jamieproctor.ca

“Now you just stay here,” said Mom. Cole swung leadenly in her hands, watching the sandbox come closer with a vague, disconnected interest. “Just stay here and have fun for a while, okay?”
Then she left, and Cole proceeded to do as she was told. She was, after all, five years old.
She piled the sand up and knocked it down.
Then she drew pictures in the sand and smudged them.
Then she dug a big hole – a REALLY big hole – and as she was preparing to fill it in, she heard a noise at the edge of her head, so tiny it was barely a buzz.
Cole looked around. No noise. She looked up. No noise.
She stuck her head in the hole. Oh, there it was! And it was louder, too!
Cole crawled down the hole. It was a tight fit, but she was small and determined and wasn’t old enough to worry about structural supports or caveins or anything like that, and besides there was a light down there, a glimmer as faint as the buzz that had turned into a hum that made her teeth tickle. Then it was brighter, then nearer, and then Cole pulled herself up and out and into the middle of somebody’s picnic.
“Ow.”
Four separate small hands removed the jug from her head simultaneously while one very large and wrinkled pair pulled her clear of the ground and onto a soft blanket. It was red, she noted through the lingering ache in her scalp.
“Feeling alright?” asked the owner of the hands.
“Yes,” said Cole. Then she remembered her words. “Thanks you. Who are you?”
The woman shrugged, and Cole watched the lines on her face scatter as she smiled. She was very old, older than Cole’s grandma, who was the oldest person in the world. “Nobody in particular. How’d you get here?”
‘Here’ was soft. Something green that wasn’t quite grass underfoot, under a blue thing that wasn’t a sky, with stalagmites that were pretending to be trees, or maybe the other way around.
“A hole,” said Cole.
“I can see that. Well, if you’ve come for a visit, you might as well stay for a little bit. Besides, I could use some help babysitting, and you need at least four for a proper round of hide-and-go-seek.”
Cole nodded. This was a true thing. And so she ran and hid and tagged and laughed and spent a long time down there in the cave, until she heard the thud of grownup feet.
“Come back if you’d like,” the old woman told her, as she scurried back down her tunnel. “We like visitors.”
And Cole remembered that, all the way through the lectures she got on wandering off in the car on her way home. And she did visit, and often, because it was so EASY to do. All you had to do was dig a hole, any hole, crawl a while, and there you were again, popping out of the ground in a cave like a summer meadow, ready for freeze tag or snacks or really almost anything, because there was a whole village down there in that little place, with small people who spoke soft words and always were patient with her.
It was a nice place.

It WAS a nice place, but it was so small!
Cole towered over the buildings. She loomed over the stalag-trees. She was even bigger than the old woman, and that had taken her ‘till her last growth spurt. Nothing was good for hide and seek anymore, and besides, that was for babies. She was bored, bored, bored, bored! It was hard work finding holes that could fit her anymore, and once she got in, she wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.
“I’m bored,” she told the old woman. “Bored, bored, bored, bored! I’m not even sure coming here is worth the effort.”
“Yes, I can see why,” she said. “Why don’t you go exploring a little? Perhaps you’ll find something new.”
“But I’ve BEEN everywhere!” said Cole. “I’ve been down the meadow-cave and up through the wood-tunnels and round and round and round the cavern of streams! There’s nowhere left!”
“Not in the upper caves, no,” said the old woman. “Here: take my cane and knock on the side of the biggest tree in the meadow. Go on now.”
Cole rolled her eyes a lot, but she didn’t have anything better to do. So you can imagine how surprised she was when the soft brown rock of the stalag-tree slid away like parting silk, revealing a ladder made of hard grey stone that Cole took down three steps at a time, sliding the last body-length on her palms and grinning through the sting.
It was dark down there, in the middle caves.
“Helloooo?” she called. “Helllooooo?”
“Aieee,” responded someone. “Help.”
“Rawrgh,” added someone else. “Rrrrooowwrrrll.”
Cole followed the voices and came upon a most disconcerting thing: five large angry men that looked like beetles crossed with lions crossed with athletes from her brother’s MMA magazines. They were holding up a much smaller and less alarming man by his ankles and repeatedly dunking him in some sort of vat.
“Hey!” shouted Cole.
They looked at her, and she realized that all those terrible cartoons she’d watched when she was a baby were good for something.
“Lunch break’s over,” she said. And then she ruined it by giggling.
The men were hard to read because they only had about a fifth of a face between them, but as a group they were not impressed and immediately ran at her. But Cole was ready, and more importantly Cole was slightly larger than they were – something that none of them seemed to be used to. Oh, they pinched and punched and bit and beat at her with their hands and feet, but they just weren’t strong enough to give her more than bruises. She’d had tougher playground squabbles back in fifth grade.
Also, possibly due to the strange shapes of their snouts, none of them had ever encountered a head-butt before. Cole was happy to bring innovation and enlightenment into their noses, and after the third man had reeled away and spun into a wall they decided they’d had enough, and lit out faster than a half-burnt match.
“Thank you,” said the less alarming man, who Cole realized was actually not alarming at all and had a rather adorable nose. He’d used the time of the brawl to reclaim his clothing, most of which, alas, was sodden in gravy. “I’d have helped, but you seemed to be doing alright.”
“No big deal,” said Cole.
“There must be some way I can repay you,” said the less alarming man, futilely adjusting his soaked shirt, which seemed to have shrunk a few sizes. “Come to my parent’s house, and we can get you some food at least.”
“Huh?” said Cole. “Oh! Yeah, food. Great! What’s your name?”
His name was Azit, and his parents were a king and a queen, and their home was a very small and polite sort of castle. Which was half the problem, the other half being the ant-lions who had crept in through the walls of the middle caves over the years. Each apart from each other wasn’t so bad, but combined they made a few problems.
“They’re not so bad, really,” said the queen, as she was showing Cole to the Royal Staircase.
“They tried to eat our son,” reminded the king.
“Well, maybe a little bad,” she admitted. “They’re perfectly respectful if you can shove them off, but we’ve had problems with that.”
“Large problems,” said the king.
“We could use someone to help with that.”
“A hero, say.”
“See you soon!” they called up after her, as she hauled her way back into her yard.
And they did. They saw Cole week in and week out for years, and they got what they wanted. She beat the ant-lions until they gave in and turned to vegetarianism, she halted the underbear invasions, she bested the fearsome darksquid, and rescued Azit from kidnappers no less than seventeen times.
She could never get annoyed at him for that, though. He was cute when he pouted, and besides, it was all one big adventure.

One big, grand adventure. That was what Cole had thought life would be like as an adult. Well, first they chained you to a school for a few years, one with harder homework and more vicious results, and then you went to work in a cube somewhere, doing Very Important Things for Very Important People.
Much of that work involved staring at the ceiling and waiting. Cole was doing that very thoroughly, and had managed to catalogue, index, and file every square inch of the panelling and ventilation system within her sight, losing herself in the cheap tiling and crooked grates, the mites and motes of dust. It seemed to get bigger as she watched, until she was almost falling in, dropping through the gaps in the vent…
…All the way down through the roof of Casa Mezzo, and half-onto the meal that the royal couple was enjoying.
“Ow, argh, urk,” said Cole. “Oh. Hello. Ah. Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Six years,” said the king, retrieving the lower third of his wine glass.
“Sorry; I was busy. School and then work and then and then…sorry.” Cole attempted to tame her hair with her hands, and succeeded only in angering it. “How’s Azit?” she asked, desperately searching for a way to salvage her manners.
“Oh, he’s fine, fine, fine,” said the queen. “He did, ah, get married.”
“Oh,” said Cole, with some relief. She’d been wondering how to explain her fiancée. “Well, that’s nice! Very nice! What a lucky girl. Is she nice?”
“Yes.”
“Well. That’s good. I’ll, uh, just be going. I’m sorry about this, it looked like a lovely meal.”
The king shrugged. “Dull as ditchwater.”
“Yes, the country’s been deathly quiet ever since you drove out Impraxxus the Endless Night,” sighed the queen. “Very peaceful. Very dull. It’s bliss. And you know, you could use a bit of that bliss. Let me show you the Royal Staircase.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t come down it the usual way, it was sort of an acci-”
“No, no. The OTHER Royal Staircase.”
It was a slim little thing tucked away in a room barely big enough for a broom closet, and it creaked under Cole’s weight. But she held her breath and kept her tread study and before she knew it sand was whispering under her bare feet as she stood on a calm purple beach underneath a glowing sunset in a place with no sky.
“This,” said the queen, who’d taken off her crown and put on a nice bonnet, “is a proper place to be.”
“Mind if I visit?” asked Cole. Down the beach, a young couple was playing tug-of-war with a friendly shark, and losing. The breeze smelled like strawberries, faint and calm.
“It’s not my beach. And I’d love it. The book club meets down here Friday nights, and I could use someone else who hates romance novels.”
And Cole still hated romance novels, and always did, so that was nice. She came down to the lower caves more than just Fridays, whenever the world got too exhausting and the days got too dreary and whenever she could let her mind wander for a while, turning five minutes of forever into hours of calm. And it worked, and it dropped her blood pressure – although some of that was the honeymoon. Cole’s wife was as determined a vacationer as the queen, but much more personal about it.

She could make the strangest places feel as cosy and personal as your bedroom, but there was only so much someone could do with a hospital bed. And besides, the old dear got so tired nowadays, and after three hours of happy times she’d nod off with her hand in Cole’s and stay there until visitor’s hours ended.
Not that Cole minded. She didn’t have the energy to make noise nowadays. And she had her ways to fill empty hours, she still did. Even if she’d nearly forgotten them while Emma and Jacob were growing up – good lord, she’d had some sympathy for her own mother after that.
Cole fixed her gaze on the gap in the window that led out into the summer night, walked up to it, and slipped through into the lower caves on a day nearly as pleasant as her last had been. Calm waves on a calm sea under a calm wind with dozing figures bured in sand to their chins, basking in a soft glow. She walked along the beach, kicking seashells and watching them splash.
It was nice. It was restful. But it was a little too quiet. Lord knows Cole had gotten enough bed rest over the past year to fill centuries. Maybe she couldn’t move too fast herself anymore, but she could at least live vicariously. Just a little.
She kicked a seashell and stubbed her toe.
After some violent swearing, further careful prodding revealed not a seashell at all, but a hatch. And under the hatch, a passage.
Well, what was one more trip?
Cole crawled, then Cole crept, then Cole squirmed, and at last, at the end of the tightest squish she’d been in since the car accident back after Jacob was born, Cole heard something buzzing at the edge of her hearing aid, twitching on the tips of her pupils.
Then light and sound, and she tumbled head over heel onto something soft and green that couldn’t be grass, out of a sun without a sky.
“Oof,” she declared, and dusted herself off, brushing away the offers of help from concerned villagers. “Ouch! Wouldn’t want to do that again. Tell me, which way’s the tunnel? I’ve got to be going now.”
The tunnel was too small.
“Damnit. Well, which is the largest tree? Just find me the cane, and I’ll-“
There was no cane.
“Oh fudge. Where is it? Where’s the old woman?”
Gone away? But her house was empty, so…
…There Cole sat, whittling and worrying at the head of a stalag-tree-carved cane, singing silly songs to herself and minding the minds of the village’s young, because they weren’t near big enough to mind themselves. As proven by how many times their little hands reached eagerly for the handle of her carving knife, or her chisel, or her hot mug of tea, or…
“ENOUGH!” she told them. “We’re going outside! Out! You are far too busy with your fingers for house and home today! Your lunch will have to wait until you pack this basket, and pack quick or we’ll leave without it!”
So they did – children listen when food is at stake – and they left. And it was quiet out there in the meadow, and peaceful (almost too peaceful), right up until the moment when the jug of water went THUD. Then “ow.”
Oh, thought Cole. Of course.
And as she reached down into the little burrow next to their picnic blanket, she smiled a little bit, and was happy that she’d never really bothered to learn all that much about the cave. Otherwise she would’ve spoiled all manner of surprises for herself.
“Are you alright?”

It was a really boring day, so boring it stuck out like a sore thumb. That’s all I remember. I was wandering around the internet on a dead Sunday and being bored at everything in a spare hour that felt days long, refreshing pages and comments and inboxes and hey look, my sister sent me a video.
‘LOOK’
Okay, sure. I looked.
It was footage of frogs from nature programs overlapped with a short, stupid song.
Okay, sure.
That was three minutes wasted. The other twenty-nine passed slow as molasses until noon rolled around and I found the motivation I needed to drag myself downstairs and go get coffee from someone who pretended to be friends with me.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey there.”
“Hey,” I said. I couldn’t remember his name but that was okay. “Give me the thing.”
“Sure. Hey. You seen that video?”
“The what?”
“The thing with the frogs.”
“Uh,” I decided. “Huh. Maybe?”
“Shit is HILARIOUS. Hey, remember when the one big red one is puffing out its neck, and the music goes all doo-DOO-doo?”
“I guess?”
“Yeah!” He did a little dance to show me the moment he was talking about but I had my coffee and didn’t care anymore, so I nodded and showed my teeth a lot and left.
I ran into my landlord on the steps.
“Hello!”
“Hey.”
“Have you seen that video?”
“What video?”
“With the frogs!”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Isn’t it just wonderful?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The red one with the neck is great.”
“Isn’t it JUST? Oh, do you mean the one at 0:43 or the second one at 1:12? Or the purple-red one at 2:28? “
“Yeah, that,” I said, and then I mumbled a lot and escaped upstairs. I had more shit to not do.

The next day I woke up with the phone ringing.
“Hey!”
“It’s two AM.”
“Yeah! Hey, it’s Theresa – you seen that video I sent you?”
I indicated to Theresa that I had seen a video with frogs in it.
“That’s great!”
“Yeah. Right. G’ni-“
“You DID watch it, right?”
“Yeah, su-“
“Did you forward it?”
“N-“
“Do that! Do it before you go to bed – mom HAS to see this. Oh, and Jeff, ooh, and maybe Ann, and Tim, and –“
I hung up and slept a frogless sleep ‘till noon, when I woke up to the sounds of voices. I raised the window and saw people on the street singing the frog song in choral harmony, hands linked.
Sugar helped. I came into work five hours late and found the building empty except for the janitor.
“Where’s everyone?” I asked.
“Gone singing,” he told me. “Tone-deaf myself. Can’t help or I’d be with them. Hey, you seen the video?”
“Yeah.”
He grinned and started humming. I fidgeted with my phone, said something, and left.
The buildings were empty and the sidewalks were full and everyone was probably going to get frostbite. I asked a paramedic about this and he told me it was fine, just keep singing and it’ll be fine. The guy on the stretcher asked me if I’d seen the video so I told him yes and left while he was busy coughing.
Home was better. I closed all my mailboxes and changed my email addresses to avoid the unending flow of links to the video and tried to get some news, but nobody’d put up anything on any site besides 5/5 reviews of the frog song. Somebody had tentatively attempted to put pictures of new frogs over the song, but he’d been evicted and shunned in the cold so I guessed that wasn’t happening.

The next day I woke up to a knocking on the door before the sun came up, and when I opened it there were cops there.
“There a problem?” I asked.
“You seen the video?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“How’d you like it?”
“Fine.”
“What length was it?”
“Three minutes?”
“What happens in the last four seconds?”
I tried to remember some of the advice I’d read on a website run by aging anti-fascist activists who exchanged recipes for charcuterie. “Am I being detained or am I free to go?”
“What happened in the last four seconds?”
I tried to close the door but someone stuck their foot in it. “Answer the question.”
“One of the frogs croaks?”
They smiled at me. “The video is two minutes fifty-seven seconds fourteen milliseconds long, and in the last four seconds the camera zooms in on the backside of the big green frog. Give us your phone.”
They took the phone and brought up the video, and I watched it.
“There, you see?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good.” And they left.
I phoned 911 to let them know that I’d just been assaulted by police officers.
“Did you see the video?” the operator asked.
“Yeah. They showed me.”
“Well, that’s nice of them. Hey, which frog was your favorite?”
“Uh. The red one.”
“Which red one?”
“The second one.”
“Oh, that’s nice! Goodbye.”

By the end of the week it was just me and five other people holed up in the basement of a condemned building, eating beans out of cans that were old enough to not have frogs stamped on them. The oldest woman with us was a sociologist and she kept telling us this is what happens when communication becomes too easy in a society, but the biology grad student kept telling her she was full of it and this never would have happened if we’d killed all the frogs with global warming like he kept saying we were going to do. I couldn’t make them calm down because I’d never gotten my bachelor’s and whenever I tried to say anything they’d start talking in Latin until I got tired.
“They’re always like this,” said the bank clerk.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that. I was the first person in this basement. You just got here five minutes ago. Why are you telling me this?”
“No reason at all, I’m just one of you guys, I fit in here just fine, yes sir indeed, no doubt, no how,” he said. “By the way, have you seen the video? Oops, slipped.”
We tried to pin him but they broke down the door before we could find his radio, and I was the only one that got away. I lost the pursuit in the ruins of downtown, where office buildings had been carved into giant monuments to frogs and every frost-coated window had been doodled with the sheet music for the frog song. Someone had rearranged all the abandoned vehicles into the shape of a frog, or that’s what I guessed they’d look like if you weren’t stuck at ground level because all the elevators had stopped working and the stairways had been scrapped for frog-sculpture materials.

“Howdy friend!” shouted a sculptor from his front yard as I slipped down a suburban drive. “Whaddaya think?”
It was a frog. “Real nice,” I said, strolling up to him.
“Ain’t it just? What’s your favorite?”
“The red one.”
“Which red one?”
I pulled the brass knuckles out of my pocket and socked him one at the base of the skull. Before he’d even hit the ground I was checking his pockets – empty, but his boots fit. I put them on and luxuriated in feet that were merely damp. It was a good feeling, made better by being so close to home. They’d never look for me there, not after all this time.
I opened the door. My landlord was sitting on the couch.
“Hello,” he said. “Hey, you seen this video?”
“You’ll never take me alive,” I told him.
“Jeez, cool your jets. I was just asking.”
“Who sent you here?”
“Who sent me the video? My daughter. Look, it’s cute.”
“Stand back.”
“What? It’s just a dog.”
I blinked. “Dog?”
“Dog.”
“Not frog.”
“No? That’s old news.”
I moved very carefully towards him, then rushed him and put him in a sleeper hold as I watched the clip. It was sixteen seconds long and showed a Labrador puppy chasing its tail until it tripped over its mother’s leg and fell over.
“Like it?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Nice. Well, see you.”
I sat around for a while, then put my bulletproof vest on the coathook and went to bed. When I woke up I shopped around the net a bit. The frog stuff was still there on some of the archives. ‘Last week’s trends.’ God I’d seen enough of that.
That dog video was pretty cool though. I forwarded that to six people.

The Dolphin and the Shark
Once upon a time, a bottlenose dolphin and a sand tiger shark encountered one another in the shallow waters of the western Atlantic coast.
“Hello,” said the dolphin. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”
“Yes indeed,” replied the shark. “Splendid.”
“Makes a man’s fancy turn to romance.”
“Indeed! Say, did you know that in order to mate I must severely bite the pectoral fins of my partner, in order to secure a grip?”
“I did not know that, and will inform my friends the next time we form a temporary coalition whose goal is to follow a female around and hem her in until she is ready to mate with us.”
“All very unpleasant, but of course it does lead to children, those little joyful bundles.”
“Of course. Except for those that belong to others of my kind. Those I will sometimes kill for fun.”
“Really? My own children devour one another in the mother’s womb until only two remain, one in each uterine horn.”
“Freak,” said the dolphin.
“Sicko,” said the shark.
They then swam their separate ways because neither had anything to gain from engaging in violence beyond severe injuries that very likely would have killed them both.
Moral: Nature tends to be grosser than you’d expect, but also less exciting.

The Tyrannosaurus’s Argument
Many, many years ago, during the Maastrichtian stage of the Cretaceous period, a Didelphodon was nosing about the forests of what would one day be Montana when it chanced upon a large clearing with a heap of rotting vegetation within it.
“Oh, a nest,” it said. “This will surely contain eggs, which I will consume as it matches my ecological role as a somewhat fox-like predator.”
“No, you won’t,” said the Tyrannosaurus that was returning to its nest, some twelve feet behind it. “Instead, I am going to consume you.”
“Wait, wait, wait, back up a bit,” squeaked the mammal. “That is clearly not what is supposed to happen here! You are a scavenging creature, and eating me would violate your natural place in the order of things.”
“You are talking nonsense,” said the Tyrannosaurus.
“Of course I’m not,” said the Didelphodon. “Your arms are tiny and incapable of gripping prey. You’re a scavenger if I’ve ever seen one!”
“My arms are not a highly-developed part of my predation strategy,” said the Tyrannosaurus, “but that is because they are extraneous. There are many entirely anachronistic predator ground-hunting birds I could use as examples who manage just fine hunting without the use of gripping arms. And this is granting you an unnecessary token in presuming their uselessness: they are quite powerful for their size, with strong gripping capability within their admittedly limited range.”
“Then what of your bulk?” pressed the mammal. “If you move above a trot you’ll fall over and turn into a pancake under your own mass! Catching prey is an impossibility!”
“Much of what I hunt moves not much faster, if that,” responded the Tyrannosaurus.
“Well, your jaws are clearly made to crack bones,” said the Didelphodon. “Marrow extraction is a prime goal for any carrion-eater.”
“Come off it,” said the Tyrannosaurus. “A bone-smashing bite matches my predation strategy perfectly: I charge full-bore into something, mash my teeth as deep as they’ll go, then drag them out and wait for them to bleed to death. Furthermore, my teeth would make shoddy molars: they can penetrate and smash, but they are poor crushers and chewers.”
“Surely your immensely powerful sense of smell makes you a dab hand at locating all those smelly carcasses, which you can easily secure with your powerful size?”
“You need more than a good nose to be an obligate or ‘pure’ scavenger; you also need a highly efficient means of locomotion. Almost all anachronistically-modern obligate vertebrate scavengers of the land are large birds which can drift on thermals at little to no energy cost, which also affords them easy and rapid access to corpses. I am forty feet long and must travel on foot, which makes waiting for corpses to make themselves known to me a much less economical action,” said the Tyrannosaurus, who was clearly losing patience. “Come now, be sensible. Almost no predator passes up carrion, but ones that settle for nothing-but are both extremely rare and physiologically distinct in a manner that I am not.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait a second,” said the Didelphodon, “even if you are an active predator – for the sake of the argument mind you not that I’m conceding anything – shouldn’t you not waste your stomach space on me? I am relatively nutrient-poor and bony.”
“This is true,” said the Tyrannosaurus. “However, you are endangering my young, and given that I’m spending much of my time guarding them, NOT eating you would be a senseless waste in and of itself.”
The Didelphodon was prepared to debate this point, but it was then that the Tyrannosaurus ate it.
Moral: Nobody likes pedants.

The Sickle-Cell Child.
Far, far away, there lived a child, and that child suffered from headaches and bloody urine. For these deficiencies it was mocked by its peers, and it sought solace in the advice of its parent.
“Parent,” said the child, “why am I different, and why do the other children taunt me for this?”
“My child,” said the parent, “your physiological discomforts are the result of the heterozygous sickle-cell trait, meaning that you carry a single gene for sickle-cell anemia, which causes many of your red blood cells to be deformed into a collapsed ‘sickle’ shape. Your peers mock you because human social groups often become tighter-knit when they have a designated ‘other’ to contrast themselves against.”
“None of this is comforting to me in the slightest, parent,” said the child.
“Don’t worry,” said the parent. “There is an advantage in this. Trust me.”
The child was dubious, but it did trust its parent. And so it came to be that one day a major outbreak of malaria swept through the child’s home, killing a substantial portion of its peers but sparing the child due to the inhospitable nature of its ‘sickled’ blood cells for the malarial virus. The child was filled with despair and depression, but persevered, grew up, and had four children. As its mate was also a heterozygous carrier of the sickle-cell trait, one of their children was born without it, two were born with it, and the last inherited two copies of the sickle-cell trait and thus died early in life from sickle-cell anemia, all as statistics would predict.
Moral: Life is profoundly and innately unfair.

The Man Who Knew About Wolves
One night, a man went to a nightclub with some other men, who were his social acquaintances.
“Look over there,” said one of them. “There are some women. Let us attempt to flirt with them as a prelude to obtaining mutual sexual gratification.”
“No, said the largest man present. “They would not be interested in you. Women prefer alpha males: aggressive, physically-impressive, and dynamic.”
“You are generalizing a canine social habit into a biologically-ordained behavioural process of the human species,” said the first man. “Furthermore, the alpha-beta social complex of wolves, from which you have derived your theory, is in fact an anthropogenically-induced behavior caused by fragmented wolf packs composed of strangers being raised and studied in captivity. Naturally-occurring packs consist of a breeding pair and their offspring, and in these the theorem of a dominant ‘alpha male’ whose aggressive assertiveness leads to rulership of the pack is provably false.”
The largest man present, who was inebriated, took this monologue as an insult and punched the first man, who suffered a minor concussion. He was subdued by the club’s security staff and charged for assault and battery, which caused him some difficulties in securing a financially-rewarded career.
Moral: No, really, NOBODY likes pedants. And if you understand social relationships so well, you should be able to avoid getting punched in the face.

Sometimes, I get folks that come to ask me a question. And it’s always the same question, and it’s always in the same way – timid, half-moused, delivered with a flinch and another dozen unsaid questions held behind it: “lady (hah!) Benthook, how do you fish so well?” Is it a secret? Is it a trick? Is it some rite you dance by moonlight, is it a chant that brings the fat ones up from below, is it a tallow you rub into your lines?
And each time I give them the long slow smile just far enough to make them start to twitch, and then I say, “why sir (or lady), I just remember the words my mother gave me to fish by,” as pretty and pious as a churchman. And it’s funny to see their faces light up like they do, or cloud over in disappointment (what’s she hiding behind that, huh?), because mama’s words were wise enough, but they weren’t any sort of magic.
“Listen, my oldest spawnlings,” old mama Benthook had whispered to me, hands busy with the lines and craggy head bent low to her knots. “The sea is for the failures. Every sorry thing with the wrong number of legs or eyes or heads sinks to the bottom of its big black heart and squirms there, hiding.” She pointed one long, scaly finger at us. “All you got to do to pull them out is be better than them. And no daughter of mine is a failure.”
Yes, mama’s words were wise enough.
Pity she weren’t always right.

“Get up, you.”
Grelly moaned at the bottom of her bed. I repeated myself, this time with my foot. Grelly arose. Simple story, same story every damned morning. Every one.
“Unnhh. Wurr. Whurr we goin’?”
“Fishing, Grelly. It’s a big moon, and that’s the ocean’s time. Get your mug and wipe the crud out of your eyes, it’s time.”
Grumbling and groaning followed, and before too long (it was always too long) we were pushing off the quay, hearing the same old waves smack against the same old wood and drinking the same old oily soup from the same old stone mugs. As the sun rose it would find us out in the shoals, first setting lines for the baitfish, then setting baitfish for the bigmouths, then (if we felt up to it) setting bigmouths for the razorjaws. And if we hooked one, I’d be the one to fight it, because when the stakes got high Grelly’s knees got weak and her palms got sweaty.
I heaved at my paddle and set to work, waiting a breath every four strokes to let my sister correct our course with her own lazy pulls. Simple story, same story every damned morning.
But not tomorrow.

On the nine hundredth stroke I stopped and sighed deep, tasted the air in all of my lungs. Yes, it was good here. The salt was flecked with that light oily scent that was the breath of fish, and lots of them. All packed together, side-to-side, with not an inch to spare. A mass of mouths all dying for a chance to stretch themselves and get some bites in.
I shook my head three times, stretched my arms, and started dumping my bait overboard.
“Cordill? What are you doing?”
I tipped the last of the four bait buckets overboard, humming a bit of an old song mama had taught me. It asked for fast jumps at the bobber and a strong pull in your arms.
“Cordill? We aren’t gonna have any left for later if you don-”
I reached out and grasped Grelly firmly by the nape, then heaved her overboard into the bait, face-first. She surfaced wasting her breath on swearing, and the more fool her because I had the paddle in my grip by then and a single whack drew blood and drove her back under.
Even with their brain banging against their skull, nothing outswims a Benthook, even Grelly. But mix that blood with the bait, and all those hungry mouths lurking all around you… well. I only needed the paddle three more times before she sank and didn’t come up again.
It was a quicker trip home that night, and with a bigger catch than usual in the canoe’s belly. A big old razorjaw, a matron, and with a belly ripe full of roe. Mama must’ve approved. I ate it raw, filled my mug and gullet with boiled oil from its liver, and threw my sister’s half-cracked cup into the midden with the first smile I’d owned proper in years.

I woke up early, heated up a morning soup with a rightful, uncompromising dose of salt, and paddled out farther offshore. Came back with a catch that nearly sank the canoe, spent the evening cooking, gutting, and carving, took the extra money left from the bigmouth cuts into town and bought a sack of red salt. Went to sleep early after filling in my sister’s bed with fresh dirt and a stone cap and drifted away as easily as if it were baiting a hook.
It was a good day. It was a new sort of day. It was the way all the days would be from now on, unless I decided to make them better yet. Maybe I’d even go hunting for a husband, now that the house had room…

Winter’s tail-end dripped away, along with the last of the morning mists. Now it was time for rain and sleet and fierce suns in dim skies, with waves that got angry and fast. Spring came with the big catches, but only if you had the teeth to bite into them and not let go.
Lightning struck the boat three times, an angry razorjaw nearly breached on me, and squalls broke out a half-minute from shining sunbeams every other day. Came back with the biggest hauls, week in, week out, and didn’t founder so much as once.
Maybe I’d get three husbands, and a cook. Maybe I’d get a warehouse. Maybe I’d hire out some hands to fish for me, like uncle did with mama, before the taste for the strong-sugar ate his teeth and wits right out of his skull. Not going to happen with me. Maybe uncle was a fool, but this daughter of Benthook wasn’t. The best vices were the safest vices, and those weren’t.
Then two months into spring I woke up, looked out the window, and saw a cherry-red sun rising into a sky already turning bluer than mama’s eyeballs. There was a hint of last night’s thunderheads slipping away over the far horizon on the back of a breeze that tugged heartstrings. A faint ghost of a big moon, a sea-moon, hung in the back of heaven.
It was a beautiful day. It was a perfect day. And it shouldn’t have been. We’d not even seen the face of summer yet, there should still be storms every week with daylong breaks for fog and dark. It got to me so bad I stopped by the churchstone before I left, to scrape a few prayers into the dirt at its base for the first time since mama died.
It would be fine. Just a gift for your hard work, that’s all. You’ve worked through the worst and come out shining bright as a fistful of diamonds, this is a chance to see what you can do with the best, that’s all. That’s all.

Went out farther than ever before. Didn’t even have to try to do it, the water was like a happy puppy under the bow, pulling me out and farther. Found myself taking breaks every fourth, like the bad old days – hah! There was no slacking here. Even the waves worked.
I stowed my paddle above a shoal so thick that the surface foamed. Tails and flukes broke water, now and then a little baitfish breached in the hurry of its attempt to avoid a happy bigmouth – usually failed.
The sky was empty. The wind was singing. My stomach was a nest of vipers.
I shook myself, stretched, and sighed in the air, felt the strong touch of the fish, then vomited into the bait bucket. I tried to breath, took in the smell again, and nearly choked as fresh heaves grabbed my gullet.
Fish, yes, there it was, there it was, but there was something else, something rancid and thicker than tar and familiar, something underneath…
Soft splinters reached my ears, and I looked downwards just in time to see the seams around the canoe’s keel double in width.
I stared. One hand groped for a bait-bucket as they doubled again. Then they tripled, then the water surged over my head.
All that water above me, but none around me – the fish were packed thick, like darting flies on a midden and three times as vicious. Baitfish tried to take shelter in my nostrils, bigmouths tasted at my fingers, and my claws did me as much good as spitting into a swell – blood flowed, but for no purpose.
I could feel a shriek brewing somewhere in my belly, and swallowed it. No failure. The canoe had split, but it would not have sunk. Up! Up! Swim, tear, pull up! No panic, feel the tug of the air in your lungs tell you the way! Up!
Light and dryness reached my fingertips even as more mouths worried at my heels, then my eyes slid above the glassiness and saw the shreds of the canoe’s starboard frame floating a reach away.
And stones-say, thank it all, the paddle was still there. I hauled out and clutched it with the love of a mother, gave myself a half-minute to curse and bless, then started the long, slow process of fighting back against that lovely breeze that had brought me here.

Night came in before I’d guessed, and it brought teeth under the big moon. Traces of bait, vomit and blood clung to the timbers of the canoe like fleas, and with them came an audience of hopeful scavengers, and with them came their predators, and with THEM came the razorjaws, slim and elegant little men and the heavyset bulk of the women, on the lookout for whatever strange beast had gone and torn itself to bits to float at the surface. Nosy animals, with nothing to satisfy curiosity with but teeth. I paddled, I swatted, and at morning who knew how much progress I’d made in miles but I’d lost yards of my raft to jagged, greedy teeth.
It was still beautiful out there, as I strained against half a paddle. A perfect sun in a perfect sky, beating down on me and cooking through my scales. Nothing to drink but salt water, with my mug at the bottom of the ocean. Nothing to eat but the gore that clung to the paddle’s handle, where a small razorjaw’s skull had proved softer than I expected. Nothing to see but flat blue, flat blue against a featureless sky without even the wind to guide me.
The wood creaked.

I didn’t turn, only breathed. And I didn’t inhale, because I knew what I’d smell; it was pooling all around me, as thick as the water that lapped at my kneeling legs as the raft settled deeper under the fresh weight. It was rotten brine and fish guts, mixed up and spread over a faint, familiar scent.
“Get off.” I’d said that. I didn’t want to, but I’d said it, and the voice was too cracked to even be mine. Someone was pretending to be me. “Go away.”
No noise at all, which made no sense. She could never shut up when it mattered. Was she going to make me say it? Could she speak, or was all the world down there as cold and quiet as a razorjaw’s smile? “Go away!”
A soft sigh at my side. Something dripped onto my shoulder.

Oh mama. You were right and you were wrong, all at once. The sea is for failures, but they do better there than we, hidden down there where we can’t see their secrets. And no daughter of yours stays a failure for long.
“Get off, Grelly!”

It’s coming down out there. You’d better wrap up tight and snug before you go, unless you want a chill. Take your coat, your heavy pants, and the biggest boots in the house – no, not those boots, these boots. Bring the heavy shovel for the long stretches, and the small shovel for the corners and the stoop. Mind your footing on the front stair.

It’s really coming down out there. You might want to check on the neighbours. Ring the doorbell on the south side, call out your name and household promptly, then raise your hands in the air and do not make any sudden movements. Bring them this casserole and the finest of our deer hides. Don’t catch a chill while you’re out.

It’s coming down out there like it hasn’t in years. Better wake up grandma – she knew all the best ways to take. Turn off all the downstairs lights and turn on all the upstairs lights. Fill the tubs and the sinks and empty the cupboards, throw it all into the freezer and don’t open it again. Lock the front door and the back door, pile up furniture in front of the windows, and jam the locks. Did you leave the car alarm on? Do that, we’ll need the advance warning system. Be quick and quiet.

It’s coming down fast out there. We’d better get ready for the long haul. Break out the first aid, count the canned goods, and everyone reload. Keep your buddy with you at all times and don’t turn your back on the shadows. Did you have a hot meal? If you didn’t, it’s too late now. Remember, they’re more scared of us than we are of them, and don’t you let them forget that either. If you’re jonesing for a cigarette, don’t bother. We can’t risk open flame ‘till this morning.

It’s coming down thick and furious out there. This could be it. Raise the floodgates, hoist the sandbags, and don’t cry, please don’t cry. We knew it would be here someday, and today is someday now. Just keep your calm and your cool and your head about you and we’ll all be laughing about this years from now. Did you remember your locker combination? Get there soon, and bring back the syringes. If the worst comes to the worst, it’ll be okay.

It’s still coming down out there. It might never end, you know. Did you scout out the caches yet? Check the traplines? I hope you at least visited the lookout – have we heard from him recently? Did you bring him the box? The red one? I hope you did that, because that’s very important. How’s your digestion lately? No aches or pains? If you feel them that’s okay, but if they spread to your legs go to the sickbay yesterday and don’t come back ‘till you can say your name forwards and backwards without stammering, shaking, or crying. It will be fine there, they have sugar for your tea.

It’s truly coming down out there. Throw more on the bonfire and don’t say any words out there in a language older than the internet. Wash your hands before you go, but not your palms. Tuck your chin in and keep it up. Keep fire close at hand and yours wits closer. And for the love of whatever’s left, don’t breathe through your mouth – the mist will give your position away.

It’s coming down out there like there’s no tomorrow. Could very well be. Take this book, ring this bell, eat this candle. Chew it six times seven times more, and be sure to say the right words from the right pages. Don’t lift a hand against them, and they won’t be able to lay a hand upon you. Do not touch what you cannot keep. Walk swiftly and silently, and come home safe.

It’s all coming down out there. You might as well accept it. Can’t make much of a difference at this point. Still, we always knew this would happen, didn’t we? We’re not surprised, at least. We aren’t. Are we? It was going to be like this. Definitely.
Oh well.

Grim-Faced Shieldwall of Gorbon
Gifter: Grirk of Gorbond
Rationale: Not my style, thank you very much. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer something you can get two hands around and really swing with.
Re-giftee: Srakeen the Shredder.

Treacherous, Scheming, Untrustworthy Lieutenant
Gifter: Lib the Mad
Rationale: Already got one.
Re-giftee: Lib the Mad. It’s not like he’ll remember giving it to me anyways. This is what, the fourth time?

A Pair of Inept Bungling Oafs Whose Loyalty is Only Exceeded by Their Stupidity and Capacity for Self-Destruction, complete with comically mismatched suits of armor
Gifter: Srakeen the Shredder
Rationale: Is she TRYING to get me killed? One is permissible, two is practically a death warrant for Nirtrazon himself. Besides, I already have Trulb. At least until I can find someone from a good home who wants him.
Re-giftee: Feed the Peasantry’s seasonal gift-box.

Peasant Child of Unknown Family With Secret Fire Smouldering in Her Eyes
Gifter: Trulb
Rationale: What exactly am I supposed to do with a fourteen-year-old? The only thing I hate more than kids is teenagers.
Re-giftee: Mong the Slavemaster. Maybe we can at least grind some labour out of the brat before it gets old and slow.

How To Escape Your Crumbling Stronghold, by Nol Oldlord
Gifter: Nol Oldlord
Rationale: Okay, explain to me this: who the darkhells is going to receive a seasonal gift implying that the gifter expects them to fail and fall like a bleating two-year-old goblin and be THANKFUL for it? Stupid old bat.
Re-giftee: Srakeen the Shredder. I think this one’s going to be making the rounds for a few years.

***

Capacious Darkplate
Gifter: Tordamore
Rationale: Doesn’t fit. I’m not entirely sure why people just go around ASSUMING that I’m a tub of lard, but this seems to happen far too often. The perils of spending most of your time either brooding in the shadows or sealed inside a big metal can, I suppose.
Re-giftee: Nol Oldlord. Two can play the gift-an-insult game, you self-important old prick.

A Handful of Blackened Ichor and Spittle
Gifter: Iz-Na!-Chlun!
Rationale: Seriously?
Re-giftee: Lib the Mad. He’ll probably eat it or something.

Tumultuous Ruin-mace, engraved with loving hands
Gifter: Mom
Rationale: In the name of all that is buried and foul, I have an image to maintain and that image does not include tiny puppies carved into obsidian.
Re-giftee: Trulb.

Giant Flogging-Whip
Gifter: Jormund the Tallest
Rationale: Ugh, ethnic gifts. Look, I don’t have anything against giants, I just don’t really care for their instruments of torture. They’re loud and clumsy and make no sense. Leave the giant implements of pain to the giants, leave the evil overlord implements of pain to me. Everyone’s happiest that way.
Re-giftee: Mom. I know she gets a kick out of this stuff. Wish Dad was still around to tell me why.

Tracking Dragon-Dogs
Gifter: The city of Backlebroad
Rationale: Couldn’t find a stupid escaped teenager, what CAN they find? Half their body weight at that age is smelly hormones and acne! A waste to feed them.
Re-giftee: Feed the Peasantry’s seasonal gift-box.

***

Seven-Hundred-and-Forty-Seven Pages of Scribbled, Crumpled Rantings on Bloodstained Parchment, in No Particular Order
Gifter: Lib the Mad
Rationale: Maybe I shouldn’t have sent him that ichor.
Re-giftee: Trulb. He’s been whining about running out of toilet paper for weeks now.

Giant and Unstoppable Doomaconda with Hypnotizing Eyes and an Eighteen-Syllable Name I Cannot Pronounce
Gifter: Oll the Serpent
Rationale: I can’t say it, I can’t spell it, and I don’t need it. Cold-blooded or no, that thing eats too much. Besides, the castle’s already heavily guarded. What more could I want?
Re-giftee: Mom. She’s been wanting a new pet for a while now, since CHRGHTM descended back to the lowest darkhell.

Towering Parapet
Gifter: Tordamore
Rationale: This fortress is tall enough already, I’m tall enough already, and if we improve on either of those things I’ll start to get dizzy. Besides, traditionally parapets are for brooding on, and I’m not that kind of tyrant.
Re-giftee: Jormund the Tallest. Maybe giants like this sort of thing.

Love Interest
Gifter: Mom
Rationale: Here’s a little bit about me: I am seventeen feet tall, completely sociopathic and happy that way, covered in spiky armour, shed hate and flame from every single inch of my steely hide, and am entirely lacking in genitalia. This tremulous little twerp is as useful to me as tits on a boar.
Re-giftee: ??? I already gave Srakeen a new dishwasher this year, and that’s about the heaviest labour I can see this waste of space doing. Might as well shut it in a tower until I figure out what to do about it.

Creaking and Ominous Graveyard, With Grandiose Mausoleum
Gifter: Nol Oldlord
Rationale: I prefer my victims burnt, and I will leave behind no physical corpse. Besides, I’m going to live forever.
Re-giftee: Nol Oldlord. Take a hint, wheezing dotard.

***

Giant Catapult
Gifter: Jormund the Tallest
Rationale: Worked for one hour, then destroyed by daring midnight raid.
Re-giftee: Dumpster.

Impenetrable Wall-Plating, Hand-Knitted
Gifter: Mom
Rationale: Penetrated.
Re-giftee: Dumpster.

Wailing Doom-Brigade of Chanting Maniacs
Gifter: Iz-Na!-Chlun!
Rationale: Read one augury, committed mass suicide without permission, formed convenient ramp across flarewater moat.
Re-giftee: Feed the Peasantry’s seasonal gift-box.

Trulb’s Heart
Gifter: Trulb
Rationale: It seemed really satisfying to tear it out at the time, but in retrospect he was the last lackey in the fortress.
Re-giftee: Whoever’s standing outside my window at this second.

How To Escape Your Crumbling Stronghold, by Nol Oldlord (used)
Gifter: Grirk of Gorbond
Rationale: Last chapter is missing.
Re-giftee: Fuck my fucking li

This is it, this is the night for it. The only night for it, too. Once a year, once every twelve months.
Listen closely, and follow closer still. This is safe, but only if you do exactly as I say.

Here is your bell. It’s heavier than it looks, but it looks like a wisp of nothing. But it is sweet and silvery to the eye, and its tone jingles well enough. It is what we need, it is what we must, it will do.
Raise it up, bring it down. And don’t stop, don’t stop. I will tell you when to stop, and do not expect it anytime soon.
Do not allow your fear to stutter your ringing or weaken your heart. I am here and will tell you of what is needed. All our tools are here. I have a platter with two vegetables wrenched from the earth this autumn, still dripping with dirt; a vessel of cattle-milk; and a charred scrap of ground meadow-weeds and half-cracked nuts, shaped as a circle. It reminds you of the moon overhead, doesn’t it?
Ring, ring. Don’t stop now, we’re just getting started. Swing it! Swing it as you ring!

And as you swing that bell as high as your arms can rise, start the call. Rising and falling, forever repeating, starting low and rushing upwards, a siren, an announcement. Each time with more energy than the last until you’re almost screaming it. It should start like laughter and end like a warcry. Yes, like that.
And then, you’ll hear it coming back to you.
And you will hear it, trust me. You’ll hear him long before you see him. The chime and clang of bells replying to bells, the hot breath of snorting beasts on the wind. Ten thousand miles in less than an instant’s passing, here from the top of the world where the sun never sets and never rises, drawn across the sky on capering hooves and sweat-runneled backs.
Listen – there it is. Just beyond the horizon and coming on like a comet in the sky, tearing the night on the frenzy of the eight runners.

There! There! Do you not see him? His great coal-blacked boots of leathered hide, the fitful mist-plumes of his heavy breath? And the face atop that suit of blood’s own colour, a face as purple as a rotten bruise, framed by a bone-white tangle that can’t be but cousin of a thornbush. Close now, so close – has he seen us, of course he has, he can see everything everywhere, and he watches all that creep the earth all year. Yessss, that is he. There can be no other. Many mimic the suit, but only one dares don it in this night, in the sky. The others are but his heralds, his messengers, his warning.
The beasts touch our roof first – hear the clutching and scrabbling of each misshapen claw. The sledge arrives soon after, frozen in the cold that lives at the end of the world, dripping with icicles – aaaah, the shingles scream under its runners!
And then the footfall. He is come.
He expects his tribute and he shall have it. Take the plate – there. Steady now, firm hands.
Hold the plate aloft. Do not look at his eyes. Do not shiver overly as the sounds of the devouring reach your ears, as crumbs rain down upon the roof-tiles. They are fearful but they are not harmful, and this is not what can be said of his ire.

There – there! He is satiated, he beckons, he drums atop one kneecap with an ancient glove whose gnarled skin conceals a hand of inhuman form. Approach with care, with love, with absolute trust, and seat yourself upon his crooked bones. You must love him as if he were your own mother, your own father – no, above them! Love him, damn you, or there will be such a sight you will never recover!
Remain calm and clear. It’s not so bad, is it? Do not inhale. Just relax. Do not inhale. Stare up at him now, it is permitted. Feel the fondness within you. Do not inhale. See how he nods? Begin.
Begin! Begin the list, slow-wit! Hurry, hurry with the list, damn you! The night he treads is nigh-endless, but the same cannot be guaranteed of his patience! Read – do not stammer, do not shudder, read for your life and mind! Read when thought bleeds and sanity shrieks! Read it aloud! NOW!

Good. Good work.
You can open your eyes now.

Look – the offerings are gone, devoured by his beasts as we tarried here, nothing left by stems and gnawed fragments. And his mark, the white stain of his paw-print, pale and lurid beneath the black sky. It is as snow, but it does not melt. Do not touch it.
It is done. Look, he is gone from us. But listen, and you will hear him. Can you hear him? He calls to you as he leaves us, as he flies away into his endless trek once more. A blessing and a warning both.
No, I don’t know what the ‘kris-mass’ is. What matters of what he said is this: this is the night before it, and this is the night that matters. Do not dwell on it.
Now flee to your home and family, and hug them with especial love, and remember this if you must remember something of the evening: this only happens only once every twelve months.
And for that, if nothing else, it is a good night.

On a white throne under a white roof under a sky greyer than a grandfather’s chin sat Rime IV, spawn of Rime III, spawn of Rime II, spawn of Rime, spawn of the First Frost. It gazed down from its frozen seat at the small thing of tepid water quailing in front of it on a patch of discoloured snow.
“Occupation,” it proclaimed.
The thing flinched, then flinched again at the precise prod of the coldguard at its back. “Your occupation,” it said. Its voice was a sad, high whistle that was all out of place against its craggy, ice-plated bulk. Were it outside you could’ve mistaken it for a random whimsy of the north wind, and in fact many people had, the most recent just under an hour ago.
“Tailor,” whispered the human. His lips were blue with cold, and the word slurred its way past them uneasily.
Rime IV waved a hand. The coldguard did its duty yet again. And all was ready for the last of the prisoners.
This one was peculiar. Its hide was more ornate and elaborate than the others.
“Occupation,” repeated Rime IV.
“Architect.”
Rime IV’s hand halted in mid-wave. “Elaborate.”
“Nel Mos, royal architect to Her Worship, the-“
One of Rime IV’s fingers twitched. The coldguard delivered a gentle admonishment to the human’s spinal column. “Explain your word,” it fluted.
Rime IV waited patiently while the little sloshing thing collected itself.
“Architect. Royal architect. I design, plan, and oversee the construction of structures. Large and small. Mostly large.”
One of Rime IV’s eyesockets swivelled. “Large?”
The human looked around. “Larger than this. By maybe-”
Rime IV’s finger tapped against its knee, and the coldguard’s talons halted themselves an inch from admonishment. “Continue,” it said.
“…by maybe three times. Oppli Cathedral certainly was, and maybe the Ducal Dome of Nolla too. I’ve had maybe seven or eight less commissions maybe twice the size. A baker’s dozen of a kind to it. And fourteen smaller.”
All six of Rime IV’s eyesockets spun once. “And?”
“And what? I mean, this is impressive, for ice, but-”
The coldguard made up for lost time, as gently as it knew how. “How would you improve upon this?” it whistled into her ear on bended knee.
The human took some time to respond, and seemed excessively fixated on the discoloured snow. Architectural speculation, perhaps? “Well. I wouldn’t.”
“Explain,” declared Rime IV.
“I’d start from scratch with a fresh foundation. I don’t fancy trying to renovate this place, not without knowing what went into the blueprints – which I’m not even sure exist.”
Rime IV nodded.
“No, I’d make something fresh. And if this is what you’ve got, then I’ve got a plan.”
“Large?” it inquired.
Nel Mos looked up at Rime IV for the first time since her sudden fall, and bared her teeth in that strange way humans did. “Large.”
Rime IV waved its other hand. The coldguard raised the architect up with as much delicacy as its carapace provided.
“Accepted.”

The tower’s base was to be stone.
“Why?” inquired Rime IV.
“You want to build big, you start firm. The ground here may be frozen solid, but it’s still just dirt and sod at heart, and at the sizes we’re dealing with, it’ll sink. We start with stones, we can make ourselves a nice firm platform to work with. And you give me a place to build, I’ll give you a beacon that’ll shine from here to the other end of the world.”
Rime IV flicked at the scribbles on the sheet before it. “Ice?”
“Farther up, yes. We’ll start with stone, but it’ll all be ice once we’re off the ground. And we can cover up the stone with a façade, if you’d prefer.”
Rime IV waved its other hand. “Yes.”
“Right now… right now what I need is a quarry. I know these hills are good for what I want, I just don’t know exactly where. Do your people have a spot for that sort of thing?”
Coldguards filed into the throne-room, heavy feet clacking on the smooth floor. Six separate limbs seized Nel and raised her to a position of prominence atop their owner’s brow.
Rime IV pointed. “Go.”

By midday, Nel Mos had been dragged across what felt to be half the Wandering Hills, and stood on a ridge above a craggy granite vale of surpassing beauty.
By the hour’s end she’d set half her crew of coldguard to laying out quarry plots.
A half-hour more, and the first test-stone was being carved free of its cradle, a task that took many once-gleaming talons down to dulled nubbins.
Ten minutes past that and she was halfway down a gully and rolling into her shoulders, head hunched to protect it from the pebbles and the cold. Her internal odometer told her that she was nearly half a mile away already, and accelerating. Her eyes, unfortunately, told her that the largest boulder at the bottom of the hill was a coldguard, standing up, arms opening wider, and wider, and wider.

“Unfortunate,” said Rime IV.
Nel Mos managed, with great effort, to make no noise.
It raised itself from the throne, took two steps and was in front of her, a tower of billowing cold. “Explain.”
“I was just-”
“The nearest hearth-fire is twelve days fast-march,” said the coldguard.
“I-”
“Explain.”
“The nearest warm-dwelling is sixteen days fast-march.”
“The-”
“Explain.”
“The nearest warm-town is two dozen days fast-march, travelling through the night.”
“I wasn’t trying to-”
“Example.”
The coldguard hauled up the architect with five claws and reached out with the other. She couldn’t feel the pain, just a strange pressure. There wasn’t even a sound.
“The stone will be hauled. You will be called. You must wait.”
Nel gave up talking as she was hauled away, all her spare breath spent. Her eyes lingered on the little red nub of her right foot’s biggest toe on the cold white floor of the throne-room as it vanished around a corner.

Days later, the architect was dragged to a high ridge from a low pit of cold slush and colder air, lips blue and body almost past the point of shivering.
“Behold,” said a voice next to her, heavy and creaking with glacial weight; Rime IV, not a coldguard. Her eyes – far-sighted at the best of times – were hazed by exhaustion and hunger, but she did as ordered.
The base was complete, or nearly so: a giant disc that could have served as a god’s gaming token. Dozens of coldguard scrambled over it, hook-hands grasping at slabs, scratching out etchings, prodding and goading at the backs of groaning things of compressed snow and hail that lumbered four-legged, burdened under tons of stone.
“Instruct,” it ordered.
Nel Mos took a deep breath and a deeper thought and began to talk. And as she talked, she began to draw in the snow.
By the day’s end, her second escape attempt had begun – on the back of a slushbeast. That night she ran afoul of a cold snap that turned her mount rigid as an oak.
“Unfortunate,” said Rime IV. And it was her right foot’s next-biggest toe this time, snip-tunk, and back to the pit with whatever nourishment could be chewed and scraped from a squirrel frozen rock-hard and stiff as a board. She cooked it inch by inch with the little warmth that could be secured by her pocket-lens, focusing the drab rays of a sun that hid behind grey clouds.

And so it grew on, and on. Time seemed to fly – the tower’s workers never rested, the tower’s builder never ceased her struggles. A level was built – a grand hall, a soaring library, a royal apartment, a solar. An escape was attempted – a dash into the maze of the under-foundations, an attempted smuggling within a load of construction debris, even the futile effort at overpowering a coldguard for its armour with a broken stone carved jagged. And each and every time another toe, another rebuke. All the same end to every story.
“Replacable,” commented Rime IV after the sixth time. The architect knew it wasn’t speaking of the digit that lay upon its floor. The tower was nearing completion
“Not by half,” she shot back. “The base was the easy part, and the floors after that. If the peak isn’t done properly, the whole thing’ll fall over. You need me.”
Rime IV waved its other hand, and she was taken away for her reward. This time it was a litter of mice, and as she felt tiny bones disintegrate against numbed teeth she drew sketches on the wall of the pit. Plans for a funeral, plans for a building, plans for the same damned thing in the end.
Every day it lived in her head, it grew. Ever time it grew, it turned. Ideas shaped into ideas shaped into ideas.

“Large?” inquired Rime IV. Its eyesocket twisted. Nel had decided that was a raised eyebrow.
“Large,” she agreed.
“Elaborate.”
The architect hugged herself absently to hold in the warmth – something she did without thinking now – and stared up at her work, the quickest she’d ever done. Thrice the height of the Ducal Dome. Nearly twice again the highest spire of the Grand Cathedral. The Gidling Spire, plus a third of itself and a nip more.
“The largest,” she said. “Easily the largest I’ve done. Almost certainly the largest ever. And with ice. Would’ve been much simpler with standard materi-”
Her eyes had been on Rime IV’s hands, and so the blow from the coldguard at her back came as no surprise.
“Do not denigrate,” it whistled mournfully into her ear.
Rime IV turned away from its contemplation of the fixing of the tower’s tallest spire. Five hundred turns of its length would be required to fully run the course of its thread, to screw it down firmly enough to fasten in the bolts that would embed it for all time.
“Complete?” it asked.
Her eyes never left those carelessly dangling fingers. “No,” she said.
Eyesocket twist. All the eyesockets. “No?”
“I said I’d build you a beacon, and I meant it. We’ll need more ice, a lot more, and the best you can find. Ice so perfect I can see my heartbeat in it, clearer than air. Ice so polished I can see my twin in it, better than any mirror. Give me this, and you will have your beacon. And it’ll go much farther than the other end of the earth.”
“Acceptable,” said Rime IV, and that was the last she heard for another day.

It was quick. Almost too quick, in the end.
The tower took shape, a shape of slenderness glad in a thousand shards. Mirrors coated it, and translucent lenses filled its guts. Every surface that wasn’t an illusion was invisible, to the point that ever the coldguards trod carefully and with limbs extended. Only the architect knew her way, propelled by that same devious memory that kept her designs fresh in her skull. Under her hands the tower changed, fleshed itself, turned into something that pierced the sky and stared back at it.
And at its base, at its center, underneath a ceiling that opened up to the heavens hundreds and hundreds of feet above, sat a throne of crystalline ice larger than the grandest mansion. And on that throne, all its bulk nearly lost in the immensity, yet precisely tuned to be the center of the eye, was seated Rime IV, spawn of Rime III, spawn of Rime II, spawn of Rime, spawn of the First Frost.
“Complete?” it inquired of the small figure far beneath it, huddled on the floor. A hundred coldguards surrounded it, having liberated it of the last, smallest toe of its left foot just minutes earlier.
“No,” said the architect, speech slurred through a mouth ever-frozen. “There is one thing.”
Rime IV leaned far back in its throne, its tendrils clinking softly against a thousand perfect reflections of itself. “Expand.”
“The last mirror is being mounted as we speak. Above us.”
Rime IV nodded impatiently. “Done.” Its hand rose, the coldguard stirred.
“Wait. One thing.”
The hand halted.
“One more thing. Just one.”
“Speak.”
“The mirror. The mirror’s being placed. And… it has no name. It needs a name. Speak the name.”
Rime IV thought, and unlike its prisoner, its thoughts were slow and cold. It thought, and it thought, and it thought, and at last it stirred in its seat, both of its mouths opening for the first time since its spawning, since its own name had left its maws.
“It. Is.”
It coughed, deep in its chest cavity. Hollow rattling came from within, and it spoke stronger now.
“It is. It is The Tower of the Last Frost.”
“Yes it is,” said Nel Mos, looking up to the sky. “Yes it is.”

In the end all those escape attempts, all those stories, all that arguing, all that tower, all of it paid off. For the very moment that the last mirror slid into place in the highest spire of the highest peak of the Tower of the Last Frost was the same moment as the sun, wits long-dulled by the winter months, chose to herald the first morning of the first day of the spring.
It was not much of a thing, as far in the north as the Wandering Hills were. A fleeting gleam of brightness in the gloom.
But even one instant of light can go a long ways. Up and down and around the tower nearly a hundred times, by Nel Mos’s designs. Up and down and around and through and into itself, doubling on itself, tripling, quintupling, on and on beyond words and into numbers, turning itself from a beam to a blaze to something fiercely beyond any sensations at all, that took one last rise and plunge and dove down from the heights to refract itself in every direction from that crystal throne.
If there was a sense that could describe it, Nel Mos’s weren’t up to the task. All those weeks of cold had left her with a chill that she felt nothing could lift. Still, she found a word for it afterwards, that feeling that entered her as she saw, for a split instant, Rime IV’s expression change and the air turn bright.
Warm.

It was, in fact, twelve days fast-march to the nearest hearth-fire. Fifteen without toes.
But Nel made the trek smiling every last step of the way.