jamieproctor.ca

Arthur Helman wasn’t sure what crossed his desk anymore.
Oh, he knew the content as well as anything – requests, pleas, wheedles, beggings, simperings, wafflings, and simple bureaucratic twaddle – but there didn’t seem to be a good term for it now that all of it came in as electronic mail. Surely it couldn’t still be called paperwork?
Well, this morning’s appointment was a blessed relief from all that: an honest-to-goodness’-sake in-person meeting. A mixed blessing, of course, since normally an elaborate network of junior managers kept him discretely separated from all of that sort of thing with mechanical precision, but he was so bored that he was willing to pretend to be bored for half an hour as a break.
…Now if only he could remember what the fellow was here to show him.

*Ric-a-ric-ric*

You can tell a lot about yourself from what you think you can tell about someone else. In Arthur Helman’s case, he prided himself on his apparent ability to discern character through one’s door-knock. This one prickled his spine: it was just north of hesitant, west of incompetent, and only a few degrees wide of annoyed. It was the sound-based equivalent of a limp, clammy handshake.
“Enter,” he said.
The door slid open – just a crack, efficiency was at a valued premium here – and in sidled his appointment, whoever that was. It obviously wasn’t for a fashion position; the man looked cadaverous. Properly cadaverous, not its normal use as a synonym for ‘skeletal.’ There were lumps where there shouldn’t be, and a general appearance of swelling.
“Yes, yes, pleasure to meet you, etc.,” said Arthur, refreshing google repeatedly on his keyboard without raising his gaze and crisply pronouncing the period in ‘etc.’ “Take a seat Mr….”
“Salt. Porter,” said the man, who did not take a seat. “Dr.”
Arthur managed not to wince, but only just. The voice was thin, so very thin that it seemed to have been driven to whistles and screeches just to be heard. “Yes, of course. Now, what was it you had to tell me?”
“Show you.” Dr. Porter’s mouth moved compulsively, Arthur saw. It wasn’t easy to tell if he was trying to smile or eat his own tongue. Not just his mouth, too – his entire body appeared to be made up of nervous tics. “Hyptertensile fabric stronger than steel. Lighter. Many uses. Here you go.”
A bundle was deposited on Arthur’s desk without permission, about the size of his fist. With some mild misgivings, he picked it up and watched as it unfurled into a sheet of silky smoothness about the size of a tea-towel.
“Try to tear it. Hard.”
Arthur tired to tear it, and it was hard. He applied the corner of his desk, a pen-tip, and finally a pen-knife, and finally had to admit that it just wasn’t happening.
“Impressive,” he said. “And your request is?”
“Time space and labroom. Need more to make more. Prototype but no mass production yet. Need privacy. Nobody comes in. Nobody. Deal?”
Arthur didn’t even need a moment to think. Yes, for reasons he couldn’t articulate this was one of the most utterly repulsive humans he’d ever spoken to, but this was also one of the most marketable things he’d encountered in years, and he’d happily signed onto contracts with men who’d driven their best friends into bankruptcy over golf disputes. “Deal.”
The handshake was even worse than he’d presumed. Dr. Porter seemed to only comprehend fingers as things that flew out with as much force and speed as possible, and if a palm got in their way so be it.

Three months and three research assistants later, Arthur stood outside the door of Dr. Porter’s laboratory and spoke at him.
“The first says he wasn’t permitted entry. No explanation given.”
Dr. Porter’s brows convulsed, but no commentary was made. He was theoretically a good listener in that he never broke eye contact, but his apparent reluctance to blink sabotaged this.
“The second says she was refused entry three times – again, with no explanation. The third didn’t hear your reply, attempted to open the door, and says you quote ‘jumped at him,’ and screamed until he ran away. When security checked in, you said everything was fine and denied he’d ever been there.”
“He shouldn’t have come in,” whispered Dr. Porter. “You shouldn’t be here. Very delicate all very delicate. Critical stage could’ve had to start over. I need no assistants you should not send more.”
“Not even one? This isn’t a small project you’re on here. You’re supposed to be refining this thing until it can be mass-produced. Did you forget? One man can’t do that by himself, even with the budget we gave you. And that reminds me of the next item on our little talk’s agenda.”
Arthur examined his phone, which he’d laboriously learned to use over the course of eight months and several extremely patient grandchildren. He still felt that a folder lent these kind of moments more rhetorical weight, but carrying around that physical weight was a task best left to the him of a decade or two ago.
“The budget is gone. I realize that is what a budget is meant to do, Dr. Porter, but ideally there is some sort of book-keeping involved in the process. A receipt at least. Perhaps two. Where are your records?”
“Private.”
“Well, this is a private enterprise. Owned privately. By private individuals. Who are employing you to perform tasks that will make them money, privately. And if you are not more public to them about their private concerns they will throw you back into the public sphere very firmly and quickly. And where are the results for this?”
“Inside the laboratory.”
“Good. Show me.”
“Don’t come in!”
Arthur’s hand froze halfway to the doorknob, not least because Porter looked as if he’d have bitten it. He was tenser than a highwire.
“Delicate in there very delicate. Wait.” He slid in through the crack of the door as he always did, and left Arthur standing on the cusp of his own lab for three minutes like a child in detention. He would’ve been insulted, but he felt as though terrible things would happen if he moved.
Eventually the door creaked open – creaked? The place was only a decade old at best – and Porter emerged again, fingers-first. Clutched in the fingers was something silky and smooth, around the size of a napkin.
“This is smaller.”
“Different application different role different results. Emergency bandage naturally sticky surface applied to flesh speeds clotting very tough will hold you together from the inside out. Look.”
This drew Arthur’s gaze to Porter’s other hand, which he was startled to see he hadn’t noticed before, given that it was clutching a live, extremely agitated rat. The rodent was thrashing madly, teeth bared, yet seemed too traumatized to actually bite.
Porter’s fingers jumped, and the thing squealed. Red burst over his palm in the moment before the cloth covered it. Arthur hadn’t even seen him move.
“Anesthetic properties theoretically applicable but no luck so far slightly painful will have to work more to sedate patient.”
Then he was gone, and the door was shut again, shades down. There were no windows in this lab, Arthur recalled. He wasn’t sure if he’d have wanted to look inside, though.

Six months. Half a year of Salt Porter living under his roof; and it was living, he was sure of that now. The security cameras alone confirmed that he never left for sleep, and his few excursions were late-night errands to fetch big brown boxes without labels. Some of the un-noted budgetary expenses, no doubt.
He shouldn’t be there, Arthur was sure of it. Every month more and more leaked out – dripped out, more like, dripped and puddled under his desk and made him uncomfortable in his own skin. The security guards avoided the wing now. The adjoining labs had doubled their days off sick, ‘sick’ or otherwise. He’d have thrown the man out face-first by now, if it weren’t for the way every other month he was pulling out a sample for the board to drool over, a new use for his miracle fabric. A bulletproof vest, a tether, a net. The applications seemed endless, but he was so damned shy of showing them the process, and mass production was always ‘later.’
But this. This might be what he was looking for. It had taken a lot of phone calls, a lot of talking (fast AND slow), and at least one private investigator, but he’d built up his evidence, he’d built up his courage, and most importantly he’d sent a security guard ahead to open the door for him and get Porter out of his face while he carefully explained what was going to happen next. And then he’d never have to listen to that awful voice again in his life.
See, there? The door was open. His pulse was even. It was all fine, all ready, and to show how he felt about this, he thrust the door wider open still as he walked through, relishing its transgressive bang against the wall.
Well, would have. Instead it was a muffled thump. The room was a dimly-lit mess; Porter seemed to have coated every single surface with a thinly-woven trial version of his fabric – chairs, tables, cabinets, sinks… It was hanging from the damned ceiling for Christ’s sake. How did he get at anything in here?
Arthur peered at the huddled figure at its desk at the lab’s far end, the security guard standing resolutely at its side, and he shook it off. He could get the cleaning team in later, this was important. He pulled out his phone, cleared his throat, and spoke as crisply as he could manage.
“Mr. Porter. It looks like I got it right the first time.”
No reaction. Arthur began to walk slowly, like a shark cruising towards an idle surfboarder. “We checked, you know. It doesn’t matter how much pie you promise is up in the clouds, eventually we start asking who’s promising. How long did you think it’d last?”
Dead silence. Relishing the absence of the horrible little voice, Arthur pressed on. “There’s no ‘doctor’ Porter. There was a PhD student, mind you, although his name was Felix. It takes a special kind of arrogant to only change half your name, you know that? And a special kind of stupid to walk that far out of field. Your thesis wasn’t on material engineering at all, it was on – let me see here – ‘Genetics and Arachnid Intelligence in Jumping Spiders’ – and it never got published because it was speculative junk that led nowhere. Just like your work here. You’re not just a con-man, you’re an incompetent one.”
Arthur was really quite close now, and he was starting to grow irritated. Yes, Porter seemed to shut down at criticism, but he’d hoped for some spite, some fire. He’d anticipated seeing the security guard pin him down and drag him off by his ill-fitting collar.
“Whatever you were up to, it’s done. Anything to say for yourself? Anything at all?”
Porter didn’t even turn around.
“Fine. Take him out. His desk can come later.”
Arthur had only waited three seconds when it became obvious to him that something was horribly, horribly wrong. But he was a man who liked to be sure, and it was because of that instinct that he reached forwards towards the security guard and touched his shoulder.
The guard wobbled at his touch like a bag of jello, and something unpleasant and damp spurted over Arthur’s fingertips, bringing fiery pain and sudden numbness with it. He bite back a curse as he yanked his fingers back, watched the guard spin slowly in mid-air, suspended by thinly-transparent strands.
Porter. “What have you DONE?” he yelled.
No response.
Arthur supposed he’d been wanting to do this for some time, but was only just now admitting it. He balled up his aching hand and drove it into the back of Felix Porter’s skull with as much force as he could muster.
It sank in up to the wrist with no resistance. It felt like dry leather, and something tickled his wrist.
Arthur shook his arm, this time not bothering to stifle his swearing, and the body lurched free of the chair with no resistance. It couldn’t have weighed more than ten pounds, and it made a sound like dead leaves as it crumpled to the floor. Arthur himself, overbalanced, was not so discreet. He landed shoulders-first like a sack of bricks, eyes-wide. Which put him in a perfect position to see the ceiling more clearly.
Yes, there were sheets and strands and billows. And hugged in amongst them were shapes. Rats. Sheep. Mice. Test animals. Withered and dessicated like mummies, dry and empty. Wrapped up in fabric – in silk.
And nestled among them, hundreds and hundreds of little silken spheres.
Some were popped open, he saw, in that strangely clear vision that appears when the active mind is turned off.
“You shouldn’t be here.”

Arthur felt his heart leap into his throat and drag the rest of his innards along with it for good measure, yet still worse than the voice – not a voice, it had never been a voice, it was a hiss, a hiss elongated and mangled into a mockery of language – was the small tight click of the door shutting.
Dr. Salt Porter was there in front of it, standing large as life. His body twitching alive, their mouth gnashing. They were jumping out of their skin, tiny eyes glittering in the darkness.
As the increasingly obscured form leapt towards him, Arthur realized that he had been screaming for the last twenty seconds of his life. It was almost completely inaudible over the seething, hissing strum of hundreds of tiny legs rubbing together.
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE COME IN!”

On the eve of October thirty-first, within the last few decades or nearabouts, a small, angry little man waddled the streets of suburbia, swearing, hissing, and spitting to himself over his stout puffs for air. And though none of this was unusual in either behaviour nor appearance, the identity of the man himself was of note: he was a goblin. Oh, Ivrint fit in well enough as far as human looks went – perhaps his belly was a bit too round, perhaps his head a bit too bald, maybe his teeth were too crooked and spiky and his eyes sparkled too delightfully when in the presence of small evils – but it was all for nothing in the face of his voice: he talked so thoroughly through his nose that a head cold rendered him utterly mute, and there was no hiding this from even the most complacent, bored, lackadaisical suburbanite.
Fortunately, those same qualities of his neighbours lent themselves quite thoroughly to apathy, and so though almost anyone who met him guessed Ivrint’s identity before he could say ‘boo’ few cared even slightly.
Well, very few.
Almost no one.
Ivrint sighed as he neared his home – Jack O’Lantern pointedly NOT on display – and the drear reality of his doom sank down over him, slumping his shoulders even lower than their natural angle. Really, it had all seemed so reasonable to him at the time; what reasonable home-owner’s association would not permit a pillar of the community to fend off pests from their yard? Yes, the pests were pets, yes, they were cats, yes, nonlethal traps were encouraged but scarcely mandated, and yes, it was in poor taste to skin and eat the things on your front lawn, but he defied any man or woman to find a specific regulation in the book that he’d actually broken as such. The spirit of the rules had been violated, perhaps, but the letter remained pristine. This was North America, that sort of behaviour was meant to be celebrated, was it not?
Regretably, his punishment was as extrajudicial as his sentence. He was under no official obligations, penalties, censures, fees, or geasa. This was simple a friendly annual request by good honest hard-working friendly pillars of the community who would knock over all his garbage cans every morning for the rest of his life and steal his recycling bins if he refused to bow to their every command.
And it was only one command. Just one. A tiny, teeny, insignificant little command. But it was a command all the same, and the one thing a goblin hates more than not being able to order people around is being forced to do the same.
The sprawling mob in front of his home looked up from their stashes. Rough-spun robes fluttered in the air. Drool dripped from oversized fangs, eyes glowed, knives were brandished against the cool autumn breeze.
A single creature stepped forwards, a head taller than Ivrint and nearly as broad, its face smeared with crimson and hastily stitched together. “Let’s go, stumpy,” it said.
And if there was a second thing a goblin hated yet more, it would be human children. The more the hatefuler.

(A third thing, perhaps, would be peanut butter. The damned holiday was infested with it, and the scent always took days to fade from his nose)

Ivrint’s final stop before his home had been the general store.
“Cindy let go of the stop sign.”
It had been a small, simple purchase, but it was an annual tradition.
“I don’t care if you want to, we’re not walking down to Beachfront Avenue, that’s six miles and the little ones’ legs will fall off. No, you can’t tape that, nobody you want to know would be interested in paying for it.”
Also, a necessary one.
“Clyde, don’t open that gate; there’s no pumpkin and that dog will bite you. Leo, stop hitting Suzy unless you want her to bite you again. Teresa, don’t dare Francis to eat that, you know he’s diabetic and the police would be on you like fleas on puppies. Simon would you…”
Ivrint gagged momentarily, pulled out his bag of horrible throat lozenges that didn’t quite taste like cherries soaked in vinegar, and popped three into his mouth at once – one for swallowing, one for chewing, and one for sucking for ten seconds and then accidentally chewing. He’d empty the thing halfway through the night, if he was any judge.
“… put that d- okay good you already did. Hurts, doesn’t it? Well now you know why you’re not supposed to pick them up. No, Jess, we’re not allowed to play tricks, just take your damned treats. No, your parents won’t care if you tell them that I said that word because they say worse themselves. Tell all you like, just shut up. Oh, you want to tell them something? Tell them this: Ivrint Gattlekrik says your father is the fattest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve hunted denning bears. Your father is fatter than that. And genetics says you’ll be fatter still. That’s right, you eat that candy. Eat it through the tears, fatty. Your fat, fat tears.”

There was always a casualty, of course.
“Look, just put it back on the stoop. Yes, I’m sure they’ll notice; they put out a pumpkin, not ten pounds of smashed shell and guts. No, I don’t care. No, you can’t light the candle again, you’re too stupid to know how – no, I don’t care if you have your mother’s lighter. Hands off – OFF, Cindy! Cindy listen to me NO I AM THE BOSS OF YOU.”
And in the ensuring chase – of course there was a chase, of course there was, every damned year he ended up chasing some kid for some reason for some distance – it all ended as it usually did. The kids split. The kids vanished. And Ivrint stood alone in the middle of the street, one hand locked around the collar of Herman Gish, the tubbiest and least-aerodynamic of them all, and swore ‘till his feet turned blue. Occasionally Herman would chime in with an effort to rhyme along.
Eventually, Ivrint’s jaw got tired and he stopped with a creaking, wistful sigh. There was a job to do, or he’d never hear the end of it. They’d made enough of a fuss about a few cats gone missing, although he was prepared to argue that even a cat was a more enjoyable companion than the presence of Cindy Warburn. Probably. On most nights.
He looked down at Herman. The boy stopped mid-swear, his chins still wobbling.
“C’mon. You can hold the bag.”

Goblins are thieves. Everyone knows that who knows anything about goblins. And like most things that everyone knows, it’s not really true at all. It would be more accurate to say that goblins often like stealing things. It’s sort of a family pastime.
And like most pastimes, it had become a hobby, then nearly a sport. Now it was just one of those things you did. Most Americans followed baseball, most goblins kept an eye on America’s Most Wanted, and for largely similar reasons.
Ivrint could have gone pro back in his youth, a century ago. Nowadays he mostly kept his looting sack around for nostalgic purposes. Nostalgia, and Halloween.
He squinted upwards into the boughs of the tree. It was some sort of spruce that had long ago left its species behind in favour of becoming as large as physically possible, and maybe a little bit bigger. “C’mon down, Suzy.”
Branches rattled at him, followed with a hiss. He sighed. “No, Suzy. I know you’re not a velociraptor. And they don’t climb trees, awright? I saw Jurassic Park four times in theaters, I know this shit. Now get down here.”
The hiss rose to a screech, and a cone bounced off his bulbous nose.
Ivrint spat into his palms. “Awright, don’t say you didn’t have a fair chance.” He grasped the tree and shook violently. After a few seconds, a thought struck him.
“Oh yeah – hey Herman, hold that bag open, will y-“
Around then, Suzy struck him. Head-first.

Two blocks and five children later, the goblin sack was a good deal plumper and squirmier, and Ivrint a good deal sorer and angrier. Suzy had been just peachy – the average goblin skull was lacking in bone, using instead a sort of jelly-like cartilage – but half his head was one big bruise now, and she’d been bitey besides. He could still hear her hissing at him from the inside of the bag, where she’d clambered to the top of the pile. It reminded him of a rattlesnake.
“Get outta there, Leo,” he said.
Silence. The wind rustled down the street in a casual sort of way, sneaking through lawns and peeking in the windows for blackmail material.
“Leo, I’m going to count to five. Ready? Gonna start now, but it’ll take a while. One.”
He waited for a moment, looked up at the stars. Wondered if any of them had to deal with shit like this. “Two. Hey, Leo, you want to know something cool about that yard you’re hiding in? Three.”
Silence.
“That’s old man Murray’s place. You remember how he used to run that alligator farm, right? Four.”
A small splash.
“Well, when he retired, they decided they’d give him a bit of his work to take home with him, and that’s around when he installed that pool you’re standing next to.”
A noise somewhere between a rumble and a gurgle filled the night.
“Fi-”
Leo dove over the fence, muscled Herman out of the way with unnecessary force, and fought his way to the bottom of the sack. Ivrint snatched up the bag hurriedly as Suzy’s gleaming eyes appeared at its entrance again, but even the brief wrestling match that followed couldn’t dampen the haunting sensations of job satisfaction that had filled him at that moment.

An hour later, Ivrint would’ve given an arm and a leg (someone else’s, of course; he wasn’t stupid) to bring back that feeling. One two three fourteen kids in his bag – including Herman, who’d started whining about how tired his legs were – and no Cindy. His voice was growing hoarse, he was out of lozenges, and to top it off the sewers were alive with scurries and guffaws as the imps and bogeys and nasties rustled along their tiny tunnels, giggling and gargling to themselves with delight as they gorged themselves on extinguished pumpkins.
Ivrint’s face puckered inwards with un-delight as he considered the merriment of his near cousins. As bad as kids, they were. No doubt they’d get along like houses on fire.
Oh. Right. That would explain it.
Ivrint dropped the sack in the middle of the road for a moment (ignoring the squeaks, swears, and gut-churning growls – and fumbled in his pockets for a moment, eventually producing a single, jagged key that looked like it had been cold-forged from half a cobblestone. With careful bludgeoning love he hammered it into the nearest storm drain, wrenched violently, and dropped down into something incredibly unpleasant that called his mother something regrettable.
“Yeah, and same to you,” he growled into the face of the imp.
It gave him the wrong finger, failed to correct itself, then hoisted all of them at once as a salvage effort.
Ivrint rolled his eyes. “Right, right. You win. Where’s the kid?”
“Kd?”
Ivrint was round and slow, but his arms were whip-thin and much longer than they looked, which was how they made it around the imp’s neck before the end of this sentence. “Talk or squeeze. C’mon, even imps know this game. Pick one.”
“’lk.”
“I don’t hear it, so I guess I squeeze it.”
“T’LK!” squealed the imp.
“There, that so hard? Go on.”
The imp gabbled a stream of sewer addresses, navigator’s-marks, and tramp-signage that would’ve been indecipherable to anybody with good solid primate in their ancestry, then made a hasty retreat before Ivrint decided to bite its head off.
Not that he would’ve. Probably. He was all full on lozenges and nausea caused by lozenges, but then again a snack might’ve settled him.

Midnight was a dangerous time of night. Halloween was a dangerous time of year. The sewers were a dangerous place to be most anytime, at least if you were easily turned around and annoyed and lost your bearings and slid down the wrong pipe three times running.
Ivrint hadn’t done that, of course. It was something like six times by now.
He trudged down the latest in a series of tiny, cramped, mostly-rusted metal sludgetubes and wished the bag he was dragging would stop griping at least. He could hardly hear himself think, which was probably why they were lost.
“WAUGH!”
Or maybe not.
Ivrint looked up from his feet into someone else’s feet. A bit farther up and he made eye contact with something’s chest. If he nearly fell over backwards, maybe a chin would be visible.
“P’sswurd,” grumbled the troll.
“’Password,’” said Ivrint. It wasn’t a guess. It was a troll. Trying to get it to learn anything else would’ve made its head explode.
“’K,” it agreed, and it slouched back lazily into its burrow as he hurried past it into the main chambers of the undersewers.
Now THIS… this was a bit much. Ivrint lived up above, and he liked it. There was tap water on demand, sugary foods, and best of all, minimal lurking involved, which was a fine thing when you were as round and fat as the average goblin. Waddling was a far more effortless mode of transit, and one that seemed to be catching on in popularity among humans. He fit right in.
Down here it was different. Imps and bogeys and bograts and boogums all LOVED to lurk. Lurking was their bread and butter, their Christmas present, and their favourite colour all at once. It was what they were, not merely what they did. He’d tried sixteen damned times to get the little bastards to come topside to start some sort of co-op with him, and each time he got as far as explaining ‘sunlight’ to them before the shrieking and cowering began. They had less spine than centipedes.
Except on midnights. And Halloween. Halloween midnight especially. They didn’t get braver, but they certainly got rowdier and more moxious. Moxious enough to, say, kidnap a human child and pit her in a knife-fight with blunted butter knives against a hobgoblin.
Despite Cindy losing her knife, Ivrint noted that the hob was faring poorly. Most likely because she’d misplaced it somewhere in his left eyeball, just shy of the pupil. He felt strangely proud at that.
“Alright,” he shouted over the din. “Show’s over. Past midnight. Up and at ‘em. Cindy we are LEAVING. We are LEAVING NOW. We are LEAVING NOW or you WON’T GET CANDY. Are you listening to me?”
Cindy gave the grandest, slowest eye-roll possible and strode over to him with forced casualness, the squelch of her footsteps the only sound in the suddenly quiet and extremely staring hall.
“Into the bag,” said Ivrint.
“What-ev-err-r,” she said. One last, languid roll, and Ivrint was alone with a sack full of children and seven hundred and forty-nine point six extremely annoyed, bored, and curious bogeymen.

A chase scene followed, much of it paint-by-numbers, although it almost got interesting when the bottom of the sack – and Herman – almost got stuck in the mouth of the manhole Ivrint was trying to exit through. But then Suzy got loose, and after that the pursuit waned with remarkable speed. Ivrint considered attempting and then immediately gave up trying to get her to spit out the imp-finger that she’d claimed as a trophy; the girl had tough jaw muscles.
“Right!” he announced to the assembled children as they filed out of his goblin-bag onto his lawn, under the annoyed gaze of their parents. “That’s it! Halloween’s over, you all have candy, clear off. Pick whichever set of adults flinches the least at your funk and head home with ‘em, thank you very much, happy Halloweehaahahah can’t finish that sentence. Good riddance!”
He stomped up the door, slammed it, sat down to undo his laces, and fell over as someone opened it into his backside.
“WHAT?!” he shouted.
“Heyit’smeee…” said Cindy. Muttered Cindy. Cindy made some sort of a noise, at least.
“What d’you want? Go home. Eat too much candy. That’s what Halloween’s for, right? Treats. We already did tricks, you little hooligan. Go for it.”
Cindy chewed her lip and whined a little through her nose. “Liiiiiiiisten.”
Ivrint rubbed his head and tried to figure the bruise from the headache. This seemed to encourage her.
“SolikeIwantedtosaythankssohere’satreatbye.”
“What?”
“Treat! Bye!”
“What?”
Something bounced off Ivrint’s head, the door slammed, and he was happily, blissfully alone.
With a chocolate bar.

Of course the damned thing had peanuts in it.

Jose Adams looked into his webcam and exactly fourteen million five hundred thousand sixty-two faithful, loyal, patient, willing, paying subscribers would stare back at him. In ten hours.
He cleared his throat a little as his prerecorded guest-host startup line played, along with what he knew would be the catchiest jingle written in this decade.
“Good evening,” said a celebrity not worth remembering whom everyone knew, “and welcome to today’s mass broadcast: the forecast that even you can afford! If you’re too slow to catch this one, or you’re missing out on last week’s tips, gold subscribers get archive access! And remember, sharing prophecies without the prophet’s consent is theft, and everyone who does this for the next two years WILL be caught.”
This was a lie, but a very helpful one. It had increased the number of subscribers by several million, all of whom were gullible enough to pay for extra services.
“Now….here’s Jose!”
And there he was. He’d already taken in his breath, and as he counted out the seconds it left his body in a hiss of words.
“All parents whose social security numbers both end in ‘8,’ your daughters will feel blue this week due to green envy, causes may vary. If you are a white male between the ages of twenty-two and thirty who was born in July look both ways twice before crossing the street this month or run the risk of being struck with a semi-truck. Owners of cats that are both orange AND striped should keep them indoors to prevent rabies. A free tip for the gambling men out there: this week’s biggest celebrity drug scandal item will start with ‘C.’ On no account should any children under the age of ten step on sidewalk cracks this week; mother’s backs will not break but their ankles might due to faulty construction work. Construction workers, take the day off for a job hunt, your companies stand a 85% averaged chance of being immobilized by lawsuits and sunk within the next year. Do not trust anyone whose middle name rhymes with ‘orange.’ Begin buying low and selling high. If anyone promises you the deal of a lifetime, they’re crooks. Take your time over lunch but skip breakfast and get home fast. If you see a reptile, run away. Goodbye.”
Jose took off his headset and closed his eyes, basking in the invisible applause of exactly fourteen million five hundred thousand sixty-two loyal, willing wallets. It was like a hot tub for the soul.
“Viewership’s up this week, sir,” said one of the happy, underpaid interns he employed to tell him things he already knew. “Should we get Craig Watson on again next week to do the intro? He’s so well-spoken!”
“No,” said Jose. “He’ll be busy.” He bundled his coat into his arms and counted how much change he’d have. “I’m going to get a coffee and something expensive and baked. I’ll be back at twelve nineteen and forty-two seconds seven milliseconds to do our premium personals.”

Life was good, knew Jose, as he retrieved the most expensive baked object in a two-block radius – some sort of insane genius’s dream of a cinnamon roll. Well, maybe not in general, but his was. And what made that life so good was knowing exactly how long it would remain so: in his case, for the next seventy years minimum. Maybe longer if he got off his ass within the next two decades and started funding some serious science in that direction. Every other billionaire he knew did nothing but fuel lobbyist groups and private think-tanks – nobody ever thought big. Luckily, Jose was there to think for them. Just like he did for everyone else.
He closed his eyes, and bit into something soft and warm. As predicted.
The taste, however, was something else.
At the tail-end of a fit of dry heaves, still foaming at the mouth with spittle, Jose looked at his incredibly expensive, incredibly delicious, yet somehow foul, odorous meal. He looked, and he understood that not all of the white matter caked atop it was frosting. And then his ears kicked in and led his eyes to the source of the trouble: a white-winged cackler circling in the breeze overhead, somehow managing to leer at him through a beak.
A common seagull.

“It can’t be impossible.”
The man over the phone shrugged as he heard that. “It is. Always has been, always will be.”
Jose rubbed his temples and tried to forget the taste of guano, despite knowing that such a thing would not happen for the next thirty years of his life. “I can forecast a researcher in Antarctica and every single slum-dweller in Atlanta. I can describe the exact life-cycle of a given rat. I can read the future of the WEATHER. And you’re telling me that it’s impossible to foresee a seagull?”
“Common gull or black-backed gull?”
“Common.”
“Yeah, no chance. Black-backs you can see, it’s just a bit fuzzy and it’s mostly them murdering and eating smaller things. Commons are like trying to read a newspaper with your ears, through earplugs. And you’re in New York and the newspaper’s on Olympus Mons.”
“That’s lunacy.”
The man over the phone shrugged at him again. Jose had never bothered to learn his mentor’s name, but he was the wealthiest individual in human history by a factor too high to pronounce, possessing more money than all humans born before 1902 had ever accumulated. He spent most of his days on some nice islands he’d had removed from the geography and history books. “It’s how it is. Just accept it. Do what I did and pay somebody to hold a little umbrella over you whenever you’re outside. You’ll be fine. And don’t glare at me so much, I don’t want to have you assassinated. Bye.”
Jose refrained from glaring at the phone; he was the fourth of the man’s apprentices. He contented himself with cursing quietly, pacing rapidly, and spinning around to stare out the window at odd moments.
His intern knocked at the door to tell him that the first private premium personal sitting of the day would be dialing in within the next minute.
“Sir, the first-”
“Cancel that,” Jose snapped. “Something important just came up.”

It had taken him six tries to find a veterinary clinic that had a gull present. ‘Rats of the sea’ didn’t get much sympathy, even from animal lovers, and those were less than affluent. Fortunately, neither were many veterinarians, and it didn’t take much cash to persuade the parting of vet and bird.
Jose stared intently at the thing. It seemed to be smirking at him. You couldn’t smirk through a beak, right? But you couldn’t leer either. He was pretty sure of both those things, but less so than he had been that morning. That was a horrible feeling, and he was eager for it to be over – surely the proximity would do it, surely being this close would fix it. Close enough to touch, and everything got so much easier…
“I know you,” he told the bird and also himself. “I know you better than you do; inside, outside, inside-out, past, present, future and miscellaneous. I have personally counted the number of skeletons in our president’s closet – three and six vertebrae – and peeped the what-ifs of the life of Temujin, Genghis Khan. I know what I will have for breakfast for the next fifty years of my life. I can see all this, and I can see all of you.”
He reached out a hand and concentrated. The seagull bit him.

Jose’s second seagull was not as conveniently restrained as the first had been, but it did not have a broken neck. As he watched it peck at the scattered potato chip crumbs on the boardwalk, he felt a certain inclination to alter that. He’d been staring at the damned thing point-blank for two hours and nothing had happened. He would’ve had more luck prophesizing a stone, something he had a proven success record at.
Jose thumbed absently at the bandaid on his right palm as he considered his options. It was the first time he’d used one in over a decade. “What are you hiding?” he whispered to the bird.
It stared at him. It awrked at him. Then it turned its back and trotted away.

More manpower was needed, obviously. He hired the best men. Then when those men questioned his decision to have them tail seagulls he fired those men and silenced them with payoffs, blackmail, or assassination as needed. Then he hired men who were not quite as good but more predisposed to keeping their mouths shut, some out-of-work ecologists, and just about every amateur birdwatcher in the city.
“Seagulls,” he told them. “Let me know about the seagulls.” And in only a few weeks he did know about the seagulls, he knew as much about seagulls as any man alive, as any head of the National Audobon Society ever had, as much as a seagull itself. Entire libraries-worth of information on seagulls had been sent into his computer. Sometimes he found himself walking very nearly like a seagull.
And yet the one bit of information he actually wanted remained elusive. They seemed to mock him for it as he passed them in the streets, gazing down at him from the lightposts and storefronts with their pudgy bodies and beady eyes.
“I’ll have you soon, you’ll see,” he’d hiss at them.
And the seagull would ignore him, or more likely proclaim aiiek, aiiiek, awk awk awk awk awk, and a great anger would well up inside him like blood in a compound fracture.
A week went by. Two weeks. Two weeks with no progress. Something had to be done.

Jose Adams clung to the underside of the dock as the saltwater lapped against his spine and hoped that he had imagined the shark fin in the harbour, because he didn’t need the distraction now. He was so close to the nest of the Big One that he could almost taste it in his mouth, taste it like the befouled cinnamon roll that had led him on this path of destruction. A week of careful hands-on surveillance, days spent in meditation, nights spent painstakingly drawing together information from the charts in his office and his own eyes. All brought to this.
Now. Now he would see what they were planning.
Carefully, achingly, he used one hand to prise the tiny periscope loose from his wire-tight jaws and shimmied it up the largest knothole he could find. Then, trying to persuade himself that he was only imagining the swirl of water beneath him as anything other than normal wave action, he pressed an eye to the eyepiece.
The view was blurry. Then there was a beak in it.
Jose jerked backwards in terror, lost his balance, and plummeted with a blubbering cry onto the head of a mature female great white shark measuring sixteen feet six inches in length who had been examining him out of morbid interest. She reacted in the only way she knew how.

It was only a little bite, the doctors told him. Just a little bite. A few stitches, really. Walk it off in a few weeks, ha-ha, don’t worry.
Unfortunately, Jose Adams had not required his medical insurance for years, and so the bite inflicted upon him was much larger than one any shark could inflict. Combined with funding half a city’s-worth of private investigators, ecologists, and birdwatchers for almost a month and the angry lawsuits for breach of contract from his advertisers, celebrity clients, and staff, and he was somewhat short of pocket, as well as short of any clothing fancy enough to possess pockets.
Well, needs must. He could make it work, of course he could. He was a prophet, wasn’t he? Any man with that could make money hand over fist in five minutes, and once he saved up a little dosh through the backroom blackmail circuit he could have a new face, a new name, and a new career. Maybe he could even foretell his own death, and wouldn’t that be a kick?
All that was down the chain, of course. Right now he had other priorities. Top priorities.
There was one down the road, pecking at a donut, and Jose’s eyes narrowed.
“Got you,” he whispered.

Six seagulls later and he was no closer to finding one that would squeal. It didn’t matter what questions he asked, what threats he used, how many splinters he shoved into the webbing of their feet, they weren’t giving up a damned thing. His stomach gurgled with rage and indigestion from the half-consumed wad of French fries that he’d fished out of a trash can and called lunch.
“HOW’D YOU DO IT?” he screamed at a sentry atop the nearby coffee shop – possibly one he’d owned a controlling share of, once upon a month ago. “WHY?”
Awrk, it commented. It ruffled its feathers.
Jose felt the bile rise up in him again, and this time it didn’t settle down. He spat curses, spat liquid into the gutter, and charged the bird. Nothing else existed, nothing else mattered – not his future, not the city’s future, not the world’s future, just the future of the bird that stared at him with its beady eyes and yellow beak. He focused all his might and intellect upon that hateful, mocking little face, he tunneled down the world that he’d played like a piano to one atom of one blemish on a single key.
He saw it picking up a French fry from his outstretched palm.
And then, for a great and glorious moment, Jose Adams felt hope rise up in him, lifting him from the ground as light as a feather. His perspective spun, the world shone bright and strange in his eyes, and his heart fluttered like a schoolboy’s before the momentum from the semi-truck left his body and sent him skull-first into the asphalt.
Something hard jabbed his palm.

Jose Adams was buried on his birthday: July eighth. On a pleasant day with a bright sun, cool breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. And a lot of seagulls.

The tibia slid from rock to stone with the smooth, seamless grace of a galumphing walrus, nicking thrice-nicked epicondyles and chipping its shaft and visiting all manner of unspeakables upon innocent bone the likes of which it had all seen at least four times previously, so it was quite all right. Eventually it spun to a gentle stop at William’s feet.
He looked at it. It was the first thing he’d seen for half a hundred miles that wasn’t a rock or ice, so he felt he owed it that much.
“Hello there.”
William looked up and saw the first human he’d met for half a thousand miles. At least, it was probably a human. Last he’d heard nobody’s brought any chimpanzees up this way, let alone any completely bald ones.
It waved at him.
“Hello,” said William. “How are you?”
“Tolerably well, tolerably well,” said the thing on its rock-pile. “I’d be better off still if you’d care to toss that bone of mine back up here. It is my favorite and I miss it so dearly.”
William shrugged, kicked the battered piece of humanity six times until it popped up into his fumbling left-handed grasp, then gave it a gentle underhand toss. It smacked into the thing’s forehead with a sound like a melon being dropped in a basket and sent it gently cartwheeling down the same path that the bone had so recently taken, with even less elegance.
“Ow,” it said eventually.
“I’m sorry.”
The thing waved a hand. “Think nothing of it. The view up there was growing dreary anyways. Oh, my manners! I am nobody of nowhere in particular. And yourself?”
“Will McKenzie,” said William. “Have you seen the northwest passage?”
It squinted to itself. “Oh! That! I was looking for that! That was a while ago, of course. Before I found my bone and built my seat. I was much busier back then, all hurry hurry hurry. No time for rest nor chat nor bone. It’s no wonder my own quit on me, you know? I certainly never gave them a break. Why I’ll have you know I’d barely placed the keystone of my chair in place before my own two legs up and left me behind, the treacherous snakes, and my left arm soon followed. Of course, that was a few long times ago. But I digress: what’s your name again?”
“Will,” said William. “Have you seen the northwest passage or not?”
“Oh! That! I was looking for that! That was a while ago, of course. Before I lost my head and found my legs. Well you see hey now where are you going?”
“The northwest passage,” repeated William, adjusting the hauling straps across his shoulders. They were huge thick things that very nearly became a second coat where they crossed his chest.
“With that great sledge? You’ll never make it, take it from me. My sledge was twice as big and there were dogs on it. And now I don’t have dogs or a sledge and look at how well it’s all turned out for me, eh?”
William looked at how it had turned out for him. One of the rocks on the seat teetered and slowly made its way downwards, landing with inevitable but gentle force on the thing’s freshly-swelling cranial bruise.
“Do you think I could tag along? Please?”

The sledge was stuck on a rock.
“Pull on it.”
William pulled.
“No, no, no! Push it! You’ve got to push it!”
William pushed.
“Oh dear that won’t do that won’t do at all, at ALL! Wiggle it up and down, up and down!”
William wiggled it up and down.
“Maybe left to right then?”
The sledge’s runner snapped off with a tired squeak.
The thing shrugged. “Well, it was a good try. When’s lunch?”
William squinted at the horizon, where the sun hadn’t risen in three months. “Now,” he decided.
They sat down to eat, William with his bulky and inopenable canned food, the thing with its bone. It gnawed on it happily, gums smearing with love across familiar grooves so ancient that they half looked to have started healing over.
William had something better than bones. He had canned food. Modern. Lead-sealed. Air-tight. Unspoilable. Each had enough basic nutrition to keep a man three times his weight walking for three times as long as William could walk, which if William could still do math correctly was nine hours and six pounds four pence. He asked the thing, to be sure.
“Sounds good to me,” it said. “How’s it taste?”
William’s brow furrowed. “Don’t know. Can’t open them.”
“Oh. So what’ve you been eating?”
“The lead seal,” said William. “Soft. Chewy.”
The thing nodded thoughtfully. “Huh. So it is. It reminds me of the days when there was marrow in my bones, back before I found my other bone. That was a while ago, of course. I had a crew, a crew of men, human men, human men who spoke the same language as me and thought the same thoughts as me and laughed at the same jokes as me and grew their beards just like mine. Those were fine days, back when we had days. I think we had days then, now the sun just seems to go up and down.”
“What happened?” asked William.
The thing shrugged. “I can’t remember. But I don’t think it was very nice. We were on a job to find something very impressive.”
“The northwest passage.”
“Right! That! I was looking for that! That was a while ago, of course, when-“
William inserted the bone gently into the thing’s face, where it began to gnaw happily. Little flecks of bone dust came loose from its jaw in its enthusiasm.

They made camp that night by the wreckage of three schooners, each one slightly smaller than the other. It was the first fire William had seen in a hundred days and nights, and he had the thing to thank for it: whenever he tried to bend at the waist unbearable pain lanced through his hips up to his heart and his vision turned black with purple highlights.
“Purple?” asked the thing, dangling from his arms as firewood dangled from its arms. “What’s that?”
William pursed his lips – cracking open a dozen fissures in his skin in the process, which slowly coagulated with red matter in the subzero air – and considered the question.
“Like blue,” he said.
“Like blue?”
“But more red.”
“Huh. What’s a red?”
William pointed at his sores. The thing looked.
“Oh,” it said. “That. That’s funny! Haven’t seen that in a while. That was a while ago, of course. When I was looking for the northwest passage. Have you seen the place? Awful nice. I took the sea route, of course, but then the boat got stuck. That was a while ago, of course. A while ago, of course. A while ago. A while ago, of course. A while ago, of course. It was a while ago a while ago a while ago, of course it was a while ago, of course.”
It blinked.
“Excuse me. But yes, it was a while ago, of course. Are you headed there?”
“Yes. Where is it?”
“Right behind. Forty miles.”
William craned his neck over his shoulder. “I didn’t see.”
“Really? It was right there.”
“You could have said.”
“No I couldn’t. My lips were stuck together and I didn’t want to make a fuss.”
William sighed, a deep and elemental force that welled up from within the tattered leather bags that had once been his boots, or maybe his feet.
“Thinking of quitting, eh lad? Don’t be like that. You’re almost there. Go on, up and get ‘em, chin-first. The early bird worms the day is won. Come on now, let’s be off. Do you need a slap on the back to get you going?”
“Yes please.”
The thing’s hand came down against leather with a firm whack, sending a knuckle bouncing away over the lonely stones, already powder as it cartwheeled. William hiccoughed, spat out a tooth, and hitched up his harness once again.

“Come on.”
The sledge had been left a good fifteen miles back. The last runner had come a cropper sixteen earlier.
“Up and at ‘em.”
The cans had had to be left behind. William had tried to put some in his pockets, but he’d eaten his pockets a month ago in an effort to stave off scurvy with the lichen that had become enmeshed in their fabric. He’d put one in his mouth instead, and discovered that its contents had leaked out months ago. Even the lead solder had rubbed off.
“Go on, you. Go on!”
His left hand was making a godawful racket. The thing was in it, that was the problem. It had gotten very annoyed when he tried to leave it with the sledge, and the way he’d fallen over right after he’d uncoupled the harness seemed to be making it very angry.
“Look now what a world it would be if we all gave up like this. I gave up myself, you could too, but that was a while ago NOT NOW come on and get moving, you’re better than this!”
His right hand was much quieter. He preferred his right hand. It hadn’t moved more than dancing in the breeze since the sixth week he’d worn the harness, but it kept clenched tight around its burden and didn’t smell too badly. The salt air was doing wonders for it, when there was air instead of ice-wind.
Two things occurred to William then. First, that he must be dying. Second, that he hadn’t used his brain this much in more than a year. He wondered if the two were related at all.
“Up! Up for goodness’s sakes and peas and rice and all the little fish! You’re HERE! You’re at the northwest passage! UP!”
“Can’t see it,” said William.
“That’s because your eyes are shut, and you aren’t clever like me. I can see right through my eyelids! You can’t! Stop making me talk loudly, it hurts my throat and I don’t have much left to hurt! Go on! Get up! Go on! UP!”
William used the burden in his left hand to steady himself, opened his eyes, and took one more breath.

He was standing on a cold, icy, rock-strewn shore. Behind him was ice. Ahead of him was ice. Farther on was a bit more ice. But the little compass that dangled on his gutted lapel and the head full of rotted charts told him that this particular ice was ice nobody had ever seen before.
Well, nobody from… home. Had ever seen before. Yes.
Oh, that was right. He’d better hurry.
“Hello? Can you see it?”
No time for that. William dropped his left hand – ignoring the protests that resulted – and applied it to his right. With a vigorous yank he removed it, along with its burden, and struck the stony gravel masquerading as dirt with as much force as he could muster.
Fwip, and the cold breeze took it. The flag flared in its grip like a little second sky. The salt and cold had bleached it blanker than a blanket.
“Iclaimthisinthenameof-“ said William, and then that breath ran out and he died.

For a while he stood there very sturdily, then the cold breeze took him. Fwip.
Thud.
“Ow!”

“This reminds me of back when I had a seat. That was a while ago, of course.”

Lesser-known weather patterns of the western Versnillies, by Horace Wemple, T. C. H.

The Versnillies remain a much-neglected gap in our otherwise-comprehensive knowledge of the workings of sun, wind, rain and moon-glow of our fair planet. Not since the death of Albrecht Pentlecock had a researcher dared set foot in those wild and tropically moist lands, where the mountains are surly, the seas unruly, and the rivers sometimes manage to flow both west, east, and uphill at the same time. Such timid-hearted testiclelessness is not for the likes of a Wemple, and it was with the determination of my heritage that I set forth on a grievous expedition the like of which no man has endured and survived solely for the purpose of returning this priceless encyclopedia of information to YOU, my loyal, safe, warm, happy, timorous little readers, all of whom I treasure more than my life itself. No thanks are necessary, although they are appreciated mightily.
Thanks can be mailed to 4758 Templedown Byway, Herbertshire, Hillditch. No coins please.

The Wobbling Woodbeam
A strange, euphoric shaft of light that is only visible within the stark and august groves of the greytrees. As I appraised the sunbeam I stepped beneath it to better gauge the tempo and beat of its spectrum, and woke up on a poor Versnillian’s roof, from whence he had tried to wake me for three days before giving me up for dead and using me as support for his washing-lines.
Rated: 3 glimmers. Could use more backroom rhythm.

The Eastern Zoloft
A warm, ruddy coastal wind with a rich nose, wide sweetness, and a charming, fruity aroma. Best enjoyed with some cheese, a brisk hike, and some bear repellant, as the east coast of the Versnillies is lousy with the furry pests. A must for sailors and other salties.
Rated: Yalloman-5, leaning towards Yalloman-4Q(a) on a fine evening with some friends and maybe a slice of melon.

Globbids
These clouds are among the rarest in the world, found only on the sixth second of the fourth minute of the eighteenth hour of February 29th, if there happens to be a rainbow of no more than three shades present. Tragically I was unable to see these myself, but the old man who informed me of their existence had some lovely (though aged) photos that I was able to purchase for as little as $5 US. Please excuse the uncanny resemblance to a plate of mashed taties, it seems to be an artifact of the film’s age – along with the strange wire-like striations that appear to hover above it.
Rated: 4.8484784/11.7474 Deweys, 2 SubDeweys. Haven’t seen anything this splendid since the days of Robbleford and his magnificent pictures of Bigfog. Anyone ever find out what happened to him?

Magenta Walloper
A highly dangerous and notorious midnight gale that molested the town of Ziblok during my stay there, consuming no less than sixteen men. After the third night of hearing gut-rending shrieks disturb my observations of the local sunsets, I set about solving the problem and was able to lure the devil in with a set of live bait provided by the local orphanage. Suffice it to say that human intellect and ingenuity won the day as usual, though the spectators (poor, superstitious rubes!) seemed to think otherwise. I was able to give it a well-earned thrashing before it very slowly fled from my mangled yet triumphant figure, and only at the cost of some small number of extremities so unused and unimportant that I shall not deign to mention them here.
Rated: 0.2 Bobbits. A pipsqueak, a piker, unworthy of note in all respect. Pish-posh.

The Monochromebow
Some of the locals told me that I was in fact misled as to the colour of this phenomena and I was merely having difficulties adjusting to my new glass eye, but they were mere peasants with substandard IQs and I have qualified at Mensa-level, so I ruled them out as rubes and brought you, my loyal readers, news of this most intriguing phenomena. I even had time to count the number of bands (one) in its arch before faint-headedness from overexertion set in and I had to be wheeled back to intensive care.
Rated: Square. I apologize for the ambiguity, but my head trauma makes my memories of this entire three-month period rather splotchy, and I don’t believe I understood the concept of numbers at the time.

The Cripplebreeze
An annual event at midsummers that livens the hours and sells shoddy trinkets. During its passing cripples dance in the streets of all the Versnillies so that it may enliven their lifeless, swollen, dragging limbs. Superstitious nonsense and besides it didn’t work. My left leg remained absent.
Rated: Boorish hucksterism.

Berlog’s Bane
Yes indeed, dear readers, I have found what man once thought to be unimaginable, psychedelic myth: a cyclone that cannot be tamed! First documented in Albrecht Pentlecock’s 1834 travelogues, the waterspout that gutted his faithful batman and left his entrails in seven different seas still whirls atop the very lake that he witnessed it spawn from! Sadly, the years have not been kind to the poor thing, and it now measures an astonishing but unimpressive four feet. That said, I saw it disembowel and consume an uncautious sheep while I was taking notes, so its spirit remains commendable.
Rated: F-0.5. Ideal for the children.

Toothbreakers
A ramshackle and altogether unconvincing category of stormcloud inexplicably celebrated in the more economically-depressed areas of the Versnillies, where it is popular with infants, teen-agers, minorities, and the non-British. Altogether fine if you’re one of *those* sorts, I suppose. Takes all sorts. Even if their tastes are wrong. Which they are.
Rated: Over. And I still don’t see what’s so impressive about clouds that rain caramels and toffee. Good grey stout droplets, that’s what a raincloud’s all about.

That Fucker
My dear readers will have to forgive me for my inclusion of phenomena that are technically currents rather than weather or weather-related, but this riptide near my hotel beach really tussled my goddamned crumpets. The little blighter yanked me three shitbirding miles offshore before I could swim across it, and on the return trip a shark of unidentifiable ethnic background made off with my prosthetic leg, so I was left confused as to what slurs would be appropriate for the occasion.
Rated: 7.2(c) GigaBastards.

Kammadon’s Manglewhorl (AKA ‘The Limbmulcher,’ AAKA ‘Screamer of Death,’ AAAKA ‘Splatmaker’)
I’m told this is lovely, and I hear no reason to doubt it. Moving on.
Rated: No I’m good enough thank you very much.

The Fireside Drizzle
So called by the locals for its exquisitely delicate and slightly charcoal-scented droplets, each of which, in all their innumerableness, is no bigger than a solitary mouse-tear. The perfect strolling rain, each breath taken in this delightful shower greatly invigorates the lungs, producing a mos

This, the final edition of ‘Practical British Meteorology,’ is dedicated to Horace Wemple, T. H.C., from XX60-XX14 the editor, publisher, author, and chief reporter of the scholarly journal.
Mourners can take solace in that although his passing was sudden, he died happy, in nearly-adequate health, and entirely unexpectedly at high velocity. It is unlikely that he even noticed the gradual buildup of carbon monoxide in his tissues until his single remaining leg buckled and sent him headfirst into the sidewalk. And really, isn’t that how we’d all like to go?

Once upon a time – and a space too, for good measure – there was a young girl being tucked into bed by her mother, who was pouting. The girl, not the mother. Don’t confuse the two.
“What’s wrong, sweetness?” asked the mother.
“Life is confusing and hard,” said the girl. “I wish it made sense.”
“Well, sometimes it all seems that way,” said the mother, whose name was actually Alison. “But just keep trying your best, and I promise it’ll all become clear to you someday.”
“Night,” said the girl, whose name was Becky.
“Good night,” said the mother whose name was Alison.
And that was that, until a bit past midnight the girl whose name was Becky (called Becky) heard a strange curdled crying coming from underneath her door. At first she thought it was the Ancient Nibs, their primeval cat, but then it failed to rise to his familiar yodel-whine crescendo and her curiosity was aroused.
The hall was empty. The living room was quiet. And then, in the bathroom, half-tucked under the dryer, she found it. It was small and wrinkled and looked like a throw pillow that had put on three different wedding dresses and it was absolutely bawling its eyes out.
“What’s wrong?” asked Becky.
“The sinister Sock-King! He rules the Lint-land with a woolen fist! My family is due to be darned to heck underneath his regime! And I can’t find anyone to help!”
Becky pondered this. The way her mom had explained it, she’d figured it would take life longer than this to start explaining itself, and that it’d be a bit less direct. But what the hey, right?
“Lead on!” said Betty, striking her most dynamic possible pose. She pointed forwards with more than one finger, for extra emphasis.
“Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!” cheered the small pillow. “I am Fwump, sonlette of Fwopp. This way, this way!”
And as Becky crawled headfirst down the bathroom’s heating duct, she hoped that this would be over before breakfast. Even if it was a weekend, she thought her mom would get suspicious if she was still out at noon.

By nine-thirty Becky staggered out of the bathroom, bleary-eyed. In one hand she held a tattered towel, in the other her fist clenched a dislocated drying-rack rod. She’d also acquired the seeds of seven new wrinkles.
“Morning, sweetness!” said Alison. “Goodness, what’s that for?”
Becky stared at what six days ago she’d been told was the legendary sockslayer-blade, whose secret name she’d learned twelve hours ago was Woolsplitter, which she had only minutes hence buried in the black thread of the Sock-King.
“Dunno,” she said. “It broke. Where’s breakfast?”
And as she ate and dodged questions about the state of her hair, Becky reflected upon the many humbling and valuable life-lessons she had learned, often at the point of a hand-knitted spear. Well, she supposed it beat gym class.

“Psst,” said the voice.
Becky paused, one hand still ready to pounce upon the piece of kindling she’d selected.
“Psst.”
Becky straightened up and looked around. The woodshed was empty.
“Naw, down HERE.”
She looked down there. A mouse was twitching its whiskers at her. Or maybe it was a rat.
“Hey lady. Name’s Mike, I’m here on behalf of a couple of… associates. Can you do us a solid?”
“A what?” Rude, maybe, but the mouse wasn’t exactly being polite either.
“A favour. You scratch our back we scratch your back. YagetwhaddImean?”
“Igeddwhaddyamean. What needs doing?”
“Hey hey – not so loud, not so loud, hey? C’mon. We can talk on the go. Eat this seed.”
Becky had been told not to take candy from strangers, but seeds weren’t candy and mice were a pretty familiar sight in the woodshed. Gulp, swallow, and then she was four inches tall and chasing the mouse down a knothole, into a world of tunnels.

“Back so soon?” asked Alison. “What kept you out there?”
“I had to learn the meaning of true friendship and loyalty,” said Becky.
Alison sighed. “All right, all right. We can stop the sarcasm, both of us.”
Becky, who had just been nearly-betrayed and then not-betrayed six times by Mike before, during, and after an epic duel above a bottomless badger-burrow against a blind albino rat, said nothing.
Instead, she handed over the kindling.
“Thanks, sweetness.”
Nod.

Gym class was not fun. Particularly the rope. Becky could not climb the rope. But dodgeball was a close second, and dodgeball where you get targeted over and over was right up there, and dodgeball where everyone picks on you until you yell at them and then you get told to pick up and store everything while everyone else gets to leave early was slightly worse than the rope, unless you had blisters.
The gym closet was enormous. Somewhere in this maze of old, broken plastic and mangled, matted foam was a bin full of old soccer balls too malformed for the field yet still firm enough to bruise flesh on impact.
Somewhere.
She was almost positive.
Maybe it was behind this mat? No, wait, that mat.
“Shit,” she said. A small gasp came from behind her.
Becky sighed and rubbed her face. “Problem?”
“Yes.” The voice was timidity in a bottle.
“Need help?”
“If you would, please.”
“Right. Be there in a moment.” She threw the ball up in the air and watched as it slowly landed, bounced twice, and tipped over a small Everest of delicately-balanced lacrosse sticks.
She shrugged, decided against using more than one swear per minute, then turned to face the tiny, pitiful little catcher’s mitt that had addressed her. A small pink ribbon was wrapped around its thumb.
“Okay, ready.”

The bus home was quiet, although some of that could’ve been exhaustion. The polo-battle against Prince Goalpost at the wedding-funeral would have worn Becky out enough even if it had happened after a normal day, even after a normal gym day, even after a normal gym day with dodgeball. It had all been quite excessive, especially the part where she had to outrun a speeding fastball.
She slammed open the house’s door with the swagger of a ten-year-old. “Hello mom school was fine thank you today I learned that there are more kinds of strength than just pure physical prowess and that true bravery comes from overcoming your fear okay that’s nice when’s dinner?”
“Ow,” replied the door.
Becky moved the door, allowing the coat that was pinned behind it to flap free.
“By node.”
“You don’t have a nose.”
“Eaby fur yu to bay.”
Becky rolled her eyes as carefully as she could manage. It was dextrous to behold.
“Okay, okay. Fine. Look, are you busy?”
“Yes,” said Alison.
“Oh. Are you really busy?”
“Yes.”
“REALLY busy?”
“Yes.”
“Super-truly-really-busy?”
“Yes.”
“Super-truly-really-busy-with-sprinkles-and-whipped-cream-and-fudge-and-cherries-and-smarties-and-coconut-on-top?”
“Yes. I hate coconut.”
“Ah. Super-truly-really-bu-“
Alison sighed for sixteen seconds straight. It was the only thing she felt free to do anymore. “What do you need?” she asked.
“Well, there’s this magical button…”

“Wakey-wakey, sweetness! Rise ‘n shine! You sleep in too much nowadays, are you going to bed on time?”
“Mmmph,” said Becky to her pillow.
“Allliieee. Are you listening to me?”
“Yuh,” said Becky. She flipped over. “Yeah. Just tired. Overcame greed, learned that happiness is not money. Big day.”
“That’s… nice,” said Alison. “Civics homework, was it?”
“Sort of.” If she closed her eyes, she could still see the view from the zipperlin as she danged from its landing gear, while Oveur’s eyes darted from her to the falling Bling Button and back again. Right choice or not, he’d hesitated too long for her liking.
“Well, time to get up. Breakfast’ll be quick today.”
“Right,” said Becky. She rubbed her face three times fast, stretched, got up, and reached for her backpack to find it gaping and empty. Her window was open and a tiny thing that looked like a cross between a hobbit and a broom was legging it down the yard with her homework flapping in the morning breeze.
She sighed.

“Mom,” asked Becky later that day, rubbing a welt on her arm from where a mop-goblin had landed a lucky blow with its battleswiffer, “does life ever STOP teaching you things?”
“No, not really,” said Alison. “There’s always something new to learn, even for people who think they’ve seen it all. Is there something wrong, sweetness?”
Becky shrugged. Her rubbing took on a vindictive air.

One week, six Lessons of Friendship, three There’s More to Life Than You’s, five Learn to be Happy as Yourselfs, and a But Don’t Stay as a Jerk Either later, Becky woke up at midnight because she couldn’t hear a thing.
She looked in the fridge. Nothing.
She checked under the stairs. Nothing.
She looked in all the heating ducts and up and down the halls and in the bookcases and under the door-cracks and even snuck up into the attic, where she personally upended each and every single one of the incredibly dusty old boxes that her grandma had given then a thousand years ago.
Nothing.
Becky snuck back downstairs to her room, rolled into her bed with the grace of a pouncing lion, and slept like a stone for three seconds before she heard a cough and pounced back upright with the fury of an angry hippo, flattening her room’s latest invader to the carpet with one hand.
“Speak,” she hissed, a fist raised.
“Urk,” proclaimed her guest. It seemed to be a box of cereal.
Becky corrected her grip. “NOW speak.”
“needsomeonetoquestforthemissingcrownofbreakfastorthekingwilllosehisthronepleasethankyoufornotchokingme-“
Becky uncorrected her grip to give herself some quiet time, and began to think.
She corrected it again. “What is this about?”
“crownofbreakfa-“
“What is it ABOUT?”
The box blinked through watery, raisin-like little eyeballs. “Uhhh….”
She used both hands. “What is it about FOR ME?”
“Ack!”
Both hands slightly more gently.
“The-ah-ah-ah… the need for careful contemplation before making rash decisions on preformed opinion-ACK!”
Becky opened her window, ejected the intruder, then went back to bed.
Five minutes later she was in the kitchen, interrogating a set of forks.
“I said no,” she said.
“Nuh-uh,” said the larger fork.
“Yeah,” said the smaller fork. “Never said no, you just threw ‘im out the wind-URK.”
“No.”
They went out the window too. And then they started rattling its latch, and then came the strawberries, and soon it was two hours past and there was a small mob in her room shrieking and clamouring and yammering and jumping and
“ENOUGH!”
being very quiet.
“If we’re going to do this,” said Becky, “this time, YOU’RE going to listen to ME. And you’re going to do it NOW. Get it?”
Nods.
“Good. Now go to the kitchen and arm yourselves.”

Six minutes later, the first boot hit Breakfast Kingdom soil and the most ruthless conqueror ever to grace its milky fields follow suit, her army of enslaved Spoonlings at her back. Few books gave precise records of the war, for most citizens fled screaming rather than bear witness to its crimes, but most reports placed the Enemy at roughly four-foot-nine, with burning eyes and a fierce intolerance for gentle homilies. Her flag was a ragged box-top, and its pole was the latest in a series of hesitant, halting endearing sidekicks to attempt to gift her with humble homespun anecdotes of simple, sweet morality. She plunged the land into a thousand-year state of darkness from which it never truly recovered, and it was soon absorbed by Luncheonea in a blatant act of imperialist aggression.
Becky slept sound and safe for six hours and had her first happy schoolday in half a month. She walked back home humming a Spoonling war-hymn as her mother looked up.
“Hi sweetness. You look chipper – learn anything at school today?”
“Just one thing,” said Becky. “How to say no.”

“The world is ending,” Ikka told his parents.
“The world is ending,” Ikka told his six siblings.
“The world is ending,” Ikka told his friends and near-relations.
“The world is ending,” Ikka told them all. “And it’s ending soon.”
They all laughed at him, or yelled at him, or ignored him, and then when he persisted he was thrown off the spine for his troubles and chased away to sulk out of the eyes of right-thinking people who were trying to eat their meals of delicious parasites in peace.
All but one person. Ikka hiked himself up on his little claws and spread his wings and took himself off and along to the very edge of the world, where home ended and the Strange began.
“They didn’t listen to me,” he said.
“Told you,” said the world.
Ikka looked down into one big, black eye beneath him. It failed to focus, clouded by cataracts and the soft red glare of the setting sun. “But they should have listened!”
“Most people find talking more pleasant. Hard to talk when someone else is talking.”
Ikka scraped at the world and himself at once. He was not a very pretty person, and this did not add to his appearance; already he was criss-crossed with scratches and cuts from his own claws. “But the world’s going to end! You’re going to end! There’s got to be something we can do, but they need to listen!”
“They’ll listen. Eventually,” said the world. It blinked, slow as a glacier. “Just wait and watch. You’ll. See.”
Ikka shook himself. “Even if they listen, what do we do?”
“You. ‘ll see.”
“See what?”
The world blinked again, slower still. This time it didn’t finish.

The end of the world was much faster than Ikka had expected, but still oh so very terribly, awfully slow.
First it shook under his feet as muscles that had held their grip for decades eased into slackness. Then came the groaning as bones ground on bones ground to powder, with the uneasy whistle of moving air as the horizon slid off-center.
And last of all, there came the crash.

The Night That Never Ended started immediately, although of course nobody knew that was what it was called at the time. All they knew was that the world had ended, gone cold and cooling still underneath their feet.
Some denied it, tried to cling still and not move, hoping against hope that it was just another seizure, another sudden bout of sleep, a severe fit of the limbs. Some abandoned hope and fell down to the dirt, wings and eyes empty. Some took to the sky and spun higher and higher in crazy circles, shrieking and staring, hunting frantically for the world, where had the world gone?
Soon, the question was answered. The night grew fangs and claws and hungry eyes and poured into the void left by the world. The dirtbound were trampled out of carelessness or killed for idle sport; the deniers fled or were consumed along with the world’s own flesh; the screamers grew weary and blundered through thickets, headlong into waiting mouths and bellies.

The Night That Never Ended ended, and the dawn rose on a worldless place, a worldless place with far fewer than had seen the sun set. Ikka was huddled with them, the last of them, stranded on a treetrunk that smelled of bark and bitter leaves. He welcomed it. Anything to obscure the stench of blood that seemed to have eaten into his brain. The fear and flight of the dark had torn his stomach into emptiness, and already he was craving the taste of parasites.
“We need a world,” he told his mother.
“We need a world,” he told his two siblings.
“We need a world,” he told his friend.
“We need a world,” he told them all. “And we need it now.”
The few who could look at him looked blank. The rest stared at their feet, or the sky, or the dirt down below where the bones littered the forest floor.
And so Ikka spread his wings again and took flight into the emptiness above the dirt, looking for a world.

Through the trees and under the trees above the brush and into the glens and hollows flew Ikka, and underneath him he saw dirt and the things of the dirt. Sometimes a scuttling at the edge of his vision would fill him with hope, but then it would scurry under a bush or behind a root and he would see it for what it was: not a world at all, but a tiny thing searching for a place to hide. He felt a kinship that disturbed him greatly.
Come midday Ikka sat on a branch and probed for insects in its bark. They tasted like rot and damp, and his claws sat awkwardly on the cold brown shag that should have been good grey scales shot through with the warmth of sixteen tons of flesh.
He missed the world. He shut his eyes and tried not to whimper too loudly; his snorting was growing distracting. Then came awareness, and he looked down.
A thing was feeding at the ferns at the base of his tree. What it was he did not know, but it was bigger than he was, and right now that was all that he’d ever wanted.
“Hello?” he said.
It rolled its eyes lazily in a circle. After some minutes, one of them settled upon him.
“Are you the world?”
It shrugged placidly, sending the vertical plates along its back into a gentle wave. Its mouth did not pause in its quest to consume for a second.
“It could be that you’re the world and don’t know it. May I land on you?”
Shrug.
Ikka landed, and felt hide underneath him for the first time in what felt like a thousand days. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine that the world had never ended.
Except…
…except he had to close his eyes. The moment they were open, everything went wrong. This world was too small, its back was too crowded. The plates were broad and many, and the finest places on the spine were rendered squished by them. There would barely be room for them as it were, and what about when the hatchlings came? No nest could stay stable on this narrow back. And with the dirt so near, he didn’t trust it to stay safe. Certainly not with this world guarding them. It seemed barely aware of itself, let alone him, let alone dozens and dozens of fledglings that would need a wary mind to ward them in the dark.
“I am sorry,” said Ikka, “but I was mistaken in my eagerness. You are not the world, and I will not trouble you further.” And with that he flew away, wondering if the thing had even noticed he was there at all.

Up into the hills and over the hills and down the dunes raced Ikka and underneath him he saw the dirt vanish, replaced by blue water that he’d never imagined, as far as the eye could see. It was a river without end, and he hovered fearfully over it, looking over his shoulder for what he’d never imagined to be comforting: the sight of dirt. Then a gust of warm air from below sent him spinning head over tail, squawking with alarm.
A deep, guttural coughing sound. Something was laughing at him. Ikka peered downwards and immediately mashed his wings for height: the thing whose eyeball was leering at him was half-submerged, but its teeth were nearly as big as he was.
“Be careful!” he admonished.
It laughed again. “I didn’t see you there, little speck. And I’ve never seen the like of you before. How do you catch fish to eat when you’re nearly plankton yourself?”
“I don’t know what a fish is,” said Ikka, “and you’re being most disrespectful and unkind. I am looking for a world to live on.”
“There are worlds and worlds,” commented the thing. “Mine is this water. Yours is what, the empty sky? Don’t you get dry up there?”
“No,” said Ikka, and a wave of nostalgia swept through him. “My world is skin on flesh and bone under blood. Scales farther than I can fly on a wingbeat and a foot-tread that keeps us far above the dirt below. A place where delicious parasites pop fresh from its pores and the hatchlings nest on a back wide enough for six to groom snout-to-tail. That is my world, and it has ended, and I am looking for a new one.”
“You sound to be a disreputable lot of ride-hitchers,” said the thing. “But did you say parasites just now? I suffer from them myself, and I would be obliged if you would pick at them.” And it rolled itself about in the water so that Ikka could look at its back, which was indeed mottled with little things that were not part of the natural blue-and-white of its hide.
“Certainly,” said Ikka uncertainly, for the thing was so very large and the water was larger still. But he set down on the cold, damp surface willingly enough. It was slippery under his claws, and colder than he would’ve guessed. But the parasites were real – great crunchy things that built their own nests around them in spiral towers – and he prised them out with vigor and vim. It had been too long since he’d eaten something that felt fat and bloody.
“Ahhh….” sighed the thing under him. Its lungs were even greater than the world’s had been, and he felt nostalgia tickling at his wingtips again. “That’s better. How many of your kind are there, little speck?”
“Dozens,” said Ikka. “No. Just a few dozen now.”
“You are welcome to my back if you wish it,” it said. “That feels so much better, and you work more quickly than the little reef-fish. Will you not stay a while?”
Ikka thought it over. It wasn’t the old world, but it was a world, and that was so much more than there had been just minutes ago. “Yes!” he cried.
“To the shore, then,” said the thing. And it dove into the water with the swiftness of a serpent, leaving Ikka to drown.
“Help!” he shrieked. “Help! Help!” The sky was dropping away above him, the blue was filling up his eyes. He tried to call, but could only taste rain and a deep, bilious salt. His head was more water than air. Then the ripple from the tail of the thing swept underneath him, stronger than the currents, and he was sent flying into the air in a tangle of wings.
Ikka turned his fall into a swoop just inches from the water again, and barely found the strength to cough.
“Are you there?” said the thing, surfacing beneath him again. “You seemed to have wandered off.”
“I think,” managed Ikka. “I think. I am sorry. Mistaken. You’re not the world. You live where we never. Can.” How in the name of anything had it done that, had it brought itself under the water? Madness! You might as well travel over the sky!
It sighed, sending another warm gust of air into his wings – and a good thing too, he was still mightily wet. “Suit yourself. A pity to lose such cleaners, but worse things happen at sea. Good luck to your world, little speck.”
“And you, yours,” said Ikka. And with that he flew towards the sight of dirt, coughing whenever he wasn’t shivering.

Past the shore and over the dunes and into the basin flew Ikka, watching the plains roll by underneath him, scanning for any hope of a world. Here was where the world had wandered when his mother was born, he recalled. He’d heard stories of it, of places where no trunk dared rear itself, where the sky was in sight at all times. It made him feel nearly as small as the water had, especially when the sunset caught the clouds on fire and painted it all red as blood.
He needed a roost, but there was nowhere high at all. Then luck – a crag of stone, toppled and unmoving in the crimson of the evening. Only barely better than dirt itself for a lair, but he could squeeze himself into a crevice and call it enough for the night.
The crevice opened an eye as he alighted next to it. “Hello,” said Ikka, after he remembered to breath.
Muscles moved underneath his feet and he felt that whatever-it-was was smiling. “Hello,” replied the thing. “What are you doing here, so far away from home? Where is your flock?”
“Hiding,” said Ikka. “I am searching for a new world for us to live on, as our old one died. Do you know of any places such as that?”
“Worlds…” mused the thing. “Tell me, what kind of worlds are these?”
“Huge ones,” said Ikka. “Strong bodies on strong legs with tails that are as big again as the rest combined and muscles that never tire. And delicious parasites.”
“Mmm,” it purred. “Well, perhaps we can help each other. I am strong, strongest of all I know. My legs are the swiftest of these prairies, my tail is my rudder that controls my sprint. I can hound and harry for hours if I must, but if I must I have failed for my kills are measured in minutes. As for size, I have a large pack whose backs you may also claim besides my own – ah, you will have room for sixteen children each unto sixteen generations before you run cramped! But there is one thing, one very small thing you request where I falter: I cannot help you with parasites. My kind are cleanly.”
“Oh,” said Ikka.
“But perhaps I can give you other meals,” it continued. “You could be very useful to me, and that would be repaid in foods richer than you know. Tell me, how high can you fly? How far? How fast?”
“Very, widely, and speedily, respectively,” said Ikka. “Why?”
“I am strong, and I am fast, but I cannot move forever without rest,” said the thing. “If your kind finds my meals for me, I will feed you on the scraps when the kill is done and my young have consumed their last. You may think parasite a fine meal, but I swear to you that you have never fled on flesh bred from bones. The young are tender, the old are meaty, and both produce a mountain of meat beyond your imagining! Swear to serve, and I and mine will provide for you and yours with bounty.”
Ikka couldn’t believe his luck. Not only a world found, but a world of endless feasts! Not only would there be room enough for all and then some, but on a family that would grow even as their two families prospered! Even as they hunted, even as they killed, even as they brought low… others.
“What will we hunt?” asked Ikka.
“Prey,” said the thing. “Vaster than us, but slower and clumsier. Broad of back and small of head. Their limbs are pillars and their brains are as trickles of water. Scarcely worth mentioning.”
Ikka felt the spring that was his own mind freeze solid. “They are worlds,” he said.
“Prey.”
“Worlds.”
“I told you twice and I tell you again: they are prey.”
“I tell you now and forever,” said Ikka, “I tell you this: they are worlds. And you want to kill them. How many of my own people will we render worldless and alone if we aid your hunts? How many more families must take up service as your pets for shelter and food?”
“They are not your pack, and not your concern,” said the thing. “Your moral qualms are tiresome. Swear unto me.”
“I am sorry,” said Ikka, “but I was mistaken. You are no world. You are a world-killer, and I will not have other worlds die so that my family can claim one. No, I will not swear to you. Not now, not until the never-ever comes.”
And because Ikka was not entirely empty of sense he said this as he flung himself skywards, which was just barely fast enough for the teeth of the terrible thing behind him to clash at his tail-tip rather than his neck.

Across the endless plain flew Ikka, wings struggling to capture any hint of dying thermals as the night cold rushed in, eyes searching the growing dark for a place to land, any place to land at all that wasn’t the dirt where the awful thing with the teeth and the glowing eyes and most importantly of all legs that seemed as tireless as it had boasted.
“Yield,” said the awful voice that seemed to have death seeped into its every word. It was below – where? He couldn’t see.
“No,” said Ikka. He might not have said it at all; his ears were numb with aching cold and tiredness.
“Yield and be forgiven. Continue and be made a toy. My children learn to hunt. Wingless, you would be a useful plaything.”
Ikka tried to put breaking bones and tearing membranes out of his mine and continued forwards, ignoring the ache in his limbs. He’d flown too far and fast on too little. His stomach was screaming even as his muscles trembled, and his mind was fast-filling with a fog as thick as the blackness that had eaten up the night sky. Even the stars were gone, as vanished as if they’d been consumed by some awful beast.
Then it hit him.
Ikka slid down it and fell down to dust, his snout feeling half-cracked. At least he could see the stars from below down here in the dirt, where there was nothing to block the sky and break his face against.
The stars vanished again, replaced with teeth.
“Your last chance,” said the world-killer. A single toe larger than Ikka and his siblings put together shoved him against the obstruction that had ended his flight, pinning him above the dirt by half against his own body length. “Swear to me and swear utterly, and you will keep a wing. And swear now.”
Ikka stared past the teeth and tried to think about things that weren’t now, about times gone by when the only teeth there were belonged to the world. Simple, humble pegs that stripped leaves clean from stems and never spoke hard words at you with hot breath that stank of meat. A mind at a head on a neck that made trees seem small, that could stretch farther into the sky than six wingbeats could take you.
The sky was moving.
Ikka giggled into the teeth of the world-killer.
“What answer is that?”
“Both,” said Ikka. “I will not serve you. But I have done as you asked.”
The world-killer may have said something to that. It may have denied it, it may have inquired of it, it may simply have cursed and bitten off Ikka piece by piece.
But it did none of those things, because that was when a tail with the weight of a world behind it came sweeping down from above and struck it across the side with a sound like lightning breaking in half. Ikka’s ears nearly bled from it; the world-killer went spinning into the dark from it, and he started laughing and laughing and laughing.
Something large moved, and he was looking into a smaller, kinder set of teeth that were deeply familiar. Younger, but familiar.
“Hello,” said Ikka. “I am looking for a world to live on.”
“Hello,” said the world.
And Ikka knew it would be alright.

It was Nap Hakell that started it, but it wasn’t his fault. If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been someone else.
But it was Nap that day that took that shot at that doe, and it was Nap who missed a clean kill and took the poor thing right in the leg instead.
You can’t blame him too much for that, he was never any real huntsman anyways, just a man taking what he needs wherever he finds it. Can’t blame him too much for that, can you?
So off Nap went, following the blood, since there was so much of it, and up and up he climbed through hills and around them ‘till he clawed through a thicket and into a glade that was full of what he wasn’t looking for. No hide nor hair of doe nor arrow, just three things:
The first thing was nothing.
The second thing was a big pit. A deep pit. Carved through dirt and turf and into rock, bigger than a man’s-height across, unless it was a tall man.
The third thing was a pile of gold next to that pit. It was a little bigger than Nap was.

It wasn’t his fault, right?

Now, Nap was a generous man and besides he couldn’t carry all that gold by himself, so he went and found himself his very best, closest friends, the ones he could trust the most, and he swore them never to tell a soul as they started divvying up that loot.
And they didn’t! They didn’t tell a soul, except for those very best, closest friends of theirs, the ones they could trust the most. And they swore them to secrecy, just like THOSE friends did with THEIR friends, and that was why in half a week’s time there was a camp full of maybe three dozen man pitched around that glade and that well, arguing and crabbing and grabbing and complaining. It was hard to tell which was getting shorter faster, the tempers or the gold-pile, and some hotheads had already started flashing knives around. So everyone was pretty happy when on the fifth day of the trip someone got up and looked around and saw a heap of gold next to that well that was just as tall as he was, right on top of the little piddly pile that had been left after last night’s scrimmage.
“Hot damn with ham in a sandwich!” he yelled. “Lookitthat! Someone get Nap!”
And there was cheering and hooting and hollering and hugs shared between men that had last night pledged to slit each other’s gizzards and everyone was so happy that it took almost four hours before they found that they had no idea wherever Nap had gone to.
He wasn’t in the tents, sleeping off his booze.
He wasn’t picking firewood, out past the picked-thin thickets.
He hadn’t gone home, where his wife was asking pointedly what they were up to.
Point of fact, Nap Hakell was gone. And his friends were sad and doffed their hats, and they split up his personal pile – one of the biggest ones – into five pieces, to be shared between them and his family. Because Nap treated his friends well, y’see? Of course he did. Nobody said otherwise.

A week later the pile was smaller still, the camp was bigger still (a little rickety pub was halfway through construction) and there was a lot of grumbling, a lot of hope. Maybe it’d get bigger again, said some. Maybe miracles can happen twice. Maybe we’ll get more.
Maybe it was a fluke, said some others. Maybe Nap did it and it’s all over now that he’s gone. Maybe we’ll spend it like water – I seen some of you doing that – and maybe we’ll all go home come two more days and it’ll be deader than a dream. And people shushed them, but didn’t cuss them, because all they were speaking was what everyone was thinking. And maybe if someone else was saying it that meant you could ignore it. It was a nervous time, and hell on a decent man’s liver – which led to a similar, smaller hell being inflicted on his bladder, which led to lots of men doing what little Heg was doing and taking a good long piss down the side of the well while trying to listen to the echo. Wherever that went, it went deep.
That was all normal. What wasn’t normal was what happened next, which was when Heg got a little bit too fancy and tried to stretch a bit too far and down he went, screaming and waving and screeching as a whole crowd ran up to see the fuss. He landed hard and he landed bad, and up came some babble about a leg or an ankle or a knee or something. Whatever it was, Heg had broke it, and he was calling for ladders, rope, cranes.
Well, they’d help. Some of them were Heg’s friends, some of them thought hauling folks out of trouble was a good pattern to start, some of them were bored. And they scared up some rope and were just about to lay it down when Heg screamed again – one, two, three times – and then stopped real fast.
And then up came a shower of gold, glittering bright in the dark against the campfires.

Well, that led to a big talk.
All of them agreed that they had to keep going at it. It was dangerous, sure, but so was life, right? At least this way you got your gold. No way were they stopping. They just had to fix it.
So they put up a big tall fence around the pit with nails and boards and sticks and logs and old doors and half of someone’s run-down-barn and they put a bar made from a whole tree on the only door in or out that took their six strongest to budge from its cradle, and they hauled that gold out double-time and locked it up every sundown.
Six days later they woke up and a whole tent was missing, with Hod junior, Hod senior, and Hod very senior all at once. Gone.
That led to a bigger talk. And that led to shouting. And that led to a fight, and in that fight a man named Gid stabbed a man named Elt right in his eye. He said he’d been aiming elsewhere, but nobody liked him and nobody cried too loud when he was tied up and chucked in the corner out of the way while they thought up what to do about him.
There were more men around that weren’t really anybody’s friends by then. Too many mouths telling too many secrets to too many ears.
So they all talked into the night about the pit, and about Gid, and eventually it all just blended together into a world that made sense. They needed that gold, like it or not. The pit would take people, like it or not. They needed to do something about Gid, like it or not.
So they took that rope and they took Gid, and they put him down there and plugged their ears to the sounds. And what came showering up from below but more shining metal.

From then on it all just kept going the same. But it was bigger, and had better suits.
The secret ran off as the town sprouted up, and when the word got loud the town grew into a city. A city that shone under the sunlight and rolled over the hills, where every home was a mansion and every man was a rich man that paid out-of-towners in golden pennies to groom his grounds.
It was a place for merry-making, for partying, for freeing cares and dancing and singing and eating on plates that were gold because why wouldn’t they be. It was a city that lived.
But not a night city. As the sun went down and the sky turned dim and the shine wore off the balconies, each and every one of those rich men would walk inside, put out their lights, pour themselves small drinks, and go to bed early with cotton wool in their ears and minds fixed on sleep. And they would drag their feet as they woke, clinging to their fuzzy dreams for fear of what they might hear as they woke.
The prison’s walls were fearful many. The prison’s doors were frightful thick. The prison’s vault was awful deep, and them that dwelled in it were the ones who’d run out of words to use long ago, and ears that would choose to hear them.
But no matter how many walls the city put between itself and that pit at its heart, they could never quite be sure that it was quiet.
So they made louder music, and more brilliant buildings, and fancier suits, and they smiled even more widely under the sunlight. And when they saw the people with tattered knees that lived in the shady corners with sad lines at their mouths and tired eyes they lectured them – in friendly words – and when they saw them again they warned them – in stern language – and when they found their persistent woe too much to bear they charged them – in formal terms – and they were all taken down to the prison, past the walls and walls and walls being built, and they were put away to moving gold, and they were forgotten where they were, which was nowhere important that needed mentioning. Ever.

It was a beautiful city, and it knew it, and that encouraged it only onward and upward. It never stopped, never halted, never paused in its glory except for the quiet night-time, when everyone turned quiet and shut themselves away.
In that quiet, when nobody was looking, when nobody was listening, was when it finally happened. And because of that, there’s only so much to say from what we have. And what we have is so very little of what was.
The hills were scraped bare, the mansions dust.
The parks were splinters, the flowers shrivelled.
The paths were torn and broken to bright flinders.
The prison was gone, the walls all burst.
And at the heart of it all, the city’s heart, where nobody ever looked and nobody ever listened, was the well, torn open from the inside. It was wider across than a quarry.

It had done so much for them all, for so long. But they’d forgotten that just because it took from them, didn’t mean that it meant to give back.
But you can’t blame it too much for that, a thing trying to take what it needs wherever it finds it.
Can you?

Back in the oldest days – much, much older than the old days – people were better, you know.
No, not just better manners and things. That was the old days. Pay attention to me. They were BETTER. Stronger, nimbler, sturdier, swifter. Especially swifter!
Now, what made that change, you ask me? Well of course, it was all the fault of the young people.

Back in those oldest days, the strongest, nimblest, sturdiest, and especially swiftest of all the people were Foot and Hand. They were sisters, and they were each the proudest, happiest, most boastful people you could ever do meet. Especially to each other.
“Sister,” said Hand one day to Foot, “I swam up a waterfall backwards today. With one hand.”
“Not bad, sister,” replied Foot to Hand. “I ran laps around the mountains today. And after each lap I jumped up to the tallest peak and down again. Took me until lunch to hit an even hundred.”
“Showoff and a liar besides,” said Hand. “You’re far too slow to do that.”
“And same to you,” said Foot. “You never did that with one hand. Your hands are too small and weak for such speed.”
And because they were sisters it wasn’t five minutes before both of them were screaming and shouting and promising never to talk to one another again and then breaking the promise to curse at the other and so on and so forth, up until the racket got so noisy that their father couldn’t sleep a wink. “That’s enough!” he said. “If you two have to keep your parents up all hours with your fighting, you can do it somewhere else. Somewhere very far away. Why don’t you go for a race? Then you can fight about something different and maybe quieter. Far away.”
“A race around the world?” said Foot. “She won’t stand a chance. Done!”
“A race around the world?” said Hand. “She’ll be left dead in the water. Agreed!”
“Where shall we start?” said Foot. “Up by Big Bend Mountain?”
“You’re off your head,” said Hand. “We begin in Kana Creek and head southeast, to the Hichkaloara River.”
“A water-race? Nonsense.”
“A land-race? Ridiculous.”
They argued and fought some more and ran out of new swearwords so they made new ones and at long last they agreed that each would race as she saw fit.
“After all,” said Hand, “it’s all that running that’s made your feet so slow and clumsy. Like an elephant’s.”
“And your swimming has swollen your arms with water,” said Foot. “They are as fat and floppy as hippopotamus’s forelegs.”
And with that it was one, two, three, go. Foot took off so hard her footfalls made half of Big Bend Mountain come down, and the splash of Hand into the water washed out half of Kana Creek and straightened out all its bends from there to the sea.
Now, these sisters were the best at everything. I told you that. And so it was no surprise when they began to use their magic to spy on one another.
“Earth,” said Foot as she ran. “Hey you, listen to me. You go underneath all the places, even the big wet ones. You keep an eye on my sister for me, and let me know if she’s gaining.”
“Sure thing,” said Earth.
“Water,” said Hand between strokes. “You paying attention? You’re everywhere in the air, so I hope you are. Just tell me how quickly my sister’s coming along. I don’t want her passing me.”
“Can do, will do, and done,” said Water.
So they looked. And they thought. And because they were looking at the same race from different angles, and because they weren’t very bright – no brains, you see – they came to different conclusions. Well, the same conclusion.
“She’s getting closer,” they both said.

“What?!” said Foot. “Bah! I’ll solve that.” And she spat and hissed at the dirt and kicked it. The clod of spit flew up, up, up, up high into the sky and broke apart into the air, where it hissed down into the mouth of Hand as she drew breath.

“The sneak!” said Hand. “I can put a stop to that.” And she mumbled and cursed and bubbled into the water and shouted out so loud that it hummed down into the rocks and came soaring up through the soil into Foot’s pounding legs.

So it was that at the end of the first day of the sister’s race, they both stumbled a bit.
Foot was just leaping over a sea when she felt her feet turn fumbly, and when she landed she almost turned her heel. “My legs!” she called out. “What’s happened to my legs? That cheat, my sister! I’ll fix her!”
Hand was turning ‘round a cape when her arms got sore and she saw how small they were. “My arms!” she shrieked. “She’s withered them up! I’ll turn her inside out and tie her up with rocks!”
And both the sisters got angry, and if there’s one sure thing about angry, it’s that it goes with bad magic like salt and pepper. Hand splashed and the ripples spread, Foot stomped and the world trembled, and the next set of curses that went sailing ‘round the world were twice as nasty as the last.

At the end of the second day, Foot was too warm. She slowed down and mopped her brow, crinkled her forehead. She was sweating.
“Water from the skin?” she said, drowsily. “That’s good. Too warm. Too warm! Why, I could stand in the Sahara skinning mosquitos all day long if I felt it! That sister! She’s gotten worse!”
Meanwhile, as the sun went down, Hand was huddling herself as she paddling, teeth clicking like beetles. “S-s-such a strange s-s-shiver,” she hissed. “Helps t-to keep off the c-c-old, though. Cold! COLD! I’ve never f-felt such a thing! She’s a-awful! Awful!”
So they kept going, and they kept scheming, and cursing, and by this time the world was looking more familiar again. They were angry and bewitched but the last leg was in sight, their home was just a few miles away, and this made they try twice as hard – and curse twice as hard.
“Take that!” spat Foot, and she snapped her teeth shut on the sky so hard it twitched.
“That for you,” snarled Hand, and she blew a breath into the air so hard that it tickled the mountains black-and-blue.
These curses were the strongest curses yet, and they were as quick as the sisters. Before a minute’s minute had gone by, they were doubled up under the nastiest magic they’d each ever heard of or made.
“Whoooshhh,” sighed Foot. “Lung are. Hurting. Maybe maybe I should. Take. A. Breath. Er.” She slowed down.
“Ow,” whispered Hand. “Ow ow ow ouch. My shoulders, my legs, my poor arms. So sore! Maybe I should stop and stretch. Just for a moment.” And she slowed down.
And the nature of slowing down when you’re good and tired – as those two sisters were, for the first time ever – is that it’s hard to stop. And that’s why when I walked outside the next day to start the cooking-fire, I found Hand and Foot side by side in the bushes yards from the finish line, passed out hand in hand like they were four years old again. Tied.
It was so cute that it almost made me forget to be angry at them, because those curses of theirs had bounced so hard around the earth that they’d landed on EVERYBODY. Nobody could jump up mountains anymore, or swim oceans, or pull themselves up by their feet. And it was all the fault of those two young people.
And my husband, of course. I told them not to listen to their father, I did. But nobody listens to me!