jamieproctor.ca

Green pines, grey rocks, blue water and loud birds. Great to be out here again – great to be out here with you again, just great. Best twenty years of my life were when we were living in each other’s pockets, you know.

Hey, let’s go have a sit down by the water. Like we did when we were seven, you know? Dangle our toes off the dock, have a drink, shoot the shit. Just like old days, except I got brews instead of lemonade and instead of boys, I don’t know, maybe let’s just talk about, well, work or something? Mine’s great! Not as bad as it was. It could be worse. I haven’t been pushed into quitting yet. They want you to have a PhD for this shit, but god forbid they pay you more than the schmuck hosing out the burger vats at the food court. I guess I should’ve listened to mom like you did. She always told me I should never have gone into biotech – ‘don’t get fancy and think you’re better than us,’ and so on. Well, I never did, and I certainly never was treated like it, hah. Hah-hah. Well, it’s not like the rest of the market’s better. I’ll stick with what we’ve got while it’s still functional, and that’s more loyal than the rest of my department, I tell you what. Heck, I’ve never done industrial espionage, that’s how good an employee I am. I mean, I’ve never actually STOLEN for personal profit, but like, EVERYONE’S taken stuff home for personal reasons. Bruce took a whole genome’d-up liver home for his dog’s cancer, and that thing was already fifteen years old. Did he get fired? No. So maybe I can take a few designer gene kits and a home crispr package and a few vats and a test subject or three out for the weekend for some fun and a little homebrewing, who gets hurt? Who’s going to tell anyone? And most importantly, who cares?

You know, I’m getting into the weeds here. Let’s go have a sit down by the water. No weeds down there. Not like uncle Bill used to say to me, and then he’d grab my leg underwater and yell WEED GOT YA and I’d scream and pee and cousin Beck and cousin Blake would laugh at me for being a baby. Then you’d come over and tell them it’s not my fault I had a weak bladder and I’d start crying and uncle Bill would pick me up and throw me off the dock to ‘get me out of my head.’ They really didn’t like that I used my head for much, did they? I mean, you’re at least as bright as I am, as everyone was so very quick to remind me, but you always knew how to make them happy with you anyways. Not just mom and the cousins and uncle Bill but cousin Denise – who loved your responsibility and maturity – and aunt Helen – who loved your smile with its big straight teeth – and grandpa Rusty – who loved you for being the first grandkid or grandma Bess – who loved you for not being the grandkid who kept pet newts, which she threatened to flush down the toilet until I screamed so loud I burst a blood vessel in my right eye and had to be taken to emerg. Everyone loved you so much. Did it help that you weren’t me? Do you think in a weird way my existence made everyone like you more? Wouldn’t that be weird? Or would it be even weirder if it were like, the other way around, huh? Wouldn’t that be just crazy?! I mean, that could drive someone nuts.

Well, let’s go have a sit down by the water. There’s nothing much else to do but talk, and the talking’s better done there. Nothing takes the sting off of boring ol’ adult conversations about bills and crap like looking at fish and birds and turtles. Like, does your mortgage really matter as much as that minnow by your toes does? Is it even a quarter as real, even if the guy at the bank won’t shut up about it and your utilities are about to be shut off and you can’t get a loan because you have no friends or family that are willing to cut you a solid? All of that’s just abstract nonsense that has nothing to do with you. But some people get into that and some don’t – like, mom always praised how practical you are, but you just got that big life insurance package, right? Right? Right? That won’t ever do you a shred of good, you’ll be dead! So much for being ‘the sensible one’ huh huh huh huh HUH?

Sorry, that got away from me. But yeah no I’m doing okay too, I’ve been making myself handy too. Plugged the holes in the roof myself, put half a lab in my office so I can work from home when I’m meant to be sleeping, heck I even got into furniture repair so I can buy a few dollar’s worth of wood and save hundreds of bucks on a bedframe, a table, a chair… oh yeah, speaking of chairs, when we’re at the water, be sure to take the big one on the right, it’s the good one, the right one for a big shot like you and by the way if it rocks a little when you sit in it that’s normal, that’s just the dock shifting, the chair isn’t tippy it’s fine don’t worry about it and just lean into the tilt.

I think it’s about time we go have a sit down by the water anyways, the sky’s gonna get dark soon and we’ll miss our chance. Mid-August isn’t so far from September, you know? Warmer than it used to be, but the sun’s still setting soon and the nights are getting longer, so there’s no time to waste. You can’t just wait and watch and hope and expect to see things get better. No, you’ve got to make things happen. You’ve got to take action. You’ve got to carpe the diem, you’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot, you’ve got to get while the getting’s good, you’ve got to aggressively splice your pet newts with Carcharhinus leucas, you’ve got to take control of your own life. You told me that sort of thing, remember? You told me a lot, and I promise I was paying attention even when you said I wasn’t and even when I told you that and you never believed me like you don’t believe me right now. I can see you thinking it. I can see you thinking everything. I’ve always been able to, and you’ve never listened or maybe just never cared, which is sort of obnoxious of you!

Hey, let’s go have a sit down by the water and forget all that stuff I just brought up. It’s all water under the bridge. I’m just a little tense because of all the stuff I just said that I also just said we should ignore, and like, I’ve got a big project in the wings that’s a secret and you know I talk too much when I’m hiding something; that was what you told mom and all our teachers, remember? God I got sent to so many detentions just for asking questions in class because of that, but yeah that’s all water under the dock, it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s what’s under the dock, we can talk about the future instead, like how I probably won’t ever be financially stable enough to start a family unless a miracle happens. Maybe I’ll win the lottery. Maybe I’ll print my own lottery ticket. I know I never got into mechanical engineering but like you know, metaphorically everyone has a way to print their own lottery ticket, right? Use what you know in a way you wouldn’t expect, right? That’s cool. I’ve got some ideas. Couple of ideas. One idea.

So yeah, let’s go have a sit down by the water. Remember how when you were little you used to tell me that the lake was full of crocodiles and they would bite my toes off? No reason at all.

The Great Gigaprofessor Gorgodoola, Grandioso of Galactical Gurgitation (GQD), gazed grimly at their undergrads. A sea of kirllion fry, networked into a single neuronic web. Six hulking hecintonners princesses, abroad to learn of the Small before inheriting their mountains from their mothers. Thirty-two nuclear proxies created by agitating select radioactive wavelengths into ‘bridge sentients’ connecting a remote student’s computer complex with a ‘hyperspot’ of spatial patterning inside the classroom demarcated by a red rope and a ‘danger! Radiation hazard!’ sign.

From the fringe of Gorgodoola’s borders, a single tendril patrolled the edge of their desk with the exhausted hunger of a fryless gull; another plucked the tea-stained baleen that overhung their jaws; a third coiled their microphone closer to their speech aperture.

“Class is cancelled,” they burbled forth – and then, at the joyous rise of voices from silence and behinds from seats, louder: “and REPLACED! With a special assignment! Sit DOWN you nuisances! Down! Down! Back in seats, ears open – this is half your participation score for this course! This is your next assignment’s grade for this course! This is the easiest stack of points you’ve ever angled for! I will tell you all a story, and I will ask you questions. If at any point one of you believes you have the answer, simply raise your hand, proceed to my desk, and whisper it to me for full marks and an early ticket out of here to go do…whatever the things you do are. It’s been five thousand years. I forget. ANYWAYS, here we go!”

***

Many years ago, three students of a long-forgotten xenosapiopology course were assigned to conduct a practical survey and report of a planet of unknown, unstudied, and uncontactable people. They were given a full suite of study equipment, a comprehensive rubric, plenty of encouragement, and a standard 1:5 time dilution.

The first of these students I will call ‘A,’ to protect her identity. A descended from the assignment craft in broad daylight, on a pillar of atomic fire and landed within three hundred meters of the study target, to whom she walked up, transvocalizer in one hand and her breakfeastslab in the other and her recorderizer in the other other and her belt buckle in the other other other and she said ‘greetings, ground-dwelling creatures! Tell me of your ways!’
It was a quote from some docudramatic-fantastic series she was into, I believe.

Anyways, the study targets got along well with A. She shared some of her breakfeastslabs and lunchbricks and they shared some of their dried meat and roasted roots. She told them about her life in the andrometan sprawl and they told her about how to avoid being eaten by large carnivorous ambush predators. They showed her how to knap flint and she showed them the ‘on’ button on her study sled and then one or two of the younger kids took it out for a joyride and used the utter-automatic setting on the bioharvest module to drive several megafaunal species into extinction and delete sixty percent of a mountain chain.

After submitting her report, A received a failing grade. What for?

***

A calciferous limb waved in a self-generated breeze from a coral-pine’s mechanized wind-support fan system. “She shared outside technology?”
“Wrong!” said Gorgodoola.

“She shared outside information?” guessed a resplendent and freshly-shed trillionpede.

“Wrong!”

“She revealed himself to them,” said one of the hecintonners princesses.

“Wrong!”
“She didn’t enable the safety lock on the study sled?” ventured a fetal ferrosaur, floating within the iron walls of its containment egg.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” shouted Gorgodoola, slamming their mighty wardorsal into the roof of their tank for emphasis. “You’re all wrong! But there’s another chance: the story goes on!”

***

The second student I will call B, for similar reasons I gave for A. B wrapped themselves in a trillion-filament-fibre fold before entering local spacetime, deleting their sensory profile from existence for the duration of the study. They descended through the atmosphere using their study sled’s insertion needleforme and only departed it to hand-gather samples, parking it in between the first and second dimensions whenever they did so. They watched, smelled, heard, tasted, and proxy-proprioceived their study targets as they suffered under a hard winter, and a dry summer, and the buildup of salts in their fields from centuries of over-irrigation, and at last the arrival of a furious cyclone that carried away homes, and lives, and livestock, and the top layer of the soil itself, leaving behind stone and concrete-baked dirt. They starved, they withered, they died. B recorded all of it and did not reach out once, not even to secure a deceased specimen for practical lab use. Upon concluding their observations, B applied a retroactive collapse to their fold and reappeared in their initial approach vector, peeling loose their entire spatiotemporal presence from possibility before it happened and leaving only the purest data in existence.

After submitting their report, B received a failing grade. Why?

***

“Indifference to the subjects’ suffering, suffering, ring, ing, ng, g!” hooted the spokesape of the bearded burderoo troop that observed from the classroom’s apse.

“Wrong!” said Gorgodoola. “And don’t throw that at me!”

“Unauthorized deletion of personal records from the fundament?” theorized a broccoli.

“Wrong!!” said Gorgodoola.

“Failure to secure a research specimen,” said the top student in the class, an insufferable beast.

“Wrong!!!” said Gorgodoola.

“Nothing and you’re screwing with our heads!” suggested a nuclear proxy, flaring slightly from its electron shell.

“Wrong!!!!” said Gorgodoola, dropping into ultrasound for emphasis. “Completely, utterly, devastatingly, fully wrong, all of you! Yet not irrevocably! My story continues!”

***

Student C. Moving along.

Student C timed its atmospheric descent to coincide with a small meteor shower and hid the sled in the fiery wake of the largest bolide. It slid itself and its belongings anterior-realitywise through the heart of the small mountain that loomed over its study targets and selectively circumscribed a small segment of its heart into a study base, from which it began to emit various monitoring rays, rhythms, pulses, and equations to build a real-time sumulation of the study target and by proxy the planet and the neighboring seventeen lightyears of its immediate environment. These was then used as a cross-reference by it when compared against immediate local data for the subsequent duration of the study. During this time C undertook four actions that were not monitoring, collecting, or collation.

First, it generated a mid-stratospheric static pulse that spontaneously rewrote the regional weather pattern for a period of two hours, preventing a projected freak three-day blizzard that would have struck when the study group’s youth were undergoing their midwinter initiations halfway up the peak.

Second, it detonated an observation coiler into waste heat, transforming a midnight avalanche set to entirely engulf the outer study target into a plume of hot vapor.

Third, when spring came late, it reconstructed its emergency caloric vat into a molecular school that physically simulated a local prey grazer, then set it to ‘collapse’ and ‘die’ near the center of the study target.

Fourth, when the lowland marchers came to clear the mountainside, it strategically ‘powerflowed’ sumulated erosion hyperprocesses through the peak’s core, creating emergency caverns that had not existed until ten thousand years ago ten minutes ago, then lured the study targets inside them using their own recorded voices and its pocket graser pointer.

After doing all of this C erased its observation post, left the retrocaverns untouched, and left for orbit from behind the horizon. And after THAT, C received a failing grade. How come?

***

Silence, true silence, is found among the defeated.

“Well?” demanded Gorgodoola. “Well? Come on! Only thing worse than being wrong is being afraid of it!”

A false goose raised its neck warily from threat-hunch. “…It detonated scholastic research gea-”

“Wrong!”
The false goose fluffed up to ball-shape. “Deploying the pocket graser was use of outside materi-”

“Wrong!”
“You’re a NASTY POMPOUS OLD-”

“Factually correct but irrelevant to the question with regards to which it remains WRONG!”

Silence again, but uneasy, uneven, a near-silence, a false-silence, filled with the thickening anxiety of those who suspect they somehow have even more left to lose and the gentle hiss of a waterfowl trying very hard not to kill.

Mercury roiled around the Gigaprofessor as they scoffed. “I will give you one more hint,” said Gorgodoola. “All three of these students failed their assignments for the same reason. Do you know what that reason was?”

It got worse. A thousand minds of different bodies all sank together, bound in the panicked lack of inspiration that only desperation can bring.

Gorgodoola’s wardorsal retracted, their baleen combed itself into calmness. The ripples around them stilled at last. “Of course you don’t,” they said, kindly. “Of course you wouldn’t. You know what they didn’t do? They didn’t FORMAT THEIR REPORTS CORRECTLY. HOW AM I TO GRADE THEM IF THEY DON’T TELL ME THEIR NAMES, THE NAME OF THE COURSE, OR EVEN IF I AM THE CORRECT PROFESSOR TO HAVE SENT THE ASSIGNMENT TO?”

A pause for a gulp of tepid teaplankton, and following it, a soft sadness. “And you know why I knew you wouldn’t know this?” Gorgodoola asked, mournfulness marching from one wingfin to the other across the league of their body’s breadth.

They didn’t.

“Well, if you’d read the syllabus, you’d know that’s because NONE OF YOU FORMATTED YOURS PROPERLY EITHER!”

We Are Not Alone: Probe Reports First Alien Life

The controversial ‘half-manned’ mission to Mars has transmitted images and data of what experts consider to be incontrovertible evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. Although not yet formally described named, the internet public has dubbed it ‘the slime mould from Mars’ in spite of a clear lack of physiological similarities. The lifeform, which measures approximately six inches in length, was found growing in a fractionally-melted layer of water sandwich in between a polar glacier and a deep crater basin, where it was extracted by hand by Martian-Man™ Dick Steele – his final mission upon running out of Fun Tube™ rations and radiation sickness pills. Steele, who expired on his company-provided Laughing Exit™ N₂O tank after loading the sample trays into the return shuttle, left the world with much to consider in his final words: “I may now die tens of million of miles from home, but I shall do so secure in the knowledge that I did so in the name of scientific inquiry, in the spirit of universal brotherhood, and at a slightly cheaper rate than building a more rugged rover thanks to the genius innovation of my CEO.” While some anonymous sources within NASA dispute the technical, fiscal, and factual accuracy of this claim, all agree on the historical import of the capsule’s soon-approaching landfall. Our nearest peer may be nothing more than a humble slimy paste, but to have found a peer at all is a thing most comforting.

MarsOrBust’s founder & CEO, Secretary of Offense Stu Burke, said that Martian-Man™ Steele had been ‘a pretty hard worker, I guess – almost as hard as me.’

***

‘A Matter of Security’: ‘Slime mould from Mars’ studied, seized, jailed

This afternoon the only known lifeform of unearthly origin landed on our little blue marble of a planet, cradled in a steel cabin atop a preserved slice of its own home. It was removed from its transport – a delicate suspension of titanium, aluminium, and carbon nanotubes, and taken into a secure bioresearch facility at an undisclosed location, whereupon it rested for half an hour before the site was raided by SEALION Squad Super, its staff were arrested and sent to the Texan Hole, and the organism was quick-extracted by cargo missile to a second, different undisclosed location. The government of the Ultimate States of the Americas has no official comment, although the President did announce on Facebook that he has: “ordered the enemy illegal alien to be answering TOUGH QUESTIONS!!! no fooling around! no playtime for polly pocket!!”

No comment is available from the bioresearch staff, as once again our reporter on-site has been sent to the Texan Hole themselves. We will continue to monitor the situation in the strongest terms possible.

***

SECURITY UPDATE: ALL IS WELL ONCE MORE

At 600 hours this morning the most illegally alien individual/individuated mass ever to exist on this planet entered Americasan territory, where it has been cornered, confined, and questioned. The subject remains mute and uncooperative and enhanced, ultrahanced, code Violet Dubai, and psychopathic-grade interrogation techniques have been approved and unsealed. Within the chambers of our country’s greatest minds and bravest spirits, the gloves have come off.

Some may ask: why are we doing this? They are ignorant and must be both protected and educated: our enemy, like all aliens, is not like us – it has no thoughts, no feelings, no patriotism, and no desire but that shared by all living organisms: to grow and survive. That which would grow and survive inevitably does so at the expense of another, and therefore we must destroy this monstrous thing before it destroys us. If we are to have Mars, it must perish. If it is to have Earth, we must perish. The choice is clear and the sides are even clearer. To this end, the limits of its hideous biology shall be plumbed so that the coming battles will be fought with clear eyes.

Watch and learn,

JOE DIRKE, SECRETARY OF INTERROGATION

***

SECURITY UPDATE: THE ROAD AHEAD

The alien’s secrets, slow and unseemly and moist though they be, are yielding themselves up under our tools. The subject refused to talk, so we waterboarded it. It still refused to talk, so we waterboarded it again. This continued for two hundred hours by the end of which it had increased in size from six inches to seven hundred square feet. The people of the Ultimate States of the Americas will not be intimidated: we have only just begun to waterboard. In an effort to curb the alien’s spread, our officers have begun to tear off pieces of the intruder and swallow them whole in front of it to assert primal dominance. It is our understanding that this being does not produce testosterone and so will be driven into Flight Mode at exposure to it. We are rotating shifts of the most muscled, angry, and hungry operators our nation has to offer. As I speak my commanding officer and father is at work, masticating the soft, effete matter of our foe within his glistening and honed bicuspids.

The enemy will falter. It will submit. And we will have it.

Asking the tough questions,

BOB DIRKE, UNDERSECRETARY OF INTERROGATION

***

Health & Cleanliness Tips: Foreign Bodies

In the past months, you may have been exposed to hazardous and uncleanly materials spreading morally unhygienic thoughts concerning the present alien-involved battlefield in which you, like all goodcitizens of the USAS, are an ever-ready warrior. Remove them from your mind and replace them with the following knowledge from the Center for Health and Cleanliness!

-Do not speak to anyone you do not know! It is believed the alien is transmitted through the noxious miasma that accompanies opening the mouth to spread unasked-for-ideas. A quiet citizen is a healthy citizen.

-Be ready to help! If you suspect a neighbour is harbouring an alien or is an alien, call the POLice and let them know of antipatriotism! Then lie on the ground with your hands on your head until the noise stops. This will indicate they are done doing their jobs.

-Affirm harder! Do you spend half an hour writing out instructions for how your life will go to align the universe in your favour? Double that to a full 1/24^th of your day, and spend it all on the purging of the alien from our soil. If every Americasan goodcitizen can do this, the accumulated force of thought should bleach us clean within the month!

-Speaking of bleach, don’t forget your biannual bleach pump! It’s mandatory for all children and any adults under the age of fifty, so report to your nearest Cleanliness Clinic™ before the 4^th of July deadline if you want to stay free!

-If you encounter an alien mass, spread out your arms to look big. This will make it shrink from your pheromones. If that doesn’t work, begin to bite and swallow it. Take a bit outta mars and defy the enemy! They’re spineless!

-If an alien tries to talk to you, don’t! The alien is a known liar! It will say things like ‘my stomach hurts’ or ‘please, help’ or even ‘do you have any antibiotics?’ Run away and scream so you don’t hear them, and remember: the effectiveness of antibiotics was clinically disproven along with all of germ theory in last year’s Supremacy Court decision of Lou Vs Germs.

Keep clean & stay unvacced and we’ll send this beastie screaming back into the luminiferous aether from whence it came before Christmas!

-Jogs Freebert, Surgeon Generalissimo

***

USAS Blows Self Up

After a tough year for the country, the Ultimate States of the Americas appears to have successfully and finally blown itself up with the remnants of its nuclear arsenal in a bid to defeat the ‘slime mould from Mars.’ The ‘mould’ (which is not a mould) grows readily in standing water and can cause severe stomach cramps if ingested by humans, treatable with antacids and preventatively not trying to put it in your mouth.

If you encounter this confused visitor to our world and are unable to resist shaking its hand, please wash it thoroughly afterwards – and consider securing a specimen for laboratory examination. We still haven’t named it yet.

The trouble began when she was five, and her great-uncle marked her particular fondness of striking her older sister with her cutlery.

“A warrior-breaker born!” he crowed. “Let her have better to strike with!”  And so he gifted her a training-blade and a tutor, and when she had worn both down to nubs another, and another, and another.  She slept and ate (the flesh of the milkfruit) and trained and killed her older sister in an argument at the age of twelve and was presented with her grandmother’s blood-gilded armour at the age of sixteen and by the time she was twenty it had been readjusted six times to incorporate the breadth of her muscles and guts and fierceness and then she took the war-name Merry and she was ready at last to be sent to battle.

She killed many people for some time, and in many places.

The day when it happened was after a victory, but it could’ve been any.  Merry drank much and stamped her feet and stood for her honours and smiled wide.  Then she woke early, trained her forms, and decapitated half the regiment under her command – some one-after-another and some all-at-once. 

Then she walked, and every league she walked she stopped and she placed the headless body of one of her soldiers on a tree so that her path was marked well, for the ground was growing unruly, bucking off the soil and showing its ancient stone bones, which she followed like a hound on the scent.  And so she plunged into the tangled lands that lay alongside the water, where the only things that grew on the rock were moss and the only thing that grew on the moss were antiquity-pines, whose sap-sticky trunks were made of knots and whose knots were made of spite and whose branches leaned to point in the direction of the windsd.  She strode through the bogs uncaring of leeches, cut down bears for her breakfasts, sang until the birds fled, and stamped as she walked to feel the satisfying crunch of fragmenting gravel underfoot.  When she saw boats in the water, she followed them, and so she came to a driftwood-and-reed village nestled under a hill of stone (as all the hills were in the tangled lands) that was crested with a grove of huddled and wind-combed antiquity-pines so old they were as much growing on each other’s needles as they were the moss.

“Wake up!” shouted Merry gleefully, waving her spear overhead with happiness.  “Here!  See!  I am Merry!  Look at what I can do!” And so saying she cut a house in half, along with a fisher and two of their relations.  “I am strong!  I am the strongest I have ever known and I am bored!  I am here to find what may kill me!  Tell those who seek to kill me that I rest at the top of the hill under the pine, and I will fight them until one comes who can kill the strongest, and then you must bury me there and mark their name upon my grave!  I am hungry and you must bring food at each day’s end!  Do this or I will kill you!”

“Merry,” said the village elder, an old and stooped man who had just confirmed the deaths of his nephew, niece, and sibling, “you will never be buried here.”

“Wrong!” shouted Merry, and she threw the elder high into the air, from whence he fell into the water and broke like a dry branch.  “Food by sundown or I will come down the hill!  I’m not picky!”

So saying, she ascended the stone hill, clambering over pink-and-grey granite as softly rounded as pillowcases, and examined the wind-blown antiquity-pines in their grey dozens.  “Too many!” she shouted.  “Boring!  Confusing!”  Thus incensed, she struck down each and every pine save the most ancient and massive that lay in the grove’s heart, and from the others she built a fire and sent up a pungent and tarry smoke-signal to any who might have lost her trail in the winding maze that was the tangled lands of the water. 

“The trees will be missed,” ventured the lead fisher who brought the fat silvery bodies of Merry’s evening meal.  “They blocked the wind when it came from the west.”
“I am strong!” shouted Merry in happy rebuttal.  “It does not matter to me, and if it matters to you, that doesn’t matter to me either!” But she was fed and happy and so only threw the fisher down the hill with one hand, which broke four of her ribs before she wrapped herself in a bed of pine-boughs and slumbered under her tree.

Less than a week passed before the first pursuers came.  Six grey-wrapped deserter-hunters, armed with nooses and bows.  They came for Merry in the night and they left down the hill one at a time, limb by limb. 

After that came the other half of her old regiment.  That lasted two days and two nights, only ending when they occupied the village and seized Merry’s evening meal – oh, the rage in her eyes when she stamped down the hill and snapped their necks.  “Fight me properly or not at all!” she shouted as she held her last sergeant underwater and watched the bubbles still, just as she had once done for her youngest cousin.  “Ugh!”  It put her in a foul mood that only stilled when she demanded larger meals from then on, and she spent much of the night sharpening her spear’s edge with her old medals, the metal-on-stone scraping haunting the dark and sparking outraged replies from every owl in miles. 

The next day, a brave hero arrived.

Merry knew them on sight and liked them just as quickly.  They were short and stocky and simply clothed; their armour was largely worn cloth and scantly aged metal.   They wielded a very sturdy stick, hardened and wrapped for handling, tipped with a razored shard of clearest glass that parted air like flesh as it moved and they walked heedlessly barefoot upon the morning-heated rock and the dry needles.

“Hello!” she shouted to them.  “Are you here to kill me?!”
“Yes,” said the brave hero.  They took a drink from their little water-pouch and put it down on the ground.  “I smelt the smoke and saw the bodies and heard terrible things.  You must be stopped.”
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled.  The hero was quick and strong and far braver than Merry, but she had grown up feeding on the flesh of the milkfruit every day – a king’s ransom spent every fifth year of her life – and she was a giant from it: more than double their height, four times their weight, twice as many lungs, and filled with unending vigor for violence.  The sun was low and curdling the clouds on the horizon’s edge by the time the hero fell, but fall they did – a slipped foot, a staggered breath, a sluggish recover, and Merry’s spear struck them down. 

“Bravery cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she cast their spear into the trunk of her pine with such force that it stuck there, shivering.  “Let another try and make this place my grave!”

“You,” said the hero quietly, with what little breath they had that was not bloody, ‘will never be buried here.”
“What?!” shouted Merry.  But there was no answer, and that night she slept with more annoyance than she would have hoped when the day began. 

When Merry woke the next day she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, where her skin was thickest.  She ignored it as she practiced her forms but did not forget it, so when the night came she slept lightly and carefully.  Because of this, the knife meant to slip into her neck was slapped away, and the cunning hunter who had dared step into her reach leapt back, cursing the light of the moon. 

“Hello!” she shouted, rousing a chorus of furious owls.  “Are you here to kill me?!”

The cunning hunter hurled a glass vial that splattered the front of her breastplate.

“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled.  The cunning hunter was fast and strong and far, far more clever than Merry, but she wore the antique and impossibly valuable blood-gilded armour of her grandmother, which did not rust when doused with liquid grit, nor rot when engulfed in snakesmoke, not sear when slapped with flash-salve, nor admit the presence of any blade however thin and quiet and quick and skillful, and at last she stepped to the quick into the hunter’s reach, grasped him in a hug, and shook him until his spine snapped. 

“Cleverness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she snatched his last poisoned blade from his failing grasp and stamped it into the roots of her pine with one foot, hard as a hammer-blow.  “Let another try and make this place my grave!”

“You will never be buried here,” whispered the hunter quietly. 

“What?!” shouted Merry, and she shook him again, but he spoke no more, and her sleep was troubled again.

When she woke next there was dried spit in her throat and glue in her eyes and someone waiting for her. 

“Hello,” said the kind elder.  She was old, almost as old as her husband had been when Merry threw him into the water.  “I brought tea.”
“I don’t eat breakfasts!” shouted Merry.

“This isn’t breakfast, it’s business.  And you don’t need to eat it, you can just try it.”
“Good!” shouted Merry, and she tried both cups down to the dregs, which were smoky and smelled of berries and sharpness. 

“I would like to ask you to move on,” said the elder. 

“Hah!” shouted Merry.  “Where to?  This place suits me just fine!”

“Exactly so!” said the elder.  “Make it suit you more still!  Take off your armour, leave your spear, come down to the water’s edge and sleep in a house.  Catch fish.  Eat more than one meal a day.  Build things.  Fix things.  Grow old.  Maybe fall in love, if you’d like to.”

“I don’t understand any of that, and I don’t care about things I don’t understand!” shouted Merry.  “Why should I?!”
The elder held up three of her fingers, old and crooked as the branches above.  “You are running the fishermen ragged, you are upsetting the owls, and you will not find what you ask for here.”

“I don’t care!” shouted Merry with redoubled force.  “And I will have what I want or I will crush you all with my bare hands!”

“Oh foolish Merry,” sighed the elder, and she looked into Merry’s eyes with a sympathy that could overflow the seas.  “You will never be buried here.”

The elder was slow and feeble and much, much, much kinder than Merry.  All of this repelled her, and when she struck at her she recoiled back, much as she remembered her timid older sister once shrinking from a mouse.  The body fell and for the first time in her life she felt herself inadequate. 

“Kindness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry.  “Kindness cannot change me!  It shouldn’t!  It won’t!  Let another try and make this place my grave!”  And she hurled the elder’s shawl, which was festooned with quartz, up, up, up, until it caught in the branches of her pine like a spiderweb. 

And then, the wind came from the west. 

Firm, fierce, and forceful it came, and it found one lone, scarred, harried antiquity-pine with a sail in its crown, and it struck that pine down, and the lead-dense knotted trunk of that pine clove Merry’s blood-gilded helmet, cleft her milkfruit-hardened skullcap, and slammed both to the hilltop so hard it raised a plume of moss and needles for six leagues. 

***

The villagers came up the hill that evening.  They built a pyre for the elder’s body, and planted the cones of the lost trees, and they raised a marker.

HERE LIES THE STRONGEST
SLAIN BY
HER CARELESSNESS

But there was nothing buried under it, for nothing – not even the fall of Merry – could break the endless, ageless stone of the tangled lands to make a grave big enough for any creature larger than a mouse. 

So they threw her body into the water, where the fish took it, and they speared and netted the fish, and thus some good came of it all in the end.

The armour they sold piece by piece.The trouble began when she was five, and her great-uncle marked her particular fondness of striking her older sister with her cutlery.

“A warrior-breaker born!” he crowed. “Let her have better to strike with!”  And so he gifted her a training-blade and a tutor, and when she had worn both down to nubs another, and another, and another.  She slept and ate (the flesh of the milkfruit) and trained and killed her older sister in an argument at the age of twelve and was presented with her grandmother’s blood-gilded armour at the age of sixteen and by the time she was twenty it had been readjusted six times to incorporate the breadth of her muscles and guts and fierceness and then she took the war-name Merry and she was ready at last to be sent to battle.

She killed many people for some time, and in many places.

The day when it happened was after a victory, but it could’ve been any.  Merry drank much and stamped her feet and stood for her honours and smiled wide.  Then she woke early, trained her forms, and decapitated half the regiment under her command – some one-after-another and some all-at-once. 

Then she walked, and every league she walked she stopped and she placed the headless body of one of her soldiers on a tree so that her path was marked well, for the ground was growing unruly, bucking off the soil and showing its ancient stone bones, which she followed like a hound on the scent.  And so she plunged into the tangled lands that lay alongside the water, where the only things that grew on the rock were moss and the only thing that grew on the moss were antiquity-pines, whose sap-sticky trunks were made of knots and whose knots were made of spite and whose branches leaned to point in the direction of the windsd.  She strode through the bogs uncaring of leeches, cut down bears for her breakfasts, sang until the birds fled, and stamped as she walked to feel the satisfying crunch of fragmenting gravel underfoot.  When she saw boats in the water, she followed them, and so she came to a driftwood-and-reed village nestled under a hill of stone (as all the hills were in the tangled lands) that was crested with a grove of huddled and wind-combed antiquity-pines so old they were as much growing on each other’s needles as they were the moss.

“Wake up!” shouted Merry gleefully, waving her spear overhead with happiness.  “Here!  See!  I am Merry!  Look at what I can do!” And so saying she cut a house in half, along with a fisher and two of their relations.  “I am strong!  I am the strongest I have ever known and I am bored!  I am here to find what may kill me!  Tell those who seek to kill me that I rest at the top of the hill under the pine, and I will fight them until one comes who can kill the strongest, and then you must bury me there and mark their name upon my grave!  I am hungry and you must bring food at each day’s end!  Do this or I will kill you!”

“Merry,” said the village elder, an old and stooped man who had just confirmed the deaths of his nephew, niece, and sibling, “you will never be buried here.”

“Wrong!” shouted Merry, and she threw the elder high into the air, from whence he fell into the water and broke like a dry branch.  “Food by sundown or I will come down the hill!  I’m not picky!”

So saying, she ascended the stone hill, clambering over pink-and-grey granite as softly rounded as pillowcases, and examined the wind-blown antiquity-pines in their grey dozens.  “Too many!” she shouted.  “Boring!  Confusing!”  Thus incensed, she struck down each and every pine save the most ancient and massive that lay in the grove’s heart, and from the others she built a fire and sent up a pungent and tarry smoke-signal to any who might have lost her trail in the winding maze that was the tangled lands of the water. 

“The trees will be missed,” ventured the lead fisher who brought the fat silvery bodies of Merry’s evening meal.  “They blocked the wind when it came from the west.”
“I am strong!” shouted Merry in happy rebuttal.  “It does not matter to me, and if it matters to you, that doesn’t matter to me either!” But she was fed and happy and so only threw the fisher down the hill with one hand, which broke four of her ribs before she wrapped herself in a bed of pine-boughs and slumbered under her tree.

Less than a week passed before the first pursuers came.  Six grey-wrapped deserter-hunters, armed with nooses and bows.  They came for Merry in the night and they left down the hill one at a time, limb by limb. 

After that came the other half of her old regiment.  That lasted two days and two nights, only ending when they occupied the village and seized Merry’s evening meal – oh, the rage in her eyes when she stamped down the hill and snapped their necks.  “Fight me properly or not at all!” she shouted as she held her last sergeant underwater and watched the bubbles still, just as she had once done for her youngest cousin.  “Ugh!”  It put her in a foul mood that only stilled when she demanded larger meals from then on, and she spent much of the night sharpening her spear’s edge with her old medals, the metal-on-stone scraping haunting the dark and sparking outraged replies from every owl in miles. 

The next day, a brave hero arrived.

Merry knew them on sight and liked them just as quickly.  They were short and stocky and simply clothed; their armour was largely worn cloth and scantly aged metal.   They wielded a very sturdy stick, hardened and wrapped for handling, tipped with a razored shard of clearest glass that parted air like flesh as it moved and they walked heedlessly barefoot upon the morning-heated rock and the dry needles.

“Hello!” she shouted to them.  “Are you here to kill me?!”
“Yes,” said the brave hero.  They took a drink from their little water-pouch and put it down on the ground.  “I smelt the smoke and saw the bodies and heard terrible things.  You must be stopped.”
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled.  The hero was quick and strong and far braver than Merry, but she had grown up feeding on the flesh of the milkfruit every day – a king’s ransom spent every fifth year of her life – and she was a giant from it: more than double their height, four times their weight, twice as many lungs, and filled with unending vigor for violence.  The sun was low and curdling the clouds on the horizon’s edge by the time the hero fell, but fall they did – a slipped foot, a staggered breath, a sluggish recover, and Merry’s spear struck them down. 

“Bravery cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she cast their spear into the trunk of her pine with such force that it stuck there, shivering.  “Let another try and make this place my grave!”

“You,” said the hero quietly, with what little breath they had that was not bloody, ‘will never be buried here.”
“What?!” shouted Merry.  But there was no answer, and that night she slept with more annoyance than she would have hoped when the day began. 

When Merry woke the next day she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, where her skin was thickest.  She ignored it as she practiced her forms but did not forget it, so when the night came she slept lightly and carefully.  Because of this, the knife meant to slip into her neck was slapped away, and the cunning hunter who had dared step into her reach leapt back, cursing the light of the moon. 

“Hello!” she shouted, rousing a chorus of furious owls.  “Are you here to kill me?!”

The cunning hunter hurled a glass vial that splattered the front of her breastplate.

“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled.  The cunning hunter was fast and strong and far, far more clever than Merry, but she wore the antique and impossibly valuable blood-gilded armour of her grandmother, which did not rust when doused with liquid grit, nor rot when engulfed in snakesmoke, not sear when slapped with flash-salve, nor admit the presence of any blade however thin and quiet and quick and skillful, and at last she stepped to the quick into the hunter’s reach, grasped him in a hug, and shook him until his spine snapped. 

“Cleverness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she snatched his last poisoned blade from his failing grasp and stamped it into the roots of her pine with one foot, hard as a hammer-blow.  “Let another try and make this place my grave!”

“You will never be buried here,” whispered the hunter quietly. 

“What?!” shouted Merry, and she shook him again, but he spoke no more, and her sleep was troubled again.

When she woke next there was dried spit in her throat and glue in her eyes and someone waiting for her. 

“Hello,” said the kind elder.  She was old, almost as old as her husband had been when Merry threw him into the water.  “I brought tea.”
“I don’t eat breakfasts!” shouted Merry.

“This isn’t breakfast, it’s business.  And you don’t need to eat it, you can just try it.”
“Good!” shouted Merry, and she tried both cups down to the dregs, which were smoky and smelled of berries and sharpness. 

“I would like to ask you to move on,” said the elder. 

“Hah!” shouted Merry.  “Where to?  This place suits me just fine!”

“Exactly so!” said the elder.  “Make it suit you more still!  Take off your armour, leave your spear, come down to the water’s edge and sleep in a house.  Catch fish.  Eat more than one meal a day.  Build things.  Fix things.  Grow old.  Maybe fall in love, if you’d like to.”

“I don’t understand any of that, and I don’t care about things I don’t understand!” shouted Merry.  “Why should I?!”
The elder held up three of her fingers, old and crooked as the branches above.  “You are running the fishermen ragged, you are upsetting the owls, and you will not find what you ask for here.”

“I don’t care!” shouted Merry with redoubled force.  “And I will have what I want or I will crush you all with my bare hands!”

“Oh foolish Merry,” sighed the elder, and she looked into Merry’s eyes with a sympathy that could overflow the seas.  “You will never be buried here.”

The elder was slow and feeble and much, much, much kinder than Merry.  All of this repelled her, and when she struck at her she recoiled back, much as she remembered her timid older sister once shrinking from a mouse.  The body fell and for the first time in her life she felt herself inadequate. 

“Kindness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry.  “Kindness cannot change me!  It shouldn’t!  It won’t!  Let another try and make this place my grave!”  And she hurled the elder’s shawl, which was festooned with quartz, up, up, up, until it caught in the branches of her pine like a spiderweb. 

And then, the wind came from the west. 

Firm, fierce, and forceful it came, and it found one lone, scarred, harried antiquity-pine with a sail in its crown, and it struck that pine down, and the lead-dense knotted trunk of that pine clove Merry’s blood-gilded helmet, cleft her milkfruit-hardened skullcap, and slammed both to the hilltop so hard it raised a plume of moss and needles for six leagues. 

***

The villagers came up the hill that evening.  They built a pyre for the elder’s body, and planted the cones of the lost trees, and they raised a marker.

HERE LIES THE STRONGEST
SLAIN BY
HER CARELESSNESS

But there was nothing buried under it, for nothing – not even the fall of Merry – could break the endless, ageless stone of the tangled lands to make a grave big enough for any creature larger than a mouse. 

So they threw her body into the water, where the fish took it, and they speared and netted the fish, and thus some good came of it all in the end.

The armour they sold piece by piece.The trouble began when she was five, and her great-uncle marked her particular fondness of striking her older sister with her cutlery.

“A warrior-breaker born!” he crowed. “Let her have better to strike with!”  And so he gifted her a training-blade and a tutor, and when she had worn both down to nubs another, and another, and another.  She slept and ate (the flesh of the milkfruit) and trained and killed her older sister in an argument at the age of twelve and was presented with her grandmother’s blood-gilded armour at the age of sixteen and by the time she was twenty it had been readjusted six times to incorporate the breadth of her muscles and guts and fierceness and then she took the war-name Merry and she was ready at last to be sent to battle.

She killed many people for some time, and in many places.

The day when it happened was after a victory, but it could’ve been any.  Merry drank much and stamped her feet and stood for her honours and smiled wide.  Then she woke early, trained her forms, and decapitated half the regiment under her command – some one-after-another and some all-at-once. 

Then she walked, and every league she walked she stopped and she placed the headless body of one of her soldiers on a tree so that her path was marked well, for the ground was growing unruly, bucking off the soil and showing its ancient stone bones, which she followed like a hound on the scent.  And so she plunged into the tangled lands that lay alongside the water, where the only things that grew on the rock were moss and the only thing that grew on the moss were antiquity-pines, whose sap-sticky trunks were made of knots and whose knots were made of spite and whose branches leaned to point in the direction of the windsd.  She strode through the bogs uncaring of leeches, cut down bears for her breakfasts, sang until the birds fled, and stamped as she walked to feel the satisfying crunch of fragmenting gravel underfoot.  When she saw boats in the water, she followed them, and so she came to a driftwood-and-reed village nestled under a hill of stone (as all the hills were in the tangled lands) that was crested with a grove of huddled and wind-combed antiquity-pines so old they were as much growing on each other’s needles as they were the moss.

“Wake up!” shouted Merry gleefully, waving her spear overhead with happiness.  “Here!  See!  I am Merry!  Look at what I can do!” And so saying she cut a house in half, along with a fisher and two of their relations.  “I am strong!  I am the strongest I have ever known and I am bored!  I am here to find what may kill me!  Tell those who seek to kill me that I rest at the top of the hill under the pine, and I will fight them until one comes who can kill the strongest, and then you must bury me there and mark their name upon my grave!  I am hungry and you must bring food at each day’s end!  Do this or I will kill you!”

“Merry,” said the village elder, an old and stooped man who had just confirmed the deaths of his nephew, niece, and sibling, “you will never be buried here.”

“Wrong!” shouted Merry, and she threw the elder high into the air, from whence he fell into the water and broke like a dry branch.  “Food by sundown or I will come down the hill!  I’m not picky!”

So saying, she ascended the stone hill, clambering over pink-and-grey granite as softly rounded as pillowcases, and examined the wind-blown antiquity-pines in their grey dozens.  “Too many!” she shouted.  “Boring!  Confusing!”  Thus incensed, she struck down each and every pine save the most ancient and massive that lay in the grove’s heart, and from the others she built a fire and sent up a pungent and tarry smoke-signal to any who might have lost her trail in the winding maze that was the tangled lands of the water. 

“The trees will be missed,” ventured the lead fisher who brought the fat silvery bodies of Merry’s evening meal.  “They blocked the wind when it came from the west.”
“I am strong!” shouted Merry in happy rebuttal.  “It does not matter to me, and if it matters to you, that doesn’t matter to me either!” But she was fed and happy and so only threw the fisher down the hill with one hand, which broke four of her ribs before she wrapped herself in a bed of pine-boughs and slumbered under her tree.

Less than a week passed before the first pursuers came.  Six grey-wrapped deserter-hunters, armed with nooses and bows.  They came for Merry in the night and they left down the hill one at a time, limb by limb. 

After that came the other half of her old regiment.  That lasted two days and two nights, only ending when they occupied the village and seized Merry’s evening meal – oh, the rage in her eyes when she stamped down the hill and snapped their necks.  “Fight me properly or not at all!” she shouted as she held her last sergeant underwater and watched the bubbles still, just as she had once done for her youngest cousin.  “Ugh!”  It put her in a foul mood that only stilled when she demanded larger meals from then on, and she spent much of the night sharpening her spear’s edge with her old medals, the metal-on-stone scraping haunting the dark and sparking outraged replies from every owl in miles. 

The next day, a brave hero arrived.

Merry knew them on sight and liked them just as quickly.  They were short and stocky and simply clothed; their armour was largely worn cloth and scantly aged metal.   They wielded a very sturdy stick, hardened and wrapped for handling, tipped with a razored shard of clearest glass that parted air like flesh as it moved and they walked heedlessly barefoot upon the morning-heated rock and the dry needles.

“Hello!” she shouted to them.  “Are you here to kill me?!”
“Yes,” said the brave hero.  They took a drink from their little water-pouch and put it down on the ground.  “I smelt the smoke and saw the bodies and heard terrible things.  You must be stopped.”
“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled.  The hero was quick and strong and far braver than Merry, but she had grown up feeding on the flesh of the milkfruit every day – a king’s ransom spent every fifth year of her life – and she was a giant from it: more than double their height, four times their weight, twice as many lungs, and filled with unending vigor for violence.  The sun was low and curdling the clouds on the horizon’s edge by the time the hero fell, but fall they did – a slipped foot, a staggered breath, a sluggish recover, and Merry’s spear struck them down. 

“Bravery cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she cast their spear into the trunk of her pine with such force that it stuck there, shivering.  “Let another try and make this place my grave!”

“You,” said the hero quietly, with what little breath they had that was not bloody, ‘will never be buried here.”
“What?!” shouted Merry.  But there was no answer, and that night she slept with more annoyance than she would have hoped when the day began. 

When Merry woke the next day she felt a prickle at the back of her neck, where her skin was thickest.  She ignored it as she practiced her forms but did not forget it, so when the night came she slept lightly and carefully.  Because of this, the knife meant to slip into her neck was slapped away, and the cunning hunter who had dared step into her reach leapt back, cursing the light of the moon. 

“Hello!” she shouted, rousing a chorus of furious owls.  “Are you here to kill me?!”

The cunning hunter hurled a glass vial that splattered the front of her breastplate.

“So kill me!” shouted Merry, and the two of them battled.  The cunning hunter was fast and strong and far, far more clever than Merry, but she wore the antique and impossibly valuable blood-gilded armour of her grandmother, which did not rust when doused with liquid grit, nor rot when engulfed in snakesmoke, not sear when slapped with flash-salve, nor admit the presence of any blade however thin and quiet and quick and skillful, and at last she stepped to the quick into the hunter’s reach, grasped him in a hug, and shook him until his spine snapped. 

“Cleverness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry, and she snatched his last poisoned blade from his failing grasp and stamped it into the roots of her pine with one foot, hard as a hammer-blow.  “Let another try and make this place my grave!”

“You will never be buried here,” whispered the hunter quietly. 

“What?!” shouted Merry, and she shook him again, but he spoke no more, and her sleep was troubled again.

When she woke next there was dried spit in her throat and glue in her eyes and someone waiting for her. 

“Hello,” said the kind elder.  She was old, almost as old as her husband had been when Merry threw him into the water.  “I brought tea.”
“I don’t eat breakfasts!” shouted Merry.

“This isn’t breakfast, it’s business.  And you don’t need to eat it, you can just try it.”
“Good!” shouted Merry, and she tried both cups down to the dregs, which were smoky and smelled of berries and sharpness. 

“I would like to ask you to move on,” said the elder. 

“Hah!” shouted Merry.  “Where to?  This place suits me just fine!”

“Exactly so!” said the elder.  “Make it suit you more still!  Take off your armour, leave your spear, come down to the water’s edge and sleep in a house.  Catch fish.  Eat more than one meal a day.  Build things.  Fix things.  Grow old.  Maybe fall in love, if you’d like to.”

“I don’t understand any of that, and I don’t care about things I don’t understand!” shouted Merry.  “Why should I?!”
The elder held up three of her fingers, old and crooked as the branches above.  “You are running the fishermen ragged, you are upsetting the owls, and you will not find what you ask for here.”

“I don’t care!” shouted Merry with redoubled force.  “And I will have what I want or I will crush you all with my bare hands!”

“Oh foolish Merry,” sighed the elder, and she looked into Merry’s eyes with a sympathy that could overflow the seas.  “You will never be buried here.”

The elder was slow and feeble and much, much, much kinder than Merry.  All of this repelled her, and when she struck at her she recoiled back, much as she remembered her timid older sister once shrinking from a mouse.  The body fell and for the first time in her life she felt herself inadequate. 

“Kindness cannot kill me!” shouted Merry.  “Kindness cannot change me!  It shouldn’t!  It won’t!  Let another try and make this place my grave!”  And she hurled the elder’s shawl, which was festooned with quartz, up, up, up, until it caught in the branches of her pine like a spiderweb. 

And then, the wind came from the west. 

Firm, fierce, and forceful it came, and it found one lone, scarred, harried antiquity-pine with a sail in its crown, and it struck that pine down, and the lead-dense knotted trunk of that pine clove Merry’s blood-gilded helmet, cleft her milkfruit-hardened skullcap, and slammed both to the hilltop so hard it raised a plume of moss and needles for six leagues. 

***

The villagers came up the hill that evening.  They built a pyre for the elder’s body, and planted the cones of the lost trees, and they raised a marker.

HERE LIES THE STRONGEST
SLAIN BY
HER CARELESSNESS

But there was nothing buried under it, for nothing – not even the fall of Merry – could break the endless, ageless stone of the tangled lands to make a grave big enough for any creature larger than a mouse. 

So they threw her body into the water, where the fish took it, and they speared and netted the fish, and thus some good came of it all in the end.

The armour they sold piece by piece.