jamieproctor.ca

Some days, I dream of heroes.
Sound in the audience chamber, nervous voices. A stammer, a shudder, a twitch, a plea. The door cracks open and a worried face shoves in a terrified one.
My eyes are already open. They cannot shut anymore.
Mercy, mercy, mercy. It’s saying something about mercy. It didn’t mean to, it’s not its fault, it would never have done that thing if only it would have known, honest ignorance, mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy.
My hand raises and it falls down, and I’m alone again as the footfalls of my panicked acolytes skitter down the foyer like spiders.
Time to sleep. I can’t sleep anymore, but gods do I ever try. Some days I even fool myself.

Some days, I dream of heroes. Noble faces and determined eyes and no matter what the stature or shape of the oncoming threat, it’s backed by a spine that’s unbending, harder than steel.
High noon on a holy day. I’m not sure which one, there’s dozens and dozens of the fucking things now, so many I’m amazed they haven’t dedicated one to my toenail-clippings. There’s a holy day for my birth, a holy day for my death, a holy day for when I rose again, a holy day for when I defeated the Prinnish army and decapitated their general with a wave of my hand and a smile. I could smile then. I had a nice smile – I have a nice smile. It’s just now there’s no lips in the way and it won’t turn off no matter what I want.
I smile at the sacrifices and the offerings, smile at the ritual mutilations, smile and smile at the choirs and the hymnals and the absolute, pants-filling terror manifest in the eyes of each and every single human in the cathedral, and when they all file out and the candles die down I’m still smiling.
Some days it doesn’t seem worth it.

Some days, I dream of heroes. A sword swings, a spell chants. I am bearded in my lair, cornered like a fat old bear come out of his den in midwinter. There are rants and ravings and curses and some good bloody honorable deaths from horrible magics.
I have so many horrible magics. One for each bone in my body, and the skeleton of a human – even a very large human such as myself – contains two hundred and six bones, two hundred and six mindless, stubborn lumps of mineral and meat that will mend and build and stand firm regardless of what life chooses to tell them. That’s real power in there, that’s a force you can bend kingdoms around and distort lives against and tear down palace walls with. Which I did. And I have. And look at all the good that it’s got me, here on my pile of broken thrones, with an entire empire prostrate at my feet. With my eyes that won’t shut and my smile that never ends and my overflowing dish of sacrifices that I couldn’t eat even if I liked the blood of innocents and the hearts of virgins.
Some days I miss bread and jam, good blackberry jam.

Some days, I dream of heroes. A whisper at first, a half-hoped prophecy that only the peasants hear (I never knew how they did that, even when I was a peasant). Then it grows and spreads into a rumour, a murmur in the streets and fields that my guards and priests and captains attempt to stifle and quash in their cruel, ham-handed way. Finally a luckless messenger stammers out a rambling, incoherent, self-serving explanation to me and I kill him for his spineless presumption just as they burst in the door, with the sunlight pouring in behind them.
A luckless messenger is talking to me right now, because it’s his turn to tell me about the treasury and the tax rates and the tributes and the vassals and the vassal-states and the states that very much don’t want to become vassal-states and behind every word he speaks is a single thought and that thought is ‘please don’t kill me.’
I listen. Well, I try to listen. I don’t nod, though – that makes him flinch. So I sit and stare and fail to keep my mind from wobbling and I wish I still had the energy I did back in the first month of this business, when I honestly, truly, really did try to understand how the hell this place was run. Then I had to execute half my officials for treason and venality and after that well hell what’s the other half worth if it wasn’t letting me know about that sort of thing?
Not so much treason nowadays. Not so much anything. Doing anything could get you killed.
A corpse is alive, even in death. Rotting, rotting, feeding a thousand thousand THOUSAND little bellies each night, spawning millions of babies, putting food in the ground. What good’s a corpse that won’t rot? What good’s an empire that won’t change?
Some days I think that thought and it won’t leave my head.

Some days, I dream of heroes, and more than once I imagined myself as their leader. Some days their wise counsellor. Some days their admirer from afar, some days the hostage they were sworn to rescue.
I was going to make a difference. I was going to change the world. I didn’t know I’d personally exterminate nineteen royal families and countless regular, everyday families, but I’d accepted that by the time it happened. Those things happen in a world of heroes and heroism and dashing swordsmen and wise, pious sages. So I wasn’t a hero. So I was a villain. All I had to do was wait, and scheme – I could scheme, I assumed at that age, how hard could it be? – and there they would be. Like moths to flame, are heroes to villains. Moths to flame.
They would stand before me, and we would battle, and if I wouldn’t lose then, I’d lose to their children, or grandchildren. Maybe I would return, maybe I would not.
But the last thing I would see would be their faces.

Some days, I dream of heroes. And oh how I wish those dreams were true.

Once upon just now, in a relatively nearby nation-state, there lived a democratically-elected leader (or ‘leader’ for short) and her three daughters. Though the leader’s husband had long ago perished, that tragedy had merely knit the family together all the tighter, and the daughters in particular would do anything for their mother.
“Girls,” said the leader one Tuesday morning, “I’m feeling mighty blue. By any chance could I ask one of you to head down to the pharmacy and get me some Advil for this headache? My skull feels like it’s trying to eat its calvarium alive.”
“Sure,” said the oldest sister, Charlene. “Right on it.”
“Then take this,” said the leader. “Might come in handy.” And she bestowed upon Charlene the mightiest iPhone in all their household, with unlimited local, national, international, and interplanetary calls (10 hours of trans-solar calls per month).
“Gotcha,” said Charlene. Then she left and the rest of them waited.

And waited.

“Girls,” said the leader on Wednesday morning, “something’s happened to your sister. Could I get you two to go check in on her?”
“I’ll do it,” said the middle sister, Penelope. “Little squirt here’ll just get us in trouble. I can do it.”
“Better take this, just to be safe,” said the leader. “But be sure not to speed on the highway.” And she bestowed upon Penelope the swiftest and most agile bike in all the nation-state, with carbon fibre support structures riddled throughout its frame for maximum durability with minimal weight, and a streamlined seat and helmet to minimize wind resistance.
“Sweet,” said Penelope. “Back in a sec.” And she wheeled out onto the road and vanished in a helmet’d blur.

“Girl,” said the leader on Thursday morning, “we are decidedly in trouble here.”
“Yeah,” said the youngest sister, Tabitha. “I kind of liked those guys.”
“Me too,” said the leader. “But I can’t exactly ask you to go looking for them. You’re the youngest, and I don’t have anything to help you do it.”
“Eh,” said Tabitha. “I think I’ve got an idea of what might help me. Just lend me your old, broken, half-functioning, no-good, boring, obsolete pager. Can I borrow that for a while?”
“Sure,” said the leader.
So Tabitha left home with head held high, hair cut low, and a hunk of rare metals and rubber that had been useless since the mid-nineties at her hip. And that was all she needed.

Tabitha left home and wandered down the back alleys and the wide streets of the world, over the hills, even closer to where her Google Maps directions told her the pharmacy lay. As she was crossing a bridge over a crik (a kind of half-creek), a twig snapped, and she frowned. There was a foul smell in the air too, and that meant…
And just like that, up from under the bridge leapt three sizable trolls, gluttonous guts jiggling, drool-ropes snapping, all eighteen of their chins aquiver with delight.
“hey luk at that” said the chief troll, whose gut marked him as one to be reckoned with. “nother girl. pics or gtfo.”
“no wai,” opined his under-troll, who had sacrificed overall girth for truly stupendously packed glutes. “girls rnt real.”
“Let me through,” said Tabitha, who could almost feel a sympathetic twin to her mother’s headache brewing in her skull at that very moment. Trolls are the only creatures in all of existence that must speak entirely through their nostrils, and they possess four of them to aid in this purpose.
“git gud,” said the chief troll smugly. “other girls did.”
“first one pwned us,” said the under-troll, sadly. “such phone. much pain. so ow.”
“The second one simply out-ran us,” said the third (smallest) troll. “We were barely putting paw to bridge before she blew past us on that bicycle. A real speed fiend if you ask me. If she wasn’t wearing that helmet I’d have worried about her; you could break your neck if you so much as go over a crack funny at that speed.”
“Let me pass,” said Tabitha. “I’ll play a game with you.”
“girls don game,” scoffed the under-troll. “no girls in internet”
“wurd”
“It’s a riddle game,” said Tabitha.
The chief troll smiled. “riddle plox.”
“Fine,” said Tabitha. “What is this thing I’m holding in my hand?”
The chief troll squinted at it. “fone?”
“Nope.”
“car keys?” suggested the under-troll.
“Nah.”
The smallest troll scratched its head and frowned. “No clue, sorry. Boy, you know, this test of yours is super hard. You know who else had hard tests? Hitler. Your test is like Hitler.”
“I win. It’s a pager. It’s like a more worthless form of texting.”
The chief troll’s face was turning the colour of a freshly-squashed plum. “HAX1!” he hollered.
“Nope, it’s true. Google it.”
The trolls were slow typists, and Tabitha quietly but efficiently beat feet while they were alt-tabbing.
“Damnit,” she said, as she crested the hills that led her out of suburbia and towards the subway station, “why did we only have the one bike?

Tabitha descended into the depths of the subway station, but then she frowned. The escalator was blocked by what looked like a very long, very expensive suitcase.
She poked it. It ‘ouch’ed.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, as the tail’s owner curled around to face her, little swirls of smoke jetting from its nostrils.
“As you SHOULD be,” said the CEO severely, baring its elegant little dagger-fangs at her. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“Nope,” said Tabitha. “Sorry.”
“I’m a wheeler. I’m a dealer. I’m a tiger in the marketplace and an animal in the boardroom. I’ve got a Midas touch that’s even turned my parachutes to gold, and I have a platinum card. I can go an entire week without seeing a single product that I’m not a major shareholder in – three weeks, in America. When I beat my wings on Wall Street, a recession starts in Singapore. I eat accounting departments for breakfast and when I want lunch I eat my competitor’s and for dinner I have a 90-ounce ribeye steak, blue rare, with an entire bottle of scotch. And I do that whenever I feel like it. Now what’s your name? I’m going to buy you out of your family and fire you to a crisp.”
“I forget,” said Tabitha.
“That’s what the last one said,” said the CEO suspiciously. “The one with the bike. ‘I forget,’ she said, and then she sped off. And the one before her said that too, I remember that very clearly. ‘I forget,’ she said, and then she showed me so many pictures on her phone that I had no choice but to submit, it was very intimidating and made me cross. I haven’t fired anyone in at least two hours and it’s ticking me off – those girls! Come to think of it you look like them. Do you look like them?”
“Nope!” said Tabitha. “But I’ve got a super cool trick I can show you. Look at this!”
The CEO craned its massive spine until its skull was level with the pager in Tabitha’s hand, making a noise like a ten ton chain falling down the Eiffel Tower. “What is it?”
“A pager.”
“What’s that?”
“An employee thing.”
“I don’t like employee things,” said the CEO suspiciously. “What’s it for?”
“This,” said Tabitha. And she shoved the pager up the CEO’s right nostril.

Tabitha emerged into the light of day soot-stained, watery-eyed, and frizzily-haired, but most importantly, triumphant. Even if her pants were a lost cause. Who cared, anyways? The pharmacy was in sight; its minarets and turrets a sight to behold. She scurried to the door, each footstep faster than the last until she was in a long-haul sprint, sneakers tumbling past sneakers. The door was in front of her, then it wasn’t, and then she was in the grand hall of the pharmacy, its shelves cascading away from her, its ceiling fans humming magnificently, and its bearded, berobed proprietor glaring at her from atop his throne, behind his counter.
Tabitha approached the counter with absolutely none of the proper obeisance. “Heya,” she said. “Advil please.”
The pharmacist peered at her from behind his half-moon bifocals. “What for?” he asked suspiciously.
“Mom’s headache.”
“No, no, no, no…. what are they REALLY for?”
“Mom’s headache,” said Tabitha patiently.
“A mom? A headache?” said the pharmacist, incredulity ripening in his voice. “Moms and headaches aren’t for goddamned teenagers. You kids just want to homebrew your own drugs. I’ve heard about it on television. You’re going to make ‘lean’ aren’t you? Or maybe ‘lank’ or ‘leprosy.’ I’m sure of it. I’m positive. You goddamned punks get worse every day – why, just this afternoon I’ve already had to detain two of you?”
“Oh yeah?” asked Tabitha. “Why?”
The pharmacist smirked. “The first one was a disruptive influence; her iPhone was scaring away my elderly and senile clientbase. Plus I heard that you can use the sparks from the batteries to turn ordinary plastic into a sinus-shattering joyride. Very naughty! So she went in the jar until I could be arsed to contact the authorities.”
“The jar?”
The pharmacist rummaged behind his desk and, with some swearing, produced a large plastic bottle with a child-proof safety cap. “It has air-holes,” he said proudly.
Tabitha’s eyes narrowed. “And the second?”
“Oh, she was clever! She left her bike outside, where she thought I couldn’t see it. Very cunning, but we have cameras everywhere. I don’t approve of bicycles; cities are made for cars. Next thing you know we’ll have pedestrians wanting in on the racket!” He began to comb his fingers through his bristling beard, trying to get it under some manner of control, then a thought struck him. “Oh, and I’ve had it told from discrete and also highly reputable sources that you can get super high off snorting the air from inside a bike’s tires. So she went in the jar. For her own good, of course. Really, it’s her parents I feel bad for.”
“I’m sure,” said Tabitha. “Look, I need Advil for my mom. Now, please.”
The pharmacist leaned back in his chair and sighed, steepled fingers a study in piousness. “Advil for your ‘vibes’ and ‘420s’ and other such young people youth rascal teen nonsenses, I presume! Pray, tell me, what is your purpose? What gadget or doohickey will you combine with your ‘mother’s’ medication to produce illicit thrills and chills? My spine shudders at the thought! Inform me!”
“Nothing,” said Tabitha.
The pharmacist’s brow knit harder than a four-handed grandmother. “I’m sorry?”
“Didn’t bring anything.”
The pharmacist leaned over his counter, beard dangling. “You’re a teenager,” he hissed, all semblance of reasonableness gone. “You’re ALL up to something! You ALL have your tricks, and your smartphones, and your ‘sugar buzzes’ and your ‘herbs’ and all your, your TOMFOOLERY devoted to getting high. I know it! Now where is it?”
“On the floor,” said Tabitha.
The pharmacist looked down and got as far as “whe-” when Tabitha grasped him firmly by his beard, yanked hard, and swung up onto the counter to the musical sound of his screaming. One hand slashed out with the speed of a swatting kitten and grabbed the jar.
“Give it BACK!” screamed the pharmacist, his long, long boney fingers reaching out for her.
“Sure!” said Tabitha. She gave it back to his forehead as hard as she could , twisted it, and felt the little ‘pop’ of the safety cap dislodging and leaving a nasty welt.
The pharmacist fell over. He was aided in this by the two hundred and ninety pounds of girls that had appeared on his forehead.
“Hi, howyadoing?” asked Tabitha.
“Been better,” said Penelope.
“Yeah, that,” said Charlene. “Let’s just leave the money on the counter, ‘kay?”

They went home.
What more do you want?
Well, okay. On the way home, they took turns riding the bicycle. And Tabitha claimed rescuer’s rights on the iPhone.

“MooooOOOooooOOoooooooooooooooooM, we’re HOME,” droned the call through the house.
“Huh?” asked the leader.
“We come bearing Advil,” said Charlene solemnly as the three filed into her office.
“Tabitha got it,” said Penelope. “There was a bit of trouble. And I think we need a new pharmacist. The old one’s all creepy.”
“Oh, right, right,” said the leader. “Thank you girls, that was sweet.” She rubbed her head. “I’ll just put these aside for now and –”
“But you had a headache!” said Tabitha.
“Well, it’s sort of cleared up by now,” said the leader, half-apologetically. “No offence, but I think just having some quiet time fixed that. You girls tend to ruckus a bit.”
There were complaints, and remonstrations, and apologies, and in the end all wounds were soothed as they should be: with ice cream.
And they all lived pretty happily for a good long while.

Hey, can we talk?
No, no, I’m up and to your left. Woah, sorry, my mistake – MY left, your right. In the air duct. Apologies, but I’ve only really cracked your culturally-mapped navigational coding system in the last sixteen minutes, when I ate the dyslexic guy.
Well yeah I can speak English. That’s the fifth crewmember I’ve devoured down to the level of individual RNA strands, you think I’ve got some sort of learning disability? I realize that this is considered a crass insult by the standards of your species, but come on, so is what you just implied. Have some dignity. Well, as much of it as you can, seeing as you’re doing that ‘whimpering’ thing. What is UP with that?
Okay, okay, let’s get to the meat of things. Sorry, that was a bit ominous. The sharp – wait, the cutting, wait, the piercing, wait, the tearing, no no no NO the POINT of things. Right! Stupid thing, languages. Can’t you just stick to pheromones like any complex species should? Oh there I go again, starting a fight. I’m not here for that! That is precisely the opposite of what I’m here for! I want to talk!
What I want to say is, I think this whole trip got off on the wrong foot. And I’m not casting blame unevenly here; I don’t want to turn this into an exercise in finger-pointing. Yes, you have been trying to track, trap, and destroy me for the last 42 hours, but I have also been defending myself with slightly more gusto than necessary, like when I ate one-third of your co-pilot and left the remains decorating seven major corridor junctions as a territorial marker. What I’m trying to get at here is, well, maybe this is just everybody’s fault. Equally.
Why am I talking to you? Well, why not? It’s you or the captain at this point, and quite frankly, that lady scares me a bit. How do you feel comfortable around someone who’s always saying things like ‘if it can hunt, it can be hunted,’ and ‘anything that tries to hide itself has a weakness’? Psychopathic, if you ask me. Yeah, I know that word. I know how your species works: you are slow, soft, relatively fat-heavy primates that are largely peaceable and social animals who work together for the greater good, a strange state of mind likely induced by your lack of giant jagged ass-blades. Any one of you that’s this quick to switch into murder mode is clearly some sort of social defective, and honestly if I’d known this from the start I’d have pounced on her the first time she spotted me instead of hissing and spitting venom and skittering away into your air filtration system. Saved you some trouble down the road, eh? Wouldn’t have been surprised if she went bugfuck on the way home and chopped a few heads off if I wasn’t here to steal her attention. Really, you should all be grateful. My now-extensive knowledge of slasher movies thanks to your ex-maintenance man says that human-on-human violence is really painful and inefficient, whereas I can kill you guys so quickly that your nervous systems shut off before they know my mandibles even exist. Sorry wait, did I say ‘can?’ I meant ‘have.’ Whoops, and ‘killed.’ Have killed. My mistake, I’m still new at this English, and your system of tenses is utterly insufferable.
Anyways, I’m just chatting to you now in the interests of brokering some sort of peace deal. I think we can all agree that there’s been some major discomfort and awkwardness on this ship ever since I spawned in cargo hold nega-four-beta-alpha-bravo-charlie-tequila, and it hasn’t been satisfactory for anyone. I’ve missed out on the quietest and most relaxing days of my life cycle, and you’ve lost roughly two-thirds of your coworkers to various grisly deaths at my claws, other claws, backup talons, primary talons, secondary talons, jaws, venom sacs, and giant jagged ass-blades. This is something that we all have to work on, and I figured I’d be the one to start by extending the olive branch and putting the first deal on the table: why don’t we split up the ship and go our separate ways before anyone else gets hurt – say, by a flamethrower? That would be really bad. I strongly suggest that we should try to fix this before anybody tries to set anyone else on fire with a flamethrower. I know your species doesn’t like being set on fire – well, not anywhere nearly as much as mine does, but still. I think we should try to broker this deal before any hypothetical people finish work on their makeshift flamethrowers and start searching the ship for innocent bystanders to fricassee, as could potentially happen very shortly. Honestly, I don’t know how you put up with her.
The split? That’ll be plain and simple. You’ll get the emergency escape pod. The captain can have her cabin. And I’ll take everything else.
Of course it’s fair. Are you pregnant? Is the captain pregnant? ‘Cause I don’t see any egg sacs clustered along anybody’s rear limbs. Except mine, because I’m pregnant and I need as much space as possible to fill with my lustrous, pulsating eggs. I’m being over-generous as it is; I could fit an extra nine thousand eggs in the space inside your ribcage, but I’m letting you keep that. I’d appreciate a few limb donations to feed the children, mind you. I don’t think you’ll miss them, seeing as you don’t seem to use them that much – what’s the difference between four and three anyways? Barely a thing.
Woop. Feel those air currents? I think the captain just manually shut down the main oxygen filter and triggered a vent purge. Look, I’ve really got to run. I’ve got another three metamorphoses to go through in the next half-hour and I can’t do that if I’m sucked into hard vacuum. Just think about what I said, okay? And tell the captain. If she doesn’t find you first, the mucus gluing you to your bed should dissolve into your outermost layer of skin in about six minutes four seconds and free you up to go looking for that crazy bitch yourself. I know, I know, gendered insults are bad, but I don’t even HAVE a gender so I’m still getting used to this stuff, okay? Just – just cut me some slack. That’s really what I’d call the point of this conversation: we all need to cut each other some slack. There is plenty of room on this near-derelict death ship for all of us plus my ten million ravenous offspring.
See you later, eh? I don’t think you’ll see me first, though.

Paul was a good boy, Paul was a fine boy, Paul paid attention to his elders. So when Paul was out one fine morning standing in the dawn and feeling the sun tickle him, and he heard the wind whisper: “follow-me, follow-me”…
…Well, he followed it. Can’t get much more elder than that, can you? You can’t. And because Paul was a good boy, a fine boy, a boy who paid attention to his elders, Paul followed it
Over the hill
Across the dale
Down the valley
Up the ridge
And through the trees to the water. Where it left him.

But Paul wasn’t alone for long. As he sat there, huffing and puffing and watching the surf wash in and out, he heard the waves roaring: “come-here, come-here, come-here!”
So because Paul was a good boy, a fine boy, a boy who paid attention to his elders, and because the waves were so very very elder and wiser than he was, he
Waded out through the surf
Paddled through the breakers
Cut himself quite painfully on a reef (ouch!)
And swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam, swam until his legs were numb and his shoulders were screaming and it was starting to feel like less effort to just let the water fill him up and take him away.
Then he touched the beach with one hand, then the other, and it was the warmest, softest thing against his cheek. If it had been edible, he’d have devoured it.

But Paul had no time to rest. A soft little sound was bugging at his ears, tugging at his brain, coughing at his thoughts. From up the hill, from the big dark thickets, the trees were creaking at him: “this-way, this-way, this-way…”
These were no little shrubs, no upstart ruderals. These were old trees, grand trees, the sort of trees that the plant kingdom lived in cowering fear of. Titans of green whose shade choked acres and whose branches out-thickened the trunks of their tiny brethren. Not as old as the wind and waves, but oh so old, oh so much older and elder than Paul, that good, fine, obedient boy who listened to those that were wiser and more experienced than he.
So Paul hauled his aching body to its feet, muscles muttering and cursing at him with foul, ancient tongues, and he
Put one foot in front of the other
And the other
And the other
Tripped over roots
Snared himself in branches
Wallowed in poison ivy
Stepped on a marvellously-coloured snake, which bit him
And finally, finally, finally he was in sunlight again. At least he thought it was sunlight; none of the colours he’d seen over the last leg of the trip were probably real, and the sky was starting to melt into the ground. He very much wanted to sit down and focus on trying to stop spinning for a while.

But Paul couldn’t do that. Because at that very moment a noise emerged from the dull roar of his accelerating heartbeat that was presently filling his ears. It was the long, low groan of the earth itself beneath his feet, the oldest thing he came into contact with day to day. “Here. Here. Here.”
Paul was a tired boy, an ill boy, a boy currently subject to hallucinatory images from sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst, and severely inflamed venomous snake bites. But he had always been told to mind his elders.
So he walked

Stumbled

Tripped

And crawled

To a little ledge on a big cliff that shook when he laid his lacerated, bruised belly upon it. Far below him and spread out from here to there was all that he had travelled – the hills, the forests, the waters, the valleys, and at the very farthest point his own home, a tiny dot what seemed like a thousand miles away. Even through the haze it was beautiful, and Paul felt smaller and more special and fragile than he’d ever known before.
Then the ledge caved in.

It had been a good day, a fine day. And as the sun set over the land, the old old heartless things of it slipped with calm confidence into night-time, murmuring and whispering and rustling to one another in their own words the same message, over and over.
“Just another seven billion or so to go.”

Deep in its crypt, the cacophonan stirred.
This was entirely out of the ordinary for it – nigh-miraculous, really. This particular cacaphonan was older than the mountain over its head, and the vast majority of that life had been spent as it had been only a moment ago. Caught between ticks, but never asleep. Waiting in the quiet, where the sky could not creep in and interrupt.
(The cacaphonan did not like the sky. Too many things moved under it too quickly, all higgledy-piggledy. It was a distraction)
A waste of time, some might call it. But if there was one thing beyond all others that the cacaphonan possessed in abundance, it was time.
But now, an unfamiliar sound had crept into whatever strange place styled itself as its mind. A strange limb touching an old floor so bare that even the dust mites had given up on it millennia ago.
And so the cacophonan stirred itself into motion. It let the cloak of ages drip away from its backs. It picked up its eight staves and three rings. Its innards began to click again. Then, properly presentable, it moved to meet its guest.
It was standing in the main foyer, examining the walls with the obviously impatient patience of the testy. That was normal. It was smaller than the cacaphonan and possessed of fully a third as many appendages, which was not.
It turned at the sound of clicking and examined the cacaphonan with its sense organs. No startlement showed. That meant that it was not lost. The cacaphonan had only experienced that particular type of guest three times, but each had become extremely lively upon meeting it.
But no, this was no wanderer. There was a purpose inside its body. And then it spoke the three strange words, and the cacaphonan knew what it had already suspected: this was a guest.
The cacaphonan inclined its foremask and awaited the wish of its guest.
“I want you to bring me a book.”
And if the cacaphonan had possessed a mouth, or shoulders, or even arms, something about its bearing suggested that it would’ve slumped into a sigh at this exact moment. And perhaps muttered something under its breath that sounded very much like:
“This again?”

The cacaphonan knew of books, if a cacaphonan can be said to know of anything. Its demesne possessed several thousand, tucked in between the parchment scrolls, the clay tablets, the tin cylinders, the rune stones, the song-skulls, the endless chimes, and the whisper jars. It had no ill feelings towards books, if a cacaphonan can be said to hold ill feelings towards anything or things.
But it was always books. The past ninety milennia, always books.
Still, its guest had requested, and so it acted. The Winding stave turned in its toes and the cacaphonan turned to the right and then past the right and through nine hundred and seventy degrees before it fell out of the realm of numbers altogether and landed in a cupboard twenty thousand miles away, give or take. There was a broom jabbing into its central mass.
Something small and eerily quadrupedal opened the door and produced noise.
The cacaphonan considered this, then gave a careful spin of the Coloured stave. This replaced every single part of the thing’s body with something more towards the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum, immediately quieting it. Winding rotated once again and the closet, broom, and expanding cloud of particles were placed somewhere less inconvenient.
The book was somewhere above the cacaphonan’s head. Rooted spun and it drifted upwards through a floor that was busy trying to fall into the ceiling, then knelt down and scrabbled through the debris until it struck floorboard. Good, solid floorboard. The concept was ‘oak’ as far as it understood these things. A brief-lived thing that lived on the scale of decades and centuries that made useful tools when carefully cut up into smaller pieces.
The cacaphonan Coloured it decisively with a red shift and watched as it exploded into an open flame so intense that it ate all the oxygen in the room, vaporized the furnishings, and instantly flash-cooked the large angry biped that had thrown open the door to see what was knocking underneath his floorboards.
The book was behind a single youthful stone in the wall, mortared three hundred eleven years four months three days six hours two minutes one second ago. It yawped resentfully as the cacaphonan gripped its spine.
Winding. Spin.

The cacaphonan appeared two inches behind its guest as courtesy demanded and held the book out in respect. It took six minutes for it to be noticed; the guest was somewhat distracted examining the cacaphonan’s resting place. The indentations where its toes had rested drew special attention.
“You have it?”
The cacaphonan did not move.
It expelled air from its lungs, turned, and took it. “Well. I did not come here for your conversation, so I can scant complain. Now. Bring me the second book.”
And if the cacaphonan had possessed eyesbrows, it would have raised them.

The second book was harder to find. The cacaphonan had gone through several quiet times since its presence had been requested, or indeed been known to the world at large at all.
Winding.
The cacaphonan stepped out from behind a dust speck and found itself suspended in a cloud seven miles above the surface of the planet. Excellent. There was a hot presence at the nape of its core, a gaze heavy with anger and a tiny bit of worry and then a lot more anger. It was being watched by an old thing, a thing it recalled hosting long ago. Though it didn’t recall it being quiet so large. The thing that now glared at him from within its cumulus den was the size of a mountain.
“You!” it roared – oh, such a roar, all thunder and fury. Why must the world be so noisy? Tiny bolts of lightning sparked off its mouth and slid down to the ground far below. “You! You won’t have it! You won’t! It’s mine now! You gave it!”
The cacaphonan did not judge the thing for its poor hosting skills. To play host was the role of the cacaphonan, to make demands was the role of the guest, and to be impediments to the demands of the guest was the role of most everything else. One of the ways of such impediments as this creature was a failure to realize that the roles played by the participants were fleeting. Even now it was vomiting a tornado directly into the cacaphonan’s face.
This was unacceptable. Several of the cacaphonan’s joints were in danger of discoupling. The Slipped stave hopped and air resistance ceased to apply to the creature in totality for six seconds, including its wingbeats. This removed the issue of the cacaphanon’s joint strain but grossly increased the volume of the creature’s bellows, to the point of inflicting acute pain in the cacaphonan’s mind and causing it to black out.
It woke up four inches above the ground. Rooted put a stop to that. Groans had replaced the all-consuming scream of rage; the creature’s landing had been considerably less gentle.
“Not yours,” it managed, hauling itself upright on its five remaining legs. “Mine now. You gave it to me.” Even half-upright, even with most of its body spilling out of its ruptured epidermis, it was moving. Its ears were bent and its jaws were dancing. Sparks spilled from its mouths, trees splintered under its limbs, and then the whole thing was airborne again, if just for a moment, just long enough to send it hurtling at the cacaphonan. “Mine!”
The cacaphonan Knotted its bones together with some of the trees it was knocking over and watched as it convulsed in mid-air, body snapping as weak wood came apart at the seams under stress it never could’ve imagined. By then it was awfully close though. It seemed a pity not to just reach out and take it.
Twitching jumped, and as every nerve in the creature’s body switched on and off again its mouth slid open, revealing teeth ten times the cacaphonan’s height and a single, plain-covered book, half-tucked under the gumline of the eighth mammoth canine for safe-keeping.
Winding. The Cacaphonan plucked it free. There!
Then the creature’s brain turned back on again and its mouth shut.

The book was largely unharmed, miraculously. The cacaphonan had gone to great pains to engineer that miracle. One of its younger antennae had been sacrificed.
“Good,” said the guest, as it stroked its cover with loving digits. The muscles on its skull moved in odd ways. “Good, good.”
It looked up. “Now get me the last one.”
The cacaphonan could not be surprised. But it was most definitely not prepared to hear that.

The last book the cacaphonan had not seen since it was born. It had been inside a box inside a hole under a stone within a pit inside a quarry in the bowels of a chasm below a mountain at the far end of the smallest moon of the world, the calm grey one where ten million years can drift by and see the same amount of change as ten minutes. There was only one other being who had even guessed at its existence, and the cacaphonan was currently its host.
Even a large moon is a surprisingly difficult target. It took the cacaphonan six Windings before it hit the mark. Six times it felt the hunger of the empty sky against skin, six times the Calmed stave bounced and froze it in between the moments, gave it the time to reconsider and re-aim.
On the seventh try, it was entirely encased in stone that hadn’t moved since the world began, gripped in a beautiful, tranquil slumber on a rock in the sky. The cacaphonan Knotted the air in its long spiral lung into the rock surrounding it, then Rooted the shattered stones repeatedly until the stars were smiling overhead again. It peered at them, looking for answers.
There.

It was so quiet here. The cacaphonan was almost tempted to idle, to take its time and enjoy the calm, long silence. But there was a guest, a very important guest, and there was nothing in all its life that it could do as important as this. It would enjoy its time here, but it would not dawdle.
Four Windings to find the right mountain.
Seven rockslides to be Rooted.
An entire mile-long tunnel bored out with Coloured and Knotted staves.

The box was much smaller than it had remembered. Its toes shook as it plucked the book from its gullet.
Then the Winding stave twirled, and it was gone.

The cacaphonan’s guest was a quick reader. It finished the book in a matter of minutes, slowed mostly by the halting, jabbing, fumble-fingered movements of its pudgy little digits.
Then it looked up at the cacaphonan again. The little flaps of skin at the forefront of its skull spread wide, the muscle in its mouth danced in that odd way it had of shaping sound. “Give me your staves.”
The cacaphonan had heard this before many times. It did nothing.
The guest smiled wider, and it spoke again. This time the words it used were not shaped with its mouth. They, too, the cacaphonan had heard before. Once. The words of the third book.
“Please,” appended the guest.
The cacaphonan placed Winding on the floor hesitantly, slowly, as if it couldn’t quite understand how. But then down came Coloured, and that was faster, and then Rooted, Slipped, each quicker, more sure, more sharp, as if it had desired to do this all along but had never found the way. Knotted, Twitching, and Calmed; a pattern was brewing, a tidy little heap. Seven staves.
“The last,” said the guest.
The cacaphonan held Nothing for a moment, searching to make sure it was proper, then placed it. Symmetry had been achieved.
It watched as the guest picked up Coloured, examined it, waved it experimentally, dropped it carelessly back to the floor. It waited.
“Now,” said the guest – and the cacaphonan couldn’t help but notice that it was breathing quicker and harder now, its body speeding up against its will – “now the rings.”
The cacaphonan waited. This too was familiar.
The guest spoke again, without sound.
The cacaphonan placed the three rings on the pile. Unsupported, they lay on edge. The guest tried to push one over and seemed satisfied when this did not work in the slightest.
“Perfect,” said the guest.
The cacaphonan watched as the guest picked up one of the rings, turned it to and fro in the small light that remained from its lantern.
It had seen this all before, once. And now, if its memory was not entirely gone, there was only one thing left to do.
It picked up Nothing, spun it twice, and as the guest turned and began to open its slow strange mouth again to speak more useless words, it sank it through the cacaphonan’s core and past its central nerve cluster.

The trek towards home promised to be long, with days in the dark passing before the first hints of sunlight began to turn black to grey in the caves ahead. The staves were restless in Olno’s grip, the rings suddenly cold and gritty on her skin as a breeze from the surface touched her. The discomfort was a price worth paying. She had power in her grip that rulers would’ve burned their children for, and the knowledge of how to use it. She had found the secret demon that hid the three truths of the mind, body and soul from the world and she had defeated it so utterly that it had given up its life before her eyes. She was destined to make a mark upon the world that no-one, not even the most ignorant peasant, could ever fail to learn of.
But…
…If only she could have some quiet. It was too noisy all the way up here, so close to the sky. No less than four times she’d thought she’d smelled surface air, she’d almost clambered her way out a side passage, and she’d been driven back by the trickle of running water, the rush of the wind, the murmur and rumble of earthworms.
No. This was spoiling her focus. She just needed some time to think. To sit and think and rest. She had plenty of time to learn of her new treasures, to ponder her new knowledge, her new self. To find somewhere cool and dark and secret, far away and under stone.
If there was one thing she had in abundance, it was time.

I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I was sick of being last to the table. I was tired of always being the little guy, getting pushed down. And because of these and ten thousand other clichés I walked into the dark, cool store (the doors went ‘ding’), walked past ten thousand machines of death to the counter, and told the clerk: “I want a bomb.”
The clerk blinked at me. It was a last-second swerve out of what had blatantly begun as a pair of rolled eyes. “Yes, sir. That is what we sell. What kind of bomb do you want?”
I hesitated. “A good one. Something that’ll take out as much as possible.”
“A bit… broad of a request there, sir. Our payloads vary greatly. I can give you a nice little piper that’ll take out a large Humvee, or a wad of C4 that’ll take out a skyscraper if placed correctly. However, as I can see that you’re new to this, perhaps a simple detonator pack would be nice? The controls are quite simple, and you can ensure your complete safety from the blast zone at your leis-”
“That,” I interrupted him, “is not one of my concerns.”
“Oh,” he said. And this time he did roll his eyes, the unshaven little git, quick-like so he thought I wouldn’t notice. “One of THOSE kind of bombs, huh? Right, right. Well, it literally is your right.”
He took me to a side shelf in a dimly-lit corner whose ugly chunky contents were not improved by the obscuring gloom, and he began to list names.
“The Patriot, the Retort, the Screaming Eagle, the Fourth of July, the STFU, the Rolling Thunder, the Porky…”
“’Porky’?”
“Set it off and th-th-th-that’s all folks.”
I frowned. “I don’t get it.”
I wasn’t looking at the clerk, but I could tell he was rolling his eyes again. I let it pass. “Look, I have eight grand in the bank, and I won’t be spending it tomorrow. What can I get for that?”
Five minutes later I stepped into the sunlight again (‘ding’), seven thousand nine hundred and forty-three dollars lighter and one chest-mounted triple-reinforced water-resistant FDA-approved extra-hi-payloaded ergonomically-supported bomb secured to my chest. The sun sparkled on it in approval, the pedestrians nodded their admiration, and the little rubberized EZ-grip dead-man’s-switch felt nice and solid in my sweaty hand.
The world was my oyster, and I knew exactly where to start prying.

The sign on my workplace was heavy and dull and grey, just like the inside of the building. And just like the building, it aimed to disappoint.
CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK. How was that fair? How was that fair? The one goddamned day I go and get the bomb and the boss goes home because he’s CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK, fuckin’ Eddie from the cube across me is sitting in his swishy apartment because of CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK, the secretary that always pretends I don’t exist when I’m talking is CLOSED DUE TO GAS LEAK. Fuck, I didn’t even know where half of them lived. Maybe I should’ve bought six or seven pipe bombs and a copy of the yellow pages – no, no, no. Breath, damnit. I could still make this work. Maybe I couldn’t make it work like I’d figured it would, but I could still make it work.
The kebab stand where I’d been short-changed six times wasn’t there today either. Damnit. I could’ve even had a last meal, and for once I wouldn’t have had to worry about the runs.
My ex wasn’t answering her phone. Double-damnit, probably at work then.
Dad was safely under six feet of sod.
Mom was somewhere in Cuba, and I doubted I could get a plane ticket for six bucks and a nickel.
Maybe that guy on Facebook? Yeah, the one who’d left all those smarmy comments on that perfectly reasonable article I linked. Yeah, fuck that guy. Where’d he live again?
Some quick phone-work told me that it was a four-hour drive out of town. Fuck, I didn’t want to drive for four hours just to blow myself up. I was expecting to do this half an hour ago, and my thumb was getting sore on the deadman switch. What if I just let it slip for a second changing hands on the wheel halfway there and blew up on an empty stretch of highway between Bumfuck and Fuckall? Worthless. A waste of money.
I realized I’d been pacing in circles for two minutes straight on the same street corner. Fuck. Got to pull myself together. Right. So personal’s out. What’s left? Dramatic. Where’s dramatic?
My eyes roved through downtown. Skyscraper after skyscraper. Just pick one of the big ones. Or… the tower! Yeah, take out the tower, take out a monument! That’d be good.

“I’m sorry sir, but this simply isn’t possible.”
The ticketmaster was polite, professional, calm, and entirely unsympathetic.
“Look, it’s just one bomb. Just ONE bomb.”
“Sir, only guests in possession of a fully paid membership can bomb the tower on scheduled appointments, weekends only as weather permits. It’s one of the tallest freestanding structures in the world; policy prohibits random bombings.”
I sighed. “Could you just… not tell anybody? Say I snuck by you?”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I will not risk my job for you. And there are cameras.”
“Right. Right. Fine. Fuck. Sorry.”

The biggest skyscrapers belonged to the banks.
“No non-employees outside the lobby, sir.”
“Five minutes?”
“No non-employees outside the lobby, sir.”
“Two?”
The security guard took two steps closer. If I craned my head, I could see the glisten of the interior lighting on his teeth.
“No non-employees outside the lobby. Sir.”
“Okay.”

I sat on the street corner. My thumb was really hurting now. I hoped it wasn’t a cramp.
What was left? Try to bomb the stadium? No… I couldn’t afford a ticket. Maybe the zoo? No, ticket. Everyone I wanted to bomb was missing, and every other fucking thing worth bombing in this city had a fucking entry fee fuck fuck fuck damnit shit PISS!
Maybe I should just bomb myself. Go home and bomb the house. Leave a note or something. Last resort. Or I could get my money back. Walk up to that smirking asshole with a patch of scruff pretending to be a third of a beard and hand him back his gadget and get my money back and feel him rolling his fucking eyes at me as I walk off…
…oh.
Well, that was right in front of my face now, wasn’t it?

‘ding’

Hundreds of years ago, not many miles from this spot – this one, right here – there lived a warmaker, a powerful general with no heart and a lot of spite and a thirsty ambition that drank blood like water.
This was not unusual at the time. Nor was it unusual when that warmaker laid low a city or two, not far from here at all. Nor when she had the subjects of that city paraded in front of her in chains and hobbles, with the skulls of their leaders smouldering in a great brazier-banner. What WAS unusual was what that warmaker did next.
“Bring me their architects,” she said.
This took some time, but after an hour or so and some beatings, she was presented with a hundred or so men and women. Some were thin, some fat, some old, some young. Most were terrified, a few were numb.
“I have destroyed your people because I am great and they were small,” declared the warmaker, from atop the small sturdy wooden stool that served as her throne. “And I wish this to be commemorated. You will build for me a monument, the grandest that has ever been raised. It will measure no less than eleven hundred tro in height, and of sufficient width to support this, tapering as it rises. There will be braziers for the skulls of defeated armies. There will be a grand mirror to shine the sun back at the sky, so that it knows that I am its match. This will be done.”
The warmaker watched the eyes of the architects carefully as her words ended. Then she pointed with her little steel knife.
“Him. Him. Her. Her. Her. Him. Her. Him. And those four. Do it.”
Small, sharp blades made fast motions.
“The rest of them, bring them shelter and food. And plenty of parchment. Their work begins.”

The monument took shape as clay on a potter’s wheel, spun out of stone and suffering on the backs and beneath the hands of ten thousand tired slaves. In their tent the architects brooded and bickered and learned and somehow pieced together a plan of a million parts without killing each other. And day by day, a shadow of their own making rose a little higher in the sky over their heads.
On the fifth year of its construction, horns and drums roared down from the hills. The warmaker had returned at the head of a groaning host, laden with several king’s ransoms of treasure carried in the unlikeliest kind of chest.
“The islands of Nilaa are mine,” she declared, “crushed between a hurricane and my men. This was their flagship, the Gorkoko. Hang it entire from the monument. Let their precious jewels shine for the sky’s amusement.”
The Gorkoko was three hundred tro long, and had never left the embrace of the water in its life until now. The architects became shipwrights from necessity, and the monument’s plans were destroyed and remade, its scale redoubled. The winches that hauled the Gorkoko to its resting place took three years to forge, and were hauled upon with miles of rope, scores of pulleys, and thousands of men and horses.
It hung just below where the monument’s former peak would’ve been, a dejected old beast. The architects felt its sour gaze upon them each morning.

On the twelfth year of construction, the air rattled again with the sound of marching men and ringing instruments, and the warmaker had her architects gathered once again. They stood at the head of her army, and they saw that each soldier carried another on his or her back.
“This is the army of the Mrtami,” she said, and she shrugged the two bodies she had carried atop her own shoulders to the ground. “And this was their general and their queen. Grant them crypts within the monument, armour and all. Let them not know the peace of their precious dirt, let the birds mock their tombs.”
The Grand Army of the Mrtami – the Grey-Clay Army, as they had known it – held more than fifty thousand men. Each casket, each tomb, was designed by hand. Each body was mummified by the dry air and the heat. Each was sealed away in a great wall that stretched up what was now the main trunk of the monolith, high in the sky.

On the twentieth year of construction, the warmaker brought the broken spires of the Citadel of Jhe, and demanded they be reborn as wings of the monument.

On the twenty-eighth year, the warmaker had the Six Kings of Selkorr decapitated, and each of their heads was placed in a sepulchre within the monument shaped to resemble its own misery-filled face a thousand times its size.

On the thirty-ninth year, the blood of every single horse of Hynm – a line of battle-bred steeds six hundred years old and more – was brought in iron basins, and placed within a great glass globe to dangle nine hundred tro above the lonely and desiccated frame of the Gorkoko.

On the fifty-seventh year, the skulls of the warmaker’s four daughters and three sons who had sought to usurp her were placed in a great brazier thirty hundred tro above the ground, along with all of their children.

And on the sixty-fourth year of construction, the warmaker came to the monument with her army, the empress of a continent, and looked up at it with rheumy eyes that stared harder than cold stone.
“Is it done?” she asked. “Is it done? Where is Glaglin? Summon Glaglin. I must know if it is done.”
A murmur travelled through the crowd of architects, drifting from end to end and back again, and at length it emerged that Glaglin had expired of old age six years ago.
“What of Telll? Niminsor? Ribst? Where are they? I must know if my monument is done.”
Dead and gone, old and dead, and passed away in the winter’s cold.
The warmaker clawed at her thin grey hair, fingers losing skin against her iron crown. “Anyone? Is there anyone at all? There must be one! I chose you, I chose you all! Why are you all strangers!”
“Not all,” said one. Grey Genless had arrived, carried in the arms of two slaves. “Not all, though I am the last you chose. Our children plan now, and our grandchildren learn from them.”
The warmaker’s gaze wavered, trying to find a face it knew in all those wrinkles. “Do they do it well?”
“As well as ever we did.”
“Yes. Yes of course. But then… but then when? When will it be done?”
Genless shrugged. “We are nearing the summit. The capstone will be finished before the month is out. We had planned to dispatch a messenger before the week ende-”
“Too soon!” said the warmaker. “Too soon! It can’t be done! Not now! There must be more!” Her legs shook as she slid off her horse, but anger kept her upright as she marched to the monument’s stone base, where the stone blocks stood as tall as houses. She craned back her neck and looked up until it hurt. “There has to be more! There has to be!”
“But lord, we have received no word of additions.”
The warmaker’s arm was old, but anger gave it speed. The little steel knife tasted blood for the first time in a decade from Genless’s chest, and the architect’s life slipped out of her with no more than a small sigh.
“There will be more!” shouted the warmaker at the architects, at her army, at the world. “There will be! I will see to it! There will be a, a tomb for this one, yes! A tomb for all of you! Yes, that’s it! Craft a sky-cage and seal your bones into it, and make it large enough to hold a cathedral!” She slipped, caught herself on the foundation, felt her bones shake, and she glared up at her monument as though it was pure poison. “There must be more, and there will be more! I will see to it! I will!” And the warmaker drew back her arm and drove her old, old fist into the foundation stone with force to shatter bones.

It was a very small thing, a tiny wave, a little ripple. But it travelled up, up, and up,
past the stones
past the treasure-filled Gorkoro
past the Grey-Clay army’s rest
past the still-crumbled spires of Jhe
past the tombs of the Six Kings
past the great globe holding the blood of the dead horses of Hynm
past the ever-lit brazier where the warmaker’s sons and daughters smouldered
and it reached at last the unfinished peak, where a single stone lay idle and loose, left by the hand of a tired slave.
It tipped.

Ten thousand tro below it landed, and it shattered at the feet of the warmaker.
She blinked in surprise, blood flowing into her eyes from a stray shard. She couldn’t see, but she could hear shouting. The horns and drums were sounding retreat. She hadn’t called for a retreat. She’d never called for a retreat. What was happening? She pawed at her eyes. What was happening?
And she never knew, for as the warmaker stood there, pawing at her eyes, her monument fell, and it fell with the slow, endless majesty of the enormous. The world could’ve ended and begun again in the time it took for the last stone to tear itself loose, but it was still impossible to outrun. It swallowed up the warmaker, the army, the little bluff with the architect’s tent, the architects themselves, and last of all itself. A valley had become a field of broken stone.

The empire fell too, as empires are fated to do. Kingdoms arose from its corpse, fell, rose again. History books mentioned it in passing, lied about it, corrected themselves, told new lies.
The monument itself went on unmentioned and unknown to all save a few. A small village of shepherds moved in not far away, but they were not builders, and their homes were fashioned from straw and clay. They never asked what the field of stones was made for, and in time rain, wind, and sun covered it with dirt, then grass, and the question became moot.
Sheep grazed on its surface. A boy watched them idly, pleasantly half-cooked in the mid-day sun. His eye halted, catching sight of something shining in the grass. A quick rummage brought it to the surface from the soil, but disappointment followed. Useless.
The warmaker’s blade was returned to the dirt, covered carefully with several large stones so that nobody might cut themselves on it. And the boy went home, and the world walked on without it.

Illeq was angry, and angry meant stomping, and stomping meant grumbling and wincing and twitching as your soft leather shoes hit something jagged or jabby with more force than necessary. This led to being angry, which lead to stomping, and thus the cycle continued. Stomp wince gripe ouch stomp whine kick swear and so on and so on and on until she walked into a stone that came up to near her knees and skinned herself quite badly on it.
“Pzessering faqqur!” she yelled, and she kicked it. This did not help, although it launched several of the smaller stones sitting atop it with considerable force into the tall grass of the mountain meadow.
“Ow,” she added.
“Ow,” agreed the grass.
“Who’s there?”
“Me,” said a small, wretched, and generally sad voice. “Me’s here. And a bump on my head, too. Someone is throwing rocks.”
“That’d be me,” said Illeq. “Sorry.”
“Oh, it’s alright,” said the voice. “It wasn’t much of a home anyways.” Its owner slipped out of the grass and stared up at Illeq from just about her ankles. It was a salamander, a little fiery serpent with legs not much less stubby than an otter’s and big red eyes that made her think of that wolf puppy that her brother Nabb was raising.
“I kicked over your home?” asked Illeq, appalled.
“No, no. Just a half-home. I was stacking these stones, you see. But I can’t burn bright enough to make them stick.” It made a little crackling noise like an ember snapping in its throat. “And I can’t burn bright enough to make hot-rock properly, and I can’t burn bright enough to make a mate happy, and everyone laughs at me. So that’s why I’m all out here, in the miserable wide-open sunny place. What about you?”
“I’m so angry I could spit stones,” said Illeq. “I want to knap.”
“You’re sleepy?”
“No – knap. Knap rocks. You hit rocks with rocks and you get really sharp rocks, the best rocks. It’s fun and it’s useful. But I asked my father to teach me and he told me ‘girls don’t knap.’”
“That’s bad luck,” said the salamander. “Could you ask someone else?”
“I did! I asked my uncle, and he said ‘girls don’t knap.’ And then I asked my mother to talk to them, and she said ‘girls don’t knap,’ and I asked my grandfather and he said ‘girls don’t knap,’ and I asked my brother-”
“And he said the same thing?”
“No. He started to say ‘girls-’ and then I kicked him and ran away up here.”
“A reasonable enough reaction,” said the salamander. “You should try spitting rocks at him instead.”
“I was joking,” said Illeq. “I can’t do that!” Then curiosity gave her a nudge. “You can do that?”
“Not properly,” said the salamander. “You need to burn bright and fast until they get all crackly and widgy. Then you twirl your tongue and jab your throat and cross your eyes and POW out comes a hot-rock that’ll burn the nose off anything that gets in your face. It’s a good salamander trick. And I can’t burn bright enough to make even a baby’s hot-rock.”
“Come on, come on,” said Illeq. “It can’t be that bad. I can’t spit rocks at all. Why don’t you show me how you do it? Here, here’s a rock.”
“That’s too big.”
“This one?”
“Too small.”
“How about this one?”
“Too jagged.”
Illeq sighed and rummaged. “This one?” she asked, holding up a slightly streaked oval the side of her fist.
“Perfect!”
The salamander’s tongue was boiling-hot and dry as a bone as it licked the stone from her palm in one smooth movement. Then its face jumped and hopped and twisted and PTTU out shot a little grey meteor, whistling through the grass like a kite.
“That’s a good shot,” admired Illeq.
There was a meaty thwack.
“That might have been a bad shot,” suggested the salamander.
Something howled from the other side of the meadow, from deep within a very, very deep chest.
“That was a terrible shot,” agreed Illeq. “Shall we run?”
“Let’s.”
And so they ran, and as Illeq stole a peak over her shoulder (the salamander had no shoulders, and as such was not afforded this luxury) she saw a full-grown mountain troll lurch up to its gangly, grumpy height, teeth already gnashing for meat.
“Up up up!” she told the salamander. “Follow me!”
And the salamander trusted her as they ran through a little grove – which the troll flattened – and over a stream – which the troll’s foot nearly dammed – and past some big stones – which the troll kicked out of the way – until they finally came to a crevice in the side of the mountain which they both popped into just as the troll’s big dirty fingers scraped at the very heels of their feet.
Illeq’s feet, really. The salamander did not have heels.
“It can’t reach us in here,” said Illeq. “I can barely fit in here. My brother barely can’t. And my father can’t at all. And this troll is much bigger than my father! Look, it can barely fit its fingers in!”
Two fingers, to be exact, and that was probably more than enough troll for anyone. They groped and stretched in the most nasty ways, relying on knuckles that shouldn’t exist in anything decent.
“Whether it can fit in or not, we’re doomed,” said the salamander. “It’ll just take a nap until we try and leave, and nothing wakes so easy as a play-napping troll. We’ll starve or be eaten, no ways without one. Oh for hot stones! Oh for a fire that burns bright!”
“There’s plenty of stones in here,” said Illeq firmly, “and we’ve got time for ages. If you can’t practice now, when can you? Here, catch!”
The salamander caught the stone on its tongue, chewed, twisted, spat, and the pebble *plinked* off the troll’s hairy finger.
“Woe,” said the salamander, despondently.
“Practice!” said Illeq. “Practice or nothing will work! That’s what I know about knapping – and I’d know more if some people would be reasonable and stop being terrible and worse than that like they always are – and I bet you the world and a wing it’s true for anything else worthwhile too. Practice, practice, practice, practice! Here’s another!”

By sundown (best as they could tell from the light seeping past the troll’s hairy knuckles) Illeq’s voice was raw from encouragement, the salamander’s tongue was sore from spitting, and the troll’s fingers were just as ugly and invincible as ever.
“Starve or be eaten,” sighed the salamander. “I hope I starve. I don’t want to be eaten.”
“I’ve been hungry before and I don’t like it,” said Illeq. “I hope I bite him on the way down. Bite off that big stupid nose of his.”
“Can we stop now?” asked the salamander. “I’ve got no fire and you’ve got no more stones and we’re both tired.”
“One more,” said Illeq. “One more. The other thing about practice is you’ve got to do it until you’re sick of it, then do just a little bit more. One more stone!”
“There’s no more stones!”
Illeq’s night-vision was pretty good by now, and she had to admit that the floor of her little nook was as clean as a whistle. But the walls at the back were bumpy and jagged as anything, and with a wrench and a heave and a haul she snapped off an irregular lump the size of four of her fingers. It was black and smudge-soft in her hands.
“Here. It’s funny, but it’s a rock. Catch!”
The salamander caught it. It chewed, twisted, chewed, twisted, crossed its eyes and uncrossed them, then made a funny noise.
“What’s wrong?” asked Illeq anxiously.
The salamander continued making its noise by way of answer; it sounded a bit like a tree falling over. Then it coiled up on its back legs, reared back, and belched.
When Illeq was done patting the smouldering remnants of her left sleeve off her arm and inventing new swearwords, she looked at what had happened to the stone wall at her side. It was crying – strange liquid tears were beading on its surface, simmering out of the cracked rock and hissing against the floor.
“Maybe you shouldn’t eat another one of those rocks,” said Illeq. The salamander made a funny burbling sound that could have been agreement or maybe not. One of its eyes wouldn’t stop spinning, the other had fixed itself due north and wouldn’t budge.
Illeq stared at the dripping wall. The heat rising from it was already making her eyes sting and her breath wheeze. In a minute she wouldn’t have time to starve to death.
Maybe it was time for strange ideas.
“Could you try spitting this instead?”
The salamander crawled to the wall, succeeding after the third try and a nudge from Illeq’s foot (there went half her shoe). It licked it carefully, like a newborn fawn discovering its mother’s teats for the first time, then plunged into its task with glee. Its cheeks soon bulged and steamed.
“Ready?” asked Illeq.
It nodded.
“Now, follow my finger, and when I flick it, you spit it. Right?”
Nod.
Illeq raised her voice. “Hey! Hey you! Hey troll! Hey sleepy-bones!”
The troll’s fingers, grown somnolent over the past hour, twitched.
“Hey big-nose! Hey old stone-fart! Wake up and come in here and try to eat us, huh? You too old and fat? Too stupid and fat? Or just too fat?”
There was a growl that put a bear’s to shame, then out came the fingers and down came the troll’s face; teeth, nose and all. Its little eyes glittered at them from behind its snout as it snarled.
“Nice to meet you too, ugly,” said Illeq. And her finger flicked.
The mouthful of molten heat the salamander held was almost too quick to see – a blur of red and white that cut across her eyes for an instant – but the impact was unmistakable. The troll screamed its lungs out into their faces, lurched backwards, then ran off howling, nose scalded down to a little red nub and dripping melted stone from its face like white-hot mucus.
Illeq scrambled out into the air and breathed deep, feeling the taste of rock and powder leave her. It had turned into a steam bath in there. The salamander joined her after a few minutes. It kept walking into the mountain by mistake.
“My,” it said after a time.
“Are you alright?”
“My. Me. Yes,” it decided. “I’ve never burned that bright before. I’m not sure anyone has.”
“Weird rocks,” said Illeq with the authority of her age. “That was a really weird rock you ate.” She looked up at the sky. “I’ve got to go home. Do you want to come?”
“Is it far?”
“Not so far. Maybe.” She looked at the salamander’s little legs, saw the wobble. “Can I carry you?”
“If you possibly could.”

There was a lot of fuss that evening, and come the next morning everyone came up to the meadow to see the mess and make sure that any of it was actually true.
(The salamander came too, wrapped around Illeq’s neck. Its legs were sore).
They found the troll-wreckage, they found the burnt grass, and dripped on the ground, cold and hard, they found strange shining stone, frozen in the shapes that it had puddled on the ground in, like ice.
And then they looked into Illeq’s little nook and they saw a whole wall of it. Frozen mid-bead, just waiting to boil up and flow.

Illeq never did learn how to knap her whole life. She was kept too busy running and inventing and making bit by bit the funny little collection of tools, odds-and-bobs, and basins that let her and the salamander melt and mould and shape and sharpen up the strange stones they’d called ‘metal.’
And she was always very busy, because whenever her brother, or her uncle, or her father came down to ask if they could help, they were always given an answer by the salamander, in between its lunches of coal.
“Boys don’t forge.”

Being busy was worth it, for that.

Doubter and Doer are walking along just talking about things, along the borders of a swift little stream. Well, Doer’s talking. Doubter’s just nodding her head. Like she does.
Then Doer sees something, points out her finger. “Hey, ya’see that?” she asks.
Doubter shrugs.
“Look! It’s some humans! Let’s fuck with ‘em.”
“Why?” asks Doubter. It’s one of her favourite questions.
“Because why not? They’re humans, it’s so easy it’d be a crime not to. Let’s seriously screw with their heads. Let’s mess ‘em up.”
“Eh, sounds like a lot of work,” says Doubter.
“A lot of work – a LOT of WORK? To get humans to do crazy shit? Sister of mine, I bet you I can drive these humans crazy just by doing one little thing to one little thing. Bet you.”
“How much?”
“Bet you big time. Bet you huge. Bet you plenty.”
Doubter scratches her nose. Agreeing flat out to something just isn’t how she works, but she’s bored of walking. Probably. “Eh….maybe? I guess so.”
“Great,” says Doer. “Now check this out.” And Doer reaches right out and whacks a good chunk of rock off one of the hills that borders the stream, kerplunk splosh it goes and it rolls down and on and on for days until at last it comes to a stop right in the middle.
“I don’t see anything happening,” says Doubter. “I’m not sure you’re winning this bet.”
“Give it a minute, impatient child,” says Doer. “Just a minute. Ya’see, sister of mine, this river has two banks, and each bank has a farm, and each farmer belongs to a country. Human stuff. Just you wait a minute.”
So they wait about six years and then one summer in the middle of a bad harvest for one farmer his kids are getting hooted at by the kids from the other side of the stream. Nothing new, nothing new.
What is new is that they’re standing on the rock to do it, and they’re throwing mudballs.
So kids being kids they fire right back and whish swing sling it’s a war on.
“Lookit that right there, lookit that good shit, huh?” says Doer. “Barely past toddlers and they’re thirsting for blood. Innocence of children my left nip – even little big-eyed baby seals’ve got mouths like a needle factory, don’t we know that, huh?”
“This doesn’t look like too big a deal,” says Doubter. “I’m not sure you’re winning this bet.”
“Oh yeh? Lookit right there, little Billy-Bob JoJo McFuckhead just skipped a pebble off’ve his neighbour’s eyelid. Oooh, bet that smarts. Now the dads get a turn.”
And they do, and it’s a proper row. Shouting, yelling, stomping, waving.
“Wah wah wah. This is MY rock this is MY rock. Wah wah wah, this is YOUR fault this is YOUR fault. Sweet tune right?”
“I guess.”
“See, it’s that first argument that’s the big one. This is what’s gonna pay off big, just you watch. Get bigger than king and country and apple pie and really dirty sex, just watch. Nothing humans love more than this. Watch it.”
So the two farmers whine and whine and their neighbours whine and whine and eventually surveyors come down but it’s one from each country and they start getting in spats too. Nasty stuff and someone almost goes home with calipers stuck up each nostril. The surveys are concluded under sullen silence and armed guard. Armed, bored guards. The kind that spend their time talking shit at each other and eyeing up each other’s killing tools to see whose is bigger.
“Awww yeah. You watching this? You watching you lose? I hope you’re watching you lose ‘cause I don’t want any take-backs on this.”
“Doesn’t look like such a big deal to me,” says Doubter. “I’m not sure you’re winning this bet.”
“Oh really? Look again, fishlips.”
So now both surveyors do what they were going to do and blame each other. This, says they, is clearly the rock of my fatherland, my people, my one-and-onlies. The other guy is clearly an asshole.
And after four years that’s how you get an army sitting in a cornfield staring at its mirror image forty yards off. Which is what’s going on right now.
“Wait for it.”
A man arises. His jaw is set with purpose. History weighs on him and he can tell.
“Wait for it…”
He strides, and there is will and intent in every footfall. At this moment he is fully conscious of himself and the universe around him. The water splashes under his feet.
“I’m not sure you’re-”
“SHADDUP AND WAIT FOR IT.”
He stands at the stone. He places one foot on the stone.
He makes eye contact with a man on the other side at random, a man who is all men in a crowd, who is exactly as important as he is at this moment. In that flash of an instant, they both understand one another deeper than any other ever will.

He chucks a pebble right at that man’s forehead.

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww yeeeeaaaahhhh,” sighs Doer as the scrimmage obscures the stream. “Bet’s over, you’re done like din-din. Fork it over. C’mon, fork it. Stick the tines in deep and hunch those shoulders and fill the plate.”
“If you say so,” said Doubter. “But I’m not sure you’ve won this bet.”
“After all that? After all that? Why you saying stupider things than usual, sister of mine?”
“Well,” says Doubter. She’s always a little uncomfortable giving suggestions. “Well. Y’know. Maybe…”
“Yeah?”
“…You could’ve used a smaller rock.”