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The cock had crowed. The bell had rung. The sun had set. And every single one of the particular and funny-shaped dice had spun widdershins when thrown and come up as full sixes, as they were very carefully made to be.
“It’s time,” said the old priest.
“It’s time,” said the even older priest.
“It’s time,” chimed in the very young priest who had recently had to fill in for the oldest priest of all who was now resting somewhere soft and loamy and dark.
And the three walked, with varied creaks and stumbles, to the dark room, barred with three beams and locks. And they unchained and unlatched them, and they opened it, and inside was a big, beautiful boy of about adult years, which in those parts was older than you’d think. Life was good and fairly easy, and when life is good and fairly easy, you get a childhood that lasts longer.
“It’s time,” said the old priest.
“It’s time,” said the even older priest.
“Yes, it’s time,” said the very young priest who was practically squirming with impatience because he’d been practicing a lot for four months. “Now you-”
“Now you are the new year,” said the old priest, deftly shushing him with a single finger. “Here is your crown.”
And he handed the man who was the new year a little garland of leaves, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Here is your raiment,” said the even older priest.
And he draped over the new year a soft and billowing robe, and as the priest slipped the sleeves over the new year’s arms he whispered in his ear.
“And here is your gift,” said the very young priest, and he shoved a little round ball of what was equal parts bread and masonry into the new year’s palm.
“Now go!” they shouted (especially the very young priest) and the new year followed their fingers and he stumbled into the gently-falling snow of the temple’s courtyard, through the white drifts and billows, as shaky-legged as a toddler because it had been almost a month since he had seen full light.

In the wall was a door. It was made of hard, blood-red wood, sun-baked. At the door was a knocker. It was gilded but probably just brass.
The new year thumped at it.
“Go away,” said a voice.
The new year stood there.
“Twice more” whispered the voice.
The new year thumped at it again.
“Go away,” said the voice.
The new year thumped at it again.
“Enter,” said the voice. And he did.
Face to face, old year and new year. Old year in his hooded cowl that let only his beard and eyes escape; new year in his garland crown. One of them pale as a cave-fish, the other tanned and rough from a year spent walking from rite to rite.
“You’re late,” said old year. “The snows are here already – when I first walked this path, the grass was yet green and the birds still sang.”
The new year shrugged.
“The priests,” said the old year. “Bah. Follow me. Follow me and listen to me. You must do both of those things very well.”
The new year nodded.
“And stay quiet.”
“Yes,” said the new year.
The old year smacked his ear.

“This is the sundial,” said the old year, ushering the new year into his little gated court. “Here is where I sit at dawn, to make sure the days spin by on track. Here, hold the tip of its blade with your left hand, take its measure.”
The new year did that, and yelped. Blood dripped from his finger as he jammed it into his mouth.
“It likes you,” said the old year. “It didn’t bite me half as deep. That is good. It’s important to be on fine terms with your days. They’re your mortar, brick, and bread.”
They stood there.
The old year coughed.
They stood there.
“Rightpocket,” the old year coughed again.
The new year jumped, fumbled, and eventually retrieved the little loaf that the priests had given him. He handed it over and almost opened his mouth but the look the old year gave him forbade it.
“Thank you for your gift,” said the old year. “Now we may proceed indoors. Follow me into my house.”

The house of the old year was empty and vast. Air currents swam with the depth and force of the ocean through its hallways, in between the creaks. Shelves and shelves of books hid every wall so thickly they very well might have replaced them.
“One journal per week,” said the old year. “You will fill fifty-two. Can you write?”
The new year nodded.
“Good. Otherwise it can be troublesome. Fill them with your thoughts. Fill them with your fears. Fill them with your blessings, and the names of every place you go, everyone you meet, every meal you take, and every festival you attend. Write the week, and in the end you will write yourself. Understand that.”
The new year nodded.
“Light the fire.”
The new year nodded, and took the little bag of flint and steel he was offered, and nodded, and was pointed towards the vast and terrifying fireplace, and nodded, and was swatted, and stopped nodding and managed to strike a few sparks until a little blaze was huddled in the center of the capacious stone mouth.
The old year placed the eldest of his journals on the edge of the hearth. “Like this,” he said. “Sear them until the ink runs, then scorches. It has to be cleaned before it’s shelved for good. I will wait in the next room until you are done. Remember, fifty-two.”
The new year remembered. He lost count twice, but he remembered, stubbornly. Even if he did burn his fingers once or twice.

The next room was as different from the halls as possible. It was a kitchen.
“You will cook everything,” said the old year. “You will stew winter potage. You will roast fall gourds. You will bake summer loaves. You will make spring jams. To live the season is to eat it, and first it must be cooked. Properly. These books are not scorched, they are recipes. Use them. Properly.”
The old year pulled the little loaf that the new year had given him out of his robe and ate it in one bite and a lot of chews.
“More properly than this,” he grimaced. “Hard-baked on the outside, raw on the inside. Do not trust a priest with an oven. Ever.”
The new year nodded.
“And stop nodding.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t say you could start talking again either. Watch. Listen. Learn. Follow me.”

So the new year followed the old year.
He followed him to the bedroom, high in the spire, where the bed was at the center of an enormous clock-work that would always turn him towards the dawn. Above him, in the spire itself, was a weathervane that would tell the weather what to do, if he used it properly.
He followed him to the etching-room, where the walls were torn to shreds by hatch-marks, and where he would tally his own days with a blunt and ragged blade. There were words he was told that would shape the day as he marked it, if he spoke them surely.
He followed him to the garden, behind the kitchens, where herbs grew and plotted furiously, ripening for the reaping. Listen closely to them and they would warn you of the plans of men and women, if you were sympathetic.
He followed him until his feet ached and his mind smeared and his toes were worn and frozen, and he learned the ways and means and ins and outs and sheer, overwhelming complexity of the grandness of the year, in the house of the old year.
“And now it is time to pray,” the old year told him. And it was.

The prayers were of a particular sort, and had to be performed in a particular place, which was a little stone garden under a little skylight above a little but surprisingly deep pond, which the new year carefully washed their feet in as he poured them each a small glass of very strong….
“Herbs,” said the old year. “It will broaden your mind, but pull it a bit thin. The rest of the day will stay strong but this…may go away. That’s later. For now, listen to me. Listen to me and do what I say, as I do what I say. First, you will step into the spring.”
The new year stepped into the spring. It was warm and sulphurous, dragged up from underground. His toes bit at him as they came back to life.
“Now, you will anoint your brow with your first sip of your drink.”
The new year’s forehead steamed in the cool air. His eyes swam.
“Down it.”
The new year’s throat ached and punched and kicked.
“Bow down and cleanse your hands.”
The new year bowed down and scrubbed his palms briskly.
“And then,” said the old year, as he scrubbed his hands against the rough stones in the cold, cold water, “you will withdraw the little knife that the priests gave you from your right sleeve, and you will slit my throat with it.”
The new year’s right sleeve was already half-raised. The knife was in his hand. His foot was raised to take a step. His course was set, he needed only to complete it.
Instead he said “W-” and while he was busy doing that the old year spun around, glistening rust in his palm, and opened his neck up both ways.
It was a very clean cut, but then it had been a very good knife. Before it was left under a rough stone for twelve months.

In the courtyard, surrounded by birdsong, waited the priests. Each knew the time it would take to a minute, to a second, as sure as a grandfather clock. When the doors creaked open they smiled, and when they saw the robes they laughed, and when the new year strode forward in the garb of the old they blessed him warmly in his wake.
They bowed before him as he walked, seeing only the cowl and robe, not the face that filled it, the face they surely thought killed. First the old priest, then the even older priest, and then the oldest priest of all, whose cough was become quite severe these days.
And he walked on, smiling and triumphant across the bright green grass, into the year, and he felt like he could do this forever.

Once upon a time there was a peasant and a sling and an empty stomach and a rabbit sat temptingly within range.
The rabbit wasn’t as unaware as it looked, the peasant was more careless than he thought, and the far side of the ridge the rabbit ran down was a lot steeper than you’d assume.
Still, once the world stopped spinning and the feeling crept back into his spine, opportunity presented itself. Particularly once he saw what was lying underneath his spine.
(it was another spine, a very elongated one, tapering to a tail-tip)
And what it was attached to.
(it was large, and scaly, and sleeping soundly)
And then he had a very, very crafty idea.

Once upon a while there was a minor noble.
On his eighteenth birthday his father took him into the dungeons of the family keep and showed him the thing they kept in irons there, and the blood they drew from it.
And then he chugged a big mouthful, belched, and wrote an astounding treatise on economic thought in five minutes, pausing only to freshen the ink.
“Someday, son,” he told him, “this will all be yourgkughug…uhr. Ahrgh.”
The minor noble cleaned up around the place and considered what to do with his newfound power. Preferably in a way that wouldn’t end with him in a similar yet crucially different situation as the one he’d just manufactured, someday.
So he sat down, made sure he had a sharp, fresh quill handy, and chugged a big mouthful of blood.
And then he had a very cunning idea.

Once upon a ways there was a tremendously wealth heiress.
This was normal in her family, and almost below-par, which she resented dearly. Any fool could make a fortune, or a few fortunes – at least, any fool with the right-sized cup and the right code to the family vault.
It was keeping the peace long enough with your relatives to make sure they put their codes in too that was the trick.
She was out of luck with uncle Edward. He favoured little cousin Edith these days. And grandma Victoria had hated her for years. And mom and dad only gave out their codes in exchange for open promises, which the heiress despised.
There had to be a better way than this, stultifying under the weight and approval of generations of insular aristocrats and their petty judgments. There had to be a way to break down the barriers. There had to be a way to get her hands on some inspiration. More than the cupful she had left. She’d been thinning it, making it last, mixing it with a lot of wine (expensive wine, but still a watering-down).
She downed the last of her cupful neat.
And then she had a wonderful idea.

Once upon a long ago there was a captain of industry.
Or well, brewery. Which relied on industry, and rhymed with it, and so was near enough. Besides, as her mother had often reminded her, just try and imagine the city’s elite without liquid inspiration. You’d have to start over from first principles, rubbing two gears together and hoping they fucked.
So industry it was. The valves and pipes and boilers and thumpers and kettles and bells and whistles and walls and wails somewhere buried under it all, attached to a particularly heat-proof set of tubes, was what everybody worth being anybody treasured most in their gin, in their throats.
And, more importantly, in their heads.
A lonely, lonely position she stood in, now that mother was gone. But as mother had always told her, that was best. The family would slow you down. Better to run alone. A good idea, one of many thousands mother had kept with her.
(She’d never asked what mother had done with the family. She’d heard ‘dynamite’ muttered in the old women’s last hours, and figured that was enough)
The city hummed outside her window. It hummed to her tune, the vibration in the blood in the booze in its belly. Resonant, tickling the brain cells.
Now if only sales would go up a little more this quarter, she’d be set.
Now if only this city’s elite would screw a little more often, and have a few more kids every five years, she’d be set.
Now if only this damned document her lawyer had handed her would make sense, she’d be set.
Now if only the traffic weren’t so loud, she’d be set.
Now if only her daily glass hadn’t curdled in her gut and left her brain numb instead of buzzing, she’d be set.
Now if only this damned empty pit under her clavicle would go away, she’d be set.
The captain of industry realized she was doodling with her pen. So she got up and threw it through the window. It was a cheap thing, anyways. Gold foil pretending to be plating.
And then she watched, just for a moment, and saw a man walk by, pick it up, and smile with the genuine warmth of those who believe themselves to be truly fortunate.
And then she had a fairly clever idea.

Once upon a last week there was a guy, and his name was Nicholas Forwards, and he was a playwright, and he was hard stumped for inspiration.
So he went down to the bar and ordered three pints. Low-calorie. Light. Gluten-free. Butane-free.
And then he drank it down and threw up and bought another three and drank it down some more and after he’d dropped the local booze level a good eight inches he lit up and lit out and ran into the street yelling “I’VE GOT IT I’VE GOT IT I’VE GOT IT” and was hit by a car.
It was the driver’s fault. Yes, he’d been running, but she should’ve been paying attention. She’d been distracted by thinking about circuit designs. Never mind that she was a carpenter, she’d had a circuit design stuck in her head for six weeks straight. If she’d been able to explain that she might have gotten off, but as it was all she did was try and explain circuits to the judge, which was poor luck anyways because the judge hadn’t been able to deliver a verdict that wasn’t a monologue on fork design in eight months.
People had a lot on their mind, these days. Even if it was just a little.
Walking into traffic and driving into the sidewalk, forgetting to eat and forgetting to stop eating. A lot of the infrastructure had become exostructure overnight, sometimes explosively.

Except the brewery.

In its guts, in the basement under the basement under the basement on the building plans, fighting through a keyring, is the great architect, the heir to the empire. He’s been down here for three days, living off his own urine and whatever bugs come too close, and he’s almost found the right key. He would’ve had it two days ago if he hadn’t spent most of the time trying to come up with a phylogenetic tree for keys.
Can’t complain, though. He knows he’s more put together than most folks these days. Which is what he’s hoping to fix. Because heeeyyy, after five hundred years of exploitative theft and greed, which you personally benefited from your whole life… well, ‘I’m sorry’ can’t hurt, right? It’s got to help, right?
Oh there’s the key. He knew he’d almost found it.

Finding the lock took another hour though.

Click clack clunk and the old vault scooches open, and inside, bound by iron and steel and odd little symbols etched onto every link, was
a three foot goanna.
“I uh, I release you from, I’m, uh, I’m sor. I’m sor.”
It blinked at him, reptile-slow. The blood-milking tubes hung limply at its side. They must’ve been running dryer and dryer for…ever. When had it got so small?
He cleared his throat again.
“I’M VERY SORR”
“thhhhhhhhhh” it said.
“y,” he concluded. And shrugged, limply.
He unchained the goanna anyways. It bit him and ran out of the room. A small squeak announced that the city’s rodent population had a new, hungry problem.
The heir to the empire examined the red dripping out of his palm, and wondered if his clearing head was from pain or something else, more fundamental. Maybe it was alright. Maybe the fuzz would stop. Maybe he could sit and rest, without worry, without thought.
He licked his hand experimentally anyways. Just in case.

It didn’t give him any new ideas, but it did contribute to his death a few days later.
Blood poisoning.

They smile.
I know they’re told to do it, I know they get fired if they don’t. But still.
It’s nice to see a smile in the morning when you’re a walking frown, isn’t it?
A smile, a speedy transaction, and a tiny mug of extremely potent pixee to start the day. I take mine shredded, with a double lemon. Cracks you wide open. The folks that use milk are cowards.
Thanks, GlitterPixee.
Your stupid rolls still cost too much though.

I stepped outside the building, stood under the filthy dank fog that crackled ozone and pissed power and reflected that although the world may run on miasma, the people definitely ran on pixee. What good were all those mechanisms and foundries and pipes and tubes and vents and sirens if everyone fell over exhausted on the controls and blew up the building?
Work transit was slow. The bus driver was cautious, and got into a fight with a man that wouldn’t stand behind the line. The bus intervened on his behalf and by the time I walked into work the scrying of the unruly passenger vanishing into the bus’s maw feet-first had already been dreamed into the households of half the planet. My had he been a screamer. I wished I had my orb with me to see the recording, but the stupid thing had chipped nearly in half when I dropped it a week ago.

It was a productive day. I had two lunches, two meetings, and speed-engraved two hundred and sixty secret names into a tablet of two hundred and sixty other names. Today this slab would be given to the accounting department, and used to issue forth spells of billing, to charge them for letting them know where to find people who could tell them where to find people who knew about the best ways to curse and counter-curse troubled metropolitan districts.
Tomorrow I would probably have to put all the names back again and pretend it never happened, but I’d burn that troll when I came to it.
I also spent a lot of time arguing with the guy in the cell across from me. He had the sort of face that demanded it; eyebrows set in a natural furrow and a lip built halfway to a sneer from a snarl. We never agreed on anything, and several times I’d had to change long-standing beliefs of mine to ensure this. Nobody could bear to agree with someone so disagreeable.

The bus home was better-behaved. Much duller. I passed the time staring out the window and counting advertisements. They seemed quaintly obsolete, those flyers and billboards. Screaming their product into the world in hopes it’d see that one-in-a-thousand who actually wanted it, who might be the one in ten thousand that’d buy it. Like the marketing version of a tree spewing seeds left right and center. Not at all the way it’s down nowadays, when your orb could just tailor them right to your tastes for a song and a dance and a hope and a dream.
Oh man. That was right! It was today!
And just like that the road home got eight times longer, right up until the moment when I got home, wrenched open the box, tore away eighteen inches of intricately mass-produced little pellets of cold iron and unearthed their protected, insulated prize: my new orb. Not the best model, but the newest, which was close enough to that to make it better.
Just needed to register it with the spiders.
Thumbprint. Brainshock. That nasty, tingling feeling like an ice cream cone just took a bite out of your forehead, and a small scream.
There we go!
I gripped it tight and rolled back my eyes and listened to the familiar whispers as the spiders scrambled in and out of my ears, pulling together everything they knew I’d want.
More fading reported from small towns in the eastern hinterland. Images of a starving dragon collapsed on a riverbank, too hungry to eat. More sages stating this was a direct result of miasmic corruption and that within the next thirty years half the planet would be a smouldering husk and the other half would envy it. More arguments.
I filed that away in the back of my head for the next time I was bored at work and wanted to pick a fight with the guy in the cell next to me. Not sure what side I’d take yet, I’d probably leave that up to him.
Used hope and dream-related byproduct from orb charging was being barred from shipment to the Great Lagoon, which had decided to start shipping its own mutilated dreamwaste to Far Asdy, which was burning it in special furnaces that had been connected to blah blah who cares.
They needed to fix the newsfeed settings on these things; it’d take ages to get this thing back to looking at what I cared about.
Seablight continued to spread. All that miasma that had been locked up low, leaking out and back up into the light again, stronger and angrier and fuelled by the rotting souls of millions of sickening and withering fish and corals.
I hid that one. Too depressing to look at. I wanted to go diving in Newdeep next summer.
GlitterPixee has been implicated in the underpayment of its workers.
Well, shit, what I had just said about too depressing? I’d have to get my morning wake-me-up somewhere else now. Maybe Ever-Dust – but that was two blocks away, no. Wakeman’s Ups? No, that was one block the WRONG way.
I’d tip the staff an extra coin, that was it. That’d work. I’d be helping AND saving myself an inconvenience.
Good job, me.

The cold iron pellets didn’t look recyclable, but they looked like they might’ve been recyclable. I asked the spiders who asked the world and got six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So I put half in the garbage and half in the smelter bin.

The next morning was another curdled sky. Seems like those are more and more common nowadays. Maybe all those sages they keep interviewing are on to something, I guess. I’m sure someone’ll sort it out.
But for now, grind as it may, as long as I’ve got me a hot cup of pixee I’m just fine.
It all must be fine.
They smile.
I know they’re told to do it, I know they get fired if they don’t. But still.
It’s nice to see a smile in the morning when you’re a walking frown, isn’t it?
A smile, a speedy transaction, and a tiny mug of extremely potent pixee to start the day. I take mine shredded, with a double lemon. Cracks you wide open. The folks that use milk are cowards.
Thanks, GlitterPixee.
Your stupid rolls still cost too much though.

I stepped outside the building, stood under the filthy dank fog that crackled ozone and pissed power and reflected that although the world may run on miasma, the people definitely ran on pixee. What good were all those mechanisms and foundries and pipes and tubes and vents and sirens if everyone fell over exhausted on the controls and blew up the building?
Work transit was slow. The bus driver was cautious, and got into a fight with a man that wouldn’t stand behind the line. The bus intervened on his behalf and by the time I walked into work the scrying of the unruly passenger vanishing into the bus’s maw feet-first had already been dreamed into the households of half the planet. My had he been a screamer. I wished I had my orb with me to see the recording, but the stupid thing had chipped nearly in half when I dropped it a week ago.

It was a productive day. I had two lunches, two meetings, and speed-engraved two hundred and sixty secret names into a tablet of two hundred and sixty other names. Today this slab would be given to the accounting department, and used to issue forth spells of billing, to charge them for letting them know where to find people who could tell them where to find people who knew about the best ways to curse and counter-curse troubled metropolitan districts.
Tomorrow I would probably have to put all the names back again and pretend it never happened, but I’d burn that troll when I came to it.
I also spent a lot of time arguing with the guy in the cell across from me. He had the sort of face that demanded it; eyebrows set in a natural furrow and a lip built halfway to a sneer from a snarl. We never agreed on anything, and several times I’d had to change long-standing beliefs of mine to ensure this. Nobody could bear to agree with someone so disagreeable.

The bus home was better-behaved. Much duller. I passed the time staring out the window and counting advertisements. They seemed quaintly obsolete, those flyers and billboards. Screaming their product into the world in hopes it’d see that one-in-a-thousand who actually wanted it, who might be the one in ten thousand that’d buy it. Like the marketing version of a tree spewing seeds left right and center. Not at all the way it’s down nowadays, when your orb could just tailor them right to your tastes for a song and a dance and a hope and a dream.
Oh man. That was right! It was today!
And just like that the road home got eight times longer, right up until the moment when I got home, wrenched open the box, tore away eighteen inches of intricately mass-produced little pellets of cold iron and unearthed their protected, insulated prize: my new orb. Not the best model, but the newest, which was close enough to that to make it better.
Just needed to register it with the spiders.
Thumbprint. Brainshock. That nasty, tingling feeling like an ice cream cone just took a bite out of your forehead, and a small scream.
There we go!
I gripped it tight and rolled back my eyes and listened to the familiar whispers as the spiders scrambled in and out of my ears, pulling together everything they knew I’d want.
More fading reported from small towns in the eastern hinterland. Images of a starving dragon collapsed on a riverbank, too hungry to eat. More sages stating this was a direct result of miasmic corruption and that within the next thirty years half the planet would be a smouldering husk and the other half would envy it. More arguments.
I filed that away in the back of my head for the next time I was bored at work and wanted to pick a fight with the guy in the cell next to me. Not sure what side I’d take yet, I’d probably leave that up to him.
Used hope and dream-related byproduct from orb charging was being barred from shipment to the Great Lagoon, which had decided to start shipping its own mutilated dreamwaste to Far Asdy, which was burning it in special furnaces that had been connected to blah blah who cares.
They needed to fix the newsfeed settings on these things; it’d take ages to get this thing back to looking at what I cared about.
Seablight continued to spread. All that miasma that had been locked up low, leaking out and back up into the light again, stronger and angrier and fuelled by the rotting souls of millions of sickening and withering fish and corals.
I hid that one. Too depressing to look at. I wanted to go diving in Newdeep next summer.
GlitterPixee has been implicated in the underpayment of its workers.
Well, shit, what I had just said about too depressing? I’d have to get my morning wake-me-up somewhere else now. Maybe Ever-Dust – but that was two blocks away, no. Wakeman’s Ups? No, that was one block the WRONG way.
I’d tip the staff an extra coin, that was it. That’d work. I’d be helping AND saving myself an inconvenience.
Good job, me.

The cold iron pellets didn’t look recyclable, but they looked like they might’ve been recyclable. I asked the spiders who asked the world and got six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So I put half in the garbage and half in the smelter bin.

The next morning was another curdled sky. Seems like those are more and more common nowadays. Maybe all those sages they keep interviewing are on to something, I guess. I’m sure someone’ll sort it out.
But for now, grind as it may, as long as I’ve got me a hot cup of pixee I’m just fine.
It all must be fine.
They smile.
I know they’re told to do it, I know they get fired if they don’t. But still.
It’s nice to see a smile in the morning when you’re a walking frown, isn’t it?
A smile, a speedy transaction, and a tiny mug of extremely potent pixee to start the day. I take mine shredded, with a double lemon. Cracks you wide open. The folks that use milk are cowards.
Thanks, GlitterPixee.
Your stupid rolls still cost too much though.

I stepped outside the building, stood under the filthy dank fog that crackled ozone and pissed power and reflected that although the world may run on miasma, the people definitely ran on pixee. What good were all those mechanisms and foundries and pipes and tubes and vents and sirens if everyone fell over exhausted on the controls and blew up the building?
Work transit was slow. The bus driver was cautious, and got into a fight with a man that wouldn’t stand behind the line. The bus intervened on his behalf and by the time I walked into work the scrying of the unruly passenger vanishing into the bus’s maw feet-first had already been dreamed into the households of half the planet. My had he been a screamer. I wished I had my orb with me to see the recording, but the stupid thing had chipped nearly in half when I dropped it a week ago.

It was a productive day. I had two lunches, two meetings, and speed-engraved two hundred and sixty secret names into a tablet of two hundred and sixty other names. Today this slab would be given to the accounting department, and used to issue forth spells of billing, to charge them for letting them know where to find people who could tell them where to find people who knew about the best ways to curse and counter-curse troubled metropolitan districts.
Tomorrow I would probably have to put all the names back again and pretend it never happened, but I’d burn that troll when I came to it.
I also spent a lot of time arguing with the guy in the cell across from me. He had the sort of face that demanded it; eyebrows set in a natural furrow and a lip built halfway to a sneer from a snarl. We never agreed on anything, and several times I’d had to change long-standing beliefs of mine to ensure this. Nobody could bear to agree with someone so disagreeable.

The bus home was better-behaved. Much duller. I passed the time staring out the window and counting advertisements. They seemed quaintly obsolete, those flyers and billboards. Screaming their product into the world in hopes it’d see that one-in-a-thousand who actually wanted it, who might be the one in ten thousand that’d buy it. Like the marketing version of a tree spewing seeds left right and center. Not at all the way it’s down nowadays, when your orb could just tailor them right to your tastes for a song and a dance and a hope and a dream.
Oh man. That was right! It was today!
And just like that the road home got eight times longer, right up until the moment when I got home, wrenched open the box, tore away eighteen inches of intricately mass-produced little pellets of cold iron and unearthed their protected, insulated prize: my new orb. Not the best model, but the newest, which was close enough to that to make it better.
Just needed to register it with the spiders.
Thumbprint. Brainshock. That nasty, tingling feeling like an ice cream cone just took a bite out of your forehead, and a small scream.
There we go!
I gripped it tight and rolled back my eyes and listened to the familiar whispers as the spiders scrambled in and out of my ears, pulling together everything they knew I’d want.
More fading reported from small towns in the eastern hinterland. Images of a starving dragon collapsed on a riverbank, too hungry to eat. More sages stating this was a direct result of miasmic corruption and that within the next thirty years half the planet would be a smouldering husk and the other half would envy it. More arguments.
I filed that away in the back of my head for the next time I was bored at work and wanted to pick a fight with the guy in the cell next to me. Not sure what side I’d take yet, I’d probably leave that up to him.
Used hope and dream-related byproduct from orb charging was being barred from shipment to the Great Lagoon, which had decided to start shipping its own mutilated dreamwaste to Far Asdy, which was burning it in special furnaces that had been connected to blah blah who cares.
They needed to fix the newsfeed settings on these things; it’d take ages to get this thing back to looking at what I cared about.
Seablight continued to spread. All that miasma that had been locked up low, leaking out and back up into the light again, stronger and angrier and fuelled by the rotting souls of millions of sickening and withering fish and corals.
I hid that one. Too depressing to look at. I wanted to go diving in Newdeep next summer.
GlitterPixee has been implicated in the underpayment of its workers.
Well, shit, what I had just said about too depressing? I’d have to get my morning wake-me-up somewhere else now. Maybe Ever-Dust – but that was two blocks away, no. Wakeman’s Ups? No, that was one block the WRONG way.
I’d tip the staff an extra coin, that was it. That’d work. I’d be helping AND saving myself an inconvenience.
Good job, me.

The cold iron pellets didn’t look recyclable, but they looked like they might’ve been recyclable. I asked the spiders who asked the world and got six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So I put half in the garbage and half in the smelter bin.

The next morning was another curdled sky. Seems like those are more and more common nowadays. Maybe all those sages they keep interviewing are on to something, I guess. I’m sure someone’ll sort it out.
But for now, grind as it may, as long as I’ve got me a hot cup of pixee I’m just fine.
It all must be fine.

Once upon a time there was oh about a ton, a ton of troll, and that troll was named Lod. She lived on the hill, under the crag, under the crag her mother had lived in – she was the youngest child, and to her had passed the hearth. Every six years or so her siblings came home and they ate and sang and swore at each other, and had a very good time. Other than that, she was much on her own.
It was a pretty good life, for a troll. They’re solitary folk. Days drift by fast enough when routine’s at their heels, and as the body thinks its way through the chores the brain (the least essential organ in any animal) is free to waste its own time on its own dime.
The downside with routines is they make ruts. And you don’t see those until you step in them, as occurred to Lod one fine April when she stood up walked out her front door and fell six feet down onto screaming, bleating softness.
“Huh,” said Lod, scraping herself upright. Someone had removed a lot of dirt from the base of her hill and replaced it with some kind of scraped path, then filled it with….little terrified clouds? She picked one up – the one underneath her posterior – and gave it a snort. Smelled like food.
“Huh,” pondered Lod.
A chittering noise turned her thoughts outwards again. A very small and hideous creature was in front of her. Its eyes were bulging great fish-goggles; its skin a thin, stretched thing like a frog’s hide. Its mouth seemed soft and toothless, and its claws appeared to have been removed. Uneven patches of hair decorated its head only; the poor thing seemed mangy.
“Want some?” asked Lod.
The chittering continued, and Lod realized it was coming from the creature’s mouth. Clearly it was half mad with hunger.
“Poor sucker,” she said, and she tore the little cloud-animal in half and handed the other half to the small hideous creature only to watch it run down the path as if its feet were on fire.
“Strange,” considered Lod.
And that was the most words she’d said at once in three years.
Damn fine dinner, though.

The next day Lod was cleaning her hearth when a fearsome ruckus appeared outside her stoop – at midday, no less – a time when most folks are waiting for the sun to die down.
Lod stuck her nose out and sniffed. It smelled of fear and rage and petulance, and then her face followed her nose and oh look it was more of the little hideous things.
“Crud,” she said. “Can’t feed you all.”
They chittered most fiercely at her. They were brandishing sticks and things. Some of them were on fire, and some were pointy, and some were just sticks. Were they trying to build a nest or something?
“Try the hilltop,” she suggested. “No birds there for years.”
“T FRS S, KLL T,” howled one of the shaggier creatures.
“Cripes, quiet,” said Lod. “Take ‘em and go.”
And she rolled a few good fire-starter-stones down the hill at them, but the creatures ran away and just left them there. And they WERE good ones, have no doubt.
“Strange,” complained Lod.
All that strange was making her hungry, too.

The next day Lod lucked out. Wandered a little farther afield than usual – easy, too, with these weird paths everywhere – when’d THEY show up? – and found a whole bunch of those little cloud-animals. She took two (lunch and dinner) and was annoyed to find herself watched once more by the furtive, smelly, and heavy-breathinged creature she’d met two days before.
“Come on,” she yelled at it, waving a portion of cloud-animal leg above her head. “Feel free. Lots here. I can’t fit it all in.”
And it skedaddled again.
But not all the way. It followed her all the way home and hung around as she ate and finally she gave up and chucked the bones at it and it ran away squeaking.
“Strange,” fumed Lod.
And then.
“Nah. They’re being assholes.”
Lod had fourteen older siblings. She knew of what she spoke.

The fourth day was odder still. Once again Lod was awoken rudely in the depths of day the shrieks of the squishy creatures, but this time it was one making the noise of sixteen. It had covered itself in shiny rocks, and it wielded a very small and tremendously ineffectual stick that was so thin it was practically two-dimensional.
“Oh fuck off,” said Lod, whose manners, often-eroded since the death of her mother, were now exhausted.
“HV T TH,” hollered the thing, and it ran at her squeaking and waving the stick around.
Lod smacked it one and it fell over and stopped breathing.
“Oh SHIT,” she said, and she quickly applied the traditional troll medicinal remedy for a stopped heart, which was to tear open the patient’s chest and squeeze it until it started up again.
However, it transpired that the creatures had unusually bony ribcages and unusually soft hearts, and so the thing staunchly remained dead.
“Shit, shit, shit,” muttered Lod as she chewed this over.
In the end she dismembered the patient (reserving the longbones), placed it together with its complete skull in a small cairn on top of the crag, and hoped that by the end of the century it’d have slept it off and be able to walk home by itself.

For three days Lod enjoyed somewhat restful sleep.
And on the seventh day she was woken, and this time there were four of them and they had larger sticks.
“Hell with this,” said Lod. She stomped her feet three times, gave her tormentors the finger, and stepped into her hearth, which ignited instantly and consumed her down to a thick wisp of smoke.

She’d go visit her sister over the sea, maybe, or her brother in the forest. Tell them about whatever nonsense this was, tell them it was their problem now, and walk out. Mom’s house was NOT worth this shit.