jamieproctor.ca

Welcome. Welcome! Come on in, come on in, don’t worry, you haven’t missed a thing! Tour starts in Now, and you’re right on time.
One two three four five six seven eighteen of you. Ah! So many eager little faces! It’s nice to see some teachers still understand the value of getting your history hands-on, eh? Much better to see and hear and touch and smell the real thing that to get it all second or eighth-hand through some dingy old book that’s been kept who knows where.
Now, if you’ll all just follow me please – keep together now! – and we’ll head to the Early wing.

First up will be the Early Early Period, which is largely prehistorical. Peer your eyes at the wonders around the cabinets. It shouldn’t take long. You see, Kenning River fossils – mostly taken from the old Grimson Cliffs down near the south bends are wonderfully, exceptionally, exquisitely preserved… but they’re rather predictable. If it’s not teeth it’s a tongue-imprint, and if it’s neither, it’s jaws. All kinds of jaws, all kinds of teeth, a lot of tongues, but sooner or later you wonder why you never find oh vertebrae for instance, or anything else. Ever. But ah well, who wants dinosaurs, eh? Leave that to Montana or wherever.
Cheer up. The next bit of the Kenning River’s distinguished past is not much less murky, but it has people in it, just like you and me. All together now, and NO bathroom breaks! Just cross your legs.

The Early Historical Period of the Kenning River is very, very early indeed, and no wonder. It’s a fertile floodplain, with good, rich soil, and an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish. The trees are tall and extremely straight. The river is cool and clean and clear and wide and very, very, very, very deep.
Have any of you done the flashlight trick? No? Any fathers or uncles or mothers or aunts told you of it? No? Yes, that makes sense. It’s the sort of thing you try once and then clam up about. You take a flashlight – watertight! – and you weight it with a stone and you drop it down somewhere deep, like just below the Want Narrows or along Long’s Launch or maybe even, god forbid, Barclay Sound. Then you count the number of seconds until you can’t see the light anymore. Go on, try it. But not more than once.
Anyways, we believe the Kenning River’s early peoples were mostly brief, mostly because there were such an awful lot of them. For there to be any room at all in the historic record, each must’ve turned up, spent a generation here, then vanished. No hint of contemporaneous occupation, no trade, just a long, long slodge of sequential occupation. Bit of a puzzle. Maybe they didn’t like the climate?
At least one hint can be seen here, in this little cabinet of archaeological curiosities. Most of them were excavated by Dr. Hardwick – have you met Hardwick? Lovely person, half gunflint and half gumball, and I mean this in the best possible way – down by the fields near the Stalling farm. Anyone here live out there? Ah, yes, very good. Then you know exactly why Hardwick has only one leg left. Good story, that! But anyways, as you can see in this helpful diagram, Kenning stratigraphy for the past twelve thousand years follows the same rough pattern: Arrival (marked by the development of elaborate fishnets and hooks), persistence (marked by the development of massive, rugged gaffes of increasing size), and then abandonment (marked by lots of charcoal and then removal of the culture in question from the record). Most puzzling! And you can see here, right at the end – about six thousand years ago – people stopped trying.
Of course, this sad state of affairs did not last for long. The Kenning River is surrounded by a fertile floodplain, with good, rich soil, and an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish.

Now we move on to the Early Colonial Period – and ah – aha! NOW I see your faces light up! Yes, here are things and pictures you can understand of people who lived just like you and me, people your teachers have doubtlessly badgered you silly over during homework! Well, don’t worry, there’s no questions, no grades here. Just some hands on objects. Yes, yes, yes! We ENCOURAGE look-but-do-touch here!
This, for example – see the handle? – is an authentic hand-gnawed basket, created by some of the very first European settlers to encamp upon the shores of the Kenning River. Well, some of the very second, actually. There appear to have been a large Swedish encampment earlier, but they disappeared rather mysteriously and the English lot seem to have mostly moved straight into their houses.
Why weren’t they suspicious? Well, you may have noticed it’s rather lovely here. The Kenning River is surrounded by a fertile floodplain, with good, rich soil, and an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish.
The trouble came a bit later, in the form of a rather virulent outbreak of Rodenta dentata that appears to have spread like wildfire among the peasantry. Now, one way to alleviate the symptoms was to produce such charming handi – err, toothicrafts as this basket here, but that’s more or less a stopgap measure, and many sufferers died tragic, early deaths as their teeth grew long and longer overnight and right into their brains. Quite nasty.
Let’s move on to something a bit more upbeat. This is a well handle, but a rather famous one: the Handle of Harvald Well. You see, one of the local gentry – mayor Qelt Barclay – produced a quite famous chart of the victims of R. dentata, and couldn’t help but notice that they formed a perfect ring around the Harvald family well. This not being the most enlightened of times, they were accused of witchcraft and the well, after having its handle removed, was filled with rocks. The Harvalds too, come to think of it. Very thorough way of solving problems back then.
And here, right here; put your hand on it, feel the grains and the gnarls of real old wood. This is the main timber of the grand old pier-post that formed the colonial village’s dock into Barclay Sound. It was the only thing left they found, most curious. Qelt Barclay went out for a bit of late-night fishing three weeks after the trial of the Harvalds and then around midnight the whole dock was bitten off by something with extremely long and sharp teeth. This, by the way, is why no one ever rebuilt the pier there but once.
Now, finally, a bit of a treat: here is the phrenological collection of mayor Thom Tellamore! So many skulls and so many insightful diagrams! Who was he? Well, he came after Barclay, a bit of a quiet type, but one day his wife caught him at home when he wasn’t expecting company and found him occupied with holding a local imbecile face-down in a washbasin. He must’ve drowned, oh gosh, dozens of people before being imprisoned for life-and-a-bit. He said was just trying to help. What a silly twit, eh?

Now we come to the Rust Era of Kenning history. Ah, we grew gritty and grand then, didn’t we? We all know the fun of the big gears and the smokestacks and the red sunsets, but it wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
Here is the steering wheel of the Lazy Stephen, the first and only passenger ship, mailboat, and tour vessel to tread the waters on her newfangled paddlewheels! If you look closely at the spokes of the wheel you can see exactly where the captain’s fingers settled into their death-grip before ossifying for ninety years at the bottom of Barclay Sound. Not much left of the fingers, mind you – the fish of the Kenning eaten by you and me may be needle-mouthed, but at the bottom of Barclay it’s more like halberds.
A good ship, the Lazy Stephen. A bit slow to turn though, and slower to turn back, even when the red lights were up and flashing.
Speaking of which, here’s a red light. This one was collected around, oh, the Funnel Shoreline. It’s an immature specimen, so its gills are still present and it’s rather small. How big do they get? Well, let me put it this way: if it was about the same age as you, we’d have to add a new wing. Cute though, isn’t it?
By the way, nobody’s tried to rebuild the pier at Barclay Sound since.
And nobody even tried to rebuild THIS even once! Recognize it? Aha! What about this? Very good! Before and after photos of the Loosely Factory! Ah, what a scoundrel was Howard Loosely, to make such a racket all day and all night, but what a CRIMINAL was he to spit so much froth and filth into the poor river all and such! As great a criminal as those that staffed his labour-lines, and three-times as unpunished! At least, until that one night.
And that reminds me, here is the end of our little tour of the Rust Era: the manacles of the Loosely foreman, old ‘Ragged Tom’ himself! Yes, that shambling, creepy, evil little man that every older brother has told their young brothers of is indeed real – or was. He ran into the water the night the factory was eaten and was never seen again.
No, he doesn’t really live in the Lo-Bog lopping off heads.
Yes, that is spooky. Very. Now come on.
No, there are still no bathroom breaks. Hold it in!

Here we come to the Wars. My goodness me, it’s as if we slid straight from one into the other, isn’t it? Poor old Kenning barely had a chance to catch a break. Lots got broken in those days, people and things both, but we kept some bits intact for you. We kept our farms and our fields and above all else our prized Kenning River; surrounded by fertile floodplains with good, rich soil, and possessing an abundance of sleek, needle-mouthed fish.
Here is the first radio in the entire town, purchased out of poor, misguided paranoia – a means to listen for warnings of air raids, mostly – and kept silent out of good sense. See that little mark scratched into the dials? Tune the radio to that frequency, and the river starts to froth clear from the Want Narrows down to the Lo-Bog.
No, you may not see.
Squeeze in now – carefully, carefully – and look! A statue with its own room, the very statue erected in honour of the dead of Kenning in the war. A pike in one hand, and a rifle in the other. Very thematic, don’t you think?
No, the pike’s meant to look a bit strange. I think it is, at least. It wasn’t there when they built the statue, but it sort of dripped out over the years. Gradual-like.
Well, if you don’t like the way it’s staring at you, don’t look it in the eye. Heavens knows it can’t help it; fish can’t blink, especially bronze ones.
This next case is a bit of a crowd-pleaser, especially with the little boys. Arms from the New Factory! Yes, the New Factory owes its existence to the war – it wasn’t all bad now, was it? How many of your parents work there?
One two three twelve! Very good!
Anyways, these were very special weapons, and they certainly put Kenning River on the map. Why, the FBI liked them so much they bought the factory’s entire production line and then prohibited their manufacture! Not that it did them much good, silly men. You have to load them with the soft strange stones from the Lo-Bog to do any good.
Yes, like the kind you throw at your brothers and sisters. Goodness, be careful with them. You could put your eyes out.
Last but not least, here is a fine treat: the rifle of Tommy the Giant! It’s a mortar, technically-
-well, it’s complicated, but-
-no you can’t touch-
HEY! No knocking on the cage!
No, I will NOT fire it! Respect this weapon! Tommy used it to storm bunkers uphill knee-deep in snow when he was on fire AND barely dressed in more than rags! And he came back just fine, even though he was seven-foot-nine and a bigger target than any German could’ve hoped for. He is a hero and no I WILL NOT LET YOU FIRE IT ahem.

Yes, yes, yes, it’s alright. I’m sorry, I got a bit carried away. It’s the Wars wing, the air is a bit stuffy there.
But be cheerful, and keep holding it in just a moment longer. We’re almost there. We’re almost here.
We ARE here. It’s the Today and Tomorrow wing.
See now, what the New Factory makes these days. No more weapons, but calm and clear vehicles for stately smooth roads. The special water-permeable design allows constant saturation in the most scalding weather, and the sound-proof walls allow the world to turn to murmurs at any speed.
Why did they stop making weapons? Well, weapons are for people that are angry, or fierce. But Kenning River has learned since the old days, the bad days. We know that there have to be new ways. The New Factory is for new ways. The New Factory is
For new things
For new people.
New things are a way of Today and Tomorrow! Here, here! Red light tags! Each red light now has a place, and in that place all its pets wear tags! No more bickering! No more squashing! No more eating! Only the peace and contentment that comes with the harmony of the home. Let me see your tags. Yes, yes, yes! Very good!
Don’t lose them. That’s a bad idea.
Here, look! Look at this, look at this! It’s a cane, a cane you’ve all seen – yes that’s right. That’s right! It’s the cane, the final cane of Mayor Thomas, the cane he used when he was nine-foot-two and still small enough to walk on land! Never let your history teachers tell you you don’t pay enough attention every again, d’you hear me? Never!
Yes, you can hold it. It’s part of your history too! But careful – careful! It’ll take at least seven of you to hold the damned thing up.

One more thing.
Just one more thing.
This is the room of Tomorrow, the one room in all this museum we set aside for a time that isn’t-yet. And to see Tomorrow, I’ll need a big thing from you: I need you to shut your eyes.
One (no peeking).
Two (I saw that I meant it).
THREE! SURPRISE!
Yes, it’s a mirror.
Well, you see – no whining, let me – no, let me finish – it’s very
It’s YOU!
YOU!
You are ALL the future! Each and everyone one of you! Each and every one of you and each and every little swimmer curdling within you at the command of Thomas; every guppy in your guts; every eel in your veins; every minnow on your tongues; every set of walleyes, and even the pulsing pike-tooth in your very brains! Yes, you WILL do this, you all CAN do this, and never forget this, not any of you.

And with this important reminder – do not forget it, not at home, not at school –so sadly, the tour concludes. Thank you all oh so very much for visiting our little museum here – and it’s YOUR museum too, do not forget THAT either! The past owns and is owned by all of us, big and small. And it doesn’t forget us. We are all swimming together here towards a future of sleek needles in cool currents calm and clear.
If you want to leave any donations, just place your hand in the jaws at the exit door. Your unfavoured hand, if you would. Just in case.
Goodbye! Good luck! And don’t stop at the gift shop! We haven’t finished cleaning it yet, and it bites!

This is a story about storms and love but its start isn’t about any of that. Its start is a quarter-mile long and a third-of-a-mile wide and still travelling at several miles a second when it slams home.
It can’t be blamed. It’s only a few million years old.
And like any child abandoned and lost, it did the sensible thing, and cried.

Four billion years later a funny thing with two eyes and two legs and two thumbs and a brain just big enough to get it into trouble peeled away a chunk of dirt and found where all that noise was coming from. And NOW – in a short five hundred years – is when our story becomes relevant.

***

Rain is a funny thing. You think you know it, but then it turns on you. A whole three generations can pass of peaceable, normal, everyday rains of rain, and then one day it’s raining frogs or fish or very startled cattle from a nearby swamp/stream/unlucky farmer’s pasture, carried up by a breeze that got bored of blowing leaves. Then it goes away and it comes back never, or maybe ever.
That’s how rain is for most of us.
For the people of the Howling Hills, it was a little different.
Rain was scheduled very carefully. Rains of bread for Tuesday; rains of beef for Wednesday; rains of fish for Thursday; ‘free rain’ on Friday through Saturday; and a rest day bar important rain business for Sunday.
Rains of rain were Mondays, and were never really looked forward to.

All across the Howling Hills, the important business of rainmaking and rainscheduling and just raining in general was everyone’s business. At age twelve you got a handshake and a pat on the back and a little chisel and you were sent up to THE Howling Hill and you picked off as big a chunk of the shrieking stone as you could in a full day. It was a pretty easy job to get a piece, but a pretty hard job to get a good one. Strength mattered, but so did care; dexterity; forethought.
Of course, after you came back, all that mattered was the size of your chunk.
A big chunk meant a good yell, a voice the wind really had to sit up and pay notice to; the sort of person who could take a tempest from a teapot and use it to blow a cloud into next week – or, much more importantly, a nice field of wheat or herd of sheep from some faraway stormless sod’s land into your own. It meant a shinier badge and a more flowing robe and a fatter waistline and enough money to send your children up to THE Howling Hill with a really really nice chisel someday.
And a little chunk meant a dull lead badge; a natty robe; chicken legs; and a talk for your children that started with ‘look, it could be worse.’
And no chunk meant you were Yel Neely, five foot tall and barefoot, watching stony-faced as the Tuesday storm came in. It was a fine one, and the stormguiders working its sides were frantic with arm-waving and cheek-puffing. They hadn’t had to work this hard in weeks.
The man driving the storm, by contrast, looked almost ready to fall asleep; his face half-eaten by the lazy slackness of someone concentrating too hard to care. A frown moved its way from one side of his face to the other over the course of a few thousand years, and near its end, as the stormcloud built itself into a hammer above his head, it metamorphosed into a grin and his hand reached out.
Shining silver slapped into his palm. A glazed pastry.
Ten stormguiders could steer a gale into blowing away a mill. Twenty would carry away a bakery or two. But only one could sneak the entire contents of a royal pastry-maker’s shop away by himself, and that was Ilm the Breeze, whose neck hadn’t broken yet from the forty pounds of his chunk only because he kept a little gale at his chin to hold it up.
In a land of the great and greedy, he was the greatest and greediest of them all, and he knew it, and he knew the people watching him knew it, which was why the sulk of their envy was like a cool summer drink to him as the sky began to rain sugar and flour.
He smiled beatifically as the crowed turned away to raise its nets and hoist its banners and snatch the food from the cobbles and he knew he was the king of all that dared not look upon him.
Except somewhere, someone’s eyes were meeting his.
For Yel Neely, it was a moment when he’d just finished yawning and had gotten turned about in the cloud, facing the wrong way – he wanted to leave, he wanted no part of all this – and oops he almost bumped into Ilm of all people.
For Ilm the Breeze, it was the moment he fell in love.

Ilm the Breeze’s home was stolen, as were all of its contents. A chair a tub a table a bed a window a gable a stable a window a bannister a towel all from a thousand homes and a thousand places taken on the whim of a thousand weekend storms. It looked like it had been designed by a colourblind magpie, and was indisputably the finest home in all of the Howling Hills.
Yel Neely sat at the rickety chair and looked at the china plates and the (unblemished) cinnamon roll in front of him and he wondered how many people out there had gone hungry to keep Ilm’s stomach at its current volume.
Ilm the Breeze sat at the big plush chair and stared at his guest adoringly and in the back of his mind was screaming his head off trying to think of what might be making Yel frown. It would give him wrinkles if he didn’t do something.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” he ventured at last.
Yel thought it over.
“Yes,” he decided. It had potential, he had to concede.
“It really is, it really is,” beamed Ilm. “I love you,” he added casually, and then there was a lull in the conversation as Ilm realized what he’d said aloud and his chunk landed on his foot.
“Oh, you shouldn’t,” said Yel.
“Yes I should,” said Ilm, a little fiercely. “I mean-”
“Oh, but you can’t,” said Yel.
“Of course I CAN,” shouted Ilm. “There’s-”
“Oh, the greatest and greediest stormguider in all the Howling Hills can’t love me, not even a little,” said Yel. “I have no name worth knowing.”
“It’s a fine name! My grandfather was a Yel!”
“I have no clothes worth seeing.”
“I’ve got spares!”
“I have no family.”
“Me either! Who wants ‘em?”
“And I have no chunk at all, and no badge besides.”
“I’ll get you one immediately!” said Ilm the Breeze. And he stomped out onto his verandah, the one where he did his serious storm-work, and he shouted and thumped and tromped up a real ripper of a wind, a proper tornado fit to split the sky and funnel away the trees.
“Get me badges!” he roared into the gale. And by the shrieks of his chunk of stone that command got bigger and bigger and whirled into the funneling cloud until no-one could say where the wind ended and the words began.
And then it leapt, and in the span of an evening and a furious morning, every badge in all of the Howling Hills – the sad lead lunkers of the poor, the rich seemly bronze of the to-do, the fat golden globes of the obscenely wealthy – was swirled away into the sky and descended upon the home of Ilm the Breeze in a furious rain, each landing with such force that they lodged deep into the dirt of his garden.
“Oh dear,” said Ilm the Breeze. “Now how will we know who is proper?”
“It’s all right,” said Yel. “I like it anyways; now nobody will think any less of me than any other.” And Ilm smiled so happily at Yel’s words that he was fit to copy the sun, and if the stormguiders of the Howling Hills did grouse at how the peasants were nearly the same as they were in stature now, well, the peasants did smile more often themselves.

Ilm the Breeze owned the finest horses in all of the Howling Hills. They were so well-bred and refined that they had lived their lives in complete and constant terror even before the storms had come to steal them away from their paddocks, and the experience itself had done them few favours. You didn’t ride them so much as gently nudge them along the garden paths.
“This is nice,” said Ilm the Breeze, gently patting the side of his traumatized mare to remind her to draw breath. “Isn’t it?”
Yel had that look on his face again. It worried him to see Yel worry, and that worried him more itself. He’d never worried about worrying before; that was for other, smaller people to worry about. Sometimes he worried he was becoming smaller, and then he worried that he wasn’t worried enough. Those kinds of thoughts kept him up at nights, but simultaneously helped bore him to sleep.
“Mmmm,” said Yel. He squinted into the warm afternoon air and looked down into his guest-room in Ilm’s home. “Mostly,” he agreed.
“Yes, yes, yes of course,” said Ilm in relief. “Wait. Mostly?”
“No, no, no, don’t worry,” said Yel soothingly. “It’s such a small thing, such a little thing. It doesn’t matter at all.”
“What is it what is it what IS it?” asked Ilm. “Is it the horse it’s the horse isn’t it! He can’t blink anymore poor thing but you really needn’t moisten his eyes more than once every few-”
“It’s the carpet in my room,” said Yel. “But you shouldn’t trouble yourself with it at all. It’s just that it’s so…”
“Hideous and horrid?” gasped Ilm, fearing the worst.
Yel shrugged. “It doesn’t match. I just don’t think you needed to take it, that’s all. You could make a much nicer one yourself. Why take things from others when you can do a better job yourself?”
“Say no more!” said Ilm the Breeze. And with that he sprinted down to the house and onto his back patio, the one where he did his EXTREMELY serious storm-work, and he smacked and he howled and he hammered up a monster of a storm, a hurricane fit to make the sky gawp.
“PUT. IT. BACK.” he thundered into the sky, and with a roar like the dragon at the end of days it did so. Gales shrieked and whistled through the Howling Hills until the dawn after the next, and by the time the clouds cleared enough for regular rain-scheduling to resume not so much as a single pilfered stick remained in the land; each and every one had been tidied back to its original place of residence.
Of course, there were harsh words for Ilm the Breeze, especially from those who’d possessed especially splendid homes that had been stolen with dozens of ripe storms. But he didn’t mind so much. Yel had complimented him most nicely on his knitting-work, and the new rug was shaping up perfectly.

Ilm the Breeze looked down his long, long arm and up the short little arm of Yel and then he looked at the view before them and he looked at Yel and then he looked at the view and then he looked at Yel and then he looked at Yel and then he asked the same stupid question that came out raw in his throat like red meat and said: “This is nice. Isn’t it?”
Yel was watching the lands below with a squinted eye and a small hand-lens; one of the few of Ilm’s possessions that hadn’t been whisked away in his own hurricane. His grandmother had been a persistent glassmaker.
From here, Yel could see all of the Howling Hills. From here, he could hear every eddy and gust and billow and blow of the breeze – all regimented, all controlled, all ordered and schemed. From here, the ground cried under his feet: the neverending wail that filled all the shrieking stone chunks; the call of THE Howling Hill.
Yel took a deep breath, thought carefully, then shook his head and pursed his lips. “No.”
Ilm the Breeze did not sob. But he did sag.
“No,” said Yel, more firmly yet still soft. “It isn’t. There’s a problem.”
“What problem?!” yelled Ilm the Breeze, shaking his fists at the sky with (im?)potent fury. “I’ve torn away the ugly things and I’ve brought you your badges and still you aren’t happy and you won’t smile, you won’t ever smile! Why won’t you smile, Yel? Why can’t I make you smile?”
“My mother always told me,” said Yel, “that it wasn’t wise to make any great decision in life without wishing upon a shooting star.”
Ilm the Breeze raised his eyes to the cloudless blue heavens of Sunday afternoon, and in them he saw his enemy.
“Right,” he said. “Right. Excuse me.”
And as Ilm the Breeze walked down the hill with the manliest, strongest strides he could muster, Yel Neely tried not to grin too widely.

Ilm the Breeze walked down to the little shack of Yel’s that he’d let him stay in so kindly, and he went down to the back stoop where Yel’s chickens – his own chickens, not someone else’s he’d plucked – scratched, and he put his feet into the sand and his nose into the air and he breathed deep, like a whale coming up for air.
Then he snatched his chunk of shrieking stone from the gust that carried it and started yelling.

The first sign of it came by sundown. A soft glow in the sky, a swirl where stars should be. People turned out of their houses and woke up their families to see it, which was a good thing because the second sign was the earth shaking. People tend to want to be able to run when that happens.
The third sign was the murmur, the long soft murmur of the solar wind, as it reached down from the sky in shimmering sheets and peeled away at the flesh of THE Howling Hill.
And at last, in the end, came the fourth sign, as all the shrieking stones and the chunks and the pride and the stormguides’ vanity tore themselves – silently – from their owners’ necks and spun towards the opening ground of the hill.

It was a proper wind, that was what everyone agreed on at the end – at least, when they were done grumbling. It was a proper wind to hoist something a little less than half a mile long and a little less than a third-of-a-mile wide into the air. And it did it all so quietly, without barely a whisper, save only one long sound that nobody could quite put words to.

Except Yel Neely, because he was sitting down next to Ilm the Breeze on his back stoop. The ex-stormguide looked so small without the chunk around his neck, without his fine stolen robes, with his waning paunch. He was looking up into the sky after THE Howling Hill with an expression that was too complicated to explain.
“I’m very sorry,” said Yel.
Ilm didn’t say anything.
“I gave you words that made you do what I wanted without explaining what I wanted,” said Yel. “And that wasn’t very nice, or very kind. And I am sorry. If you’re angry with me, that’s alright.”
There was a long sigh, and then sound again, from Ilm. “No, no, no, no,” he said. The ex-stormguide kicked a bare foot aimlessly, watched the chicken watching the wiggle of his toes. “I’m not angry, you know. I could never be angry with you. I’m just. Well. Lonely. Sorry.”
They sat there, feet in the dirt, looking at the sky.
“The stars are coming back out,” said Yel.
Ilm sighed. It was the softest sound he’d made in decades, but it was also the most important.
“Look,” said Yel. “Look. You helped me with so much. You helped us all with so much. You helped all those people we stole from with so much. So I think, just maybe, I can help you with that.”
Ilm looked down at Yel. “Really?”
Yel took his hand. “Really. Just a little.”
They sat there together, and watched the trail of the solar wind vanish into space with THE Howling Hill. And maybe they made a wish or two.
It wasn’t howling though, not anymore. It sounded like laughter.

The steering wheel is sun-warmed shit under my hands. It’s wobbling like it has carpal tunnel. I bet that’s expensive to fix. I bet I’d better make an appointment. I bet on most days that would be a straw fit to drive a hole through a camel’s spine and out its belly.
But not now. Today is the day. With a capital THE.
I am calm and I am in control and I am so happy you could probably get a Geiger reading off my face or maybe somewhere else. I am so relaxed my muscles have turned over management to my tendons. I am cooler than a cucumber could dream and nothing will stop me. Nothing can stop me.
I want this day. I want this moment, and then a lot more just like it. I want a cold one in my hand and a warm one in the sky and I want them five minutes ago but it’s okay because it’s all happening.
At last.

It was the overtime that did it. Paid overtime, so how bad can it be? Ask the man who’s been getting four free hours a day for forty months. You spend it all on caffeine and energy drinks and you brew them into nasty things that are probably illegal and then you lean on your mop until you can hear it talking to you.
Then you drive home (one hour) go to sleep (two hours) and then wake up already getting into the car and chewing something you hope was breakfast (one hour).
And then you’re back again, back again, jiggety jig. Enjoying that nice quiet hallway. Digging that clean calm boardroom. Trying hard not to launch a broom through a particularly insolent cubicle’s monitor, or empty toiler cleaner all over the chair of a noxious smiler.
Some days it’s hard, you know? Real hard.
Man needs a break. Man needs a holiday. A holy day. One day.

Smell that? I can. I’m not even trying but it’s all I can smell now. It’s salt on the breeze. At least, I hope it’s salt. Sea salt from salty seas, with salty beaches. Not the other kind. The kind that came in a tiny bottle and never stopped growing once it got out.
Bad stuff but a good job, that one. I wonder whose idea that wa-
No no no. We leave work AT work. We are not at work. This is a new concept but we will adjust or I will disembowel us and give us something to REALLY contemplate.

Work is not for contemplation. Work is for doing.
This is a philosophy that extended beyond me, you understand. This was the rock upon which the whole institute rested its aching back. So many things so many meetings labs silos bunkers fridges hot rooms all devoted, every last one, every room, ALL OF THEM places and spaces that existed for specific reasons and purposes none of which any of which had anything at all to do with anyone actually thinking. They were for doing.
I should know. I’ve cleaned every last one of them six hundred and no no no numbers. That routine goes BEYOND numbers. I am my mop and my mop is me and I clean and I spray and I spit quietly when no one is looking which is surprisingly common even though every square inch of this building is covered in cameras. When you have machines to do your looking for you, why bother? And this, of course, slides readily into the next step: when you don’t bother, why bother EVER?
I experimented, you know. This place is all about science (applied in a specific and practical way). I did my part by spitting on one camera in each wing for ten days straight.
No word. As it should be. Anyone who can take the time to notice the janitor clearly isn’t working hard enough. So no one did.

I’m running down the turnoff, wheels grumbling to themselves. I can’t complain too much about the car. It’s an old vehicle that needs more love than I can afford to give and more care than I’ve had in thirty years and also it’s not mine. But no one was using it. At the moment, that’s the best ownership there is. I needed to beat the rush and my old clunker was too fat and slow.
That reminds me of a thing I don’t particularly want to be reminded of: I wonder how many of them got out of work? It’s not like I went out of my way to pull the alarm or anything (Christ, do we even HAVE those? We’re too high-security for a lot of important things, maybe fire alarms are on the list), but at least some of those doors I went through started kicking up a damned fuss.
Fuck ‘em. I can already see the little yellow strip at the edge, where the blue meets the green. Even the spreading purple coming from the east hasn’t touched it. It’s perfect.
It’s so close.

One day. Everyone has one day.
Except me.
I filled out the forms, you know. In triplicate. On my lunch break. Which was technically breach of contract because I’m not allowed to have one, but I kept scrubbing with one hand through the whole thing. The bio wing has really shitty A/C and the vents practically hurt to look at with all the crud they get baked onto them, a job for two arms and maybe two feet, but I did it anyways. I did not complain. Complaining could get me denied.
I filled out the forms and then I passed back the forms and then I waited and I waited and I waited and three months later when the day came.
(it was yesterday)
I asked someone and they said oh no sorry never got that try again tomorrow.
And that was when I nodded and smiled and cleaned the physics corridor seventeen times in a row and then I put my mop on my shoulder and headed down to the labs.
One day.

It didn’t even take one day. It was barely even one hour. I have no idea why they wanted the paperwork for time off in so early, and so badly. Control freaks.
Pretty shitty control freaks, though. I walked through those doors like they weren’t even there. You know this, my security badge only stopped working by the time I was heading into the silo, after visiting the whole of biohazards, and that was only because the system claimed the shards of broken glass embedded in the mop handle
(labels include: variola, lyssavirus, some other latin shit that all breaks nicely if you smack it hard enough)
were choking hazards? And then I just had to thump the door a little. They want me there to do my job as 24/7 as possible but some shithead had just thrown up a door and then gone home forever. Double standards, but who’s surprised?
So easy, all of it. We design for ease of use. We design for maximum effectiveness with minimal effort. We design for big returns on small actions. We design for results, we are results-oriented people. I was already seeing some results scream overhead at about eight kilometers a second when I pulled out of the parking lot. One of them couldn’t even do that properly; it landed off to the east and turned half the morning sky all orange and shitty, shot through with black dust and white heat.
Fuck it, it’s someone else’s problem. This is it.
One day.
Everything we’ve ever built here was meant for one day. And now I’ve gone and

I’m in the sand. I’m here.
I’ve got a cold thing in my hand I found abandoned in the beach bar and it’s even liquid and I’ve got warm stuff overhead and underfoot.
I sink my feet deep into the underfoot and oh man oh god that was what I needed. I can feel each toe individually. How long have they spent wrapped up in those boots, in those galoshes? One point two thousandish days. Twenty-eight-point-eight-thousandish hours. One hundred seven-
Nah.
I lean back my head and squint into a burning blue sky that’s already turning green at the seams. That’d probably be the carnivorous algae. Or the ‘messiah’-strain anthrax. Maybe one of them ate the other, or fucked it? Who cares.
I did a lot to get this day off. For now, work is someone else’s problem.

West Wind and East Wind, children of the sky. One from above, one from below; a clash and a thrash and tied in a bow.
They were good, obedient children all day and all night, except on one little topic.

West Wind and East Wind, bickering all day. Never giving ground, each in other’s way.
Oh how those two fought and fumed. No sidling, no idling, no taking turns, just WEST or EAST with no backing down!

West Wind and East Wind, whistling through the glens. Ruffle through a tent’s walls, that’s where it begins.

The tent walls belonged to an old man, and this was their first mistake, because it is generally considered unwise to offend or trouble those who have had more planning time than you’ve had birthdays. “Hey!” he shouted up at them. “Who did that?”
The two winds paused for a moment on either side of the meadow. Because they were not bad children, they felt sorry. Because they were children, they looked at each other and glared.
“THEY did it!” each shouted, and then oh they were back at it in a flash, whirling and snarling and thundering against each other fit to wake the dead, blow away topsoil, and set the old man’s tentwalls flapping hard enough to give it wings. Which it did.
He watched the tent walls sail away over the trees with sorrow in his lined face, annoyance in his clenched hands, and vengeance in his (surprisingly strong) pulse. “Right,” he said. “That’s time to do things about this.”

So he went to their parent, the sky. It was a short trip.
“Problems down there?” asked the sky.
“Your children are endlessly quarrelling, which is giving us all no end of grief and also they have destroyed my tent.”
“Whoops,” said the sky. “Sorry. Kids will be kids, right?”
“They have kept us all up night after night with their swoosh and swish and wrestling.”
“Ah, I’m sorry,” said the sky. “Whatchagonnado, yes?”
“There’s starting to be Talk going around about your parenting skills.”
The sky bristled, giving people quite a start from here all the way on to there. “They WHAT?” it said in a voice so frosty crops failed three miles away.
“Oh, you know, the usual. Idle young people without enough to do, talking about how you leave your idle young people without enough to do. Nonsense! Chatterfluff! But it’s happening, and it’s happened, and it’s not stopping. Best fix that.”
So the sky yanked itself off its hinges and stood up and stomped on down to the glade and it glared at the two winds fit to give them hives of embarrassment which they acquired immediately.
“YOU!” shouted the sky.
“Yes?” said the winds meekly.
“YOU!” exclaimed the sky.
“…yes?” mumbled the winds feebly.
“YOU?” expounded the sky.
“What is it, parent?” asked the winds, somewhat confused.
The sky scratched its head and tried to wrap its head around this question. It didn’t get up very often, and the blood rushing from its head was a very strange and disconcerting experience. And seeing the ground from this angle was making it woozy.
“Be good. Or something,” it said somewhat lamely. Then it stomped off and lay down again, and no amount of fuss from the old man could rouse it from its snores. All that walking took a lot out of a body, even one made of blue and air.
The winds looked at each other in chufty disagreement.
“You heard the sky,” the West Wind said. “You must be good.”
“You mean YOU must be good,” said the East Wind.
“You mean YOU” and so on and before long the glen rustled with the gusts and gales of wrestling winds once more.

The old man’s hat blew off his head. That was surely the final final straw. His wife had told him it had granted him a rakish character. Without it he just looked like a character. Nobody takes those seriously, as he had found throughout much of his younger years.
But he still had plans. Big plans. So he made a big cone of his hands and put it to his big mouth and let out a big holler.
“Hey up there!” he hollered.
“Hello down there,” said the clouds in a breezy, pleasant sort of voice.
“Nice weather, huh?!” bellowed the old man.
“Sure is,” said the clouds contentedly. “Feels good to give it, too. Better to gift than to receive, our mother ocean always said.”
“You could give a mightful gift of peace and quiet to everybody right now, and also my lost hat, if you would do a favour and go and tell those two winds off, over yonder in the glen!” the old man shouted.
“Mmm,” said the clouds, in a polite way. “Well, we could… but I’m not sure if they’ll listen. They’re awfully noisy young things, and we don’t know if it’s our place, and besides it’s only Tuesday, and…”
“Just do it!” screamed the old man. “Go on!”
“Oh alright,” murmured the clouds sadly, and they slid sideways through the air (discretely, and apologizing to it for the trouble) until they hovered over the glen, which was still filled with thrashing air and cursing. The clouds practically turned sunset-pink at the language, which was not at all fit for ears.
“We beg your pardon,” the clouds said, “bu-”
“Your head in a platypus’s belly!” shouted the East Wind.
“Your face on a rhinoceros’s rump!” snarled the West Wind.
The clouds cleared their throat and tried again. “We’re sorry to interrupt, but if it’s at all possi-”
“A weasel’s guts and your brain!”
“Defecation in your eye!”
The clouds were now almost fluorescent, but they made one last heroic effort. “Would you both PLEASE stop-”
“Brown bear’s anus! You!”
“Copulation! Sideways!”
The clouds stiffened their spine, hardened their resolve, and fled without dignity.
“What was THAT then, eh?!” yelled the old man at the clouds. But they only apologized at him, and he took his leave with much muttering and griping.

After THAT the old man’s pants blew away, and this was the final final FINAL straw for good, seeing as the old man’s skinny chicken legs now did not even belong to him but rather to anybody passing by in possession of working eyeballs and a reasonable amount of bad luck. He sat and he grumped and he didn’t cry because he was a big boy, but his not crying made such an awful fuss that an old woman slipped out from under a corner of the sky (which was snoring) to check on him.
“Boy,” said the old woman (who was his wife) to him. “Don’t you remember anything about all the things I said to you?” You’ve screwed up good here, my love.”
“I know, I know, I know,” muttered the old man (who was her husband). “But they blew away my hat and my tent and now my pants. I have nothing left, not even dignity.”
“Aw, nothing of value lost anyways,” said the old woman. “Come on, use that little brain of yours, husband-mine. What’d I always tell you?”
The old man’s brows knit. There was a lot of brow; you could’ve made a sweater with their output. “It takes more muscles to frown than to smile?”
“Naw, the other one.”
“A watched pot never boils?”
“Warmer. But no.”
“A kind word gets more done than a harsh one.”
“Yeah! That one! Now get ‘er done smart guy, that’s my lad.”
The old man nodded and gave the old woman a kiss on the cheek. They both blushed a little, and then she went back under the sky where all the dead people went.
“Right,” said the old man. He straightened a hat that wasn’t there and hiked up pants that weren’t there and he put on some real and very solid determination. “I’ll do this now.”

So he walked up to the clouds and whistled them down again.
“Hello,” they said.
“Hey,” said the old man. “Listen, I’ve got a message for you. It’s from the sky. It says it’s awful tired and sore after all that running around it did today, and would you mind giving it a nice soft place to sleep for tonight?”
The clouds puffed to themselves. “Oh! Oh yes indeed! Sure! The poor sky. We’ll help it out, no fear. Thank you.”
“All good,” said the old man. Then he strolled away nonchalantly and the moment he was under tree cover he ran like mad because clouds travel slow but so do old men.
Next up he walked down to the loose corner of sky that the old woman had slipped through, and he picked at it until the sky snorted itself awake.
“Ow,” it complained. “That stings.”
“Hush up,” said the old man. “I’ve got news for you. The clouds are all tired tonight, you see? Your Winds are keeping them up all day and all night, and they just want a place to have a nice nap. Do you think you could give them a nice place to sleep tonight, where there’s no fuss?”
“Oh, the poor clouds,” said the sky sympathetically. “Nothing worse than to be tired, and woken up all the time. If you know what I mean. Yes, of course I can help them.”

So that evening the sky comforted the clouds, and the clouds comforted the sky, and everybody else sort of coughed and looked the other way and hummed to themselves a lot. And in the morning down in the glen, as West Wind and East Wind paused in their labours, both of them felt a shove.
“Was that you?” asked East Wind.
“No, it was you,” said West Wind.
A shove, a shove, a shove shove shove, and West Wind was spinning and East Wind was twirling, all out of direction, gridlocks broken.
“It was us!” sang a happy fresh voice.
“It was me!” added another, proudly.
“And who’re you?” asked the two winds, confused – and a little happy – as they were blown all off course and away from each other, already starting to slide over distant lands and far-off horizons.
“South Wind!”
“North Wind!”
“Oh no,” the two older winds groaned, “more siblings!” And they grumped and complained and whined but they were basically alright with this because they were already seeing so many new places, and it had got awful boring wrestling with each other in that glen. Besides, the new winds were so very young it was hard to stay angry with them, or with their far-away sibling. Not with so much new to say and do.

All in all, it was a good day for most people. The winds explored. The sky and clouds snuggled together, beaming quietly. And the old man retrieved his tent and hat with the aid of a fine stick.
His pants took some doing, though.

It has been said that life is a cabaret.
This is true.
It has also been said that life is like a box of chocolates.
This is also true.
Furthermore, across varying times, places, and people, life has been asserted to be a highway, a theme park, a rollercoaster ride, and a bitch.
All of these claims are true, both independently and collectively. This is possible because life is, when you look at it under a microscope, essentially fractal, and therefore any given portion of it, however small, inevitably turns out to be a precise blueprint of the whole. Once you know that one fragment, you know everything.

For Addrea Cut, life at the moment was a rough-sided pit whose bottom was stubbornly resisting her past three hours of extertion to shift it from dirt to sandstone. It was also tired, sweaty, and sore-kneed from three hours of exertion. She was trying to place her perspective of life in general and hers in particular in perspective despite this recent disappointment, but it was a little tricky due to her having just wasted three hours of exertion.
Really, when you looked back on three hours of exertion, it was all to laugh.
Addrea sighed, the sort of self-pitying sound her grandmother would’ve thrashed her for (now, in adulthood, secretly relished), and glared up at the lazily uncaring sides of her trench, taller than her head and a monument to wasted effort after THREE HOURS OF etc.
“Fuck this blind,” she declared, and with the patience and care of someone who knows there’s only one obstacle between themselves and a good (well, filling) dinner, she began to commit violence upon her pockets. Past three layers of wadded paper, pencil stubs, and crumbs from lunch her fingers closed on cold stone.
Once upon a time, it had been a claw, attached to something slightly taller than Addrea, six times as wide, and shaped a bit like an armadillo crossed with a pile of rocks.
It knew what to do with soil.

Addrea staggered into camp some three minutes and six steps later, covered in speckles of backwashed soil and disappointment. Dinner was whatever was within arm’s reach. Dessert was disappointment and note-taking.
Test pit B complete failure. Again. Will try tomorrow. Again.
Food low. Still. Again.
She wished she had more to add, but she’d run short of both facts and pencil.
This was almost worse than the Hihle Marshes had been. At least the wildlife in the badlands was friendlier. Mostly by dint of its absence.
One more try, right? One more. Tomorrow she’d wake up, spend half the afternoon scraping out a damned pit, and then go to bed and then the day AFTER tomorrow she’d get up and leave and travel down to the rails and go home and be scolded at by her mother in between attempts to feed her with real food that wasn’t half-rotted trail biscuit.
Addrea looked up at the just-emerging badlands stars and contemplated their endless, happy twinkle.
Well… the day wasn’t QUITE over. And if she started now, and finished (failed) now, she could catch tomorrow’s rail instead. Really, it was good scheduling.
And so, with the noble aim of perseverance in the face of adversity in her heart and visions of pie in her head, Addrea Cut stepped out from her camp and into the past again.
For good.

Time was the thing, the principle, the money-maker. Any excavationist worth their hunch would say that. Time wore away at you, whether beast or rock; it eroded soil; sagged skin; ground stone to sand; and chewed away flesh from bone.
And, as had been illustrated oh-so-many-years-ago by Menny Agling on the gloomy cliffs of a faraway beach, in both cases the ultimate result is the same: the preservation of the toughest core when all dross has been devoured by the centuries.
The Hadly had understood that. Eight thousand years ago they’d understood that. Living on the sides of old buttes, growing crops in the short and surly shadow of erosion, counting pebbles as they fell off crumbling mountains and ground them down to immortal molehills, they’d have been idiots not to.
And then, they’d gone one step better.

Addrea turned over the little fragment in her paw – her hand. She tucked away the claw and concentrated: no pigmentation; the barest of geometric design, curvature showing something deep-dished and thick-walled. Built to last forever in all respects.
Hadly.
Late-era Hadly, to be precise. Geistoff Hadly himself had speculated on that in his later years, theorized that as time wore on and on at them they decided to emulate what they saw around them, every day, and strip away the extras. The earliest Hadly pottery sherds were coloured like dreams; purple and blue and a searing pale pink stolen from sunsets. Their sides were eggshell-thin and marked with pinprick care.
Pretty, but mostly useless. Not like this one.
Addrea clenched her hand and sorted her thoughts, in order: grubs, maize, antelope, nuts, berries, wa-
cool blue pale grey light dust of red sand on top trickle down
-ter. Her hand unclenched, and she smiled. Then she nestled it in the dirty dregs of her empty coffee pot, concentrated for about a minute, took it out, and set the batch to brew.
The Hadly had been a remarkable people, really. It took skill to build to last. It took more to build to accumulate.
She fortified her plan over the coffee, turning the map in her head over and over. Pits Z through B had been on good ground for Hadly; in the shade, out of the deadly badlands sun that would eat your mind and then your body; and with enough soil to grow the stubborn dead-end stalks they had settled for as corn. Pit A was – and she felt a bit guilty at this now that she admitted it – a token effort. Right at the very southern corner of the butte, where the sun would fry you from morning to midnight, and on ground that was more rock than dirt. She’d just been planning to scrape the surface, call it a night, and head for home.
But this was the first Hadly artifact she’d found since she’d set up here, three weeks ago.
What had they been DOING?
The claw was back in her palm again, and Addrea hummed to herself in tune with its urges, low and lower, grumbling in a clueless sort of way. It had been a simple animal in life and death and age, like the Hadly knew, had only focused it further.
Dig.
“Hope you’re ready, pal,” she whispered to herself. “Hope you’re ready.”

Four feet down, she found the firepits. Charcoal and ash spewed like vomit through the straggly turf, fragments and drifts locked up and now free to drift away.
They looked like ovens to her eye. The sort of heat they’d been trying to generate here was beyond anything a bonfire could want; this was something you’d rig for pottery firing. A pit of late-Hadly sherds, even discards… that would make her rich. But why build the oven out here in the blazing sun? Even a potter had a boiling point, and there was no clay nearer nor farther to here than anywhere else.
Five feet down she hit the pit, and things started to make sense.

The profession of the excavationist was made respectable by the efforts and diligent scholarship of Dr. Geistoff Hadly, a man so impeccable in his presentation that he never dug in anything less than a full suit and tie, and so resilient in the face of danger that he had survived no less than forty-three cases of severe heatstroke by his retirement to academia at age fifty-seven.
The profession of the excavationist was made period by the pressing need of Menny Agling for money in the face of an ailing father, a dead mother, and a society that viewed an unmarried woman as only slightly more respectable and useful than an unkilled rat. She couldn’t sew, couldn’t sing, couldn’t cook, and couldn’t clean. But as a child she’d spent days wandering the broken shorelines of the Grey Coast, bringing back crabs and shells and stones to her father, and as an adult she went there with a pick and brought back… well, money. Seashells that sounded of waves when you held them to your ear. Flattened stone fronds pressed into rock that smelled of dew and heat. And at least one famous fish that had almost seemed to move under your eyes, although no measuring tape had ever confirmed it.
She’d never made all that much money, Menny Agling – that she had been able to live on her own at all was considered socially appalling at best. But she’d made a little dent into history, and as the years pressed down on her dozens of others had quietly lined up to take a crack at it, pickaxes ready.

Now, as Addrea stared down into the half-empty hole in front of her, it struck her that the Hadly had been there first. And they hadn’t so much left a dent as a full-blown smash.
It certainly made her own work easier; now she was excavating someone else’s backfill, rather than chewing through stone by stone on her lonesome – the Hadly ovenfires had cracked the side of the butte open like dried mud in the sun, giving them room enough to dig what seemed to be a deep, if narrow pit. This had been filled in; the layers were all out of sorts, the stratigraphy was a jumble of hastily-squashed dirt and rock.
A hurried burial. Was she about to break into a Hadly tomb? That’d be a first. Most speculation on the Hadly had their dead as burned into crisps; the one case where their preoccupation with aging and weathering was deliberately averted. The Hadly would build a spear-point of mammoth bone that would soak in the weight of centuries to build a killing edge, but they’d turn themselves to fickle smoke and ash in a heartbeat.
Maybe if you spent that much time using and copying the bones of the long-dead, you started to get a little concerned about what your grandkids might do with yours.
Addrea’s claw stubbed against solid stone again. She was at the bottom of the Hadly pit, and no coffin or bone in sight. So much for that theory. No garbage either; not a midden. It was past midnight now and ten feet down and she had nothing to show for it but another layer of dirt, sweat, and bruises. She leaned back against the butte and sighed, then fell through it.
A short and confused burst of flailing with the claw later, Addrea had cleared enough space to breathe and light her lantern in. In the quick flash of its light against her swollen pupils, she could almost see the air streaming in around her, filling up…
A tunnel. The Hadly had dug a tunnel into the side of the butte.
For all the bone-turned-stone and finely-ground rock that were material fixtures in almost all their artifacts of all eras, no-one had ever found an undisturbed Hadly fossil mine.
‘Till now.
Addrea’s face felt funny and after a moment she realized that she was grinning to herself like a maniac. It had been a while, since she’d felt this hopeful. The last time had been… on the rail home from the Hihle, she thought. No more lice and midges and fat-mouthed fish that mistook your toes for minnows and especially, ESPECIALLY no more of the damned storks. Ever.
This was that moment turned inside out: she wanted this to last forever.
But first, she had to see what happened next.
Claw out, she began to tunnel, humming its song again. This time it was perkier.

Six feet in the dirt thinned out and she was left in the raw newness of the old tunnel, the floor still strewn with the same dust, the same pebbles as the day it had been filled in and abandoned. It was the early morning now but Addrea hadn’t felt as awake as she was in… years, even. Her mouth tasted like blood and victory. She held the lantern high like a conductor, basking in the sight.
The walls were full.
This was an impossibility, she admitted to herself through the haze of giddy greed that had settled over her mind. There were chisel marks everywhere; the Hadly had collected thoroughly from this place. But somehow, each and every track and turn of the stone was reflected, trick-image-like, into a backbone or a leaf or a rib or a limb or a skull.
Skulls. A hundred glittering tiny emptied eyes looked back at her.
It was like an entire forest had been gift-wrapped and packaged in stone, just for her, all for her. What had happened here? A flash flood? Eruption? Whatever it was, it was hers, beautifully and fully hers in a way she hadn’t felt as piercingly since the birth of her little brother.
Then she leaned in deeper and started to examine them, because she was a professional. A very rich one.

Dr. Geistoff Hadly had published the bulk of his writings on the excavationist trade some sixty years ago.
Menny Agling had died forty years before that.
The Hadly had persisted from approximately nine to five thousand years ago before…disappearing.
Addrea’s claw had been estimated by a particularly obnoxious yet useful professor as being somewhere between five hundred and two hundred thousand years old.
The oldest tools used by the Hadly were often reshaped from the limbs of creatures that looked much like rhinoceroses, but far too large. Addrea had seen a skull once, with a strange and malformed-looking set of horns that resembled a pair of balloons grown out of control.
Most of Menny Agling’s fossils had vanished into private collections once she was dead enough to become acceptably fashionable. The Revered Goven had examined one of her larger fish, once, and had said that there was something odd about the shape of the bones that didn’t quite make sense… but that was a textbook and ten years ago.
But she didn’t think anyone had ever seen anything like these.
A herd of… things. Words defied her. The skeletons made no sense; the tails were too long; the posture was alien; the teeth were…
Lizards, maybe? Iguanas? No.
She reached out and touched the smallest skull she could find, concentrated, and felt a brief burst of pitter-patter terror as over-large lungs and a lightning heartbeat failed to carry her away from…something. She had no skin she had scales or no wait that couldn’t be right.
None of it made sense. But oh how she could see now with her hand there, could see fresh new colours and so bright in the darkness. A useful one, whatever this was.
Addrea drifted deeper down the tunnel in a daze, a hand on the skull in her pocket, light shining on new old bones. Larger ones.
This was a horn. A horn attached to a skull. A skull bigger than she was.
There were two more horns. She considered this superfluous in the best possible way.
A touch…
force unimaginable a thirty-foot frame solid legs sharp beak chewing through the stalks brace your back and face it head-on
…and, just to see if it was possible, one hand carefully gripping the horn, she lightly smacked her forehead against the stone wall.
It gouged open like soft cheese, and her smile would’ve split her face if it could’ve. Too big to carry out in one piece by herself, but just the horn would do for now.
Pockets filling, the deeper calling, the tunnel narrowing, on and on and on past bones and bones.
Here’s a toe. A touch and its owner comes rising up, strong legs under a body forty foot and more, voice echoing forever deeper.
Here’s a claw. A nimble thing from a nimble thing that hops and leaps and scurries through ferns and ferns and ferns like the ones mashed deeper into the stones.
Addrea shook her head and looked closer at the claw, followed the thin leg into the barely-there body splayed against the wall, fingers tracing its deeper outline and the rough marks around the tiny torso.
Something on her skin she could feel, soft and tough and protective
feathers.
Now she looked with fresh eyes, saw the deeper shape of the limbs, the deeper angle of the neck. Tiny sharp teeth but oh how it looked like a bird to her. Deeper.
Deeper.
The tunnel was curling deeper she was sure, wrapping around itself like a snake. Her pockets were full of bones-come-stones and as she went deeper she found more and more she was overflowing with the past. Her heart was a drumbeat and her skull was a weapon and her eyes were lamps and she reeled with the intoxication of being the first, the absolute first, to see or know any of this as she went deeper.
Deeper down she traced the ferns deeper and found the plants that looked like horsetails from deeper days, giants that meshed with half-air-drowned fish like lungfish that took deeper breaths of air but died anyways and fell deeper into time go on deeper and come down where she was deep.
A breath. Addrea took one and realized she’d been holding it, or maybe she hadn’t. She was certainly dizzy enough to feel it. The air was…no, it wasn’t bad down here, just a bit stuffy. She’d smelt bad air before. She’d smelt
the haze in the air from the ash and slurry
No, no, that wasn’t her. That was from something
the blood-slick smell the soft grunt the wet tearing fear
in her pocket.
Addrea’s jacket was a gift to her from her parents and had lasted her over ten years by dint of stubbornness and a watchful eye, particularly around her mother whenever she made meaningful noises about replacements. It had character, Addrea always argued. It had comfort, and character, and no it is not worn down to a hole-mangled nub that’s just slander.
It was also blessed truth because it was what allowed her to shuck it off and onto the floor without so much as undoing a button. Bones scattered against her toes and the lantern jangled in her grip.
It was out. How long had it been out? How long had she been down here with nothing to guide her but… but hallucinations, pictures from inside an ages-empty head?
Well, she wasn’t blind yet. Her hand was on the wall, and she could still feel the grooves of the Hadly chisels. Someone else had been here, someone else had left their mark, someone else…
The grooves stopped. And on her face she could feel the soft movement of once-stale air, moving on and out as it escaped from something
Deeper.
Addrea’s legs were moving before she could even swear, and then they were moving over nothing as she slid and bounced and clattered and the lantern flew away and she landed and it landed on her and dirt landed on that and stone and.

At some point, Addrea opened her eyes. There was still nothing but the dark, but now she could see it a lot better, and she was almost sure she didn’t have a concussion.
There was dirt on her. A little dirt. And stone. A lot of stone. She probably didn’t have any broken bones though. She remember what THAT felt like.
Well, she could make it. The contents of her pockets might be scattered some…however many feet above her head in the tunnel, but her PANTS pocket was sitting tight, claw inside. She could dig through this.
Her free hand crept its way inside, gripped smooth stone, and paused a little, sorting through an unfamiliar feeling leaking its way out of the old bone.
Absolute terror.
Addrea realized she was humming again, this time slow and soft. Like a lullaby.
Slowly, softly, with the tenderness of a mother tending her cradle, she began to scrape away the layers of years covering her, fingers brushing stone that was also bone, mind ready to reject the images that were…
…absent.
Nothing was speaking. Back above, the fossils had seemed practically seeping with life, diving in through any sense she exposed. Here they were mute rock.
The last layer shed itself from her, and with it her patience for the mystery. Right. She’d get up, feel her way out with her jacket QUICKLY, make a lot of money and hire people that weren’t her to dig this place up.
She stood up, brushed herself briskly, felt her way to the wall of the slope she’d toppled down, and realized that her fingers were touching something breathing.

There was a moment.
It was a moment shared across countless childhoods, when you turn around and realize your parent was there all along, watching you.
It was a moment from Addrea’s days in the Hihle Marsh, when she met the eyes of a giant Murdun stork as it ate an entire flock of ducklings, one after another.
It was a moment from hundreds and thousands and millions of years ago as the thing under her fingers raised her head from her kill and peered at the small creature huddling in the bushes through the sulfurous clouds.
And then, Addrea made the mistake that small, terrified creatures always do in that moment.
She blinked.

The cave was emptied. The tunnel was a broken mass of debris. The camp was hollowed, left waiting for the badlands sun to smooth it away into nothingness.
And the rail had an extra passenger that night, headed towards a home.
It was a strange new place she found herself in, but this was nothing new. Life is, after all, essentially the same across time and space. It gets simpler as you grow older and harder.
Once you know that, you know everything.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: begin, seed, spawn.
Oon-Above grew from a single family lost in the drifts meeting a single family stuck in a hollow. It filled the hollow and tunneled into the drifts and found them pleasing, if chilly. A safe place, and less cold once you wrapped yourself in the furs of a lemmer. Food and comfort both, down under the midnight that lasted months.
A clan dared venture beyond the forest for want of room and roots, and found that the oldstone, though so much heavier than wood, was ready to carve and twice as strong. If you heated it just so, if you hummed to it just right, it would do as you said and make homes that no fire could consume or storm thunder down. That was the root of Tnekt.
Guna was already ages-old when it was settled, but it had only poked itself above the surface some forty years before the canoes came. Then came more canoes, and more, and more, for the fishing was so very good. There were too many canoes and not enough Guna, and then someone asked what if they encouraged the growth of the atoll through fishmeal, and cleaning, and regular blood. And then came Great Guna.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: grow, thrive, sprawl.
Oon-Above filled quickly, oh too quickly. The crystalline snow-domes arched higher above the many hollows and the tunnels were bored deeper into the drifts for more space, more room, but still there was not enough. They flowed through the ice like water through cracks, and at last they came to a crack and chiselled it through to see a strange horizon that was green and blue, not white. They had found the edge of the glacier, and underneath them lay all the taiga in the world.
Tnekt did not grow. Tnekt chiselled away. Dispassionately, carefully, endlessly. Giant ridges and blocks are shaped hollowed and stamped. Walls are made from buttresses. Lamps from lumps. The average size of a dwelling in Tnekt is over fifty feet at the shoulder, and it holds hundreds. The inhabitants struggle to reach their own steps, like children wearing their parent’s clothes. But it is sturdy and invincible to assault and every day there is less oldstone and more Tnekt.
Great Guna grew and grew and grew without limit, feeding off the sea and its heady intellect both. Coral-shaping and coral-breeding were the greatest of professions, artistry and craftsmanship swirled together like the rainbow colours of its output. Some shone softly for light; some grew into natural fishtraps, some even floated, and then Great Guna grew rootless islands and sent vast expeditions into the world, to chart and to explore and to recruit. Join us, they said as they sailed. Join us, and make land from nothing. This is our word. This is Great Guna.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: crush, mangle, mutilate.
There were people down there beneath Oon-Above in the taiga in the trees, soft strange people who had never known the low creak and groan of living encased in ice that could crush continents. They did not know of the tunnels and had never seen hollows, not until they were brought back packed in slush and too cold to feebly resist. There they were warmed and put to work digging deeper, ever deeper, to grow, to expand, to render the hollows grander, the tunnels broader; to tend the lemmers and slaughter their flesh; to shine the ice-mirrors until they gleamed and spat fire from the sky. They hated and were despised and this was good and proper as Onn-Above took their timber and their bodies and their metals and crushed their land flat one league at a time.
Tnekt grew restless. There were wars to be fought, and feuds had grown dull; there were riches to be coveted, and their own had become everyday. Beyond their borders lay new foods, new goods, new trinkets. So they clothed their warriors in oldstone hauberks and gave them flaked spears and set them loose to demand tribute and teach construction and burn villages and sow crops. And in Tnekt’s name, they accomplished much of this.
Great Guna encompassed three separate island chains by the time of the breeding of towermaker coral. Less than a decade following that, it held eleven; seven in shackles. A war-island would sail into a bay. Join us, they said. Join us, and make land from nothing. And if they were received impolitely, or perhaps not eagerly enough, or maybe refused, they would flood the bay with towermaker spawn. Without the hour it would be a clot, within the day spires fit for ballista would raise. A bay into a beachhead, a village into an abbatoir, an island for Great Guna, which grew greater still. The corals still needed blood.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: bloat, fester, rot.
The lenses kept Oon-Above safe. Who could threaten them from below, with the ability to reflect light until it steamed flesh and fired wood? They took what they wished and burned what displeased them and crushed the rest as the glacier moved under their feet. And as time went on, they took more and more. The hollows and chambers of Oon-Above grew clotted with loot and plunder; the gentry competed and boasted and outdid one another. This one had more slaves. This one had more gold. This one had grander chambers. The chambers in particular were easy to rectify; have your slaves carve more, have your gold commission more. Oon-Above was already a warren, but year by year it was nearly coming to resemble a collection of soap bubbles.
Tnekt glutted itself. Every year thousands went to the fields on its behalf and every day thousands moved cartloads on its behalf and every night it took itself to the table and satiated its stomach on their offerings. The stone was cold but the nights were warm, and warmer still if you were of the oldest of the oldstone, the families who traced their roots back to the dawn of Tnekt itself, when that ingenious clan had first began to heat it and tap it and hum at it just so, just so. HE was of grander lineage than SHE, but not as much as THEY, and so on and so on. Harmless arguments that turned deadly when it came to politics and it always does.
Great Guna wrapped half the world, albeit much of it quiet blue. They decided what was land and what was sea, and dominated wherever the two met. They took up the spear and the shield and the great ballista when this was questioned. Where the war-islands sailed they were obeyed, and they sailed everywhere, expanding as the years rolled on and each being caroused and welcomed and feasted when it returned home with an admiral bragging their conquests. All were glad to listen and toast. Except, perhaps, the other admirals.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: rupture, erupt, drain.
Oon-Above’s most sacred and respectable and beautiful of places was the Hearthollow, where the oldest and riches and most impressive of its gentry lived. And this was why when the slaves revolted, it was here that the fighting was fiercest, and this was why it was here that the lens-operators grew desperate enough to turn their glares on Oon-Above itself, and this was why it was here that the thin-sliced shelled of Oon-Above was first revealed to be, alas, only too thin. Entire hollows slid away, sheared side from side. The glacier groaned and bucked underfoot and slid and crumbled at its edges. Oon-Above burned as it froze, screamed and fell silent save pattering footsteps and muffled weeping.
The Tennekta died. This was not unusual. The Tennekta died young and childless. This was unusual. The Tennekta’s mother’s family was accused of treachery by her father’s family, and the Tennekta’s father’s family was accused likewise by the same. This was not unusual. The Tennekta’s families put each other’s crops to the flame after a hard, drought-ridden year. This was unusual. Six months later, half of Tnekt was starving and the other half was putting each other to the spear. This, by then, was usual.
In all of Great Guna’s grasp, none were greater than Admiral Deeg. Born on the eighteenth isle of the fifth chain of the ninth conquest, his ambition had risen him from slave’s-son to island-driver to Admiral to the heights of the fleet. He had brought thousands into the grasp on voyages of years, each time returning with a fresh crew of strangers to behold Great Guna itself for the first time. And although all toasted him in the streets, his fellows stared at his back and groused at its foreign shade and shape. It was not right, they said, for Great Guna to rely so upon a man who was not proper of it, raised right. And one day they all said so to each other, and they gave him a toast that night that was a good deal stronger than usual. So strong, in fact, that he smelled it as he raised the cup. That night, Deeg returned to his war-island. That night, Deeg sent word to his old lieutenants. That night, Great Guna itself saw towermaker coral fill its harbours.

These are the rules of civilization.
A civilization must: wither, unravel, crust.
Oon-Above was emptied, its people long-fled into the forests to hunt for roots and beg aid before its greatest accomplishment was done. After the long slow years of its dissolution and collapse, very little of the front third of the glacier remained, and it retreated in sulky silence, leaving broken trees and grooved ground and the odd lump of shiny metal that had once been an admirable statue in the halls of a respected family. Now gone.
The oldstone heated just right and hummed to just right came apart in just the right way, and soon enough just the wrong one. A building falls into a building falls into a building like dominoes made of oldstone and flesh and screams and the fields and the harbour are clotted with screaming refugees. What is left is gripped by war-lords, and soon after the strange great coral-island appeared on the horizon, its walls manned by keen-eyed and hungry-toothed warriors, they found themselves grasped low and made to bow in the ruins of their grandfathers. Now gone.
Great Guna’s grasp reached halfway around the world the night of Admiral Deeg’s escape from death. By the day he breathed his last, it no longer existed. The last of the war-islands had sunk each other ten years before; the secrets of the towermaker had been long lost, running into the saltwater with the blood of the coral-architects as Guna was laid low by ballista and torch and thunderous strife. As the fleets streamed home to devour one another their subjects rose up one by one to look above the horizon and find that where once land had been made from sea, only blue remained. Now gone.
And they thought about what they would build now.

These are the rules of civilization.
Much as they would pretend otherwise.

The sky was boiling into purple from gold and the clouds were a deep red and even if the children were too young to think of it as anything more than pretty they weren’t about to be put to bed at now of all times, when there was still so much left of the day.
“I’m not tired,” said the oldest child.
“I’m not hungry,” said the middle child.
“And I’m not thirsty,” said the youngest child. “Why do we have to come indoors?”
And their mother, a long, tall woman, shook her head and sighed and coughed and shuffled them indoors to their last meal, and as she chided them and pushed them into position she saw that the grumbles weren’t going away.
“Well then,” she said, placing the dish in the center of their little circle, “I suppose it’s time enough to tell you now about the dark.”
This did not interest the children very much because all of them already knew that they were not permitted to go outdoors after dark. “You just told us that,” whined the oldest.
“Yes,” said their mother. “But I didn’t tell you why. So sit now and listen to me and eat, sit now. Tell me, do you know of your uncle?”
Three heads shook.
“Then I will tell you. He was my brother, and he was noisy and rowdy and happy and even longer and taller than I am. If you’re lucky I think you” – and you was the youngest child – “might match him someday. A good man, if a little lazy. But the girls liked him a lot.”
“He was handsome?” asked the oldest child.
“He told us that he could catch fish just by smiling at the river,” said their mother.
They giggled.
“Anyway. This was a while ago. Back when your grandfather was still alive, but getting on a bit. You know our goats? Those were his goats, back then. Not quite as many, of course, but oh he kept them well. Grandma used to say he was half-goat himself by his beard. He loved them almost as much as I do you. And you can imagine how much it hurt him then, when he woke up one morning and found himself one goat short.”
“Did he find it?” asked the oldest child.
Their mother shook her head. “No. He looked all day long and not a trace. It was as if it had dropped off the face of the world. So he came home sad, and he slept, and the next morning, what do you think he found?”
“A giant!” said the middle child.
“No,” said their mother.
“It’s never a giant,” the oldest child whispered. The middle child poked them.
“No,” said their mother, cleanly pushing her hand in the way of the vengeful fingers of the oldest child,” but another goat missing.”
“They were running away!” said the youngest child.
“Not from your grandfather,” said the mother. “No, for he loved them almost as much as I do you. And there was something there this time: he found tracks. Great, big-footed tracks. It was a lion.”
Now the children were all ears. “Did he catch it?” asked the middle child. “Did he kill it?” asked the oldest child. “How big was it?” asked the youngest child.
“Patience,” said their mother. “Now, your grandfather was not a young man anymore, and he was largely resigned to cursing his fate. But your uncle was a young man – a VERY young man in his heart – and he proposed to stay up for it. He took his own spear and grandfather’s knife for weapons and his favourite dog for an alarm and he put himself up by a thorny wall near the goat-pen, so he would be prepared. He ran himself to all exhaustion the night before (oh, and he came back to find your grandfather another goat short) then slept all day, and when the sun had fallen he woke himself and crept out to his place and waited. There was a very large moon and it was easy to see him even as he walked away from the house. Almost like lamplight, but pale.”
Here their mother stopped to have a mouthful and the children squirmed wilfully. Patience. Patience. Easy to say and so hard to do.
“Patience,” she reminded them. “And that next morning, we walked out the doors, and we found a dead dog. It had blood on its mouth, and a broken back. Next to it was my broth – your uncle’s spear. It had a clean tip, and a broken halt. And your grandfather’s knife and your uncle were not to be seen, then or ever.”
Another mouthful. And a few more as the silence stretched.
“Did you kill the lion?” asked the middle child.
Their mother shrugged. “Who can say? No one was going to sit outside and wait another night, not after that. We lost more goats, and one day we lost none. Would it have lasted longer without my brother’s watch at the night? Who knows. Would it have lasted shorter without my brother’s watch at the night? Who knows. It’s a big darkness out there, my children, and it belongs to things that will hunt us if they find us in it. It’s no place for us to put ourselves, however young and strong and beautiful we may be, however bright the moon shines, however strong our blades or loyal our dogs. Keep to indoors under the night, children, keep to indoors when it’s dark. And keep safe.”
And then it was time for bed. And because they were good children (if impatient) and they listened to their mother, they went without further protests.
Not one sound was made all night, though they waited long before sleep in the dark. It seemed thicker than was right.

Ruddy red gleaming pure white tore the edge of the sky to shreds, flaking away the dark into morning. It was a time for rest now, for full bellies to absorb their burdens.
This was something she was explaining to her three cubs, which were not inclined to listen. Little bodies with little bellies burned as fast as they ate, and the cubs were very little indeed. But venturesome, and quarrelsome, and forever yowling.
“Mother mother mother MOTHER!” shouted the largest into her ear. “Get up! Get up and go! Let’s go running! Let’s go prowling! Let’s find something and hunt it and eat it and do it again! Come on come on come on come ON!” The last comment was coupled with a furious assault on her tail-tip, which placidly whisked itself away from the pounce.
“Shush,” she murmured softly. “Shush. It’s the day now. It’s too warm to hunt. Too bright to hunt. We’d be seen and we’d catch nothing. And worse than nothing is failure. Shush and digest.”
“Bored,” whined the middle cub. “Bored bored bored bored BORED bounce on your side pounce on your ear GOT YOUR EAR hah got it.”
“Yes, yes,” she grunted, and aimlessly pawed the cub away – carefully. “You got it. But you hunt nothing more than ears for now. We must rest.”
“Why must we rest, mother?” complained the largest cub. “Why? We’ve got room. We’ve got room for food. We’ve got room for the fight. Let’s go and get something.”
“Well then,” she said, stretching herself out on her side until her stomach seemed to last for miles, “I suppose it’s time enough to tell you now about the weight. Pay me some attention.”
So they did, and although they were now too big to really nurse they pawed and kneaded and jumped on her belly for old times’ sake as she spoke.
“Before your father, there was another,” she told them. “And he was bigger than your father, and he was tougher than your father, and he was bolder than your father. Handsomer too. And his teeth!”
“So where is he?” asked the largest cub. “Why isn’t he here then?”
“Because one day he grew bored and hungry and out of temper. We’d made no kill that night and he was angry. Fit to roar down the sky. So he went out prowling by himself and he came back full and happy. ‘What did you find?’ I asked him. It was very strange you know, for him to hunt without us. Stranger still to come back with anything. It’s hard to hide with all that mane.”
“’I found a herd of tasty little horned things in a village,’ he told me happily. ‘Goats. All bunched up with nowhere to run. Hairy, but tasty.’”
“That sounds good,” said the middle cub. “Let’s go get some let’s get some of those now I don’t mind hair look see I can bite your hair just fine mwike diff.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” she said sedately. “But no. We will not. And I will explain why. You see, it came to pass that we were slow in killing the next night as well. And though we all had some to eat – and he most of all – he was annoyed with it, and he went and fetched himself another goat. And the next night. And then the very next night he came back near-dawn, and quite vexed.”
“’What is wrong?’ I asked him. I could see that he walked slowly, and his temper was sour.”
“’A man was waiting,’ he said shortly. ‘A man with a stick and a dog and a knife. I broke the stick and I broke the dog and I got that man – ah, so poor next to a goat, hairless but scrawny! – but I think he may have poked my paw.’ And of course I rubbed faces with him and consoled him and so did we all, but he didn’t go out again. I think it hurt his pride. But of course it had hurt more than his pride, for here we all knew – and he wouldn’t admit it, but he most dearly of all – that the weight had set in.”
The cubs yowled confusion and sought battle with her nose. She nudged them into submission.
“What’s weight,” yelled the largest cub ineffectually, swatting at her whiskers. “Why should any of you care about weight? It sounds lousy.”
“The weight,” she said, “lay inside him. In that paw. Such a little cut from such a little tooth, little things, but it dragged at him, and the more he pretended it was not there the greater it grew. By three days in he limped, by a week he hopped, by two he crept, and by three he no longer moved much at all save to haul himself to food. And by four your father came upon us, and came upon him, and when your father took us all away he was hard put to do more than mumble at him. If you look over there at that hill, you can see the trees where we left him.”
The cubs looked. They were short, but they made up for it by hopping.
“I see it! I see it!” said the middle cub. “I can see his bones! Bones! Big bones!”
“Liar,” said the oldest cub. “He’ll be all eaten up by now. Anyway, I don’t see why we shouldn’t go look and eat something and-“
Thump, went her foot, and the oldest cub was pinned for a brisk washing against all protest and struggle. “The lesson,” she instructed them serenely between lashes of her tongue, “is not learned. It is incautious to hunt needlessly with full bellies in the day. And incautiousness leads to bad luck, and bad luck feeds the weight.”
“I d-n’t. H’ve-no-w’i’ht!” proclaimed the oldest cub with as much mouth as was not being licked.
“Lies,” she said, tranquility spreading from her like a sunbeam. “Why, it’s there right now, in each of us, trembling in our chests. Age feeds it. And injury. And by injury, ill-chance and happenstance and carelessness. Take a step wrong, and the weight will pull at you. Be incautious, and the weight will slow you. And come to harm, and the weight will take you. It’s an old world out there, my cubs, and though we fear none that walk it we must respect its rules. Be mindful. Be careful. And should you feel a heaviness in yourself, be doubly so.”
The cubs grumbled at that endlessly, but they were sensible enough to be grudgingly persuaded to be sensible, and so subsided into naps in the shade, one after another.
The smallest cub slept last of all, tucked as near to its mother’s side as its siblings would permit it. It looked out across the wide plains and shivered in the rising heat.
It could put name to the heaviness inside itself now.

Hannah was a morning person. She’d never said so, but she’d felt so for years. Like some flowers, she woke with sunlight. As a child, her mother had told her the crack of dawn was loud enough to wake her. She regularly beat the early bird to the worm.
And now, with the day fading into evening, she’d pulled into the driveway a little too quickly and beaten it to the ground, too.
Hannah pulled herself free of her seatbelt, cursing quietly in time with the angry treetop chattering of the bird’s mate. She’d never liked birds. The scaly-dry legs; the beady eyes; the ruffled, battered shapes of the feathers that covered and protected the pink, naked scrawniness underneath. But like them or not, it didn’t feel right to leave the corpse lying there. It’d give her the creeps, and attract cats, raccoons, or who-knew-whats.
So she took an old spade and ten minutes and pinned the little red bird under a foot and a half of cold, close-packed dirt and gravel.
Then she went to bed.

Dawn rose soft and rounded at the edges but sharp enough to cut; it was just past five when Hannah slid away the covers and yawned herself awake. She glanced out the window and a flash of red sped into her mind. She jumped – was it? No, a cat must’ve dug it – but no, no, another, longer look showed that she was wrong.
It was another bird, another red bird, not hers. The second half of the pair again? She couldn’t tell under all the feathers. It was nestled on the gravel mound down there, staring up at her window, but unhurt. Unwilling to move, mind – even when she started her car, not so much as a blink crossed the thing’s face as its feathers billowed in warm engine exhaust. It was still there when Hannah turned the corner out of sight.

It was still there when her car crunched into the driveway nine hours later, head full of fog and arms full of groceries. For all she could tell it hadn’t moved a muscle. Except its head. Its head followed him, towed by those giant, unblinking eyes, fixed tight in their sockets.
It didn’t scare her, mind you. Didn’t scare her at all.
But she took the stairs two at a time, and closed the screen door to the warm April night.

She woke up in a grey place and found her face pressed to her bedside window, as if her body was already preparing to ask the question at the back of her brain.
Clotted red bled through the morning haze by her car. It was still there. Amazing a cat hadn’t got it.
Breakfast was squishy, tasteless and rushed – anything to get her up and out the door faster, farther away from that endless glare. She approached her car from behind and fumbled a bit too quickly with the handle, swore as she shut the door on her coat, and spent all day at work full of dry lips and fast twitches.
She looked up red birds. Pictures of robins and cardinals and red-winged blackbirds filled her screens.
No. Not those, not those. She had a book at home. She’d find out at home.

The bird was still there that evening. If it weren’t for the tight, tense movements of its neck as it watched her go in, she’d have thought it was dead. It was those eyes. Those wide, bright eyes. They were meant for flies to crawl over, not madness.
Hannah found the book after a long search and a tasteless dinner – it was a dust-chewed old thing that weighed more than a bowling a ball – and found herself watching the bird as it watched her, flipping through pages and chewing at her hair.
Not a waterfowl. Not with that sharp-tipped beak. How had she missed that?
Not a songbird, not with it being bigger than a cat. How had she missed that?
Not a hawk or eagle, not with that drab, crusted-red spatter of colour over its wings and body.
She closed the book and returned it to its tomb, glanced out the window.
Still there. Still watching.
It took her longer to fall asleep that night. There was too much red in her dreams.

The next morning Hannah woke up saw the bird had breakfast got dressed went downstairs forgot her keys found her keys went outside and found it sitting on her car.
For a moment she just stood there in confusion. No wonder she hadn’t found it in the book, she thought. It was bigger than a turkey. How had she missed that? It must’ve escaped from a zoo. Or somewhere.
There was something else, something jangling at the edges of her nerves as time cramped and her eyes slid molasses-slow over the thing from its mad eyes to its long, scaly legs, claw-tipped, clutching. Tufts of fur and red matted them, calico and grey and white and
Oh, she thought. So the cats did find it. And she took a small step back when she knew this, and as she did that the bird let out a shriek that rattled the windows and launched at her.
It was so fast, so fast. Barely a blink and now wings were around her, feathers in her mouth, cold grips at her shoulders and a sharp stabbing pain in her scalp and an all-engulfing scream so loud that she couldn’t tell if it was her or the bird. Her arms were useless flapping things pinned down and trailing but her legs were thundering up her steps and it wobbled for a second, just a second and that was enough, just enough for her to shed her skin and blunder through the door, coatless and crying.
Blood was in her eyes. Germs too, probably. And her phone was on the porch, in her pocket. And just as she thought that, she heard the scrabble and thud and clank of what only yesterday she would’ve called a raccoon on the roof.
She locked the back door and all the windows before she went to her computer and saw the flash of red at the corner of her eye, the screen.
No connection.
The line was out.

It was strange to see morning this way, not from a bed as a fresh start but as a change in the air, a glow that grey in the sky by inches.
Hannah wasn’t sure she liked it. She wasn’t sure of anything by now. And she couldn’t see the bird.
Empty grey gravel in the driveway. A spade-width, maybe a little more. She pictured her shovel, pictured the little dead thing she’d buried, pictured the animal that had torn at her head.
How?
She looked and looked and saw no answers, and no bird, and then she thought of her coat and her phone. Maybe it was too far to her car, but if it was still on the porch…
It was. Top of the steps, a stride and a half from the door at most, and mostly undamaged beyond twin tufts of down lining at the shoulders, blowing in the cool air like wings.
Hannah stood with her hand on the door, screaming at herself to take action. And when that didn’t work she swore at herself aloud, and when that didn’t work she thought of how she’d never get help without leaving the damned house anyways, and when that didn’t work and she finally had to admit that the hairs on the back of her neck weren’t coming down she gave in and went upstairs and fetched the very small mirror from her cosmetics kit and held against the just-opened crack of the door, biting her lip as it tilted along the side of the house from sky to trees to paint to brick.
To red, rust, blood red. And an eye.
She dropped the mirror. It broke against the porch with a soft crack and something leaped past the window in a feathered blur at eye-height.
That night Hannah stayed up and counted cans in the kitchen until the early morning faded away her fingers. Sooner or later, someone would come. Sooner or later. She was grounded, and she was bleeding, but she was alive.

She woke to the sound of splintering wood and silence.
Eyes widened, fingers tightening on cold metal, small and hard and the only weapon to hand. Canned chicken. Who would eat canned chicken? From the back of the cupboard, from school?
Standing up took an eternity of dying muscles and groaning floorboards, ears wide for anything from the front hall.
Quiet. The kind of quiet that watches you.
Three awful, noisy steps to the knife drawer. A long, slow creak and a half-foot of precious, stainless steel.
Quiet. Maliciously, perfectly quiet.
And then, wishing in every bone and muscle and nerve that she still had her mirror, Hannah leaned around the corner.
Early light seeped through the front door. Its window was smashed. Its panels bulged. Its rubbing lining spilled onto the carpet like dried intestines. But it stood.
She sighed with the sob of the death row paroled, cheek to the wall, and turned around to see the rust-red fade to light crimson under the morning sun as it stood in her kitchen, head cocked, eyes mad. The feathers ruffled in the breeze from the gaping back door behind it, splinters still stuck in its scaly three-toed feet. It was taller than she was, and smelled of mist and must. Dew sparkled on its claws, the feathers pluming its stiff tail, the teeth in its just-open muzzle as it peered at her.
And then it leaped.

They arrived two days later and found it empty and torn and abandoned. And in all the fuss over what they found in the kitchen, barely any notice was taken of the little pit in the driveway, barely wider than a spade. A tiny, bright red feather in it spoke of a lost songbird.
Maybe a cat got it, they said, and returned to the business of the strange prints by the back door.
And the soft dawn wind plucked at the feather and carried it away over the trees and through the mist into the early morning of the world.

The warrior-queen stumbled.
It was only a light tremble, a waver in her arm, a quick spin of her arms for balance, but it magnified itself as it worked its way up her body and the blade of her long, shining sword dipped noticeably, which gave Klalmxxydor just enough to bite it off along with a third of her right arm.
She dropped, cursing quietly and ferociously, legs kicking away the smouldering skull of her bodyguard to clatter into some corner of the burned husk that was her throneroom. Her blood was pouring but her eyes were blazing, and as she slumped back against the seared stone of her throne itself she gave him the finger with her spare hand.
Klalmxxydor paused mid-chew and carefully inclined all five-foot-eleven-inches of his skull just a fraction of an inch downward, teeth bared in a mockery even recognizable to humans.
The spark in her face turned cold, but not with death, and she spat something at him in high-pitched gobbledegook.
“M’lady?” he inquired snidely as his claws drew back.
To his surprise she laughed – blood bubbled and it cut off quickly – and then repeated herself, this time in old saurish, accent harsh and thudding.
“May you become as insufferable to yourself as you are to me at this moment, lizard,” she said. And then she smiled, and then she spat.
And then she fell over as Klalmxxydor’s foreclaws penetrated her torso from four angles at once.

The city was burning brightly under the cool crisp evening as he stepped free from the burning rubble of the palace, the city sprawled below like a dead deer just beginning to become temptingly bloated with putrid aromas. Klalmxxydor breathed in soot and screams like a good wine and shook himself, relishing the clank of twenty thousand scales as they slid up and down his body. Then he stretched his wings and…
…and…
If he’d possessed the facial muscles for it, he’d have frowned. His wings…
He craned his neck to stare back over the length of his own body. Yes, there it was, all the same as he’d left it. Upward of seventy feet long, a third of that his tail, plated in armour even a charged knight armed with a lance couldn’t hope to penetrate, standing on four legs strong enough to support a castle and lithe enough to swat gnats out of the sky, with his two broad wings the size of mainsails just now unfurling to catch the sunset air and-
The unfrown would’ve deepened here as his mind caught up. And. And not moved at all.
Klalmxxydor shook his head three times, then snarled to himself. He scanned the sky for reassurance and caught sight of a bird fleeing the flames – a little pigeon.
There, there was his proof.
He looked back up at his own wings, his own body. It was ridiculous. It was moronic. But it was undeniable.
He was just too damned big to fly. He’d need wings big enough to cover half the city just to glide, and the muscles to drive them would be large enough to triple his torso’s width and breadth.
An ill-tempered hiss escaped Klalmxxydor as he stomped inelegantly down the lanes of the burning city, torching fleeing peasantry and merchants alike to lighten his bad mood. It wasn’t every day he got to consume royalty, and now here he was having to walk home owing to the tragic unrealities of his own physical form. There was simply no fun to be had.

Walking was unusual and tiring both, one feeding the other, and unusual was halfway home when he felt a great and ferocious trembling in his gut. Oh, he’d eaten his share of king and queen on his little expedition, but that was a lean meal, and mostly armour – especially the queen. The woman had practically been an armoury with legs.
Still, luck was with him yet. A deer lay in the copse just ahead, paralyzed with fear of the reptile and the faint and stupid hope that its nose wasn’t working properly or its vision clouded.
He breathed in air, and breathed out heat. The air ahead of the dragon turned red and seared itself into white and blue and beyond, shimmering into a heat so pure that it caught fire in self-defence. The copse withered from the temperature just a split instant before the flames erupted from it, the deer screamed like a knight and fell still, and as the fire danced and whirled over the ground around him all that Klalmxxydor could think of was how tremendously ridiculous the whole thing was.
Fire. Not volatile chemicals such as a beetle might spray, not a spark such as might snap from the impact of flint and steel, but pure heat. And produced from his gullet, which was scarcely the most scarred and durable portion of any creature’s anatomy.
What, by cinders, was THAT meant to be?
And why the smoke that issued from his nostrils? What was he burning in there? His own organs? His last meal? If it came from his stomach it could very well be and no wonder he was hungry. If it came from his lungs… then how? How had he not seared his own breath away?
No. He would not be party to this farce. Not anymore. People would sneer at him.
The deer tasted like ashes in his mouth. This was still better than the third through fourth deer, which simply ran away.

Home arrived at dusk, a broken mound of stone and charred trees that had once been a respectable hillside. Klalmxxydor was so tired from walking that he didn’t even bother to round upon the small party of vengeful knights ineptly tailing him some half-mile back. They’d wait ‘till morning, and then he’d finally get some triple-cursed food for breakfast.
Right now all he wanted was sleep.
The bed of Klalmxxydor was gold and gilt, silver and steel, and it was piled in drifts deep enough to nestle his head and broad enough to cradle his body. He’d amassed it since he was barely big enough to spark, and by all rights it should’ve expanded slightly today but he couldn’t carry things and walk at the same time so he hadn’t. What a waste of a long trip. Next time he’d…
Well. He supposed he’d just have to walk AGAIN. But be more prepared next time.
Klalmxxydor sighed and turned himself over in his wealth and shut his eyes and felt the coins drip down his forehead and became so suddenly furious that he nearly breathed fire again in spite of himself.
He was seventy feet long and thirty feet tall and eighteen feet broad even if a third of that was tail and he was lying quite comfortably – not so comfortably now, stiff with ire as he was – on a bed of gold at least twice his diameter when curled and deep enough that he did not simply grind through it into the floor when shifting.
That was probably half as much gold as had ever existed anywhere already, just there in his bed. Even if half or more was silver. And.
And.
Klalmxxydor’s eye twitched uncontrollably.
That was implausible.

The treasury was much smaller now; half its wealth scraped and crushed and mangled into the cracks in the floor so deep that Klalmxxydor’s great thick claws could not get at it. It was not gone, but it was at least out of sight and therefore mind and it soothed him. There. Plausibility.
He sighed and rearranged his wings, curled himself up around his single, tiny treasure-heap, rested his head on his legs and-
Icy dread crept up his spine. That was it. That was it. That was what had been bothering him all along.
No wonder he had nearly gone mad today, with such an atrocity lying underneath his very nose – literally – all this time.
Damnable dukes of ash and smoke, how had he MISSED it? His legs – four of them. His wings – two of them.
SIX limbs? What in the name of all that crackled was that meant to BE? A hawk crossed into a cat? An ant grown scaled? Six limbs. SIX LIMBS!
He’d have to fix that.

It was very painful, lying on his belly with the stumps tucked raw against the ground, but Klalmxxydor bore it in good humour. At last, at long last that filthy uncertainty had drained from his mind. And now he was as he always should have been. Plausible.
He sighed with contentment, and as he noticed this it was as if his happiness had pumped itself out of his lungs with that very breath.
How is it, he thought to himself, that a seventy-foot, narrow-chested body covered in heavy armour does not collapse its lungs under its own mass?

The knights waited for dawn, passed the night coating their faces with the ashes of their homeland and quietly wishing one another goodbye. As the day broke their swords unsheathed and their faces set and they descended, one by one, into the great smoke-fogged pit of the dragon’s lair.
They nearly stumbled over the body.