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Once upon a time on that one week in July when the sun makes some nice visits on the earth, a rotten little kid was up too damned late when he saw his uncle carrying along home, and what he was carrying along with him was a bottle with not one drop left in it. He was singing loud enough to make a frog swallow its eyes and making the most disreputable faces.
“Hey,” said the rotten little kid. “Hey uncle. What’s with all that noise?”
“I won, I won, I won!” chanted the uncle, waving his bottle like a magic wand. “I won it and I won again, it’s mine, it is – I have the secret and I won! Yes I did!”
“What secret?” asked the rotten little kid. “Go on, tell me. C’mon, tell me. Pleeease tell me. Tell me. Tell me tell me tellmetellmetelmetelmitlmitlmi.”
“The secret,” proclaimed the uncle in sonorous tones, “is ugh.”
“Ugh?” asked the rotten little kid.
The uncle fell to the ground, and so did the two perfectly-broken halves of the rotten little kid’s mother’s biggest bowl. And they both stayed there ‘till morning, when the uncle’s brother-in-law dragged him in and berated him and threw some soup at him until he went away.
“Tell meee,” said the rotten little kid, as he left.
“Tell you what?” asked the uncle. “No sir no nothing, nothing to tell you, not at all. You’re imagining things in your rotten little head. Now bug off and stay bugged you bugger.” And he stumped away down the road whistling.
The rotten little kid was true to himself and true to his nature, and so he ditched his chores and his parents and spent the perfectly nice sunny day sneaking after his uncle, who took every backroad, overgrown path, and lost trail in the whole damned world until he finally stopped on a warm, sunny hill without a speck of shade for as far as the eye could see. If you stuck your tongue out, you could hear the saliva sizzle.
“Hey,” said the uncle up at the sky. “Hey you. Big guy. C’mon. Listen up. I’m down here, you’re up there, c’mon, be sociable. You gonna get lonely up there. Stick your face down here near my face and let’s be friendly-like.”
Nothing happened. The rotten little kid wondered if his uncle was a little crazier than he thought. That could be troublesome. He already had one crazy uncle, and keeping two of them straight would be a real pain.
“And hey,” said the uncle, “you’d get a chance at winning back your losings, you big fat stupid loser.”
Woosh – thump. Down came the sun, the whole sun. There was no mistaking it; the whole sun dropped out of the sky like a cat from a windowsill and sat there on the driest patch on the highest point of that little hill, glowering and glaring at the rotten little kid’s uncle like he’d peed on its doorstep.
“You’re a sore winner,” said the sun.
“Best way to fix it is to make me a sore loser,” said the uncle. “Now g’won. Pick a cup.”
The sun picked one of the cups the uncle was holding out, and they both cast them to the hilltop.
“Beetles,” said the sun.
“Scorpions,” said the uncle.
They picked up the cups.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, NINE scorpions!” shouted the uncle triumphantly. “How many beetles you see, nee? Count ‘em or I’ll count ‘em for you and then count ‘em again, just to rub it in. G’won, count ‘em!”
“Three,” said the sun sulkily. “Fine. Double or nothing.”
The uncle grinned with all eight of his teeth and three of his nostrils. “Fine, fine. More fun for free! Here, you pick a cup. Loser picks, right?”
The sun spat on the hill – burnt some grass real good, no wonder it was so bare – and on they played, all day until the wee evening, when the sun lost a triple-or-nothing and they folded for the day.
“I’ll take a bottle,” said the uncle. “Gimme a bottle. The good stuff, the right stuff, the real stuff. Gimme now, gimme fast, before I lose my mind and bash my brains.”
“Shut up,” said the sun. “You cheat.”
“Cheaters never prosper cognito ergo sum,” said the uncle. “Look at my prosper. No way a cheater’d have that much of it.” He took the long, shining bottle the sun gave to him and he tipped it way way back and swigged a third in one go, then let out a belch that painted a rainbow.
“S’nice,” he said. “S’nice. Same time tomorrow?”
“Go away.”
The uncle waved amicably and wandered off home. He got there six minutes behind the rotten little kid and that saved him from getting anything thrown at him on account of the rotten little kid’s mother being busy spanking him. So! He had a pretty good day.

Next day, the rotten little kid was all knowing. Giving his uncle the knowing-eye. You know, that one.
“I know that one,” said the uncle to the rotten little kid. “It’s that eye, the knowing-eye. Keep that thing offa me. Get it away with you and get gone. What’s your problem, anyways?”
“I know a secret,” said the rotten little kid with the ineffable smugness of youth and age.
“No you don’t,” said the uncle. “You’re a rotten little kid. You don’t know a damned thing and I feel just fine about that.”
“Do too,” said the rotten little kid.
“Do you? You know? You know about your secret auntie who lives down the well who I keep fed on old stray dogs?”
“Nah,” said the rotten little kid. “Don’t know about that.”
The uncle’s eyes narrowed. This was serious. “You know about the giant fly I raised from hand at your age, that lives in the old rotten tree in the dead thicket in the dark woods and eats a whole sheep every other month that I blame on the dropples?”
“Nope,” said the rotten little kid. “Got no clue about that.”
The uncle’s eyes widened and his nose narrowed. This was really real. This was big bad. “You know,” he whispered, “you know about the way I REALLY lost my sixth toe? About how I got in an argument with your momma and kicked a wall and a rat came out and ran off with it, then I told gramma it was her fault and she spanked your momma black and blue?”
“Nu-uh,” said the rotten little kid. “No idea about any of that old nonsense.”
The uncle’s eyes oscillated and his ears twitched and his tongue bounced in and out of his throat like a gopher from its hole. “YOU KNOW ABOUT MY CHEATING THE SUN AT GAMBLING?!” he shrieked loud enough to deafen grown mothers two villages over.
“Sure!” said the rotten little kid. “Dead simple. I knew that one good.”
The uncle slumped soundly. “God you’re a rotten little kid,” he said admiringly. “Reminds me of me except smaller and dumber.”
“And you remind me of me, except bigger and smellier,” said the rotten little kid with a smile that lit the whole world. “Tell me how you’re cheating. Let me in on the cut. I want a cut of the cut. So I have a cut. Cut. Cut.”
“Quit saying cut and you’ve got a deal,” said the uncle.
“Cuuuuttt,” sang the rotten little kid. “Cut cut a cut cut cut cutcut cut cut cut cot coop cut cang clurg-”
There was a pause while the uncle extracted the rotten little kid from his palm tooth-by-tooth.
“Awright,” he said. “Truce. Lemme explain. See, you take two cups like this, y’see?”
“I see.”
“And then you take a hill like this one,” said the uncle, squatting down in the dirt, “all jumping with bugs. Or crawling. Or squirming. Whatever, see?”
“I see.”
“And then you drop your cups on them – wham!” said the uncle. The shells went thunk, not wham. “Hard and fast and no aiming allowed, see?”
“I see.”
“Then you sit there and you guesstimate and calculjecture yourself up a bug, see,” whispered the uncle.
“I see.”
“Then you whip off the cups and count up all the bugs you both got and BAM WHAM BAM you got a WINNER!” sang the uncle.
“I see.” The rotten little kid scratched his nose. “One thing that gets me: how’re you cheating?”
“Oh, that!” said the uncle. “Sun doesn’t know what the hell ants are. Must be near-sighted. Just play on top of that one hill I use – all covered in anthills – and say your ants are scorpions or camel spiders or moths or centipedes or octopuses or what-have-you. He can’t tell ants from your gramma’s behind or your momma’s breakfast.”
“Gross,” said the rotten little kid. “I want to go cheat now.”
“Shoot,” said the uncle. “We’d better hurry or we’ll be late.”
So they went down and they were just a little bit late. “Hey sun,” said the uncle. “Hey you up there. C’mon. Win back your losses. C’mon. C’moooon. C’mon.”
The sun waited.
“You got a third player now,” said the rotten little kid.
The sun popped onto the hill like a bad cork. “Here’s a cup, get rolling, call it fast, go.”
“Owls,” said the kid.
“Dang,” said the sun. “I swear I saw those.”

So by day’s end the sun owed two people, and they took two bottles because why the hell not.
“This tastes lousy,” said the rotten little kid.
“It’s a song for your tastebuds and cancer on your skin,” said the uncle. “It’s ultraviolet and it tastes ultra vibrant and it makes my heart sing like a horny canary. Try it, it’s good stuff. It’ll put hair wherever the hell you want hair. Maybe places you don’t, too. It’s that good.”
The rotten little kid sniffed his bottle of liquid sunshine dubiously. “No thanks,” he said. And he chucked it in the river and went home early so he wouldn’t get yelled at.
The uncle, by contrast, slept in a ditch. And so when he wandered in the next morning, he was awful surprised at all the ruckus that was afoot. People were running around and yelling at each other and the sky and the rocks and just about anything they could yell at because hey who wouldn’t want to have a good yell to fit in like then. The uncle respected that sort of thing.
That said, it was a little noisy. He sidled up to his brother-in-law and asked him what was going on.
“Stream’s gone funny,” said his brother-in-law. “It’s all rainbows and blue skies.”
“Pretty,” admired the uncle.
“I tried to have a drink this morning and a bluebird stuck its head in my mouth,” said his brother-in-law. “It stuck its head right in there. Then it thought my tongue was a worm or something. It bit my tongue. I am not a very artistic man but I do not like having my tongue bitten. So yes, maybe that stream is pretty, but it is also a very big pain in my ass. You should fix that.”
“Who told you?” asked the uncle.
“Lucky guess,” said his brother-in-law.
So the uncle went over and bugged the rotten little kid, who was sitting by the stream fishing for blackbirds with a worm on a hook.
“Hey kid,” said the uncle.
“Hey ugly,” said the rotten little kid. “Whatcha need?”
“You to fix your big stupid mess you no-good little horrible rotten thing on a stump with a wart sticking out of its backside and a blister in its eyeball with three noses,” said the uncle.
“Jeez,” said the rotten little kid. “Jeez.”
“G’won,” said the uncle. “G’won, fix it. Fix it now. Fix it or your mamma’ll get on my case and wear it down to a broken bit of baggage. Fix it now or be uncleless and have no-one to pick on in your old, stupid age that is older and stupider than you. Fix it or I’ll call you a chicken. Fix it. Fix it.”
“Go get mamma to fix it,’ said the rotten little kid. And he laid down with his hat over his eyes which was how the uncle knew the conversation was over, so he gave up and got his sister, which is what most people learn to do when they want to get something done.
“Brother,” said his sister, “you are the dumbest man ever to be a member of my family, at least until this little guy gets bigger. Why in the big blue stupid world would you go making bets with the sun? It could snuff you out before I could say appaloosa or chloroform.”
“Don’t worry,” said the uncle, “I’m real careful to always cheat like crazy. I’ve ripped off that sun more than your son’s ripped off bandages. I’ve given it the gift o’ grift. If I’ve said one honest word to that big old set of hot balls I’ll eat my pants.”
“See now brother,” said his sister, “if you were just a little bit smarter you’d realize why this isn’t making me much happier when I hear you saying it.”
“Fair enough,” said the uncle. “Look, here’s how you cheat the sun.” And he told her.

“Hey,” said the sun. “Three again?”
“Keeps things lively,” said the uncle. “This is my sister. She has a beautiful vermillion dress and she loves to own old, tired-out dogs that don’t give a hoot about anything anymore, and her children are the worst little people in this worst little world of ours, times five. And she has a very painful kick. Ow. Ow. Ow.”
“Hey,” said his sister.
“Hey,” said the sun. “Throw ‘em.”
They threw ‘em.
“Hippopotami,” said his sister.
“Oh goddamnit,” said the sun.

So his sister came back with a big sponge that was still warm from the sun’s soft, baby-smooth hands and stuck it in the stream, gluck, glurck glop, and it sucked up all that sunshine inside itself. Then it exploded and it rained sponge for three hours on the weekend.
“That sort of worked out,” everybody agreed. “Kind of.”
“Let’s not mess with the sun again,” they all suggested.
“Great!” everyone concurred. “Let’s do it.”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven hundred. Huh,” said the sun. “Huh huh. That’s a bit more. A bit more than last time.”
“Afraid to lose?” asked the uncle.
“Put ‘em up, throw ‘em down,” said the sun.
“Rats” said everybody.
“Rats,’ said the sun. “No, not what you guys said. I mean literally rats. Literally figuratively ‘rats.’ Oh hell you know what I mean.”

Now things started to get a little crazy. See, everybody spent half the day out of their mind on liquid sunshine, and half the day was a long, long, LONG time because the other half the day they spent pouring liquid sunshine on everything, which made the day half again as long. That’s three half a days for every day, you understand. That’s pretty hard math.
Lucky, everyone was too busy with sunshine to care. Everybody except for the uncle, his sister, his brother-in-law, and the rotten little kid.
“This was more fun when I was the only one doing it,” complained the uncle. “Now everybody’s doing it and it’s no fun anymore. Nobody understands me, but that’s how I feel and it’s a proper way to feel.”
“Birds,” said his brother-in-law grimly. “Birds. Peacocks in the pantry. Whip-poor-wills in the walls. A large, angry male ostrich in my bedroom, preventing me from sleep and ruining my capacity for alliteration. I cannot take this much longer.”
“I don’t like this,” said his sister. “There’s too many happy people around. They’re a bad influence. I saw what started all this, and it was you being happy. People are happy enough on their own damned selves, you’ve got no right to be showing off and making them all miserable with it. I’ve half a mind to smack you and the other half to sock you.”
“I’m bored now let’s do something else,” said the rotten little kid.
The uncle looked upon his relatives with graven graveness. “For once,” he said, “I almost don’t quite not agree with all of you absolutely. Let’s go fix this up.”
So they made the walk down to the sun’s hill, which was really easy nowadays because there’d been seven hundred and something people making the trip every day for like a month. Three half months and a month, for a month. Or something.
“How long have we been walking?” asked the rotten little kid. “My feet hurt. My legs hurt. My nose hurts. My brain hurts. Carry me or I won’t stop talking until you fall over.”
“Adversity builds not caring,” said the uncle.
“You carry him,” said his sister.
“Fine,” said the uncle. “But I’m going to complain about it.”
“Watch me care,” said the sister.
The uncle watched her very closely the whole rest of the walk but he was unable to watch her care, and this explained why he was in such a bad mood when they stood on the sun’s hill and it asked “Hey, where’s everybody?”
“What’s it to you?” asked the uncle.
“What’s it to YOU?” asked the sun.
“What’s it TO YOU?” asked the uncle.
“Go away,” said the sun, loftily. “I’m popular now. Everybody likes me and they all come over to gamble every single day. I’ve double or nothing so many times that I’m up to nine trillion seven zillion and three-half doubles, and all I need to do is win once to win big. It’s going to be amazing and you’re too stupid to care so go away.”
“YOU go away,” said the uncle, pissily. “Nobody likes you. They just like your liquid sunshine and they all come over to get it off you every single day. And you’ll never ever win a single bet because you’re a big dumb baby that I’ve been cheating out the wazoo since I was smart enough to tell the difference between an ant and literally any other animal on the face of the planet. You are the stupidest solar body ever to exist and I hope you blow up in a really disappoint and silly manner because you are also disappointing and silly, which must disappoint YOUR MOTHER very much every day of her sad, miserable, abandoned life, because you abandoned her and left her all alone out of ingratitude you shiftless, shitless, pantless, gutless, yellow-bellied, red-faced, orange-cheeked, wall-eyed MORON who isn’t fit to fry a fat beetle let alone heat an entire planetary system for billions of years, which you are trying to do, which you are failing to do, because you aren’t fit to do it on account of being a knock-kneed gullible so-and-so with peameal bacon for brains and cornmeal muffins for common sense with gravy between the ears.”
There was a nice long slow moment while the sun digested this.
“What.” It said.
There was a really short and awkward moment while everyone indigested THAT.
“What,” repeated the sun, “is a wazoo?”
“Nothing,” said the rotten little kid.
“Oh,” said the sun.
“It means a big gullible GOB OF GIT!” hollered the uncle, who was subdued most unkindly by his sister.
“He called me gullible, and many other things!” said the sun.
“Nah,” said the rotten little kid.
“Oh. Okay. So, want to play?”
“No,” said the rotten little kid. “No. Nobody wants to play.”
“Well then I’ll play by MYSELF!” roared the sun, and it zipped off far away into the highest part of the sky to sulk.

And that’s where it’s stayed.
Except in July. It makes visits in July.

Aist was young.
She hatched on a whorlwise moon, tail-first – a stubborn, significant sign. She spent eight skycoils eating and hiding and when the ninth passed she ambushed her pater from above as he fed her brethren. Her attempted ingestion of his leftmost eye was laudable, and brought her fresh from her clutch to the roaming paddock.
Aist was strong.
She was half the size of the rest of the crèche, but caught up to them quick and fierce, by stealing and jumping and biting and spitting and hissing. And more biting. She took the food of the strongest by the end of her third skycoil in the paddock and everafter the biting required was lessened. Nobody wanted to be at the end of that again. They enjoyed having a full eyecircle of nine.
Aist was quick.
When the doommaker came to the roaming paddock and inspected the crèche, she ran and hid and took the adults nearly all spin to catch. The doommaker laid eyes and hands upon her, counted her eyes backwards and forwards, slapped her tail, wriggled her arms.
“This one,” she said, “is going to be trouble.”
“Whose?” inquired the attendant feedmaker, and the doommaker shrugged. So they gave up on it and took her out of the roaming paddock early.
Aist was clever.
They put her to the boneworker, and she grew bored with tending coals and began to steal small leftover sherds until she was caught making an entire scimitar. They put her to the borderwarder and she attempted to wrestle the packmater during feeding sessions. They put her to the sheltersheller and she ate half a wall when its hide would not scintillate correctly, then used the spraying blood to paint articulate and hurtful truths upon the remainder.
And it was because of all those things that the boneworker and the borderwarder and the sheltersheller and her pater came to the pathwatcher and spoke to it and said this, which was “this one is trouble.”
The pathwatcher shrugged. “Find things for her to do.”
“She will not do them,” said the boneworker.
“Keep her busy.”
“She will not stop her business.”
“Distract her.”
“She is distraction in scales.”
The pathwatcher hummed to itself and clacked the big claws that denoted its station under its official carapace. “Mmmph. Use your imaginations.”
“She has too much im-“
“Together. All of you together. Go on. Think. Think of something to preoccupy one neonate. I trust you, or you wouldn’t be you. Go on. Fulfil the trust.”
So they put their heads together and their arms entwined and they thought and argued for a full spin. And when that was done, they split up. Three of them went to eat, her pater went to Aist He found her by walking about exposed and vulnerable, and at last she landed upon his neck-nape.
“Neonate,” he said. “You have a thing to be doing.”
“I do and am,” she said, and bit at his eyes, which he was shutting carefully.
“Not this. You have a thing to be doing. Go out there outside the walls and outside the halls and go into the forest and find me a white stone the size of your head and bring it back. I need a new eyerest or your mater will devour me from boredom.”
Aist shrugged. “As pater pleases,” she spoke, and she bounced off into the air and off a wall while he went off to get something to eat, whereupon he found that she had already eaten half the honey.
“Neonate,” called a voice as she hurried through the rumbling bridge that swung between the halls as they plodded along, “neonate. I have a thing that must be done.” It was the boneworker.
“I’m busy busy busy,” she scolded him. “So busy that I can’t even talk.”
“No no,” said the boneworker. “It’s a small thing, a little thing. I need some bones from a bradbuck, there should be a dead one not far from here, only a little ways away. Go and fetch its ribs, won’t you? Just its ribs, the big nice hollow ones for blowpipes, that’s a good neonate.”
Aist sighed and hummed and whined and said “fine! Be that way!” and ran away, sliding down the walls and feeling their big grumpy sighs as her claws pricked them.
“Neonate, neonate! Attend to me, neonate!” The sheltersheller was hanging there, brushes in hands, surveying a dreadful big blank spot where one of the walls had shed a scale. “I am paintless, neonate!” he shouted. “Positively paintless! Fetch me some dyes, some good dyes from the good grey berries you can find outside. Go and get them, go on and on or this colour will set and we will be blemished for good! Go on!”
“FINE,” shouted Aist. And she stomped down down down the leg of the wall and down to its foot, where the borderwarder sat with her guards and watched the moons go by.
“It’s a wobblewise tonight,” she said idly as Aist went by. “Bad news if we don’t get these boys more feed.”
Aist didn’t reply, just hissed.
“Anything crunchy,” she said. “They’ve got good strong teeth. Anything nice and crunchy, or they won’t give it so much as a nibble’s nibble.”
Aist walked off into the foliage with her arms set as if to crush stones, and the borderwarder chuckled after her.

Aist was a lot of things, but she wasn’t foolish, and she knew all those errands at once meant something, and that something wasn’t all good news for her.
“They want to tire me out,” she said to herself as she hid on vines and slipped through pools. “They want to bring me down. They want to humble me up. And that means that there’s probably tricks in all these jobs. Yes, there’ll be tricks. I’ll track those tricks, I will, and stop them dead. Dead, dead, dead. Dead like that thing there. That thing that’s dead.”
It was the bradbuck the boneworker had set her after, and it was a good one – the bones were clear and glistening against the shrunken skin, as beautiful as a polished lip.
“That’s too good,” she said to herself. “Too good, too good by half.” And she threw a little stone at it.
Sure enough, up from those bones swarmed a feast of fleshwasps, each as big as her arm and three times angrier. They shrieked and screamed and gave up looking while she lay low there, half-immersed in her puddle.
“Mmmm,” she said. “Mmmm.” And she rolled in the mud until she was nothing but a muddy blob, took her stolen honey (not yet eaten) in her teeth, and crawled inchy-winchy all the way up to the very base of the bones, so close she could hear the little shouts the wasps used to talk to each other.
“Here,” she whispered, and she poured that very tasty honey inside the mouths of the three largest bones. “Here, here, here.” And the wasps heard the noise and smelt the honey and dove into those three fine bones quicker than anything. They were most unhappy when she plugged the ends with mud, and less still when she swung it into her bag.
“Good,” said Aist. And she rinsed off the mud, because it was smelly, and she dove to the bottom of the pools to look for white stones.
Six pools later she was making up new words that meant bad things. Every stone was red or orange; white was gone as gone could be. Just half a skycoil ago every stone they’d passed had been whiter than her mater’s eyes, but now they were harder to find than legs on a stenchworm.
She considered the stenchworm’s egg that had just halted her train of thought.
“Huh,” she said. “White enough.” And she tucked it into her bag.
Now she went to the thickets to look for food – guard-food, not normal food – and was disappointed. They were deep in the thickets by now, and if a thing was not soft and pliable enough to slip between branches it did not exist.
“Crunch crunch crunch, need crunch munch, a bunch bunch bunch” she nonsense-hummed to herself.
(Aist was not poetic)
She stopped to give her aching feet a rub and looked around. The hardest game she saw was an immature isoblob, smooth and hairy and nub-nosed and mostly mouth. It was shoveling its way through the forest floor on a journey that would take its whole life.
“Hmm,” she said.
Then she picked up some nice ripe quickseeds, put them in front of the isoblob, watched as it ate them, and bagged it.
“VERY crunchy,” she said. “At first.”
The grey berries were easy to find – very easy. So easy that she didn’t believe it, and that’s why she poked them with a single toe instead of grabbing them up.
“Oooh oooh ooh,” she hissed as the toe itched like mad, so hard that she almost tore it off with her scratching and clawing. “Ooh oh ooh no, ooooh no way am I grabbed that up. Oooh. Ooh!”
So she walked away from the grey berries, dug up a little juma-burrow, skinned the prickly little juma, and wrapped the berries in its hide spike-side-in, carrying the whole thing with the greatest care.
Then she walked home. And smiled a lot on the way.

“Have you brought food?” asked the borderwarder?”
“Here!” said Aist. And she fished out the isoblob, which snuffled aimlessly at the new things it was seeing.
“That’s as crunchy as a wet leaf,” said the borderwarder.
“Not after what it ate,” said Aist. And she threw it to the guards, who tore into it ravenously and downed it in less than a blink and a bite.
“What did it eat?” asked the borderwarder.
“Quickseeds,” said Aist. Then she ran, because some of the guards were already beginning to squat. The borderwarder’s shouts started loud in her ears as she ran, but then grew quiet – she probably didn’t want to open her mouth.

“Neonate,” said the sheltersheller suspiciously. “That was fast.”
“It was, it was, it really really was,” said Aist. “I didn’t want an ugly wall. Here, here, take the berries – I wrapped them up nice!” And she threw the bunch to the sheltersheller, who screamed a little and grabbed them out of the air by the skin of his teeth.
“Careful!” he admonished. “Careful careful careful CAREFUL!” If you get these on your scales, it’ll-” and then he started whimpering, as he watched the juices from the prickle-pierced berries seep out of the package and down his arm.
“Paint carefully!” she yelled. And then she was gone, and the scratching started.

“Ah, these are good ribs, fine ribs, true ribs,” said the boneworker approvingly as he eyed them up. “Did you have any trouble getting them?” he inquired, just a little too idly to be true.
“No,” said Aist. “I did take a trip getting them though. There’s a bit of mud on there and there and there and there and there.”
“Huh!” said the boneworker. “Easily fixed!” And he jammed his long, clever claws into the mud plugs of the ribs and pulled them right out, along with a fistful of fleshwasps.
“Oops,” said Aist. And she ran, ran, ran.

Aist’s pater knew she was there. She had just landed on his neck again.
“Did you have fun?” he asked.
“It was HARD and BORING and LONG and TIRED and I got bit by wasps and itched by berries and I looked everywhere everywhere EVERYWHERE,” she whined, “but then I found this here you go.”
“This is a strange stone,” said her pater, as he took the stenchworm egg in his arms. “It feels soft.” Then it wriggled.
“It’s near-hatched,” she told him. “Good luck.”
This time she didn’t stop running until she reached the very top of the very horn of the very tallest wall, and she didn’t stop laughing until the moon slid from wobblewise to whorlwise and the world went quiet again.

The boneworker, bandaged head to heel, left his post alongside the sheltersheller, swollen of arm. They walked the long slow road to the pathwatcher’s post, and on the way they fell step-in-step with Aist’s pater and the borderwarder, who walked far apart from them and each other, both a little downwind. And when they entered the pathwatcher’s post, they spoke all at once very loudly in a way that somehow turned into a single, clear message.
“We have tried together,” they told the pathwatcher, “and we have failed. We give up on her altogether.”
And that was that.

And for the rest of that skycoil, there was hardly an adult that could look at a neonate without grousing, and there was that real quiet that came from the heaviest of sulks, and the quiet pitter-patter of scheming revenge that would never come to fruition. And overlaid on all of it, hiding in the dark corners and clogged with stolen honey, a stealthy, unstoppable giggle.
Aist was happy.

The Bakeries and Baked Goods of the Exotic Plateau of Limbala, by Thoracic Wemple, W. M. P.

To bake is to understand life. Not a man-jack of our society would dispute this. Not a solitary child of the most gormlessly ignorant spawning – nay, not even a woman, poor, idle, clotted-headed creature that she may be, would gainsay such an indisputable statement of truth. And so we voyage onwards, my fellow philosophers of the natural – onwards, ever onwards! – to broaden our palates and minds across this world of ours. Each loaf consumed, each cookie sampled, is another word on another leaf in another chapter of another volume in the great store-house of knowledge that is our glorious amassment of all things worth knowing of our dear planet. A storehouse that remained woefully incomplete with regards to the far corners of the world – ‘till now! Yes, from the very pen that brought you tales of the Cinnamon Buns of the Canaries, the Rolls of the Amazon, here, for your reading pleasure, is the firm, infallibly scientific and reasoned documentation of the hitherto-unknown bakery-based organisms of the Limbala Plateau! No voyage too harrowing, no peril too great – though our expedition was nigh-decimated and yet more, I alone have returned to bring the golden light of knowledge! Carpe diem!

Crescens volare, “The Flying Croissant”
A distant off-shoot of the common French breakfast item, possibly occurring here as a result of pre-historic migration over long-subsided land bridges(?). It is much larger than its more sophisticated and refined European cousins – no doubt a sign of moral degeneracy. A real delicacy with some properly sweetened jam, if you can get it. Travels in great flocks that can blot out half the sky, with the yearly bakelings clustered in the center for protection. Seems to observe sophisticated mourning rites upon the death of elders. May require further research.

Sacerdos kirkos, “Lama’s Donut”
Baked in the mountainside prayer-lodges of one of the more obscure societies, to be consumed by holy men while fasting. I was informed that the Baker of Days, the messianic figure of the local mythology, had both invented the pastry and disseminated its use for aid in thought. Tawdry mawkish nonesuch duff if you ask me. I sampled one, as much for amusement’s sake as anything, and can personally verify that in overall effect it is manifestly inferior to simply drinking a half-dram of laudanum, the civilized man’s narcotic.
As a minor note of sorts, blowing through the central hole of the donut produces a high E. Doing so is considered a sacrament.

Bannock rex, “King of the Dinner-Rolls”
Called by the locals ‘the destroyer of entrees,’ this fearsome creation measures over twenty feet in height, forty in length, and has utterly ruined countless appetites, wasting thousands of hours of meal preparation. Its population remains low – the breed is anti-social, and few ovens can withstand the temperatures needed to produce such a colossus – but they are all but indestructible and fear nothing. Only one had been brought down within living memory of my visit, and my informant – an old, old, old woman named something uncouth who I have graciously rechristened “Spatula” – said that it took the combined efforts of three entire baker-clans, normally mortal enemies. Their feuds were set aside for a decade or more following the hunt, so many of their young chefs were stuffed in the deadly battle. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
(Addendum: The coloured plates attached of this magnificent apocalyptic appetizer-cum-meal were found upon the body of the late, much-lamented Arthur Facklebee. Arthur, the world is the poorer for the passing of your gift [if not so much by your habit of belching loudly after every meal], but science is enriched even after your passing.)

Australopita rheasymphysisspondylus, “Chap”
A jocular little thing, more of a bun than a bread, barely a mouthful at most. Takes longer to eat than to say, and even less to describe thoroughly. Good for the clap.

Xenognosis enigma, “Red-Bellied Knish”
Despite its misleading name, this is not a true knish at all; rather, it seems to be distant kin to the puff-pastries of the Medditerannean. Enigmatic to the eye and elusive to the palate, this is a genuinely challenging thing to eat – not for its lacking or excessive taste or paletular weight (it measures a mere 4.9902 middlies upon the Sir Walter Middup scale of granular vs monolithic), but rather for its incredible dexterity, its fierce speed, and its incredibly unsettling gaze. Focusing on chewing the thing is nearly impossible with its stare upon you, and in your moment of hesitation it vanishes from your mouth and down a nearby mouse-hole, with only a flash of its shiny reddened underside for your troubles. Must be crippled with a special mallet for easy consumption, which can dent the crust if done improperly.

Sokolata delicioso, “Bawlman’s Bowel-Serpent”
The ‘common-name’ for this deadly but delicious snake was provided by my beloved, esteemed, and tragically late colleague Dr. Regimagillen Q. Bawlman G. T. O., who was both the first white-man to sample it and the first to describe its unique properties. A transcription of his observations is included here with permission from his widow.
Dr. R. Q. B.: Dibs.
Dr. T. W.: Damnit. Well then on you go.
Dr. R. Q. B.: Yes I certainly shall my old biscuit don’t mind if I do. Well I say this is rather enticing Wemply, you should have a taste, it’s rather like caramel filling with a hint of aaaaaauuuuuuuuggghhhhh. Aiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrgggh. Gah glah glur ugh ah ah uhh. Uh.
(As a polite explanatory footnote to Dr. Bawlman’s astute observations, it should be noted that the principle active ingredient in the entirely unique candy filling of the delicioso is, in fact, mashed poisonous caterpillars – a bit of knowledge that I was tragically only made aware of after the fact.)

Triticaephestes ophidian, “Flourback”
An aggressive and short-tempered but otherwise typical roving ‘pre-cut’ loaf. Its already poor disposition grows crankier still when its personal space is threatened, and it will lash out with little regard for the relative size difference between itself and the object of its irritation. It boasts a deep, hard-bitten crumb and a ferocious crust, which in no small part contribute to its surly sureness in its own invincibility.
(A postscript: it appears that T. ophidian nests communally in the cold season for mating purposes, as my dear friend and long-suffering batman Blartly mis-stepped face-first into such a reproductive ‘ball’ of the feisty little things while searching for a place to set up my shaving kit. Remarkably, he was skeletonized in less than thirty minutes by my stopwatch – rather less time than the lazy clod had taken to prepare my morning snuff, might I add.)

Lutumungar brontotritica, “Hillbaker”
I only glimpsed this majestic bread once, yet even from a distance of over seven miles its sheer majestic bulk made it indescrible and unmistakable. Mere words fail me…the grace of a phyllo… the shapeliness of a baguette… yet wrapped around and within a body measuring a little more in size than that of Buckingham Palace. It was kneading a small mountain when I observed it, apparently preparing to lay its eggs.
One of a kind, and God be praised, I can die peaceably now that I have witnessed it.
(Jenkinsman, my editor whom I loved as a brother [in spite of his persistent, unstoppable nosiness], alas, wandered in for a closer look and had his head blown off his shoulders when the behemoth sneezed, in a manner that may to the unenlightened common moron appear to be akin to that produced by placing an elephant gun to the back of his skull and pulling the trigger. Such ignorant foolishness is laughable. Laughable!)

Archaeomatzo pericles, “The First Bread”
A grandiose title, to be sure, but I believe it to be true. Yes, it is indisputable – I, Dr. Thoracic Wemple, W. M. P., have alone brought proof of the oldest known what-based organism to the shores of the civilized societies. Look – look at the majestic speckling of its surface! Can you not see the noble crest of its spine? The fine, upstanding crumb? Yes, it is, it is it! Indeed it is! The first bread product has been found, and in its shape and form I believe we can all agree that it is unmistakeably, irrevocably Euro-Caucasian-Anglo-Briton-Saxon! Only a fool would think otherwise! A fool! A fool would say such a thing, at such a sight! By GOD it is so!
(It is with unspeakable pain and breathtaking grief that I must report the tragic and deeply regrettable demise of the Revered Arthur P. Z. Quattleston, who, although he had the utter gall to question my purely objective and unbiased analyses, certainly did not deserve to have his skull beaten into a thick dough of skull splinters and mush with a rock. By natives, of course.)

Dr. T. Wemple, W. M. P. is the world’s foremost expert on exotic bread-based organisms. Mail is to be addressed in his name and sent to the Saint Shuffleprick Institute For the Mentally Lunacidal until further notice and/or after the completion of his trial.

Remember thisthought now forever.
Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years beforenow, a smallthing wandered from herd. Lostwises until dark. In dark, in oldfear, it stumbles from tree to tree to ferns ferns ferns. Lives, by luck. In morningcalm, in time, it sees flock of tiny fleshgulpers in branches laughing at it with nighteyes. Smallthing wonders if it had their nighteyes, would its life be made easier. Idea is old and dull constanthought nothing new.
Smallthing asks tiny fleshgulpers in branches laughing at it with nighteyes to share nighteyes. Offers fleshbulk daywise as shield for fleshgulper flesh. Fleshgulpers laugh laugh laugh agree.
Gonn is founded forever. Not by forelimb, but by mindeye.

Don’t hunt in that valley.
No, it’s not dangerous. Not the usual way.
No, it’s not sacred. No spirits there. Trust me.
No, it’s not even interesting. Just don’t do it, alright? Listen to your father.
There’s things down there, and you leave them alone. Don’t flip over any stones, don’t rustle through any bushes, and don’t ever spill blood down there. Ever. You hear me?

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen, smallthing’s spawn wander vastly in herd of herd of herds. Tiny fleshgulpers for nighteyes, plodders for fleshbulk, leaperkin for dayeyes. All prosper. All wander as one. Herd of herd of herds becomes herd of herd of herd of herds. Reckoning is difficult. Paces are offset. Some straggle some stride some wander. Unmanageable.
Fearbassador is sent with tremblewords to feasters that lurk in herd of herd of herd of herd’s wake breeding herds of feasters. Fearbassador is consumed. Fearbassador is sent. Fearbassador is consumed. Fearbassador is sent. Fearbassador is consumed. Fearbassador is sent. Feasters listen. Feasters join herd to feast upon slowill, to directmanage. They feast only if allfeast.

Jan. 14th, 17XX
Dear fir.
I write thif letter to you, as a prominent natural philofopher, to afk (begging your pardon, fir) exactly what if the provenience of thif rock I have quarried on my land. It is uncommon queer to the eye, and refemblef brick. To be frank, fir, it haf me buggering puzzled.
-Yourf fincerely, JXXXX SXXXX JXXX.

On warm day in cool wind under softsky herd halts, thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen. Waters have upswollen lands have downswollen, oldwalkpath has been overswollen underwater leaving nowhere to walkpath. Conference consultation commences, decisions made, arguments hissed, insults snapped. Three points emerged: goodfood here; goodwater here; goodweather here. Consultation decision made: stop for whilesome.
Two years later stone nests are made.
Hundred years later stone walls are made around stone nests.
Thousand years later stone spires are made around stone walls around stone nests.
Gonn is made shape. By forelimb.

Apr. 11th, 18XX
-Good weather. Will make Call River a day ahead of time.
-Jackshit Paul upset the canoe stupid Canadian fuck.
-Overnighting in abandoned cabin to dry out. Old & badly-built but the roof’s there. Got lucky & shot a deer, good food tonight. He won’t stop complaining anyways, keeps jumping at shadows & whining about noises. Stupid & superstitious.
Apr. 12th, 18XX
-He’s gone. Run out in the night quiet as a mouse probably hiding under some slimy rock somewhere the little lizard. If I see him in daylight again I’ll nail his ass to the canoe & send it down a waterfall.
&  he took the deer too

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen, Gonn has swollen in flesh. Gonnlands have swollen in plentitude to match. Ferntending learned. Frondshaping learned. Stonebuilding is higher longer wider stronger better every thousand years. Trick is as follows: tap rocks, listen, build. Trick is good.
Gonn cannot go. Gonn is anchored in rock. But Gonn swells with travellers. Allherds come to Gonn, to trade to witness to learn to tribute to join Gonn, be of Gonn.
Gonn is herd of herd of herd of herds morewise. Gonn is lands turned to Gonnlands. Gonn is stone upon stone upon stone upon stone abovehead into stoneskies blocking rainsunallweather. Gonn is growing learning faster than mindwise smallthings, every year, everyear. Gonn is feasters minding plodders minding fleshgulpers minding leaperkin minding jagged minding feasters.
Gonn is great, great is Gonn. All is Gonn.

Aug. 5th, 18XX
There’s no oil, John. Yeah, I know the valley bowl spot looked good, but it’s dryer than your grandma’s tits. The drill’s hit something down there, and it looks like there SHOULD be something, should be a pocket the size of half of New York, but it’s empty. Whatever’s in that hole went away a long time ago. Find a new spot.

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthen, Gonn is neighbourmade. Notalone but still greaterthanall. Gonn is learned from. Other cities grow: Laurr Pangg Avall. Gonn is greaterthanall. All are lesserthanGonn.
Gonn has flyeyes now. Cold ones have spires in Gonn, rookeries nests nooks squats. Cold blood flows through small brains but useful for wings. Word wends to Gonn on wingeyes: plot. Laurr is secondlesserthanGonn, wishes first. Predation planned. Counterpredation planned in Gonn.
Arenas bloodied. Food hoarded. Packs formed. Tooth claws spikes flesh all readied feared ravenous.
For glory of Gonn.

Nov. 2nd, 19XX
…the best site I’ve seen since I laid eyes on Drumheller. Bones everywhere – I don’t know how the oil prospectors missed them. We’ve got nearly intact skeletons sitting right at the surface; I picked up three skulls in one day. This could be big, world-news big.
I want a team out here now. Two teams. Hell, just shovel every grad student you can get into a truck, we’ll take twice as many and call it not even close enough. Just do it fast.

Thousand thousand thousand run out of thousand years laterthan, Avall falls lastofall. Landripped underthem, downswollen. Gonn vastswimmer cold ones swim in through waterbreach, feast on panickpaddlers worrysplashers drowners.
Gonn is alone again. Gonn is greaterthanallstill greater than beforewar; cavedigs shelter all smallthings shelter herds. Gonn is stillstrong stronger than beforewar; hoards are deep food grown in nolight holds safe from raids. Gonn is oneplace where stone upon stone upon stone is forelimbmade not chancemade. No otherplace. Gonn is alone.
Gonn looks skyhigh. From skyhigh, Fire looks back.

January 28th, 19XX
It’s a brick.
I know what you’re thinking, Cathy, but stop thinking that and read what I’m saying: it’s a brick.
Yes, the brick was made from Cretaceous sandstone. It’s a brick.
Yes, the brick was found IN Cretaceous sandstone. It’s a brick.
Yes, I know this is giving the creationists ammo they don’t deserve. Fuck them, fuck that, it’s a brick. We’re scientists; we have to explain this. We’re going to explain this.
Yes, we don’t have enough people working the site. But we’ll have them lining up for the chance after we get this published.
Yes, it’s putting our careers on the line. Everyone does that, sooner or later. But everyone else only wishes they got to do it this way.

Firegrows in southsky. Gonn builds. Gonn always builds. Gonn builds in mindeye, in forelimb, in lifedeath, in war, allalone. Gonn is great. Gonn will not end.
Gonn will submerge underland. Downswell Fire will come, Gonn will stand. Fire will sear, Gonn will stand. All lands will burn, but Gonnlands will sink understone, live understone, hide understone.
Gonn will stand. Gonn is greaterthanall. Greaterthan its parts, greaterthan its stones. Gonn will neverend notnow. No matter how long.
Run out of thousands foreverever, Gonn remains. For glory of Gonn.

June 9th, 20XX.
Thirty-eight years of defend and counterattack and publish and counter-publish and it all comes down to this: me, an excavation team, about seventeen film crews, and a lot of memories.
We’ll enter the vault from the east, where the readings say it’s backed on stone. No sense disturbing the wall. The 65-million-year-old wall. God, I can’t believe you were right about the bricks.
This one’s for you, Tom. You should’ve been here for this.
They’ll remember it forever.

Some days, I dream of heroes.
Sound in the audience chamber, nervous voices. A stammer, a shudder, a twitch, a plea. The door cracks open and a worried face shoves in a terrified one.
My eyes are already open. They cannot shut anymore.
Mercy, mercy, mercy. It’s saying something about mercy. It didn’t mean to, it’s not its fault, it would never have done that thing if only it would have known, honest ignorance, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy.
My hand raises and it falls down, and I’m alone again as the footfalls of my panicked acolytes skitter down the foyer like spiders.
Time to sleep. I can’t sleep anymore, but gods do I ever try. Some days I even fool myself.

Some days, I dream of heroes. Noble faces and determined eyes and no matter what the stature or shape of the oncoming threat, it’s backed by a spine that’s unbending, harder than steel.
High noon on a holy day. I’m not sure which one, there’s dozens and dozens of the fucking things now, so many I’m amazed they haven’t dedicated one to my toenail-clippings. There’s a holy day for my birth, a holy day for my death, a holy day for when I rose again, a holy day for when I defeated the Prinnish army and decapitated their general with a wave of my hand and a smile. I could smile then. I had a nice smile – I have a nice smile. It’s just now there’s no lips in the way and it won’t turn off no matter what I want.
I smile at the sacrifices and the offerings, smile at the ritual mutilations, smile and smile at the choirs and the hymnals and the absolute, pants-filling terror manifest in the eyes of each and every single human in the cathedral, and when they all file out and the candles die down I’m still smiling.
Some days it doesn’t seem worth it.

Some days, I dream of heroes. A sword swings, a spell chants. I am bearded in my lair, cornered like a fat old bear come out of his den in midwinter. There are rants and ravings and curses and some good bloody honorable deaths from horrible magics.
I have so many horrible magics. One for each bone in my body, and the skeleton of a human – even a very large human such as myself – contains two hundred and six bones, two hundred and six mindless, stubborn lumps of mineral and meat that will mend and build and stand firm regardless of what life chooses to tell them. That’s real power in there, that’s a force you can bend kingdoms around and distort lives against and tear down palace walls with. Which I did. And I have. And look at all the good that it’s got me, here on my pile of broken thrones, with an entire empire prostrate at my feet. With my eyes that won’t shut and my smile that never ends and my overflowing dish of sacrifices that I couldn’t eat even if I liked the blood of innocents and the hearts of virgins.
Some days I miss bread and jam, good blackberry jam.

Some days, I dream of heroes. A whisper at first, a half-hoped prophecy that only the peasants hear (I never knew how they did that, even when I was a peasant). Then it grows and spreads into a rumour, a murmur in the streets and fields that my guards and priests and captains attempt to stifle and quash in their cruel, ham-handed way. Finally a luckless messenger stammers out a rambling, incoherent, self-serving explanation to me and I kill him for his spineless presumption just as they burst in the door, with the sunlight pouring in behind them.
A luckless messenger is talking to me right now, because it’s his turn to tell me about the treasury and the tax rates and the tributes and the vassals and the vassal-states and the states that very much don’t want to become vassal-states and behind every word he speaks is a single thought and that thought is ‘please don’t kill me.’
I listen. Well, I try to listen. I don’t nod, though – that makes him flinch. So I sit and stare and fail to keep my mind from wobbling and I wish I still had the energy I did back in the first month of this business, when I honestly, truly, really did try to understand how the hell this place was run. Then I had to execute half my officials for treason and venality and after that well hell what’s the other half worth if it wasn’t letting me know about that sort of thing?
Not so much treason nowadays. Not so much anything. Doing anything could get you killed.
A corpse is alive, even in death. Rotting, rotting, feeding a thousand thousand THOUSAND little bellies each night, spawning millions of babies, putting food in the ground. What good’s a corpse that won’t rot? What good’s an empire that won’t change?
Some days I think that thought and it won’t leave my head.

Some days, I dream of heroes, and more than once I imagined myself as their leader. Some days their wise counsellor. Some days their admirer from afar, some days the hostage they were sworn to rescue.
I was going to make a difference. I was going to change the world. I didn’t know I’d personally exterminate nineteen royal families and countless regular, everyday families, but I’d accepted that by the time it happened. Those things happen in a world of heroes and heroism and dashing swordsmen and wise, pious sages. So I wasn’t a hero. So I was a villain. All I had to do was wait, and scheme – I could scheme, I assumed at that age, how hard could it be? – and there they would be. Like moths to flame, are heroes to villains. Moths to flame.
They would stand before me, and we would battle, and if I wouldn’t lose then, I’d lose to their children, or grandchildren. Maybe I would return, maybe I would not.
But the last thing I would see would be their faces.

Some days, I dream of heroes. And oh how I wish those dreams were true.

Once upon just now, in a relatively nearby nation-state, there lived a democratically-elected leader (or ‘leader’ for short) and her three daughters. Though the leader’s husband had long ago perished, that tragedy had merely knit the family together all the tighter, and the daughters in particular would do anything for their mother.
“Girls,” said the leader one Tuesday morning, “I’m feeling mighty blue. By any chance could I ask one of you to head down to the pharmacy and get me some Advil for this headache? My skull feels like it’s trying to eat its calvarium alive.”
“Sure,” said the oldest sister, Charlene. “Right on it.”
“Then take this,” said the leader. “Might come in handy.” And she bestowed upon Charlene the mightiest iPhone in all their household, with unlimited local, national, international, and interplanetary calls (10 hours of trans-solar calls per month).
“Gotcha,” said Charlene. Then she left and the rest of them waited.

And waited.

“Girls,” said the leader on Wednesday morning, “something’s happened to your sister. Could I get you two to go check in on her?”
“I’ll do it,” said the middle sister, Penelope. “Little squirt here’ll just get us in trouble. I can do it.”
“Better take this, just to be safe,” said the leader. “But be sure not to speed on the highway.” And she bestowed upon Penelope the swiftest and most agile bike in all the nation-state, with carbon fibre support structures riddled throughout its frame for maximum durability with minimal weight, and a streamlined seat and helmet to minimize wind resistance.
“Sweet,” said Penelope. “Back in a sec.” And she wheeled out onto the road and vanished in a helmet’d blur.

“Girl,” said the leader on Thursday morning, “we are decidedly in trouble here.”
“Yeah,” said the youngest sister, Tabitha. “I kind of liked those guys.”
“Me too,” said the leader. “But I can’t exactly ask you to go looking for them. You’re the youngest, and I don’t have anything to help you do it.”
“Eh,” said Tabitha. “I think I’ve got an idea of what might help me. Just lend me your old, broken, half-functioning, no-good, boring, obsolete pager. Can I borrow that for a while?”
“Sure,” said the leader.
So Tabitha left home with head held high, hair cut low, and a hunk of rare metals and rubber that had been useless since the mid-nineties at her hip. And that was all she needed.

Tabitha left home and wandered down the back alleys and the wide streets of the world, over the hills, even closer to where her Google Maps directions told her the pharmacy lay. As she was crossing a bridge over a crik (a kind of half-creek), a twig snapped, and she frowned. There was a foul smell in the air too, and that meant…
And just like that, up from under the bridge leapt three sizable trolls, gluttonous guts jiggling, drool-ropes snapping, all eighteen of their chins aquiver with delight.
“hey luk at that” said the chief troll, whose gut marked him as one to be reckoned with. “nother girl. pics or gtfo.”
“no wai,” opined his under-troll, who had sacrificed overall girth for truly stupendously packed glutes. “girls rnt real.”
“Let me through,” said Tabitha, who could almost feel a sympathetic twin to her mother’s headache brewing in her skull at that very moment. Trolls are the only creatures in all of existence that must speak entirely through their nostrils, and they possess four of them to aid in this purpose.
“git gud,” said the chief troll smugly. “other girls did.”
“first one pwned us,” said the under-troll, sadly. “such phone. much pain. so ow.”
“The second one simply out-ran us,” said the third (smallest) troll. “We were barely putting paw to bridge before she blew past us on that bicycle. A real speed fiend if you ask me. If she wasn’t wearing that helmet I’d have worried about her; you could break your neck if you so much as go over a crack funny at that speed.”
“Let me pass,” said Tabitha. “I’ll play a game with you.”
“girls don game,” scoffed the under-troll. “no girls in internet”
“wurd”
“It’s a riddle game,” said Tabitha.
The chief troll smiled. “riddle plox.”
“Fine,” said Tabitha. “What is this thing I’m holding in my hand?”
The chief troll squinted at it. “fone?”
“Nope.”
“car keys?” suggested the under-troll.
“Nah.”
The smallest troll scratched its head and frowned. “No clue, sorry. Boy, you know, this test of yours is super hard. You know who else had hard tests? Hitler. Your test is like Hitler.”
“I win. It’s a pager. It’s like a more worthless form of texting.”
The chief troll’s face was turning the colour of a freshly-squashed plum. “HAX1!” he hollered.
“Nope, it’s true. Google it.”
The trolls were slow typists, and Tabitha quietly but efficiently beat feet while they were alt-tabbing.
“Damnit,” she said, as she crested the hills that led her out of suburbia and towards the subway station, “why did we only have the one bike?

Tabitha descended into the depths of the subway station, but then she frowned. The escalator was blocked by what looked like a very long, very expensive suitcase.
She poked it. It ‘ouch’ed.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, as the tail’s owner curled around to face her, little swirls of smoke jetting from its nostrils.
“As you SHOULD be,” said the CEO severely, baring its elegant little dagger-fangs at her. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Nope,” said Tabitha. “Sorry.”
“I’m a wheeler. I’m a dealer. I’m a tiger in the marketplace and an animal in the boardroom. I’ve got a Midas touch that’s even turned my parachutes to gold, and I have a platinum card. I can go an entire week without seeing a single product that I’m not a major shareholder in – three weeks, in America. When I beat my wings on Wall Street, a recession starts in Singapore. I eat accounting departments for breakfast and when I want lunch I eat my competitor’s and for dinner I have a 90-ounce ribeye steak, blue rare, with an entire bottle of scotch. And I do that whenever I feel like it. Now what’s your name? I’m going to buy you out of your family and fire you to a crisp.”
“I forget,” said Tabitha.
“That’s what the last one said,” said the CEO suspiciously. “The one with the bike. ‘I forget,’ she said, and then she sped off. And the one before her said that too, I remember that very clearly. ‘I forget,’ she said, and then she showed me so many pictures on her phone that I had no choice but to submit, it was very intimidating and made me cross. I haven’t fired anyone in at least two hours and it’s ticking me off – those girls! Come to think of it you look like them. Do you look like them?”
“Nope!” said Tabitha. “But I’ve got a super cool trick I can show you. Look at this!”
The CEO craned its massive spine until its skull was level with the pager in Tabitha’s hand, making a noise like a ten ton chain falling down the Eiffel Tower. “What is it?”
“A pager.”
“What’s that?”
“An employee thing.”
“I don’t like employee things,” said the CEO suspiciously. “What’s it for?”
“This,” said Tabitha. And she shoved the pager up the CEO’s right nostril.

Tabitha emerged into the light of day soot-stained, watery-eyed, and frizzily-haired, but most importantly, triumphant. Even if her pants were a lost cause. Who cared, anyways? The pharmacy was in sight; its minarets and turrets a sight to behold. She scurried to the door, each footstep faster than the last until she was in a long-haul sprint, sneakers tumbling past sneakers. The door was in front of her, then it wasn’t, and then she was in the grand hall of the pharmacy, its shelves cascading away from her, its ceiling fans humming magnificently, and its bearded, berobed proprietor glaring at her from atop his throne, behind his counter.
Tabitha approached the counter with absolutely none of the proper obeisance. “Heya,” she said. “Advil please.”
The pharmacist peered at her from behind his half-moon bifocals. “What for?” he asked suspiciously.
“Mom’s headache.”
“No, no, no, no…. what are they REALLY for?”
“Mom’s headache,” said Tabitha patiently.
“A mom? A headache?” said the pharmacist, incredulity ripening in his voice. “Moms and headaches aren’t for goddamned teenagers. You kids just want to homebrew your own drugs. I’ve heard about it on television. You’re going to make ‘lean’ aren’t you? Or maybe ‘lank’ or ‘leprosy.’ I’m sure of it. I’m positive. You goddamned punks get worse every day – why, just this afternoon I’ve already had to detain two of you?”
“Oh yeah?” asked Tabitha. “Why?”
The pharmacist smirked. “The first one was a disruptive influence; her iPhone was scaring away my elderly and senile clientbase. Plus I heard that you can use the sparks from the batteries to turn ordinary plastic into a sinus-shattering joyride. Very naughty! So she went in the jar until I could be arsed to contact the authorities.”
“The jar?”
The pharmacist rummaged behind his desk and, with some swearing, produced a large plastic bottle with a child-proof safety cap. “It has air-holes,” he said proudly.
Tabitha’s eyes narrowed. “And the second?”
“Oh, she was clever! She left her bike outside, where she thought I couldn’t see it. Very cunning, but we have cameras everywhere. I don’t approve of bicycles; cities are made for cars. Next thing you know we’ll have pedestrians wanting in on the racket!” He began to comb his fingers through his bristling beard, trying to get it under some manner of control, then a thought struck him. “Oh, and I’ve had it told from discrete and also highly reputable sources that you can get super high off snorting the air from inside a bike’s tires. So she went in the jar. For her own good, of course. Really, it’s her parents I feel bad for.”
“I’m sure,” said Tabitha. “Look, I need Advil for my mom. Now, please.”
The pharmacist leaned back in his chair and sighed, steepled fingers a study in piousness. “Advil for your ‘vibes’ and ‘420s’ and other such young people youth rascal teen nonsenses, I presume! Pray, tell me, what is your purpose? What gadget or doohickey will you combine with your ‘mother’s’ medication to produce illicit thrills and chills? My spine shudders at the thought! Inform me!”
“Nothing,” said Tabitha.
The pharmacist’s brow knit harder than a four-handed grandmother. “I’m sorry?”
“Didn’t bring anything.”
The pharmacist leaned over his counter, beard dangling. “You’re a teenager,” he hissed, all semblance of reasonableness gone. “You’re ALL up to something! You ALL have your tricks, and your smartphones, and your ‘sugar buzzes’ and your ‘herbs’ and all your, your TOMFOOLERY devoted to getting high. I know it! Now where is it?”
“On the floor,” said Tabitha.
The pharmacist looked down and got as far as “whe-” when Tabitha grasped him firmly by his beard, yanked hard, and swung up onto the counter to the musical sound of his screaming. One hand slashed out with the speed of a swatting kitten and grabbed the jar.
“Give it BACK!” screamed the pharmacist, his long, long boney fingers reaching out for her.
“Sure!” said Tabitha. She gave it back to his forehead as hard as she could , twisted it, and felt the little ‘pop’ of the safety cap dislodging and leaving a nasty welt.
The pharmacist fell over. He was aided in this by the two hundred and ninety pounds of girls that had appeared on his forehead.
“Hi, howyadoing?” asked Tabitha.
“Been better,” said Penelope.
“Yeah, that,” said Charlene. “Let’s just leave the money on the counter, ‘kay?”

They went home.
What more do you want?
Well, okay. On the way home, they took turns riding the bicycle. And Tabitha claimed rescuer’s rights on the iPhone.

“MooooOOOooooOOoooooooooooooooooM, we’re HOME,” droned the call through the house.
“Huh?” asked the leader.
“We come bearing Advil,” said Charlene solemnly as the three filed into her office.
“Tabitha got it,” said Penelope. “There was a bit of trouble. And I think we need a new pharmacist. The old one’s all creepy.”
“Oh, right, right,” said the leader. “Thank you girls, that was sweet.” She rubbed her head. “I’ll just put these aside for now and –”
“But you had a headache!” said Tabitha.
“Well, it’s sort of cleared up by now,” said the leader, half-apologetically. “No offence, but I think just having some quiet time fixed that. You girls tend to ruckus a bit.”
There were complaints, and remonstrations, and apologies, and in the end all wounds were soothed as they should be: with ice cream.
And they all lived pretty happily for a good long while.

Hey, can we talk?
No, no, I’m up and to your left. Woah, sorry, my mistake – MY left, your right. In the air duct. Apologies, but I’ve only really cracked your culturally-mapped navigational coding system in the last sixteen minutes, when I ate the dyslexic guy.
Well yeah I can speak English. That’s the fifth crewmember I’ve devoured down to the level of individual RNA strands, you think I’ve got some sort of learning disability? I realize that this is considered a crass insult by the standards of your species, but come on, so is what you just implied. Have some dignity. Well, as much of it as you can, seeing as you’re doing that ‘whimpering’ thing. What is UP with that?
Okay, okay, let’s get to the meat of things. Sorry, that was a bit ominous. The sharp – wait, the cutting, wait, the piercing, wait, the tearing, no no no NO the POINT of things. Right! Stupid thing, languages. Can’t you just stick to pheromones like any complex species should? Oh there I go again, starting a fight. I’m not here for that! That is precisely the opposite of what I’m here for! I want to talk!
What I want to say is, I think this whole trip got off on the wrong foot. And I’m not casting blame unevenly here; I don’t want to turn this into an exercise in finger-pointing. Yes, you have been trying to track, trap, and destroy me for the last 42 hours, but I have also been defending myself with slightly more gusto than necessary, like when I ate one-third of your co-pilot and left the remains decorating seven major corridor junctions as a territorial marker. What I’m trying to get at here is, well, maybe this is just everybody’s fault. Equally.
Why am I talking to you? Well, why not? It’s you or the captain at this point, and quite frankly, that lady scares me a bit. How do you feel comfortable around someone who’s always saying things like ‘if it can hunt, it can be hunted,’ and ‘anything that tries to hide itself has a weakness’? Psychopathic, if you ask me. Yeah, I know that word. I know how your species works: you are slow, soft, relatively fat-heavy primates that are largely peaceable and social animals who work together for the greater good, a strange state of mind likely induced by your lack of giant jagged ass-blades. Any one of you that’s this quick to switch into murder mode is clearly some sort of social defective, and honestly if I’d known this from the start I’d have pounced on her the first time she spotted me instead of hissing and spitting venom and skittering away into your air filtration system. Saved you some trouble down the road, eh? Wouldn’t have been surprised if she went bugfuck on the way home and chopped a few heads off if I wasn’t here to steal her attention. Really, you should all be grateful. My now-extensive knowledge of slasher movies thanks to your ex-maintenance man says that human-on-human violence is really painful and inefficient, whereas I can kill you guys so quickly that your nervous systems shut off before they know my mandibles even exist. Sorry wait, did I say ‘can?’ I meant ‘have.’ Whoops, and ‘killed.’ Have killed. My mistake, I’m still new at this English, and your system of tenses is utterly insufferable.
Anyways, I’m just chatting to you now in the interests of brokering some sort of peace deal. I think we can all agree that there’s been some major discomfort and awkwardness on this ship ever since I spawned in cargo hold nega-four-beta-alpha-bravo-charlie-tequila, and it hasn’t been satisfactory for anyone. I’ve missed out on the quietest and most relaxing days of my life cycle, and you’ve lost roughly two-thirds of your coworkers to various grisly deaths at my claws, other claws, backup talons, primary talons, secondary talons, jaws, venom sacs, and giant jagged ass-blades. This is something that we all have to work on, and I figured I’d be the one to start by extending the olive branch and putting the first deal on the table: why don’t we split up the ship and go our separate ways before anyone else gets hurt – say, by a flamethrower? That would be really bad. I strongly suggest that we should try to fix this before anybody tries to set anyone else on fire with a flamethrower. I know your species doesn’t like being set on fire – well, not anywhere nearly as much as mine does, but still. I think we should try to broker this deal before any hypothetical people finish work on their makeshift flamethrowers and start searching the ship for innocent bystanders to fricassee, as could potentially happen very shortly. Honestly, I don’t know how you put up with her.
The split? That’ll be plain and simple. You’ll get the emergency escape pod. The captain can have her cabin. And I’ll take everything else.
Of course it’s fair. Are you pregnant? Is the captain pregnant? ‘Cause I don’t see any egg sacs clustered along anybody’s rear limbs. Except mine, because I’m pregnant and I need as much space as possible to fill with my lustrous, pulsating eggs. I’m being over-generous as it is; I could fit an extra nine thousand eggs in the space inside your ribcage, but I’m letting you keep that. I’d appreciate a few limb donations to feed the children, mind you. I don’t think you’ll miss them, seeing as you don’t seem to use them that much – what’s the difference between four and three anyways? Barely a thing.
Woop. Feel those air currents? I think the captain just manually shut down the main oxygen filter and triggered a vent purge. Look, I’ve really got to run. I’ve got another three metamorphoses to go through in the next half-hour and I can’t do that if I’m sucked into hard vacuum. Just think about what I said, okay? And tell the captain. If she doesn’t find you first, the mucus gluing you to your bed should dissolve into your outermost layer of skin in about six minutes four seconds and free you up to go looking for that crazy bitch yourself. I know, I know, gendered insults are bad, but I don’t even HAVE a gender so I’m still getting used to this stuff, okay? Just – just cut me some slack. That’s really what I’d call the point of this conversation: we all need to cut each other some slack. There is plenty of room on this near-derelict death ship for all of us plus my ten million ravenous offspring.
See you later, eh? I don’t think you’ll see me first, though.

Paul was a good boy, Paul was a fine boy, Paul paid attention to his elders. So when Paul was out one fine morning standing in the dawn and feeling the sun tickle him, and he heard the wind whisper: “follow-me, follow-me”…
…Well, he followed it. Can’t get much more elder than that, can you? You can’t. And because Paul was a good boy, a fine boy, a boy who paid attention to his elders, Paul followed it
Over the hill
Across the dale
Down the valley
Up the ridge
And through the trees to the water. Where it left him.

But Paul wasn’t alone for long. As he sat there, huffing and puffing and watching the surf wash in and out, he heard the waves roaring: “come-here, come-here, come-here!”
So because Paul was a good boy, a fine boy, a boy who paid attention to his elders, and because the waves were so very very elder and wiser than he was, he
Waded out through the surf
Paddled through the breakers
Cut himself quite painfully on a reef (ouch!)
And swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam until his legs were numb and his shoulders were screaming and it was starting to feel like less effort to just let the water fill him up and take him away.
Then he touched the beach with one hand, then the other, and it was the warmest, softest thing against his cheek. If it had been edible, he’d have devoured it.

But Paul had no time to rest. A soft little sound was bugging at his ears, tugging at his brain, coughing at his thoughts. From up the hill, from the big dark thickets, the trees were creaking at him: “this-way, this-way, this-way…”
These were no little shrubs, no upstart ruderals. These were old trees, grand trees, the sort of trees that the plant kingdom lived in cowering fear of. Titans of green whose shade choked acres and whose branches out-thickened the trunks of their tiny brethren. Not as old as the wind and waves, but oh so old, oh so much older and elder than Paul, that good, fine, obedient boy who listened to those that were wiser and more experienced than he.
So Paul hauled his aching body to its feet, muscles muttering and cursing at him with foul, ancient tongues, and he
Put one foot in front of the other
And the other
And the other
Tripped over roots
Snared himself in branches
Wallowed in poison ivy
Stepped on a marvellously-coloured snake, which bit him
And finally, finally, finally he was in sunlight again. At least he thought it was sunlight; none of the colours he’d seen over the last leg of the trip were probably real, and the sky was starting to melt into the ground. He very much wanted to sit down and focus on trying to stop spinning for a while.

But Paul couldn’t do that. Because at that very moment a noise emerged from the dull roar of his accelerating heartbeat that was presently filling his ears. It was the long, low groan of the earth itself beneath his feet, the oldest thing he came into contact with day to day. “Here. Here. Here.”
Paul was a tired boy, an ill boy, a boy currently subject to hallucinatory images from sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst, and severely inflamed venomous snake bites. But he had always been told to mind his elders.
So he walked

Stumbled

Tripped

And crawled

To a little ledge on a big cliff that shook when he laid his lacerated, bruised belly upon it. Far below him and spread out from here to there was all that he had travelled – the hills, the forests, the waters, the valleys, and at the very farthest point his own home, a tiny dot what seemed like a thousand miles away. Even through the haze it was beautiful, and Paul felt smaller and more special and fragile than he’d ever known before.
Then the ledge caved in.

It had been a good day, a fine day. And as the sun set over the land, the old old heartless things of it slipped with calm confidence into night-time, murmuring and whispering and rustling to one another in their own words the same message, over and over.
“Just another seven billion or so to go.”

Deep in its crypt, the cacophonan stirred.
This was entirely out of the ordinary for it – nigh-miraculous, really. This particular cacaphonan was older than the mountain over its head, and the vast majority of that life had been spent as it had been only a moment ago. Caught between ticks, but never asleep. Waiting in the quiet, where the sky could not creep in and interrupt.
(The cacaphonan did not like the sky. Too many things moved under it too quickly, all higgledy-piggledy. It was a distraction)
A waste of time, some might call it. But if there was one thing beyond all others that the cacaphonan possessed in abundance, it was time.
But now, an unfamiliar sound had crept into whatever strange place styled itself as its mind. A strange limb touching an old floor so bare that even the dust mites had given up on it millennia ago.
And so the cacophonan stirred itself into motion. It let the cloak of ages drip away from its backs. It picked up its eight staves and three rings. Its innards began to click again. Then, properly presentable, it moved to meet its guest.
It was standing in the main foyer, examining the walls with the obviously impatient patience of the testy. That was normal. It was smaller than the cacaphonan and possessed of fully a third as many appendages, which was not.
It turned at the sound of clicking and examined the cacaphonan with its sense organs. No startlement showed. That meant that it was not lost. The cacaphonan had only experienced that particular type of guest three times, but each had become extremely lively upon meeting it.
But no, this was no wanderer. There was a purpose inside its body. And then it spoke the three strange words, and the cacaphonan knew what it had already suspected: this was a guest.
The cacaphonan inclined its foremask and awaited the wish of its guest.
“I want you to bring me a book.”
And if the cacaphonan had possessed a mouth, or shoulders, or even arms, something about its bearing suggested that it would’ve slumped into a sigh at this exact moment. And perhaps muttered something under its breath that sounded very much like:
“This again?”

The cacaphonan knew of books, if a cacaphonan can be said to know of anything. Its demesne possessed several thousand, tucked in between the parchment scrolls, the clay tablets, the tin cylinders, the rune stones, the song-skulls, the endless chimes, and the whisper jars. It had no ill feelings towards books, if a cacaphonan can be said to hold ill feelings towards anything or things.
But it was always books. The past ninety milennia, always books.
Still, its guest had requested, and so it acted. The Winding stave turned in its toes and the cacaphonan turned to the right and then past the right and through nine hundred and seventy degrees before it fell out of the realm of numbers altogether and landed in a cupboard twenty thousand miles away, give or take. There was a broom jabbing into its central mass.
Something small and eerily quadrupedal opened the door and produced noise.
The cacaphonan considered this, then gave a careful spin of the Coloured stave. This replaced every single part of the thing’s body with something more towards the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum, immediately quieting it. Winding rotated once again and the closet, broom, and expanding cloud of particles were placed somewhere less inconvenient.
The book was somewhere above the cacaphonan’s head. Rooted spun and it drifted upwards through a floor that was busy trying to fall into the ceiling, then knelt down and scrabbled through the debris until it struck floorboard. Good, solid floorboard. The concept was ‘oak’ as far as it understood these things. A brief-lived thing that lived on the scale of decades and centuries that made useful tools when carefully cut up into smaller pieces.
The cacaphonan Coloured it decisively with a red shift and watched as it exploded into an open flame so intense that it ate all the oxygen in the room, vaporized the furnishings, and instantly flash-cooked the large angry biped that had thrown open the door to see what was knocking underneath his floorboards.
The book was behind a single youthful stone in the wall, mortared three hundred eleven years four months three days six hours two minutes one second ago. It yawped resentfully as the cacaphonan gripped its spine.
Winding. Spin.

The cacaphonan appeared two inches behind its guest as courtesy demanded and held the book out in respect. It took six minutes for it to be noticed; the guest was somewhat distracted examining the cacaphonan’s resting place. The indentations where its toes had rested drew special attention.
“You have it?”
The cacaphonan did not move.
It expelled air from its lungs, turned, and took it. “Well. I did not come here for your conversation, so I can scant complain. Now. Bring me the second book.”
And if the cacaphonan had possessed eyesbrows, it would have raised them.

The second book was harder to find. The cacaphonan had gone through several quiet times since its presence had been requested, or indeed been known to the world at large at all.
Winding.
The cacaphonan stepped out from behind a dust speck and found itself suspended in a cloud seven miles above the surface of the planet. Excellent. There was a hot presence at the nape of its core, a gaze heavy with anger and a tiny bit of worry and then a lot more anger. It was being watched by an old thing, a thing it recalled hosting long ago. Though it didn’t recall it being quiet so large. The thing that now glared at him from within its cumulus den was the size of a mountain.
“You!” it roared – oh, such a roar, all thunder and fury. Why must the world be so noisy? Tiny bolts of lightning sparked off its mouth and slid down to the ground far below. “You! You won’t have it! You won’t! It’s mine now! You gave it!”
The cacaphonan did not judge the thing for its poor hosting skills. To play host was the role of the cacaphonan, to make demands was the role of the guest, and to be impediments to the demands of the guest was the role of most everything else. One of the ways of such impediments as this creature was a failure to realize that the roles played by the participants were fleeting. Even now it was vomiting a tornado directly into the cacaphonan’s face.
This was unacceptable. Several of the cacaphonan’s joints were in danger of discoupling. The Slipped stave hopped and air resistance ceased to apply to the creature in totality for six seconds, including its wingbeats. This removed the issue of the cacaphanon’s joint strain but grossly increased the volume of the creature’s bellows, to the point of inflicting acute pain in the cacaphonan’s mind and causing it to black out.
It woke up four inches above the ground. Rooted put a stop to that. Groans had replaced the all-consuming scream of rage; the creature’s landing had been considerably less gentle.
“Not yours,” it managed, hauling itself upright on its five remaining legs. “Mine now. You gave it to me.” Even half-upright, even with most of its body spilling out of its ruptured epidermis, it was moving. Its ears were bent and its jaws were dancing. Sparks spilled from its mouths, trees splintered under its limbs, and then the whole thing was airborne again, if just for a moment, just long enough to send it hurtling at the cacaphonan. “Mine!”
The cacaphonan Knotted its bones together with some of the trees it was knocking over and watched as it convulsed in mid-air, body snapping as weak wood came apart at the seams under stress it never could’ve imagined. By then it was awfully close though. It seemed a pity not to just reach out and take it.
Twitching jumped, and as every nerve in the creature’s body switched on and off again its mouth slid open, revealing teeth ten times the cacaphonan’s height and a single, plain-covered book, half-tucked under the gumline of the eighth mammoth canine for safe-keeping.
Winding. The Cacaphonan plucked it free. There!
Then the creature’s brain turned back on again and its mouth shut.

The book was largely unharmed, miraculously. The cacaphonan had gone to great pains to engineer that miracle. One of its younger antennae had been sacrificed.
“Good,” said the guest, as it stroked its cover with loving digits. The muscles on its skull moved in odd ways. “Good, good.”
It looked up. “Now get me the last one.”
The cacaphonan could not be surprised. But it was most definitely not prepared to hear that.

The last book the cacaphonan had not seen since it was born. It had been inside a box inside a hole under a stone within a pit inside a quarry in the bowels of a chasm below a mountain at the far end of the smallest moon of the world, the calm grey one where ten million years can drift by and see the same amount of change as ten minutes. There was only one other being who had even guessed at its existence, and the cacaphonan was currently its host.
Even a large moon is a surprisingly difficult target. It took the cacaphonan six Windings before it hit the mark. Six times it felt the hunger of the empty sky against skin, six times the Calmed stave bounced and froze it in between the moments, gave it the time to reconsider and re-aim.
On the seventh try, it was entirely encased in stone that hadn’t moved since the world began, gripped in a beautiful, tranquil slumber on a rock in the sky. The cacaphonan Knotted the air in its long spiral lung into the rock surrounding it, then Rooted the shattered stones repeatedly until the stars were smiling overhead again. It peered at them, looking for answers.
There.

It was so quiet here. The cacaphonan was almost tempted to idle, to take its time and enjoy the calm, long silence. But there was a guest, a very important guest, and there was nothing in all its life that it could do as important as this. It would enjoy its time here, but it would not dawdle.
Four Windings to find the right mountain.
Seven rockslides to be Rooted.
An entire mile-long tunnel bored out with Coloured and Knotted staves.

The box was much smaller than it had remembered. Its toes shook as it plucked the book from its gullet.
Then the Winding stave twirled, and it was gone.

The cacaphonan’s guest was a quick reader. It finished the book in a matter of minutes, slowed mostly by the halting, jabbing, fumble-fingered movements of its pudgy little digits.
Then it looked up at the cacaphonan again. The little flaps of skin at the forefront of its skull spread wide, the muscle in its mouth danced in that odd way it had of shaping sound. “Give me your staves.”
The cacaphonan had heard this before many times. It did nothing.
The guest smiled wider, and it spoke again. This time the words it used were not shaped with its mouth. They, too, the cacaphonan had heard before. Once. The words of the third book.
“Please,” appended the guest.
The cacaphonan placed Winding on the floor hesitantly, slowly, as if it couldn’t quite understand how. But then down came Coloured, and that was faster, and then Rooted, Slipped, each quicker, more sure, more sharp, as if it had desired to do this all along but had never found the way. Knotted, Twitching, and Calmed; a pattern was brewing, a tidy little heap. Seven staves.
“The last,” said the guest.
The cacaphonan held Nothing for a moment, searching to make sure it was proper, then placed it. Symmetry had been achieved.
It watched as the guest picked up Coloured, examined it, waved it experimentally, dropped it carelessly back to the floor. It waited.
“Now,” said the guest – and the cacaphonan couldn’t help but notice that it was breathing quicker and harder now, its body speeding up against its will – “now the rings.”
The cacaphonan waited. This too was familiar.
The guest spoke again, without sound.
The cacaphonan placed the three rings on the pile. Unsupported, they lay on edge. The guest tried to push one over and seemed satisfied when this did not work in the slightest.
“Perfect,” said the guest.
The cacaphonan watched as the guest picked up one of the rings, turned it to and fro in the small light that remained from its lantern.
It had seen this all before, once. And now, if its memory was not entirely gone, there was only one thing left to do.
It picked up Nothing, spun it twice, and as the guest turned and began to open its slow strange mouth again to speak more useless words, it sank it through the cacaphonan’s core and past its central nerve cluster.

The trek towards home promised to be long, with days in the dark passing before the first hints of sunlight began to turn black to grey in the caves ahead. The staves were restless in Olno’s grip, the rings suddenly cold and gritty on her skin as a breeze from the surface touched her. The discomfort was a price worth paying. She had power in her grip that rulers would’ve burned their children for, and the knowledge of how to use it. She had found the secret demon that hid the three truths of the mind, body and soul from the world and she had defeated it so utterly that it had given up its life before her eyes. She was destined to make a mark upon the world that no-one, not even the most ignorant peasant, could ever fail to learn of.
But…
…If only she could have some quiet. It was too noisy all the way up here, so close to the sky. No less than four times she’d thought she’d smelled surface air, she’d almost clambered her way out a side passage, and she’d been driven back by the trickle of running water, the rush of the wind, the murmur and rumble of earthworms.
No. This was spoiling her focus. She just needed some time to think. To sit and think and rest. She had plenty of time to learn of her new treasures, to ponder her new knowledge, her new self. To find somewhere cool and dark and secret, far away and under stone.
If there was one thing she had in abundance, it was time.

I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I was sick of being last to the table. I was tired of always being the little guy, getting pushed down. And because of these and ten thousand other clichés I walked into the dark, cool store (the doors went ‘ding’), walked past ten thousand machines of death to the counter, and told the clerk: “I want a bomb.”
The clerk blinked at me. It was a last-second swerve out of what had blatantly begun as a pair of rolled eyes. “Yes, sir. That is what we sell. What kind of bomb do you want?”
I hesitated. “A good one. Something that’ll take out as much as possible.”
“A bit… broad of a request there, sir. Our payloads vary greatly. I can give you a nice little piper that’ll take out a large Humvee, or a wad of C4 that’ll take out a skyscraper if placed correctly. However, as I can see that you’re new to this, perhaps a simple detonator pack would be nice? The controls are quite simple, and you can ensure your complete safety from the blast zone at your leis-”
“That,” I interrupted him, “is not one of my concerns.”
“Oh,” he said. And this time he did roll his eyes, the unshaven little git, quick-like so he thought I wouldn’t notice. “One of THOSE kind of bombs, huh? Right, right. Well, it literally is your right.”
He took me to a side shelf in a dimly-lit corner whose ugly chunky contents were not improved by the obscuring gloom, and he began to list names.
“The Patriot, the Retort, the Screaming Eagle, the Fourth of July, the STFU, the Rolling Thunder, the Porky…”
“’Porky’?”
“Set it off and th-th-th-that’s all folks.”
I frowned. “I don’t get it.”
I wasn’t looking at the clerk, but I could tell he was rolling his eyes again. I let it pass. “Look, I have eight grand in the bank, and I won’t be spending it tomorrow. What can I get for that?”
Five minutes later I stepped into the sunlight again (‘ding’), seven thousand nine hundred and forty-three dollars lighter and one chest-mounted triple-reinforced water-resistant FDA-approved extra-hi-payloaded ergonomically-supported bomb secured to my chest. The sun sparkled on it in approval, the pedestrians nodded their admiration, and the little rubberized EZ-grip dead-man’s-switch felt nice and solid in my sweaty hand.
The world was my oyster, and I knew exactly where to start prying.

The sign on my workplace was heavy and dull and grey, just like the inside of the building. And just like the building, it aimed to disappoint.
CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK. How was that fair? How was that fair? The one goddamned day I go and get the bomb and the boss goes home because he’s CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK, fuckin’ Eddie from the cube across me is sitting in his swishy apartment because of CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK, the secretary that always pretends I don’t exist when I’m talking is CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK. Fuck, I didn’t even know where half of them lived. Maybe I should’ve bought six or seven pipe bombs and a copy of the yellow pages – no, no, no. Breath, damnit. I could still make this work. Maybe I couldn’t make it work like I’d figured it would, but I could still make it work.
The kebab stand where I’d been short-changed six times wasn’t there today either. Damnit. I could’ve even had a last meal, and for once I wouldn’t have had to worry about the runs.
My ex wasn’t answering her phone. Double-damnit, probably at work then.
Dad was safely under six feet of sod.
Mom was somewhere in Cuba, and I doubted I could get a plane ticket for six bucks and a nickel.
Maybe that guy on Facebook? Yeah, the one who’d left all those smarmy comments on that perfectly reasonable article I linked. Yeah, fuck that guy. Where’d he live again?
Some quick phone-work told me that it was a four-hour drive out of town. Fuck, I didn’t want to drive for four hours just to blow myself up. I was expecting to do this half an hour ago, and my thumb was getting sore on the deadman switch. What if I just let it slip for a second changing hands on the wheel halfway there and blew up on an empty stretch of highway between Bumfuck and Fuckall? Worthless. A waste of money.
I realized I’d been pacing in circles for two minutes straight on the same street corner. Fuck. Got to pull myself together. Right. So personal’s out. What’s left? Dramatic. Where’s dramatic?
My eyes roved through downtown. Skyscraper after skyscraper. Just pick one of the big ones. Or… the tower! Yeah, take out the tower, take out a monument! That’d be good.

“I’m sorry sir, but this simply isn’t possible.”
The ticketmaster was polite, professional, calm, and entirely unsympathetic.
“Look, it’s just one bomb. Just ONE bomb.”
“Sir, only guests in possession of a fully paid membership can bomb the tower on scheduled appointments, weekends only as weather permits. It’s one of the tallest freestanding structures in the world; policy prohibits random bombings.”
I sighed. “Could you just… not tell anybody? Say I snuck by you?”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I will not risk my job for you. And there are cameras.”
“Right. Right. Fine. Fuck. Sorry.”

The biggest skyscrapers belonged to the banks.
“No non-employees outside the lobby, sir.”
“Five minutes?”
“No non-employees outside the lobby, sir.”
“Two?”
The security guard took two steps closer. If I craned my head, I could see the glisten of the interior lighting on his teeth.
“No non-employees outside the lobby. Sir.”
“Okay.”

I sat on the street corner. My thumb was really hurting now. I hoped it wasn’t a cramp.
What was left? Try to bomb the stadium? No… I couldn’t afford a ticket. Maybe the zoo? No, ticket. Everyone I wanted to bomb was missing, and every other fucking thing worth bombing in this city had a fucking entry fee fuck fuck fuck damnit shit PISS!
Maybe I should just bomb myself. Go home and bomb the house. Leave a note or something. Last resort. Or I could get my money back. Walk up to that smirking asshole with a patch of scruff pretending to be a third of a beard and hand him back his gadget and get my money back and feel him rolling his fucking eyes at me as I walk off…
…oh.
Well, that was right in front of my face now, wasn’t it?

‘ding’