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In the chamber in the tower in the fortress of the cavern of the lost star toiled the wizard. Red and sweating was his face; pale and shaking were his liver-spotted hands; blackened and terrible were his thoughts. His name was Thanisember Ducc and he had cried aloud one word every minute of every hour of every day since the new moon had turned and that word was ‘DOOM’ in every tongue spoken by every creeping thing found under every footfall of soil unglimpsed by human sight.

“DOOM!” he cried aloud one more time, the last time, and with that word his hammer descended – red-hot, star-forged – and shattered at the force of the blow, shivered into cold leaden dust. On the anvil lay a blade, and in that blade now slept a soul, and in that soul awoke a desire, an echo of the creeping lust felt in the palsied grip that now scrabbled at its hilt.

“Who are thou that wouldst make me thine?” it asked in the grating and uncanny way of blades.

“I am Thanisember Ducc, sword,” said Thanisember Ducc, “and I have made you all that you are, and I have given you all that you will be, and I am thy master. Now come! Much remains.”

And much did remain, for before Thanisember Ducc and the blade descended from the chamber of the forge he had to brandish the sword in the Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-One Degrees, and curse the nine winds, and bless the three deepest hells, and give the sword his blood, and his spit, and his tears (the last were extracted by the wizard inducing himself to sneeze, as both sorrow and pain had been made alien to his heart by his own will for some grim millennia), and tidy the forge, and destroy every tool that had touched the sword before his own hand, and when all of this was said and done and done and DONE he raised the blade high and proclaimed “I name thee Clovenfang, and remind and abjure and admonish thee once more that I am thy maker and I am thy master,” and sheathed it in a scabbard of lamb-skin.

Then he descended the tower and ascended another, which was surmounted by a bed of grand and intoxicating scope, and, having placed the sword at his breast like an infant so that it might suckle upon his dreams of destiny and ambition, fell into slumber.

For an hour, not one midge-fly dared bestir the air in that tower. And another. And another. And at the fourth hour, the sword Clovenfang gently began to shake and tremble and slowly turn in its scabbard until – inch by inch – the naked blade was brought free, then close, then closer, and until it came to just barely reach the wrinkled hide of Thanisember Ducc.

There it rested for a single instant, preparing for its victory. But that was its undoing, for the moment metal kissed skin the ire of the special gem the wizard kept knotted in the tip of his beard was aroused, and it screamed fit to wake the dead and scare the cat. Thanisember Ducc awoke in a furious start, wrested Clovenfang from his breast with a word used to swear demons to their mothers, and threw it from the window where it fell into the very darkest places of the emptiest parts of the universe entire.

“Damnation to the sky and sea!” he cried as he fell into a swoon. “Six times! Now seven! Why does this keep happening?” And the saddest thing of all was that this question was sincere.

***

The next day Thanisember Ducc woke up already furious with himself and the universe and the sixteen other wizards he wanted dead and decided that tradition be damned, he would not let there be an eighth failure, and so he garbed himself in his most potent robes and warded himself with his most puissant chants and hid himself underneath his most secret seemings and stepped – for the first time in mortal ‘membrance! – into the small world beneath him.

Then he walked into a store, purchased a handgun, transformed the clerk in unspeakable and horrific ways for their insolence in his presence, and left before the smell of air and water sickened him.

***

In the chamber in the tower in the fortress of the cavern of the lost star toiled the wizard, but not for long. Pinched and peevish was his face; clenched and crabbed were his fists; impatient and frustrated were his thoughts. Furthermore, he only bothered to cry ‘DOOM’ sixteen times in six minutes. He was not shaping this weapon from raw ore himself, and besides, he was sick of it.

“DOOM!” he cried aloud one more time, the last time, and with that word the air dimmed and the spiders died on the windowsills. On the – unused, pristine, unmarked – anvil lay the gun, and in that gun now slept a soul, and in that soul awoke a desire, an echo of the creeping lust felt in the fumbling grasp now already on its handle.

“Hey what gives?” it asked.
“I am Thanisember Ducc, gun,” said Thanisember Ducc, “and thine command of bladespeake is fit to bring me to tears.”
“So I got an accent, big deal – hands off the merchandise!”
“I am thy master,” said the wizard, “though I have not made thee all that thou are or given thee all that thou will be. Now silence! Much remains!”

The gun did not remain silent, and it complained of being carsick through its brandishing at each of the Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-One Degrees, said the curses and blessings of the nine winds and three deepest hells sound ‘like French? Is that French?’, complained of the smell and flavour of Thanisember Ducc’s sweat, blood, and tears, and loudly sang ninety-seven of ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall as the wizard tidied the forge and destroyed every tool that had touched it before his own hand, until he raised it high and shouted “I name thee NOTHING, and remind and abjure and admonish thee tenfold that I may not be thy maker, but I am thy MASTER,” and sheathed it in a small shoulder holster before retiring to bed with it pressed carefully against his bosom.

Before the hour was out the gun had twisted in its confines, pressed muzzle to mystical breastbone, and clicked down its trigger until the magazine was empty – alas for Nothing, it was in an instant! For Thanisember Ducc had stored the bullets in a small and inconvenient pouch in his closet, and so the weapon spent the night stewing in resentment and in grand and violent dreams.

Three days and three nights slept Thanisember Ducc, feeding his dreams to his weapon. And on the morning of the fourth day he awoke with weary brow but bright eyes and an iron grin: his gemmed beard had not shrieked once.

“Thou hast passed all seven of thine forebears, Nothing,” he said to the gun. “And now you shalt in turn witness mine own ascension. Let us begin with Borgonglorin the Brink.”

***

Borgonglorin the Brink was a wizard of elder and deeper skill than Thanisember Ducc, of a magnitude and more, and he was merely the least and most modest of the true masters of their shared craft – an archmagister with a single toe dipped into the pools of farthest mystery.

But he had his pride, and it was this that bestirred him when the comets of his demesne awoke him from a pleasant mid-decade nap to tell him that Thanisember Ducc, of no real repute, was besieging his under-tower with all manner of tumult and crass spellery.

“Ho!” shouted Borgonglorin the Brink out his bedchamber to the ragged figure at his draw-gate. “What keeps you to such crass hours?”
“Vindication!” shouted Thanisember Ducc, twice as loudly and three times as rudely. “Stir thine feet and take challenge or forfeit your fortress and your life!”

This took Borgonglorin’s mood from pride to wroth, and he ascended from his under-tower with all the mood of a tempest and all the figure of a giant, and in each hand he held his blade, which was named Solemnpartings, and it thought as he thought and cut as he cut and was the manifestation of his will and desire for ever more than the universe would give him. Such is the power of a wizard’s true-forged and true-loyal weapon, and he was insulted to see that Thanisember Ducc approached him without so much as a dagger but instead held a sort of odd  little metal wand.

“To the death and beyond!” called Thanisember Ducc, in a real display of rashness, for surely Borgonglorin would have settled for merely taking his life in return for waking him before his evening meal.

“To the death and beyond!” agreed Borgonglorin the Brink.

BANG, said Nothing.

***

Once the under-tower was looted of lore and mettle and rune Thanisember Ducc took his leave to the mangled rewot of Sdrawkcab, which took him three hours ago to find, located as it was between the last thing he’d done and the last thing he hadn’t.

“No draug!” Sdrawcab unsaid, their terrible drows secondthoughT already returned to its scabbard.

BANG, said Nothing.

After that – or before it? – Thanisember Ducc travelled ‘cross the bleak abyssal plains and found the space between continents and settled into the grains of sand and there in the spark of death inside a half-buried fish’s skull he found the dwelling of Sliiine the Sliiimewrought, bodiless but not bladeless, who had spent the last sixteen million years in perfect and total contemplation of the moment of life’s cessation.

“It is finished,” said Sliiine, who had no blade and needed none.

BANG, said Nothing.

And with the crooked sixpence taken from Sliiine’s war-chest the way was parted for Thanisember Ducc to walk the crooked path down the crooked mile to the crooked house, where he caught Cantilever the Sheared at dinner and didn’t even allow him the courtesy of drawing jagged Uncline in self-defence.

BANG, said Nothing.

So the sun began to fall on the greatest day of Thanisember Ducc’s long, long, long life, and he felt as spry and fresh as a new-blossom’d daisy, such so that even the feeling of night-dew prickling on his face in the living breathing world couldn’t bring him to disgust and animal appetites and cravings that he had shrugged off when fire was newly-tamed began to stir within him.

Thus, he entered the Taco Bell.

“Bring unto me ambrosia,” he commanded the clerk.

“Want a beverage with that?” replied the clerk.

Thanisember Ducc did not transform the clerk in unspeakable and horrific ways for this, for some other, greater wizard appeared to have beaten him to the punch. But he scowled most grievously and did not say another word but remained cloaked in august and imperious silence until his meal arrived, whereupon he fell upon it as if it were a fresh sacrifice with its liver yet unbruised.

“Don’t I get anything?” asked Nothing. “I been busting my ass all damned day for you, can’t I get a smear of guac at least?”
“Silence,” proclaimed Thanisember Ducc with the gravity of a dwarf sun. “The product of thine mouth hath gained me greatly this day, but do not think that this bequeaths thee free reign of it to flap and flurry as a wind-whipped gosling in the gos’mer rains of midsummer.”
“Say WHAT?”

But Thanisember Ducc did say more, but leapt to his feet and departed with haste to the washroom, and with haste and distress in his heart and elsewhere, did cast aside his robe and wand and pouch and Nothing into one stall and his self into another and began, forthwith, to cleanse himself of bodily impurities.

Thence sat Nothing, abandoned and dissolute, and not alone: for lo! A form stood at the sink, hands wringing idly under the faucet’s flow, and no soap was used, and Nothing saw a soul shadowed and small and willing to bend to its favour.

“Hey. Hey! Hey buddy, c’mere!”
“Who said that?” asked the stranger, keen of eye and swift of mind.

“Over here. Listen, buddy, you want to do me a favour?”
“Sure?” pondered the stranger solemnly.

“Listen. Bullets are in that pouch, gun’s on the toilet seat, bob’s your uncle, fanny’s your aunt, boom goes the dynamite. Just fill it up and let it do the talking.”
“Fill the toilet?”
“The GUN,” said Nothing loudly, but not too loudly. And yet in vain! For when the stranger’s hand did reach the pouch, it was detected – the bullet-pouch was sewn from Thanisember Ducc’s own cast-off skin, and at the touch of a foe the gem in the tip of his beard shrieked and wailed until the wizard, though bent-double in agony, spared a moment’s concentration to murmur a charm for wayward witches that spun the stranger out of the bathroom via the ceiling and into the lower and stranger atmospheres.

“Wretched weapon!” he cried. “Thou betrays me! But futile are your efforts, for mine is the hand that feeds your maw and none other, and that maw shalt thereby never be turned against me! Now slumber on, and speak not, lest I take stronger measures!” And thus having uttered his threat, he returned to his troubles.

For some six-and-score minutes those words seemed to hold sway, but in truth it was but a ruse: Nothing did not sleep but waited in silence for its chance, and so its chance did come: an employee with mop and bucket and broom and an empty heart, one ready to be filled with the sweetest poisoned lies. And, most importantly of all, latex gloves adorned his hands.

“Hey buddy! You, with the pimples and the slouch and the stupid hat and shirt? You just won a FREE GUN!”

“Huh yeah wha?”

“Over here! Stall number two! Just grab it up and load the bullets from the pouch – second pouch, the one that looks like old man gooch. That’s it! That’s the one! Load it up and let it fire and it’s yours and-”

But as the bullet-pouch’s shape was wrought from the hide of Thanisember Ducc, so too was its cunning wrought from his mind: as the employee’s hands fumbled at its fastener, it contrived to catch at his glove, and pull it, and tangle it, and so bring his skin into contact with its own. Thereby once more did the gem in the tip of the beard of Thanisember Ducc shriek and howl, and, raising his haggard head, once more did the wizard chant his spell to defeat any witch that feared losing her way home in the morning, and thereby send a second wayward voyageur of the men’s room to chart the great Missing Sky.

“Twice you have betrayed me, Nothing!” he called. “No more! Servant thou’st been, but only as long as thy treachery remains frail and faltering! Now I shalt take measures against it firming!” and with this Thanisember Ducc raised his hand and raised his will and burst the bullet-pouch asunder as if it were a fly on the back of his arm that he had happened to swat, and as the ammunition was dashed upon the floor so too were the hopes of Nothing, for it rolled all about underneath the sinks where no man’s hand might hope to grasp it.

And it was then, as the wizard once more excused himself to his labours, that fate took charge. Fate was small, and chubby of cheek, and shy of foot, but big enough to wander a short ways on his own to a washroom unattended.

“Hey kid!” said Nothing, desperation earnestly if not greatly hidden in its voice. And lo, as the child turned his gaze to it, there was nothing to be seen in his soft brown eyes than earnest, honest, loving, well-meaning obedience and trust. A Good Child, one above duplicity, unable to be bribed or cajoled into wrongdoing, no matter the cause, the curse, or the cruelty.

“Mind lending a hand, kid? Somehow I’ve lost my marbles all over the floor, and if you could find just ONE and shove them back in that funny gadget on the toilet in stall two, that’d be swell.”

The little good Samaritan’s arms were short, but his hands were small, and if just one bullet was all that could be reached, it was still all that was needed. It slid home with a click as polite as a cricket in a church, and only then, despite the silence of the gem in his beard, did Thanisember Ducc raise his head in suspicion due to some errant twitch of the currents of the air, just as the bathroom door opened and the child’s father investigated, curious as to the whereabouts of his errant heir.

Nothing did not have time to aim. But it did not need it.

BANG, it said. And BANG went forth, and it struck the coat-hook of the stall, and whenceforth the security camera above the sink, and whenceforth the basin of the sink, and whenceforth it caromed across the walls corner-to-corner like an excited cat, and thereafter it descended unto the doorstop and shot out zipping past the father’s startled eyes like an enraged bee, and at that moment, as its deadly presence grew evident to even his mortal gaze, he shouted out a plea, a call of warning, an attempt to save any whose ears were fit to hear.

“DUCK!”

The last to so familiarly and discourteously address Thanisember Ducc had perished at his hand timeless centuries ago. He drew himself up in shock and affront, opened his mouth, and became perforated about the ears.

“Hey buddy,” said Nothing. “Your kid’s a real trooper. You got a spare couch?”

***

No word ever reached the lesser wizards of the world of what sudden sickness had claimed five of those above them. And none of the greater wizards would ever deign to comment on any doing by those beneath, or to admit the existence of those above themselves.

But for some time following that busy day that none professed to know of, the little peoples were untroubled by sorcery or ensouled sword or wicked desire, as wizards great and small scried and fretted and plotted new and grandiose spells to ward their shrivelled lives. For entirely coincidental and unrelated reasons, most assuredly.

Most assuredly.

It was hard to say when it started, because when the first person caught it on video it was subtle – and who knows when the first person just SAW it and had nobody believe them? First, second, seven millionth, it was what it was and it was undeniable: someone was taking a slow-pan of their garden when a middle-aged woman with a tired face walked up to it and put it in a box.

She put her hands under the ages and scooped it up – schoomp, like that, like a human scooping up a jellified cat by the armpits and butt – and slid it into a big cardboard box.

“Hey,” said the recorder. And that – even after a few days and a few billion gallons of digital ink – was all that there was to be said.

***

Then the same thing happened to a grove of trees by a convenience store in Georgia. The box was of normal size; a couple feet on a side. The pines were of normal height; a couple dozen meters. The two combined as smoothly and logically and cleanly as a cat scruffing her kittens, with only a few shed needles.

She reappeared ten minutes after that at a municipal park in Kyoto. It went into a box that looked like it had once held wine, from the plants to the stones to the pond.

And six seconds after that, the entirety of Algonquin Provincial Park was rolled up like a scroll and placed in a hollow tube that looked like it had once held wrapping paper. This was when someone managed to reach her and ask her a question, which was as follows:
“What the hell?”

The woman politely considered this, then reached out with a sigh, picked up the (slightly scuffed and alarmed) park ranger, folded them into a little piece of paper, then put them in her pocket.

Then she did the same with everyone else present, one at a time. She did not rush and did not lunge and it took about half a second, if half a second were ten minutes were half a second. Her movements were tired, but careful; firm, but kind. No blood was shed and no spines were snapped.

The little pieces of paper were tissue, and brightly coloured. The sort of thing you might pack a birthday surprise inside if you bought something at the last minute and left it in the bag. Every single folded scrap of paper went into the same pocket, which was on the front of her jacket, which was made of something that wasn’t leather, or was, or maybe, but was definitely old. It was not a very big pocket.

A few hours after that someone saw her piling the Great Barrier Reef into a Tupperware, rock by rock, coral by coral, fish by fish. Each delicate little half-bleached organism was placed in with her right hand, and with her left, a tiny splash of thousands of gallons of water to keep it moist. Sharks spilled in and out of her hands like minnows, and her brow furrowed just a little deeper with every deathly-white scrap of reef that left her hands.

***

After that she was everywhere, all at once, one after another.

In Central Kalimantan at midnight placing orangutans into a small cloth bag one after another, along with the trees they slept in.

In Manhattan during lunch, bottling the falcons, back slouched and legs dangling from the rims of skyscrapers.

In the Virunga Mountains that afternoon, scrubbing the forests for mountain gorillas with a loupe and a jewelry box and a long-suffering expression that no amount of squinting could hide.

In the Antarctic Peninsula amidst the endless winter twilight, piling glaciers and icebergs and penguins into an ice cube tray, and shaking an unfathomable amount of krill into a worn zip lock bag.

In Madagascar she spent over two minutes under the sunset with a pair of tweezers systemically plucking every lemur from the island into an old egg carton filled with cotton swabs.

And across the entirety of the globe, over the course of half an hour of deeply mixed feelings, she picked up every single mosquito using a petri dish and a drop of blood on a dusty shop knife. She made the cut without apparent flinching and wiped the blood off on her shirt when she was done.

New Zealand became fernless. The redwoods of California were plucked like carrots and put in potting trays. Every bed of moss was stripped and placed in a laundry basket. The mushrooms were taken out of the dark and fed into a bag of noxious smells. Every lichen was transferred to a pet rock named (by the stencil on his side) ‘Greg.’

If anyone got too close they were taken too, but too close was really very close, and she still kept vanishing so often that few had the opportunity. Much of the time when nobody had eyes on her it was assumed she was in the ocean. At least, that’s what everyone decided when a spy satellite caught her filling a portable fish tank with blue whales. The air filtration unit was wheezy and the glass was smeared and the moment she was done she sprinkled them with a little kelp from her zip lock, pulled out a second tank and her scoop, and left.

Two minutes after that was the last time anyone saw a grey whale. The tour boat was very surprised.

By the time forty-eight hours had passed, there wasn’t a single animal or plant or fungus or anything left that wasn’t a human. Astronauts looked down from space stations where someone had floated in and rudely taken their experimental crops and insects and saw no more green on the big blue marble under its white swirls. Even microorganism tests came back clean on every surface; some said they’d seen her wandering with a hand vac and changing the bag every so often, running it over anything and everything.

And still she hadn’t said a word.

***

On the third day, she started seriously working on the last remaining species.

The tissue paper came out again, and then back into her pocket, burgeoning with humanity. They were filed without sorting; packed without prejudice; tucked away for the sake of expedience and nothing more. The ones who fought and the ones who ran and the ones who asked ‘why’ and the ones who never knew anything was going on at all were placed side by side and one after another based on proximity, or something even more purely chance.

Violence did not work in any form. Someone got excited and launched a lot of it at one point; the offending missiles were removed from the sky like splinters and placed in a black heavy duty-garbage bag with red pull ties.

The very last human being on the planet to be collected was a sleeping premature baby in an incubator in a hospital in a country that – like every other one – no longer existed by any meaningful definition of the term.

She patted their head in a vague yet friendly way as she tucked them into the tissue paper. And then, seeing as her task was now complete, she gave them a triple-thick wrapping to use up the leftovers.

***

The geography and geology, she left with only a few souvenirs to remind herself of.

An old chip of rock from a river near a bay. A shell that had turned to stone. A bit of muck from a very, very deep place.

The soil she kept, and the water. They went into large clear plastic bags, for easy identification.

All of it went into her locker, but for the tissue-papered contents of her one large pocket. THAT went into a small, plain cardboard box, and that box was covered with bright wrapping paper.

Then she held it in one hand and a black marker in the other, propped it against her forearm, and wrote ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ on it in large, unseriously celebratory font.

***

She did not leave a forwarding address.

“The defendant will now speak before the tribunal.”
“This all seems highly irregular. Legally speaking, I mean.”
“The defendant has created highly irregular times. Explain your motives and actions in your own words.”
“Oh fine, oh fine, well, it was mostly about the pigs.”
“The pigs?”
“Feral pigs specifically, yes. Crossbred with wild boar. Country’s FULL of them – it’s a global problem, really, we’re just one of many –”

“The defendant will keep track of her point.”

“Oh right yes. Well, we had something of an advantage here: thanks to conservation efforts, Australia has a healthy population of predators big enough to tackle a full-grown feral boar as a meal. Saltwater crocodiles. Largest living reptile on the planet, wonderful creatures. And they’ve been eating feral pigs like candy since the ‘70s rebound at least. They turn rivers into absolute barriers to hog territorial expansion, it’s quite amazing –”

“The defendant will keep track of-”

“-BUT they can’t actually meaningfully reduce the total hog population, just curb its growth slightly. And so we figured-”

“Define ‘we’.”
“Me, Doctor Ludwig, and Pamela Hicks. You’ve got all of us here, I believe?”
“Continue.”
“Okay, fine. So we figured that we could use what was already a proven ecological asset as the foundation for a genuine panacea for an unsolved and long-ongoing environmental issue. We just had to motivate the salties to eat more pigs.”
“Which you didn’t do.”
“No, no, we did! We really managed it! Basically, the problem we were dealing with wasn’t that they COULDN’T eat pigs, it’s they couldn’t eat ENOUGH pigs. So we developed this sort of heavily-modified symbiotic variant of a tapeworm, and after careful and sufficient testing we poured a few billion of their eggs into rivers and lakes across the continent.”
“Describe this tapeworm.”
“Well, we wanted the crocodiles to be hungry, so we tweaked an organism that would normally leech nutrients from their host’s meals to absolutely gorge itself on them, then dissolve itself on reaching full capacity in a slick, high-energy slurry that would act like a crocodilian energy drink. End result was an exothermic organism with an endotherm’s digestive speed and appetite, and a hell of a lot of energy to pursue that appetite.”
“The tribunal would like to ask the defendant a question with a yes or no answer: did the defendant wilfully create and widely disseminate a biological contaminant intended to transform the bulk of Australia’s saltwater crocodiles into perpetually-starved high-speed eating machines?”
“Well, that’s-”

“Yes or no only.”
“Yes. A bit. But-”

“The defendant will now explain the further modifications that occurred after the initial crime.”
“-oh good yes, I was getting to that. Which ones?”
“The bulletproofing.”
“Well, people were shooting them.”
“The crocodiles had begun roaming the land.”
“Lots of energy to keep those little legs walking and a big appetite to feed, so yes, we expected them to get a little more prone to terrestrial hunting. That was why we first started working on the algae –”

“The defendant will return to the topic at hand.”
“-yes, that was the algae! We originally started developing a keratin-friendly algae that could evaporate heat quickly and tolerate dry air so they wouldn’t cook themselves to death when they were on land for long periods of time, and then after people kept shooting at them for no reason –”

“When did these modifications take place?”
“Last July, I think.”
“At that time the death toll was over six thousand.”
“Look, they were expected to hunt pigs. We assumed that the average human being was less of an easy meal than aa pig, and clearly we were wrong. I’m sorry for assuming the best of our species?”
“The topic at hand, defendant.”
“So anyways since people were shooting at them we decided we could take advantage of the rugged, tough coating the algae developed when it dried out and sort of encourage it to layer itself densely like Kevlar. A big crocodile already has a pretty good suit of armour, but the algal encasement really helped protect them.”
“Which is why the death toll quadrupled over the next two months.”
“Statistically, it seems a bit likely, yes. That’s when Doctor Ludwig suggested the eye implants.”
“Explain the eye implants.”
“So, the idea was that they would alert humans that a crocodile was near through a simple co-opting of the natural function of the tapetum lucidum. The salties can already see in the dark by reflecting light back through their eyes as eyeshine, right? So we just add extra light sources to that to make their eyes REALLY ‘pop’ no matter what, and humans will receive tons of advance warning of their presence. Easy peasy! We spent the next four months catching every croc we could and fitting them with ocular implants that turned their gaze into flashlights.”
“At what point did you become aware that these devices were deadly weapons?”
“Well, I don’t know when we became ‘aware.’ I mean, we heard rumours, but we figured people were exaggerating until we saw one of our fresh surgeries use his eyes to saw a tree in half.”
“This was?”
“In December, I think?”
“Were you aware that global news first received credible video of a crocodile with ‘laser eyes’ using them to cut through a car door in mid-October?”

“No. We were very busy installing new ocular implants in the crocodiles; we were basically working twenty-four-seven. And none of us were big on the news in general. We live in our heads, you know?”

“That leads us to the final line of questioning for this session: would the defendant explain the purpose behind the cranial alterations to the seven test crocodiles recovered from her lab?”
“Oh, we were making them smarter – or well, trying to. Intelligence is such a hard thing to describe, let alone qualify or quantify, you know? But it seemed like a lot of the problems we were dealing with would go away if the crocodiles were clever enough to understand that killing humans with the concentrated light from their eyes was wrong, even if they were firing harmless weaponry at them. Also Pam thought after that we could teach them how to do their own ocular implants. We were REALLY sick and tired of doing those surgeries by then, which is why we got a little sloppy on the particulars of neurological booster we developed – ‘more neurons in the brain with more connections faster’ was the closest we bothered aiming – and why it was a brute-force genome edit delivered through a retrovirus injection. Way less cutting and stitching involved, I tell you. My fingers were practically fused together by the time we got around to finishing up, which is probably why I was asleep in the lab when you fellas got me. I passed out trying to spellcheck myself!”

“That is more than enough for now. Return the defendant to-”

“Hang on a second, I just-”

“The defendant will-”

“thought of-”

“-be SILENT-”

“-something-”

“-AT ONCE.”
“-did you say seven? Seven crocodiles? In my lab? Because we were working on about fifteen.”

***

In retrospect, it was agreed the sentencing would likely have been lighter had the primary defense not been ‘Australia’s received enough invasive animal species; it’s time to give one back to the world, isn’t it?’

They sat by the edge of the water and they breathed and they waited for their lungs to overflow.

Big, deep, shuddering breaths that made their bones rattle and the skin of their cheeks flap like sails.  Over and over and over until their blood was so oxygenated it could glow in the dark and then:

“One, two, three, go.”

“Rock,” said the first diver, who was the tallest and longest and leanest.

“Rock,” said the second diver, who was the shortest and roundest and hairiest.

“Paper,” said the third diver, who was the baldest and burliest and loudest.

“How do you always do that?” asked the first diver (whose name was Cloe) in a voice that was carefully NOT whining and therefore was extremely whining.

“Simple,” said the third diver (whose name was Bert).  “You two are too much siblings: you always pick the same thing.”
“But how did you know it was going to be rock?”

“You looked like you were going to pick rock.”
“But how-”

“There’s a rock-shapedness about you,” said Bert.  He wrenched his arms in a brief windmill stretch, cracked his neck, shook himself, took one more deep, deep, rattling breath and dove into the water.  The ripples slid out like rings in a tree trunk; perfectly two-dimensional.

“I hope he gets stuck and drowns,” said Cloe.

“No you don’t,” said the third diver (whose name was Marci).

“Fine.  But I hope he doesn’t find anything.”

“He won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because he spent too much time gloating at you and not enough time getting ready.”

Cloe grabbed Marci’s hair with the casually gentle malice of a sibling and messed it up.  She reciprocated, and together they watched the water.

***

In the water, Bert

swam

down

all

the

way

through the bright light

into the murky weeds

past the long long roots and tendrils

along the muck and into the sheets of silt

where there was no light and you felt with your hands and the sensation of the water on your skin and the instincts at the nape of your neck

which was where he began to feel the burn inside and as he did that his hands closed on something

something new

and he turned and grabbed and wrenched and pulled it free

and rose and kicked

all

the

way

up

***

When Bert came out of the water he breached like a dolphin and spouted like a whale and wheezed like a walrus all at once, which made a much more interesting sight than he had going in.  Cloe applauded; Marci waded in to help him stand up. 

“I got it,” he said, or gargled, or something.  He put his hands on his knees and his knees on the sand and the sand on his palms one after another.  “I got it.”
“You got it?” asked Cloe.

“I got it.”
“He got it?”

Marci gently removed the contents of Bert’s palm, knuckle by whitened knuckle.  “He got it.”
“What’d he get?”
“I got it!” coughed Bert.  “Didn’t you hear me, I got –”

“A dead root,” said Marci.  “A really big one.”

“-it,” finished Bert at a lower volume and a lot more mumble.

Cloe began to cackle.

“Knock it off,” said Bert.

“It’s nice,” Marci told him.  “Waterlogged, not rotten.  You could carve something out of this.”

Cloe continued to cackle
“It won’t do,” said Bert.  “It’s no dinner.”

“It’ll do.  Just not what you thought it was, that’s all.”

Cloe was still cackling. 

“Fine,” he said.  “Fine, fine.  Found it under the silt.  Who’s next?”
Cloe’s cackling reached a peak and trailed off into a happy sigh.  “I’ll do it,” she snorted, wiping away a tear.  “Just let me – hoo boy – take a second to – ahah, holy shit – get a breath back in.  Hweeeee.  You just about drowned me on land here.”
Bert stood up straight, walked out of the shallows, bopped Cloe on the head as she began to fill her lungs again (he had to reach a long way up) and laid down in the sunshine with his eyes closed. 

“Do you want this?” Marci asked, one hand full of root.

“Put it down over there,” he said, muffled under both his arms.  “Let it dry out before we make any big decisions.”

“Too late,” said Cloe.  “Big Decisions is heading down now.  See you in a minute.”

She stepped back, rocked on her heels, thumped a foot like a rabbit and took one, two, three long, lunging, leaning strides before she launched like a frog, arched like a salmon, and shot down through the surface.

***

In the water, Cloe

slid

down

all

the

way

away from the sun

and beneath the weeds

and through their stems that were their roots that were themselves

and into the soft scum and mud of the shallow bottoms

down beyond that she eeled

turned so thin edge-on that the water couldn’t stop her

and turned so wide flat-out with her feet and hands to beat for power

down

farther

yet

in

the

dark

where the shapes grew regular and veiled and rotten and everything was hard and crusted

her heel kicked and caught in something long and thin and unbreaking

and she had to coil in on herself and feel blindly with fumbly fingers that weren’t paddles anymore

she was free

but she was running low

and she took the thin thing in one hand

and she took the first thing she could reach in the other

and she kicked

all

the

way

up

***

Cloe bubbled up to the surface and inhaled and yelled “holy SHIT’ and waved her finds in the air all at once which meant instead she swallowed water and coughed and sank.  Marci ran in and dragged her out by the arms and the scruff of her neck, dripping and wheezing and whistling like a jay with a tin-plated windpipe. 

“Did you get it?” asked Bert, who hadn’t moved a single centimeter in the most ostentatious way.

“Fuck, you, I, got, two,” gasped Cloe, expelling unwanted liquids from her mouth in several ways.  She threw her possessions overhand at Bert an astounding six inches, then rolled over onto her face, which Marci adjusted to prevent her choking on her own vomit.

“Two what.”
“Chicken BUTT.”

“Chicken what?”
“YOU’RE the, chicken.  Butt.”

“It’s a dead gar,” said Marci.  She held the partially-fleshed remains with a critical eye and a blind nose.  “Big one.  Too bad it’s so far gone.  Nice bones.  And this over here is… a turtleshell.”
“Awhuhh.”
“With gar teeth in it.  I think one of them choked on the other.  Very pretty.”
“But not dinner,” said Bert.

“Very pretty,” said Marci.

“Beats a root,” said Cloe.

“The root smells better,” said Bert.

“Bug off,” said Cloe.

“Make me,” said Bert.

“I will,” said Cloe.

“I’ll go in a minute,” said Marci.

She breathed and she breathed and she breathed, then she took two heavy stones, one in each hand, and she went to the highest of the very little cliffs above the water, which weren’t very high, and she jumped.

***

In the water, Marci sank

all

the

way

down

through the light

under the weeds

under their underpinnings

through the murk

and into the dark

to the very bottom

where she let loose her stones and began to kick

swimming fast just above the jagged remnants

feeling them barely-not-brush against her with her hair

seeing them almost-just-not snag at her with her mind

until she plunged over the edge

of the shelf

of the rim

of the basin

and into the cleft

where the bottom was besides her everywhere

and everything was a claw waiting to grasp her and ask

stay

stay

stay

but she was quick and sure and clean and lucky

so she didn’t stay

but she stopped for a moment

and felt

with all of herself

and felt

with all of her care

something new

and she grabbed it

and bent

double

and heaved with her spine and arms and legs like a jack-knife

and it broke free and had no choice but to come with her as she tore it free

all

the

way

up

up

UP

***

Marci hadn’t broken surface before Cloe’s hands were on her arm, her shoulder, turning her up to her first inhalation in minutes and minutes.  Bert held her back flat while she floated and breathed and remembered what air was, and together they waited until she was ready and they carried her up and out to the shallows where she planted her feet and swayed in gravity and took herself ashore. 

“What’d you get?” asked Cloe.  For formality’s sake, since it was taking up both of Marci’s arms and was taller than she was. 

Marci held it up for inspection anyways.  It was long, and sleek, and curved, and it shone in the sun despite the intrusion of corrosion and time and muck on its person.  The grace was only slightly marred by a mangled rectangular placard placed squarely in its middle, announcing in antique glyphs

MYFLOR  A.C M

E N – D 8

  UNSHI  STAT

“Now THAT’S dinner,” said Cloe.
“Dinner and more if you let me do the talking,” said Bert.  “They’re crying for anything big at the junkers right now.”

So they left, Bert carrying the treasures in his arms, Cloe carrying Marci on her back.  And they didn’t turn to look at where they’d been or say farewell, because this was just one dinner (and more) and they’d be back, and the water would be there, and so would what waited inside it, beneath it, taken back by it.

Them too, one day, a maybe day.  But there was no rushing to any of that, so they walked slow. 

Ludlow County is a smear on the edge of the map made when a cartographer’s attention slipped. It has a population of about two or three hundred, give or take a hundred. It doesn’t even have a post office.

Someone wanted to change that.

***

The postman rolled into town early in the morning after a long night’s journey and bought a breakfast of candy bars and coffee at the general store.

“No sense trying to get any sleep now,” he said to Truly Shirley at the counter. “Might as well get started, right?”
Truly eyed him flatly, and nosed him and eared him flatly for good measure. There were lugworms less flat than the once-over he was receiving.

“So, that’ll be what?”
“Best if you’re on your way,” she said, with a voice like crumbling hopes and dreams.

“Sorry now?”

“Get back to your big city, where you belong.”

The postman frowned. “I’m from Milton County, a buck forty east of here. About two thousand people.”
“We don’t like big city people around here,” said Truly. “Bringing in ideas from far away.”

“It’s mail.”
“High-faluting nonsense. Better watch your back.”

“Can I get my change?”
“Not around here you can’t. Folks will stop it.”
“I mean my coins.”
Truly Shirley dumped a handful of bronze and copper tokens on the counter in a variety of shapes and sizes and levels of corrosion. The postman sorted through them until he found something that he was pretty sure had Latin written on it, pocketed it, and left.

“They’ll find you, you know!” she called after him as he stepped back into the sun. “They can smell the big city on you! It’s in your blood! In your boots! IN YOUR PANTS!”
The postman considered this and his pants, but they were nothing but worn and slightly dusty denim, and so he was left none the wiser. His musings were then interrupted by Truly Shirley throwing her call bell at him, and he departed in some haste and tumult while she fumbled in her purse for a reload, curses following him out of the parking lot and up the street.

***

The post office wasn’t what he’d expected. A building had been rented on the edge of town – small, two stories, enough space in the back to cram a postman in. Instead, there was a small pile of smouldering charcoal and soft ash that the breeze stirred aimlessly.

“Looks like it happened pretty recent,” he told the officer. “I mean, it’s still warm, and nobody saw anything last night.”
“Damn right they didn’t,” said the officer, whose name was Euphonious Harper. “I made sure of it.”
“I’m sorry, what do you mean?”
“This was the old Murgatroyd place, back far as anyone can remember, until that spineless, shiftless, faithless son of a bitch Maurice sold it to you and your sort for his miserable thirty pieces of silver. There’s been more done here under the new moon than could be imagined by anyone anywhere, and those who know about that sort of thing would never stand to see the ancient ways disrespected and defiled by the scent of a soft-souled outlander who doesn’t know the handshakes or the hand signals or the hand-binding of Holmsome Hrrrg.”
“The what of wholesome who?”
Euphonious Harper spit in the dirt at the postman’s feet. “Exactly. You’d better be out of town before Bile Tuesday’s waxing half-moon, that’s all I’m saying. Fhtagn cordynk.”

Thus speaking, the officer hissed three sibilant syllables between his teeth, twisted his fingers like a wire puzzle gone rogue, stepped into the shadow of a thin and sickly sapling, and vanished without a trace.

The postman wandered around the burning remnants of the building, poked at the tree’s shadow for a bit, and elected to work out of his truck.

***

When the postman returned to his truck he was surprised and marginally pleased to find a letter already wedged under his windshield wiper. It appeared to have been written in blood, but the stamp was legitimate (if rumpled and old) and the writing was readable (if shaky and misshapen) so he did his duty and delivered it, hampered only slightly by the address being as follows:

Behind the big rock

The biggest rock

Under it      

Near the grove of dead pines

The postman saw the dead pine grove from the road after spending half the afternoon cruising up and down the backwoods of Ludlow County. Each tree was brittle and dryer than a bone, and each tree had nails driven into its sides, and each pair of nails had a jawbone dangling from them in an empty soundless shriek, with colour from flesh-fresh white to tea-stained brown.

Behind the big rock near the pine grove (which was splashed with rusty stains that seemed as old as the stone surface itself), there was the biggest rock (which was painted with odd symbols and figures that made the postman’s eyes twist), and under the biggest rock was a hole just wide enough for a big man’s shoulders that was dark out of proportion to its apparent depth. A moonless night had taken up permanent residence in it.

There was no mailbox, so the postman knocked on the stone. Something shifted underground – a rabbit, or maybe a fox, or a badger? – but came no closer.

“Mail,” he spoke into the still air.

A fly buzzed. There were a lot of them around, and the stink of death was heavy, but no meat was to be seen. The sky was hopelessly blue.

“Mail,” repeated the postman, and knocked again.

After an hour of waiting, he bent regulations just a little and left the mail at the mouth of the hole by pinning it under a gnawed human skull he found sitting in the crotch of one of the pines. By the way the skin of his neck crawled, something watched him all the way back to his truck, but it didn’t speak up about it so he didn’t try to start a conversation.

***

The day was wearing thin, and so too was the postman’s wakefulness. He ventured to the outer rim of town, found the county’s three-room motel, and requested a room.

“You can’t have room four,” said the proprietor, who was a whip-thin and wide-eyed man named Harry Bacon.

“I thought there were only three rooms?”
“There are,” said Harry, making unflinching eye contact with someone hypothetically standing three inches to the left of the postman. “You can’t have room four. Don’t ask about room four. There’s no hidden money under room four. You got it? I’m clean. You got it? I’ve been in town for years. You got it? There’s nothing suspicious going on. You got it? You got it? You got it?”
“Yes?” hedged the postman.

“FUCK!” screamed Harry. “They found me!” And with a wail of despair, he pulled out a sawn-off lug of a shotgun from under the desk, fired it into the ceiling, and hurled himself through the window.

The postman left money on the counter (and after a moment’s thought, the odd coins he’d received from Truly Shirley too) and took the key for room three, which was already unlocked. The bed was dusty and there was a kilogram of soft white powder wrapped in plastic hidden in the toilet tank that messed with the flush a little, but other than that it was pretty alright.

***

At three PM the postman woke to the sounds of voices raised in anger. Strange flashes of colour etched their way past his windowsill, illuminating a standoff between robed locals chanting words not meant for human mouths, slick-haired men in nice suits with desperate eyes and expensive firearms, something with too little hair and too many teeth, and Truly Shirley.

He gazed at the tableau for a moment, watching it flicker like bad stop-motion-animation between the flashes of lightning striking from a dim and rainless sky. Then he brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and took a good, long look at himself in the mirror.

“I like my job,” he asked himself.  “But do I like it THAT much?”

There was no reply save for a wordless wail from outside the door, immediately followed by gunfire, explosions, screaming, and the wet, leaden thudding of flesh against the motel’s siding. 

“I’ll sleep on it,” he decided. And he did, though it took him some time and a pair of earplugs. 

In the morning he found the bodies missing, but also his answer: several cars left lonely in the  parking lot with keys still inside and wallets tucked under the dashboard. 

***

Ludlow County was a smear on the edge of the map made when a cartographer’s attention slipped. It had a population of about two or three hundred, give or take a hundred.

It used to have a post office, but now it doesn’t.

The Bay of Blenth was not a bad place to live altogether. The river was wide and gentle; the fields were wide and watered well by its floods; the woods were thick and shaded; the winters weren’t too much to bear; the seas were sheltered and rich.

No, the Bay of Blenth was an excellent place for a human to live. The tragedy was that it was an even BETTER place to live if you were a mosquito. The slow river and the shallow puddles in the fields were their nurseries; the shaded woods their havens; the light winters their modest off-season; the rich bounty of the bay an inducement for lovely blood-rich humans to congregate. Thus the mosquitoes of the Bay of Blenth were the largest, fattest, and smuggest to be found anywhere, and its people were accordingly blessed with a rich variety of itchy red lumps all over their exposed skin, particularly in the summer months.

The particular summer month that finally broke this age-old harmony was a notably humid and windless one, where the clouds clotted everything from horizon to horizon for weeks on end and the swarms grew so thick that the cows returned from pasture weighing less than they had going out, and anyone out for a walk had to tie a scarf over their mouth or risk inhaling an entire meal of crunchy protein. The biweekly meeting of the town hall was filled with complaints and the occasional anguished whimper.

“Mosquitoes have bitten my sheep-guard dog’s nose so thoroughly that he can no longer smell a fox from a frog!” screamed a man in a frenzy of despair.

“Peace, peace, we are all suffering,” soothed the head of the town council, a limpid man who had seen three score summers like this come and go.

“Mosquitos have barred my two-year-old triplets from leaving the house,” droned a haunted shell of a woman. “I spin wool all day while they break things and attempt to eat them. I lament life.”
“Peace, peace, let us not succumb to despair; this too shall pass,” repeated the head of the town council, exuding a calm that very nearly overpowered the thick choking smoke the building had been filled with in futile hope of keeping out the bugs.

“As of two hours ago, mosquitos have filled every outhouse across the Bay from the bottom up in a solid mass,” said a mournful-looking man. “It’s like dipping a pig trotter in a pool of sharks.”

“My good kin and neighbours, something must be done IMMEDIATELY,” said the head of the town council, voice firm with indignation and legs rigidly crossed. “The time has come for action, no matter the cost or the risk. We shall draw straws, and whosoever draws the shortest of the straws will venture to the tower of the wizard Wulwreath, and shall beseech him for aid in our darkest hour.”

So speaking, a large handful of straw was fetched, broken, shuffled, distributed, measured, and judged, and a lone luckless lumberjack named Leen was sent out in quest of the wizard Wulwreath; whose tower, she discovered after scant minutes of questioning, was most recently sighted and sited in the Bay itself, some half-mile offshore on a small shoal. He was studying sharks.

The voyage was simple, but finding someone willing to lend a boat to it was not. At length Leen resorted to the ancient technique of lying about what she was doing, and thus armed, was able to row to the squat and malformed shape of the tower unhindered by anything more than mosquitos and the rippling waves of dread spilling off the structure’s sides and gushing deep into the sea.

The door to the tower of the wizard Wulwreath opened before it could be knocked upon, recoiling from the lumberjack’s scarred knuckles like her mother-in-law from her dinner table.

“Enter!” it shouted portentously. And so she did, and found herself in a dark and troubled space. Each wall was a ceiling, and from each of them sprouted four more walls, each adroitly avoiding intersecting with each other, their parents, or themselves. There were no floors. All the stairs weren’t. The contents were scarcely less troubling than their confines: unshelved books and unbooked shelves that somehow shared space; the skeletons of giant insects; a stuffed and mounted jellyfish; and a giant set of glass jars containing miniaturized terrariums of hopes, dreams, and despairs. Through it all flowed a mighty river of time, sucking up all the spare moments and idle hours and centralizing them for recapture, reuse, and repurposing.

“Who disturbs my contemplations?” demanded an even yet more portentous voice. It was the wizard Wulwreath. He was squatted on top of a crystal orb, on top of a platinum spire, on top of a burning brazier of crackling dragon-eggs, and he was smoking an indecipherable substance from a cyclops’s skull.

“Leen, the lumberjack. From town.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“You get a lot of trees that need cutting?”
“What are trees?”
“Then there you go.”
The wizard Wulwreath nodded solemnly, causing plumes of smoke to erupt from his eyeballs and shatter. “So it does go. And what do you seek me for?”
“The Bay of Blenth is under mosquito siege, worse than anyone can ever remember happening before. Can you help us?”

“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” muttered the wizard, sucking down another lungful of materials. “Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Of course!”

“One last thing. Aren’t you studying sharks?”
“Of course I am.”
“Then where are they?”
“What a silly question,” said the wizard. He opened the skull’s jaws, and lo, inside it, there was a shark.

“Oh,” said Leen. And she departed fully informed and told the town council that there would be help, and everyone rejoiced.

***

One day later, a great smoke and fire rose from the peak of the tower of the wizard Wulwreath and vanished.

One week later, the dragonflies hatched. They were bigger than before, and in greater numbers, and with greater appetite, speed, and ferocity. Each of them had a tiny dragon’s head in place of their own head, and a tiny dragon’s head in place of each of their own legs, and a tiny dragon’s head in place of their own tails. Each of those heads could eject poisonous acid when it breathed, and each of those heads wanted to eat mosquitoes, and each of those dragonflies wanted all the mosquitoes to be eaten.

At first the people rejoiced – finally you could breathe freely again; could see across a field in broad daylight; could expose skin for longer than a second without it being perforated – but then the first tiny poisonous fires began to catch in the hay and the wheat and the grass and matters became somewhat more tense.

“It isn’t TERRIBLY poisonous acid,” pondered the head of the town council wisely, “since it only gives you a rash. So the problem is solved.”
“The rash takes all your skin with it when it comes off,” said a half-exsanguinated fisherman, whose entire body was swaddled in smelly bandages.

“Well, we’re already used to bundling up a bit to avoid the mosquitoes, so this is nothing but an improvement, and the problem is solved,” asserted the head of the town council regally.

“The flames grow and threaten despite the dampness and the lack of sunlight for the past month and more,” said Leen, who was coated with soot and marginally scalded around the gills.

“The rains shall arrive any day now, so the problem is solved,” explained the head of the town council fondly.

“The dragonflies have learned to fear not humanity, and they find our livestock toothsome,” said a rancher. “I lost six head of cattle this morning.”
“My good kin and neighbours, this crisis shall be averted at ONCE,” shouted the head of the town council with the absolute conviction of one who owned a small herd of prized dairy cows. “As we are beset by the foul and unjust magicks of the wicked wizard Wulwreath, we must reach out to the one force that can counterbalance and counteract his sorceries: we shall draw straws, and whosoever draws the shortest of the straws will venture deep into the woods and find and secure the aid of the witch Wezelynn.”

This time the lucky winner was a cooper called Colm, who was in a bad mood to begin with and was not best pleased by being told to venture deep into the shaded woods while his livelihood burned down behind him. But there was no putting it off, and so with a walking stick and a bellyful of bellyaching and a head full of thunder he stomped off through the smoke and the fire and the (still present!) mosquitoes and spent a day hiking and a night hiding in a tree and a day walking and stumbled and tripped and when he got up he was face to face with the cottage of the witch Wezelynn, tucked under a tree root.

Colm knocked on the door with his pinky finger’s knuckle.

“Enter,” it croaked in the voice of a mummified toad. So he pushed it open, and pushed his pinky finger inside, and the rest of him followed into a dank and rotted pit, like the heart of a peach gone rancid and prised open by little clicking chitin jaws. Splinters and ashes and tatters abounded. In the center of the clutter and the rot was the firepit, in which burned the indescribable, and atop that was the cauldron, in which simmered the unthinkable, and within that curdled the witch Wezelynn.

“What do you want,” she said, eyes shut. “And make it quick. I’m bathing.”

Colm found that the roof of his mouth was trying to stick to his tongue was trying to stick to his teeth which were trying to stick to each other.

“I don’t bite,” said the witch Wezelynn. “Slice and stew and slurp, yes. But I don’t bite. Now open that fly-trap before I seal it shut proper for wasting my bathtime.”
“The wizard Wulwreath has covered us with dragonflies after we begged him to save us from mosquitos,” said Colm. “We are poisoned and singed and bitten, and beg you to drive away his pests.”
The witch laughed at that, which sounded like a mudslide drowning a rabbit burrow. “Oh! Oh I see how it is! You tried to solve all your problems with a wizard, and now that THAT’S backfired on you – unexpected, I’m sure! – you finally have it in you to come beg aid from the wicked, cruel, capricious witch Wezelynn. Such a brave boy you are! I bet you’re only here because you picked the short straw.”
“Please,” begged Colm. “I had half my boots burned off walking here.”

“Hah! I bet you did. Well, I can fix that. I can fix the mosquitoes too. I can fix it all up so well you’ll never dare bother me during bathtime again!” And the laugh came again, but longer, and thicker, and it wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t end, wouldn’t ever ever ever end until Colm shut his eyes to escape it and when he opened them again he was on the edge of the forest.

***

The next day the rains didn’t come. Indeed, the clouds finally vanished and the sun shone brightly, so although the fires continued, the mosquitoes at least suffered another blow.

The next day the rains didn’t come, and it was spotlessly blue from east to west. The air felt thin and glassy, like a lens.

The day after that the rains didn’t come.

And the day after.

And the day.

And the

And

Until the standing water evaporated and the river shrivelled and the fields crumpled and the world itself felt crisped and the dragonflies all died and the mosquitoes all died and there was no place for their eggs to brew and simmer and the who world seemed to be curling up into a desiccated husk, and still the sun shone and the air was clear even as people dug wells deeper, resorted to complicated schemes with panes of glass and trays of saltwater from the bay, ate their meat near-raw for the juices.

So it was explained why the mood at the next meeting in the town hall was somewhat less than ideal.

“We roast!”

“We burn!”
“We wither!”
“We thirst!”
“Your concerns are well-founded and urgent and we should not waste our time asking why they may or may not have arisen and who may or may not have caused them,” decreed the head of the town council with immaculate decorum. “But we have one last play to make, one last hope for salvation, though perilous it be! Once more, the straws! And once more, draw! And behold, the short straw is oh dear.”

So the head of the town council took himself – reluctantly – to his feet and walked up the winding road – slowly – to the keep where he – begrudgingly – requested audience – humbly – with the Prince of the Bay of Blenth, whereupon he was taken to the court and placed on his hands and knees while the prince finished watching his jester.

“Excellent,” said the prince. “Now more wine. Oh, who’s that?”
“I am a humble and unnoteworthy messenger,” said the head of the town council, “who has but come to beseech thee, milord, on behalf of the people of your fair lands, who are suffering most terribly through no fault of anyone at all besides the mosquitoes, milord, and the dragonflies sent by the wizard Wulwreath, milord, and the drought plaguing the land which has eradicated the mosquitoes and the dragonflies that is believed to have been sent out by the wicked witch Wezelynn, milord. Please, milord, may you spare us and succour us, your undeserving and everloyal and unquestioning subjects?”

The prince stood up. Grave was his face and keen were his eyes. “Your pleas move me, oh lowly creature,” he spake solemnly. “Lo! I shall make ever permitting stagnant or standing water on your property or your fields (such as might permit the breeding of dragonflies or mosquitoes) an offence punishable by death!”
“And the drought, milord?” ventured the head of the town council.

“Oh, yes, right,” said the prince. “Double the tributary requirements: I will need to make a second, larger keep to show the other princes that these hardships haven’t shrunken my sword. Someone execute this man for interrupting me.”

The head of the town council would have protested, but was interrupted and foreshortened to merely the * of the town council, and so missed his chance.

***

The next summer the mosquitoes were thick and furious as usual across the Bay of Blenth.

Everybody suffered, but nobody complained. They knew better.

And besides, it wasn’t as if NOTHING good had come of it. Town council meetings were much faster now.

In a small hilly daley kingdom the people were blessed by a king, and blessed was that king from all the proper and respectable authorities of the heavens and earth. He was huge, and strong, and fast, and keen with his blade, and fierce with his fist, and under his protection they feared nothing from no other. In all manner of respects was he perfect, save for one small manner: he believed that the sun was his cousin, and a shiftless one to boot.

“Why does he shirk my lands so?” he complained to his court on a beautiful summer afternoon. “Look! See how he slowly begins to slink into the west! What’s so wonderful over there that he should quit my kingdom so eagerly! Is not the cathedral’s steeple so high and grand? Are not my fields ripe and full? Are not the trees so thick and lustrous? Whyfor have you, my advisors, permitted some secret shame to thus rob me of his kinship?! Whence did this wound against his pride occur?! Woe!”
“I’m sure we can remedy this matter,” implored the eldest and closest of the king’s counselors, who could see his swording hand clawing restlessly at his pommel. “We shall consult the court polymath, wise Gum, who knows all manner of truths of earth and water and beyond. In her hands we may place a matter of this import, as it lies beyond our humble means.”

“Wonderful,” said the king. “And if this fails, I will know you have all only managed to further insult my cousin and will chop you all up.”

***

Wise Gum did not appreciate being dragged from her study, nor did she enjoy being introduced into a category of court personnel liable to be chopped up, and she was a little less than pleased when she was informed that it was laid upon her efforts and skills to prevent them all from being chopped up.

“A little notice would have made this matter easier,” she told the king, with a distinctly unwise amount of peevishness.

“Fear not,” said the king, whose mood at the moment was too expansive and buoyant to notice little things like other people. “As long as my cousin tarries tonight at my table, I shall be content. That leaves you at least three hours to entire him, does it not?”

“So it does,” said wise Gum. “I will go now to prepare my arguments and arts.”
“Excellent,” said the king. “I look forwards to not having to chop you all up.”

So wise Gum left the company of the cheerful king and left the anxious court and strode into the town below the king’s estate and made very fast friends with several very fast woodcutters and lo! The king was halfway through his evening meal before he realized something strange had happened.

“Ho!” he called at the glow through the banquet hall’s western windows. “Why do we still not need candles lit at this late an hour? Has my cousin decided to stay for the meal?”
“Indeed,” said wise Gum. “And overnight, if it pleases you.”
“Greatly!” said the king, shedding many familial tears. “So greatly! I have half a mind to run outside and embrace him myself!”
“A bit too much too quickly,” cautioned wise Gum. “Give your cousin his space and privacy while he visits outside the standard hours of the day, please.”
“Of course, of course, of course,” sniffled the king, pulling himself together. “At least for three days, I think. At least. And if he remains distant after that time I will know you have all told him foul lies about me and will chop you all up.”

Wise Gum bowed as low as was diplomatically necessary and excused herself from the meal. She hurried out the manor doors, passed by an exhausted and sweaty crowd of deeply overworked loggers, charcoal-burners, and woodcutters making a very large and beautiful bonfire of all the tallest and oldest trees in the area, and headed back down into the town, where she began knocking on the doors of every sail-stitcher, tailor, paper-miller, tent-maker, painter, and muralist in sight, and a few that weren’t. And they were just the start.

***

The sun continued to grace the king’s estate with his presence at all hours, and so enraptured was he rendered by this that he went very nearly the full three days without complaining. But in the evening of the final day his attention span began to wane, his lip grew a pout, and he chopped off the littlest fingers on both the hands of his steward for clinking a mug too loudly when serving him.

“Does something trouble you, your majesty?” asked wise Gum, who’d taken to sitting in at evening mealtimes and loudly asking the king complicated questions whenever he got too close to any of the windows.

“Three days is too long,” said the king, standing up with the full authority of his station and knocking over the dinner table. “I’m going to go see my cousin now.”

“Certainly,” said wise Gum. “But first you’ll need to shave. You don’t want to meet your cousin with an unshaven face.”
“True!” said the king.

“And before you shave, you must bathe.”
“Right!”
“And after you bathe, you must dress grandly.”
“Certainly!”
“And after you dress grandly, you should walk in stately procession to meet your cousin. Don’t rush! Don’t hurry! Don’t fumble!”
“You are indeed very wise, Gum,” marvelled the king. “I will do just that.”
“Haste is the enemy of dignity,” said wise Gum. And so speaking this she sipped her soup slowly until the king departed for his chambers, whereupon she leapt from her seat and ran out of the manor so quickly her shoes nearly caught flame.

The procession was indeed stately. It was indeed grandly-dressed. And it was indeed in no rush, at least until the king became bored halfway there and broke into a little rush, forcing the rest of his court to hurry after him and getting three of his older counselors trampled.

“My cousin!” the king shouted grandly as he flung wide the estate doors. “I am here!”
And lo! Though it was far after hours, there was yet light! A soft, cloudy late afternoon, lit by a gentle glow concealed behind beautiful and nigh-motionless haze that filled the sky from horizon to horizon. It was ethereal and beautiful, even if the perspective was a little funny where it reached the edges of town and the shade of the light perhaps suggested that someone had run low on the right shade of red at the last minute.

“Ah cousin, what poor luck, for such an overcast moment to herald our proper introductions,” lamented the king. “But you remain here, and wish to remain with me! It is a blessing forsooth for me to see you guest so gladly, and in proper manner rather than nesting outside my window! Why, I could be satisfied with this sight all my days.”
And all the court breathed a sigh of relief.

“Let us go together on a midnight hunt in one week,” said the king brightly, and so all their hearts shattered together.

***

The king was too pleased with chatting with his cousin as he roamed his estate to notice half his treasury had been paid out to the town’s artisans, and very nearly too pleased to comment on the remarkably static nature of the sky, but he was not QUITE pleased enough to fail to notice that the beautiful golden fields that surrounded his estate were somewhat withered.

“Ah, the crops suffer,” he said. “A sorry sight to show my cousin.”

“Droughts are not unseasonable this time of year, your majesty,” noted wise Gum, who was hastily shoving rocks and loose brush in front of an odd texture in apparent midair that one might have called a rip or a crease.

“It is true, it is true. Would that we had some rain!”
“Hopefully not for a week,” said wise Gum, dropped the last of her armful of bracken and twigs atop a scraped-bare patch of what appeared to be canvas.

“What? Why?”
“Omens,” she said with a mysterious gesture.

“Ah. Of course. But in a week I shall ride through the woods with my cousin at my side on a midnight hunt in the light of midday, and there will be peace and goodwill between us, and if this does not happen I will know that he is displeased with the advice you have given me about him and will chop you up.”

“Quite so,” said wise Gum. “Quite so.”

***

The rains came overnight at the week’s end, and in a moment of merciful timing it was when the king was abed, blissfully slumbering in the warm light of two am. It took half the town to take down the great wooden framework of poles and stilts that had held the boxed sky aloft, and the other half to clean up the acres of soaked paper and runny-painted canvas scraps, and a THIRD half to collect up all the melted-down-to-the-nubbin candles and lamp-wicks that had burned out every evening for the past week, and between all of that there was absolutely no help left to lend a hand to wise Gum in her chambers, which was how she liked it because if someone had said something or sneezed or twitched or breathed in the wrong way while she was mixing the last of her ingredients the manor might have exploded or maybe just stopped existing.

Instead, she got precisely what she wanted: a little piece of transparent waxy substance the size of her thumbnail, which she put in a glass globe, which she dangled from a wire, which she gently suspended from the corner of the king’s crown as he dozed upon his throne.

And into that globe she added three tiny drops of oil, plink plink plunk, and from that globe came a bright and terrible light.

“Wuzzat?” said the king, who was a terribly light sleeper.
“It’s your cousin,” said wise Gum, gesturing just above and between the king’s eyes. “He so wished to go on the hunt with you that he arrived early, and he’ll go with you wherever you wish.”
“MAGNFICENT” yelled the king. “Oh my cousin, I would hug you if not for your likelihood of burning my arms. Come! To the horses! To the hounds! To the woods! Wake up my lazybones servants; there is no need for sleep for there is no longer night in my lands! My cousin has well and truly come home!”

And so good was his mood that he didn’t spare a single glance for the shreds of paper and paint that his horses waded through as they charged past the once-parched and formerly-light-starved fields on their way into the woods in search of animals to kill.

***

There were four principal downsides to the king’s cousin.

First, he made speaking to the king very difficult – the light shone just above and between the king’s eyes, which did made it easy to modestly avert your gaze in deference but was problematic when attempting to look him straight in the face with firm and clear-eyed sincerity. This led to the execution of approximately one courtier a week for ‘treasonous squinting.’

Second through third were the little drops of oil every week, plink plink plunk. The king had already been a terribly light sleeper and an insomniac, but now he was a man possessed by such joy that he fought sleep with every huge and robust sinew and bone in his body. He dozed fitfully and without plan, so that wise Gum had to follow him almost everywhere with a droplet-dispenser and an oil-skin, ever ready for an opening.

The easy part was convincing him to never take the crown off. “Your cousin finds it most regal,” she had told him, and that had been that; it would never leave his brow again. In the fields, in the woods, at the high table, at court, in bed, in the bath. Never, ever, ever.

After two months of this the royal jeweler was in tears at the state of the thing. “Dust!” he cried. “Cobwebs! Ruin!”

“Chopping,” reminded wise Gum, and he subsisted into despair and whimpers. But he was right.

***

On the second week of the third month of the king’s endless and personal accompaniment by his cousin the sun who graced his lands with his unending and glorious light, the king rolled over in his sleep and pressed the globe to his crown briefly, triggering a small but intense dust fire and causing the thin glass to explode with a tiny ‘pff.’

The king yawned, stretched, smelled smoke, scratched out the flames attempting to take root in his chest hair, rolled over again, and was blissful as a babe until the precise moment he awoke at ten am.

“BETRAYAL!” he screamed as he hurled himself out from his bedclothes. “ALARM!” he howled as he descended the stairways to the rooms of wise Gum, sword in hand. “TREASON!” he shrieked as he hauled her from her workbench by her scruff. “My cousin has abandoned me!”

“No, no, no,” said wise Gum, whose brain was still half in the mathematical proof she’d been working on and half on thoughts of lunch and was refusing to budge in the same way a rabbit might when stalked by a wildcat.
“YES YES YES!”
“No, no, no,” tried wise Gum again.
“YES YES YES!”

“Your cousin probably had to go back to the sky to attend to matters for a moment,” said wise Gum, whose gut had seized control from her brain in extremis. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”
“Without a WORD to ME?” hollered the king, waving his sword through a candle, a desk, and a stool forwards and backwards.
“He’s very very busy.”
“TOO BUSY for his OWN COUSIN?” bellowed the king, biting off one of his own incisors in fury.
“Ask him, I’m sure he’ll-”

“I WILL!” roared the king, and he threw wise Gum carelessly through her bed and ran from the room, from the manor, to the cathedral, up the belltower, and onto the rim of the lip of the edge of the highest window under the very tip of the steeple.

“GET BACK HERE, YOU SHIRKER!” he called. And with that he jumped, and with that he seized, and for one glorious moment the sunlight was covered by his hands and he could almost see it shining between his fingers.

His heart rose. The rest of him, inevitably, didn’t.

***

The next king was a very distant cousin. He was smaller, and older, and slower, and he didn’t like spending much time in town or at court or with his family or with anybody in particular.

This was considered a blessing. There are worse things to have in slight deficit than a fondness for the company one’s associates and relations. Particularly when astronomy is involved.

When Lever Blake woke up and smelled the air deep in his chest and tasted the humidity in the curl of his eyelashes and saw the joy and genuine delight in the way the blackflies danced over the shrubs, he knew what kind of day it was.

“The fish are biting,” he said with happy delight. And so he took up his rod and his line and his tackle box and his good hat and he took Little Tim too, and all of them stepped out into the spring and shunned the roads and asphalt, turned away from the gravelled paths, left the sound of automobile and air conditioning to be muffled by the trees and went down the small ways and half-trials down to the lakeside together.

***

There was exactly the right shape and force of wind, and Lever knew the exact whip and slice of line for it. Eye, hand, motion. No thought needed or desired.

Plunk!

He sat on a stone, back alarmingly slouched, and he watched the insects swarm over the water and abruptly vanish to threats below and he knew life was good and true and real and everything was as it should be.

“Lever!”

And there was one more thing as it should be.

“Lever!” again, because Wedge Tyler never took silence for an answer.

“Wedge!” replied Lever. “I was just sitting here and thinking on how life was good and true and real and everything is as it should be.”
“Ah, that’s just fine, that’s just fine. How’s it going?”
“The fish are biting.”
Wedge whistled. His pitch was poor in sound but powerful in volume of air moved. “Fine, fine, that’s just fine. I’ll join you, if you don’t dispute it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
So Wedge rolled up his pantlegs and stuck his legs in the lake and leaned back and considered clouds. “In my consideration,” he said, “those are some nice clouds.”
“They are, they are.”
“That one there looks like a bunny.”
“What kind of bunny?”
“White and wispy.”
“As long as it isn’t red.”
“Why so?”
“Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Remember?”

“Nah, nah, nah,” said Wedge, shaking his head like a wet golden retriever. “You were always the one for the weather stuff. You know when the fish are biting, you know when it’s time to make hay, you know when the rain is coming in.”
“You knew the fish were biting just now yourself or you wouldn’t have come down here.”
“It was optimism, that’s all. And besides, I’ve been coming down to check for the past week.”

“Better too much than not enough,” said Lever. He cast his line again, the arc, the hand, the eye, and something fell over behind him and he swore and the line splashed in an unseemly way.

“Fuck,” said the something. “’Zat you , Lever?”
“It is,” said Lever. “Be careful. You put me off my cast.”
“Sorry,” said the something, who was clearly and obviously Fulcrum Thomas. “Can’t see a damned thing in these glasses.”

“You still need those?” asked Wedge.
“Another few weeks minimum. But the surgery was worth it, so they say.”
“So they say,” said Wedge. “Should be fine.”
“Whatever.” Fulcrum had already begun to remove his jacket and whatever else he had to hand. “Lever, are the fish biting?”
“The fish are biting,” confirmed Lever.

“Damn straight,” agreed Wedge. “Ah!”
“Ah what?”
“One just took a toe,” said Wedge, holding up the leg who claimed toe ownership for approval. “See? There? Clean hit too. A muskey, y’think?”
“Could be, could be,” said Lever.
“Well that’s great,” said Fulcrum. He finished shucking off the last of his pants and immediately trundled into the lake and fell over with a godawful explosion of water and noise.

“Oh come ON,” said Wedge as he surfaced, swearing.

“I’m alright, I’m alright. Got my legs under me now. I’m alright.”
“You’ll scare the fish!”
“No I damn won’t! Ask Lever and he’ll tell you: if the fish are biting, they’ll bite. Argh! There’s one right now!”
“It’s true,” said Lever. “Just mind the spray, will you? This is my good hat.”

“Sure!” called Fulcrum. And furthermore, “ARGH!”

There was a clattering from up the path; Pulley Stevens was coming down the way with three head of fine cattle, their eyes rolling and their heads balking.

“Ah!” he called. “The fish?”
“Biting,” confirmed Lever. He cast his line again, but with less care; the time for craftsmanship had passed, now it was for the sake of the love of the experience of the emotion of the motion.

“Good, good,” said Pulley. Behind him the woods were alive with crackling branches; the rest of town was nearly here now, stragglers all. Hinge Thomas and Plane Rupert and Knob Wilson and all the others and all the rest, all dressed up, all ready to go, all here for those words.

 “G’wan!” he called and tugged and cajoled. “Get in there! You heard the man!” And they did, with reluctance, which matched how Fulcrum received them.

“Keep on my lee side,” he bellowed. “I was here first! I’ve got the right of the fish! ARGH!”
“You can’t own the lake, Fulcrum,” said Wedge.

“And you can’t own everyone else’s business! Butt out!”
“Your butt’s in the way – YOU butt out!”
“The fish are biting,” reminded Lever, and he baited the hook with the very last of Little Tim and sent it on its glorious geometrically exquisite trip to the lake and everyone saw it and knew it was good.

 “So they are,” said Wedge, the ripples growing red around his legs.

“Blessed be,” said Pulley, shoving a particularly recalcitrant and mournful snout away from the shoreline.

“Frog willing,” said Fulcrum. And then “ARGH!” and his whole mountainous body quivered. “THEY COME!” he screamed.

And so they did. The water boiled, the air shimmered with the splash and pop of their bodies and jaws. From ashore came the call, the echo of Lever’s early premonition.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” and so they leapt and jumped and waded and foundered into the shallows, tripping and sliding on rocks, on branches, on each other. People fell and got up and fell and got up and fell and never rose again or were sucked down, screaming in joy and terror.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” roared Fulcrum, as he melted away in the center of a bass vortex. “THE FISH ARE BITING! THE FISH ARE BITING!” and at the last even his lips were gone below and out of it all and no more sign or splash was made.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” called Wedge as inch by inch he was tugged down and on and on and in towards the water, knee by thigh.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” called Pulley in terrible rhapsody as he took a running dive and landed amidst the screams and bleats of his fading livestock, a thunderous burst amidst their ebbing struggles.

“THE FISH ARE BITING!” went up from a hundred and more sets of tetrapod lungs, emptied of air and filled with water and vacating chest cavities and more and more and more, all together, all united, all going, going, going, going, gone.

***

By noon the fuss was over and the wind was beginning to pick up, so Lever packed up his tackle box. The clouds weren’t the right shape anymore. The bugs weren’t dancing properly. The humidity was unhappy. The mood was gone.

But you didn’t judge a day by how it ended, but what was in it. It had been good. It had been right. It had been done.

The fish had bitten. And so in extrapolation the fish would bite. It had been ensured.

So when Lever put away his rod and his line and his tackle box and his good hat, he didn’t pack them too deep in his closet. You could never quite figure when those sorts of days WOULD come, but you could be ready for when they did.

The spring stood on top of a peak, on top of a mountain, on top of everything, and in the spring swam the very small fish, and they spoke of what they would do and who they would be.

“I’m going to be a shark,” said the first fish. “I’ll swim all over the world, and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I’m going to be a gulper eel,” said the second fish. “I’ll live at the bottom of the world and I’ll eat anything I want.”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.

“I’m going to be a flying fish,” said the fourth fish. “I’ll swim through the air, not just the water.”
“I’ll be a leaping salmon,” said the fifth fish, and so on and on and on for the spring was full from one side to the other, as big as it was, as small as they all were.

But small things grow ever bigger, and one Now not too far from Then when the sun shone particularly brightly a little fish swam uncommonly close to the very edge of the spring, and – as much by design as accident – it slipped into the whirling current of one of the ten thousand streams that shot forth from the spring, and it was gone.

The first fish to follow it took about four minutes. The first fish to follow THAT fish took about four seconds. And on, and on, and on, until it was a flood, a tide of little flesh with big dreams and wild hope and fierce fear all pouring out of the spring at every turn, descending down into the world on the ten thousand streams that fed into a hundred thousand rivers that drained into the oceans.

The first, second, and fourth fish were gone before then – seized on by hungry and long-bodied and long-toothed river predators. The fifth fish was plucked by a small but determined bird.

The third fish didn’t know what to do.

***

Some of the fish remained in the rivers, found their ways into lakes, stopped to tarry in pools and ponds. They grew up, put down roots, stayed as lampreys, as trout, as bass, as sunfish and cichlids and pike and every colour and form and imagining of the oxbow, from murky thousand-mile meanders to cold clear crisp mountain craters that seemed just a little bit like the echo of the spring they had spent their childhoods in, the spring that they had forgotten.

The remainder found their way out into the rest of the world, the bulk of the planet’s surface, the conquering of topography by hydrology. They flooded the estuaries, clotted the corals, meandered into the great pelagic deserts, sank down to the abyssal plains and into the hadal trenches, moved up and down the water column like dust in sunbeams, grew white-bellied and black-backed, shaded the colours of the rainbow, turned thin and long and stout and strong and bright-eyed and blind and beautiful in every way.

The third fish didn’t know where to go.

***

Of the billions, so few were left to grow all the way up. One in thousands, hundreds, millions, who could count them? Most of those lucky few were small, discreet, quiet and quick and worried and a little bit more like their childhood than they might have thought they’d be. Some were larger, some were larger still, a few were largest of all – great sharks that cruised through vast clouds of tiny life and swallowed them whole; or knife-toothed predators that swallowed seals and dolphins. They too found themselves not quite who they thought they’d be; wary, hungry, eternally restless and fretful and just a little wistful for a childhood in a high and safe place that they could not recall.

The third fish didn’t know who to be.

***

The spring filled again. Every year, every revolution of the sun, every passing cloud and empty breeze and idle hour poured more into it, until at last it was overflowing with very small fish, still fresh, still amorphous, still eager and still unknown.

And when the hastiest of that year’s young swam too far from the spring’s center, too close to the current tugging at its fins, too close to the stream – it found the oddest thing. A little lump in the riverbed, a spot of piled sediment, an obstruction forming itself into a stone. The new fish didn’t know what it was but that was normal, and natural, and fine, and so it put it out of its head and soon it pressed on.

Every year more debris piled; every year it packed in more tightly; every year the stone grew in size and scope until the waterway was cut in half by its mass and the number of streams that flowed out from the spring was ten thousand and one.

The very small fish followed the streams to the rivers and lakes and the ocean, and they did not know what the stone was. But some stayed longer than their friends every year, just a moment. And the fish that lingered there swam more slowly for a time, with more worries to weigh them down.

***

The ages passed, and the stone grew. It grew and grew and grew until it forced streams to merge, then to stop, then finally half the spring was obstructed, clogged tight by its bulk. The very small fish slid unevenly from the mountaintop now, and the rivers and seas of the world were unevenly filled save for in places where the base of the stone cracked and permitted small tunnels and trickles to worm underneath its bulk and funnel down the mountainside in sharp short leaks.

In one such crevice on one such day of one such year swam a little fish, sooner than it had planned – it was not yet time for the rush down the seven thousand streams, but the stone had swollen so that it was impossible to avoid it even before the time to leave came, and a small bit of curiosity led it down a passage it couldn’t possibly back out of. But it was far too little a fish to understand or fear this, and so it went down, down, down into the depths of the stone, through passages bigger fish had never swum, and at the very heart of the stone, so far in that the rush and spray of the streams was inaudible for the first time in that little fish’s life, it heard the voice of the third fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. It said this in the terrible sort of way that comes with having thought it endless times before, until the thought wears away and the words mean nothing and all that’s left is raw and red.

“Would you like to come outside?” asked the little fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish.

“Would you like to not be in here?” asked the little fish.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “yes.”

The little fish swam and slammed and shoved with all its small force against the walls around it, but it was only a very little fish and so it was unable to do much at all.

“I’m going to go away now,” said the little fish at last, “but I’ll come back. And when I come back, I’ll help you. Is that alright?”
“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. And, “okay.”

***

The little fish was very excited to speak with its friends after that.

“I am going to be an enormous shark,” said the little fish. “So that I can come back to the spring and break the stone wide open.”
“A shark can’t swim all the way back up the seven thousand streams!” said its little fish friends. “You’re nuts.”
“Well then, I’ll be a mighty salmon,” said the little fish. “So that I can leap upstream from the ocean all the way here and break the stone wide open.”
“A salmon isn’t nearly big enough to break that stone open,” said its little fish friends. “You’re weird.”
“Well then,” said the little fish, “I’ll figure it out myself. Just you wait.”
“That’s really strange,” said its little fish friends. And then near the edge of the spring one of the boldest very small fish was caught by the current and swam down, down, down the mountainside, and so the conversation was, unbeknownst to its participants, already almost over.

***

The little fish was so fiercely intent upon its mission that it was too distracted to notice all the danger of its journey, and so made it all the way to the sea without so much as a scratch. And only then did it realize – so fiercely intent, again, on its mission – that it had precisely no idea as to what its mission was.

“I could be a shark, and split the stone wide open” it said, but then it remembered its friends’ objections to that, and hesitated. “Or maybe a salmon, so I could reach the stone again?” it thought, and it recalled its friends’ objections to that too. “Maybe if I were half shark and half salmon,” it thought daringly, but then it realized that was not a good idea, and it despaired for a moment in a half-hearted little fishy way.

“Oh!” it thought then, so hard that it said it aloud. “I can simply ask a shark and a salmon for help!”

This took longer than the little fish had thought it would, and during the course of this it learned several new things, such as that many sharks were hungry or busy and salmon weren’t much less so. “Excuse me-” and “Would you mind-” and “Please, if you have a moment-” were all fine enough ways to begin a conversation, but the conclusions of those conversations always seemed to converge in headlong flight.

So instead the little fish thought to itself for a while, and it thought of how it had gotten an answer from the third fish, and it began with a very different sort of question to the next shark it found – a handsome sort of oceanic whitetip, with the customary dour mouth and mournful attitude of its type.

“Are you alright?” the little fish asked.

The whitetip didn’t blink, because it couldn’t. But if it could’ve, it would’ve. “What do you mean?” it asked. It didn’t lunge at the little fish; oceanic whitetips don’t lunge. They just stubbornly come at you over and over again until you’re food. But the little fish didn’t know this, and took the lacking lunge as a good omen.

“Do you need any assistance?”
“My back has parasites on it. Can you fix that?”
“I can try,” said the small fish. And indeed, over the course of many days, it did just that. It was a funny sort of way to get food, but consistent, and when the shark began to be mostly-clean (“cleaner than I’ve felt in years”) it was gracious enough to share the scraps of its food, since crumbs for an oceanic white-tip were pretty good meals for a little fish. By the time the shark was clean it was quite reluctant to part from the little fish.

“I will come back,” it promised the shark, “but I would like some help from you first, if that’s alright. I need to destroy the stone at the spring. Can you do that?”
“Not me,” said the white-tip. “And I have no idea of what this spring you’re talking about is. But I know a few friends of my friends. I’ll send them to the nearest river-mouth come spring, if you can give them direction.”
“Oh good,” said the little fish. And it left, and it was so pleased with itself that it immediately introduced itself to another shark, who asked much the same of it, and before it was done cleaning THAT shark it was beset with requests from a third, and so on, and on, and on.

***

Spring found many decidedly clean sharks lurking at the river mouths, along with a number of curious salmon who might not have been particularly keen to listen to the little fish but were cautiously interested in doing so when a shark was lurking behind its request. The sharks were bull shark: grumpy, blunt, and as fond of river water as the white-tips were of the open waves.

“Follow me,” said the little fish, and they did – all the way down the rivers, whose greatest inhabitants hid in astonishment at the force of fish they travelled in; all the way to the edge of the seven thousand streams at the mountain’s base, where the sharks had to sit and wait; all the way past the rocks and the spray and the bright froth of the birthing edge of the spring, up into the very cauldron where they’d been born and gone and forgotten it, except for the little fish, who had a very specific thing to remember.

The stone still sat there, brooding and omnipresent, and although it certainly startled the salmon and the little fish to see it again the real attention of all the OTHER little fish – the very little fish, the very small fish – was on the newcomers, for they had never seen other fish before that were not themselves.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“Some salmon and someone looking for a friend,” replied the little fish, and it moved to the base of the stone and began to inspect it for weaknesses. There were none; the stone was perfect and untouched.

“Where are you going?” they asked.

“We’re going back to the rest of the world, once we’re done,” said the little fish as the salmon began to nudge and budge and thrash their powerful bodies against the stone. Mud churned into the gravel of the spring; it was moving, but only barely. “And we’re bringing the stone with us.”

“What are you doing?” they asked.

“We’re letting my oldest friend out,” said the little fish. “Because they’ve been trapped in there for a very long time, and I promised I would do that, and I’ve asked for help so they would do that, and I’ve given help to others so they would help me. Can you help me?”
The very small fishes of the spring were not old enough to know that was a ridiculous thing to ask, and so agreed immediately. And although every one of them was smaller than a human’s littlest fingernail, in sum and totality, they could move at least one (small, sad) mountain.

The stone slid. Not surely, not safely, not smoothly, but it slid. And when it slid, it spun, and as it spun it began to tumble, and then the water took it and everything around it – salmon, little fish, the spring’s yearly crop of very small newborns (blessedly close to leaving anyways) and all.

***

The sharks found them at the base of the mountain in the birthplace of the rivers, and found something else too: pulverized by the fall and the rush, the stone was frailer than it seemed. It crumbled away in their jaws, bite by bite, and when the last piece was gone it took the little fish a moment to even realize that the third fish was there now, naked and revealed, floating in some sort of shock.

“I don’t know what I want,” said the third fish. But the words meant something different now.

“That’s alright,” said the little fish, the pilot fish. “I’ve gone to some trouble to bring you this far; it would be rude to leave you alone now. Do you mind following me for a little while, though? I owe some sharks some cleaning.”

***

Ten thousand streams ran from the spring again – messy, uncoordinated, squabbling down the side of the mountain. Above them, above the world, the next year waited.

They didn’t know to miss the stone. They didn’t know the odd pits and grooves in the spring’s bed were unusual. They didn’t know anything at all.

But they were happy, in the way of very small fishes. Even if they didn’t know it yet.