared at several thousand dollars’ worth of damage. “Huh,” he managed.

Kevin stared at the sword, now returned soundlessly to its scabbard. “Huh,” he repeated.

Kevin stared out the window, at the nice day. “Huh,” he concluded.
Then he went outside and stayed outside for about a week straight before he ran out of groceries.

***

“And I really was impressed at the sword you made my brother I saw it when I went over of course he wasn’t bragging about it or anything but it was sitting there when I came in and took a nice look and of COURSE I’ve seen Helen’s lawnmower and what I’m getting at here is I’m very interested in seeing if you can do something for me if that’s alright I’m sure you’re very busy since you’re so skilled but it’s just a little thing a small problem I’m sure you can handle it super easily no trouble at all if that’s okay.”
The troll’s door squeaked open a crack in front of Louise.

“Everyone else knocked and then went in,” he told Louise.

“Oh I’m sorry I just didn’t want to impose is all and then I started explaining myself and I got a bit carried away you know how I get carried away I’m sure Helen mentioned it ahahahaha why I mean you know how it is when you’re worried about filling up a bit of awkward silence the worst thing in the world isn’t that so?”
“Mm,” said the troll. He raised his hand and gently flicked a small tin woodpecker into the air, where it fluttered free before landing on one of his chimneys, which it began to enthusiastic hammer on.

“Anyways it’s just a small thing just a little project I’m sure it’ll cost nothing at all it’s so tiny teeny eensy-weensy of a chore it’s dead simply why I’m sure you churn out things like this between breakfast lunch and dinner as easy as blinking as simple as pie as straightforward as one to three like falling up a log you can do it under your sleep just like that, surely.”
“What is it.”

“I need you to make my car cool and convenient and spacious and good for the environment and healthy for me,” said Louise.

The troll peered over her shoulder into her driveway. “Yup. Leave it. Come back tomorrow.”
“Oh okay do you need me to leave the keys too or-” but the troll had already gently hooked one finger under the bumper and began to tow Louise’s SUV into his hall, slowly but inevitably, and by the time she’d scurried out of his way and brushed the dust off herself the door was beginning to shut again.

“Oh dear I didn’t ask the price is it free?”
“You tell me,” said the troll.

“Oh well would two hundred be alright or-”

The door shut.

Louise spitballed numbers for another half-hour before she gave up and went home. Her sleep was restless.

***

The morning was bright and cloudlessly bluer than the fiercest robin’s egg when Louise crossed the road and stood before the troll’s hall. She didn’t notice it.

She noticed only the car.

It was… different. The same, but different.

Every angle was just so. Every bit of bodywork precisely adjusted. It was obviously the same car, but it was somehow, inconceivably, incomprehensibly, impossibly slightly tweaked so that it looked perfect. Also it was trimmed with silver, including its new and incredibly stylish hood ornament (a finch?).

The finch cheeped at her.

She opened the door. Again, it was the same. The same in every way. It just somehow had gained an extra row of seats and had more cargo space. Louise’s eyes informed her that this was totally reasonable no matter how hard she looked for the seams. The surfaces were of identical plastic and pleather, but they made it look better. Made it look good. Made it look flawless. It was ideal in every way.

Louise sat behind the steering wheel and gently gripped it, feeling warm and comforted and at peace with the world. Then her eyes alit on the little message sitting at precisely twelve o’clock between her hands, printed very firmly on a sturdy square piece of paper.

It Costs 5 Cents More Per Litre Than The Pump Reads.

Louise considered this for a while. Then she drove it across the road and parked it and considered it a bit more.

“Well if you price it out considering the work was free it’s quite good quite good indeed I can drive it quite a lot before it starts costing me more than the renovation would’ve otherwise I’ll just have to plan around it yes maybe ratio my kilometers I can make a chart and in the meantime I can walk more and get that old bike Helen kept offering me yes I can use those for getting around town and just break this beauty out for when I’m off to visit Kevin and actually I can ask HIM to visit ME more often since he’s spending so much more time offline good for him really and you know I think I can make this work and-” so on and so forth on and on and on.

***

Saturday evening, Agnes came by the troll’s home. No job needed doing, just a little tin of cookies from her mother to say thanks. And hey, it was just across the road, so it was no trouble at all.

The chimneys sat silent and empty of smoke. The windows were shuttered. The door was locked tight. And a big sturdy piece of card was fixed over the smaller, lower doorknob, on which was printed in very firm and large handwriting: Gone Fishing.

And below that, slightly less firmly – as if the author had added it on spur of the moment: Make What You Need Yourselves.

Agnes laughed at that for a good long while.

“Please,” she said. “Like that wasn’t already happening. They didn’t notice?”

Then she wedged the cookie tin against the door with a rock, spread some seed for the little brass chickadees that chirped at her from under the grassy eaves, and went home still chuckling.

Soon after that, the sun went down. But that just meant it was already morning somewhere. 

Anna and Adam didn’t agree on much.

“Kids!”
But one thing they would never, ever argue on-

“Kids! Up and at ‘em!”
-was the joy of sleeping in deep and warm on a winter morning.

“KIDS! IT’S TIME TO GET UP!”
But alas, it was spring, and with it came spring cleaning, and with it came their mother’s kind, gentle, warm, reassuring hurricane bellow, and so Adam and Anna shook off the cobwebs, gritted their teeth, and trudged through their ablations in a haze of their own misery until they had metamorphosed into a pretense of presentable.

“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” said Mother, beaming at them. Her arms were already full, every hand occupied with a different project. “You know the drill, don’t you? I don’t have to tell you twice? Go on! Get it done! Do what you do best! Shoo!”
And so urged on and on they were laden with products and tools and solutions and kicked out the door, and though they ignored each other and made no small talk so as to make the journey take as much time as perceptibly possible, at last, inevitably, the dread conclusion lay in sight at long and gruesome: the wide and vast woodlands, just-thawed, still-damp, and ready for change.

“Damn I hate spring cleaning,” groaned Anna, burying her face in her hands.

“YOU hate it?” retorted Adam, already elbow-deep in a bucket of loose buds. “All you have to deal with are the animals. I’m up to my eyebrows in plants.”
“At least yours stand still! And animals includes lots of stuff; you ever heard of bugs – I mean, you ARE one, so-”
“At least yours are low-effort! Every tree needs every leaf set up and running! You just have to poke all the groundhogs awake and call it a season!”

“Oh please! You only think my job’s easy because you couldn’t tell a groundhog from a wild hog! A blind baby could do your job! And do it faster!”
Adam smiled at his sister in that particular little tight-lipped way she never tired of pointing out was entirely stolen from their mother. “Prove it, you blind baby.”

“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Do my stupid lame easy moron job that a blind baby could do, and do it better than I can. Go on. Try your best. It should be easy, right?”
Anna grinned at her brother in that particular too-many-teeth way that he always insisted was just mom’s Winter Face. “Sure. Dead simple. And YOU, of course, can definitely pick up my slack since you’ll be doing my job, and doing it very well and making no mistakes at all and finishing it super fast. Since it’s so easy, right?”
“Right!”
“Right!”
Agreement reached in all good cheer and venom, they departed, then returned and swapped tools without making eye contact or saying anything above a mutter, then departed again.

***

“This will be easy,” said Adam to himself as he walked through the woods, banging on the tree-trunks and drumming on the burrow-holes. “Hoy! Birds of the air and beasts of the field! Get up! Get going! Wakey wakey time’s-a-wastey!”

A blackbird scuttled down to a lower branch to trill at him reproachfully. He swooped it up in his hand and scoffed. “Look at you! It’s spring and you haven’t even sprouted yet – oh, my sister REALLY never even tried with you. Let’s get your colour going. Is it this one – yes, it must – oops.”

The blackbird fled to a nearby tree, dripping bright red paint from both wings and scolding him mercilessly.

“Well, that was just an honest mistake. Who brings red paint for fresh buds, anyways – what a weirdo my sister is!” He bobbled the bucket in annoyance, carelessly sloshing it all over a cardinal that had been picking stray seeds from his shoes. “Oops. Are you not being fed and watered enough, that you have to do that? Honestly, she really is a lazy pill. Well, I’ll get things fixed up around here, don’t you worry. Where are some better colours?”
So Adam rummaged through Anna’s paints and spent a good while shaping up the birds for the spring, with many a mumble, slip of the brush, and “who keeps THAT colour around anyways?” excuse. But he was running out of paint and birds and excuses for errant splashes, so he took a moment to pull the checklist out of the duffle bag and scoff at it.

“Humdrum claptrap bullshit,” he sneered, carefully running his eyes over every entry. “’Remove Winter Fur’ – ha! I’d like to see her remove autumn leaves! I can finish this in a single second!” And so, with the utter confidence of the completely self-aware, Adam reached one-handed into a burrow and extracted a groundhog, which bit him.

“Fuck! Mean thorns on you, little nettle. Now let’s – oh my sweet pumpkin seeds, LOOK at you! You’re absolutely LOADED DOWN with last year’s growth! Well, we can fix THAT I hope!” And thus saying, Adam produced his (private, personal) hedgetrimmer from his pocket and began to work on fixing that.

“Stop squirming, please,” he muttered, over the indignant squeals. “Working on such irregular and stubby limbs is very hard even without them moving windlessly. There! That’s not so bad, is it? You’re nice and ready for your fresh foliage. Git! G’won! Who’s next?”

His question went unanswered, his audience remained slumbering in their dens.

“Honestly,” sighed Adam, rolling up his sleeves and jamming his arm into a hollow stump, where it contacted squirrels. “Oh, why do you all have to make such a simple thing so COMPLICATED. Oh! Shelf fungus. Is that an animal? Well, it certainly isn’t a plant, so it must be an animal. Let’s get you trimmed!”

***

“This’s going to be easy as hell,” mused Anna as she strolled through the woods, juggling her brother’s canvas backpack from hand to hand. “Look at this shit! It’s just standing there in the open, right ready for it! Hey trees, catch!” And so saying, she turned the bulk of the pack inside out and vigorously shook all the buds inside out into the air, where they flitted about and landed on pretty much everything but what she was aiming at.

“Wow, looks like SOMEONE didn’t bother to make you all aerodynamic,” said Anna, shaking her head in dismay. “This is what not looking at the birds’ll get you. Guess it’s up to me to set things straight here.” And so saying, she picked up the buds and stuck them to the sides of the trees, where they wouldn’t be so exposed and fragile.

“Why he insisted on putting you guys on the tippy-tips of the wimpiest little twigs on these things, I’ll never know,” she said, shaking her head in dismay (and spraying pollen everywhere).

“ANYWAYS, what’s next on the menu? Flowers? Eergh, he’s let them get all infected and rotten, look at the colours! What a wasteful boor!”

So Anna buried the rotten old colourful flowers, took her brother’s big vat of green paint, and set them all up more sensibly.

“Everyone knows plants are green,” she said to herself as she diligently worked over a fallen log. “Everyone except my big smart clever BROTHER, apparently – and why would he know, it’s not like they’re his JOB or anything, no no no, better not try to learn what he’s doing there, why bother when he can leave it ALL to his sister to do it properly. He’s never going to hear the end of this one. Hey, are mushrooms plants? Pretty sure they’re plants. Well, they’re not animals, so they’re probably plants. Hold still for your touch-up!”

***

The sun set eventually, much to its great relief. It wasn’t sure if it could take much more of this. In the long slow shadows of its descent the two siblings met in the woods. Each held their head high.

“Done and done,” smirked Adam.

“Dead simple,” mocked Anna.

“Why you ever thought you could get away with claiming this took even a single snot of skill or effort is beyond me,” said Adam. “Behold! The birds of the air and the beasts of the field!”
“They’re woodland animals, you – oh my FUCK! What did you DO to the birds!?”
“I put them in spring colours – lavender, violet, and so on,” said Adam. “So the bees can fertilize them with pollen. Obviously. Admittedly, their petals were a little trickily-shaped, but-”

“Oh dear deer you PAINTED them?” Anna clawed at her hair like a drowning ape reaching for oxygen. “Feathers aren’t flowers! Feathers aren’t flowers at ALL!”
“Well they’re close enough,” said Adam loftily. “And anyways, I think they look pretty good now. Except for the goose, I couldn’t decide what looked best on it, so I tried a bit of everything. The leaves look fine, I think.”

Anna gently cradled the goose, ignoring his (exhausted) attempts to twist the flesh off her arms and examining every square inch of the bouquet he had transformed into. “Wings.”
“What?”
“They’re not leaves. They’re wings.”
“Oh, what’s the difference.”
Anna looked up with the expression of someone who had seen the face of Satan in their breakfast toast. “What’s the DIFF- OH MY FUCK WHAT THE HELL IS THAT WHAT IS THAT WHAT DID YOU DO?”

Adam’s brow furrowed, gently at first then with escalating concern as he followed his sister’s trembling arm and outstretched finger. “A bear?” he replied tentatively.

“Why is she BALD?”

“Well, I had to trim off the old growth,” explained Adam reasonably. “Since SOMEONE let all the mammals keep their foliage after last autumn instead of shedding it properly, like they’re supposed to. Look how the fresh air is shaking her branches!”
“She’s SHIVERING you VACUOUS DIPSHIT oh my SHIT I am GOING to MURDER you TWICE, ugh ugh ugh ugh UGH!” wailed Anna, stamping her feet in an agony of dismay.

“I don’t see why you’re being so fussy over a few extraneous extremities,” said Adam. “It’s not like they were living tissue or anything, like is that a flower?”
“Fur is NOT FLOWERS, you TREMENDOUS-”

“What you’re standing on. Is that a flower?”
Anna looked down and lifted one boot experimentally. “Yeah,” she said, the seething hate gently, carefully pushed aside for the sake of very patiently answering a very dumb question from someone she knew to be very stupid.
“What kind?”
“You tell me if you’re so smart.”
“Is that a daisy?”

“Sure, why not.”
“Why is it green?”
“Because it made more sense than it being like, pus white and bruise yellow? It’s a plant, dude.”
Adam swallowed his tongue before the scream escaped, then coughed it back up. “Green.”
“Plants are green. Duh.” She pointed at a patch of bluebells. “Green.” She pointed at a nearby toadstool. “Green.” She pointed at the nearest tree – a sturdy birch. “See? Green. You’re welcome. I guess SOMEBODY had to fix that eventually.”
“Why are its buds sprouting on the trunk.”
“So they don’t fall off? Double duh.”
Adam didn’t swallow his tongue in time, and the howl that escaped him sounded like it had been retrieved from the bottom of a trapped jaguar’s lungs. “Did you do ANYTHING right you – you DIPSHIT?! Don’t you know your precious animals need to eat plants to LIVE?!”
“Uh, yeah, triple duh,” said Anna. “I did all the berries. See?”
Adam desperately crawled into the midst of the thicket he was directed to, hands trembling and a fleck of spittle sliding down his chin. “These are raspberry bushes,” he said at last.
“Sure.”
“Why are they sprouting blueberries.”
“Well, it’s not a big difference.”
Adam plunged into a second patch. “These are blueberries. And they’re growing strawberries.”
“Yeah? I ran out of blueberries.”
“And where,” demanded Adam, plodding free of the patch, vines over his shoulders and desolation in his eyes, “Are. The. Raspberries.”
“Where do you think they are? In the maple trees.”
At this Adam lashed out his fist into his sister’s brisket, but Anna’s autonomous nervous system had been tense as a wire since she laid eyes on the goose and it counteracted with a knee to the groin, followed by applying said goose to Adam’s nose. Adam’s free hand stuffed poison ivy down the back of Anna’s shirt and it all continued as it thus began, but moreso, and moreso, and moreso, and moreso, until at last Mother heard the ruckus from clean across her globe and came downstairs to separate, investigate, and interrogate.

“I told you,” she said in her most severe and wintery tones, a child in each hand, “to do what you do best. This scarcely seems it.”

“ANYONE could do what they do best!” Anna and Adam agreed violently, pointing bitten and scarred fingers at the other.

“Oh,” said Mother. “I see my mistake. You’ve done exactly what you do best together, it just isn’t anything useful. Well, what’s done is done. Time to fix it.”

And they did, and it took as long as you thought and was as tedious and frustrating as you’d imagine, but in the end spring – reluctantly, slowly, gradually – sprang, and everything was as it was intended to be.

But no matter how long she made them scrub, they never could get the red paint off those two birds.

The day dawned bright and big and bold upon town and it shone upon a dread and gruesome sight: a tent as big as the sky and as brightly coloured as a forest of springtime birds in full song. Joyous tinny music spilled from it, and a man with a truly spectacular moustache and a megaphone strode out from it, big blue eyes crinkled in joy under his gigantic top hat.

“Atten-shun all! Young and old! Thin and fat! Boys gals and nonbinary pals! You must come here, one and all, and give us your money or your lives!”

Then he put away his megaphone and went back inside the tent. As an afterthought, a big and bold-fonted banner was unfurled proclaiming it GIBLO’S MAGNIFICENT AND MARVELOUS TRULY TERRIFIC SHOW.

But everyone already knew that.

***

“I don’t see why we ought to do as he ordered,” argued Little Flek, as her mother busied herself digging up their family savings from the hidden chest under her wardrobe.

“Sweetness,” said her mother with a friendly smile, “Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show has terrorized this green good earth of ours for over one hundred years. They are a crew of the finest cutthroats, robbers, and tricksters ever assembled, and their leader – Giblo the Grandiose – is believed to be an actual and truthful wizard. We’ve got utterly no choice but to do as they say.”
“Nonsense,” said Little Flek. “I bet I can handle it.”
“You are eleven.”
“Nearly twelve! And besides, haven’t you read me all those fairy tales and stories all this time? I know exactly what to do. The only way I’d have a better chance is if I were the third of three sons and you set my two older brothers out ahead of me.”
“Those were stories for children, sweety.”

“Are you saying you left out the important bits?” demanded Little Flek.

“No. But there are truths hidden in them you may not yet be old enough to-” and here Little Flek tuned her out, for those were the magic words to get your children to stop listening to you. She nodded and hummed and when her mother was done she said “that’s fine. Now give me a bit of the old grey cheese from our fridge.”

“I like the old grey cheese in our fridge. And take water with you, it’s warm out.”
“I’ll make good use of it, I promise,” said Little Flek. “And I KNOW it’s hot out GEEZ.” And she took the old grey lump of cheese (and a bottle of water, begrudgingly) and split off a little corner of it and placed it on the ground outside their door until she attracted a mouse, which she picked up, pet, and put in her pocket (don’t do this at home). She put the cheese in her other pocket and while she was at it she broke some pale twigs from the birch tree by her home’s front door and took them too. Thus equipped, she set forth for the entrance to the midway, which was easy to find as it was being guarded by a twelve-foot-tall man with the muscles of a rhinoceros.

“HELLO,” he said to her, crouching down on one knee for ease of conversation. “I AM STRONGMAN STU, THE TICKETMASTER. DO YOU HAVE A TICKET FOR THE SHOW, LITTLE LADY? OR PERHAPS HOUSEHOLD BELONGINGS YOU ARE GOING TO GIVE TO US IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR LIFE AND THAT OF YOUR LOVED ONES?”
“Neither,” said Little Flek in her most fearlessly bored voice. “I came here to shut you down. It will be a trivial matter, as I am the strongest person in the world.”
“GOOD ONE,” said Strongman Stu with genuine admiration. “ALWAYS HAPPY TO MEET A FELLOW PRACTITIONER OF THE PATH. BUT TELL ME, CAN YOU DO THIS?” and so saying, he scooped up a stone from the ground and ground it to juice in his palm.

“Easily,” scoffed Little Flek. And she produced her grey cheese, which she wrung to whey.

“NICE,” said Strongman Stu. “TRADE YOU.”
“I’m sorry?”
“OBVIOUSLY WE SHOULD CHECK EACH OTHER’S WORK. LIKE SO!” and so saying, the ticketmaster flicked a droplet of the rock-juice in his palm into his mouth and drank it thoughtfully. “SEDIMENTARY WITH A STRONG BOUQUET,” he opined loftily. “TRY SOME.”
“No thank you,” said Little Flek.
“SURE,” said Strongman Stu with a big nasty grin. “AND I BET YOURS DOESN’T TASTE LIKE WHEY AT ALL. THE CHEESE-ROCK IS THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK, KID. GO HOME AND BEG MOM TO PAY US OFF. LESS OF A WASTE OF EVERYONE’S TIME.”

But Little Flek was not defeated yet. “Your suspicions are unwarranted,” she said dismissively. “Exactly the sort of thing a puffed-up weakling would say. Why, I bet you aren’t even strong enough to pick up this midway.”

“PLEASE,” laughed Strongman Stu. “YOU INSULT ME.” And he picked up the entirety of the midway rides, cotton candy, balloon games and all, but he did it with one hand – his right hand – and held the other one out in challenge to Little Flek. “AND I CAN STILL ASK YOU FOR YOUR TICKETS,” he mocked. “WERE YOU HOPING TO TRICK ME INTO STANDING HERE WITH MY HANDS FULL? READ A BOOK WRITTEN WITHIN YOUR LIFETIME, SQUIRT. CASH OR GET ROLLING.”
And Little Flek didn’t want to admit it, but that rather had been her plan. However, the words of the strongman and the rucking-up of his tank top had given her a different sort of idea, and so she stepped quickly around to his right side, reached into the back pocket of his jorts, and yanked out his wallet.

“HEY!” shouted Strongman Stu, almost dropping the Midway. “GIVE THAT BACK!”

“Go get it!” called Little Flek. And she threw it into the nearby wondrous portable outhouse the circus had placed nearby for their patrons, where it splashed thickly. And as the ticketmaster ran to the toilet and jammed one hand in while the other desperately balanced the midway in the other, she advanced upon the big top quite unbothered by anyone.

“Hmm,” she said to herself as she did this. “Hmm.”

***

The big top was a hundred feet high and girded in iron-and-bulletproof-glass and sparkled like a prism left under a sunbeam. At its steel entryway lounged a tremendously bored woman, dangling in the trunk of an even-more-bored-looking elephant. Attending her were sixteen baboons with broadswords, a lion with an eyepatch and a sabre between his teeth, a bear with brass knuckles, and a tiger with a rocket launcher.

“Halt or whatever,” she monotone’d to Flek. “Show’s not on. Go away. Buzz off. Beat it.”
“But I need to go into the big top to speak to Giblo the Grandiose,” whimpered Little Flek in the most drippy tones she could manage, wringing her sleeves desperately to conceal the movements of her pockets.

“You really don’t.”
“I really do,” sobbed Little Flek, and as she covered her face with her hands she slipped loose the mouse from her pocket, which ran across the ground between her and the elephant, scurrying over its foot as it fled.

The elephant shifted gently from one shoulder to the other, unbothered.

“Kid,” the bored woman said, looking even less impressed (if possible). “That’s an old wives’ tale. And I know your mom is probably like, thirty, but even she probably wouldn’t be dumb enough to tell you it’s real. Don’t you go to school or something?”

“Oh no I don’t know what you’re talking about at all,” mumbled Little Flek, saying all the very bad words she knew inside her head as fast as she could. “Oh no no no, I don’t at all. Oh I’m so sorry for all this trouble!” and saying so she threw herself at the feet of the lion and apologized left right and center while checking each paw quickly and carefully.

Darn gosh it to heck. Not a single one of them had a thorn stuck inside.

“Oh my god,” said the woman, choking the words out between the giggles and wheezes of a virulent laughing fit. “Oh wow.” She slammed a fist into the elephant’s cheek and got herself under control. “You believe in THAT shit too? Whoops sorry, I mean that ‘stuff.’ Can’t swear in front of a nine-year-old.”

“I am ELEVEN!” snapped Little Fleck, incandescent with rage. “And I wasn’t!”
“Sure. Sure. Sure! Y’know why my lion doesn’t have thorns in his paws?”
“No! Yes! Maybe! I don’t care!”
“Because I train them in old parking lots and mesh cages and he’s got enough scar tissue on those toes to block BULLETS,” she mocked, striking a match on the side of one of the baboon’s heads and lighting a cigarette. “Y’know why my elephant isn’t scared of mice?”
“I’m not listening!”
“Because elephants aren’t scared of mice, they’re just scared of little scurrying stuff they can’t recognize, and this elephant spends all day standing in a dark, dinghy stall with mice and roaches wandering around over and between her feet! She doesn’t give a shit! Much like the shits I only intermittently remove from her enclosure! And by ‘I” I mean ‘the monkeys’ because I’m too important to do that myself! It’s great!”
“You’re treating these animals very poorly,” said Little Flek. “Why?”
“Because they don’t matter!” said the woman loudly, stubbing out her cigarette butt in the tiger’s right ear. “I care about one thing! Money! They get paid in peanuts so I get paid in benjamins! It’s great! They don’t even know that you can exchange money FOR peanuts!”

The elephant raised a single large, delicately-feathery eyebrow at this. Then she turned the woman upside down, turned out her pockets with two quick shakes, then swung her trunk and sent the woman sailing hundreds of feet through the air, where her flight terminated in the outhouse. The baboons plucked up the discarded worldly possessions, boarded the lion, tiger, and bear, and the entire procession headed off out the front gates hooting and hollering with great enthusiasm.

“Hmm,” said Little Flek as she watched them leave. Then she turned on her heel and strode into the darkness of the big top. “Hmm.”

***

In the big top all was dim and disheveled. Rings and netting and audience seating lay as half-assembled dinosaur skeletons in the dark. A little sun of dim morning light slunk down in a shriveled shaft from the apex of the tent, high high high above Little Flek’s regard.

On the far side of the big top was a little trailer that said OFFICE on it. And in front of it was a clown.

“I seek to speak to Giblo the Grandiose,” Little Flek announced to him. “Stand aside!”

“Go home, kid,” said the clown in the voice of a man who’d surrendered to life long ago only to watch helplessly as it took no mercy upon him.

“Don’t make fun of my size,” snapped Little Flek. “I am a great and terrible ogre, who crunches the fingerbones of men between my teeth!” and as she said this she produced her handful of white birch twigs from her pocket and snapped them to bits in her jaws with much snarling.

“Those are clearly sticks,” said the clown.

“They are NOT!” shouted Little Flek. “You should be afraid of me!”
“I’ve got a gun,” said the clown, brandishing it half-heartedly and half-assedly.

“Oh, well, you too have fearful power then. Want to play a riddle game?”
“No,” said the clown.
“Look behind you!” shouted Little Flek.

The clown looked behind himself, turning his spine with a noise like slow-popping corn in a battered tin pan. When he winched himself back around he looked down at his feet and sighed from the very bottom of his shallow, tar-soaked lungs. “So. My big floppy shoes have laces made of rope built into their outside entirely for the look of it. They don’t come undone, and you can’t tie them together.”

“I KNOW that!” snapped Little Flek, scrambling away with flushed face and furious brows. “Don’t explain it to me like I’m five!”
“You’re basically five.”
“I am ELEVEN!”
“Spend your day more productively, kid. Go home and get mommy and daddy to pay up so we don’t bulldoze the town.”
“My daddy’s dead and it’s my MOTHER not my MOMMY – I SAID I’M NOT FIVE!”
“Boo hoo cry me a river,” said the clown without particular venom. “Life’s hard for everyone. You think I’m doing this because I’m living the good times? I had no money so I joined the show; now I owe THEM money for my fanciful clown suit, greasy clown paint, tiny clown car, and unlicensed clown gun. Plus interest.”

“What’s interest?”
“Uninteresting but expensive.”
“Look behind you!” shouted Little Flek.

The clown shut his eyes and breathed through his nose very heavily. “Fine. One. Two. Three. Oh look, nothing’s there. Still. And I still don’t have real laces, so –”

The tiny clown car’s controls were sized appropriately for Little Flek’s use. The horn, however, was slightly louder than average, which she held down with her elbow as she wedged the accelerator with one of her shoes until she bailed out as the big top’s wall loomed above her. The clown howled in wordless anguish and pursued his renegade vehicle across the dusty once-midway grounds until it hurtled into the doors of the outhouse and he – still screaming – launched himself after it.

“Hmm,” said Little Flek as she considered this. But her journey was almost over, and she was only half-shoed, so she did not tarry long. “Hmm.”

***

No one answered when Little Flek knocked on the door to the trailer that said OFFICE. At length she opened it.

It was full of stars. Distant stars, so dim they could barely twinkle. Near stars, glaring balls of nuclear hellfire. Dead stars, pale-glowing corpses of impossible density that made lead seem lighthearted. Rending stars, turned to ravenous vacuums that ate anything near them. And they swirled as one choir around the head of the figure in the center of the office, cross-legged, two-headed, many-eyed.

He was still wearing his gigantic top hat, but his spectacular moustache had fractalized into something that looked like but was not a beard. He did not need a megaphone anymore.

“I am Giblo the Grandiose,” he explained. “I am a wizard of the Ninth Sceptre and the Seventh Sphere. I know all of the Great Mysteries and two of the Little Mysteries, and can whisper the Hidden Truths and Utter Lies. I take gold and turn it to coal; I take coal and turn it to magic; I take what others have and turn it to my own; I take what I want and turn it to what I need. Unravel your wits and lay bare your devices before me. Unspool your strength and lie prone before me. Take action against me if you should dare do so.”

Little Flek stood there and thought and thought and thought with her mind like a rat in a wheel, her hands in her pockets.

Her hands found something in her pockets.

“Hmm,” she said. “Hmm.” Then she pulled out her water bottle, removed its cap, and poured it all over Giblo the Grandiose’s laptop. It made several nasty noises and a nasty smell and died most tragically.

“WHAT?” shrieked Giblo the Grandiose. “How am I meant to handle payroll now?!”

But he was talking to himself, for Little Flek had already left. Himself, and every employee of Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show within earshot, at the top of his impressive lungs.

It wasn’t easy to fit the entire OFFICE into one (already overoccupied) outhouse. But if faith can move mountains, spite can at least tip a trailer, and bounced cheques can push it a few hundred yards in a big hurry. 

***

“I’m home,” said Little Flek, eyes downcast and sore of foot. “And I lost a shoe. I’m sorry.
“That’s alright, sweetie. We can afford more now that you’ve saved us and our life savings by getting Giblo’s Magnificent and Marvelous Truly Terrific Show disbanded and scattered to the winds.”
“But I didn’t do it the right way,” pouted Little Flek. “I tried all my best magical tricks and not a single one of them worked – everything that DID work was based around property damage and fiscal desperation. You were right: all my big ideas were just stories after all.”

“Oh you silly goose,” smiled her mother fondly. “Maybe you weren’t paying any attention to those fairy tales? Property damage and fiscal desperation are the most powerful magics and most timeless stories of all.”

And Little Flek knew her mother was right, and gave her a hug, and though she remained little in size she grew a bit larger in wisdom that day.

The outhouse was left behind and eventually had to be demolished.

Well, most of the issue was the ice storm.  Worst since ’68, in my reckoning – and I was just a little kid back then and my grandpa said he’d never seen it so bad in all his years.  Every tree turned into an ice bomb, branches and trunks snapping lines across town so fast you could hardly hear yourself shout over it. 

But we were ready to pick up and start piecing things back together once it left.  The second storm actually HELPED with that – all that warm midnight rain.  Except it was a thunderstorm, and well, wouldn’t you know it, lightning went and hit the sewage plant.  Talk about unlucky!  And what were the odds that it would start a fire?  The storm drains were overloaded from all the water to begin with, now we had a town full of downed power lines, falling tree branches, and spreading sewage slicks.  Which was probably why the second ice storm made things so much worse – it froze a lot of things to the ground we’d rather have been able to remove.  It also turns out it’s hard for an arborist truck to brake and turn carefully over black ice made of ‘sewer grease,’ who knew?  Certainly not the guy driving the cherry-picker that crashed through town hall and put the mayor in a body cast.  Oh boy, that sure slowed down coordination of relief efforts a bit, I’ll tell you what.

After that a lot of the emergency repair crews took it slow, which meant more time without power, which meant even more stuff in fridges and freezers going bad, which meant more garbage going out, which meant the raccoons and possums were well fed enough to have leisure time, which they used to master fire and confederate under a Trash Lord.  And THAT meant the garbage guys had to go and deal with that immediately, because if you don’t get in there fast before they establish a line of succession – or (god forbid) elected government –you’re looking at a federal-level issue.  So everyone was still making a lot of trash but nobody had time to pick it up because they were trying to get squirrel wetworks teams to get a hit on a possum, and the trash was just piling up in everyone’s garages.  This created lots of bad vibes, which resonated with each other, sunk into the bedrock, and deharmonized our local skeleton sedimentary layer.  Half of the town’s on Precambrian granite, so that was safe (you can’t get ghosts from igneous rocks any easier than you can wring water from them), but the south edge is all limestone from the Ordovician, which on the plus side meant most of the angry risen fossilized dead come to roam the surface weren’t actually SKELETONS per se because most of them were things like trilobites, molluscs, brachiopods – you know, invertebrates.  And the odd sea scorpion which boy howdy let me tell you did NOT make anyone happier to go outside.  Nobody died, but some of them committed property damage, some of them kept people up all night, some of them got embroiled in local politics and sided for and against the Trash Lord… it just was one more big headache in a week of big headaches, one more damned thing.  So really everything EQUALLY led to the town’s psychic reservoir overtopping and eroding containment, this was just the last straw.

Now, I know that reservoir was put together with the very best and most modern designs and the finest materials money could buy, but that was in the seventies.  The early seventies.  I’m not pointing fingers, but if I had to, I’d point them at the budgetary decisions in subsequent decades, not the initial planners.  We had a good thing handed down to us and we didn’t do due diligence in keeping it healthy, which is why our own fitful nightmares slid free of it and filled our lives with imagined horrors, leading to us running screaming from our beds into the night and colliding with torn trees, fallen wires, angry Paleozoic ghosts, militant bands of marsupial and placental wildlife, and black ops garbagemen kill squads.  While sliding on ice made of sewage.

You know, I don’t like to complain, I really don’t, but I feel like it was really unfair for the media to call it a ‘shit-storm.’  The shit was a third order knock-on effect at best, and even if it DID get into the drinking water a bit that didn’t cause half as many problems as the subsequent contamination of the lake with metajungian fluids, catalyzing it into a collective unconsciousness driven by a series of obtuse and mystical archetypes that it didn’t understand or want because it was a body of water and sediments and thereby causing it to defend itself by counter-flooding the town.   

This was a major problem, because the racoons and opossums had turned most of the city trash bins into fortified strongholds by then and they discovered they could float.  I don’t know if you’ve read up on Mahanian naval doctrine yourself, but they figured it out on their own pretty fast and before afternoon hit they’d neutralized most of the city’s water-capable vehicles with molotovs (siphoned from lawnmowers and snowblowers, mostly) and had free control of the water, granting them rapid-access deployment to anywhere in the city.  This display of power clearly elevated the Trash Lord to a Trash Duke, which automatically granted them authority over all nearby bears, which automatically granted the Primary Reserve the authority and duty to take command and use all available force to suppress the threat, which they did by automatically deploying a hypersonic dog whistle in the opera house’s basement, which had (unfortunately) suffered water damage and just sort of howled uncontrollably in a human-audible pitch that made everyone weep black tears and see things.  It also made the bears speak the tongues of man to say really nasty and hurtful things AND then on top of that they started trying to summon demons and although that didn’t work too well because as I said previously we’re on limestone and granite here they DID also start setting fires, which wasn’t too good because although the town was flooded it also had a lot of little outboard-motor-using trash bin boats floating around running on volatile mixes of whatever they could siphon.
Yeah, it wasn’t great. The main flotilla got caught down on Main Street when the traffic lights fell over and blocked escape to the harbour and boy you could smell the burning fur for blocks, it was just awful, just awful.  But it WAS food and the seagulls down by the harbour got curious and ate it and well it turns out some of it wasn’t cooked through and they got racoon roundworms in them, which normally would be a big deal on account of long-term neurological damage to the host but in this case was problematic because the mass suffering from the trash fleet was also big enough to cause a half-proper demonic offering and incarnated some sort of embodiment of despair into the roundworms, causing them to spontaneously overrun their hosts in a dang gruesome flurry of nematodes and merge into a worm-king gull bigger than the clock tower which tore the roof off the supermarket and started eating all the spoiled food from when the trash flotilla siphoned their backup generators to make explosives.  And THAT meant the Primary Reserve had to initiate another automatic countermeasure, which turned out to be cloud seeding with blessed table salt to create a holy water rainstorm, only due to the complicated patterns of heat and moisture coming off the fire, floods, and ice (physical AND metaphysical) it made some sort of tornado instead, which carried away the ghosts, the nightmares, the bears, the worm-king gull, and the entire lake, plus the supermarket.  That actually helped a lot but when all was said and done it turned out the Trash Duke was the highest ranking official left in town with full use of all four limbs so they promoted themselves to Trash Mayor and started passing decrees. 

Since then, it’s been mostly okay.  Mixed blessings, you know?  We’ve got the branches off the lines and the lines off the ground and we cleaned up the sewage and the power’s NEARLY back on, but our new town hall is the garbage dump and you can’t legally serve on the council unless you’re covered in fur and have tiny little paws that look like hands. 

Still, it’s really a very pretty little town most of the year.  You’ve just caught us at a bad time, that’s all.

It was a big, beautiful busy day that it happened, and oh it had all been so NICE.  Goodboy had been driven in the motile vehicle and had been permitted put his head out the window, they had gone to the PARK and Goodboy had gotten to jump in all the puddles he wanted and then had been allowed to jump in THE LAKE which was a VERY BIG puddle INDEED, and he had chased a SQUIRREL, and he had gotten TREATS, and then right as everything was being put away and Goodboy was anxiously waiting at the front entryway to be let in to Home his Owner had sworn and groaned and spoken Bad Words in the Danger Voice. 

“Fuck!  They got into the trash!”

Oh good this wasn’t Goodboy’s fault.  Goodboy remained cautious but drooped less, even as Owner stomped inhome and began searching for bags and a shovel with more force than necessary.  It would probably be alright… but just to be safe, he tucked himself in one of his favourite spots under the workdesk, where it was warm and he had a tattered old blanket that smelled comfortingly of himself and Oldgirl.

Oldgirl had beaten him to it, though she only grunted a little as he elbowed a space for himself among her sprawling limbs.  “It was fun!” Goodboy told her brightly.  “I got treats!  I jumped in a pond!  Who are They and why did They get into the trash if it makes Owner unhappy?  I chased a squirrel!”

“’They,’” said Oldgirl in her creaky wheezy voice, “are undomesticated.”

“Wow!” said Goodboy.
“Domesticated,” continued Oldgirl, mercilessly pre-empting a question before Goodboy could think of it, let alone articulate it, “means you live in Home.  You have Owner to look after you and give you treats and walks and take you to parks.  They don’t have any of that.”
“Gosh,” said Goodboy.  “So what do they eat?”
“Last night?  Trash.”
“Geez.  Owner never lets ME do that.”
“You have treats instead,” said Oldgirl, rolling onto her back with a noise like a fistful of cellophane wrappers being squeezed and groaning in deep spinal satisfaction.  “What’s there to be missed?” 

And Goodboy couldn’t argue with that logic, but he did spend much of the evening longing at the trash and thinking of how if he put his nose into it he became Bad, while They got to do it as much as they pleased, somewhere, even if they didn’t get treats.

That could’ve been the end of it.

***

But it wasn’t.  It wasn’t because that night, when Goodboy was blissfully asleep on the end of Owner’s bedcoversheets, he slid loose from his dreams like oversized footgloves on cold feet, carried to wakefulness by a godawful, inescapable, impossibly unignorable noise.  It was in his ears, it was in his heart, it was making his liver jump up into his mouth. 

Then another voice joined in and Owner swore and reared up in bed and banged its cranium on the bedsill and swore and kicked and accidentally booted poor, poor, undeserving, longsuffering Goodboy in his gluteus maximus, for which he whimpered and made pitiful sounds at a very reasonable volume.

“DON’T YOU DARE,” snapped Owner, fishing light and metal tools from shelfdrawers in the dark, fuming at everything its eyes saw for the audacity of existing in a world that dared inconvenience it thus.  “Shit-come-stink, don’t you dare join on in, I swear.  Bad enough there’s a whole pack of the little bastards out there, don’t you dare-” it trailed off into grumbles and Bad Words and then it stepped out onto the back porchform and began to wave the light and clang the metal tools and holler at the singing. 

Goodboy watched, but only a little.  He was trying to understand what They were singing, between the clangs and the roars of Owner.  It sounded like something he felt he should know, and when it stopped and Owner grunted in satisfaction and stomped off inhome back to bed Goodboy went first to Oldgirl’s rugpile in the corner near the heating duct, where she responded to his nudging with semi-syllabic Bad Words of her own. 

“Why would I join in with whatever They’re doing out there?” Goodboy asked her.

“Because They are like us,” she snorted.  “They just live less comfy, make more noise, and get louder at night.  Owner doesn’t want you to start singing along too, and if you did you’d get less treats.  Forget about it and go to bed.”
Goodboy half-listened.  He went to bed and thought a lot, until the quiet night broke over his sleepy head like floodwaters overtopping a dam.

That could’ve been the end of it too.

***

But it wasn’t, because when Goodboy got out of bed to see what was going on he did so by following the sound of Owner’s Bad Words, at higher volume and pitch than ever before  It was standing in the back yard, holding the broken remains of the birdfeeder and shaking them in rage. 

“Suet is for woodpeckers, you thieves!” it shouted.  “They’re endangered around here, you aren’t!  I should put out poison instead!  I should-” and such and so on.  Goodboy was nervous listening to this so instead he went and found Oldgirl, who was sitting glassy-eyed by her water dish. 

“Why would They eat suet?” he asked her.  “What’s poison?  What’s endangered?  What are you looking at?”
“Hnrgkblrt,” said Oldgirl.  “Gn.”

“Why are you falling over?  Hey.  Hey!  Hey!  Hey!”
So the day was all very not nice AT ALL and although Goodboy got to ride in the motile vehicle he did NOT get to put his head out the window and then he had to wait in it while Oldgirl and Owner went into the V E T clinic, and then Oldgirl didn’t even bother to come back out, and when he sat there and sulked very very quietly INDEED Owner glared at him and said “don’t you start, damnit” and he didn’t even get so much as an apology treat, and on the way back he saw six and seven squirrels and he didn’t get to chase any of them, and when Home was there the broken birdfeeder was still sitting in the garbage cannister with the trash at the end of the driveway, waiting, which made Goodboy think.

That could’ve been the end of it.  But Oldgirl was still someplace else, so Goodboy’s thinking had nowhere to go but back in on itself and within itself and over and over again and when Owner opened the entryway to take Oldgirl’s bed out to the garbage (yes, she’d made a mess when she fell over, but that seemed rude) Goodboy’s curiosity grabbed the reigns and he slipped through behind Owner and away from Owner and into the woods, running as quietly and quickly and excitedly as he’d ever dared. 

And even that too could’ve been the end of it, if he’d gotten hungry or bored or found a squirrel.  But he didn’t and didn’t and didn’t.

He found where They were.

***

Six, sitting in the little clearing, huddled under a cozy drift of leaves for warmth in the late summer evening, watching the sun set with the suspicion that it was doing it faster than it had a few weeks ago.  They looked at Goodboy and he didn’t understand what that meant so he said:

“HI!”

“Hey,” said the nearest one of Them.  Quieter than everyone Goodboy met in the park.  Cautious.  Was he scared of Goodboy?  Weird, considering how Goodboy was smaller than anyone else here.  Tidier though. 

“Why are you dirty?” he asked before the thoughts could finish cooking.  “Do you eat suet because it’s your treats?  Was the garbage good?  What did your singing mean?  Have you seen Oldgirl she’s missing right now?  How do you not get bored?  Won’t you get cold out here in the winter?  What does that look mean?  The first look.  And now you’re doing a second one and I don’t understand it either?”

A laugh slipped out from someone near the back of Their pile.  “Boy.  You just got away, huh?”
“I didn’t get AWAY away,” said Goodboy defensively.  “I just went to visit!  Owner will come pick me up, I’m sure.”

“What?” said one of them, sitting up with ANOTHER complicated look.

“It takes good care of me,” explained Goodboy.  And just as he said that, off in the distance he heard the crackle of underbrush under big clumsy feet and the call of Owner’s irritated voice shouting his name (that was okay, Owner would be excited to see all the new They he’d met!).

Their new new third look intensified and spread from face to face and back again and only got stronger, and then Goodboy understood all of them.  The first expression had been how he looked at a squirrel.  The second was how he looked at a treat Owner had put V E T pills in.  The third was how he’d looked at the bug he’d caught trying to sneak into the house once, before he pounced. 

“Oh I bet it does,” They told him.  They sat up without stretching or shaking themselves off, all business.  Limbs under torsos, eyes never leaving his.  “I bet it does.  Let’s give it something to feel useful about, hey?  Let’s make your Owner feel responsible.”

Goodboy felt dry in his mouth and wet on his legs and opened his mouth to proclaim he wasn’t scared but it just wasn’t happening. 

Then They held him down while one of them raised a tree limb, clutched carefully between both of its dextrous, opposable-thumbed forelimbs. 

***

Owner was very upset for a whole weekend, but in the end it went and visited the rescue center downtown to pick up a new pet, even though its hearts still ached.  Its spawner had always told it that it was a human person. 

It is a fact known to many that a wizard is most vulnerable at one instant in their long and devious careers: right after graduation.  They have shed the cocoon of academic licensing but remain damp with debts and dues and fees, and their wondrous exoskeletons have yet to harden in the dry air of the world.  That’s when you pounce and devour them.

Metaphorically, of course.  Herbie the Magnificent wasn’t interested in eating people; he employed others for that sort of thing.  What he wanted was something more.

“What I want is something more,” he told the wary and kneeling form of the (just graduated; the trollskin diploma was still crisply affixed on its placard of giant’s-toenail) Wizard Morby Jones.  “Always have, always will.  I have the ambition of ten men and the money of ten thousand plus, and both are always greedy for more.  And I want a home.  A citadel.  A fortress.  A bastion whose fortifications can repel any foe, turn away any beggar, daunt any tax-collection.  And you will build this for me.  No cost is too great.”
“Really?” blurted out the Wizard Morby Jones.  She had a good face for blurting: a wide, expressive mouth with enough room to twist in disbelief, confusion, and a smidge of (just barely-hidden) delight. 

“Really,” said Herbie the Magnificent, his hairy-caterpillar brows beetling in wormlike undulations – a truly confusing mashup of invertebrates. 

“Like, you mean it?”
Herbie threw the pickled jewelled mouseburger he was eating at the Wizard in a rage.   “I have the ambition of TEN men!” he hooted in anger.  “I meant it!  A cost too dear implies there is a cost I am not willing to shoulder in pursuit of my desires!  Fuck you!  Ask me that again and I’ll be even MORE upset!”
“Alright,” said Morby.  “How do you feel about the delvers?”
“Pernicious ticks that live under rocks and think themselves better than me,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “They don’t deserve their holds.”
“You like the holds?”
“Oh yes.  EVERYONE thinks themselves better than me, that’s why they’ve all got to pay.  But the holds are nice.  I enjoy big rocks.”

“Excellent,” said Morby.  “I can do this.”

And so the Wizard Morby Jones locked herself in her ritual chamber with antique tomes and ancient scrolls and creaking texts and threw them all out her window, cracked her knuckles, and got down to some really rough-and-ready thaumaturgy.  By the time she was done her hands were shaking, her arms were noodles, and her legs were overboiled chickens, but she kept a bottle of Jorge’s Wondrous Alchemee at hand to solve side-effects like that and after a fortifying gulp her elbows were no longer made of macaroni, and she was able to stagger forth from her chambers and tell the eagerly-awaiting Herbie the Magnificent the words: “it is done.”
“Already?”
“Yeah.”
“Not fast enough, terrible, awful, bad job,” he said reflexively.  “I won’t be paying you.”
“I already took my payment,” said Morby. 

“Really?”
“Really.”
“Wow.  It must not have been that important or I’d have noticed.  Alright, show me.”
So the Wizard Morby Jones led Herbie the Magnificent to the balcony of his coast-side estate, and pointed out with her finger the nearest of the mountains looming farther inland, and with her other hand she proffered a silver telescope, and with that telescope Herbie the Magnificent saw a crag jutting from its side – just slightly – that was no crag at all, but perfectly-shaped stone. 

“I used my powers to bargain with a legion of delvers,” she told him.  “They toiled all night under my enchantments and have built you a great delve-hold fit for any who finds a fort fine.”

“Fantastic, amazing, super,” said Herbie the Magnificent, throwing the silver telescope over the balcony like a used tissue.  “I’m moving in tonight.  Get everyone and everything packed up, we’re leaving in ten.”

***

And so Herbie the Magnificent led a great (if hurried) caravan of all his possessions and wealth from his coast-side estate to the newly delved hold sunk deep into the mountainside, and he was pleased indeed with what he found there.  Halls carved from ravines that stretched so high you could almost imagine the sky loomed overhead.  Walls sheer as a cliff-face, seamless as a magician’s purse, harder than dragonscale.  Doors that would only open at the sight of his face; vaults that would disgorge their contents only at his touch; dungeons that would never open but at his sufferance.  A gilded throneroom that would make an emperor weep; a peaktop observatory that could part the clouds and give vision to consume an eagle with jealousy; a tiny chamber underneath the very root of the mountain, embedded in the craton’s core, holding a giant lever surrounded with runes. 

“What do those say?” demanded Herbie the Magnificent. 

“‘Dignified Extinguishing of the Crown,’” said Morby.  “‘Use When All Else Is As Dust And Ashe And No Other Choice Is To Be Made.’  It’s for emergencies.”
“Only suckers care about those,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “I’m bored and I’m pulling it now.”
And he did, and to his credit, he ran fast enough to make it out of the great front doors before the magma claimed them.  There he met the Wizard Morby Jones, who was a little less out of breath than he was.

“Your stupid delve-hold was garbage,” he complained to her, bent double and wheezing through his knees.  “I want a refund.”
“That’s impossible,” said Morby, lying on her back in the mountain meadow and watching the shimmering heat of the molten stone as it took the fortress and all its treasures beneath the earth to dwell in incandescent glory.  “But I can build you another one.”
“A better one.  This one was garbage.  I don’t like rocks or delvers – never have.  I can afford a second one easily.  I’ll pay anything.”
“Wonderful,” said Morby.  “What would you like this time?”
“Something by the sea again.  My old mansion was way nicer than this dump.”
“Wonderful.  Wonderful, wonderful.”  Morby Jones stood upright and shook her arms in her sleeves, once again every inch the Wizard.  “I’ll get started.”

“One thing first.  Back there, how come you started running before I finished my sentence?”

“Common sense.  I’ve got enough of it for both of us.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing at all, nothing at all.”

***

That night, the Wizard Morby Jones chanted the Undulations of the Deep.  She Repelled the Kelp and Incanted the Magnesium and Summoned the Currents and even – briefly – Bent the Thaumocline, and when dawn reached her she hadn’t blinked in twelve hours and smelled like an old fish wrapped in a used gym sock. 

“Done,” she croaked.  “Gimme water.”
“I don’t owe you a thing,” said Herbie the Magnificent, lounging sulkily in his luxurious weregoose-down sleeping-back. 

“I already took payment for this.”
“Well that’s nice but then I DOUBLE don’t owe you a thing.  Get your own water.”
“Fine,” creaked Morby.  “Job’s done.”
“Wake up everyone, let’s get going, leave the weak and indolent behind, here we go,” said Herbie the Magnificent, springing up like a jack-in-the-box.  “Where is it?”
Morby pointed a single shaking finger.  “There.”
“Where?  By the island?”
“It IS the island.”
“Great, I knew that.  Hurry up or get left behind.”

***

It took sixteen hours to make the long march down to the coast with all of the remaining wealth and treasure of Herbie the Magnificent (mostly things that hadn’t yet been moved into the delve-hold when it melted). 

It took four more hours to secure transport grand enough to deliver them all across the waves, and four again to load them up. 

Two hours of watching the grand, ephemeral pillar of spray and salt and foam draw nearer, loom larger, and larger, and larger. 

A full hour of climbing its misted towers; marvelling over the living tides that formed its walls; witnessing the wonders of the deep in its nested chambers that hung out over the abyss; testing the unending strength of its giant mafic anchor that kept it affixed above the lode in the oceanic crust from whence it had spawned; speaking to the genteel fish that swarmed through the structure of the building and gave directions; breathing in the air that tasted of the freshest sea while somehow never getting damp and feeling lighter than the thinnest bubble. 

Six seconds for Herbie the Magnificent to enter the room with the gargantuan pressure-valve, read the sign saying “TOUCHE NOTTE UNLESS YE SEEKE THE EMBRACE ETERNALLE OF YE DEEPES,” and yank hard on it. 

***

“I think I know the problem,” said Herbie the Magnificent, sitting on the shoreline and watching the distant dissolution of the sea-towers back into wave and fancy while around him his remaining staff desperately performed artificial respiration on each other and surreptitiously pocketed trinkets from the flotsam of the beach. 

“Oh?” asked the Wizard Morby Jones quickly, hands falling to something in her pockets.

“Yes,” said Herbie.  “It’s that you keep making these stupid things in places where they can fall apart and sink.”
“Oh,” relaxed Morby.
“So you should put the next one in the sky.  I’m having a nap now, have it ready when I’m done.  And be quick about it – why are you wasting your time standing around being jumpy?”

“Pattern recognition.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Yes,” said the Wizard Morby Jones with a big fond smile.  “You wouldn’t have.”

***

Herbie the Magnificent’s nap lasted nine hours, and during those nine hours the Wizard Morby Jones made nine promises to nine different demons of the air, each of which vowed to thwart the power and force of all of the others to the best of their abilities in a specific location, thereby creating a vortex of wind that would levitate any material placed within it and permitting the rapid assembly of a castle upon a cloudhead.  The building itself was made of unshatterable glass tempered by the breath of a passing dragon, who had contributed her flames when she couldn’t stop laughing after Morby explained her request. 

It dangled in the cool black air of the dark before dawn, impossible and existent, perfect and maddening, a dream that made reality a little less real by its presence.

“Wow, amazing,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “But it could be taller.  I’m not paying you.”
“I already took my payment,” said Morby. 

“Was it a lot or a little?” asked Herbie the Magnificent suspiciously. 

“A lot,” said Morby blandly.  “A huge amount.  Immense.  Heaps.”
“Is that more than a little?  By how much?”
“Yes.  A ton.”

“Huh!” said Herbie the Magnificent confidently with his brow furrowed in the manner of someone very concerned over appearing very unconcerned about how much he just heard that he didn’t understand in the slightest. 

“And speaking of tons, there’s a strict weight requirement for this one.  Don’t overload more than one hundred tons of weight in any forty-degree segment of the tower relative to its peers, or the balance of hatred that keeps it floating will drift off-center and topple it.”

“How the hell is anyone meant to keep track of all that?” demanded Herbie, eyes squinted angrily to conceal the genuine bemusement filling them.  “There’s too many number things in them!”
“Basic math skills.”
“What with the what now?”

“Nothing you’ll miss.  Goodbye forever, Herbie the Magnificent.”

“Sure whatever,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “Put everything in the east wing!” he hollered to his (few, resigned) servants.  “I wanna see that sunrise.”
And so – two hours later – he did. 

Briefly.  At high velocity.

***

There were many questions after that, and all of them went unanswered because the only person who had answers was Morby Jones and she wasn’t talking.  She may not have had the ambition of ten men, but thanks to services rendered she had the common sense, pattern recognition, and basic math skills of two; and that, a modest portfolio, and a bungalow were enough to make her happy for a long, long time.   

Well.

That, and she started calling herself ‘Wizard Morby Jones the Magnificent,’ for the same reason someone might mount the antlers of an elk they killed over the fireplace.  But only privately, in her head. 

She had too much common sense to do otherwise. 

On the secret phase of the moon at the twenty-fifth hour of the thirty-second day of the thirteenth month in the Hidden Year, the prospective doctoral graduates of the Academee of Arte Wizardrous assembled for review of their theses. As usual.

“You young people have it too easy,” whispered the eldritch and imperturbable voice of their supervisor, the Archwizard Wazzlok. “Back in my day only a single prospective a year made it past the adjudicating committee. And it was uphill both ways and covered in megasnakes. Now declare your miserable projects and get on with your failures.”

“I’m gonna bind demons into my service and make you eat those words, old man,” said graduate student Gloshpill the Truculent.

“Bold and brash and brainless,” scoffed the Archwizard. “I’ve seen a thousand of you, and it never gets old. NEXT.”

“I’m going to create a novel animus relocation and storage retrieval device using a locally sourced old-growth cemetery,” announced graduate student Morgannageddon Peters.

“Necromancy,” Wazzlok said like a four-letter word. “Because putting some buzzwords on makes THAT new terrain.”

“Just watch me, you fossilized creep.

“’Just wahtch meh yew fossulyzled creeeep,’” said Wazzlok in a needlessly high-pitched and blubbery voice. “NEXT.”

“I would like to monitor the long-term decomposition and ecological succession of a drakefall,” said graduate student Mina Pint.

The Archwizard Wazzlok sneered down at her with disdain, which was easily done since he was a bodiless and pitiless skull, as was the style of the time. “Really? BIOLOGY? Why not go to social parascience and save all our time – or drop out and go be an alchemist. Whatever – shoo! Git! BEGONE, AND HARRY ME NO MORE until the fourth of the fifth of the sixth, whereupon you shall provide your progression updates.” Then he laughed in the voice of the dead, hollow and grating, and they were dispersed.

Gloshpill to the pentagopticon.

Peters to the nearby cemetery.

And Mina to her room for her pack and camping gear. It was going to be a long hike.

***

Finding the drakefall was tiring but easy. The Glass Mountain got one or two a year, and Mina had foreseen this one back during her bachelor’s of applied mysticism. The Six of Konks, upended into the Medium Arcanistor by the Niche of Shovels, Paralleled. Opportunity. Doomed opportunity, in more than one sense of the word.

It was still warm when she arrived, the hour of its death determinable with nothing more than a thermometer. Cause of death: a cracked neck on impact with the transparent slopes of the peak – typical. The corpse itself: young adult, two decades old and ready to establish its own territory – also typical.

Conditions were ideal, which meant Mina had about ten minutes to get ready before she’d end up torn limb from limb. So she spent five minutes searching through her pack for her carefully-hand-scribed expansible undetectable circle; three minutes digging hurriedly through her pockets for her university-supplied ‘pocket protector’ danger ward; one minute turning her wallet inside out for the quick-birdmorph-bailout tab her sister insisted she keep on her at all times, and thirty seconds running up and down the side of Glass Mountain frantically searching for a safe crevice to hide in before she realized she’d tied the expansible undetectable circle to the side of her pack for easy and immediate access on-site.

The resulting nervous giggling took only ten seconds, which was great because laying out the circle took twenty and at ten minutes on the dot the first sky sharks arrived – six meters long and not built slender and as eager for a free lunch as they were hostile to others wanting THEIR free lunch. The escalation was remarkable in its smoothness and scope.

Mina took a deep breath (through her nose), got out her pencil of keenness, and started taking scratch notes.

***

“And so on the fourth hour of the fifth day of the sixth month you come to I, the Archwizard Wazzlok, to report your progress. And you’re all on time too – contemptible. A true Wizard is neither early nor on time and never admits being late; being prompt is for lesser things like ants and humans. Now speak your first inevitable stumbling blocks upon the road to your miserable excuses for theses!”

“Things are going completely great,” said Gloshpill the Truculent, smiling through the sixteen poultices of wyrmstongue salve and holy water applied to his many visible otherworldly burns. “I’m in my lane, I’ve got my grindset on, I’m making real and genuine connections and searching for opportunities with like-minded people that share my values. I’m coming for you, old man.”

“That’s what they all say,” jeered the skull, shadowed fathomless glee dancing in its empty sockets and spilling from its creaking jaw as malformed chuckles. “YOU!”

Peters looked to Mina, then back to the Archwizard Wazzlok. “Me, or her?”

“YOU!”

“Fine. I’m doing great. Full strata’s catalogued, all the areas of interest and danger have been marked for exploration, contact, and clearance. I’m all ready to start making friends.”
“Wizards do not have those… things,” scoffed Wazzlok. “Always someone trying this – be pals! Get acquainted! Harness the power of the heart! You know what the power of the heart is? About enough to power one cursed amulet if you aim the blade right and don’t stumble on the chant. NEXT ONE!”
“I think I’ve reached the end of the mobile scavenger phase,” said Mina. “The skysharks left once the easily detachable flesh and organs were all gone, and the glassfinches have taken most of the smaller pieces they missed. A murderbear stopped by about midway through but she looked well-fed and most of the best bits were already gone so she didn’t bother sticking around to contest it, and-”

The Archwizard Wazzlok vocally combined all the worst elements of fake snoring sounds and a loud raspberry. “BORING! You’re all BORING in addition to incompetent! BEGONE, THOU AND THINE, ‘TIL NEXT WE MEET AND I AM DISAPPOINTED!” And he screamed in the tongue of the damned, which was a much less distressing sound, but nonetheless marked their dismissal.

***

Mina’s camp had grown safer since its inception, but no less sensitive to disturbance. The expansible undetectable circle had been tethered with a leyline guiderope, permitting her as soundless an exit and re-entry as possible as she clung to it with both hands and all of her sanity.

Not that she used it much. Her need for supplies was scant and her work was neverending. The larger scavengers may have moved on, yes, but the large would always be outnumbered by the small. Osseous bonepeckers – blank-eyed, small-bodied, big-billed – began their long labour of perforating the most invincible and least marrow-rich portions of the dragon’s skeleton. Two great clans of empire ants feuded in the corpse-stinking glass soil underneath the body, killing hundreds for precious scraps of leaking decomposing fluids. Mockingspiders darted from crevasse to crevasse, scuttling subversively with legfuls of precious scales to adorn and armour their webs.

Now and then, one of the little scavengers would venture too far from its meal (or be chased away from it), slap into the rim of Mina’s camp, then frantically scrabble along its edge – from its perspective, soundlessly; from her own, making a noise like a cat rubbing its nose on a windowpane. She didn’t note this, but she did draw a doodle of it.

***

“Lo, another wearying mortal landmark of time hath pass’ed, and so on and so forth. COME NOW, DISAPPOINT ME!” cried the Archwizard Wazzlok.

“We’ve reached an accord,” said Gloshpill the Truculent, adjusting the impossibly expensive ultramoth-silk tie around neck. His lapels and cuffs looked sharp enough to cut glass even before you noticed the diamond encrustations. “Honestly, I might not even finish this thesis if you can’t make it worth my while. Big stuff is in the works, I’ve got so many irons in the fire I’m too hot to handle. The gears are turning, old man. Step back or get crushed.”
“Next meeting is going to be SWEET,” said Wazzlok with horrific relish. “And you, wretch’d goth?”
“I’ve secured goodwill at the internment site by fusing most of the communal dead into a calcium titan and helping them plan and execute a series of cryptic works projects for the benefit of the community – tomb maintenance, coffin reconstructions, root trimming, open-access-ossuaries, all that kind of stuff,” said Peters. “No organized resistance as of yet, but I think the local greyskulls’ll try something before our next meeting. I’m getting too popular for them to feel safe.”
“How very ethical of you, little miss bleeding heart. Did I tell you what the power of the heart is? About enough to-”

“’-power one cursed amulet if you aim the blade right and don’t mumble the chant?’” droned Peters in an unfortunately excellent imitation.

There was a pause that started off amusing and turned tense around nine seconds in.

“Go away,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok without apparent inflection. “Biologist?”

Mina cleared her throat. “The enrichment opportunist phase is coming to a close. The corpse has been stripped of almost all valuable surface nutrition, so the boom-and-bust visitors are clearing out and dying off, and I think I can expect-”

“You go away too.”

They did. And they all had unpleasant dreams that night, though none would ever admit it to themselves, let alone each other.

***

The dragon’s body had become a carcass. The carcass had become a (somewhat weatherbeaten skeleton). And now the skeleton had become a construction site. The dilettantes and daytrippers had harvested the easy meals, and now the work of reclaiming the hard stuff had fallen to the persistent, the patient, and the sunk-costers. Slow-moving and easy prey for Mina’s pencil and pad, but all the more exactingly captured for it: these were scarcer and less-studied creatures, and she wanted to make sure they were as perfectly depicted as possible.

She agonized for hours over the proper degree of angle on the shell of a cubeworm colony, where the long, slow stirring of their soft muscles intruded six-dimensional feeding tendrils past the hard surface of the bones and into their metamorphological internals, venting the useless material nutrients into their environment and keeping the savoury conceptual innards for their own nourishment.

She stayed up all night trying to find the precise colour grid reference to describe the mourning-mussel reefs that sang beautiful, sorrowful symphonies all day and night as they consumed the shaded memories of the dragon’s powerful limbs and heart, pulsing their aural grief into chromatic representation beyond the capacity of the mind.

And she literally held her breath for sixty-two hours (assisted by a bottle of Infinitely Wondrous Lungs held to her face by sixteen straps) while she very very carefully drew the arcanophilic bacterium she’d isolated from the rubble of the skeleton’s cranium, pausing only to remove all traces of sweat from her skin and make sure that the containment orb hadn’t cracked.

When she was finished with that last one she took it back to the carcass, placed it inside with tongs, burned all her clothing and scrubbed herself with a scour pad carved from a mantitcore’s tongue, and screamed herself to sleep. Then it was up and off in the morning for her next report.

***

“I’m doing great,” said Gloshpill the Truculent, not that anyone had asked. “I’m doing FINE. Everything will be cool. I just need a little more time, yeah? A little more time, that’s all I’m asking. Everything’s under control. I’m cool, we’re right. Nobody’s upset with everybody and everything is going GREAT.”

“I see no reason to question you and you’re absolutely correct,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok companionably. “Next.”
“The greyskulls are on the ropes,” said Peters, muffled slightly from behind a ferocious ghoulskin eyepatch and several large bandages. “They struck before they were ready – figured we were even less prepared than they were, dumb old farts – and all it did was turn cryptic opinion against them. I started with a calcium titan and two squads of sleeper-sheriffs and now I’ve got-”

“Don’t care,” said Wazzlok very loudly and clearly. “Biologist? Anything new?”

“The arcanonophilic stage has nearly concluded, and I think I’ve potentially made some very promising new discoveries,” said Mina. “I could be among the first researchers to deliver an accurate on-site report on this stage of a drakefall.”

“Wow,” said Wazzlok. “Knowledge is power, so obviously you’re more powerful than am I now. Are you going to fireball me, almighty graduate student? Are you? Are you?”
“No?” said Mina, her questioning tone a matter of anxiety rather than calculation.

“Then I guess if you’ve got no power you’ve got no knowledge worth having. You’re all disappointing in exactly the same predictable ways I knew you’d be. Don’t bother showing up next time unless that changes.”

So they left, and Mina indulged herself in one extra overnight stay at the Academee in a single-occupancy sleeping berth made from a shed dream-moth cocoon, and once that blissful time was over she dried the tears off her cheeks and hiked back up Glass Mountain.

She couldn’t afford to miss what came next.

***

She didn’t.

Alpine farmer’s crinoids sprouted from the ruin of the remaining ribs, spine and pelvis; fronds sifting pollen from the air and using it to cultivate a ‘garden’ of mismatched lichens around themselves for emergency meals.

The Crowcuses had begun to bloom, seeds carried high on the lowland thermals and fallen to find sturdy osteo-soil, gnarled stems bearing cawing, clever blooms that watched the hidden colours swirling in the air currents around their home with lively minds.

And a single Grandelay’s Daylit-Star swayed gently in the wind atop the broken horns of the dragon, unfurling slowly to the size of a ship’s sail at full noon, folding gently down to fit in your palm by midnight, its long arms snaring stray insects and sunbeams and bringing them down to its messily heptagonal mouth, its spillage feeding an abundance of bright flowers and impossible insects around its nest.

Many of them had scales. Some had leathery wings. Mina saw one breathe a tiny plume of fire, barely big enough to serve as a lighter.

She put it and a single lost splinter of the drakefall’s toe-bone in a hemisphealed jar, then went back downslope for the last time.

She didn’t look back. She’d seen everything already.

***

“Listen man I’m begging you PLEASE just give me ONE SOUL you’ve GOTTA have a soul around here man I’m ON MY KNEES I’LL DO ANYTHING THEY’LL BREAK MY SPIRITUAL KNEECAPS I’LL-”

“I told you before about being early,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok in poorly-affected boredom barely masking great cheer. “If you were that desperate, you’d have listened to me. And here we have my other two disappointments? Are you both ALSO not so eager to get a degree today?”

Peters slammed a scroll down on the tabletop, which creaked in offense. “There. The deed to the whole cemetery and its inhabitants and their deeds and actions. Freely given, no strings attached. A perfect necropolis crafted from one old boneyard everyone wrote off as meaningless.”

The Archwizard Wazzlok could not frown as he read over the proffered document, but he did click his teeth in a very annoying way. “Mm. Well. Well. Well well well well well.”

Peters said nothing. Gloshpill coughed awkwardly, then cringed with new yet violent reflex.

“Indeed. Hmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-”

“Either give me my goddamned paper and get out of my life, or give me a reason to walk to the fuck out of here and never listen to anything you ever say again,” said Peters.

“Well,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok, drawling the word uncomfortably, “if you insist, then – listen when I’m talking to you! Pay attention! Stop putting your coat on!”
“Make me.”
“Fine,” snarled the skull. It hurled the scroll to the floor and spat a glob of burning wax onto it. “There’s your degree. Beg for it.”
“No.”
“Crawl for it!”
Peters snapped her fingers and a small but lively bony hand leapt from the breast pocket of her shirt, danced across the floor in a gentle waltz, then picked up the scroll and flipped it end-over-end all the way back to her coat pocket.

“Nah,” she smirked. “I’ve got people to do that for me now.”

“Fuck you!” yelled the Archwizard Wazzlok, but she was out the door and his unearthly roar was drowned in the sound of creaking wood and friendly bone-chimes.

“Can I go now?” asked Gloshpill the Truculent, meekly.

“Who?”
“Me…?”
“Oh, that. Nobody cares. Biologist, are you still here?”
“Yes,” said Mina.

“Why?”
“Because I’ve found something important. I’ve got an end-to-end reconstruction of the reef phase of a drakefall, from settler organisms to climax community, and-”

“Where’s the sex factor,” demanded the Archwizard.

Mina did not hesitate. “Well, the crowcuses matured several weeks ago, and the crinoids have been dispersing gametes since-”

“The oomph. The wow. The pizzazz. Give me a mushroom cloud, you worm! Give me a lightning bolt! Give me the dead rising and the seas parting! Give me hidden secrets and unnatural power! Give me wizardry or GET THE HELL OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

Mina did hesitate. “Well… you could harvest the skyshark teeth from the mobile scavenger phase. They often become embedded in the dragonscale and with exposure to excessive ultraviolet light at high altitudes they fuse together into natural protective talismans that resist blades forged of any known metal. I checked. And of course the glassfinches sometimes overeat and die from thaumaturgical rupture if they get into the liver, forming autoamulets strong enough to fuel a spontaneous one-mage thunderstorm.”
Wazzlok did not blink, then he did not blink again. Thrice. Four times. Then: “how big?”
“About the size of your palm.”
“The thunderstorm.”
“Oh, I thought you meant the glassfinch. Well, enough to fuse a delve-hold from root to stem. I tested on one of the abandoned pieces of the complex by Crooky Peak.”

Five times. No, six.

“The enrichment opportunist phase is promising in terms of raw materials. Mockingspider webs make lovely scrolls to begin with, but I experimented with the scaled webs these specimens created and I think you can just make a scrollcase entire with them that will scribe its own contents on any parchment you leave in it. Saves on fingerwear. And the bonepeckers can turn small wing-and-digit osseous matter into very serviceable flutes, which seems to induce extreme pain in the undead when you blow on them – I checked with my sister in grave studies. Lastly, I’m pretty confident empire ant clans are attracted VERY strongly to this sort of scavenging opportunity, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a rich harvest of bottled animus from their battlefields if you bring enough ghostflasks – I only had one on hand to test with, but I think I could have filled a whole metric cask.”

“Old metric or ancien metric?” asked Wazzlok, voice as flat as a pronated corpse.

“Old; there was a LOT. I can’t prove that reliably, though – I brought one up for the arcanophilic phase study and I was too late to check the exact volume. I did get to use it for the mourning-mussel vapours though – do you know they outgas 98% proof imagination?”
“Sensory, short-term, or long-term?” asked the Archwizard Wazzlok in what seemed startlingly like an instant of genuine intellectual curiosity.

“Pure. I checked, it seems almost entirely undiluted. Wizard Wibbis didn’t believe me, he kept saying I’d refined it in the forge and made it all up. I don’t think he’d be able to deny the cubeworm shells, though. Those are pretty solid evidence, except for the parts of them that are filled with conceptualized 6-D dragon bauplans. Which is most of them. And I’d show him the arcanophilac bacterium I found but frankly I’m nervous just thinking of it. The thing could’ve wiped out the whole school in hours if exposed to the open air.”
“Do you have a picture?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
Mina showed him. He screamed a little, but quietly and under his breath, as if something else was on his mind.

“I don’t quite have my notes finished on the reef phase yet,” she added into the silence, once it returned. “But it looks promising. Crowcus petaldown fresh from high altitudes turns you invisible; crinoid garden greens keep you awake for days on a single full belly with no negative side effects…. so far? And, well, there’s the daylit-star – that’s a protected species, but it’s doing this thing that I’ve never seen before, with the bugs, and –”

“I have heard enough,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok. His words were quiet, but final.

Still, Mina felt compelled to add to them, with the determination of a midstream academic. “-but it’s just that-”

“I have heard more than enough,” amended the Archwizard Wazzlok. His voice had grown deeper and less nasal, echoing from some emotion he had not felt in decades. “I have heard of treasures beyond reckoning, hidden from all behind their own blinkered ignorance and incurious assumptions. I have heard of a cornucopia of secrets unimagined, guardians at gates unseen, sentinels standing to provide directions to new heights of power never hungered for in the deepest, darkest dreams of the dead. I have heard of a mind so fiercely dedicated to this passion that it unravelled all of this and more in the process of a single doctoral thesis of Arte Wizardrous, when faced with the most staunch opposition imaginable. You are more deserving than any I have found to receive your degree, which is why I’m going to devour you now before you can challenge me.”

“Sir?” asked Mina, some four sentences behind and trying to catch up.

“Call it academic self-defence.”
Mina began to open her mouth – she was pretty sure to say ‘sir?’ again – but the Archwizard Wazzlok beat her to it at greater speed. And at greater diameter. And at greater depth. Wide and far yawned the jaws of the Archwizard Wazzlok, and between them a gulf gaped that was home not to darkness or torment or death but something more viscerally unpleasant; a crawling sensation on the nape of the neck; the prickle of irate hair on the goose pimples of the arm; the shiver that moves from spine to toes.

And as she began to pass from this place to that other one, Mina’s fingers relaxed – unbidden by her preoccupied mind – and dropped the little hemisphealed jar she’d retrieved from her pack to show the Archwizard.

It held:

~1 cubic mm sliver of the drakefall’s toe-bone

10 cubic cm fresh alpine air from near the peak of Glass Mountain, redolent with ultraviolet and ultraviolent radiations, arcane decay, and background reality bleedthrough

1 surprised and agitated drakebug, containing approximately six megatons of ecoillogical arcane force, balanced in precarious and unstable equilibrium until disturbed

Archwizard Wazzlok’s teeth began to slide down. His jaws began to shut. The wind began to whistle between his incisors.

The drakebug began to become disturbed.

***

Wizard Mina Pint was the first doctoral student in nine generations to be awarded her degree for ‘demonstration of Force Magicke.’ This was an widely considered an outmoded and generally unpleasant thing to be reminded of in more civilized times – particularly by the older faculty, who could remember that sort of thing being a little too common – but the Boarde Academee ruled that this was the only fair outcome to the situation, especially given (1) the absence of the Archwizard Wazzlok to provide a firsthand account of the initial academic evaluation of the doctoral candidate’s thesis; (2) the fact that the Archwizard Wazzlok attained his own rank by committing ‘demonstration of Force Magicke’ against the then-provost of the university and his entire extended family while they were on holiday (by surprise); and finally (3) the fact that the Archwizard Wazzlok had definitely started it.

She was also the first doctoral student in the history of the Academee of Arte Wizardrous to not receive ceremonial appointment to a personal tower or spire upon completion of her thesis. This was partially because the Academee was suddenly very short on towers (specifically any standing more than two stories off the ground within ten miles of the blast radius), but also for another, quieter reason: Wizard Mina Pint declared herself keen to get back to her research site – “in case I miss something” – and nobody on the Boarde would dream of arguing otherwise.
In fact, some of them were having trouble sleeping at all.