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Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored, bored.  Beyond tolerance, beyond belief, beyond all reality she was bored.  This was the true sentence.  Not incarceration, not forced labour, it was boredom.  “I sentence you to so-and-so hours of being bored,” the judge hadn’t told her.  Straight-up lies, omitting that. 

So she fidgeted, and she paced, and she poked, and did all the other distractible things a human being might do when confronted with too much time to do nothing in, and she lost her mind and found it again and finally one day she looked up at the ceiling and wondered if she’d ever tried climbing on top of it.

Sammy put her feet on the floor, and then one foot on top of the other, and then her foot on the wall, and her other foot on the ceiling, and then she took a step with just a little bit extra and she was on top of the ceiling.. 

She wondered why nobody had ever tried that before.  The overside of the ceiling was an odd texture; made of something that wasn’t quite molecules, and as she stood on it the light clipped through her eyes in a way that made her very very uncomfortable. 

Also an alarm was ringing and someone was shouting, which wasn’t helping either.  So she shuffled her feet – generating something that was like a static charge but inside-out and upside-down – and put one directly on top of the other, and then the same again, and in doing so she climbed on top of top of the ceiling, and then on top of on top of that, and was on top of the roof.

The breeze nearly blindsided Sammy; it’d been so long since she’d been outside with no walls to block it.  Her shirt felt too thin and her skin felt too cold and she enjoyed it more than she felt was probably reasonable, and for a while the sheer joy at each new step made in a new place kept her as warm as she needed to be.  But after walking lap number six the low-slung guardrail of the roof began to look too much like another wall to her, and the large siren had started up, and so with great annoyance Sammy looked around, saw a tree, and climbed on top of it. 

Getting there was the same as before.  One foot on top of the other, and again, and then on top of the tree, which was where it was quite different and quite difficult because it wasn’t a nice flat surface like the roof, or a nice quasiflat unsurface like the top of the ceiling.  She was standing on many hundreds of branches, all at once and all together, and even more leaves than that, and the leaves were needles because it was a pine tree, which just made for even more confusion.  Its trunk was a winding python of a gnarled, sap-ridden thing, and Sammy felt like she was balanced on a crocodile’s nose. 

So she looked around for the first thing she saw and climbed on top of that instead – one foot atop another, then atop it – which was a bird, and that was much worse.

***

Sammy stood on feathers and beak and bones and blood and body and air sacs and crop and liver and heart and lungs and guts and legs and feet and wings and so many muscles and a pair of big eyes and an offended little beak and a loud and VERY upset song being directed at her with tremendous volume and venomous force. 

It was like trying to keep your footing inside a cement mixer.  So she screamed a little, and leapt a little, and she jumped off the bird and landed on the other next thing she saw, which was another bird, and that was twice as bad because it had happened two times in a row but also only half as bad because that helps you get used to it but unfortunately the bird was at least twice the first bird’s size, which brought her right back to square one. 

So Sammy jumped, and landed on a bit of cloud.

It was soft, in a gassy sort of way.  But hard, because it was water, and few things were more relentless, even on holiday in the sky.  This particular scrap of nothing was roaming under her foothold, just bumbling its way along until it could build up a head of thunder and shit itself all across the landscape in a torrent of tiny little droplet daggers.  It accepted her presence with the casual benevolence of someone who didn’t really care if you existed or not, and Sammy was left to stare at the world around her and marvel at how high she’d climbed, which she did.  She was upside down and this seemed like it should matter more than it currently did. 

It turned out that a lot of things mattered less than they should when you were upside down.  The ground was much less enormous when it was the sky; and the sky was far more solid and real when it was the ground.  A big blue blanket stretched out beneath Sammy’s feet, as real and solid and true as the floor she’d paced on just a few million instants ago.  She could see a lot and didn’t understand most of it.  Something flitted in the corner of her eye, she turned to face it, stepped a little harder than she’d meant, and she was on top of the underside of a plane. 

It was very unpleasant.  The sound was outrageous – vibrating her bones, chattering her teeth, shaking her until she couldn’t tell if she was shivering with  the cold or not.  The metals underfoot were confused and muddled in a way that the water vapour hadn’t been, lacking confidence or direction or much of anything beyond their own solidity.  And worst of worst of WORST of all there were a lot of upside-down people around her that didn’t know which way wasn’t up or how up worked, and in Sammy’s haste to get away from their loud and deeply confusing thoughts she stepped on one of the plane’s signal transmissions and climbed on top of a satellite. 

***

It was quiet again.  Cool, since Sammy’s foothold was currently on the nighttime and shady side of the planet and therefore a long, long way below zero.  Peaceful, in a thousands-of-miles-per-hour sort of way.  An antenna was poking into Sammy’s heel, which was probably very expensive for someone somewhere. 

She could look down and see everything everywhere in such absoluteness that none of it was visible.  Or she could look up, which would be much worse.

Sammy looked up and saw nothing nowhere.

So  much nothing.  So much nowhere.  Everything everywhere wasn’t even a rounding error.  It went on forever, and she couldn’t understand forever, and in the face  of it all she realized that was probably okay, or at least if it wasn’t okay it was in a way that her mind couldn’t grasp. 

Sammy relaxed, open at last to a truly boundless universe whose infinite space made her feel finally, comfortably housed without being confined.  She reached out with empty arms and grasped at the ungraspable, content with the futility of this gesture, then shuffled her feet just slightly wrong and climbed on top of everything. 

Being in space is difficult and painful.  Being outside of space is not pleasant.  It’s also not unpleasant.  It is many things that are impossible to conceptualize because they aren’t concepts or even things. 

But whatever they were or weren’t, Sammy experienced or did not experience a lot of them or not-them and then after a nonsequential antiquantity of unevents she climbed back down, which should not have worked or even not worked.

Which it didn’t.

***

Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored.  And very grateful for it, too.

Truly grateful.  Wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

But.

Maybe tomorrow she’d try to climb again. 

Just a little bit. 

The crackle of the flames in the chill open air could’ve been taken from any ancient Earth firepit, but the light that eminent was subtly different in a way that made the mind stutter. Probably reflection from the discarded hull debris; this was metal that had never really been intended to be inside a planet’s atmosphere, let alone pull the same duty as a simple circle of stones.
The captain cleared her throat. “Well. I appreciate this is not an ideal situation, but I also must remind you all of just how much of our survival was down to our knowledge and boldness in the face of unknown dangers. Now is NOT the time for hesitation or dwelling on any hypothetical mistakes of the past. We are products of the most technologically advanced civilization to ever exist; we travel the space between the stars; we have made all the universe our home using nothing but the brains between our ears. And now that we’re all here, and safe, and warm, it’s time to use those brains to plan for the future.”
“We already turned on the rescue beacon before the ship broke up, didn’t we?” asked the staff doctor. 

“I did,” said the systems engineer.

“Right.  We did that.”
“Not the far future,” said the captain patiently and without condescension.  “The NEAR future.  Our ability to leave this planet is out of our hands; we’ve done all we can unless any of you believes yourselves capable of crafting an interstellar ship from shattered hull fragments-”
“In theory, in a few hundred years,” said the systems engineer.  “In practice, no.”
“-and so we must move to consider our non–immediate but yet-imminent needs.  For example, water.  James?”
“I rigged up a dew collector,” said the staff doctor.  “Based on the temperature differential and moisture content we’ve seen recently, it should get us something.  And we can purify it with the sunlight and the basic filter I’ve got on hand.  That’ll last us until we can find a river or something; shouldn’t be too hard with the coastal cliffs as a surveillance site.”

“Excellent,” said the captain.  “And then the next point of interest: food.  We’re on a terra-seeded but wild-grown world, and much of what we encounter will be familiar in origin but alien in expression, potentially in ways that might cause us harm.  Anything we ingest should be strictly examined for possible side effects, and it is for this reason that I advocate we continue to exploit the local near-fish.”

“It tasted that good?” asked the systems engineer skeptically.
The captain plucked up a charred bone from their makeshift plate and jabbed with it for emphasis.  “No!  It was pretty awful, really, even for something without seasoning.  But the basic chemical and physical makeup was almost entirely within hominid-orthodox limits.  It’s as much a fish as something you’d pull out of a pond in Sol, if not moreso!  It’s truly admirable in its adherence to the teleost bauplan, however many generations separated it from its source.  I recommend we all consume it.  I want to consume more of it.  I will put the fish in my mouth and gnash my teeth and rend it and swallow it and it will become me and I will become it.  I will stand on the sharp grey rocks and watch the bright bright sun ripple on the surface and I will dive and strike and grab and feast feast feast on the fine fresh fish flesh fiercely freely frantically furiously.”

The captain adjusted her shirt collar, sat down, and was immediately tackled and tied up by the chief scientist, the staff doctor, and the systems engineer. 

“How long until this wears off?” asked the systems engineer as he wiped the scanty sweat from his brow.

“I am perfectly fine and wish for fish,” said the captain. 

“Difficult to say,” hazarded the staff doctor.  “Depends on if it’s a fast-acting parasite messing with the nervous system, toxin accumulation doing the same, or maybe some kind of total allergic reaction caused by incompatibility on the cellular level.  With the supplies on hand, the best we can do is keep her comfortable and eat the trees.”
“The what now?” said the systems engineer.

“We would be better off if we had very very very large teeth like beavers or something that constantly sharpened themselves and never stopped growing,” pondered the staff doctor.  “As it is we only have one set of adult teeth due to terrible mammalian dentary practices, and they’re very low quality.  We’ll have to chop the trees into very small pieces to eat them or unhinge our jaws, which would be painful and unhealthy in the long term.  Cooking them will help with that as long as we get them down to charcoal, but then there’s not much nutritional value left – although maybe we could use that to absorb any potential toxins from the fish or the tubers I tried eating earlier, which may be what was causing the captain to act irrationally.  Yes, I think we’d better try that.”
“Try eating the trees?”

The staff doctor blinked.  “What?  Who’d want to do that?”
“You.  Twenty seconds ago.”
“That would be odd.  I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You just said to do that.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?” asked the staff doctor, and as his hand started drifting towards the remaining emergency rope the systems engineer jumped for it too.  The scuffle that followed was inconclusive, but the staff doctor had done more work on the captain and so ran out of steam first and was subsequently hogtied with several granny knots and a lot of complaining. 
“Okay,” breathed the systems engineer.  “Alright.  No fish.  No tubers.  What do you think?”

This was directed to the head scientist, who was staring into the flames with brow furrowed in gentle but fierce thought.  At this prompt they looked up at them all – two bound, one standing and panting – and cleared their throat.

“Rocks,” said the head scientist. 

“And?” asked the systems engineer. 

The head scientist shook their head dismissively.  “Rocks,” they explained.  And then their eyes went back to the fire. 

“Great,” said the systems engineer.  “Just great.”  He blew out a sigh.  “So, as the only one who apparently hasn’t consumed any of the local flora or fauna and come down with whatever alien poisoning is messing with the rest of you, it’s up to me to be the sensible, rational, reasonable one around here – as usual.  We’re going to be smart and practical and think this through.  We’re going to find the other survivors and eat them.  This is the best expenditure of our limited time and energy and resources, and will not go wrong.”

“Rocks,” said the head scientist. 

“Right!” said the systems engineer, and then he passed out.

The head scientist went to sleep some six minutes later – still sitting bolt upright — and twenty minutes after that the fire died.

The air still shone and shimmied for quite a while longer, though.  Some of the substances the ambient oxygen was peeling loose from the salvage-firepit’s metals were very lively indeed. 

Winter ended and the waters ran warm. And where went the warm, there went the wizards in their great study-ships: fat-bellied and top-heavy; high in back and front and overstuffed with mobile studies and bilge laboratories and secret water-and-air-tight compartments and crewed by a few shaken souls or no one at all.

And where wizards went, other wizards typically did not. Because of things like this.

***

“This,” said Hope, waving her hand up and down at the breadth of this, which had been smelly even before its preservation in brine, “is my finest discovery yet.”
“Doubtless.”

Hope had a habit when lecturing of tapping her fingers on any nearby surface in a way that wasn’t quite a rhythm. She did this now. “Radical bauplan inversion; in full defiance of gravity – the torso reversed; the tail turned on its head; each limb completely acting in antitorsion. An incredible and incredibly demanding feat to sustain in violation of natural and physical laws, powered by an internal metaphorical stomach capable of turning any concept that can fit down the gullet into fuel.”

“Impressive.”

“It took a two-day chase to bring down this specimen. It was only foiled when it tried to swallow my anchor and got stuck on it. Forged and worked metals were a complete novelty that it had no idea how to cope with; although I hypothesize it would’ve managed with sufficient exposure.”
“Very likely. But there is one small problem.”

“What?”
Mercy sucked down the last mouthful of tea for just a little longer than necessary. “You have interpreted the organism upside-down and backwards.”

***

And so came the third thing that turned with the seasons: with time came the warmth, and with the warmth came the wizards, and with the wizards came the perniciousness.

Perniciousness was Hope naming a newly-described and interestingly-shaped coral Gluteus mercy.

Perniciousness was Mercy sending one messenger-gull an hour to Hope’s vessel for six nights running, each with only a useless fragment of a request or a slight spelling correction on a previous message.

Perniciousness was Hope intercepting the monthly merchant resupply whale-pod and bartering for all of their squid, tunny, and marlin – far in excess of what any one researcher would need for even the most extravagant birthday feast – on Mercy’s birthday.

Perniciousness was Mercy’s spynacles letting her know the precise day on which to announce her weeks-old description of a new species of ectoplasm-consuming nothosaur, which was the exact day before Hope finished inscribing her final analysis of her own specimen of it.

And true perniciousness was that the first question that appeared in each of their heads each time after each insult without fail or hesitation was ‘how can I beat this?’

***

It was never a difficult question to answer.

This time, the answer was a small clockwork fish filled with a particular enzyme extracted from a pernicious species of cave-dwelling trilobite, which would result in whatever ate the fish metamorphosing into something spined and horned and aggressive and very rapidly cancerous, which would then do likewise to whatever ate IT, and so on and so forth. Hope’s theory was that if she flung it into the sea in Mercy’s general direction the odds were better than not that she’d end up with an angry armoured fish devouring part of Mercy’s rudder before the week was out.

“Good luck,” she told the little brass-and-coral nightmare, and with a gingerly-applied pat to the backside, she flung it into the sea.

***

Simultaneously, Mercy stood from her desk with a sore back in the palm of one hand and a devious little mixture in the other. It was made of ground ultraviolet glass and bottled sunshine and just a hint of malefic vitriol extracted from black walnut heartwood. It wanted out, and wanted to be consumed, and whatever consumed it would, should, could become a wrathful and desiccated husk of its own self devoted only to mindless thrashing spite against every piece of the world to make contact with its own rotting frame.

The currents were augured to be favourably Hope-borne for the next few days, so she dumped the lot overboard with a very lazy flick of her wrist and didn’t bother to look twice.

“Have fun finding specimens with THAT,” she muttered to herself three minutes later, when the words occurred to her. She was alone on her vessel and felt no shame in doing this.

***

Three days later the surface of the sea ran black-and-electric with a host of screaming, thrashing, nightmare-ridden, armour-plated, invincible, immortal, agonized beasts of various sizes and shapes, all lethal and unhappy about it and all of them skeletons filled with tumorous spike-and-tooth growths.

Hope tried fire, the standby of every wizard. It made them smell like glue and the shoreline, but did not make them flinch.

Mercy, the elder and the more experienced mariner, tried lightning. It made them shake and shudder and move twice as quickly for approximately an hour. The waves ran thicker and thicker with enemies and the hulls of each ship – reinforced with word and wand though they were – began to groan and creak under the many, many, many teeth and jaws being applied ever more pressingly.

“Perhaps this will work,” said Hope as quietly and carefully as she could, measuring out a dram of powdered brontofish grain-by-grain into a triple-sealed lead-glazed flask, hands made clumsy and fingers barely able to move in safety gloves fashioned of inch-thick walrus leather. “As long as I’m careful,” she amended.

“Needs must,” said Mercy, who had brought up the hidden vault attached to her ship’s anchor and was – behind a cold iron safety sheet –opening a triple-combination-locked door entirely by feel. It cracked open, revealing a single megaloplesiosaur tooth, vibrating under the pressure of the atmosphere and its own charge. She plucked it up and began to wrap it in the thickest possible blankets, as carefully as if it were her own newborn child. “If done properly.”

It was at precisely that moment that the two ships – driven by the push and pull and prying of the deranged hosts of enraged sea creatures, and otherwise left undirected and unobserved – bonked into one another at full force.

***

When the explosions were over and the clouds had begun to creep back over the horizon and the sea had recovered enough to let ripples disturb its surface again, it dawned on a very new sort of argument.

“I have the space; you make the offer,” said Mercy.
“I have the provisions; YOU make the offer,” said Hope.
“A barrel of hardtack isn’t worth much if a passing scavenger takes your legs before you’ve even had a chance to get hungry.”
“And a nice safe chunk of driftwood isn’t much use if you wither up and die on it weeks before it starts to sink. Give me something I want.”

“I think I see sharks coming back,” said Mercy.

“I think they’ll damage this barrel if they eat me,” said Hope.
They waited there for the second-longest ten seconds of either of their lives, avoiding eye contact. Then Hope clambered aboard the chunk of what had been part of Mercy’s fo’c’sle while Mercy fished out the (still dry) barrel.

“I think perhaps,” she said as she began to pry at the edge of the lid with the charred stump of what had once been her emergency stylus, “we may have gotten a little over-invested in ourselves.”
“As opposed to our research.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps.”
“After all, it is the knowledge we produce that will truly matter in the long run.”

“Indeed,” said Hope. “Our egos are only truly grown through genuine accomplishment, and accomplishment cannot be made by hounding at the work of another. When one of us spends their time on rivalry over scholarship, we all lose, history included.”
“Truth,” said Mercy, putting her weight on the stylus, which snapped.

The lid of the barrel came off with a pop.

They looked inside for the longest ten seconds of either of their lives.

“You know,” said Hope, “I spent ages looking at this specimen after you left. It wasn’t upside-down and backwards at all.”
“Oh?”
“No. It was just upside-down.”

Mercy tilted her head and squinted. “You know,” she said. “I think you’re right.”
“I don’t think it’s edible.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
There was no way to record who pushed who overboard first. It was simply too close to tell.

Nothing happened for six hundred years, then a shovel hit me in the head.

It was small and soft – mere metal – and it dented very badly from the shock of striking my skull. Someone didn’t appreciate that, because I heard my first sound in six hundred years and it bore the unmistakable cadence and sharpness of swearing. It went on and on and on and then it stopped.

Shortly afterwards, the next shovel hit me in the head. This time it was more careful – a bump, a brush, a touch – and it wasn’t alone. A steady probing, cautious little metal fingers feeling out the edges of my existence. On and on and on it went and slowly the weight left me until sight returned and I stared unblinking at a wide and blue sky again.

Not that I had a choice. No eyelids.

The shovellers gathered around to look and chatter about my eyes and their lack of lids, and I saw to my great ambivalence that they were the same creatures that had embodied me in the first place. Bilaterally symmetrical, vertebrates, physiologically ensouled, lacking conceptual anchoring, carbon-based, chronologically linear, socially dependant, and analogically unresonant. A troubling and troubled existence for anything or anyone.

And their leader stepped up with a tablet as old as I was and familiar sigils on it and I knew that other things hadn’t changed much either.

“You are bound to my words and wishes, demon!” hollered the leading primate, brandishing the tablet. “In the name of your namer’s intent, I conjure your form and abjure your will and bid you thus: rise from your grave!”

So commanded, I did as I was told. It took thirty seconds and took the lives of a dozen or so of my excavators, but I was probably as unhappy about it as they were. When I stood atop the ground again – many-coiled, many-legged, flexing my hands without arms and my arms without hands, jaws beginning to sing in the open atmosphere once more – I was struck once more by how ugly everything around me was. It’s amazing how the vividness of these things fades, even from a perfect memory.

“I will ride thee,” demanded my summoner, and I did as I was told and placed it atop my head, surrounded and protected and warded by my coronal fields and sagittal spines from forces solid, liquid, or gaseous. “Southwest, and fast-paced!” it commanded, and I did as I was told and moved my limbs and beat my wings and slithered my form and began, with the worst mood I’d ever been in, to travel.

Being still had been nice. Quiet. Not peaceful, but a place to be full – of emptiness, of stillness, of senselessness.

Now I was in motion and I’d forgotten just how deeply wearing velocity was. And the air tasted too strongly of nitrogen and hatred. I’d forgotten that.

***

The fields I moved through were familiar. The crops were new, the clothing and houses and tools were new, but the fields were familiar. Much labour for much wealth for a few’s benefit. My rider’s clothes were unique and impractical, and from this and its covetous mien as we tore through the roadways and trampled the crops I deduced two things: first, that it was one of the few; second, that it was not the beneficiary of the labour here. The avarice arose from it like heat-haze on a rotting carcass, and only grew stronger as we moved from the agrarian to the fortification. A mighty edifice stood atop a gentle hill, moated and trenched and walled and isolated. Organisms moved within and without it guided by purpose and fear and boredom and all the other reasons why any of them did anything, and my rider told me “strike down the door!” and I did as I was told, with claw and tooth and my full amalgamated and observable mass.

“I have come to seize my birthright, as the rightful and UNJUSTLY EXILED heir!” it proclaimed, unbothered by the dust and the debris and the screaming. “I demand my usurper of a sibling come forth and submit to my authority, as is proven by my sovereign ability to direct and subdue this antique treasure of my people’s lands!”

At this, a messenger came forth and said something that was eloquent and diplomatic and my rider said “kill them” and I did as I was told. The second messenger simply said it’d go find my rider’s sibling and so I was given no more commands for a time but to wait, coiled in ready position, left to ponder the state of the bricks and the stones and the air around me.

It wasn’t much different than I’d known in any of the ways that mattered and most of the ones that didn’t.

Presently, a gong rang out, followed by a trumpet and the collapse of an entire wall of the central keep. Stepping free from the rubble on squat limbs came a thing so large that surely it had been almost as buried as I’d been. It was taller than sixteen tall men stacked up on top of one another, and a little wider than it was tall, and a little longer than it was wide. Hundreds of tons of alloys and synthetics plated it inside and out. It stank of dead earth and crushed stone. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen in my entire existence.

“YOUR ILLEGAL AND ILLICIT SOPHISTRY IS HEREBY DISPUTED AND DENIED, BY EVIDENT PROOF OF ANCESTRY, LEGITIMACY, AND MY OWN POSSESSION OF A TRUE AND KNOWN TREASURE OF OUR HERITAGE,” proclaimed a voice broadcasted through old, old electronics. “I GIVE YOU THE CHANCE TO LAY DOWN YOUR INFERIOR DEMON, RENOUNCE YOUR CLAIMS, AND DIE NOBLY.”

“Destroy it,” my rider commanded, and I did as I was told.

***

It was a process.

Firstly, it had been a long time since I’d fought anything.

Secondly, I had never fought anything like this before. Its chronology was not mine; its shape was alien; its weapons were bizarre – brass-and-lead teeth that fired themselves at me; gases that incandesced into explosive fury; elements that fought each other and tore the air apart. It had no heartbeat but it had a heart and that heart was a very small and confused sun; it had no blood but its limbs moved with pumping liquids; and it had no brain but was clearly possessed of a very vigorous and purposeful mind that was intent on solving the problem of how to kill me.

In this, we had a protracted and deeply confusing disagreement.

I bit its carapace and it rammed my thorax; I spat pressurized hatred and it fired electrostatic bolts; I clawed at its cockpit and it directed a hailstorm of radioactive solids at my coronal prow. We were too different in kind to find each other’s weaknesses and too alike in strength to be overpowered. It was like a cloud trying to wrestle a wave.

The fortress, of course, was demolished. The casualty rate was high but not absolute. The landscape was being rapidly reshaped every other second in every which way. And the worst of it was, there wasn’t a moment’s quiet.

“SURRENDER!” bleated from my adversary’s back.

“ABDICATE!” howled my rider atop my skull.

“NEVER!” they agreed, and all the while we groped and strained and tried to crush one another with sheer bulk; in collapsing emotional vortices; in torrents of high-velocity projectiles.

***

In the end, I was lucky first. In a fit of what I’m not too proud to admit was genuine frustration with the noise, I captured a particularly vehement burst of the constant stream of electromagnetic chatter flowing from my opponent and threw it back at the incessantly yawping devices atop its back. I intended it as a slap. Instead it crawled inside its hardened carapace, scurried inside the cockpit, and permanently fried out the controls, leaving its rider muted mid-sentence and electronically scrambled.

The metal cage halted midstride, and I felt its mind, so perpetually motile and dynamic, light-fast, whip-sharp, stop flat for a second; not for want of ability, but in genuine astonishment.

“BEHOLD!” yelled my rider, arms flung wide. “Behold my TRIUMPH, as DICTATED by JUSTICE and FATE ITSELF!” It stood up, trembling with joy and hate, and stepped proud of my coronal fields onto my brow, visible to all remaining witnesses (a wary crow in a distant and untoppled tree; many unnoticed arthropods; an unending well of microorganisms). “Behold ME, the RIGHTFUL RULER of this FIEF, as I ALWAYS SAID! ALL HAIL-”

My erstwhile opponent’s smallest armament (a peculiar sort of metal tube that spat geometrically and chemically complex missiles) went ‘ffutt’ and my rider’s tablet and upper body vanished.

The quiet that followed was not as absolute as it had been underground, but it was such a relief that I was hard pressed to find any superior to it.

***

So we enjoyed it, the two of us. And when were done, we tried in vain to find a way to speak to one another in any way but through matter and motion; and when we were done with THAT we set out, side by side, on a long walk away from fields and fiefs and shallow graves.

Maybe we’ll bury ourselves again when we get there, wherever it is. But this is not a bad way to be, for now.