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Someone chipped a rock.
Nuk took the chip from the rock that someone chipped and put it on a stick. It was a spear.
Mala took the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and she made it smaller, and fletched it. It was an arrow.
Neb took the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he shot a deer with it and traded the hide for iron, which he smelted and shaped. It was a dagger.
Titus took the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he had it smelted down and reforged into steel. It was a sword.
Gao took the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he had it melted and reshaped into a pick. He mined sulfur and a few other interesting things with it, and shaped them into a sort of explosive. It was gunpowder.
Diego took the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he placed it in a long tube and fired a little bit of lead out of it. It was a gun.
Hiram took the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he used all manner of interesting little machines to make it fire extremely, extremely fast. It was a machine gun.
Wernher took the machinery from the gun that Hiram made with the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he arranged them and fuelled them and launched them into the air and watched them fly and fall down into the ground, where they exploded. They were rockets.
Julius took the rocker that Wernher made with the machinery from the gun that Hiram made with the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he made a very special sort of substance to place inside it. It made small machines tick, click, and squeal when you held them close to it.
An elected official took the special payloads that Julius made with the rocket that Wernher made with the machinery from the gun that Hiram made with the gun that Diego made with the gunpowder that Gao made with the help of the sword that Titus made from the dagger that Neb made using the arrow that Mala made from the spear that Nula made from the chip from the rock that someone chipped, and he pushed the button.
There probably wasn’t really a button.

Someone chipped a rock.

A very long time ago in that misty location called Someplace, there was a man. And this man was a chef. And this chef’s name was Nim.
Nim cooked all the food for his village. It hadn’t always been that way, but now every last meal went through his fingers, a stream of cuts and chops and bushels and bundles. It was such a waste not to have this happen. Nim could make a fish fly straight through your stomach, could put a bird to swim inside its juices, could take a handful of leaves and an anonymous root and make a dessert that would bring an old miser to tears of gratitude and vows of charity for just a taste more. There was no count to the number of recipes he knew, for he knew none; each dish was spontaneous.
People asked him how he fit all that knowledge inside just his one head, how he did it. Very often.
And each time this happened, Nim would think it through carefully as he stirred the pot or tossed the pan or shut the oven door. And he would say, “Practice. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. That’s practice.”
Nim’s practice caught the eyes of all kinds of people, from the watery eyes of fellow serfs who tended his home for him during his long cooking hours, to the desperate eyes of mayors who pled with him for bowlfuls, to the very pudgy eye of his lord, King Jot. King Jot knew what he liked, and he liked the little bit of Nim’s food that he had confiscated from an upstart peasant. King Jot also got what he wanted, and so Nim was yanked bodily from his home in the dark of night and brought up to the king’s castle, hauled between the arms of a dozen strong and rough men.
“They say you’re the best,” said King Jot, to Nim. “Is it true?”
Nim thought about this. “Maybe,” he said. “If someone knows more, I do not know him.”
“Well, get to work then!” said King Jot. He sent Nim off to the kitchens, and inside an hour he had eaten the best soup of his life, soon followed by the finest breakfast, the perfect luncheon, and a roast that had him thumping the table with his palm after each bite, sending the silverware a-quivering.
Things changed for people that weren’t Nim. The peasants had to do their own cooking again, the castle guard endured the scent of that which was untouchable for them, the king managed (somehow) to grow broader. But Nim remained in the kitchen, day in and day out, having only a bigger stove. If he felt resentment, he didn’t show it. He just practiced. First a bit, then a lot. Then more.
One day the king’s brother came a-visiting, Duke Crumb. King Jot put especial emphasis on Nim that this meal be perfect, so as to properly show off – though he needn’t have bothered. Everything was exceptional, always exceptional, and the boar and potatoes was transformed into something unearthly for the plate. The duke, a thin and darting man, twitched and snapped at his plate until he’d eaten enough for five hungry lumberjacks, resentful though he was of his host and his endless boasting.
“Now wasn’t that the finest thing you’ve ever eaten!” laughed King Jot as the servants carried away their plates. “No chef can compare to mine, not even yours! Don’t you agree, brother?”
Duke Crumb fumed a little. “It is true, maybe,” he said. “Possibly. But tell me, is your cook a true royal chef?”
“What d’you mean?” asked King Jot. “He cooks, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, yes, any old housewife can COOK – well, maybe not like this,” admitted the duke. “But a royal chef must be willing to make sacrifice, to burn bright and hard and fast, to cook the finest no matter the cost to life and limb, to give himself to his employer body and soul!”
King Jot’s eyebrows were hopping like crickets. “Well now! Do I hear a suggestion from you?”
“Have him cook us his hand for breakfast,” said Duke Crumb. “A truly royal chef can make anything taste wonderful, even under the worst pain, even the least palatable morsel, without hesitation.”
King Jot grumbled and twitched. “Fine!” he shouted. “I’ll have Nim cook us his hand for breakfast! You’ll see how true and royal he is!” And so the order was given.
Nim woke up early the next morning, and prepared his kitchen carefully, with tourniquet and dressing (medicinal) and butcher’s knife and cleaver and dressing (light and fruity). Then he placed his hand in the frying-pan, and cut it with a strong blow and a twitch, and he fried it finely and sliced it thinly. And it was the best breakfast that either of the two royal brothers had ever had.
“Magnificent,” said King Jot thickly, as he licked his plate. “Wondrous. Amazing. Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Yes,” muttered Duke Crumb, “but we’ll see how well he cooks with one hand!” And he stalked away home, to his own (long-suffering) chef, who made him a very nice dinner that wasn’t quite enough.
Nim stayed up late all week in the kitchen, a tidy bandage wrapped around his stump, changed daily. He hoisted his pans and pots with exactly five fingers and one thumb, and became adept at holding many things in just one palm, salt shakers and pepper grinders and spice containers dancing from countertop to dish and back again, nearly juggling. He practiced. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. And he cooked meals exactly as fine as he had before.
The winter grew cold and long, and as his peasants shivered King Jot invited his brother over to the castle for a lavish solstice banquet. Nim laboured long and hard into the evening, and at the end of the food King Jot threw down his napkin and smugly pronounced his chef the finest there could be. “Even one-handed he is twice the match of any other, times ten!” he crowed. “Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Fine, fine, fine,” muttered Duke Crumb, steepling and unsteepling his fingers like an indecisive carpenter. “But he is no true royal chef.”
“What’s that?” asked King Jot, sharply.
“He has given a hand for you,” said Duke Crumb, “but it was his left! A TRULY royal chef would’ve given us his best and finest first and foremost, no less! Have him cook his right hand, and we’ll see what sort of chef your man really is.”
King Jot fussed with his moustache and sucked on his lip. “Fine!” he bellowed. “Let it be done, as proof of his skill!” And again the order was given to Nim.
Nim had a short nap after dessert and woke up before the night had left, and he prepared his tools once again, asking a brave and stout servant to swing the cleaver for him. Then with a swish and a thud, Nim’s next challenge began. He filleted the hand and fried it and drizzled it with oils and spices. It was prepared in time for breakfast and served crispy-golden, and it was the best breakfast that the two royal brothers had ever had, except for the last one.
“Glorious,” said King Jot tearfully as he picked crumbs from his beard and devoured them, one-by-one. “Outstanding. Beauteous. Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Fine,” said Duke Crumb, sulkily. “But let us see how he can cook without fingers!” He grumbled the whole way back home, and badgered his own cook to prepare him a snack at two in the morning, which he didn’t like for no good reason.
Nim barely slept for a month. He used tweezers between his teeth to grasp objects, and his toes to hold pans and pots, and his stumps to manhandle roasts and apply rubs. He practiced. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. And every single dish he prepared had never been more delicious.
Spring came, the flowers blossomed, and the kitchen became unbearably hot once again. To celebrate the labour of the farmers, Duke Crumb was invited to enjoy much of the fruits of their previous year’s labour. A great salad was made by Nim, with hundreds of different ingredients applied in exactly-measured quantities, and when the great bowl was emptied King Jot belched loud enough to rattle every window in his castle. “I own the greatest chef in all creation,” he proclaimed, boldly, “and may God strike me down if I say otherwise!” And God didn’t, so he smiled even wider.
“Fine!” snapped Duke Crumb. “Fine! I admit it! It is true! But he has not given you his all yet.”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked King Jot, puzzled. “He has no hands left!”
Duke Crumb’s lips were thin, bloodless strips already, but somehow he pressed them thinner still. “He still has his head,” he whispered.
King Jot shrugged and sighed noisily. “Will THIS prove his superiority to you, brother?” he asked.
Duke Crumb nodded once. “Indeed,” he said, and managed not to smile.
“Then let it be done!” roared King Jot. “Guards! Inform Nim!” And they did.
“This is not a good plan,” he warned the guard captain. “Tell the King to reconsider this. It will not end well for him.”
The guard captain gave him a look. “Just do it.”
Nim did not sleep that night. He sat and thought and planned. A great cauldron was set up, and spiced with every last thing in his kitchen, brothed and prepared five-times-over. The exact temperature was calculated and reached. The cleaver, honed to the thinness of a sliver, was clutched tight between his toes. And with a single, clean motion Nim cut off his head and sent it – plunk! – into the pot, where it boiled and bubbled until noon, when the servants obeyed his instructions and took it out and served it for lunch.
It was simply the best thing that King Jot and Duke Crumb had ever dreamed of. Ever.
“Terrific,” said King Jot with a sigh as he threw the bones over his shoulder. “Miraculous. Divine. Don’t you agree, brother?”
“Yes,” said Duke Crumb, face a twisted mask of misery. “Yes. I admit it. I MUST admit it.” He burped. “It does go down a bit…rocky though.”
“Does it?” asked King Jot, and belched. He felt most strange. “It does, doesn’t it? Ow! Ah!” And both the brothers clutched at their temples as migraines bloomed and blossomed inside their skulls, migraines with shapes and names, migraines that smelled of garlic and chives and knifes and soap and spices. A thousand thousand things and know-hows and to-dos and meal-plans and shopping-lists all sprouting through their heads, like a flower. First a bit, then a lot. Then more. Then more.
And all at once.

The new King was an estranged nephew; Jot had never found a wife, claiming them quarrelsome. King Root was a far more even-tempered and restrained man than his late uncle, and on the whole people were happy enough, especially since Duke Crumb’s estate had been restored to farmland. That fed a few more mouths in each house, and that’s always good.
The royal kitchen sat unused, as part of some agreement that no chef ever spoke aloud or broke. But now and then someone, usually an adventurous apprentice, would wander down there and touch the big cleaver embedded in the countertop next to the stove. For luck in their studies.

It never helped, of course. The only way to learn is to practice.

It all started so innocently. A man, a plan, a way to save time where it was needed.
The man was Wally, and that wasn’t his fault, it was his parents’. The plan came to him late one Friday night, as he prepared to engorge himself upon moderately violent video games in order to forget what lay ahead of him at weekend’s end. A simple idea, one that leaked into his skull from places unknown.
“If I go to bed earlier,” said Wally to himself (Wally), “I could wake up earlier and have a longer weekend!”
This was such a good idea that Wally did it right away, and slept deep and long. Something in his head ticked over and over in the night, muttering inside REM, whispering as he surfaced from a blanket of boring dreams.
“Hey!” said Wally. “If I work ahead of myself over the weekend, I’ll get off early at work every day all week! That’ll save LOADS of time!”
And so Wally did just that, and laboured all weekend. On Monday morning he dragged his carcass and his workload into his office – sleep-deprived and yawning and more than a little bit cranky – and was promptly rewarded with more work. A lot more work.
“Hey,” said Mitchell, his boss, “you proved you can handle it, right?”
“Right,” said Wally. And he left it at that, because any of the next words he was planning to say could’ve gotten him in trouble. But that was fine, because all those frustrations and fumes bottled themselves up inside him, fermented, and popped out as another fabulous, wonderful idea, fresh and faintly alcohol-scented.
“Hey!” said Wally. “If I just get Mitchell’s job, I’ll be able to give myself time off!”
So Wally went to night school and started visiting the same bar as Judy (his boss’s boss) and undermined and sabotaged Mitchell at every opportunity, taking only enough downtime to eat and sleep. And seven months later, the job was his and Mitchell had departed in disgrace, leaving Wally the heir to the office and five hundred pounds of unfilled, unsorted paperwork that had accumulated during Mitchell’s nervous breakdown, much of which was coffee-stained.
“Balls,” said Wally. “I’d better get all of this done so I can take some time off.”
So he pulled out his pen and his pencil and his eraser and he delved through the mountains of files and emails and letters and bills and Important Notices and when he was done he had almost as many as he’d started with, and his employees were all complaining their asses off.
“I’ll never be able to have a nice quiet weekend this way,” said Wally. “I’ll work through the weekend and clear it all up. My NEXT weekend will be perfect.”
So he did that for three weekends in a row and still had work left over, which was when he began to reconsider his strategy.
“What if I were to just take the money and run?” he asked himself. “I’m at a moderate position of authority, I could embezzle and steal and pinch and nick a fair bit before I lit out. Enough to keep me comfortable in a different country with a different name, surely. I’ll do it! But I’d better do it right.”
And Wally boned up on how to do it right. He watched films, read books, learned a bit more finance, and after three years of nonstop planning he ripped off a few million dollars and ran away to an undisclosed location under a name that wasn’t Wally. Mind you, he was still Wally underneath it all, which was what made him do what he did next.
“I can’t relax,” Wally told himself. “If I get sloppy, they’ll find me. And then they’ll get me. I need an escape route and traps and warning flags and a carefully randomized schedule that never lets the locals see me as anything other than background noise. And I’d better look this all of this up under a number of different disguises and IP addresses, so I don’t leave a trace.”
Wally planned and plotted and researched and constructed and organized himself for five more years. And at the end of it all, he had a secure bunker that he was confident was traceless, a shrouded and hidden and re-routed and false-flagged ID that would’ve fooled the CIA five times over (the FBI eighteen times, a preschooler six), and some incidental inside knowledge of illicit drug dealing going on five miles down the road that he’d stumbled on and used as a self-example of how NOT to cover your tracks.
“They’re going about all wrong, all sloppy,” fretted Wally. “And if they get caught, I might get spotted too, and that’d be a disaster. I’ve got to prevent that. And I can only REALLY do that if I’m in charge.”
Wally was very methodical. He integrated himself to the drug-dealers over the next two years, was running the operation in three, and had realized that the whole thing was run incompetently immediately, which was what launched his six-year project of taking over the entire cartel complex and all subinstitutions himself. He barely had time to sleep at nights and had to use a lot of his own product to keep himself awake and energetic, but finally he sat at the top of the heap, all the connections and phone numbers and favours he could ever need at his fingertips and a host of varyingly loyal subordinates beneath him. His eyes were bleary and his mind was weary and he knew he wasn’t through as soon as the first reports started filtering up to him.
“It’s the damned governments,” he mumbled to himself – very quietly, because somebody might be listening. “Oh my men can do their jobs well enough, but only if they’re not constantly being pecked away at by secret services and so on and such. I’d better get them off our backs. I’d better do that right quick, or I’ll never get any rest or quiet.”
The bribing took a long, long time. The cosying-up took even longer – Wally’s people skills hadn’t atrophied so much as adapted to a world where ‘fuck you pal’ was a courteous greeting. But he was persistent, and he never let up, and one day he found himself an internationally-renowned Respectable Citizen who’d made himself a very close personal friend of the current administration of his home country.
“Partisanship,” he muttered. “Partisanship will be the death of me. I won’t get a thing done once those other guys get in, they’ll go a-poking and a-prodding at my past, keep me on the defensive. I’ve got to keep them out. Shut them down. And bribes won’t do it, no no no. Must be a direct hand in it. My hand.” He looked at his hand. Papery skin, visible veins. Well, he’d been busy and a bit stressed lately; soon he’d have all the time in the world.
Running a campaign and debating the press were hard, debating your opponent was easy – all nudges and winks and nod-nods. Wally became the last president of his country of birth at the end of a five-year trek of carefully founded propaganda, and he celebrated with a nap in the big chair that was now his due. It was the first he’d slept in about a decade.
He woke up in a cold sweat. Christ, now he was in for it. Everybody’d be after him now, looking for something. He had more subordinates than a dog had fleas, he had more whiny neighbours looking for help than a bird had ticks. He had more enemies than a shark had teeth. Jehovah’s galloping nutsack, what had he gotten himself into?
“I’ve got to get a handle on it all,” he whispered subvocally – circumventing the surely-present spycams. “They’ll keep me on my toes, never give me a moment’s rest. Got to find a way to shut them all up, get them out of my hair.” He ran a hand over his scalp and winced. Maybe he could tell them to stop it? No, they wouldn’t listen. Could he wait his term out? No way, they’d be on him like a pack of jackals at a dying wildebeest. Why did they spell it that way anyways, with two ‘e’s? His head hurt. He needed that break. Why wouldn’t anyone just give him a bit of a damned break? Every damned human being in the world seemed to just love standing between Wally and Wally’s peace and quiet kick-back time.
Wally examined the desk in front of him. There was a phone. He wasn’t supposed to use it except as a last resort.
Well, he’d tried the others, so he guessed this was it.

The bunker was cold and dark and a bit wet, and Wally’s fingers were shaking quite badly as he stuffed rags into the cracks that had formed in its exterior under the force of the bombs. That’d have to do until he mixed up some fresh cement. And checked the Geiger counter. And sorted the foods by perishability.
Well, he’d get it all done now and have some spare time tomorrow. Then he’d have all the time that was left in the world.

There’s a saint for everything, they say, and the people of Saint Clemeth knew this to be so. After all, if the Good Lord could spare a saint for Saint Clemeth, he must have them fit to burn.
It’s a lonely little place, Saint Clemeth. Not bad, but lonely. Empty and treeless, with only the sea spray and the gull-cry and the mourning of the seals to make an impact on the world. The seals do that the most, with their calls. Those sorrowful night-cries of theirs sounded like someone very young, or maybe very old, and very unhappy either way; one-of-a-kind-anywhere-ever. The people of Saint Clemeth knew that a special sort of seal that made a special sort of wailing like that needed a special sort of name. So they called them wailing seals.
Saint Clemeth was not the patron saint of imagination. He was a straightforward sort of man, who’d dethroned the king of the rocks and opened Saint Clemeth (the island) to the Good News and all that sort of thing, then up and died and left a little cairn that was currently tucked behind a neat white church perched above a small and brightly-painted town nestled on the shores of Saint Clemeth. The island.
The people of Saint Clemeth lived the time the Lord allotted each of them long, full, and slow. If you could paint someone’s life, most of the people of Saint Clemeth would look very similar: a big, broad, blue line that stretched on across the canvass and petered off to a neat little tapered end. If you looked very closely, perhaps with some sort of microscope, there’d be a miniscule little blip every twelve months when the fishing festival of Saint Clemeth (the saint) happened. If a family fisherman caught the crown-fish, that little blip of excitement would be visible with the naked eye. And that would be about that.

It’d been eleven months and about thirty days of waiting and here it was again. The sort of day that made the sea spray high and the seals wail low, the time for that little blip in the slow blue lives of Saint Clemeth’s fishermen, where they’d grab their line and tackle and nets and tricks and boots and stomp on down to the docks in the afternoon, with all the town watching with binoculars and telescopes and squints and in the case of Mad Mortimer his seeing-eye gull. Mad Mortimer swore up and down and on a blue moon that the cranky little bird worked, but he also swore up and down and on a blue moon that he’d never walked into the side of his house ever, or at least more than once, and certainly not in front of witnesses no sir, so he wasn’t what most people called trusty.
Mad Mortimer was a big, big man, and so was the dent in the side of his house, worn smooth by salt air and repeated collisions after pub night (most nights). In fact, it was so big that if you stood very still in it with your back against the wall and held your breath and if you were as small as little Susan was, you’d almost vanish from the street if people weren’t looking too closely. Little Susan found this very useful, especially when her mother was chasing after her to cut her hair for the festival.
“SUUUUUUUU-SIEEEEE!” came the Voice with a pealing clang-clong-cling that’d have driven pride into a church bell’s heart. “COME RIGHT HERE THIS INSTANT I MEAN IT” and so on and so forth, all the words and threats blurring into one big fuzzy siren that told little Susan that she’d better keep moving, because her mother was hunting fast and hard. No stone would be unturned, no doorstep unpeered, no neighbour unquestioned. Little Susan would have her haircut so she could be at the docks promptly and timely to wish her elder brother Stanley good-luck before he headed out to help Uncle Benson fish for the crown, and if she happened to think Stanley was the biggest louse ever to escape from a lobster trap and scuttle into town in the guise of a human, well she’d just have to keep it to herself. Little Susan had resolved that she would sooner die than suffer such tyranny, but she’d rather it not be of embarrassment: her mother was a mighty and skilled woman in many ways, but she was a terror with a pair of scissors. She needed an escape route, and fast.
“SUUUUUUUU-SIE!” called the voice, sharper now.
That’d torn it; next she’d be using little Susan’s full name. It was time to get serious about escape. But where? The streets were bustling, every path filled with revelry. Potential Judases. Her only hope was to hide somewhere her mother would never look for her, never suspect her presence, never even think to ask of….
“SUSAN! AGNES! MCALLISTER!”
Right, that was it. Time to head to the docks. Little Susan slipped out of Mad Mortimer’s dent like a wisp of steam from a teacup and eeled her way downhill in the alleys and byways, head held low and feet drumming along like a double-time marching band. An eye or two caught her passage – Kelvin the ironmonger, cousin Patricia – but so what? Nobody would ever suspect her destination, no one would guess that she’d hide right in the place she meant to avoid. It was utterly, utterly, totally, completely, absolutely foolproof, and she reached the docks with her spirits high.
“Hoy,” said Stanley. “What’re you doin’ here? Where’s mam?”
Out of the frying-pan and into the fire, little Susan swallowed the immediate grimace that threatened her face and mustered her wits. “Dunno.”
Stanley looked at her and frowned. “She wouldn’ let you wander ‘bout alone. Where’s mam?”
“Dunno,” said little Susan, calculatingly.
Stanley’s eyes narrowed. “You di’nt run away, didja?”
“No!” said little Susan.
He shook his head. “Figgurs. Unc Benson!” he called, turning about to his uncle’s boat. “I’ll be back quick as a blink! Jus’ got to drag me sis back to mam.” Having said his piece, Stanley turned back to find his sister twenty feet away and accelerating.

Confound the luck of little girls, thought little Susan. But her hopes were still alive. The docks weren’t a safe unknown anymore, but there were a dozen places to hide every dozen feet, and a dozen more of those if you were small and slight and willingly to hold your breath. All she had to do was dodge between the procession of the MacDonald children – all head and shoulders above her, easier done than said – and then weave behind the crowd forming (at a safe distance) around Mad Mortimer’s make-your-own-foghorn-from-a-tin-can-and-an-angry-cat demonstration, and then hop, skip, and jump into the nearest empty boat, low in the water and tied as firmly as a rock.
Little Susan peered out just above the waterline and saw her brother go dashing by. Success, and sweetly taken! But he’d slow down soon, and backtrack; Stanley was a loathsome sort, but clever. She’d need to take a more careful shelter, and look, the cabin door was unlocked! Saint Clemeth was watching over his festival after all, and over little girls in particular. So she hummed a bit as she shut the door behind her, and peered through the dusty old window into the bright blue world. Not more than a few minutes, and she’d be home and dry. Not at home though. That would be troublesome for a while yet.
There was a noise, and little Susan froze. No, it’d been a creak, a groaning of a board in an old tub that from the look of it had been afloat one decade – or century – too many. There were no ghosts in town. Not since the one at the lighthouse, or the one at the cairn, or the one that was in their basement. Stanley had a lot to answer for. But she was sure there was no ghost at the docks.
“Mmmmmmrrgh?”
Little Susan opened her mouth to scream, saw Stanley ashore in the crowd, and shut her mouth again. Instead, she spun on her heel to face any ghosts that might’ve been about and hissed “quiet!”
A pile of old furry rags sitting in the captain’s chair moved, and opened its bleary brown eyes, lost in a tangled beard much too big for them that had somehow spread from nose to navel. “Ffuurwut? Eh?” it creaked.
Oh, thought little Susan, and saw what it was. It wasn’t a ghost. It was old man Thane. He was called that so as not to confuse him with Big Douglas Thane the miller’s helper, or Little Tommy Thane who cried the Sunday papers up at Noonan’s way. They weren’t his relations. She wasn’t sure if ANYONE was old man Thane’s relation.
“Oooooh,” said old man Thane, looking more closely at her and recognizing a person, even if it was a small one. “Ayyy seeee. Whurter ye doon heer. Eh? Whuut yoo in me hoom fuur?” He had the most peculiar voice; every word he spoke sounded like it was being hauled up out of a very strange and deep tidal cave.
“What’re YOU in here for?” countered little Susan.
Old man Thane’s face was a mask of misery, a thousand little lines carved by unhappiness that tears could never have shaped, like a mighty canyon formed from trickles of water. It wrinkled at little Susan’s question. “Caant feesh,” he mumbled. “Bee indy wayy. Noo fest-“ and here he stopped to wince extra hard –“eye-vall fer me.”
“Stanley’s doing it,” said little Susan, filling the name with as much disdain as she could manage. “Anybody could do it. Everybody’s trying. Aren’t you going to even try?”
Old man Thane didn’t say a word, but his expression said everything, every word that little Susan had ever heard tale of old man Thane. Not Captain Thane, though he’d owned the boat for as long as he’d need to for it, been afloat for longer than any set of grandparents anyone could name. Old man Thane. Because a captain worth his name had to catch something. Wherever old man Thane spread his nets and cast his bait, that was where the other boats fled, leaving him on one side of the island and they on the other. And they’d snare fish, and old man Thane would snare his bent old brown fingers in his nets and sit there looking at them as if to ask what had gone wrong.
The next day he’d try the other side of the island. And it would happen again.
Old man thane: the man that never left his boat and couldn’t catch so much as a cold.
“Anybody could do it,” repeated little Susan with total confidence.
Old man Thane kept not saying a word.
“Well, probably,” she amended.
Old man Thane lowered himself farther into his chair again and turned it away.
“Well, maybe not you, MAYBE,” said little Susan. “But neither can loads of people! Stanley could never get the crown. Ever. Not in a million years.”
Old man Thane didn’t say anything. But he turned his chair ‘round again, slowly and laboriously, with a lot of creaking. She wasn’t sure whether it was from his legs or the cabin.
“Wuut?” he asked.
“What?” she replied.
“Hoo ye noo?” he asked.
“Hoo I noo what?” said little Susan.
“Hoo ye noo abut me cruun!” yelled old man Thane, stamping his feet and smashing his fist on the arm of his chair with a violent spasm. His voice creaked like leather and his chest pumped like a bellows, he’d gone all red in the face under his mess of whiskers, but his eyes weren’t angry, just confused, and that’s what made little Susan stay calm. That and that she was sure that if she ran outside, Stanley would be standing right there, sure as sixpence. Saint Clemeth seemed to be in the mood for giving that sort of luck to little girls today.
“I don’t know about anything,” she said, trying not to sound too proud. “My teacher says so.”
“Me HAHTT,” clarified old man Thane. He coughed violently. “Me hahtt.” He sank down into his chair again, rubbing at his face. “T’sawwl noo guud. Not witoot me croon, me hahtt. Noo guud seens den, noo guud noo, noo guud everr. Noo guud.”
That haunted look was back in him now, shrinking him where he sat. He was the smallest-looking adult little Susan had ever seen, as small as little baby Caroline that was still in a crib. And it was because he looked so very small, and because she couldn’t imagine a captain without a hat, that little Susan said what she said next, which was this:
“I could get it for you.”
Old man Thane looked up again.
“If you really want it, I guess,” she said.
He rubbed at his beard, fingers colliding by chance with a pipe that was lodged somewhere near his chin. “Tha…..th’…oon th’ rooks. Oop hy. Abuv. In tha stoons whaar hee poot et.” His hands were shaking as they dislodged the pipe. “Caan ye? Whiill ye?”
Little Susan looked over her shoulder at the docks, and saw no sign of Stanley. A seal blinked at her with watery eyes from underneath the pier; the affronted royalty of the rocks.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Old man Thane looked at his pipe as if it were the most complicated object in all the world. And he nodded.
So little Susan left – after checking the docks again, carefully – and did some thinking as she walked, aimlessly. She’d made some sort of a promise now, and that was important. It was also a pretty big promise, from the way the old man had acted. That was also important. So she should go and do it right now, which meant thinking. That was hard.
Well, she’d check the rooks first. So she looked around, and she saw the rooks. Everywhere. Underfoot, in the harbour, on the hill up above, all over the place. Saint Clemeth was a rooky place, it was part of what made it hard for anything to grow there. It also made this hint of little Susan’s next to useless.
What next? Oop hy. Abuv. So little Susan looked oop hy and abuv, and saw a lot of big blue sky and only the merest wisps of clouds. She started to get dizzy, and looked somewhere else. That wasn’t very helpful at all.
In tha stoons whaar hee poot et. Which hee? Which stoons? There were just as many stoons as rooks, and little Susan was getting really annoyed about this riddle, which was much harder than the ones grandpa told when she wasn’t supposed to be listening. Those all ended up being about naked people and body parts. Body parts like the hand that descended on little Susan’s neck like a vise.
“Susan Agnes McAllister,” breathed an extremely quiet and deathly calm voice in her ear. “You are in so much trouble right now.”
Little Susan would’ve protested, but felt that uninstructed use of her throat might cost her her head.
“It is almost noon and you still don’t have your hair cut,” continued her mother in her absolute monotone. “You will have to say good luck to your brother with messy hair and a sore backside.
Little Susan cursed her entirely fruitless and now-deadly aimless wandering, but silently. Her back was prickling with the anticipation of the smacking to come, the air seemed thick with tension. Or something else. She couldn’t quite place it.
Little Susan’s mother paused for a moment to listen, and then little Susan heard it. Oh. Screams.
They were getting louder very quickly.
“What is-“ managed little Susan’s mother, and then Mad Mortimer came rumbling into sight, running uphill but with the full force of panic behind him and his heart in his mouth, bleating fit to burst. There was a sound like eight kinds of armour-clad fur-spitting hell coming after him, a racket that couldn’t have been bested by a freight train laden down with fifteen cars of mixed pins and balloons.
Mad Mortimer was a big man, and the byway that little Susan and her mother stood in was a small one. And he wasn’t about to stop.
In the half-second it took for little Susan’s mother’s full-formed, adult, rational mind to process this, little Susan had wriggled off and away and run for dear life through an open door, proceeding through an open window, an alley, and a road in that order, all uphill. Faint crashes and shouts behind her informed her sensitive ears that her mother was probably all right but angrier than before, and she shouldn’t check on her. It wouldn’t be safe.
Safe. She needed to be safe again. Not the docks, not the town, not anywhere, where could she go?
Well, right there in front of her, inside the church. Thankfully empty, too.
Little Susan reached for her second neglected doorknob of the day, only to find that the minister, trustless, heartless man that he was, had locked the place up for the festival.
She said a word her grandpa had taught her (inadvertently) and pounded the door and hurt her fist. Where now? There was nowhere to hide up here on the hill, nowhere to run, and if she walked down the road back into town she’d be spotted for sure. She needed to hide, hide, hide, the overpowering instinct that nature instills in children and mice, and she ran around the church in circles, hoping against hope that the back door was open.
Locked.
Little Susan slumped down against the door, resigned to her fate. That was when she saw her hiding place, courtesy of Saint Clemeth, patron saint of luck for little girls and maybe Saint Clemeth (the island) too she guessed.

Saint Clemeth’s cairn was small and cramped and something in it seemed to be poking little Susan in the most uncomfortable part of her rear. She wondered how Saint Clemeth had ever managed to fit inside it. Maybe he’d been small and cramped too. But as she heard her mother’s footsteps fade away in the distance alongside some particularly vicious mutterings, she wasn’t about to complain about space. Better a numb backside than a raw one.
Something was definitely poking her and threatening to undo that. She rolled over and around in the tight little cubby that was the holy receptacle of Saint Clemeth’s earthly remains, then froze mid-wince, eyes bigger than saucers, waiting three slow blinks to make sure what she was seeing was still there.
It was.
And so it was that little Susan reached into Saint Clemeth’s cairn, oon th’ rooks oop hy abuv the town, in tha stoons whaar hee poot et, and removed old man Thane’s hahtt.
It looked nothing like a captain’s hat, and it was much smaller than she’d have thought it was; a circle of rusted iron and blackened silver, dark as a lump of coal even when held up to the sun. It smelt like metal and salt and it made her palms itch and her mother’s voice in the back of her head go on about tetanus. But more importantly still, it meant that her promise was still good! Now she just had to get it back down to the docks and
“SUSAN.”
Little Susan’s feet acted without her mind needing to inform them, and that was how she stayed one step ahead of her mother for the first fifty feet of the race, because her mind was busy obsessing over how stupid it’d been to stand up in plain sight on the top of a hill with her mother not two minute’s walking distance away.
The next half-kilometer was a test of drive. Little Susan’s mother had a hide to tan and a child to discipline and set on the straight and narrow. Little Susan had a promise to keep and a deadline to reach – as they entered the town, the foghorns on the boats were sounding, the lines were being cast off, the wailing seals of the harbour were kicking up a caterwauling fuss at the unwanted intruders on their rightful dominion.
The last ten yards were decided on endurance and leg-length, and here it was that little Susan’s mother claimed an unfair and biased advantage and seized her up in both hands.
“What is THAT thing you’ve-“
Little Susan’s vision was a tunnel now, made of curious faces staring her way, a maze she couldn’t see through. Where was he?
“-rusty all over, you’re going to get lockjaw-“
The faces turned away as one, back to the sight of the festival’s launch, the boats all headed for the harbour’s mouth. All of the faces, except for one. Old man Thane was staring dead straight at her, mouth frozen wide open in shock, pipe dribbling out of one hand to fall to the deck at the sight of her and what was in her hand.
“-give me that!”
The last six inches were decided by a strategic elbow of little Susan’s, which planted itself in her mother’s side and halted her grip for a fraction of a second, which was just long enough for little Susan to move her arm on the last, shortest, and hardest stretch of the race and hurl the cruun at old man Thane, where it bounced off his chest and into his boat.
Little Susan missed what happened for the next few minutes, because she was busy being given the sorest backside of her life. It was alright. Afterwards, plenty of people wanted to tell her about it.

Old man Thane looked down at the thing on the deck of his boat for a long, long time. He reached down to it real, real slow. And as he straightened up that bent old back of his, he placed his crown upon his head.
And old man Thane changed, just like that, in the strange little ways that people change all their lives. He stood up straight, and he looked tall. He stood up strong, and he looked big. His eyes weren’t watery, they were glistening, his crooked fingers clenched and unclenched themselves into straight shape, and even his beard was different. It flowed, not bristled.
He didn’t say a word, but he bent back down to his work. A quick shrug and a tug and a yank and the moorings were gone, his boat was adrift, its engine a-putter as he steamed out of the harbour, last in line, serenaded by all the annoyed wailing seals.

Out there in the mouth to the wide open sea, the boats gathered. In a moment they would scatter, but not too far. This was a test of who could find the best fish right here, right there at Saint Clemeth’s. Nobody wanted to bring back some foreign fish, it’d ruin the spirit of the thing right proper. But before they scattered, they’d gather to wish one and all good luck at the harbour’s mouth, and that was what put so many noses out of joint when old man Thane chugged up in his boat and stopped there, right in the middle of all of them before they’d even had a chance to exchange pleasantries.
He cut the engine and watched them. The day seemed too quiet all of a sudden, even with the seals still complaining and all the other boats running.
“”Ey, move it!” yelled Uncle Benson.
“Gerout of there!” said Mr. Macdonald.
“What’s about that poky hat?” asked Angus the younger.
Old man Thane did a very unnerving thing here. He looked at each and every one of them, all at once, and he grinned, he grinned bigger than anybody would’ve thought a human mouth could stretch. He grinned ear to ear and back to the other ear again, and if there was ever a more fearsome thing to see than that, not one of the men knew it.
All of them shrunk back in their seats.
“Christ on a cracker,” mumbled Stanley. Uncle Benson said nothing.
Old man Thane cocked his head and listened to them all mutter, and then he coughed. Once, twice, three times. A big hacking rasp that sounded like someone tearing strips off a lung. Gunshot coughs.
Now, two things happened. First off, all the other boat’s engines stopped dead. Second, a fish jumped into old man Thane’s boat.
He caught it with one hand and looked at it as if it were made of gold for a long, long, long time. Then he tossed back his head and let out a bark. One, two, three barks. Big, solid, sharp-tongue calls that sounded like they came from a dog’s mouth.
The seals shut up just like that. And another fish jumped into the air and right into old man Thane’s mouth.
He chewed it and swallowed. One gulp. Then he wiped his mouth and laughed and laughed and out came the biggest tearer of a bellowing roar that hadn’t been heard since the end of the world, a sound that a foghorn wanted to be when it grew up. It shook the timbers of every boat present and it made the sea curl itself up into fits and when it ended the air seemed more fragile than it had been just a minute ago.
When it ended, old man Thane wasn’t there anymore. And neither was old man Thane’s boat. But the water was being sucked down in spirals where they’d sat, and Stanley told anyone who’d listen – just little Susan, as it turned out – that he saw a big old tail flip against the current and head down into deeper waters, searching for shining scales underwater.

Nobody caught any fish, not for three days. After that they came back, but they were scared pretty fierce for a while.

By and by, it came to pass after all the fuss had died down that the people of Saint Clemeth heard something new – or rather, didn’t hear it. The wailing seals had stopped their evening wailing, stopped up for good. Now they just barked and burbled and bellowed like any regular old seal did, and they did it all day and snoozed all night. Obviously, they needed a new name now. The old one didn’t fit.
So they called them Thane’s Grandchildren. And that name fit nice and snug.

Jamie Proctor, 2012.

-150,000 BP. The first incident of violence. An early modern human (H. sapiens sapiens) returns home early from the hunt due to bad weather and finds his brother making fresh with his wife. Rather than bludgeon the man, he instead compares his sibling’s penis to a mammoth’s: relatively small, furry, and smelling like a dead whale. Unprepared for this novel assault, the surprised adulterer can only attempt to retaliate with a crude form of ‘yo mama,’ and is laughed out of the clan for his foolish self-burn.
-140,000 BP. The first full-scale war breaks out. All twenty combatants suffer serious boo-boos and ouchies, and the defeating general is noogied alive. A rematch is scheduled, but is called off on account of mammoths.
-15,000 BP. An over-long game of “mammoth-fur-overcoat’s-on-fire, NOW IT’S OUT” during the crossing of the Bering land bridge leads to the first attempted homicide in the Americas.
-334 BC. Alexander the Great launches the beginning of one of the most successful military campaigns ever to exist in history and goes on to conquer a vast empire, all of which falls apart within a few years of his death. This is considered worthy of emulation and he is admired widely for millennia.
-266 BC. Filled with boldness at their successful use of flaming pigs to deter invasion by elephants, the people of the Greek city of Megara attempt to outfit pigs with shield, spear, and armour. It ends poorly for them, but provides the invading army with easy access to delicious bacon.
-0 AD. An attempted pranking of a troublesome holy man by leaving him tied to a big stick overnight gets a little out of control.
-100 AD. With an unusual lack of major enemies and a low point of internal strife, citizens of the Roman Empire develop the game of ‘stop hitting yourself’ to satiate their boredom.
-500-ish AD. King Arthur’s best friend runs off with his wife, explaining his actions with the first use of ‘bros before hos.’ This is the first and far from last complete and total failure of this defence.
-700 AD. Hundreds of churches and monasteries in the British Isles are burned and pillaged by the Norsemen with the use of only a single knock-knock joke for entry, usually the same one over and over. According to archaeological data, it wasn’t a particularly good one, even in the original Old Norse.
-1095 AD. The crusades are officially declared to be ‘on’ after the Turks respond to Pope Urban II’s calls for pious violence with “umad?”
-1255 AD. Mansa Ali expands the Mali Empire, using a mixture of conquest and surprise bouts of truth-or-dare to force his neighbours to give him all their land or be labelled wussies.
-1277 AD. In an abrupt end to a decently long and obscenely successful life of mass murder, Genghis Khan dies in a riding accident after his youngest son Tolui saws the left leg off his horse as a prank.
-1281 AD. The Divine Wind destroys Mongol attempts at invading China. Its existence is credited to the grace of the gods and the secret construction of largest whoopee cushion ever made.
-1400 AD and so on. Large quantities of European noblemen wear gigantic amounts of metal all over themselves, and are greatly surprised and annoyed to learn that projectile weaponry has already been developed, often at a range of six hundred feet and straight through their eyeballs.
-1453 AD. The Hundred Years’ War ends after one hundred and sixteen years, and is widely admired for having given the French and English time to really find out who they were and get a grip on life and all that deep stuff, and what it really MEANT, man. The answer, naturally, was killing foreigners.
-1493 AD. Columbus sails back to Spain and tattles on the Indians for having nice stuff and hiding when he demanded they share. Europe in general agrees that such naughty behaviour merits a thorough genocide and time-out.
-1520 AD. Montezuma bets his life and country that he’s a bigger asshole than Hernan Cortes. Cortes wins the bet before he gets the joke, which pretty much sets the tone for Spanish relations in the New World from there.
-1776 AD. General George Washington pinky swears to the Hessians that he will not cross the Delaware on December 24th. Though it was once commonly held by American historians that he was crossing the pinky of his other hand behind his back at the time, this is now considered to be a myth.
-1812 AD. The British and the Americans take turns burning down each other’s landmarks, declare victory, and go home. No, really.
-1865 AD. In a deplorable display, American president Abraham Lincoln is assassinated without so much as a twenty-second head start, let alone the opportunity to call time-out.
-1876 AD. George Armstrong Custer tries to call safety at Little Big Horn but is overruled by Crazy Horse, who claims that they ‘called it’ as home base first. Custer disagrees loudly and is bludgeoned, in that order.
-1877 AD. The Bone Wars of the American west begin between rival paleontologists Cope and Marsh, showing once again that the one thing an upper-class pedantic twit can’t stand is another guy just like him.
-1914 AD. The Christmas truce occurs and lasts for another 4 years after all the soldiers involved realize how much nicer it is than getting shot. After a lot of arguing, the governments involved agree to lie to the historians to prevent embarrassment and settle the victor with a coin flip. Germany argues that Britain rigged the toss, Britain cites losers-weepers doctrine, and the ensuring bitterness sets the stage for the next go-round.
-1915 AD. The tank is conceptualized, named, and constructed as part of an elaborate practical joke.
-1940 AD. The first battle won by a tank driving backwards. Simultaneously, the first battle won as a result of drinking and driving. Also the last. Formal records deleted so as to prevent copycats.
-1945 AD. Humans become ‘Death, the destroyer of a few square miles in New Mexico.’ Several additional, more heavily populated square miles follow. It is estimated that at some point humanity will work its way up to ‘world,’ and in far future times, if the fates sing right, ‘worlds’ may be attainable.
-2001 AD. An attempted punk’d-ing in New York goes horribly wrong.
-2003 AD. Iraq is invaded by the United States of America for being in the wrong place at the wrong time for all the wrong reasons, something something, something or other, yadda yadda and so on.
-2109 AD. An anonymous world leader finally discovers and uses the perfect ‘yo mama’ joke.
-2109 plus five minutes or so AD. Open nuclear warfare.
-6381 AD. Junior xeno-archaeologist Qdu372 uses an extremely rare specimen of intact human skull as a hand puppet and is punched in the skepplem by his associate, senior xeno-archaeologist TBI9.

An old man sits at a dusty, fly-speckled table made of some sort of blatantly prehistoric wood, bottle in hand, mind in the bottle. His hair is a wavy-washy mane of white shrubbery turned grey by lack of showering. The clutter of the antique shop surrounding him camouflages his body nicely, turning it into another of the obscure, half-cracked shapes that infest his surroundings. Every single item in the entire building is broken, including the small pocket-watch he is examining.
The little hand is stuck on half-past ‘almost-time,’ and is thusly stuck on a very small and high-pitched whining chime. It has been stuck there for over one hundred thousand years.
“Fuck it all,” says the old man, much too loudly, and gets up. A coat that looks like it was formerly a mangy bear is donned, and approximately sixty-three different small and oddly shaped items that were crammed into its pockets spill out all over the place and fly underneath the various tables in the building, never to be seen again.
The old man sighs in a way that cuts like a curse and leaves on his beaten bicycle. He stops three times in the first mile to patch holes in his tires.

This is a different table, a streamlined table, a modern table. An ergonomic table. A table that has been designed five times over to optimize educational throughput and dynamically engage the learning capabilities of its students. The chair hurts your back, and the young woman sitting at the table has solved this problem by dissolving her backbone and turning her entire body into one big, perfect, utterly graceless slouch. It’s breathtaking.
Class has been over for five hours, but the air still reeks of desperately infinite dullness. If you took a good long breath and held it – forever – you might glimpse the platonic ideal of tedium.
The clock ticks once every second-and-one-five-hundredth. The last one was noteworthy, and a signal. So the young woman draws herself to her feet in a sort of sustained shrug, drags herself outside of the deadened space, and trudges down the street, battered sneakers leading the way, eyes leaden.

Sneezes. So many sneezes. One two threefourfixevenightine blurring over and under each other into a number beyond numbers. It’s a wonder the old woman can keep her brains in her head the way she’s rattled by them, though the hiccups seem to be stabilizing her. A shake of her head and a last, titanic eruption and she’s free from the grasp of the hay fever and back to scratching the bumpy red skin on her forearms and cursing.
“Pollen,” she mumbles. “Damned pollen. Always the pollen. Must be dandelions or something or other.” A cough, a snort, and she’s nearly blinded by the rheumy gunk in her eyes: scrubbing and more swearing is her answer.
The alarm clock goes off and a migraine thunders down upon her forebrain from the top of her spine, a herd of angry and spiky thoughts that almost blot out the timepiece’s message: better get going.
“Shit,” she says. And sneezes. And after putting a few dozen boxes of tissues into her purse she and her motorcycle are off and away down the highway, both of them hacking fit to burst.

The site of meeting is a run-down old stretch of road somewhere on earth, dusty and dirty and an insult to pavement.
“We’re here?” asks the old man
“We’re here,” agrees the old woman.
The young woman musters the bare minimum of a shrug.
“We can’t be here,” says the old man. “It’s missing. Lost again? AGAIN?”
“It’s always lost,” says the old woman. “That’s how it WORKS.” She winced. “Don’t start this again, you know how it makes my hemorrhoids-”
“I don’t need to know that.”
“Then hush up and get going. We’re wasting daylight. You ready, Borry?”
The young woman looks up. “It’s Boredom,” she says. “You know that.”
“Good. Let’s get trit-trotting then.”
And so the three set out, arm in arm, side by side, one trudging, one peddling, one motoring: all at the same pace, all in the same place, across the world. Roads and roads pass by underneath them, mountains turn into footholds, clouds swim across their eyes. Larger than mountains and less substantial than a puff of breath.
“This is stupid,” says the old man.
Boredom rolls her eyes extremely slowly at this, and down in the world underfoot a five-year-old spends three hours watching a spider spin a web on his bedroom wall.
“What’s stupid about it?” challenges the old woman. “It’s good, clean work, and it’s all going just fine. We’ve got an important job to do, and once it’s done it’s done.”
“We could be bigger. We should be in the book.”
“Oh pshaw, you always want to be in the book. What’s so great about being in the book, eh? Three of the ones in the book don’t even get names, and one of them people never even remember!”
“More’n we’ve got,” says the old man. He frowns down below, and an English professor grading a paper smacks his face into his palm so hard he nearly breaks his nose. “The pale horse, death. You remember that ‘cause it’s in the book. Who remembers ‘irritation, on a bicycle?”
“There’s more to life than being memorable,” says the old woman. “We’re every bit as important.” She scratches a mosquito bite, and far away a farmer stubs his toe and lets fly with some of the worst profanity ever voiced.
“Oh speak for your own damned self,” snarls Irritation. “I never signed up for this. Look at us! We can’t even all get together on time! It’s our big showing, our big chance, our big show-off, and we’ve got three riders. Three! And one of them’s walking! What kind of amateur-hour crap is that?”
“I’m here,” says a fourth voice.
It’s hard on the ears, but then again its owner is hard on the eyes in the most true sense of the words. Difficult to even put a sex to that face, because it looks like everybody. It stands astride a unicycle, poorly balanced.
“Hey,” says Boredom.
“Hi,” says the fourth voice. “Are we doing something still? I got lost.”
Irritation rubs his forehead. He feels old, older than usual. “You are everywhere any human has ever been. Ever. You were already with us from the start. And you got lost.”
“Well, maybe I sort of forgot,” says Stupidity, a bit defensively. “It’s not like I wrote it down or anything. ‘Meet Discomfort, Irritation, and Boredom at four o’clock for a big hoedown-“
“The RIDE,” hisses Irritation, through clenched and creaking teeth. In a city, a tuba player in a cramped apartment complex practices until 5 AM.
“-yeah, a ridedown. Anyways, it’s not like I had it written down or anything. I knew I’d remember.”
“You forgot.”
“Oh. Well, yeah. I got lost, that’s all.”
Somewhere in between the words, a man driving an old truck tries to drink hot coffee with two fingers and steer with the other three, and fails.
“I want out,” says Irritation. “Seriously.”
“Well leave,” snaps Discomfort. “Nobody’s stopping you.” Somewhere, a traffic jam stretches out a five mile journey to six hours.
“Out of this job, not out of you lot. We could be big if we just changed careers. We could do a band or something. Anything but this!”
“Music,” says Boredom.
“Yeah!”
“Music,” she repeats, roiling the word around in her mouth to see how it feels.
“You up for it?”
“Nah,” she sighs. A long and dreary rain sets over a camping trip for the entire weekend, cooping fifteen people in their tents.
“You’re outvoted, Irritation” says Discomfort smugly. “Two to one.”
“Boredom won’t agree with anything you say and Stupidity’ll side with both of us at once,” snaps Irritation. “Two-to-two.”
“Tutu?” asks Stupidity. “We could dance!”
“Shut up,” its friends encourage it.
“Well, I liked it,” it mumbles. And somewhere, somehow, a ‘quality excellence in motivation and employee strategizing team’ is formed.
“Look, it doesn’t have to be music. We could….I don’t know, form a moving company. Write a bestselling screenplay. Do anything other than this.”
“You’re planning to retrain Stupidity? Poor dear can barely handle what it’s doing now.”
“I’m doing what now?” asks Stupidity, picking its nose. It flicks it away, and somewhere, somehow, a child decides to throw a rock at a bee’s nest, just to see what’ll happen.
“Besides, we only have to do it once. I say we should stay along and stick with this; we’re already nearly done for good.”
“Once is too much. I say we should drop it,” says Irritation. Mothers scold their children.
“No, we should stay,” says Discomfort. Feet step on nettles.
“Drop!” Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep.
“Stay!” Thousands awaken with dried-out mouths and splitting headaches.
“Uhh..” says Boredom.
“What?”
“Yes, what!?”
“Where are we?”
The four riders-sort-of look around. They’re on a dirty, run-down road. Who knows where.
“Lost,” says Irritation. “Again.”
“Your own darn fault,” says Discomfort. “You always start that argument.”
“No, no, no – shut up. We can do this. Where have we been? Africa? Europe? We did Eastern Europe at least, didn’t we? How about Indonesia?”
“The one with the lemurs?” asks Stupidity.
“No. Fuck off. Christ, did we hit North America?”
“I’m certain we skipped Canada,” says Discomfort. “I’d remember the trees.”
“We saw loads of trees.”
“Yes, but that was Kamchatka. I’m certain of it.”
Boredom yawns.
“Christ’s nuts on a fruitcake,” says Irritation, and slumps in defeat. “Damnit. Damnit damnit damnit.”
“Chin up now,” says Discomfort. “We’ll get it done tomorrow. You’ll see.”
Irritation’s already pedalling away, but is polite enough to give a single-digit response over his shoulder.
“Fiddlesticks,” says Discomfort. “Well then, no shame in another go.  Again.  Same time tomorrow, you two?”
Boredom has already sat down on a rock, and is busy examining a bug. “Sure. Whatever.”
“I’ll come,” says Stupidity. “If I don’t get lost.”
“Then it’s settled. If at ninety-five millionth you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

How to Bake a Space Whale.

Ingredients: 1 singular, tiny pinpoint seed of all possible existence (metric)

Pre-prep
-First off, you want to set the cooking time of your universe. This recipe could take around ten to fifteen billion years depending on how you handle it, and you’ll want a good bit of time left after that to enjoy your Space Whales before the universe becomes uninhabitable by crunch or endless expansion into a cold, starry void devoid of all matter, light, and hope.
-Be sure to check your singularity before you get started! Nothing worse than getting five billion years into a universe and finding out you forgot to create the conditions for anything bigger than elementary particles to arise, or forgot to include gravity. Many of these problems can be brushed off by purchasing your singularities from reputable sources, but it’s good practice to give them a once-over before you start just to be safe. Better safe than sorry!
(If you are preparing your own singularity at home, consult the accompanying one-googol-page manual on ensuring the proper conditions required for a universe to support Space Whales)

Preparation
-Detonate your prepared singularity and wait a few billion years for it to come down a little from the boiling point and the matter to spread out a little.
-Now the tricky part: we need a planet that can sustain carbon-based macroscopic life. How macro? VERY. At a minimum a good Space Whale should be over five metres, and an expert can tease them out to more than 25 metres. Precision in planet selection is key here – especially since we need very large oceans of liquid water, the bigger the better! And be sure to remember the need for land animals at some point so our whale has something to evolve from; don’t think we can just find a world with no visible land mass and leave it at that.
-Other important factors include a nice, stable sun that’ll keep tickin’ along at the same, reliable temperature for a few billion years longer than you think you’ll need, and a solar system that’s relatively clear of floating debris – the last thing you need is for your Space Whale to take flight and then be whacked by a falling boloid.
-All right, once you’ve got your future water world all picked out and the math done to your satisfaction, here comes the hardest part of this whole recipe: wait. Wait until the oceans settle into place, wait while tectonic plates jerk and jostle around, wait wait wait WAIT. Do NOT attempt to rush things. You’ll feel the urge to tweak here and there, but stifle it: the most beautiful creations arise from a mixture of luck and planning, and anything that’s all planning has no soul to it. WAIT.
-If you’ve waited for a few billion years and no ‘primordial soup’ has arisen and you’re sick and tired of it, just go ahead and smash it with an asteroid loaded up with some pre-prepped nucleotides or amino acids or something. Nobody’ll notice the difference unless you’re on the cooking network, and by then you can just pay them to shut up.
– Time to do our favourite thing again: wait. Interference should be minimal at this point, although if you see an opportunity to poke anything towards getting larger, go for it. Macroscopic life should turn up anyways if you’ve picked your planet right, but there’s nothing wrong with giving it a slight boost – this recipe already takes billions of years, no sense in making it take millions more.
-Once you’ve got something with a good skeletal structure or a carapace or anything solid in it, time to prod that little sprout out of the water and onto the land. Go go go! Remember, the faster you kick your babies out, the quicker they’ll come back, raring to drop themselves into the big blue and get all nice and large. This is where you’ll find your whales. Bear in mind that this could take a while, and usually more than one try.
NOTE: the first things on land could very well be skittering little horrors with exoskeletons and too many legs. Those are bugs, and sadly, you’ll probably need them for ecosystem fodder for the entirety of your planet’s existence. Just grit your teeth and ignore them.
-Now this is the troublesome bit: once you’ve got your whales, you need some sapience. But not just any ol’ kind of sapience! Comb your way through your planet’s ecosystems, and find all the species that possess all of the following: (1) outsized genitals, (2) aggressive social dynamics, (3) at least basic capacity for tool use.
-Once you’ve got a list of candidates, take whichever of them seems to have the most capacity for mental development and see to it that they get as smart as they can as fast as they can. We need their brains to outpace any other portion of their anatomy: smart now, working posture or functional internal organs later. Any inconvenient physical difficulties can be propped up once they’ve got the proper technology for it.
-Next up is dispersal. Take your developing sentients and spread them as far and wide as you can – don’t worry about spreading them too thin, intelligent life is very persistent, unusually so for anything macroscopic! What you want now is a very diverse population with many different cultures and world systems, preferably all conflicting.
IMPORTANT: Check right now on the state of your developing societies. If many of them are in open conflict, that’s great and you clearly judged the socially aggressive nature of your species perfectly! If not, better start again. Slamming an asteroid or a comet or something into the whole lot should work for a clean-ish slate, provided they aren’t running on fossil fuels yet.
-Patience time again, but not for long. Technology spreads quickly, and it only gets faster and faster exponentially as it all builds up to a head. For the final stretches of this recipe we’ll need three or four branches of advanced science to all build to fruition at around the same time, but don’t worry; the odds of it are much higher than you’d think! Trust in the ingenuity of your sapients, and you’ll know it’s all about to pay off when you hit the following milestones: (1) advanced genetic modification, (2) fully integrated cybernetics, (3) a well-developed space program, (4) massively potent nuclear weapons stockpiled in vast quantities (relative massiveness of weapons and vastness of quantity is dependant on the outsizedness of the species’ genitals: the more everybody’s got, the more they need to flaunt!), (5) overwhelming nationalism and hatred between at least two highly-advanced societies.
-Here’s the last big job you’ll have to do: just try to make sure that the politics on both sides ramp up more and more and in the unlikely event that everybody looks to be calming down, maybe slap a pinpoint aneurysm on the troublemaker. In no time at all the magic of paranoia will have fuelled all sorts of whacky projects that promise some vague hint of dealing with the enemy. If you start to feel bad about what you’re doing, remind yourself that it’s all about the big picture, and really, what’s a few eons of suffering when compared to the eternal beauty of your Space Whale?
-IMPORTANT: at this point somebody will have the idea of putting whales in space. This will always happen, as long as all the societal and technological requirements for your sapients have been met and whales exist. It’s just one of those things that happens. Initial developments will involve putting cybernetics in the whales, tweaking their genetics for null-gravity environments, and putting them in very large spacesuits.
-Your final, and possibly smallest action necessary in this whole thing: find somebody with access to nuclear launch codes and sic ‘em (this should not be difficult).
-If all goes well, the very first ‘test pilot’ whale will be in the process of liftoff as the world is consumed in nuclear fire, bathing its altered form in radiation and sparking its glorious ascension into the heavens above all, where it will sing the songs of its world’s end until the end of the universe!

Congratulations! You have successfully baked one Space Whale, and can spend billions of years enjoying its sorrowful and haunting melodies! Now, if you still feel the hunger for creation and want a real challenge, try making a Space Squid for it to be eternal foes with! (pgs. 136-148)

The last mile was always the longest.
Drag, step, drag, step, breathe in, step step drag. One foot in front of the other, body sinking to the earth under the pain and the aches and the slow soft searing heat of the Other Sun.
My left leg felt like broken stones, my lungs ached, my body sweltered inside its armour, but my head had never been clearer, my grip never firmer on the cattle prod that was serving time as a walking stick – bent and burnt out after an encounter with a metal vest. This, with the mind burning bright as the body dropped away, was how it always was after a holy quest. The journey had been harsh, the foes fierce, but the Terminal was in sight now, the big black hole in the ground that was home. It was going to be fine.
I collapsed within sight of the entrance, I was told later. The light reflecting from the one piece of my armour that still shone caught the eye of a labourer as he futilely scavenged for leftover metal scraps across the street in a building that had been picked clean when his mother was young. By little things we are saved, and of course, by the grace of the Lord Longsteel. At Its word I was tended to, splinted, cleaned, and repaired, and before three days were over I knelt before It in audience, in Its tunnels at the heart of the Terminal, between the two rails that were Its path.
I took care to hold my face in profile for one of the glittering eyes of the security cameras. Lord Longsteel was many things, and one of them was deaf – no, not deaf; numb to sound. “Your knight-errant has returned, my Lord. I have travelled to the rubble of the far west and spoken with the people of the railyards. Their lords respect our treaty and send their regards to you as kin.”
The rails under my feet vibrated slow-fast-slow. Lord Longsteel was pleased.
“I have travelled to the waters of the far south. The people of the waters are still missing, and they show no sign of having returned. Where their lords have taken them, I cannot say.
Slow-slow. Lord Longsteel accepted this.
“I have travelled to the heights of the far east. The lords of the air still hold those places firm, and their subjects have destroyed almost all passage to the ground. They still descend to hunt intruders, and it was there that my leg was shattered as I escaped.”
A single rumble. Lord Longsteel was not pleased.
“I was pursued by air as I retreated here. Lord Vtol, I believe. It hunted me for some days, but I lost it in the crumbled ways, by the debris of the banking skyscrapers.” I lowered my eyes. “I regret to say this, Lord, but I was unsuccessful in my search in all places it took me. Your thief is still missing.”
Silence. And then a long, low rumble of rage creaking its way across the ancient steel rails, growing and rattling across the cracks in the concrete walls, turning into a roar of anger.
I felt no fear. If the Lord wished me dead, it was just and I would be pleased to make amends in such a way. Even if my duty were to falter, unlike as it could be, my end would be utterly unpreventable and therefore worthy of no real thought or consideration.
“I have not searched the north, Lord,” I said.
Silence again.
“It is deadly, that I know. But I am prepared to risk it. And there is still time if the thief has fled by that path – he will be slow, cautious. I will not.”
I fell silent now, for the Lord was speaking – not mere emotive expressions now, but plans, instructions. A complex rhythm of reverberations and echoes, spilling over one another and roiling across the narrow depths of Its tunnels. Orders. Precise directions, carved out of Its memories and ancient schematics and prehistoric graffiti.
Synopsized:
Go here.
Kill him.
Bring that.
I rose in obedience, and nearly stumbled. “A final boon, Lord… might I be healed? I cannot travel any distance on this leg.”
Acquiescence. Power would be gifted.
I knelt again – carefully – between the two rails that made the path of Lord Longsteel, and I grasped the Third Rail in my hands.
There was no sensation, of course. I could tell my teeth had nearly fused together, that my hair was crackling and jerking away from my body, that my muscles were twisting and tangling. But there was no feedback, no feeling. Only current that mends, that tears broken bone into place and fuses it solid. Power from the grid, invoked down through the body of Lord Longsteel, through Its heart, and from that, the Other Sun.
Go here.
Kill him.
Bring that.
I nodded. And I left.

My armour was still battered. Plates were damaged, cushioning torn, the helmet still had a single massive dent in it just above the right eye where a lucky shot from lord Vtol had nearly done for me as I cowered behind a shoddy old wall in the crumbled ways. I left it behind, along with the shredded mess that had held my left leg together. What was left was mostly functional, and at least it was clean. My cattle prod was recharged from the Third Rail itself, its grip duct-taped and the whole returned to me.
Five days of supplies were in my backpack, taken from the hands of a cringing labourer. They would be sufficient for a week if I was careful.
The first day was quiet. Peaceful. All morning I walked the dark tunnels that led outwards from the Terminal, a wandering, wavering grid long since broken to smithereens by the chaos that had come after the Other Sun arrived. Come high noon I emerged from beneath the dirt in a cloud of broken rubble, and from then on I walked and ran and crawled through the gutters of the levelled blocks that marked the wide flat around the Terminal, each emptied of useful objects for decades and more, scavenged dry by two generations of scavengers that laboured for Lord Longsteel.
The second day took me farther, into the fringes of the northern boxtowns. Shells of thin, dirty metal stacked high to form uneven warehouses, bulky shipping centres, hollow factories. All would’ve been ugly even in their prime; nowadays, they were barely standing. Many sported holes in their sides, great gashes carved by the lumbering forms of rogue trucks and SUVs. What inhabited those creatures were no lords. Animals. Dangerous, vicious, unpredictable, but stupid. I gave the streets a wide berth and kept quiet, took care to leave no footsteps to mar the countless tread-marks that spilled over the street.
Two more days.
The sky drifted by, sometimes dark, sometimes light, always with the thin red light of the Other Sun there just above the horizon, circling clockwise, never dipping, never rising. Those that live on it, they don’t sleep, don’t wake. Just are. It kept me on edge, and I breathed a good sigh of relief on the fifth day, when I walked out of the maze of streets-turned-side-streets and into the searing sun of a field of debris large enough to swallow the Terminal and everything else in it, broken concrete and steel as far as the eye could reach. And far away out there, small but still managing to loom, was a dark silhouette.
Now I just had to make it there. And find some food along the way. That would be nice.
There was a sound. My prod was in my hands and my eyes were moving before I even recognized it: a whimper. Muffled, adult, female. “Come out,” I said.
Silence.
“I heard you there. You can come out, or I can find you. And if I have to find you, I will be displeased.”
Silence. Then: “here. Over here. In the hole.”
I tracked the voice over a small hill of debris and found it to be speaking truth: a pit bored into the ground, an exposed basement minus the structure above it. At its bottom sat an old woman, older than any I’d ever seen – her hair had gone all grey, her faces was a mass of wrinkles so deep they looked like knife cuts. Foggy grey eyes peered out at me in dull-witted terror.
“You’re one of them knights.”
I could feel the fear, and recognized it along with her clothes: a labourer. Must’ve gone rogue, or had her lord die. There’d been no deaths among their ranks that Lord Longsteel knew of since the turn of the decade, when lord Landeater had come a-conquering from some military base out there who knew where, it and five hundred other tanks. An actual truce had been called across the city to deal with it, a one-of-a-kind occurrence. “Knight-errant,” I told her.
She slid lower in her seat, arms grasping for a grip. “You going to kill me? Please don’t kill me. I been down here three days, please don’t kill me now, please help.”
Looking down, I saw a satchel at the old labourer’s side. “Throw up that first. Slowly. And don’t reach inside it.”
Her eyes darted from me to the cattle prod to the bag.
“You will only have time for one shot. It will not hit.”
She sagged again, and I knew I’d won even before she reached for the satchel’s handle. Up it went, tossing and turning. I riffled through the contents: some old canned food, some dried vegetables and meats, the usual things. Enough to sustain my return trip.
“You going to leave me here?”
I looked back down into the pit. “Is there a reason for me to take you?”
The face went blank, then opened up again. “I knows the path.”
I looked out across the blasted ruin surrounding me. “The path.”
“Just look at me sitting here and try to tell yourself it’s all sun and roses out there. Believe it or not, this pit weren’t there when I stepped on it.”
“You offer your services as a guide.”
“First time I’ve fallen, and I been heading back and forth ‘cross this place for years. You heading to the sparkbox? I can get you there, even, and that’ll take some getting into. Please. Please take me.”
I looked out there. There was only one place my thief could be hiding. And the food could be stretched. Also, if I refused to aid her, she might begin to shriek, and I wasn’t looking forwards to what that might drag out of the boxtowns. “Deal.”
She was surprisingly light, the old labourer. It took almost no effort at all for one arm to drag her bony, fleshless body up into the light again, those cloudy eyes blinking themselves silly at the world around them.
“Go,” I said, holding up her satchel in one hand, the prod in the other. “And don’t think of running.”
She nodded aimlessly, and I saw that familiar hunched cringe. I’d seen it a thousand times in the Terminal. It was good. It was right. It felt like home.

The ‘sparkbox’ did indeed take some getting into. It couldn’t have been more than three miles away, but it took almost ten to walk to it, a weaving, dodging, winding ramble of a trek that took us scraping over the edges and rims of a thousand jagged rustpits, any of which would’ve been a nearly-certain death sentence. I ceased to question my decision to bring the labourer with me after the close of the first day. Particularly since I held our food supplies at all times, and slept with my eyes open.
Getting into the building was surprisingly simple – but I suppose the natural minefield of pitfalls surrounding it had preserved it regardless of its security. My quarry certainly hadn’t passed through the door we found, its body a fused, stubborn mass that would yield to no key ever made, a handle that was eroded to a nubbed screw and a pinnacle of rust. One, two, three kicks and its hinges gave themselves up to their rust with children’s-screams of protest and outrage. Dust blizzarded the air inside, swarming the sunlight like infuriated insects.
“In,” I said.
The labourer gawped at me. “What?”
I gestured with the prod. “In.”
She went in. I followed and kept an eye on her, watched her tip-toe across the floors, wince at each groan and rattle, jump like a jackrabbit at my switching on a flashlight.
“Follow the beam,” I said, and traced a path. We walked that way, held by the light, and we walked down twisted stairs, following old signs in languages no longer spoken.
Generators. If this place had power, that’s where the thief would’ve gone.
“What’s your aim?” asked the labourer.
I considered intimidation, and decided against it. “Justice. We hunt a thief.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“No more than living. He stole a valuable of my Lord and fled. A coward is only dangerous when cornered, and still less so than any other man.”
“Oh.” And at first I believed she was responding to my words, until my flashlight crept the extra foot forwards and alit on what lay in front of her.
The generator was a massive thing, stretching from floor to ceiling and surpassing both, passing through them and into other places, strange ones. Its triplets sat beside it, still half-shrouded in the darkness.
“Fusebox,” I said. “Hold still.” The light wandered the walls as we stood there in the dark, hovering fitfully until it exposed the grey, dusty contours on a nearby wall.
“Go.”
The labourer moved quickly this time, eagerness to be done with the whole business infusing her every step. I watched her, pinned her there with the light as always, then took my first step, then four more, then felt the world move.
Less than a second later I lay on my side, half-buried under something cold and heavy. My legs were numb and my head was a fiery swollen blot that was trying to crush my own brain, moisture leaking from its back and wetting my hair where it had impacted against ancient steel. Darkness was all around me; the flashlight had been crushed under rubble. I screwed my eyes shut and concentrated, focused, narrowed reality down enough to reach my ears.
A chuckle. Footsteps – light footsteps, barely-fleshed bone, how could I forget the labourer’s weight, how could I forget my own! The sounds of clanking, clacking, clicking, tampering. And then there was light, light above me, light around me. I lay on my back in the ruins of a tunnel, a tunnel like the Terminal, like home, but lost and powerless. A sharp, searing blankness was spreading across my back: my cattle prod had snapped apart and was electrifying the rail I lay upon, spread in the middle of the tracks.
Footsteps. And from above, a grinning face. Those old foggy grey eyes…they were still clouded over. But the face they were set in was sharper than a drillbit, and full of dark amusement.
“Really? You didn’t see it coming? Not even a little? What HAS happened there in the city, for those monsters to be willing to name the likes of YOU knight-errant?”
“L-l….ord…said-“ I wheezed and clutched at my side; all my air seemed to have escaped, and more wouldn’t come in. “Said….man.”
“Oh? Hah! They’re not very good with pronouns, haven’t you noticed? Humans are all one to them, and it’s up to you to assume the sex when they speak. Clumsy idiot.” She burst into giggles for an instant, and bit her lip to cut it short. “You know, I was considering turning on the rail and putting you out of your misery. But after that display of wilful denseness and sexism combined? I think you’ve earned a slow exit from existence.” She held up something in the light, doubled vision saw a blurred shine. “Here, you can have your keys back.” A falling star, a clatter-clack on my chest. “The fusebox’s open now. I would’ve just bashed it, but running the risk of breaking anything in there? No thank you. No thank you at all. A miracle the damned place is still running, a bigger one that it hasn’t been co-opted by one of your vultures-in-vehicles-clothing out there.”
“Blassspphem…” I sighed, involuntarily. Keeping breath inside me was getting harder every second, and it wasn’t easy to begin with. I could feel that numb spark of electricity trickling down my back, like water, like a current. A current across the rail my back was spread upon, like a current in a river. Current flowing down a grid.
“Blasphemer?” She chuckled again, and this time it was forced, grim. “No. Blasphemy is bowing down to those damned things. A blasphemer is the one that turns on his family, her friends, for the chance to be a monster’s servant. All for a chance to play at being a damn-fool knight of the round table, only you’re working for the damsel-eating dragons.”
“I ssserrve….the rightful rul. Ers.” Blood in my mouth, had to swallow it, not sure if it was going down the wrong pipe. Going down any pipe. “Of all. By their might. Myy…..willll.” Current, flowing. Flowing back home. Only a trickle, but enough to sustained a flow.
“And a fat fucking lot of good it’s done you there, hasn’t it? Your people are slaves, miserable and tormented. Mine are hidden, and they’ve got hope. You’re dead. I’m alive. And this power’s going to go to people that need it, not to fill the gut of whichever over-grown poltergeist your superstitious little brain has cooked up into a god.” She pursed her lips. “So many of the damned beasties, so hard to keep track of. Especially with those ridiculous names you blind little zealots keep giving them. So tell me, less-than-man” – that mocking grin was back on her face, snapped into position –“which was your overseer?”
My face was a rigid mask, so I couldn’t smile. But I still managed a snarl of triumph, baring my teeth in the face of defeat, in the eyes of the enemy.
“Longsteel.”
And just with that name, I felt a tug against the power that leaked from my back, from the cattle prod that had been charged from the Third Rail.
She burst into laughter at that – real laughter, a loud, happy guffaw the likes I’d never heard but somehow recognized. “Hah! Sounds like an off-brand dildo. And about as impressive – never heard of him at all, the small fry.”
“My Lord’s reach is limited,” I whispered. The rail was rumbling, the earth was shaking. “But none can surpass the strength of Its fist.”
I don’t know if she heard me. By then she’d put the pieces together, turned her smiles to terror. Her feet made to move towards the staircase, but her body was slow, too slow, that bony, fleshless thing. Small. Frail. Especially when Lord Longsteel came screaming up the tunnel, twelve cars long, nine hundred feet long, Its eyes burning yellow blazes that made the sun seem cold and dead in the sky. Its roar filled the air and replaced it, turned ears into empty things, and it was the sweetest melody I had ever been unable to hear, covering even the surely unholy scream of metal created as Lord Longsteel launched Its lead car forwards and off the tracks, seizing the thief of Its wealth with iron fangs.
I watched my Lord’s wheels grinding towards me on the rails, and I knew that those final instants were perfect. My legs were vanished from my knowing, my lungs were a morass of fluids unknown, my body was a twitching, juddering ruin that was already smoking in places, but my mind had never been lighter, my soul less burdened by turmoil. The journey had been long, the foes had been cunning, but that great darkness was finally there, and at the behest of Lord Longsteel, who would have this place, this power. My duty was done.
It was going to be fine.

There was a home all alone in the woods. Not so common these days, but this was those days, back when distances were longer and the world was more lonely.
There was a boy, and he wasn’t very old, and he was off through the woods and into its deepest thickets to fetch in as many berries as he could carry – and maybe a little more than that, and maybe a little more than that too, and perhaps he could have a few mouthfuls or fistfuls for his stomach while he was there. Just a little. This was perhaps not so greedy as it sounds; you must remember that he was a very little boy after all, and could only eat and carry so much. Still, he persevered, and was nearly bent double under the strain of his load before he brushed aside a tangle of picked-clean branches and came face-to-snout with a small bear that had just finished trimming off a bush of its own.
The small bear twitched her nose at the boy, and the boy’s eyes got big, and they stood there for a moment.
“Go away,” said the bear. “Mine.”
“YOU go away,” said the boy. “They’re mine.”
“I’m bigger than you and I say they’re mine,” said the bear, and she stood up on her back legs and roared at the boy so loud that his ears crinkled up. He ran home and by the time he was there he’d lost his shoes and he’d lost his berries and he’d almost thrown up three times.
“No berries?” asked the boy’s sister. “What have you been doing out there so long?”
“Hrurp,” said the boy, and tried to explain. Then he threw up.
“Well, I see you stopped to eat some,” said sister. “And you didn’t bring any back? Lazy shiftless little boy, I should give you a whack.”
“Bllear,” managed the little boy, and coughed. “Bear.”
Sister frowned and tapped her chin. “A bear? What kind of bear?”
“A huge big bear,” said the little boy, holding out his arms to demonstrate. “She was twice my height and four times my weight and it roared at me until I ran away.”
“That’s a pretty small bear,” said sister. “Not so big at all. I bet she isn’t even grown-up yet, same as me and you. Well, mostly you. Get me a good stout stick and I’ll see about that.”
So the boy went and got his sister a good stout stick, fresh from the limb of a surly old oak by way of a lightning storm a few other days ago, and off she went into the deep woods and the thickets, thump thump thump, with her little brother scurrying along behind her like a mouse.
“I don’t see a bear,” said sister. “Better get to picking berries. I’ll just have a bit of a nap while I wait.” And she sat right down under the largest and most impressive berry bush and started snoring, quietly by firmly. The boy was annoyed by this greatly, and played a small game of catching stinkbugs as he picked berries and carefully dropping them one-by-one on his sister’s legs. This kept him occupied until he picked the last berry from a particularly large bush and met eyes with the small bear on the other side of it.
“Go away!” said the bear. “Told you already!”
“YOU go away,” said the boy. “They’re mine and my sister’s.”
“I’m bigger than you and I say they’re mine,” said the bear. She stood up and roared again, and she roared so loud that it woke up sister, who shot up to her feet in a flash, mashing all the stinkbugs under her feet in her hurry – squish squish squash.
“Back off from my brother!” she yelled, and she whacked the small bear three times: once in the stomach, once in the nose, and once on top of the small bear’s head.
“Augh!” said the small bear, trying to hold her nose and duck another bruise, and she ran away deeper and farther into the woods, leaving sister and the boy alone to gather up as many berries as they wanted. She didn’t stop running until she reached her family den.
“Stop making such a ruckus,” scolded her brother. “Mother’s sleeping, and if we make too much racket she’ll wake up and give us all such a cuffing that we’ll never stop being sore.”
“The berries are lost,” cried the small bear. “It doesn’t matter if mother beats me black and blue, my stomach will be sore enough that I won’t even notice. And yours too!”
“What now?” said brother.
“People have taken up our berry bushes,” she said. “Two people – a little tiny one I chased off, and a big scary shouty one. She’s harder than an oak tree and she roars louder than I do and she smelt worse than a skunk dipped in old pond scum.”
“Well now,” said brother, raising his hackles. “Well now! We’ll see about that. I claw my marks on oak trees as I see fit, and I roar louder than the thunder, and as for smells, you’ve seen what I’ll eat. I’ll shiver them down to nubbins, both of them, see if I don’t!” And he stomped off with a lot of angry muttering, stamp stamp stomp, with his little sister scurrying ahead of him.
“Don’t you learn?” asked sister when small bear came into sight again. “Go away! These are our berries to pick! Be sensible and be scared of me.”
“You should be scared!” small bear told her. “Now clear off and let us eat in peace.”
“No,” said sister, and she might’ve said more but just then brother came into sight and opened his mouth and what came out was the rankest, loudest racket that had been heard in that place since the world was put together. It nearly peeled the bark off the trees, and the nearest berry-bushes shed their crops and almost withered on the spot.
“Aah!” yelled sister and the little boy, and they both dropped their berries and ran away home on the spot, stopping once halfway to throw up. Brother’s breath smelled like the inside of a dead fish five times over and old berry juice.
“Well, this is a problem,” said sister.
“You could’ve beat him,” said the little boy, “if you weren’t so scared.”
Sister whacked the little boy on the head. “Hush up. He was a bit of a lot too big for that. No, I think I can’t beat him. We’re going to have to get some more help now.”
So sister and the little boy packed up some lunch – no berries, sadly – and made a walk all the way up a hill of stone and moss to its top, where there was nothing but some old juniper bushes in the sunlight and a broken old tent, which was where big sister was staying.
“Open up and help out!” called sister, smacking the tent with her good stout stick.
Big sister opened it out and came out, and gave sister a bit of a look while she was at it. It was a pretty nasty bit of a look, and it made sister get quiet fast.
“I was trying,” said big sister, “to sleep. Late nights hunting take their toll.” She stretched and shook and scratched herself, some of the big teeth in her hair going click-clack softly as her fingers ruffled them. “Now, what needs doing in such a loud, rude hurry, eh?”
“A bear is stopping us from getting berries,” said the little boy, “and it’s too big for sister.”
“It’s a huge big bear,” jumped in sister. “He was over twice my height and four times my weight and its breath was the worst thing ever. Ever.”
“That’s a bit of a bear,” said big sister, “but I’ve heard of worse. And the blowhards always fall down the fastest. Get me my club and my horn and I’ll see about what needs doing.”
So sister and the little boy grabbed up big sister’s horn and club – it took both of them to lift the club – and gave them to her while she had a quick breakfast of old jerky. And then they packed up and followed her down the hill and through the deep woods and into the thicket at big sister’s quick jog, trit trot trit, two of sister’s footsteps for every one of her’s, four of the little boy’s.
Small bear was browsing from the largest and most impressive berry bush when she saw big sister come into the thicket, and her eyes got as big as saucers. “Broffer!” she called, and nearly choked on her berries.
“Eh, hum, what?” said brother. He raised himself up out of the shade from his snooze and saw big sister face to face, already right there in front of him.
He stared at her, and she stared back.
He snarled, and she snarled back.
He roared, and she roared back.
And then he swiped at her, and she dodged and hit him in the head with her club so hard that he thought he saw every single star in the sky before sunset.
“OW!” said brother, and then big sister punched him in the jaw. “OW, OW!” he yelled, and she stomped on his foot. “OW OW OW!” He roared again and tried to bite big sister, and she screamed at him and jammed her club in his teeth.
“OW!” said brother, and took another heaving swipe that tossed big sister head over heels into a berry bush. She came barrelling back out teeth-first and tackled him into a wrestling, thrashing ball of angry fur and fists. Hair and blood and trampled bits of greenery and berry mush flew everywhere.
“Oh no oh dear oh no,” mumbled small bear, who was hiding underneath the largest and most impressive berry bush.
“What’s wrong?” asked the little boy, who was also hiding there.
“They’re being too noisy, too noisy,” said small bear. “They’ll wake up mother. She’s trying to sleep now and she’ll be very angry if she has to come sort all this out. Oh dear oh no, they’re smushing all the berries, too! Mother will be VERY angry if she sees all this.”
“How angry?” asked sister, who was a bit squished, being half-underneath small bear’s behind.
“She’ll knock us all black and blue right through the fur until we won’t be able to sleep all winter,” said small bear. “And she’ll maybe eat all the berries left over just to teach us a lesson.”
Just then, there was a noise that rumbled on through the ground – like a rockfall, but throatier and meatier.
“Oh no, she’s woken up,” moaned small bear. The earth began to tremble and shudder. “Now we’re in trouble.”
“What can we do?” asked the little boy.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“Make them stop!” said sister, and she jumped out from underneath the largest and most impressive berry bush, pulling the little boy along with her, and they each grabbed one of big sister’s arms.
“Let go!” shouted big sister. “I’ve almost got him.”
Brother bared his teeth and shook himself and small bear landed on his head, knocking him straight on his nose. “Get off!” he said. “I can turn this around still!”
Mother shuffled into the clearing and everybody stopped paying attention.
Mother wasn’t very big, but she took up a lot of space standing there, patchy fur ruffling in the breeze, grey old face bobbing as she looked around with bleary eyes. The world sucked in on mother, draining away all the details at the edges.
She didn’t look very happy.
“Wurt-“ and it sounded like that because mother’s jaw was all stiff and could barely move“-iss going on hur?”
Big sister looked at mother and didn’t say anything, but she adjusted her hands on her club three times in a row.
Brother looked at mother and opened his mouth then shut it then opened it again and seemed to forget what he was doing.
Sister very carefully shoved little brother and small bear. They blinked.
“We…” said little brother. “Were…. Picking.”
“Berries,” said small bear. “Berries. We were all picking berries.”
“Together.”
“Yes, together!” said small bear. “We were helping each other.”
“Pick berries,” added little brother. “It’s easier that way.”
Mother looked at big sister and brother with her beady little eyes. They glistened. “Wurt arr dey doing? Dey’re rooining de bushesh.”
“He had a stinkbug on his nose,” said sister.
“And big sister was helping him with it,” said small bear.
Mother took a sniff. “Grar! Be murr crrful wif de bugsh! Only gt so many burriesh errey yeer, cant wist dem.” She snorted and scuffed at her snout. “Desere mih burriesh nyways, shuld ask prmissin.”
Brother coughed and hacked and spat out his tooth, which had been stuck in his throat. “We, ah, err,, ack, wanted to surprise you,” he rasped.
“Yes,” said big sister. “With a gift, a present of food for you in exchange for your berries.”
Mother smiled. “Brahh, childen plyin nishe fer treetsh, always de shame. De burriesh arr fer fmly.” She thought a moment, rubbing her head with a claw. “Bruuuutt….nothingses people cant be fmly.”
They all looked at each other.
“I would like to have a mother again,” said the little boy. “Even a very hairy one.”
“It would be nice to have a sister,” said small bear. “Or two.”
“I wouldn’t mind another, littler sister,” said sister. “I can only boss around one little brother so long.”
“It would be good to have more small hands to find the good foods,” said brother. “I don’t mind eating the foul stuff, but it gets tiresome. I miss softer foods.”
“A mother,” agreed big sister, “would be nice. And a brother that I can hit properly.”
“Gud!” said mother, and she bobbed her head happily. “Nuw gitta pcking, ‘m hungry.”
They got picking. It took a lot of work, but they did it.

There were two homes after that, all alone in the woods. Two homes and a tent. A home, a den, and a tent. And a path that wound around them, rough, untravelled by many feet, but marked by blazes and clawmarks and the thud-thud of feet large and small. A quiet sort of trail, meant only for a few people that would nod and move aside to make room for one another. Certainly no worn road.
But this was those days, back when distances were longer and the world was more lonely.
Well, a little less lonely.