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Once upon a time – and a space too, for good measure – there was a young girl being tucked into bed by her mother, who was pouting. The girl, not the mother. Don’t confuse the two.
“What’s wrong, sweetness?” asked the mother.
“Life is confusing and hard,” said the girl. “I wish it made sense.”
“Well, sometimes it all seems that way,” said the mother, whose name was actually Alison. “But just keep trying your best, and I promise it’ll all become clear to you someday.”
“Night,” said the girl, whose name was Becky.
“Good night,” said the mother whose name was Alison.
And that was that, until a bit past midnight the girl whose name was Becky (called Becky) heard a strange curdled crying coming from underneath her door. At first she thought it was the Ancient Nibs, their primeval cat, but then it failed to rise to his familiar yodel-whine crescendo and her curiosity was aroused.
The hall was empty. The living room was quiet. And then, in the bathroom, half-tucked under the dryer, she found it. It was small and wrinkled and looked like a throw pillow that had put on three different wedding dresses and it was absolutely bawling its eyes out.
“What’s wrong?” asked Becky.
“The sinister Sock-King! He rules the Lint-land with a woolen fist! My family is due to be darned to heck underneath his regime! And I can’t find anyone to help!”
Becky pondered this. The way her mom had explained it, she’d figured it would take life longer than this to start explaining itself, and that it’d be a bit less direct. But what the hey, right?
“Lead on!” said Betty, striking her most dynamic possible pose. She pointed forwards with more than one finger, for extra emphasis.
“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!” cheered the small pillow. “I am Fwump, sonlette of Fwopp. This way, this way!”
And as Becky crawled headfirst down the bathroom’s heating duct, she hoped that this would be over before breakfast. Even if it was a weekend, she thought her mom would get suspicious if she was still out at noon.

By nine-thirty Becky staggered out of the bathroom, bleary-eyed. In one hand she held a tattered towel, in the other her fist clenched a dislocated drying-rack rod. She’d also acquired the seeds of seven new wrinkles.
“Morning, sweetness!” said Alison. “Goodness, what’s that for?”
Becky stared at what six days ago she’d been told was the legendary sockslayer-blade, whose secret name she’d learned twelve hours ago was Woolsplitter, which she had only minutes hence buried in the black thread of the Sock-King.
“Dunno,” she said. “It broke. Where’s breakfast?”
And as she ate and dodged questions about the state of her hair, Becky reflected upon the many humbling and valuable life-lessons she had learned, often at the point of a hand-knitted spear. Well, she supposed it beat gym class.

“Psst,” said the voice.
Becky paused, one hand still ready to pounce upon the piece of kindling she’d selected.
“Psst.”
Becky straightened up and looked around. The woodshed was empty.
“Naw, down HERE.”
She looked down there. A mouse was twitching its whiskers at her. Or maybe it was a rat.
“Hey lady. Name’s Mike, I’m here on behalf of a couple of… associates. Can you do us a solid?”
“A what?” Rude, maybe, but the mouse wasn’t exactly being polite either.
“A favour. You scratch our back we scratch your back. YagetwhaddImean?”
“Igeddwhaddyamean. What needs doing?”
“Hey hey – not so loud, not so loud, hey? C’mon. We can talk on the go. Eat this seed.”
Becky had been told not to take candy from strangers, but seeds weren’t candy and mice were a pretty familiar sight in the woodshed. Gulp, swallow, and then she was four inches tall and chasing the mouse down a knothole, into a world of tunnels.

“Back so soon?” asked Alison. “What kept you out there?”
“I had to learn the meaning of true friendship and loyalty,” said Becky.
Alison sighed. “All right, all right. We can stop the sarcasm, both of us.”
Becky, who had just been nearly-betrayed and then not-betrayed six times by Mike before, during, and after an epic duel above a bottomless badger-burrow against a blind albino rat, said nothing.
Instead, she handed over the kindling.
“Thanks, sweetness.”
Nod.

Gym class was not fun. Particularly the rope. Becky could not climb the rope. But dodgeball was a close second, and dodgeball where you get targeted over and over was right up there, and dodgeball where everyone picks on you until you yell at them and then you get told to pick up and store everything while everyone else gets to leave early was slightly worse than the rope, unless you had blisters.
The gym closet was enormous. Somewhere in this maze of old, broken plastic and mangled, matted foam was a bin full of old soccer balls too malformed for the field yet still firm enough to bruise flesh on impact.
Somewhere.
She was almost positive.
Maybe it was behind this mat? No, wait, that mat.
“Shit,” she said. A small gasp came from behind her.
Becky sighed and rubbed her face. “Problem?”
“Yes.” The voice was timidity in a bottle.
“Need help?”
“If you would, please.”
“Right. Be there in a moment.” She threw the ball up in the air and watched as it slowly landed, bounced twice, and tipped over a small Everest of delicately-balanced lacrosse sticks.
She shrugged, decided against using more than one swear per minute, then turned to face the tiny, pitiful little catcher’s mitt that had addressed her. A small pink ribbon was wrapped around its thumb.
“Okay, ready.”

The bus home was quiet, although some of that could’ve been exhaustion. The polo-battle against Prince Goalpost at the wedding-funeral would have worn Becky out enough even if it had happened after a normal day, even after a normal gym day, even after a normal gym day with dodgeball. It had all been quite excessive, especially the part where she had to outrun a speeding fastball.
She slammed open the house’s door with the swagger of a ten-year-old. “Hello mom school was fine thank you today I learned that there are more kinds of strength than just pure physical prowess and that true bravery comes from overcoming your fear okay that’s nice when’s dinner?”
“Ow,” replied the door.
Becky moved the door, allowing the coat that was pinned behind it to flap free.
“By node.”
“You don’t have a nose.”
“Eaby fur yu to bay.”
Becky rolled her eyes as carefully as she could manage. It was dextrous to behold.
“Okay, okay. Fine. Look, are you busy?”
“Yes,” said Alison.
“Oh. Are you really busy?”
“Yes.”
“REALLY busy?”
“Yes.”
“Super-truly-really-busy?”
“Yes.”
“Super-truly-really-busy-with-sprinkles-and-whipped-cream-and-fudge-and-cherries-and-smarties-and-coconut-on-top?”
“Yes. I hate coconut.”
“Ah. Super-truly-really-bu-“
Alison sighed for sixteen seconds straight. It was the only thing she felt free to do anymore. “What do you need?” she asked.
“Well, there’s this magical button…”

“Wakey-wakey, sweetness! Rise ‘n shine! You sleep in too much nowadays, are you going to bed on time?”
“Mmmph,” said Becky to her pillow.
“Allliieee. Are you listening to me?”
“Yuh,” said Becky. She flipped over. “Yeah. Just tired. Overcame greed, learned that happiness is not money. Big day.”
“That’s… nice,” said Alison. “Civics homework, was it?”
“Sort of.” If she closed her eyes, she could still see the view from the zipperlin as she danged from its landing gear, while Oveur’s eyes darted from her to the falling Bling Button and back again. Right choice or not, he’d hesitated too long for her liking.
“Well, time to get up. Breakfast’ll be quick today.”
“Right,” said Becky. She rubbed her face three times fast, stretched, got up, and reached for her backpack to find it gaping and empty. Her window was open and a tiny thing that looked like a cross between a hobbit and a broom was legging it down the yard with her homework flapping in the morning breeze.
She sighed.

“Mom,” asked Becky later that day, rubbing a welt on her arm from where a mop-goblin had landed a lucky blow with its battleswiffer, “does life ever STOP teaching you things?”
“No, not really,” said Alison. “There’s always something new to learn, even for people who think they’ve seen it all. Is there something wrong, sweetness?”
Becky shrugged. Her rubbing took on a vindictive air.

One week, six Lessons of Friendship, three There’s More to Life Than You’s, five Learn to be Happy as Yourselfs, and a But Don’t Stay as a Jerk Either later, Becky woke up at midnight because she couldn’t hear a thing.
She looked in the fridge. Nothing.
She checked under the stairs. Nothing.
She looked in all the heating ducts and up and down the halls and in the bookcases and under the door-cracks and even snuck up into the attic, where she personally upended each and every single one of the incredibly dusty old boxes that her grandma had given then a thousand years ago.
Nothing.
Becky snuck back downstairs to her room, rolled into her bed with the grace of a pouncing lion, and slept like a stone for three seconds before she heard a cough and pounced back upright with the fury of an angry hippo, flattening her room’s latest invader to the carpet with one hand.
“Speak,” she hissed, a fist raised.
“Urk,” proclaimed her guest. It seemed to be a box of cereal.
Becky corrected her grip. “NOW speak.”
“needsomeonetoquestforthemissingcrownofbreakfastorthekingwilllosehisthronepleasethankyoufornotchokingme-“
Becky uncorrected her grip to give herself some quiet time, and began to think.
She corrected it again. “What is this about?”
“crownofbreakfa-“
“What is it ABOUT?”
The box blinked through watery, raisin-like little eyeballs. “Uhhh….”
She used both hands. “What is it about FOR ME?”
“Ack!”
Both hands slightly more gently.
“The-ah-ah-ah… the need for careful contemplation before making rash decisions on preformed opinion-ACK!”
Becky opened her window, ejected the intruder, then went back to bed.
Five minutes later she was in the kitchen, interrogating a set of forks.
“I said no,” she said.
“Nuh-uh,” said the larger fork.
“Yeah,” said the smaller fork. “Never said no, you just threw ‘im out the wind-URK.”
“No.”
They went out the window too. And then they started rattling its latch, and then came the strawberries, and soon it was two hours past and there was a small mob in her room shrieking and clamouring and yammering and jumping and
“ENOUGH!”
being very quiet.
“If we’re going to do this,” said Becky, “this time, YOU’RE going to listen to ME. And you’re going to do it NOW. Get it?”
Nods.
“Good. Now go to the kitchen and arm yourselves.”

Six minutes later, the first boot hit Breakfast Kingdom soil and the most ruthless conqueror ever to grace its milky fields follow suit, her army of enslaved Spoonlings at her back. Few books gave precise records of the war, for most citizens fled screaming rather than bear witness to its crimes, but most reports placed the Enemy at roughly four-foot-nine, with burning eyes and a fierce intolerance for gentle homilies. Her flag was a ragged box-top, and its pole was the latest in a series of hesitant, halting endearing sidekicks to attempt to gift her with humble homespun anecdotes of simple, sweet morality. She plunged the land into a thousand-year state of darkness from which it never truly recovered, and it was soon absorbed by Luncheonea in a blatant act of imperialist aggression.
Becky slept sound and safe for six hours and had her first happy schoolday in half a month. She walked back home humming a Spoonling war-hymn as her mother looked up.
“Hi sweetness. You look chipper – learn anything at school today?”
“Just one thing,” said Becky. “How to say no.”

“The world is ending,” Ikka told his parents.
“The world is ending,” Ikka told his six siblings.
“The world is ending,” Ikka told his friends and near-relations.
“The world is ending,” Ikka told them all. “And it’s ending soon.”
They all laughed at him, or yelled at him, or ignored him, and then when he persisted he was thrown off the spine for his troubles and chased away to sulk out of the eyes of right-thinking people who were trying to eat their meals of delicious parasites in peace.
All but one person. Ikka hiked himself up on his little claws and spread his wings and took himself off and along to the very edge of the world, where home ended and the Strange began.
“They didn’t listen to me,” he said.
“Told you,” said the world.
Ikka looked down into one big, black eye beneath him. It failed to focus, clouded by cataracts and the soft red glare of the setting sun. “But they should have listened!”
“Most people find talking more pleasant. Hard to talk when someone else is talking.”
Ikka scraped at the world and himself at once. He was not a very pretty person, and this did not add to his appearance; already he was criss-crossed with scratches and cuts from his own claws. “But the world’s going to end! You’re going to end! There’s got to be something we can do, but they need to listen!”
“They’ll listen. Eventually,” said the world. It blinked, slow as a glacier. “Just wait and watch. You’ll. See.”
Ikka shook himself. “Even if they listen, what do we do?”
“You. ‘ll see.”
“See what?”
The world blinked again, slower still. This time it didn’t finish.

The end of the world was much faster than Ikka had expected, but still oh so very terribly, awfully slow.
First it shook under his feet as muscles that had held their grip for decades eased into slackness. Then came the groaning as bones ground on bones ground to powder, with the uneasy whistle of moving air as the horizon slid off-center.
And last of all, there came the crash.

The Night That Never Ended started immediately, although of course nobody knew that was what it was called at the time. All they knew was that the world had ended, gone cold and cooling still underneath their feet.
Some denied it, tried to cling still and not move, hoping against hope that it was just another seizure, another sudden bout of sleep, a severe fit of the limbs. Some abandoned hope and fell down to the dirt, wings and eyes empty. Some took to the sky and spun higher and higher in crazy circles, shrieking and staring, hunting frantically for the world, where had the world gone?
Soon, the question was answered. The night grew fangs and claws and hungry eyes and poured into the void left by the world. The dirtbound were trampled out of carelessness or killed for idle sport; the deniers fled or were consumed along with the world’s own flesh; the screamers grew weary and blundered through thickets, headlong into waiting mouths and bellies.

The Night That Never Ended ended, and the dawn rose on a worldless place, a worldless place with far fewer than had seen the sun set. Ikka was huddled with them, the last of them, stranded on a treetrunk that smelled of bark and bitter leaves. He welcomed it. Anything to obscure the stench of blood that seemed to have eaten into his brain. The fear and flight of the dark had torn his stomach into emptiness, and already he was craving the taste of parasites.
“We need a world,” he told his mother.
“We need a world,” he told his two siblings.
“We need a world,” he told his friend.
“We need a world,” he told them all. “And we need it now.”
The few who could look at him looked blank. The rest stared at their feet, or the sky, or the dirt down below where the bones littered the forest floor.
And so Ikka spread his wings again and took flight into the emptiness above the dirt, looking for a world.

Through the trees and under the trees above the brush and into the glens and hollows flew Ikka, and underneath him he saw dirt and the things of the dirt. Sometimes a scuttling at the edge of his vision would fill him with hope, but then it would scurry under a bush or behind a root and he would see it for what it was: not a world at all, but a tiny thing searching for a place to hide. He felt a kinship that disturbed him greatly.
Come midday Ikka sat on a branch and probed for insects in its bark. They tasted like rot and damp, and his claws sat awkwardly on the cold brown shag that should have been good grey scales shot through with the warmth of sixteen tons of flesh.
He missed the world. He shut his eyes and tried not to whimper too loudly; his snorting was growing distracting. Then came awareness, and he looked down.
A thing was feeding at the ferns at the base of his tree. What it was he did not know, but it was bigger than he was, and right now that was all that he’d ever wanted.
“Hello?” he said.
It rolled its eyes lazily in a circle. After some minutes, one of them settled upon him.
“Are you the world?”
It shrugged placidly, sending the vertical plates along its back into a gentle wave. Its mouth did not pause in its quest to consume for a second.
“It could be that you’re the world and don’t know it. May I land on you?”
Shrug.
Ikka landed, and felt hide underneath him for the first time in what felt like a thousand days. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine that the world had never ended.
Except…
…except he had to close his eyes. The moment they were open, everything went wrong. This world was too small, its back was too crowded. The plates were broad and many, and the finest places on the spine were rendered squished by them. There would barely be room for them as it were, and what about when the hatchlings came? No nest could stay stable on this narrow back. And with the dirt so near, he didn’t trust it to stay safe. Certainly not with this world guarding them. It seemed barely aware of itself, let alone him, let alone dozens and dozens of fledglings that would need a wary mind to ward them in the dark.
“I am sorry,” said Ikka, “but I was mistaken in my eagerness. You are not the world, and I will not trouble you further.” And with that he flew away, wondering if the thing had even noticed he was there at all.

Up into the hills and over the hills and down the dunes raced Ikka and underneath him he saw the dirt vanish, replaced by blue water that he’d never imagined, as far as the eye could see. It was a river without end, and he hovered fearfully over it, looking over his shoulder for what he’d never imagined to be comforting: the sight of dirt. Then a gust of warm air from below sent him spinning head over tail, squawking with alarm.
A deep, guttural coughing sound. Something was laughing at him. Ikka peered downwards and immediately mashed his wings for height: the thing whose eyeball was leering at him was half-submerged, but its teeth were nearly as big as he was.
“Be careful!” he admonished.
It laughed again. “I didn’t see you there, little speck. And I’ve never seen the like of you before. How do you catch fish to eat when you’re nearly plankton yourself?”
“I don’t know what a fish is,” said Ikka, “and you’re being most disrespectful and unkind. I am looking for a world to live on.”
“There are worlds and worlds,” commented the thing. “Mine is this water. Yours is what, the empty sky? Don’t you get dry up there?”
“No,” said Ikka, and a wave of nostalgia swept through him. “My world is skin on flesh and bone under blood. Scales farther than I can fly on a wingbeat and a foot-tread that keeps us far above the dirt below. A place where delicious parasites pop fresh from its pores and the hatchlings nest on a back wide enough for six to groom snout-to-tail. That is my world, and it has ended, and I am looking for a new one.”
“You sound to be a disreputable lot of ride-hitchers,” said the thing. “But did you say parasites just now? I suffer from them myself, and I would be obliged if you would pick at them.” And it rolled itself about in the water so that Ikka could look at its back, which was indeed mottled with little things that were not part of the natural blue-and-white of its hide.
“Certainly,” said Ikka uncertainly, for the thing was so very large and the water was larger still. But he set down on the cold, damp surface willingly enough. It was slippery under his claws, and colder than he would’ve guessed. But the parasites were real – great crunchy things that built their own nests around them in spiral towers – and he prised them out with vigor and vim. It had been too long since he’d eaten something that felt fat and bloody.
“Ahhh….” sighed the thing under him. Its lungs were even greater than the world’s had been, and he felt nostalgia tickling at his wingtips again. “That’s better. How many of your kind are there, little speck?”
“Dozens,” said Ikka. “No. Just a few dozen now.”
“You are welcome to my back if you wish it,” it said. “That feels so much better, and you work more quickly than the little reef-fish. Will you not stay a while?”
Ikka thought it over. It wasn’t the old world, but it was a world, and that was so much more than there had been just minutes ago. “Yes!” he cried.
“To the shore, then,” said the thing. And it dove into the water with the swiftness of a serpent, leaving Ikka to drown.
“Help!” he shrieked. “Help! Help!” The sky was dropping away above him, the blue was filling up his eyes. He tried to call, but could only taste rain and a deep, bilious salt. His head was more water than air. Then the ripple from the tail of the thing swept underneath him, stronger than the currents, and he was sent flying into the air in a tangle of wings.
Ikka turned his fall into a swoop just inches from the water again, and barely found the strength to cough.
“Are you there?” said the thing, surfacing beneath him again. “You seemed to have wandered off.”
“I think,” managed Ikka. “I think. I am sorry. Mistaken. You’re not the world. You live where we never. Can.” How in the name of anything had it done that, had it brought itself under the water? Madness! You might as well travel over the sky!
It sighed, sending another warm gust of air into his wings – and a good thing too, he was still mightily wet. “Suit yourself. A pity to lose such cleaners, but worse things happen at sea. Good luck to your world, little speck.”
“And you, yours,” said Ikka. And with that he flew towards the sight of dirt, coughing whenever he wasn’t shivering.

Past the shore and over the dunes and into the basin flew Ikka, watching the plains roll by underneath him, scanning for any hope of a world. Here was where the world had wandered when his mother was born, he recalled. He’d heard stories of it, of places where no trunk dared rear itself, where the sky was in sight at all times. It made him feel nearly as small as the water had, especially when the sunset caught the clouds on fire and painted it all red as blood.
He needed a roost, but there was nowhere high at all. Then luck – a crag of stone, toppled and unmoving in the crimson of the evening. Only barely better than dirt itself for a lair, but he could squeeze himself into a crevice and call it enough for the night.
The crevice opened an eye as he alighted next to it. “Hello,” said Ikka, after he remembered to breath.
Muscles moved underneath his feet and he felt that whatever-it-was was smiling. “Hello,” replied the thing. “What are you doing here, so far away from home? Where is your flock?”
“Hiding,” said Ikka. “I am searching for a new world for us to live on, as our old one died. Do you know of any places such as that?”
“Worlds…” mused the thing. “Tell me, what kind of worlds are these?”
“Huge ones,” said Ikka. “Strong bodies on strong legs with tails that are as big again as the rest combined and muscles that never tire. And delicious parasites.”
“Mmm,” it purred. “Well, perhaps we can help each other. I am strong, strongest of all I know. My legs are the swiftest of these prairies, my tail is my rudder that controls my sprint. I can hound and harry for hours if I must, but if I must I have failed for my kills are measured in minutes. As for size, I have a large pack whose backs you may also claim besides my own – ah, you will have room for sixteen children each unto sixteen generations before you run cramped! But there is one thing, one very small thing you request where I falter: I cannot help you with parasites. My kind are cleanly.”
“Oh,” said Ikka.
“But perhaps I can give you other meals,” it continued. “You could be very useful to me, and that would be repaid in foods richer than you know. Tell me, how high can you fly? How far? How fast?”
“Very, widely, and speedily, respectively,” said Ikka. “Why?”
“I am strong, and I am fast, but I cannot move forever without rest,” said the thing. “If your kind finds my meals for me, I will feed you on the scraps when the kill is done and my young have consumed their last. You may think parasite a fine meal, but I swear to you that you have never fled on flesh bred from bones. The young are tender, the old are meaty, and both produce a mountain of meat beyond your imagining! Swear to serve, and I and mine will provide for you and yours with bounty.”
Ikka couldn’t believe his luck. Not only a world found, but a world of endless feasts! Not only would there be room enough for all and then some, but on a family that would grow even as their two families prospered! Even as they hunted, even as they killed, even as they brought low… others.
“What will we hunt?” asked Ikka.
“Prey,” said the thing. “Vaster than us, but slower and clumsier. Broad of back and small of head. Their limbs are pillars and their brains are as trickles of water. Scarcely worth mentioning.”
Ikka felt the spring that was his own mind freeze solid. “They are worlds,” he said.
“Prey.”
“Worlds.”
“I told you twice and I tell you again: they are prey.”
“I tell you now and forever,” said Ikka, “I tell you this: they are worlds. And you want to kill them. How many of my own people will we render worldless and alone if we aid your hunts? How many more families must take up service as your pets for shelter and food?”
“They are not your pack, and not your concern,” said the thing. “Your moral qualms are tiresome. Swear unto me.”
“I am sorry,” said Ikka, “but I was mistaken. You are no world. You are a world-killer, and I will not have other worlds die so that my family can claim one. No, I will not swear to you. Not now, not until the never-ever comes.”
And because Ikka was not entirely empty of sense he said this as he flung himself skywards, which was just barely fast enough for the teeth of the terrible thing behind him to clash at his tail-tip rather than his neck.

Across the endless plain flew Ikka, wings struggling to capture any hint of dying thermals as the night cold rushed in, eyes searching the growing dark for a place to land, any place to land at all that wasn’t the dirt where the awful thing with the teeth and the glowing eyes and most importantly of all legs that seemed as tireless as it had boasted.
“Yield,” said the awful voice that seemed to have death seeped into its every word. It was below – where? He couldn’t see.
“No,” said Ikka. He might not have said it at all; his ears were numb with aching cold and tiredness.
“Yield and be forgiven. Continue and be made a toy. My children learn to hunt. Wingless, you would be a useful plaything.”
Ikka tried to put breaking bones and tearing membranes out of his mine and continued forwards, ignoring the ache in his limbs. He’d flown too far and fast on too little. His stomach was screaming even as his muscles trembled, and his mind was fast-filling with a fog as thick as the blackness that had eaten up the night sky. Even the stars were gone, as vanished as if they’d been consumed by some awful beast.
Then it hit him.
Ikka slid down it and fell down to dust, his snout feeling half-cracked. At least he could see the stars from below down here in the dirt, where there was nothing to block the sky and break his face against.
The stars vanished again, replaced with teeth.
“Your last chance,” said the world-killer. A single toe larger than Ikka and his siblings put together shoved him against the obstruction that had ended his flight, pinning him above the dirt by half against his own body length. “Swear to me and swear utterly, and you will keep a wing. And swear now.”
Ikka stared past the teeth and tried to think about things that weren’t now, about times gone by when the only teeth there were belonged to the world. Simple, humble pegs that stripped leaves clean from stems and never spoke hard words at you with hot breath that stank of meat. A mind at a head on a neck that made trees seem small, that could stretch farther into the sky than six wingbeats could take you.
The sky was moving.
Ikka giggled into the teeth of the world-killer.
“What answer is that?”
“Both,” said Ikka. “I will not serve you. But I have done as you asked.”
The world-killer may have said something to that. It may have denied it, it may have inquired of it, it may simply have cursed and bitten off Ikka piece by piece.
But it did none of those things, because that was when a tail with the weight of a world behind it came sweeping down from above and struck it across the side with a sound like lightning breaking in half. Ikka’s ears nearly bled from it; the world-killer went spinning into the dark from it, and he started laughing and laughing and laughing.
Something large moved, and he was looking into a smaller, kinder set of teeth that were deeply familiar. Younger, but familiar.
“Hello,” said Ikka. “I am looking for a world to live on.”
“Hello,” said the world.
And Ikka knew it would be alright.

It was Nap Hakell that started it, but it wasn’t his fault. If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been someone else.
But it was Nap that day that took that shot at that doe, and it was Nap who missed a clean kill and took the poor thing right in the leg instead.
You can’t blame him too much for that, he was never any real huntsman anyways, just a man taking what he needs wherever he finds it. Can’t blame him too much for that, can you?
So off Nap went, following the blood, since there was so much of it, and up and up he climbed through hills and around them ‘till he clawed through a thicket and into a glade that was full of what he wasn’t looking for. No hide nor hair of doe nor arrow, just three things:
The first thing was nothing.
The second thing was a big pit. A deep pit. Carved through dirt and turf and into rock, bigger than a man’s-height across, unless it was a tall man.
The third thing was a pile of gold next to that pit. It was a little bigger than Nap was.

It wasn’t his fault, right?

Now, Nap was a generous man and besides he couldn’t carry all that gold by himself, so he went and found himself his very best, closest friends, the ones he could trust the most, and he swore them never to tell a soul as they started divvying up that loot.
And they didn’t! They didn’t tell a soul, except for those very best, closest friends of theirs, the ones they could trust the most. And they swore them to secrecy, just like THOSE friends did with THEIR friends, and that was why in half a week’s time there was a camp full of maybe three dozen man pitched around that glade and that well, arguing and crabbing and grabbing and complaining. It was hard to tell which was getting shorter faster, the tempers or the gold-pile, and some hotheads had already started flashing knives around. So everyone was pretty happy when on the fifth day of the trip someone got up and looked around and saw a heap of gold next to that well that was just as tall as he was, right on top of the little piddly pile that had been left after last night’s scrimmage.
“Hot damn with ham in a sandwich!” he yelled. “Lookitthat! Someone get Nap!”
And there was cheering and hooting and hollering and hugs shared between men that had last night pledged to slit each other’s gizzards and everyone was so happy that it took almost four hours before they found that they had no idea wherever Nap had gone to.
He wasn’t in the tents, sleeping off his booze.
He wasn’t picking firewood, out past the picked-thin thickets.
He hadn’t gone home, where his wife was asking pointedly what they were up to.
Point of fact, Nap Hakell was gone. And his friends were sad and doffed their hats, and they split up his personal pile – one of the biggest ones – into five pieces, to be shared between them and his family. Because Nap treated his friends well, y’see? Of course he did. Nobody said otherwise.

A week later the pile was smaller still, the camp was bigger still (a little rickety pub was halfway through construction) and there was a lot of grumbling, a lot of hope. Maybe it’d get bigger again, said some. Maybe miracles can happen twice. Maybe we’ll get more.
Maybe it was a fluke, said some others. Maybe Nap did it and it’s all over now that he’s gone. Maybe we’ll spend it like water – I seen some of you doing that – and maybe we’ll all go home come two more days and it’ll be deader than a dream. And people shushed them, but didn’t cuss them, because all they were speaking was what everyone was thinking. And maybe if someone else was saying it that meant you could ignore it. It was a nervous time, and hell on a decent man’s liver – which led to a similar, smaller hell being inflicted on his bladder, which led to lots of men doing what little Heg was doing and taking a good long piss down the side of the well while trying to listen to the echo. Wherever that went, it went deep.
That was all normal. What wasn’t normal was what happened next, which was when Heg got a little bit too fancy and tried to stretch a bit too far and down he went, screaming and waving and screeching as a whole crowd ran up to see the fuss. He landed hard and he landed bad, and up came some babble about a leg or an ankle or a knee or something. Whatever it was, Heg had broke it, and he was calling for ladders, rope, cranes.
Well, they’d help. Some of them were Heg’s friends, some of them thought hauling folks out of trouble was a good pattern to start, some of them were bored. And they scared up some rope and were just about to lay it down when Heg screamed again – one, two, three times – and then stopped real fast.
And then up came a shower of gold, glittering bright in the dark against the campfires.

Well, that led to a big talk.
All of them agreed that they had to keep going at it. It was dangerous, sure, but so was life, right? At least this way you got your gold. No way were they stopping. They just had to fix it.
So they put up a big tall fence around the pit with nails and boards and sticks and logs and old doors and half of someone’s run-down-barn and they put a bar made from a whole tree on the only door in or out that took their six strongest to budge from its cradle, and they hauled that gold out double-time and locked it up every sundown.
Six days later they woke up and a whole tent was missing, with Hod junior, Hod senior, and Hod very senior all at once. Gone.
That led to a bigger talk. And that led to shouting. And that led to a fight, and in that fight a man named Gid stabbed a man named Elt right in his eye. He said he’d been aiming elsewhere, but nobody liked him and nobody cried too loud when he was tied up and chucked in the corner out of the way while they thought up what to do about him.
There were more men around that weren’t really anybody’s friends by then. Too many mouths telling too many secrets to too many ears.
So they all talked into the night about the pit, and about Gid, and eventually it all just blended together into a world that made sense. They needed that gold, like it or not. The pit would take people, like it or not. They needed to do something about Gid, like it or not.
So they took that rope and they took Gid, and they put him down there and plugged their ears to the sounds. And what came showering up from below but more shining metal.

From then on it all just kept going the same. But it was bigger, and had better suits.
The secret ran off as the town sprouted up, and when the word got loud the town grew into a city. A city that shone under the sunlight and rolled over the hills, where every home was a mansion and every man was a rich man that paid out-of-towners in golden pennies to groom his grounds.
It was a place for merry-making, for partying, for freeing cares and dancing and singing and eating on plates that were gold because why wouldn’t they be. It was a city that lived.
But not a night city. As the sun went down and the sky turned dim and the shine wore off the balconies, each and every one of those rich men would walk inside, put out their lights, pour themselves small drinks, and go to bed early with cotton wool in their ears and minds fixed on sleep. And they would drag their feet as they woke, clinging to their fuzzy dreams for fear of what they might hear as they woke.
The prison’s walls were fearful many. The prison’s doors were frightful thick. The prison’s vault was awful deep, and them that dwelled in it were the ones who’d run out of words to use long ago, and ears that would choose to hear them.
But no matter how many walls the city put between itself and that pit at its heart, they could never quite be sure that it was quiet.
So they made louder music, and more brilliant buildings, and fancier suits, and they smiled even more widely under the sunlight. And when they saw the people with tattered knees that lived in the shady corners with sad lines at their mouths and tired eyes they lectured them – in friendly words – and when they saw them again they warned them – in stern language – and when they found their persistent woe too much to bear they charged them – in formal terms – and they were all taken down to the prison, past the walls and walls and walls being built, and they were put away to moving gold, and they were forgotten where they were, which was nowhere important that needed mentioning. Ever.

It was a beautiful city, and it knew it, and that encouraged it only onward and upward. It never stopped, never halted, never paused in its glory except for the quiet night-time, when everyone turned quiet and shut themselves away.
In that quiet, when nobody was looking, when nobody was listening, was when it finally happened. And because of that, there’s only so much to say from what we have. And what we have is so very little of what was.
The hills were scraped bare, the mansions dust.
The parks were splinters, the flowers shrivelled.
The paths were torn and broken to bright flinders.
The prison was gone, the walls all burst.
And at the heart of it all, the city’s heart, where nobody ever looked and nobody ever listened, was the well, torn open from the inside. It was wider across than a quarry.

It had done so much for them all, for so long. But they’d forgotten that just because it took from them, didn’t mean that it meant to give back.
But you can’t blame it too much for that, a thing trying to take what it needs wherever it finds it.
Can you?

Back in the oldest days – much, much older than the old days – people were better, you know.
No, not just better manners and things. That was the old days. Pay attention to me. They were BETTER. Stronger, nimbler, sturdier, swifter. Especially swifter!
Now, what made that change, you ask me? Well of course, it was all the fault of the young people.

Back in those oldest days, the strongest, nimblest, sturdiest, and especially swiftest of all the people were Foot and Hand. They were sisters, and they were each the proudest, happiest, most boastful people you could ever do meet. Especially to each other.
“Sister,” said Hand one day to Foot, “I swam up a waterfall backwards today. With one hand.”
“Not bad, sister,” replied Foot to Hand. “I ran laps around the mountains today. And after each lap I jumped up to the tallest peak and down again. Took me until lunch to hit an even hundred.”
“Showoff and a liar besides,” said Hand. “You’re far too slow to do that.”
“And same to you,” said Foot. “You never did that with one hand. Your hands are too small and weak for such speed.”
And because they were sisters it wasn’t five minutes before both of them were screaming and shouting and promising never to talk to one another again and then breaking the promise to curse at the other and so on and so forth, up until the racket got so noisy that their father couldn’t sleep a wink. “That’s enough!” he said. “If you two have to keep your parents up all hours with your fighting, you can do it somewhere else. Somewhere very far away. Why don’t you go for a race? Then you can fight about something different and maybe quieter. Far away.”
“A race around the world?” said Foot. “She won’t stand a chance. Done!”
“A race around the world?” said Hand. “She’ll be left dead in the water. Agreed!”
“Where shall we start?” said Foot. “Up by Big Bend Mountain?”
“You’re off your head,” said Hand. “We begin in Kana Creek and head southeast, to the Hichkaloara River.”
“A water-race? Nonsense.”
“A land-race? Ridiculous.”
They argued and fought some more and ran out of new swearwords so they made new ones and at long last they agreed that each would race as she saw fit.
“After all,” said Hand, “it’s all that running that’s made your feet so slow and clumsy. Like an elephant’s.”
“And your swimming has swollen your arms with water,” said Foot. “They are as fat and floppy as hippopotamus’s forelegs.”
And with that it was one, two, three, go. Foot took off so hard her footfalls made half of Big Bend Mountain come down, and the splash of Hand into the water washed out half of Kana Creek and straightened out all its bends from there to the sea.
Now, these sisters were the best at everything. I told you that. And so it was no surprise when they began to use their magic to spy on one another.
“Earth,” said Foot as she ran. “Hey you, listen to me. You go underneath all the places, even the big wet ones. You keep an eye on my sister for me, and let me know if she’s gaining.”
“Sure thing,” said Earth.
“Water,” said Hand between strokes. “You paying attention? You’re everywhere in the air, so I hope you are. Just tell me how quickly my sister’s coming along. I don’t want her passing me.”
“Can do, will do, and done,” said Water.
So they looked. And they thought. And because they were looking at the same race from different angles, and because they weren’t very bright – no brains, you see – they came to different conclusions. Well, the same conclusion.
“She’s getting closer,” they both said.

“What?!” said Foot. “Bah! I’ll solve that.” And she spat and hissed at the dirt and kicked it. The clod of spit flew up, up, up, up high into the sky and broke apart into the air, where it hissed down into the mouth of Hand as she drew breath.

“The sneak!” said Hand. “I can put a stop to that.” And she mumbled and cursed and bubbled into the water and shouted out so loud that it hummed down into the rocks and came soaring up through the soil into Foot’s pounding legs.

So it was that at the end of the first day of the sister’s race, they both stumbled a bit.
Foot was just leaping over a sea when she felt her feet turn fumbly, and when she landed she almost turned her heel. “My legs!” she called out. “What’s happened to my legs? That cheat, my sister! I’ll fix her!”
Hand was turning ‘round a cape when her arms got sore and she saw how small they were. “My arms!” she shrieked. “She’s withered them up! I’ll turn her inside out and tie her up with rocks!”
And both the sisters got angry, and if there’s one sure thing about angry, it’s that it goes with bad magic like salt and pepper. Hand splashed and the ripples spread, Foot stomped and the world trembled, and the next set of curses that went sailing ‘round the world were twice as nasty as the last.

At the end of the second day, Foot was too warm. She slowed down and mopped her brow, crinkled her forehead. She was sweating.
“Water from the skin?” she said, drowsily. “That’s good. Too warm. Too warm! Why, I could stand in the Sahara skinning mosquitos all day long if I felt it! That sister! She’s gotten worse!”
Meanwhile, as the sun went down, Hand was huddling herself as she paddling, teeth clicking like beetles. “S-s-such a strange s-s-shiver,” she hissed. “Helps t-to keep off the c-c-old, though. Cold! COLD! I’ve never f-felt such a thing! She’s a-awful! Awful!”
So they kept going, and they kept scheming, and cursing, and by this time the world was looking more familiar again. They were angry and bewitched but the last leg was in sight, their home was just a few miles away, and this made they try twice as hard – and curse twice as hard.
“Take that!” spat Foot, and she snapped her teeth shut on the sky so hard it twitched.
“That for you,” snarled Hand, and she blew a breath into the air so hard that it tickled the mountains black-and-blue.
These curses were the strongest curses yet, and they were as quick as the sisters. Before a minute’s minute had gone by, they were doubled up under the nastiest magic they’d each ever heard of or made.
“Whoooshhh,” sighed Foot. “Lung are. Hurting. Maybe maybe I should. Take. A. Breath. Er.” She slowed down.
“Ow,” whispered Hand. “Ow ow ow ouch. My shoulders, my legs, my poor arms. So sore! Maybe I should stop and stretch. Just for a moment.” And she slowed down.
And the nature of slowing down when you’re good and tired – as those two sisters were, for the first time ever – is that it’s hard to stop. And that’s why when I walked outside the next day to start the cooking-fire, I found Hand and Foot side by side in the bushes yards from the finish line, passed out hand in hand like they were four years old again. Tied.
It was so cute that it almost made me forget to be angry at them, because those curses of theirs had bounced so hard around the earth that they’d landed on EVERYBODY. Nobody could jump up mountains anymore, or swim oceans, or pull themselves up by their feet. And it was all the fault of those two young people.
And my husband, of course. I told them not to listen to their father, I did. But nobody listens to me!

“Now you just stay here,” said Mom. Cole swung leadenly in her hands, watching the sandbox come closer with a vague, disconnected interest. “Just stay here and have fun for a while, okay?”
Then she left, and Cole proceeded to do as she was told. She was, after all, five years old.
She piled the sand up and knocked it down.
Then she drew pictures in the sand and smudged them.
Then she dug a big hole – a REALLY big hole – and as she was preparing to fill it in, she heard a noise at the edge of her head, so tiny it was barely a buzz.
Cole looked around. No noise. She looked up. No noise.
She stuck her head in the hole. Oh, there it was! And it was louder, too!
Cole crawled down the hole. It was a tight fit, but she was small and determined and wasn’t old enough to worry about structural supports or caveins or anything like that, and besides there was a light down there, a glimmer as faint as the buzz that had turned into a hum that made her teeth tickle. Then it was brighter, then nearer, and then Cole pulled herself up and out and into the middle of somebody’s picnic.
“Ow.”
Four separate small hands removed the jug from her head simultaneously while one very large and wrinkled pair pulled her clear of the ground and onto a soft blanket. It was red, she noted through the lingering ache in her scalp.
“Feeling alright?” asked the owner of the hands.
“Yes,” said Cole. Then she remembered her words. “Thanks you. Who are you?”
The woman shrugged, and Cole watched the lines on her face scatter as she smiled. She was very old, older than Cole’s grandma, who was the oldest person in the world. “Nobody in particular. How’d you get here?”
‘Here’ was soft. Something green that wasn’t quite grass underfoot, under a blue thing that wasn’t a sky, with stalagmites that were pretending to be trees, or maybe the other way around.
“A hole,” said Cole.
“I can see that. Well, if you’ve come for a visit, you might as well stay for a little bit. Besides, I could use some help babysitting, and you need at least four for a proper round of hide-and-go-seek.”
Cole nodded. This was a true thing. And so she ran and hid and tagged and laughed and spent a long time down there in the cave, until she heard the thud of grownup feet.
“Come back if you’d like,” the old woman told her, as she scurried back down her tunnel. “We like visitors.”
And Cole remembered that, all the way through the lectures she got on wandering off in the car on her way home. And she did visit, and often, because it was so EASY to do. All you had to do was dig a hole, any hole, crawl a while, and there you were again, popping out of the ground in a cave like a summer meadow, ready for freeze tag or snacks or really almost anything, because there was a whole village down there in that little place, with small people who spoke soft words and always were patient with her.
It was a nice place.

It WAS a nice place, but it was so small!
Cole towered over the buildings. She loomed over the stalag-trees. She was even bigger than the old woman, and that had taken her ‘till her last growth spurt. Nothing was good for hide and seek anymore, and besides, that was for babies. She was bored, bored, bored, bored! It was hard work finding holes that could fit her anymore, and once she got in, she wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.
“I’m bored,” she told the old woman. “Bored, bored, bored, bored! I’m not even sure coming here is worth the effort.”
“Yes, I can see why,” she said. “Why don’t you go exploring a little? Perhaps you’ll find something new.”
“But I’ve BEEN everywhere!” said Cole. “I’ve been down the meadow-cave and up through the wood-tunnels and round and round and round the cavern of streams! There’s nowhere left!”
“Not in the upper caves, no,” said the old woman. “Here: take my cane and knock on the side of the biggest tree in the meadow. Go on now.”
Cole rolled her eyes a lot, but she didn’t have anything better to do. So you can imagine how surprised she was when the soft brown rock of the stalag-tree slid away like parting silk, revealing a ladder made of hard grey stone that Cole took down three steps at a time, sliding the last body-length on her palms and grinning through the sting.
It was dark down there, in the middle caves.
“Helloooo?” she called. “Helllooooo?”
“Aieee,” responded someone. “Help.”
“Rawrgh,” added someone else. “Rrrrooowwrrrll.”
Cole followed the voices and came upon a most disconcerting thing: five large angry men that looked like beetles crossed with lions crossed with athletes from her brother’s MMA magazines. They were holding up a much smaller and less alarming man by his ankles and repeatedly dunking him in some sort of vat.
“Hey!” shouted Cole.
They looked at her, and she realized that all those terrible cartoons she’d watched when she was a baby were good for something.
“Lunch break’s over,” she said. And then she ruined it by giggling.
The men were hard to read because they only had about a fifth of a face between them, but as a group they were not impressed and immediately ran at her. But Cole was ready, and more importantly Cole was slightly larger than they were – something that none of them seemed to be used to. Oh, they pinched and punched and bit and beat at her with their hands and feet, but they just weren’t strong enough to give her more than bruises. She’d had tougher playground squabbles back in fifth grade.
Also, possibly due to the strange shapes of their snouts, none of them had ever encountered a head-butt before. Cole was happy to bring innovation and enlightenment into their noses, and after the third man had reeled away and spun into a wall they decided they’d had enough, and lit out faster than a half-burnt match.
“Thank you,” said the less alarming man, who Cole realized was actually not alarming at all and had a rather adorable nose. He’d used the time of the brawl to reclaim his clothing, most of which, alas, was sodden in gravy. “I’d have helped, but you seemed to be doing alright.”
“No big deal,” said Cole.
“There must be some way I can repay you,” said the less alarming man, futilely adjusting his soaked shirt, which seemed to have shrunk a few sizes. “Come to my parent’s house, and we can get you some food at least.”
“Huh?” said Cole. “Oh! Yeah, food. Great! What’s your name?”
His name was Azit, and his parents were a king and a queen, and their home was a very small and polite sort of castle. Which was half the problem, the other half being the ant-lions who had crept in through the walls of the middle caves over the years. Each apart from each other wasn’t so bad, but combined they made a few problems.
“They’re not so bad, really,” said the queen, as she was showing Cole to the Royal Staircase.
“They tried to eat our son,” reminded the king.
“Well, maybe a little bad,” she admitted. “They’re perfectly respectful if you can shove them off, but we’ve had problems with that.”
“Large problems,” said the king.
“We could use someone to help with that.”
“A hero, say.”
“See you soon!” they called up after her, as she hauled her way back into her yard.
And they did. They saw Cole week in and week out for years, and they got what they wanted. She beat the ant-lions until they gave in and turned to vegetarianism, she halted the underbear invasions, she bested the fearsome darksquid, and rescued Azit from kidnappers no less than seventeen times.
She could never get annoyed at him for that, though. He was cute when he pouted, and besides, it was all one big adventure.

One big, grand adventure. That was what Cole had thought life would be like as an adult. Well, first they chained you to a school for a few years, one with harder homework and more vicious results, and then you went to work in a cube somewhere, doing Very Important Things for Very Important People.
Much of that work involved staring at the ceiling and waiting. Cole was doing that very thoroughly, and had managed to catalogue, index, and file every square inch of the panelling and ventilation system within her sight, losing herself in the cheap tiling and crooked grates, the mites and motes of dust. It seemed to get bigger as she watched, until she was almost falling in, dropping through the gaps in the vent…
…All the way down through the roof of Casa Mezzo, and half-onto the meal that the royal couple was enjoying.
“Ow, argh, urk,” said Cole. “Oh. Hello. Ah. Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Six years,” said the king, retrieving the lower third of his wine glass.
“Sorry; I was busy. School and then work and then and then…sorry.” Cole attempted to tame her hair with her hands, and succeeded only in angering it. “How’s Azit?” she asked, desperately searching for a way to salvage her manners.
“Oh, he’s fine, fine, fine,” said the queen. “He did, ah, get married.”
“Oh,” said Cole, with some relief. She’d been wondering how to explain her fiancée. “Well, that’s nice! Very nice! What a lucky girl. Is she nice?”
“Yes.”
“Well. That’s good. I’ll, uh, just be going. I’m sorry about this, it looked like a lovely meal.”
The king shrugged. “Dull as ditchwater.”
“Yes, the country’s been deathly quiet ever since you drove out Impraxxus the Endless Night,” sighed the queen. “Very peaceful. Very dull. It’s bliss. And you know, you could use a bit of that bliss. Let me show you the Royal Staircase.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come down it the usual way, it was sort of an acci-”
“No, no. The OTHER Royal Staircase.”
It was a slim little thing tucked away in a room barely big enough for a broom closet, and it creaked under Cole’s weight. But she held her breath and kept her tread study and before she knew it sand was whispering under her bare feet as she stood on a calm purple beach underneath a glowing sunset in a place with no sky.
“This,” said the queen, who’d taken off her crown and put on a nice bonnet, “is a proper place to be.”
“Mind if I visit?” asked Cole. Down the beach, a young couple was playing tug-of-war with a friendly shark, and losing. The breeze smelled like strawberries, faint and calm.
“It’s not my beach. And I’d love it. The book club meets down here Friday nights, and I could use someone else who hates romance novels.”
And Cole still hated romance novels, and always did, so that was nice. She came down to the lower caves more than just Fridays, whenever the world got too exhausting and the days got too dreary and whenever she could let her mind wander for a while, turning five minutes of forever into hours of calm. And it worked, and it dropped her blood pressure – although some of that was the honeymoon. Cole’s wife was as determined a vacationer as the queen, but much more personal about it.

She could make the strangest places feel as cosy and personal as your bedroom, but there was only so much someone could do with a hospital bed. And besides, the old dear got so tired nowadays, and after three hours of happy times she’d nod off with her hand in Cole’s and stay there until visitor’s hours ended.
Not that Cole minded. She didn’t have the energy to make noise nowadays. And she had her ways to fill empty hours, she still did. Even if she’d nearly forgotten them while Emma and Jacob were growing up – good lord, she’d had some sympathy for her own mother after that.
Cole fixed her gaze on the gap in the window that led out into the summer night, walked up to it, and slipped through into the lower caves on a day nearly as pleasant as her last had been. Calm waves on a calm sea under a calm wind with dozing figures bured in sand to their chins, basking in a soft glow. She walked along the beach, kicking seashells and watching them splash.
It was nice. It was restful. But it was a little too quiet. Lord knows Cole had gotten enough bed rest over the past year to fill centuries. Maybe she couldn’t move too fast herself anymore, but she could at least live vicariously. Just a little.
She kicked a seashell and stubbed her toe.
After some violent swearing, further careful prodding revealed not a seashell at all, but a hatch. And under the hatch, a passage.
Well, what was one more trip?
Cole crawled, then Cole crept, then Cole squirmed, and at last, at the end of the tightest squish she’d been in since the car accident back after Jacob was born, Cole heard something buzzing at the edge of her hearing aid, twitching on the tips of her pupils.
Then light and sound, and she tumbled head over heel onto something soft and green that couldn’t be grass, out of a sun without a sky.
“Oof,” she declared, and dusted herself off, brushing away the offers of help from concerned villagers. “Ouch! Wouldn’t want to do that again. Tell me, which way’s the tunnel? I’ve got to be going now.”
The tunnel was too small.
“Damnit. Well, which is the largest tree? Just find me the cane, and I’ll-“
There was no cane.
“Oh fudge. Where is it? Where’s the old woman?”
Gone away? But her house was empty, so…
…There Cole sat, whittling and worrying at the head of a stalag-tree-carved cane, singing silly songs to herself and minding the minds of the village’s young, because they weren’t near big enough to mind themselves. As proven by how many times their little hands reached eagerly for the handle of her carving knife, or her chisel, or her hot mug of tea, or…
“ENOUGH!” she told them. “We’re going outside! Out! You are far too busy with your fingers for house and home today! Your lunch will have to wait until you pack this basket, and pack quick or we’ll leave without it!”
So they did – children listen when food is at stake – and they left. And it was quiet out there in the meadow, and peaceful (almost too peaceful), right up until the moment when the jug of water went THUD. Then “ow.”
Oh, thought Cole. Of course.
And as she reached down into the little burrow next to their picnic blanket, she smiled a little bit, and was happy that she’d never really bothered to learn all that much about the cave. Otherwise she would’ve spoiled all manner of surprises for herself.
“Are you alright?”

It was a really boring day, so boring it stuck out like a sore thumb. That’s all I remember. I was wandering around the internet on a dead Sunday and being bored at everything in a spare hour that felt days long, refreshing pages and comments and inboxes and hey look, my sister sent me a video.
‘LOOK’
Okay, sure. I looked.
It was footage of frogs from nature programs overlapped with a short, stupid song.
Okay, sure.
That was three minutes wasted. The other twenty-nine passed slow as molasses until noon rolled around and I found the motivation I needed to drag myself downstairs and go get coffee from someone who pretended to be friends with me.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey there.”
“Hey,” I said. I couldn’t remember his name but that was okay. “Give me the thing.”
“Sure. Hey. You seen that video?”
“The what?”
“The thing with the frogs.”
“Uh,” I decided. “Huh. Maybe?”
“Shit is HILARIOUS. Hey, remember when the one big red one is puffing out its neck, and the music goes all doo-DOO-doo?”
“I guess?”
“Yeah!” He did a little dance to show me the moment he was talking about but I had my coffee and didn’t care anymore, so I nodded and showed my teeth a lot and left.
I ran into my landlord on the steps.
“Hello!”
“Hey.”
“Have you seen that video?”
“What video?”
“With the frogs!”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Isn’t it just wonderful?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The red one with the neck is great.”
“Isn’t it JUST? Oh, do you mean the one at 0:43 or the second one at 1:12? Or the purple-red one at 2:28? “
“Yeah, that,” I said, and then I mumbled a lot and escaped upstairs. I had more shit to not do.

The next day I woke up with the phone ringing.
“Hey!”
“It’s two AM.”
“Yeah! Hey, it’s Theresa – you seen that video I sent you?”
I indicated to Theresa that I had seen a video with frogs in it.
“That’s great!”
“Yeah. Right. G’ni-“
“You DID watch it, right?”
“Yeah, su-“
“Did you forward it?”
“N-“
“Do that! Do it before you go to bed – mom HAS to see this. Oh, and Jeff, ooh, and maybe Ann, and Tim, and –“
I hung up and slept a frogless sleep ‘till noon, when I woke up to the sounds of voices. I raised the window and saw people on the street singing the frog song in choral harmony, hands linked.
Sugar helped. I came into work five hours late and found the building empty except for the janitor.
“Where’s everyone?” I asked.
“Gone singing,” he told me. “Tone-deaf myself. Can’t help or I’d be with them. Hey, you seen the video?”
“Yeah.”
He grinned and started humming. I fidgeted with my phone, said something, and left.
The buildings were empty and the sidewalks were full and everyone was probably going to get frostbite. I asked a paramedic about this and he told me it was fine, just keep singing and it’ll be fine. The guy on the stretcher asked me if I’d seen the video so I told him yes and left while he was busy coughing.
Home was better. I closed all my mailboxes and changed my email addresses to avoid the unending flow of links to the video and tried to get some news, but nobody’d put up anything on any site besides 5/5 reviews of the frog song. Somebody had tentatively attempted to put pictures of new frogs over the song, but he’d been evicted and shunned in the cold so I guessed that wasn’t happening.

The next day I woke up to a knocking on the door before the sun came up, and when I opened it there were cops there.
“There a problem?” I asked.
“You seen the video?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“How’d you like it?”
“Fine.”
“What length was it?”
“Three minutes?”
“What happens in the last four seconds?”
I tried to remember some of the advice I’d read on a website run by aging anti-fascist activists who exchanged recipes for charcuterie. “Am I being detained or am I free to go?”
“What happened in the last four seconds?”
I tried to close the door but someone stuck their foot in it. “Answer the question.”
“One of the frogs croaks?”
They smiled at me. “The video is two minutes fifty-seven seconds fourteen milliseconds long, and in the last four seconds the camera zooms in on the backside of the big green frog. Give us your phone.”
They took the phone and brought up the video, and I watched it.
“There, you see?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good.” And they left.
I phoned 911 to let them know that I’d just been assaulted by police officers.
“Did you see the video?” the operator asked.
“Yeah. They showed me.”
“Well, that’s nice of them. Hey, which frog was your favorite?”
“Uh. The red one.”
“Which red one?”
“The second one.”
“Oh, that’s nice! Goodbye.”

By the end of the week it was just me and five other people holed up in the basement of a condemned building, eating beans out of cans that were old enough to not have frogs stamped on them. The oldest woman with us was a sociologist and she kept telling us this is what happens when communication becomes too easy in a society, but the biology grad student kept telling her she was full of it and this never would have happened if we’d killed all the frogs with global warming like he kept saying we were going to do. I couldn’t make them calm down because I’d never gotten my bachelor’s and whenever I tried to say anything they’d start talking in Latin until I got tired.
“They’re always like this,” said the bank clerk.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that. I was the first person in this basement. You just got here five minutes ago. Why are you telling me this?”
“No reason at all, I’m just one of you guys, I fit in here just fine, yes sir indeed, no doubt, no how,” he said. “By the way, have you seen the video? Oops, slipped.”
We tried to pin him but they broke down the door before we could find his radio, and I was the only one that got away. I lost the pursuit in the ruins of downtown, where office buildings had been carved into giant monuments to frogs and every frost-coated window had been doodled with the sheet music for the frog song. Someone had rearranged all the abandoned vehicles into the shape of a frog, or that’s what I guessed they’d look like if you weren’t stuck at ground level because all the elevators had stopped working and the stairways had been scrapped for frog-sculpture materials.

“Howdy friend!” shouted a sculptor from his front yard as I slipped down a suburban drive. “Whaddaya think?”
It was a frog. “Real nice,” I said, strolling up to him.
“Ain’t it just? What’s your favorite?”
“The red one.”
“Which red one?”
I pulled the brass knuckles out of my pocket and socked him one at the base of the skull. Before he’d even hit the ground I was checking his pockets – empty, but his boots fit. I put them on and luxuriated in feet that were merely damp. It was a good feeling, made better by being so close to home. They’d never look for me there, not after all this time.
I opened the door. My landlord was sitting on the couch.
“Hello,” he said. “Hey, you seen this video?”
“You’ll never take me alive,” I told him.
“Jeez, cool your jets. I was just asking.”
“Who sent you here?”
“Who sent me the video? My daughter. Look, it’s cute.”
“Stand back.”
“What? It’s just a dog.”
I blinked. “Dog?”
“Dog.”
“Not frog.”
“No? That’s old news.”
I moved very carefully towards him, then rushed him and put him in a sleeper hold as I watched the clip. It was sixteen seconds long and showed a Labrador puppy chasing its tail until it tripped over its mother’s leg and fell over.
“Like it?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Nice. Well, see you.”
I sat around for a while, then put my bulletproof vest on the coathook and went to bed. When I woke up I shopped around the net a bit. The frog stuff was still there on some of the archives. ‘Last week’s trends.’ God I’d seen enough of that.
That dog video was pretty cool though. I forwarded that to six people.

The Dolphin and the Shark
Once upon a time, a bottlenose dolphin and a sand tiger shark encountered one another in the shallow waters of the western Atlantic coast.
“Hello,” said the dolphin. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”
“Yes indeed,” replied the shark. “Splendid.”
“Makes a man’s fancy turn to romance.”
“Indeed! Say, did you know that in order to mate I must severely bite the pectoral fins of my partner, in order to secure a grip?”
“I did not know that, and will inform my friends the next time we form a temporary coalition whose goal is to follow a female around and hem her in until she is ready to mate with us.”
“All very unpleasant, but of course it does lead to children, those little joyful bundles.”
“Of course. Except for those that belong to others of my kind. Those I will sometimes kill for fun.”
“Really? My own children devour one another in the mother’s womb until only two remain, one in each uterine horn.”
“Freak,” said the dolphin.
“Sicko,” said the shark.
They then swam their separate ways because neither had anything to gain from engaging in violence beyond severe injuries that very likely would have killed them both.
Moral: Nature tends to be grosser than you’d expect, but also less exciting.

The Tyrannosaurus’s Argument
Many, many years ago, during the Maastrichtian stage of the Cretaceous period, a Didelphodon was nosing about the forests of what would one day be Montana when it chanced upon a large clearing with a heap of rotting vegetation within it.
“Oh, a nest,” it said. “This will surely contain eggs, which I will consume as it matches my ecological role as a somewhat fox-like predator.”
“No, you won’t,” said the Tyrannosaurus that was returning to its nest, some twelve feet behind it. “Instead, I am going to consume you.”
“Wait, wait, wait, back up a bit,” squeaked the mammal. “That is clearly not what is supposed to happen here! You are a scavenging creature, and eating me would violate your natural place in the order of things.”
“You are talking nonsense,” said the Tyrannosaurus.
“Of course I’m not,” said the Didelphodon. “Your arms are tiny and incapable of gripping prey. You’re a scavenger if I’ve ever seen one!”
“My arms are not a highly-developed part of my predation strategy,” said the Tyrannosaurus, “but that is because they are extraneous. There are many entirely anachronistic predator ground-hunting birds I could use as examples who manage just fine hunting without the use of gripping arms. And this is granting you an unnecessary token in presuming their uselessness: they are quite powerful for their size, with strong gripping capability within their admittedly limited range.”
“Then what of your bulk?” pressed the mammal. “If you move above a trot you’ll fall over and turn into a pancake under your own mass! Catching prey is an impossibility!”
“Much of what I hunt moves not much faster, if that,” responded the Tyrannosaurus.
“Well, your jaws are clearly made to crack bones,” said the Didelphodon. “Marrow extraction is a prime goal for any carrion-eater.”
“Come off it,” said the Tyrannosaurus. “A bone-smashing bite matches my predation strategy perfectly: I charge full-bore into something, mash my teeth as deep as they’ll go, then drag them out and wait for them to bleed to death. Furthermore, my teeth would make shoddy molars: they can penetrate and smash, but they are poor crushers and chewers.”
“Surely your immensely powerful sense of smell makes you a dab hand at locating all those smelly carcasses, which you can easily secure with your powerful size?”
“You need more than a good nose to be an obligate or ‘pure’ scavenger; you also need a highly efficient means of locomotion. Almost all anachronistically-modern obligate vertebrate scavengers of the land are large birds which can drift on thermals at little to no energy cost, which also affords them easy and rapid access to corpses. I am forty feet long and must travel on foot, which makes waiting for corpses to make themselves known to me a much less economical action,” said the Tyrannosaurus, who was clearly losing patience. “Come now, be sensible. Almost no predator passes up carrion, but ones that settle for nothing-but are both extremely rare and physiologically distinct in a manner that I am not.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait a second,” said the Didelphodon, “even if you are an active predator – for the sake of the argument mind you not that I’m conceding anything – shouldn’t you not waste your stomach space on me? I am relatively nutrient-poor and bony.”
“This is true,” said the Tyrannosaurus. “However, you are endangering my young, and given that I’m spending much of my time guarding them, NOT eating you would be a senseless waste in and of itself.”
The Didelphodon was prepared to debate this point, but it was then that the Tyrannosaurus ate it.
Moral: Nobody likes pedants.

The Sickle-Cell Child.
Far, far away, there lived a child, and that child suffered from headaches and bloody urine. For these deficiencies it was mocked by its peers, and it sought solace in the advice of its parent.
“Parent,” said the child, “why am I different, and why do the other children taunt me for this?”
“My child,” said the parent, “your physiological discomforts are the result of the heterozygous sickle-cell trait, meaning that you carry a single gene for sickle-cell anemia, which causes many of your red blood cells to be deformed into a collapsed ‘sickle’ shape. Your peers mock you because human social groups often become tighter-knit when they have a designated ‘other’ to contrast themselves against.”
“None of this is comforting to me in the slightest, parent,” said the child.
“Don’t worry,” said the parent. “There is an advantage in this. Trust me.”
The child was dubious, but it did trust its parent. And so it came to be that one day a major outbreak of malaria swept through the child’s home, killing a substantial portion of its peers but sparing the child due to the inhospitable nature of its ‘sickled’ blood cells for the malarial virus. The child was filled with despair and depression, but persevered, grew up, and had four children. As its mate was also a heterozygous carrier of the sickle-cell trait, one of their children was born without it, two were born with it, and the last inherited two copies of the sickle-cell trait and thus died early in life from sickle-cell anemia, all as statistics would predict.
Moral: Life is profoundly and innately unfair.

The Man Who Knew About Wolves
One night, a man went to a nightclub with some other men, who were his social acquaintances.
“Look over there,” said one of them. “There are some women. Let us attempt to flirt with them as a prelude to obtaining mutual sexual gratification.”
“No, said the largest man present. “They would not be interested in you. Women prefer alpha males: aggressive, physically-impressive, and dynamic.”
“You are generalizing a canine social habit into a biologically-ordained behavioural process of the human species,” said the first man. “Furthermore, the alpha-beta social complex of wolves, from which you have derived your theory, is in fact an anthropogenically-induced behavior caused by fragmented wolf packs composed of strangers being raised and studied in captivity. Naturally-occurring packs consist of a breeding pair and their offspring, and in these the theorem of a dominant ‘alpha male’ whose aggressive assertiveness leads to rulership of the pack is provably false.”
The largest man present, who was inebriated, took this monologue as an insult and punched the first man, who suffered a minor concussion. He was subdued by the club’s security staff and charged for assault and battery, which caused him some difficulties in securing a financially-rewarded career.
Moral: No, really, NOBODY likes pedants. And if you understand social relationships so well, you should be able to avoid getting punched in the face.

Sometimes, I get folks that come to ask me a question. And it’s always the same question, and it’s always in the same way – timid, half-moused, delivered with a flinch and another dozen unsaid questions held behind it: “lady (hah!) Benthook, how do you fish so well?” Is it a secret? Is it a trick? Is it some rite you dance by moonlight, is it a chant that brings the fat ones up from below, is it a tallow you rub into your lines?
And each time I give them the long slow smile just far enough to make them start to twitch, and then I say, “why sir (or lady), I just remember the words my mother gave me to fish by,” as pretty and pious as a churchman. And it’s funny to see their faces light up like they do, or cloud over in disappointment (what’s she hiding behind that, huh?), because mama’s words were wise enough, but they weren’t any sort of magic.
“Listen, my oldest spawnlings,” old mama Benthook had whispered to me, hands busy with the lines and craggy head bent low to her knots. “The sea is for the failures. Every sorry thing with the wrong number of legs or eyes or heads sinks to the bottom of its big black heart and squirms there, hiding.” She pointed one long, scaly finger at us. “All you got to do to pull them out is be better than them. And no daughter of mine is a failure.”
Yes, mama’s words were wise enough.
Pity she weren’t always right.

“Get up, you.”
Grelly moaned at the bottom of her bed. I repeated myself, this time with my foot. Grelly arose. Simple story, same story every damned morning. Every one.
“Unnhh. Wurr. Whurr we goin’?”
“Fishing, Grelly. It’s a big moon, and that’s the ocean’s time. Get your mug and wipe the crud out of your eyes, it’s time.”
Grumbling and groaning followed, and before too long (it was always too long) we were pushing off the quay, hearing the same old waves smack against the same old wood and drinking the same old oily soup from the same old stone mugs. As the sun rose it would find us out in the shoals, first setting lines for the baitfish, then setting baitfish for the bigmouths, then (if we felt up to it) setting bigmouths for the razorjaws. And if we hooked one, I’d be the one to fight it, because when the stakes got high Grelly’s knees got weak and her palms got sweaty.
I heaved at my paddle and set to work, waiting a breath every four strokes to let my sister correct our course with her own lazy pulls. Simple story, same story every damned morning.
But not tomorrow.

On the nine hundredth stroke I stopped and sighed deep, tasted the air in all of my lungs. Yes, it was good here. The salt was flecked with that light oily scent that was the breath of fish, and lots of them. All packed together, side-to-side, with not an inch to spare. A mass of mouths all dying for a chance to stretch themselves and get some bites in.
I shook my head three times, stretched my arms, and started dumping my bait overboard.
“Cordill? What are you doing?”
I tipped the last of the four bait buckets overboard, humming a bit of an old song mama had taught me. It asked for fast jumps at the bobber and a strong pull in your arms.
“Cordill? We aren’t gonna have any left for later if you don-”
I reached out and grasped Grelly firmly by the nape, then heaved her overboard into the bait, face-first. She surfaced wasting her breath on swearing, and the more fool her because I had the paddle in my grip by then and a single whack drew blood and drove her back under.
Even with their brain banging against their skull, nothing outswims a Benthook, even Grelly. But mix that blood with the bait, and all those hungry mouths lurking all around you… well. I only needed the paddle three more times before she sank and didn’t come up again.
It was a quicker trip home that night, and with a bigger catch than usual in the canoe’s belly. A big old razorjaw, a matron, and with a belly ripe full of roe. Mama must’ve approved. I ate it raw, filled my mug and gullet with boiled oil from its liver, and threw my sister’s half-cracked cup into the midden with the first smile I’d owned proper in years.

I woke up early, heated up a morning soup with a rightful, uncompromising dose of salt, and paddled out farther offshore. Came back with a catch that nearly sank the canoe, spent the evening cooking, gutting, and carving, took the extra money left from the bigmouth cuts into town and bought a sack of red salt. Went to sleep early after filling in my sister’s bed with fresh dirt and a stone cap and drifted away as easily as if it were baiting a hook.
It was a good day. It was a new sort of day. It was the way all the days would be from now on, unless I decided to make them better yet. Maybe I’d even go hunting for a husband, now that the house had room…

Winter’s tail-end dripped away, along with the last of the morning mists. Now it was time for rain and sleet and fierce suns in dim skies, with waves that got angry and fast. Spring came with the big catches, but only if you had the teeth to bite into them and not let go.
Lightning struck the boat three times, an angry razorjaw nearly breached on me, and squalls broke out a half-minute from shining sunbeams every other day. Came back with the biggest hauls, week in, week out, and didn’t founder so much as once.
Maybe I’d get three husbands, and a cook. Maybe I’d get a warehouse. Maybe I’d hire out some hands to fish for me, like uncle did with mama, before the taste for the strong-sugar ate his teeth and wits right out of his skull. Not going to happen with me. Maybe uncle was a fool, but this daughter of Benthook wasn’t. The best vices were the safest vices, and those weren’t.
Then two months into spring I woke up, looked out the window, and saw a cherry-red sun rising into a sky already turning bluer than mama’s eyeballs. There was a hint of last night’s thunderheads slipping away over the far horizon on the back of a breeze that tugged heartstrings. A faint ghost of a big moon, a sea-moon, hung in the back of heaven.
It was a beautiful day. It was a perfect day. And it shouldn’t have been. We’d not even seen the face of summer yet, there should still be storms every week with daylong breaks for fog and dark. It got to me so bad I stopped by the churchstone before I left, to scrape a few prayers into the dirt at its base for the first time since mama died.
It would be fine. Just a gift for your hard work, that’s all. You’ve worked through the worst and come out shining bright as a fistful of diamonds, this is a chance to see what you can do with the best, that’s all. That’s all.

Went out farther than ever before. Didn’t even have to try to do it, the water was like a happy puppy under the bow, pulling me out and farther. Found myself taking breaks every fourth, like the bad old days – hah! There was no slacking here. Even the waves worked.
I stowed my paddle above a shoal so thick that the surface foamed. Tails and flukes broke water, now and then a little baitfish breached in the hurry of its attempt to avoid a happy bigmouth – usually failed.
The sky was empty. The wind was singing. My stomach was a nest of vipers.
I shook myself, stretched, and sighed in the air, felt the strong touch of the fish, then vomited into the bait bucket. I tried to breath, took in the smell again, and nearly choked as fresh heaves grabbed my gullet.
Fish, yes, there it was, there it was, but there was something else, something rancid and thicker than tar and familiar, something underneath…
Soft splinters reached my ears, and I looked downwards just in time to see the seams around the canoe’s keel double in width.
I stared. One hand groped for a bait-bucket as they doubled again. Then they tripled, then the water surged over my head.
All that water above me, but none around me – the fish were packed thick, like darting flies on a midden and three times as vicious. Baitfish tried to take shelter in my nostrils, bigmouths tasted at my fingers, and my claws did me as much good as spitting into a swell – blood flowed, but for no purpose.
I could feel a shriek brewing somewhere in my belly, and swallowed it. No failure. The canoe had split, but it would not have sunk. Up! Up! Swim, tear, pull up! No panic, feel the tug of the air in your lungs tell you the way! Up!
Light and dryness reached my fingertips even as more mouths worried at my heels, then my eyes slid above the glassiness and saw the shreds of the canoe’s starboard frame floating a reach away.
And stones-say, thank it all, the paddle was still there. I hauled out and clutched it with the love of a mother, gave myself a half-minute to curse and bless, then started the long, slow process of fighting back against that lovely breeze that had brought me here.

Night came in before I’d guessed, and it brought teeth under the big moon. Traces of bait, vomit and blood clung to the timbers of the canoe like fleas, and with them came an audience of hopeful scavengers, and with them came their predators, and with THEM came the razorjaws, slim and elegant little men and the heavyset bulk of the women, on the lookout for whatever strange beast had gone and torn itself to bits to float at the surface. Nosy animals, with nothing to satisfy curiosity with but teeth. I paddled, I swatted, and at morning who knew how much progress I’d made in miles but I’d lost yards of my raft to jagged, greedy teeth.
It was still beautiful out there, as I strained against half a paddle. A perfect sun in a perfect sky, beating down on me and cooking through my scales. Nothing to drink but salt water, with my mug at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing to eat but the gore that clung to the paddle’s handle, where a small razorjaw’s skull had proved softer than I expected. Nothing to see but flat blue, flat blue against a featureless sky without even the wind to guide me.
The wood creaked.

I didn’t turn, only breathed. And I didn’t inhale, because I knew what I’d smell; it was pooling all around me, as thick as the water that lapped at my kneeling legs as the raft settled deeper under the fresh weight. It was rotten brine and fish guts, mixed up and spread over a faint, familiar scent.
“Get off.” I’d said that. I didn’t want to, but I’d said it, and the voice was too cracked to even be mine. Someone was pretending to be me. “Go away.”
No noise at all, which made no sense. She could never shut up when it mattered. Was she going to make me say it? Could she speak, or was all the world down there as cold and quiet as a razorjaw’s smile? “Go away!”
A soft sigh at my side. Something dripped onto my shoulder.

Oh mama. You were right and you were wrong, all at once. The sea is for failures, but they do better there than we, hidden down there where we can’t see their secrets. And no daughter of yours stays a failure for long.
“Get off, Grelly!”

It’s coming down out there. You’d better wrap up tight and snug before you go, unless you want a chill. Take your coat, your heavy pants, and the biggest boots in the house – no, not those boots, these boots. Bring the heavy shovel for the long stretches, and the small shovel for the corners and the stoop. Mind your footing on the front stair.

It’s really coming down out there. You might want to check on the neighbours. Ring the doorbell on the south side, call out your name and household promptly, then raise your hands in the air and do not make any sudden movements. Bring them this casserole and the finest of our deer hides. Don’t catch a chill while you’re out.

It’s coming down out there like it hasn’t in years. Better wake up grandma – she knew all the best ways to take. Turn off all the downstairs lights and turn on all the upstairs lights. Fill the tubs and the sinks and empty the cupboards, throw it all into the freezer and don’t open it again. Lock the front door and the back door, pile up furniture in front of the windows, and jam the locks. Did you leave the car alarm on? Do that, we’ll need the advance warning system. Be quick and quiet.

It’s coming down fast out there. We’d better get ready for the long haul. Break out the first aid, count the canned goods, and everyone reload. Keep your buddy with you at all times and don’t turn your back on the shadows. Did you have a hot meal? If you didn’t, it’s too late now. Remember, they’re more scared of us than we are of them, and don’t you let them forget that either. If you’re jonesing for a cigarette, don’t bother. We can’t risk open flame ‘till this morning.

It’s coming down thick and furious out there. This could be it. Raise the floodgates, hoist the sandbags, and don’t cry, please don’t cry. We knew it would be here someday, and today is someday now. Just keep your calm and your cool and your head about you and we’ll all be laughing about this years from now. Did you remember your locker combination? Get there soon, and bring back the syringes. If the worst comes to the worst, it’ll be okay.

It’s still coming down out there. It might never end, you know. Did you scout out the caches yet? Check the traplines? I hope you at least visited the lookout – have we heard from him recently? Did you bring him the box? The red one? I hope you did that, because that’s very important. How’s your digestion lately? No aches or pains? If you feel them that’s okay, but if they spread to your legs go to the sickbay yesterday and don’t come back ‘till you can say your name forwards and backwards without stammering, shaking, or crying. It will be fine there, they have sugar for your tea.

It’s truly coming down out there. Throw more on the bonfire and don’t say any words out there in a language older than the internet. Wash your hands before you go, but not your palms. Tuck your chin in and keep it up. Keep fire close at hand and yours wits closer. And for the love of whatever’s left, don’t breathe through your mouth – the mist will give your position away.

It’s coming down out there like there’s no tomorrow. Could very well be. Take this book, ring this bell, eat this candle. Chew it six times seven times more, and be sure to say the right words from the right pages. Don’t lift a hand against them, and they won’t be able to lay a hand upon you. Do not touch what you cannot keep. Walk swiftly and silently, and come home safe.

It’s all coming down out there. You might as well accept it. Can’t make much of a difference at this point. Still, we always knew this would happen, didn’t we? We’re not surprised, at least. We aren’t. Are we? It was going to be like this. Definitely.
Oh well.