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It was at the ungodly hour of eleven in the morning when I heard those most wretched words ever spoken by man or beast: “Rise and shine, sir.”
“Turn off the sun, blast you,” I responded with good humour, but alas, I was greeted with naught but the pinning-open of the tent-flap – and so, having been shone upon, I was accordingly forced to make myself rise. 

But there was no rule that said I had to be blasted happy about it.

“Is there any mail?” I demanded of my batman as I snugged on my boots.  They still squeaked, even after ten weeks – the d—ned things were never going to be broken in at this rate. 

“No, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.”
“Dash it all Batholomew, it’s been a full week!  Half the campaign could be over by now, and then where shall we win fortune and glory, eh what?”
“At breakfast, perhaps, sir.”
Life was suddenly close to being worth living again.  “Ah yes!  Tell me, Batty old boy, what’s on the menu today?”
“Tea and rations.  The supplies have been delayed along with the mail, sir.”
“MREs?” I asked, though I already felt that sinking sensation in my stomach that I had learned came when I had spoken a question whose answer I full well knew and dreaded.

“Indeed, sir.”
“You know I despise the things.”
“It’s unfortunate, sir.”
I rubbed a hand over my face.  “Is the tea fresh at least?”
“I regret to inform you that it is bugged, sir.”

At this moment my composed was broken and I permitted myself to run my right hand over my face and exhale sharply, and it was a mark of his distinguished and exemplary servitude that my batman did not so much as raise an ear or quiver a wingtip at this,. 
“Well,” I managed at last.  “Batty old boy, nobody ever said war was going to be easy”

***

Though I would never dare breathe a word of it aloud in polite company (for fear my mother would catch wind of it and pass away or disown me on the spot), I had to confess I had rather come to enjoy teabugs.  The way the little shells crunched between my teeth reminded me of eating icicles fresh from the stable roof when I was a small lad. 

MREs, now… those were a different kettle of fish.  I’d never gotten used to the noise, really.

“Are you deuced certain they don’t have anything else?”

“Utterly, sir,” said Batholomew.  Of course he was.  Of course there wasn’t. 

Well, nothing for it.  I took a deep breath, pulled the ripcord on the sheep, and raised my voice a little over the bleating.  “You know, I’m beginning to feel that, well, maybe not the war itself you understand, but perhaps the little bit of it here – just a TAD, Batholomew, just a TAD – has maybe, perchance, not been badly planned or unplanned, but could be described as, well, being given a little less time and effort in the planning department than it could be oh d—n it all, how long do these things take to heat up!?”

“Two minutes, sir,” said Batholomew as he replaced my empty mug with a full one.  I valiantly summoned every ounce of breeding from my veins and resisted the urge to slurp over the continued protests from my plate; aunt Germania would have been well, not PROUD, but given a stern nod.  “It says so on the packaging.”
“Packaging is for pricing, and pricing is for the common man, Batholomew,” I reminded him fondly.  He really was excellent at what he did, but he was still just a batman.  “You know, I think I’ll take a moment to stretch my legs while it cooks.  Take a look around outside.”
“Astute thinking, sir, to so familiarize yourself with the terrain.  If I may be so bold, would sir mind the chance to educate me on it?  I find it often helps to settle sir’s thoughts, to speak them aloud.”
“Of course, of course, of course!” I shot to my feet and darted out of the tent so quickly I nearly tripped over my own boots and had to catch myself by the dangling beeswax-waterproofed taurpalaphant flap.  I kicked the wretched footwear savagely until it subsided with a shudder; I should have known better than to purchase boots from a man who hadn’t worked for my grandfather.  “Right.  Right!  Now err, now.  Now.  Behold!”
There was a lot to behold.  Unfortunately I had beheld rather a lot of it when we first arrived here and hadn’t bothered to refresh myself since, having had much better things to do with my time, and so perhaps I found myself a trifle light on details to elaborate on and found myself hoping – quite nonsensically – that Batholomew would mistake my loss of words as solemn profundity.  Which was rot because for one thing Batholomew had served my family since he was weaned and knew me too well to fall for that, and for another thing he was merely a batman and as such seeking to impress him would be too bally close to trying to impress my boots, or my blankets.

Still, it wouldn’t do to appear indecisive or show ignorance, so I made the best of a bad situation, straightened up, tilted my mug at the valley beneath us in an appropriately insouciant manner, and said “bloody big bones, aren’t they?”

“Very perspicacious of you, sir,” said Batholomew solemnly.   The wind ruffled the fur on his face in a manner that I had always found deeply hilarious as a child. 

“One wonders where the rest of the old chap went off to, eh what?”

“Bargorbibriminus.”
I raised both eyebrows, then hastily corrected it to one and hoped he hadn’t noticed.  “Oho?”
“The old capitol of Gorbus.  After the goliath was felled with a meteor by the observatory stationed there at the peak of Mount Ibrimi, most of its carapace and long bones were disassembled over the subsequent centuries for royal construction and maintenance.  The ribcage, lodged as it was in the creature’s torso, was not accessible until it had become too embedded in the ground to be worth the trouble, and so it was left unattended until the empire waned and the capitol was abandoned for Barmuhegus in the west, towards the coast.”

I raised the other eyebrow again.  “Egad!  A scholar you are, Batty!  Quite so, quite so.  And nobody’s ever come back for the sad blighter since, have they?  Makes one think, makes one think.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the ghastly blood covering the valley floor I suppose is what, rust from iron in the rocks?” I pondered, scratching at my chin in a deliberate and thoughtful way. 

“Perhaps a bit, sir.  The rest is the goliath’s.  Too dense to evaporate and too toxic to be handled or consumed.  It’s a bit like treacle in texture.”
“Suppose we couldn’t feed it to you lot for lunch to get rid of it, hahahahahahahaha,” I said wittily.

“Very droll sir,” said Batty with that tight little smile I knew he only used when he couldn’t admit how humorous I was without losing face.  “But alas, we must content ourselves on dried apples for now.  Though speaking of meals, I do believe by the sound of it that yours is done cooking.”
“Don’t call what that thing’s done ‘cooking,’ Batty,” I groaned as I turned away from the vast gory crater below the camp and back to the cool shade and noxious smell of my tent.  “I swear to you on every member of my family, after this war is through I will never touch mutton again, ready-to-eat or not.”

***

After I’d breakfasted (by which I meant poked through breakfast with a fork until it looked sufficiently consumed, then consigned the rest to my boots in hopes they’d learn to be less noisy and clumsy – mother always did say I was too soft on my beasts, but then again mother herself always had a soft spot for our estate’s curtains, which had belonged to her own mother, so really life’s complicated in that sort of way don’t you know), I turned my attention to matters of import: grand strategy.

“Where the devil ARE those dastardly little creatures?” I demanded as I stared despondently at my desk, or the morass of paperwork and documents that surely hid my desk.  Batholomew did his best, but ofttimes in my peregrinations I was short of time to perform the sort of larger-scope examination of the resources at my fingertips, and so my work ran fallow under his care.  “Where are those blasted scouting reports….”
“Over here, sir.  By your elbow, next to the pay slips.”
“Pay, pay, pay – bah for pay, and bah for the man who thinks of nothing beyond it!  Does glory and truth and righteousness mean nothing to the common man, Batty?”
“Certainly not to the common conscript, sir, though this is not to say they do not have concerns beyond coin for services rendered.  I understand they are most upset over the lack of mail from home.”
“Yes, yes, we all miss hearth and home but for god’s sake that’s precisely why we’re out here!  These little b—–ds (pardon my Frankness) think they can steal the bread-box of the empire right out from its table, and I for one am here to tell them jolly well how wrong they are.  If you don’t believe in that, what is there to believe in?”
“The mind boggles, sir.  The scouting reports, sir?”
I took them and looked at them and groaned at them.  “Oh balderdash!  Look at this – this muck!  ‘Nothing to report, nothing to report, nothing to report!’”  Then why are we here if there’s nothing to report?”

“Sir’s orders are to fortify the pass atop the ‘blood pit’ and wait for-”

“Yes yes yes, ‘wait for further instructions.’  Well, we’ve waited and there’s no further instructions!  And there should be, because I for one think it’s nonsense to tie up this many men and beasts out here waiting for an attack by unholy little upstarts that never arrives?”
“Sir?”
“Come off it Batty, you know I’m no bible-thumper but it’s pretty black and white: ‘man shall have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the beasts of the land.’  Truths to build empire by Batty, truths to build empire by – and these rotters violate it every bloody moment they spend alive.”  I shook my head in disgust.  “Bloody dinosaur riders.  I need to clear my head again.  Wait half a moment.”

“Sir, if I may-”

I stepped free of gloom and ink and into the air again.  It was nearing now and the sun was vicious and barbed and so it took me a good ten seconds of squinting to see anything, from the lovely sapphire-blue sky to the jagged old ribcage of the valley to the single column of cavalry quietly creeping its way up the gully of the last legs of the pass towards the camp. 

Well, at least the mail was finally here.  Although there were an awful lot of them.  And those certainly weren’t OUR flags.  And they weren’t Frankness Foreign Soldieres.  And they were holding something that glittered in the sun – here I fished out my trusty binoculars, a gift from my youngest sister (god rest her soul!) – which, on inspection, looked to me like guns.  ‘Marshlock’ lever-actions.  Made in Veersch, sold anywhere else to anyone who shouldn’t have them, most particularly around here.  To the dinosaur riders.

The advent of the repeating rifle had been a real godsend for the little blighters, it was true. 

One looked up and made eye contact with me through my binoculars and waved.  I dropped them onto the rocks and ran into the tent, purest authority coursing through my veins.

“BATTY!  The ENEMY is HERE!  To ARMS, damn you, to ARMS!  Where oh where is my pangolpany?!  ARMOUR ME, you WRETCHED BEAST!”  I didn’t wait for him to respond, but began to ransack my quarters – oh mere minutes ago I had known where everything was, now it was a tangle as foreign to me as the depths of the sea by Shoresline.  “ARM me TOO!  Ah H—L, ah H—L, ah ****!”  I picked up my fork and then put it down and picked it up again.  “Where is my PANGOLPANY?”
“Sir!” said Batty. 

I looked up to find him keen and at the ready and holding out my lovely armoured coat to step into, scales fluttering in the breeze from epaulettes to knee-length tail.  I hurried into it in a rush, shrugging so frantically that I almost shaved my neck clean with the collar, and hurried to peer out of the tent again.  The enemy had not yet breached the crater’s rim; with speed and courage they would be bottled up in the narrow pass.  “Damn you, Batty,” I cried, “we may yet win this!  Now hand me my bees.”
“Sir!” said Batty, and I felt the long, cold wax-rubbed bore of my beestick in my right hand, which wasn’t shaking at all. 

“Alarm!” I shouted  to him.  “Get the horn, rouse the trumpeters, get the alarm!  I’ll hold them off!  I’ll do it!  For glory!  GO!”
Then I braced myself, rushed forwards to the rim, slowed a bit down strategically, dropped and crawled the last bit to avoid being picked off, gently stuck the tip of my beestick out into the air to see if anyone was looking, then peered over the edge.

Still there beneath me, moving quicker now but still quiet.  The fools thought they were as of yet undetected!  I closed my eyes for a split second to pray, popped them open, drew a beed on the lead rider, and pulled the trigger. 

A low, gluey ‘thump’ emerged from the barrel, but nothing else.  I pulled it again.  And again.  Glump, glump.  A fourth time I tried, ignoring all trigger discipline and squeezing the little lever like a disobedient boot, and this time the beestick emitted a belch and went silent entire. 

“Drat,” I said.  It was what my father said when I spilled tea on his desk, and it was the only thing that filled my head now.  That had been the worst thrashing of my life.  “Drat.”

My hands still weren’t shaking.  The beestick fell out of them anyways, which didn’t seem fair.  It was also getting difficult to talk and my mouth tasted like I’d been eating coins. 

“I’ll take that now,” said a stranger’s voice from somewhere behind me.  I’d have investigated this, but found myself rather stiff-necked.  Then hairy, winged hands took the beestick from me – dripping royal jelly from the barrel; what tom-fool had let THAT happen? – and I saw Batholomew and he spoke to me and it was quiet puzzling because he didn’t sound like Batty at all.  “Wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.  If you held down the trigger long enough something might actually come out.”

I squeaked something interrogatory.  He patted my arm gently and began to tug at the pangolpany’s sleeves.  “Best to take this off.  There isn’t MUCH contact oil on the inner collar, but you drank an awful lot of awfully special tea today – without so much as a bite of mutton to adulterate it, picky thing – and it’d be a shame to lose you to a runaway allergic reaction by now.  I put a lot of effort into you, Horace, and I don’t intend to throw it all away by mistake.” 

I was shucked clean of armour within the minute, which was also the amount of time needed for the first of the dinosaur riders to reach us atop the pass.  Her horse eyed me with wary impatience as she patted its neck with one scaly, feathered limb, balancing her ‘Marshlock’ atop her shoulders with the other.  “Well.  Glad to make your acquaintance in person, Colonel,” said the wretched up-jumped vermin.  “It IS the Colonel, isn’t it?  If you aren’t, tell him thanks for playing mailman; I think I’ve received more gossip-by-post in the last month than the dowager empress has since she attended her first ball.  And who’s this you brought with you?”

“I am indeed the Colonel,” said Batholomew.  “And this is ALSO a colonel of sorts: meet Horace Winsmoore-Handover, soon to be Duke Horace Winsmoore-Handover (if his father keeps drinking the way he was when I saw him last).  The third.”
“A lot of smoke for a little spark,” the insolent leering vermin said, peering at me like aunt Tabitha might examine an undusted mantelpiece.  “Did you get them all like this?”
“The officers are locked down tight, the conscripts are locked more mundanely in their barracks with the runs,” said Batholomew.  “They’ll be well enough to surrender and not much else, and frankly after the time they’ve had I think they’ll be glad of it.  You can probably get half of them to sign on within the month, within the week if you promise they’ll get to shoot their old commanders.  Not these ones, though.”

“What’re they good for then – boot fodder?” asked the terrifying inhuman vermin.  She reached out with the barrel of her weapon and poked my cheek and her teeth were inescapable due to my frozen eyelids. 

“No, no.  Nothing so particular.  Hostages.”
“Ah.  So we feed them while they sit around doing nothing.”
“I can personally assure you,” said Batholomew with the largest smile I had ever seen on his face, “that they have been very well trained for exactly this situation.”

“Well, at least they’re trained for SOMETHING,” she said.  And they laughed, laughed, laughed, and all I could think of as I stood there, eclipsing the anger and the fear and even the shame was that my nose was beginning to itch. 

Yes, nobody ever said war was going to be easy.  But it could at least have the d—ned decency to be straightforward. 

A tree fell in the forest.  It may or may not have made a sound.

What it DID make was an opportunity.  Bark-torn, xylem in shambles, phloem lost, roots demanding to know what made the pressure change, all of it wide-open for ground-level opportunism. 

And oh, the opportunism there was to be had!  Every arthropod with working limbs and a stout stock of haemoglobin fell upon it, or upon each other.  Woodlice roiled in their armoured columns; beetles teamed atop the fallen limbs, knives clutched betwixt their mandibles; great fat grubs were hatched and gnawed and devoured alive in the endless sturdy halls of the banquet of the tree’s corpse.  Caterpillars who had claimed leaves as their lofty private gardens desperately raced to outeat a horde of upstarts, monocles popping in outrage as they watched their green estates wither away at the hands of the dirtbound masses. 

But at last the frenzy subsided, the crowd calmed, the victors stood atop the log.  Though chance had played their part in the great struggle, at last destiny had declared a winner to rise alone in triumph in the center stage of this particular performance of history. 

“Victory!” cried the largest of the beetles, hoisting their banner in its tattered limbs.  “Through strength of carapace, situational flight, and indefatigable numbers, by virtue of our efforts we have CLAIMED this carcass for our people and our plump, wood-boring children!  Pay us tribute!”

Upon saying so, there came a quick cold wind from above, and behind that a beak, and behind that a bird, and when the bird departed so too did the beetle. 

Then came the woodpeckers. 

***

After the Time of Knocking was through, the ragged survivors reassembled for a meeting near the tree’s heartwood. 

“My friends and beetlefamily,” croaked the eldest of them, “we have endured much.  We have seen loved ones and children plucked screaming from their nests by tongues so long and gross as to defy all description.  But here at last we have gone too deep for even the mightiest pileated to penetrate.  Though we have all suffered, this is but the dark before the dawn.”

There was a brief crunching sound as the bear began to sink its claws into the wood and brace itself. 

“Well,” said the second-eldest beetle present.  “To hell with speeches anyhow.”

***

When the Time of Claws was through, and the Second Time of Knocking had reaped what little remained on the newly-exposed wooden core, and a few particular peckish possums had stopped by late one night and picked off most of the survivors in what was not a Time Of but was generally regarded as being a Time, the tree was a different place.  For one thing it had been torn asunder into several logs; for another, someone seemed to have eaten all the beetles.

“This was good luck,” said one woodlouse, who was now gnawing away quite happily on the humus and scum of the tree, its bark, and several dozen unlucky beetles.  “That could’ve been us.”

“This was smart timing,” retorted another woodlouse.  “We were letting the beetles think they had the run of the place on purpose, so they could get vertebrate’d, which any fool could see would happen.  We had everything under control the whole time.  Never let chance take credit for your own cleverness.”

“Nah, ‘twas Detrital Providence,” proclaimed a third woodlouse.  “We were MEANT to have this tree, and the beetles were always meant to be purged by blessed beak and consoling claw.  Lo, we are given that which we were always promised, and shall always be ours forever and ever, while our foes are assured eternal damnation and befoulment by horrid bone-bearing beasts in the hinterlands of the cramped corners of the furthest ends of the most despicable stretches of the earth.  Here we shall flourish for all time, ensconced in these hallowed halls free of shrews, spiders, and – may they never curse us with their foul presence – centipedes.”

“That sounds MUCH better,” said the second woodlouse. 
“Did you hear something?” asked the first.

“A whiny noncommittal jerk who won’t be a team player,” said the third woodlouse.  “Throw it off the log.”

“But I heard something,” complained the first woodlouse as it was dragged to the edge of the log, tiny legs flailing in abject pitifulness.  “It sounded like ‘drip drip-”

It plunged to the forest floor, where a shrew devoured it instantly.  The woodlice cheered at this, and such was the tumult and the joy of their celebration that they didn’t hear the drip, the dribble, the splash, or the flood. 

***

Some time later, the log was in the water. 

“This is a test,” the third woodlouse reminded its brethren.  “We are being purified and made wholesome so as to inhabit our new home.  Behold!  Already the water has washed away the centipedes and the doubters, and this strange ‘creek’ we float in is bereft of shrews!”

“And we shed the losers that didn’t get with the program,” said the second woodlouse.  “Dead weight’s gone, our enemies are suffering – this is all gravy if you ask me.”
“It washed away half of us,” said a different first woodlouse.  “That seems to be bad.”
“Cast the new whiny noncommittal jerk who won’t be a team player into the water,” commanded the third woodlouse.  And so the different first woodlouse was dragged to the edge of the log – more slowly this time, because there were fewer woodlice – and shoved down at great effort and expense until the waves took it, along with a gigantic grasping pincher-claw.

“Rejoice!” called the third woodlouse.  “For lo, the beasts of this new land obey our command!”
“What if they come up here?” panicked a new first woodlouse.

“It’s totally impossible for that to happeaaaaarghhhhhh,” said the second woodlouse, as a crayfish gently plucked it from the surface of the log and began to devour it.  For lo, this was not the case.

***

The Time of the Smaller Claws was one of great strife, of perilous revolutions and the upheaval of societal order.  For one thing, the woodlice were enserfed to the log, ordered to farm algae and so the crayfish might consume it consume it and also consume the woodlice.  For another, the log would very slowly and perilously revolve as the algae on its underside overgrew and the algae on its surfed was withered by the sun and grazed away, upheaving the order of society as the woodlice were driven like cattle to their new and soggy pasture while the crayfish scuttled to their new domains. 

“This is foreordained by the universe, probably,” the third woodlouse had admitted as he was devoured by a hungry crayfish.  “But in a good way.” And this had caught the attention of the crayfish as an amusing thought. 

“What nonsense,” it laughed at the next cocktail party it attended as the guests devoured plates of woodlice.  “The bigger people eat the smaller people, that’s just how it is.  Putting more words on it is just fancy-pants delusions.”

“Exactly.  Any fool can construct a complex series of tautological arguments insisting that the universe is meant to end with themselves in charge of everything; REAL smart people know that might makes right and they’re the mightiest ones so ipso facto quod era demonstratum lorem ipsum they’re meant to be in charge of everything.“

“Quite so.”
“To be sure.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“On a totally different topic, has anyone found the water to taste saltier and fouler recently?”
“Your tastebuds are acting up.  Must have not eaten enough woodlice, get some more in there.”

“No, no, it HAS been getting saltier the farther we drift.  Maybe we should consider beaching the log, or even pushing it farther upstream.”
“Boring killjoy.  We’d have to stop rotating it with woodlouse farming to do that; come up with a more conveniently solvable problem and we’ll listen to you.”

***

The time that followed the passing out of the estuary into the Big Big Blue Horizon had no title because it very rapidly ran short of enough inhabitants to form a quorum on matters of history, ending with a woodlouse sitting atop the brilliantly-shining salt-speckled hull of the log, wide eyed and terrified at everything. 

“This seemed avoidable,” it mumbled.  It gummed fruitlessly at some of the little sticky bits gluing themselves to the wood, ingested salt, and passed away.

A gull sampled it, in the optimistic way of gulls.  The few clinging speckles of barnacles-to-be were less appetizing, and so it left them and the log and forgot about them. 

***

There was a lot to consider.  In order, and with care.

First, there was all the recent salt-scarring of the log.  Recent.  It hadn’t always been in its current environment.  Intriguing.  This was wildly interesting to initial studies and many barnacles had written fascinating papers on it. 

Second, oddly widespread scarring from intense sludge-and-chew algal farming.  Someone had been monoculturing its surface for nutrition. The precise circumstances surrounding this were controversial and mysterious and many barnacles had spent their careers gambling away their reputations with carefully-calculated libelous assaults over it.   

Third, a dry core towards the interior, one that was becoming more waterlogged.  The log was becoming more sodden and less seaworthy. One day, it would sink.  This implied the end of near-surface barnacles, which divided the barnacles further into those that talked about this too much and those that didn’t. 

There would be more of consequence to this, but at the last moment where the last barnacle watched as the last bit of light slid away overhead and it sank below its comfortably-habitable depth range headed for the deepest abysses the planet could offer, it couldn’t think of any. 

But it considered what the last woodlouse and the last crayfish and the last beetles may have felt, or other, more speculative creatures, which made it feel less like the last and more like one in the company of others.  So that was nice. 

***

The log itself had no known opinions after falling.  Nobody was there to listen. 

It was a bright, crisp morning with the sun’s rays not yet begun to burn the dewdrops when Yolgyi took up her pack and ventured forth to see the dinosaur wizard.

It was best to leave early.  The road was long, and the meteor was due at noon.

***

Down from the uplands through the mist-shrouded redwoods and the tumbled grey stone went Yolgyi, plucking insects and berries and a particularly slow and fat little furry thing for her breakfast.  Out into the wide green meadows she went, chewing and nippy at juicy young shoots yet to grow hardened and horned with cellulose, sipping quickly and furtively from a small pond she strained through a little slip of fern-woven cloth.  Down to the sea, the sea, the great shallow sea that roiled over sunken squashed sullen continental crust and split the continent from groin to gullet, where she dropped her pack by a tangle of innocuous driftwood and seaweed, put together a fine and functional raft in no time at all, and set out, propelled by a paddle from her pack and a good solid meal. 

Towards the single island in sight from this little inlet on this small stretch of coast, towards the single landmark that rose from the modest hill that broke a scant copse of trees.  Towards the  tower of the dinosaur wizard. 

The waves were slight, for it was a pleasant day and the breeze small and more concerned with preventing heat rather than inflicting chill.  Yolgyi concerned herself with other things than seamanship.  Speed, spawned from the smoothness and force of a stroke.  Efficiency, from the angle and shape of that same stroke.  Stealth, from hurling oneself flat onto the raft and cowering beneath the web of beach-sludge she had brought along for just that purpose until an eye attached to a wing attached to a beak longer than her body moved on.  Silence, from shipping her paddle and barely moving enough to breathe until a shadow with flippers wider than her raft grew bored of nudging it with its snout.

By such means and methods did Yolgyi travel until the correct kind of corals spun by underneath her raft and she threw herself into headless frenzy, whaling away on her paddle until she leapt from stone to stone to shore and hit the soft sandy beach already running in midair, sprinting through the little salt-sprayed cycads that whispered warnings she ignored, dancing from foot to foot through the obsidian shards planted in the sand that droned of deep and profound pains to befall trespassers, and up to the very door of the tower, where she redoubled her speed and began to hum and sing and whistle in such a way that the very loud and horrible spell that was meant to instantly decapitate intruders instead clipped her pack free from her back just as she jumped, hurling both it and herself through the gate of the tower just as it slammed shut behind her. 

There, Yolgyi permitted herself a breath, and then another, and a third.  But she rummaged in her severed backpack for her tools while she did it, because it was not far until noon, and the tower of the dinosaur wizard stretched far above and below her, formed from a ring of three mighty gingko that had been induced to cleave together into one titanic hollowed spiral with a central space that plunged deep into the roots below as far as it soared up to the crown above. 

Great and mighty glyphscapes flowed over the walls of corals, of shells, of teeth – all taken from the tides and used to render down the concrete reality of a global ecology into a representation simple enough to be conceptualized and true enough to crack the door of reality a little wider than it normally rested.  Every cracked ammonite whorl; every broken Xiphactinus tooth; every desiccated and windstripped bird carcass; every shark egg case; every mammal skull; every sliver of bark and dab of algae and wave-tossed pebble; each and every one standing for so much more than they were and all the implication of all that had made them and would make more.  All of them and all of that all fit just precisely so that it might fit just precisely right. 

Yolgyi set her eyes on the most beautifully and sublimely perfect of the pieces, the fragments that most eloquently suggested and supported the whole, and began to assail them with her small and crude but very sturdy pick.   In this matter she worked her way up the slow and winding path of branches towards the tower’s apex.  She ran and searched and with every fifth step and every second dart of her eyes she skipped closer to the wall and SWUNG and an irreplaceable and unfathomable segment of the world would go crunch. 

The sun was almost overhead, singing down through the crown of the tower.  Yolgyi ran faster and swung harder. Some of the swings of her pick went crack or chip or clank rather than crunch.  It’d have to be good enough.  Her lungs were on fire and her legs were swamps of lactic misery.  It’d have to be good enough. 

And then she burst through into full sunlight.

Above her was the noonday sun, which made her squint.  Above her was a great shadow, which made her snarl.  And above that, between her and the sunlight, towering and fiercely indifferent, stood the dinosaur wizard. 

The dinosaur wizard was fifty feet long and over a dozen feet tall and had a big solemnly duck-faced skull filled with dental batteries composed of hundreds of tiny little teeth that could grind the most stubborn plant matter down to mere calories and a long hand-gnawed staff clutched between their forelegs absolutely crawling with hidden mysteries.  They were singing.  The song was audible everywhere, but it was only this close that you could tell it was happening, feel it as it shook its way into your bones and sunk down into your molecules and took every atom gently into its grasp and settled there, turning itself into connective tissue between Everything and Everywhere and Everywhen. 

Yolgyi hurled her pick at the dinosaur wizard’s nearest foot, which didn’t go crunch or crack or chip or clank or even thud really, just thump.  But she did this because she was getting a good solid grip on her blade.  And while she did that she ran even faster, and while she did that she leapt still higher, and with all her speed and her weight and her force and her fury she came down blade-first on the left hindfoot of the dinosaur wizard and sunk it hilt-deep in their flesh. 

The song didn’t change. 

“Fuck,” said Yolgyi without much heat.  And above them both was the meteor, a glimmer barely calculable, and it came down in all its speed and violence and met the song and

***

It was dark out, too early for even the most bright-eyed of the morning chorus to be up and singing.  But Yolgyi was awake, and she was thinking.  And as she thought she filled her pack; tightened it here, loosened it there.  She sharpened her blade; filed it down here, serrated it there.  She planned and replanned the exact motions she would make to lash seaweed and driftwood; to deface spell and destroy shell.  She thought of bone and sinew and muscle and where and how to cut.  And when the last of the night’s predators had slunk to their sleep and passed by the entrance to the tumbledown rockheap of her home, when it was a bright, crisp morning with the sun’s rays not yet begun to burn the dewdrops, Yolgyi took up her pack and ventured forth to see the dinosaur wizard.

This time she drank too long at the pool and was eaten by an alligator.

***

Paddled too swiftly and was devoured by a mosasaur. 

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Tripped on one of the obsidian shards and was blasted out of time by its outraged cries. 

***

Slipped on the edge of the tower and fell off.

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.

***

Didn’t bother to get up.  Yolgyi let herself do that every once in a while.  At first she’d lied to herself, told herself it was to go over her plan from first principles and make large changes. 

Now she admitted the truth.  She did this because now and then she wanted some sleep. 

She couldn’t.  The song was in her bones, the same as it was in everything else, and she couldn’t hear it and that made it so she couldn’t ignore it.  So she laid in bed all morning coiled and tired and restless and counting down the seconds until noon with the precision of a revolving planet until it was dark out again and she was still awake.

***

Tried to leave before sunup and was caught and eaten. 

***

Tried to leave before sunup and was caught and eaten.

***

Tried to raft before sunup and became lost in the dark, hit a reef, and was eaten by a shark. 

***

Tried to leave before sunup and was caught and eaten.

***

Tried to raft before sunup and became lost in the dark, drifted out to sea, and ran out of time. 

***

Stepped on an obsidian shard in the hazy dawn-light and was blasted out of time by its enraged cries. 

***

It had been a long time since Yolgyi had felt that little stir of something changing.  Maybe since she’d first gotten really reliably good at making the raft?  Or since she’d properly mastered how many calories she needed to move as quick as she had to, down to the mouthful. 

She’d have to redo that part too now.  She was in the tower and she had time to spare.  She could take her time wrecking things.  She could try to see how much more damage she could do to the song from down here.  She could try to see how much more damage she could do to the dinosaur wizard from up there. 

***

The

***

Answer

***

Was

***

Not

***

Enough

***

After Yolgyi found that out, she slept in again. This time she actually slept, too.  For how long she wasn’t certain at all.  It wasn’t a worthwhile concept right then. 

When she woke up, she left her pack and ventured forth to see the dinosaur wizard. 

Crept through the terrors of the night.

Ate what she needed for energy.

Built the raft she needed to cross the waves.

Walked up the beach slowly, steering far and away clear of each and every obsidian shard. 

Ducked and rolled under the trapped gate.

And climbed the tower slowly, so slowly, tracing the pattern of the world with her eyes and her touch. 

Until at last Yolgyi stood under the nigh-noon sun, in the shadow of the dinosaur wizard, and she asked: “What’s the point?”
“To buy time,” said the dinosaur wizard’s staff. 

“I didn’t ask you, stick.”
“My master’s voice is busy singing the song that keeps this world from its grave,” said the dinosaur wizard’s staff in the smug voice of a stick that knew it was being obstructive. “I speak for them in all ways and meanings intelligible to the unwizardly.”
“Then I ask them: buying time for what?”

“For the other great wizards, of course.  As we twist on the gyre of the universe by my master’s voice, they may learn and think and plan and secure a more permanent future.”

“And what if they can’t?”
“They are great wizards and you aren’t,” said the staff.  “Of course they shall.”

“And they’ll do this and tell your master before they undo it all again?”
“Of course they shall.”
“And they haven’t done it by now for very good reasons?”
“Of course they haven’t.”
“And you’re certain they’ll fix things soon?”
“Of course they will.  A mere meteor is nothing before the assembled strength of all of dinosaur wizardkind.”
“Did one of you bring it here?”
“Of course not,” said the staff indignantly.

“Do you know who did it?”
“Probably that fuck-o from Appalachia, he’s always been too into celestial mechanics for his own good and he’s pretty bad at cosmathematics.  Anyways, it’ll be easy to fix this.  My master has given us all the time in the universe to work with.”

“Your master,” said Yolgyi, “has given me enough time to travel down to the coast, sail over here on a raft, and try to kill them.  If I rush.  This is a very simple thing to do compared to what you’re saying your master’s peers are trying to do.  If they’re trying to do it.”

“Pish posh,’ said the staff.  “Leave matters of wizardry to the wizards and go back to whatever it is you do.  Play with rocks or something.”
The meteor fell.  The song rose.  And it was dark out.

Yolgyi stared into the dark, took the fern cloth out of her pack, and began to unravel and reweave it. 

***

She spent

***

A long time

***

Practicing it

***

Then when she got to the island, it took

***

A few tries

***

To get the swing of

***

It

***

But at last she walked carefully, so very carefully, all the way up the tower, tiptoeing, tiptoeing, net slung over her shoulder, as the song began to hum all with itself in her bones and in her brains.  And as she stepped up onto the crown of the tower with the sun almost right overhead, she felt the contents of her net begin to sing and cry and grumble along with it, such that the eyes of the dinosaur wizard widened and it spun – slowly, haltingly, like a twisting, toppling tree – to face her, staff raised. 

“What are you DOING?!” demanded the staff.

“Playing with rocks,” said Yolgyi.  And she spun the net above her head and hurled it spinning wide, sending a load of very loud and angry obsidian shards hurtling directly at the dinosaur wizard’s face.

There was a brief, complicated moment where a being that had all the time in the universe tried to decide between being blasted out of time and interrupting the song they were singing.  They had to think quickly.

This did not happen. 

The song fell.  And a second or two later, so did the meteor. 

***

It was dark out in the south, and growing darker fast.  Huge clouds of smoke and ash and vapour roiling up at speeds too quick to look like anything but slower than molasses.  The world was on fire or about to burn. 

Yolgyi stopped picking the last few fragments of obsidian and dinosaur wizard bone out of her side and sat down for a rest.  And insofar as she had the energy to think of anything at all, as the meteor’s spray raced forwards towards the tower, it was this:

If anybody lives through this, they’d better not be dumb enough to think wizards are a good idea. 

The Pit of the Deceivers

Robin Mooch

This rotten edifice was once drafted to serve as the foundation of a great and stately tower to praise the glory of the Blessed Truth.  Yet tragedy struck when cultists and depraved scum amongst the architects blended cursed and unholy ointments into the mortar.  After standing gloriously for exactly three semesters months the entire rotten edifice came crashing down, becoming a ruin shunned by all sane folk.  But whispers speak in the city slums of darker things remaining amongst the rubble, for the wicked have plans that run far deeper than merely destroying their adversaries.  Two to six brave adventures must plumb the depths of the foundations of what was once the Tower of Intellect, rendered now….The Pit of the Deceivers.

1: Entry to Hades

Broken mortar and scattered stone, nothing of value or import left amidst the lingering bitterness of betrayal.  The tower is still almost visible in the sky if you shut your eyes and imagine what could have been.  The air is cold and moist, like the tongues of the liars who brought it down.  You stand on the precipice of something.  Dare you take the next step?

The illusion of pointlessness is only skin-deep: a careful search with even moderate attentiveness will peel loose this first of the many pathetic lies shielding the Pit’s masterminds from justice – a trapdoor hidden behind a stack of fouled and rotten sacks of potatoes in what was meant to be the root cellar.  No roll necessary; these parasitic and fawning mockeries never dreamed keen eyes or stout mind would search for them, trusting in the need of their noble adversaries to trust them.  No longer!

Inhabitants:

Treasure: A lost holy symbol of the Tower of Intellect has avoided capture or defilement, having fallen into one of the abandoned water barrels, where it shines like a lost coin in a gutter.  It will Embless the party during their mission as a 50^th-level Holy One.  Its material value is 50 gold, its ideological value is priceless.

2: Descent into Lies

The maddening spiral of this stairway stretches to depths unfathomable, and every inch of it is a slow but suffocating insult to the senses.  The stone beneath your feet is fouled and slippery as no honest rock should be; the air which should be clean and wholesome is rank and slimy in your lungs; the light flickering from the torches is greasy and only deepens the shadows.  From somewhere you hear a whisper of a monotonous and nasal chant. 

This stairwell is testament to the hubris and folly of its builders: for all its grotesque pretensions to grandeur, it is but a few scant shallow stories in depth – the rest is but the work of architectural smoke and mirrors, an optical illusion creating the appearance of endless evil where rests a rather humdrum and typical squalid hole.  So too typical is the waiting ambush; several cultists of the Scum Sucker are skulking in the alcoves holding torches, posing as the crude statuettes that otherwise fulfill this role.  They are clumsy and fearful of the righteous; this ambush suffers a -5 penalty; -10 if the holy symbol from Area 1 is present. 

Inhabitants: 10 Scum Sucker cultists (LVL 1; 3HITS; 1ATK; 2DAM, SPEC: Rotten wounds: when a cultist dies they vomit bile as an extra 1DAM Rot attack).  These pitiful creatures will fight to the death; not out of bravery, but out of the sheer inability to comprehend that they may be outmatched.  If panic gets the better of them one or two might cast themselves down the shaft in stupid terror, thereby destroying their own illusion.  Thus is evil ever undone and deceit unmasked. 

Treasure: None.  The cultists are penniless due to their own perfidious and pernicious sloth. 

3: Chambers of Ingratitude

This foul-smelling and cramped dormitory clearly serves as domicile for the cultists you so recently slew.  A twisted and sloppily constructed idol to the Scum Sucker dominates what little floor space is available – the mindless idiots, in their haste to raise praise to this putrid being, have witlessly ceded the only available patch of floor space they could have used for anything productive. 

The cultists’s bedsheets are repositories of fleas and nits; any foolish search for something of value in the possessions of these wretches will find naught but a chance at contracting Scum Scabies (33RISK; 1DAY).  The Idol of the Scum Sucker is, for all its putridity, powerless to do anything to impede the stout and good-hearted. 

Inhabitants: None.

Treasure: The Idol of the Scum Sucker is utterly worthless and the party should be punished with ill-fortune by the grace of the divine should they attempt to carry it with them.  If the holy symbol from Area 1 is present it will dissolve the Idol into foul-smelling mucus instantly. 

4: Apse of Treason

A gnarled and crooked little domed chamber houses what little pathetic pretense of knowledge and learning this festering slime-trap can muster: a single shelf, filled with reams of snot-encrusted and pus-smeared papers.  This must the cult’s record-keeping section, where they kept all the records of their sabotage, backroom dealing, and terrible slanders against the wonders of the Tower of Intellect. 

The cultist’s attempts at hiding their lies are as transparent as daylight to any player examining these records.  Bringing these texts to the authorities will doubtlessly lead to the wheels of justice coming down with great and holy force upon any straggling supporters who remain in the rest of the city. 

Inhabitants: None.  The cultists are all illiterate, fumbling morons who don’t even know how to employ capitalization properly, let alone spell.  The sight of this room – necessary though it is for their foul work – pains them. 

Treasure: Bringing the texts to the attention of authority will surely garner the party commendations and raise their esteem in the eyes of all. 

5: Labyrinth of Hate

The stonework – already of meager, barely-serviceable quality – here degrades into rough and clumsy scratching on raw and untrammeled stone; a cavern clawed loose from the rock without even the beneficial caress of water’s flow.  A maze of twisty little passages seemingly surround you, all alike.  Keep your wits steady and your blade ready. 

This pitiful attempt at a ward is a true labyrinth indeed; all the party need do is follow the single winding path and their escape shall be guaranteed, so long as they can defeat the Scum Slave chained to the exit. 

Inhabitants: 1 Scum Slave (LVL 3; 15HITS; 2ATK; 7DAM, SPEC: Chained, the Scum Slave cannot move from its position and can only spit for 1ATK 1DAM against any foe beyond its reach).  This pathetic thing is meant to be the cultists’ superweapon.  Do they not realize their own incompetence foils their every ploy?  Of course not. 

Treasure: The Scum Slave has swallowed a bejewelled ring if the party can bring themselves to cut open its rotten belly.  It is worth 40 gold. 

6: Road to Damnation

This is like the first staircase the party encountered but smaller.

It’s probably less impressive too now that they know the trick behind it. 

Inhabitants: None.

Treasure: None.

7: Chamber of Lies

Within this dark place, the nadir of this antithesis to the once-glorious Tower, foul vapours congeal and mist from a noxious pit in the floor that plumbs the depths of the world and intrudes into a place far more sinister.  Above it, foolishly believing themselves its masters, two robed figures lower their clasped hands and pause in their unceasing, monotonous, idiotic chanting.  The Twin Deceivers unsheathe their wicked, backstabbing daggers and prepare for a battle their cowardly hearts suspect they cannot win. 

These two utter bastards oversaw the overturning of the overarching rules and overall guiding principles of the Tower of Intellect and would gladly have turned it into a rotting hive venerating the wretched Scum Sucker – blessed be that their own incompetence achieved nothing but its ruin!  They even now whine and entreat their dark master to return.  Enact great and terrible vengeance upon them!

Inhabitants: Foul Sorcerer Sammael (LVL 3; 10HITS; 1ATK; 5DAM, SPEC: Spellcasting: 2rot missile, 1foul stench).  and Fiend Scholar Paeiet (LVL 3; 8HITS; 2ATK; 2DAM, SPEC: Spellcasting: 2deceitful whispers, 1screech), the ringleaders of this wretched coven who turned all others to blasphemous worship of the Scum Sucker.  They will fight with vicious cowardice to the death while begging for mercy they do not deserve and will never get. 

Treasure: Nothing they own is worth anything.  Setting their belongings on fire will cause a pure diamond worth 100 gold to form in the pockets of all party members with a tiny ‘ding’ of pure sweetness and light. 

8: The Pit of Deceit

Behold!  The great antithesis in its rotting flesh!  The Scum Sucker’s loathsome maw roils hungrily at you from the great pit, gnashing with spite that it hasn’t received the feast that it was promised!  Stand fast!

To defeat the Scum Sucker, all the party need do is close the hole by clogging it with any of the loose objects lying around, preferably including the bodies of Sam and Pat. 

Inhabitants: Sandii the Scum Sucker (LVL 10; 0HITS; 0ATK; 0DAM, SPEC: Otherworldly, the Scum Sucker cannot intercede without a potent mortal intermediary and is powerless to touch the physical plane)

Treasure: Upon defeating the Scum Sucker and closing the Pit of Deceit the party will return in triumph to the Principal of the city and be granted Monitorship of all byways and the adulation and admiration of all worthy folk. 

***

The Festering Cavern

Sam Bolth

There is a very large cave outside of town, everyone knows that and it’s a cool place to hang out sometimes.  It’s got a big gross monster inside it, everyone knows that, they let it be and have its space.  Until recently, all of this wasn’t a problem.  Now the monster’s crawled out across the countryside screaming and farting all night.  You’ve been hired to go in and make it stop. 

1: The Holeway

The cavern’s mouth is wide and damp and smells bad.  Inside you can hear a distant whining. 

Some of the ooze dangling from the ceiling is acidic glue; anyone taller than a dwarve will run into it if they aren’t careful. 

Inhabitants: 2 Acidic Glue (LVL 2; 20HITS; 1ATK; 8DAM, SPEC: Flammable, weak 2fire). 

Treasure: the Festerer regurgitated a big smelly pellet from last night’s meal just outside the cavern mouth.  Anyone poking through it will find a ‘best runner-up’ trophy from last year’s Minidungeon Round-Robin, worth 5 gold.  

2: Main Sludgepit

The cave combines limestone walls and a filth-covered floor with a rotten and root-riddled ceiling that’s about to cave in.  Whatever lives here doesn’t pay much attention to its surroundings. 

The center of the sludgepit will suck in anyone who walks through it without checking (Dwarve and alf players will sense the uneven flooring just before they get too close; so will woodwisers).  Six scavenging Big Teeth are hiding on the ceiling by holding onto the roots.

Inhabitants: 6 Big Teeth (LVL 1; 3HITS; 3ATK; 1DAM, SPEC: Gnawing, if one ATK hits the next hits automatically)

Treasure: The largest Big Teeth has a ruby caught in its incisors worth 50 gold.

3: Rear Sludgepits

Farther in the cavern splits apart into three deep alcoves.  All of them are filled with loose garbage and bones.

The first sludgepit is filled with skeletons and nothing else.  The second sludgepit is filled with a skeletonne formed from a cow, two deer, and three humans.  The third sludgepit is shallow and leads to Area 4. 

Inhabitants: 1 Skeletonne (LVL 3; 12HITS; 4ATK; 2DAM, SPEC: Splinter, whenever it loses 3 hp create a copy of this monster with 3 less hp)

Treasure: The deer were both trophy bucks and their antler racks are worth 10 gold each. 

4: Narrow Passages

This tunnel is dark and cramped and pretty hard to get through and it’s almost like whatever made it doesn’t want any company.

The roots in the walls will try to grab you (2ATK) and deal 2DAM after seizing hold.  Attacking them with rot, fire, or bladed weapons will stop them immediately; blunt weapons, light, or cold will take longer and they’ll deal 1DAM before backing off.

Inhabitants: None.

Treasure: None.

5: The Festering Cavern

This is the worst-smelling place you’ve ever seen and it’s because of the big gross monster squatting in the center of it.  It looks like a flightless robin the size of a truck and it’s still whining even as it jumps at you. 

Boss fight.  If you bring it to half health it tries to escape, but it’ll panic and get stuck in the roots in Area 4 and you can finish it off pretty easily. 

Inhabitants: 1 Festering Robin  (LVL 5; 22HITS; 1ATK; 7DAM, SPEC: Thin Skin, weak 3all)

Treasure: Everyone thanks you for getting rid of a greedy asshole who was driving people away and trying to turn a perfectly good hangout spot into his private shithole. 

***

The Silent Pool

Pat Garvey

Imagine a place devoid of sound.  Devoid of light.  Devoid of time.  A place neither hot nor cold.  An endless, tranquil pool where you can sink forever without the need to break the surface for breathe.  It sounds amazing, and you’re here to find it, somewhere higher up this peaceful enchanted hillside of Tumbled Peak.

1: Soft Slopes

These green and mossy stones welcome you to the mist-enshrouded base of the tranquil rise in terrain.  What awaits you?

Although the moss looks slick, it’s perfectly safe and stable underfoot as long as you don’t jump around a lot like an asshole. 

Inhabitants: None. 

Treasure: Peace of mind. 

2: Fae Copse

Halfway to the summit a small village comes into view, woven into the small local trees and the stone of the ground, moss-shrouded and fern-draped. Who lives there?

The alfs, dwarves, and nomes of this town are shy but very friendly and will be nothing but friendly and nice to anyone visiting as long as you don’t start accusing them all of backstabbing you like an asshole. 

Inhabitants: Like ten good friends. 

Treasure: Camaraderie. 

3: The Silent Pool

Atop the worn and weathered warm-edged stone of Tumbled Peak lies the pool.  But someone has made it here before you – sitting in it is a small and stalwart figure.  You know them.  Where from?

Gee I don’t know maybe from before the society’s membership went from seventeen to three huh?

Inhabitants: Your best friend Sandy who really did not deserve any of the shit that went down and is here to have a goddamned break with you half an hour after you turn in this stupid fucking submission. 

Treasure: The peace of mind that comes from splitting a joint half an hour after saying PS I Quit Fucko

PS: I quit, Fucko. 

PPS: ‘Fucko’ is you, Robin.