Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 28 — Gunslinger

Revolvers.

Those were what Filmrock called them, the two weapons at my sides. And as I looked down at the gun in my hand, the huge thing that could easily double as a nasty bludgeon, I took a breath of fresh morning air. Here at this little rest stop along the large dirt road, just a few logs and a burnt out campfire by its side, I concentrated on what C told me. Well, except for “I am a horse”, which was his goddamn catchphrase by this point.

The right hand did it all for me. I just watched as it reloaded the six fresh bullets into the weapon all on its own. Just looking at it made me feel sick; it looked about as natural as a stallion excreting liquid caramel from his nipples. Which, thinking about, wasn’t that sickening by itself. I don’t want to go into it, but I’d seen such a thing before. Oh God, had I seen such a thing before. Of course, that was after I’d dipped an apple into the caramel fountain, taken a bite, and complimented the candy maker when the host came up to me and demonstrated his caramel-spewing nipples. I recalled seeing it and gagging. I went back for seconds because it was good, but I still gagged inside!

“Can you feel it?” C the Horse asked. Did I mention he was horse?

“Feel what?”

I could feel him breathing on the back of my neck in a way that made me really want to hold onto a dead Cherrypillar for comfort as he spoke. You know, just to be sure she was dead and not breathing down my neck. “I just cut your hair with hooves. With. Hooves.”

“So what?” I asked, looking up at his terribly long face and nostrils so big you could stick at least three spoons in them and call it a mining company. In truth, it felt divine to have my hair back to the reasonable length I was used to. Or, at least to having this body’s equivalent of that hair. “You used hooves to cut my hair. That’s nothing special?”

He whinnied. “You’re insane! Hooves, my friend, hooves!” C’s lips flapped like the wings of a pegasus who doesn’t realize he’s actually a very fat seal.

“Stop that, ” I warned.

“Fine!” he spat. “I’m gonna go over here and graze, like horses do. You continue trying to do that thing with the whatnot.” C walked over to the side of the little clearing and bit a tree. “Wait a minute. This isn’t how you eat grass at all!”

Shaking my head, I felt the weapon in my left hand. It felt lighter by about six bullets than the one in the right. Taking a breath, I tried to imitate the motion that C’s hand had known. In a quick series of fluid motions, I’d reloaded the emptied weapon.

“Oh God!” C called out. “Grass is terrible!”

After holstering the revolvers, I spent my time playing with my hands. Fingers were magical in what they could sense. I could easily imagine that fingertips were more sensitive than even sex organs. Speaking of which, I rapped a knuckle on my groin, hearing the pleasant thump of the codpiece. That lead to me wondering what it would feel like to have hands on one’s genitals, which, I concluded, would likely feel deeply unpleasant, and so skinwalkers likely didn’t touch themselves much.

Somehow, that lead to far more genital-related questions than I cared to explore, such as “Could I use fingers to rip the flesh of a man’s unit like peeling the skin of a banana?” So, I shook the thoughts from my head and called C, who dutifully reminded me that he was a horse and, oddly enough, that agility was important for shooting guns.

An animal squealed, and I jerked my head up to see C skewering a squirrel to death with his tongue. As C recoiled the tongue and dragged it into his maw, I heard him chuckle. After it went down his bulbous throat, the animal clearly still squirming and alive, C looked at me and smiled. “She was pregnant, almost ready to give birth. Meant there was more food for me.”

“O…kay,” I said. “So, uh… are we going to ride today? I want to get past New Pegasus today, whatever that is.”

He came up to me. “Right. Get upon me; there’s adventure to be had, Timmy!”

Near an hour later of fast riding and the forest gave way to a ghastly sight. I’d been seeing parts of it from afar, through gaps in the tree, but I’d never expected it to just be so suddenly there, like it’d just fallen from Heaven and broke its ass in two. That’s right. Its whole ass.

Nestled in a dimple in the land that extended as far as I could see, which wasn’t all too much given how big it was, was something that had once been a city. It was absolute ruin. A fallen city that was more like a dried and decayed corpse than a bastion of civilization; it was a husk that suggested a shape without fleshing out the details. The outline of the victim was there, as were the empty holes where it used to look out upon the world—but glass or eye, the critical things that made it alive and breathing were long gone.

I tried to whistle, but I would never learn that I couldn’t whistle. C walked into the city at a snail’s pace. Well, no, I clearly saw a drag racing snail pass us by. But it was okay, because this place was just so fascinating. I’d seen such places as this before. It had been years ago, when the Rheinwehr was marching south and southeast to reclaim our nation from demonic hands, and I’d seen the great cities of the South like this. Only, this was worse.

This city looked as if a titanic earthquake had ravaged and obliterated it, and then the earthquake had released a Titan from under the world, and the Titan had seen the city, narrowed his eyes, and whispered. “I shall brutally copulate with that.” And then he did, because cities can’t say no. And then I was riding C the Horse in that event’s aftermath.

C took me through the streets which had once been paved with bright orange-gold bricks, but which now looked like the Valley of the Shadow of Death, only less sexier and filled with debris. We came across a lamppost and stopped. It was ludicrously tall here in the overgrowth that was claiming the city, its steel gray color standing in strong contrast with the lush green bushes around it. Hanging from the lamppost, bloated from rot and the sun like fat whores after eating far too many pounds of bird shit, were two bodies. They couldn’t have been too old, still freshly dead enough.

The bodies were of a man and a women. They’d been stabbed, mutilated, and one of them had been disemboweled. Both of them had what looked like dried tears on their cheeks below their dried-out eyes. The reasons, I suspected, had to do with the fact that, despite the the mutilations, despite having been hanged, the man and the woman were holding hands. Below them, written in blood, were the words “MEDASIN MEN 4EVER! DEATH TWO WARDENS!” Clearly, whoever had written this had had nothing but the utmost respect for the Equestrian language.

My hands caressed my guns like a stallion would his beloved mare, only with actual love. Slowly, my hand went to my knife. I could feel the reason why on the hairs of my neck. And, just then, the bushes by the lamppost exploded as a half-naked man jumped out, holding a rusty chunk of metal that he must have thought was a sword.

“Medasin Men forever!” he shouted.

“Haha—no,” I replied, leaning to the side and quickly stabbing him through the eye.

The man gurgled something as I jerked the knife out of his body. Based on how he looked—short-shorts, no shirt, faded sandals, a number of bright feathers sticking out from his hair bun, and a hot pink cloak—he had probably been trying to say something like, “There’s a sale on hookers today.” The prostitutes in this city very aggressively marketed their wares, it seemed.

When I wasn’t jumped by a random horde of barbarians as I’d been expecting, I got off C, cleaned the knife, and examined the man. Rummaging through his pockets, I found three of those blue papers that called themselves “bucks”, a pencil that’d been chewed almost to the point of unrecognition, and a ticket stub from “Paradise in the Skies Theatre”. Looking up from his body and past the bushes, I could actually make out a ruined building with a sign on its front advertising that very same theater. Probably just something he took while he was hiding there.

“You know,” I said, almost absently, “if I keep getting attacked by random people, do you think one of them will eventually learn to stop trying to attack the scary-looking guy who keeps killing them?”

C gave me a look like a dog trying to figure out how to wag its tail. “No.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so either. I could probably kill them all, and never once would random robbers ever learn not to screw with me. Like dreamcatcher spiders are hovering over their memories.”

“I… am not familiar with that creature,” C said after a brief pause.

As I got back onto C, I said, “It’s just a translation of a word, Traumfänger.” We resumed going down the street, myself watching for any more would-be raiders. “Dreamcatcher spiders are these neat little spiders that prefer to build their webs above the beds and other places where things sleep. When you sleep and one is near to you, its eyes will go crazy, and you will not dream, no matter if you suffer from nightmares. When you wake up, you are beyond rested.” I shrugged. “Nature is fascinating, all the weird things it comes up with. Especially the ones that don’t make any sense.”

“Oh, the stallion from another land,” I sang, C providing me a beat with his voice. “He’s riding a horse, he’s carrying guns. Here he commm-buh-duh-dums. Watch me ride ’pon the stead, great in deed, with no fleas. Here he rides to save the day, and maybe… uh…”

“See some T-’n’-A,” C singsonged back, and I repeated it.

My voice carried through the empty, desolate streets. Well, desolate except for that giant centipede with arms like a man we’d found earlier. That was something to stare at. Not far away, in the direction I was slowly trying to go in, I could hear definite sounds of a great many voices talking and dealing amongst themselves.

“The duster’d knight, here he comes. He tells kids ‘Don’t do drugs’. Though he knows smoking’s cool, he tells you that it’s bad. Because he might kill kids, but he still cares about your future. So lo and behold—he’s RSVPing your birthday paaarty, where he’ll accidentally seduce your single mother and kill your dog! Yeah!”

As we turned the corner, I made C stop. At the end of the street—a street that might have at one point been some sort of main street, given how large it seemed—was an opened gate made of repurposed steel and other junk. Standing upon the gate and around it were men in suits of armor that looked like the gate: thrown-together piles of metal and junk.

C and I went down the street, mindful of the tall, ruined buildings around the street that watched over us like jealous househusbands. The sounds of people, of civilization, got louder the nearer we got to the great gate. Nearing it, I noticed that the men all wore beards and sported long, clean hair, like the destruction of the surrounding city had erased all knowledge of razor blades but, dammit, not even the end of the world could keep these men from their combs. It was respectable.

Arms crossed, they looked at C and me before looking between themselves, but they never stopped us. Above the gate, hanging from a banner, were the words “Welcome to New Pegasus!” Next to it was a sign with a barely clothed woman laying on her stomach, giving me what was supposed to be a seductive look but seemed more like a constipated grimace next to the words “Visit Double-D’s—the premier venue for all your needs!”

“If I was a single father and widower, would you have my dead wife, diapers, and a bucket full of scorpions, as all fathers want?” I asked the sign under my breath. “That’s what I thought.”

When we’d passed through the gates, I finally saw New Pegasus. It looked like the world had ended, with cracked streets, ruined buildings, and with the look of a refugee camp, but one wherein nobody realized that the world had ended. Open-air stalls with merchant hawking wares and little caravans set up with even more wares absolutely filled what had once been a massive town square, with people of all sorts walking through. Some of them strode with a purpose, on their way for something in mind. Others milled around, drifting from place to place, like window shoppers in a land where windows are just an old wives’ tale, and shut up about them or Daddy will have to spank you.

High above at the center of the bazaar was a flagpole with two flag flying therefrom. The bigger of the two was of a flag fluttering fluidly in the wind, its sigil that of a manji, the Equestrian word for a Swastika. Below it was a small black flag depicting a wingéd silvern eye.

The voices of men and women bartering and selling, talking to friends, lovers, and children filled the air with a feeling of life that could only be solved with far more fire than was called for. Spreading out from the central bazaar were more streets lined with people walking to and from what I suspected were other districts.

If any of these people had something in common, it was that they all dressed like battered refugees. Oooh, and there was one refugee with tatters but wearing also a monocle and tophat. She was my new favorite.

C and I went down the street towards the markets. Children, dirty and wearing outfits like slaves, converged around us, oohing and ahhing at the sight of a real live horse. I leaned forwards and whispered into C’s ear, “If you tell them you are a horse and then devour them, I will kill you.”

He blew air through his lips, spraying a now-laughing child with bits of spit. Why the girl-child found this something to laugh and squeal excitedly about was beyond me, but I suspected it had something to do with being the closest thing she’d had to a bath in months. In any case, C said nothing, likely because horses—which were apparently a fairly common animal here, said C—were just animals, like Höllenhunde or bears or communist spiders.

Kids molesting and petting C, I observed the façades of the buildings. Here, unlike everywhere else, it at least seemed like folks had done a half-assed job of trying to fix the place. Many buildings looked like you could live in them, with some even having curtains, though none that I saw had glass. Seriously, what was with the lack of glass? If I found a Flammenwerfer and went to the beach, I could conceivably end up a very rich man in this where.

By far, though, the most well-looking structure was the big one to the far end of the bazaar. Its sign labeled it as “Double D’s”. Above this was a large billboard of a women’s near-naked thighs as she bent over, most of her body unseen. Next to her, though, was the image of a well-groomed, fine-looking man holding up a glass of wine. “For all needs and preferences,” said the blurb by his head. And then, at the bottom: “Family Fridays: Kids eat free with purchase of adult meals or services.”

Clearly, this place was two things: A good place to find out what’s what about what. And, a safe, family-friendly establishment.

C was purring like the cat as the children pet him. When I indicated for C to go, he actually hissed at me and refused to go. I hissed back at C, fierce and more catlike. He hissed back, and soon he and I were in a literal hissing match. The children laughed and giggled at us, and even a few women—mayhap their mothers, as deathly skinny as they were—came up to watch.

With a sound like grinding flesh and bone into a fine herbal cough remedy, C’s neck twisted around a full hundred-right degrees, staring up at me. His tongue came out of his mouth, whipped around, and smacked me across the face and he uttered a guttural, lion-like growl.

The mothers gasped, the children screamed and ran away. I watched as C spun his neck back the right way, not coming back the way it’d come but instead going the full way so that he neck had made a full revolution. The skin of his neck was twisted brutally, but then, before my eyes, it sawed and gnawed itself until the flesh gave way. It jerked, and I could see the muscles in this new cut reassembling themselves before his fleshed sewed itself back on right.

“Aww,” C groaned, ears flopping.

“They’re so cute when they piss themselves in terror and run away.”

“Yeah.” C sighed like a lover waiting for her soldier-lover to return home from the war, unaware that he’s currently banging, like, two chicks right now in a foreign land and has no interest in ever returning to his natty old hag of a girlfriend. “Let’s go kill some evil orphan matrons in order to teach kids the value of murder and the lack of inherent value in a life.”

“You read my mind so well that now I am thoroughly startled,” I said calmly, without much tone, “so instead of obeying your soulless will, let’s go to Double D’s and see what there is we can find out.”

“Ah, the titty/family-friendly bar,” C replied. “You got it, rider.”

I stepped into Double D’s, having tethered C outside. The very first thing I saw was a woman with freckles, a smile on her face, and two bulbous, grotesque fleshly tumors hanging from her bare chest. It was a miracle anyone could stand to look at them; they were so horrendous and cancerous and malignant.

“Howdy there, sugar!” she chirped, and she sounded exactly like the very first Equestrian mare whom I’d met way back in Ponyville. In fact, she sounded exactly like that mare, even looked like her, down to the ludicrously skimpy brown pseudo-blouse. But when this bare-breasted woman looked me over, her smile faded slightly.

“What, uh, what can I do ya for?” she asked with a wink. This time, it wasn’t like the ludicrously but otherwise accidentally sexual line the mare had spoken to me. Her voice sounded like she meant exactly what the other meaning of that phrase was. “Or are ya just looking for other somesuches?”

Trying not to make eye contact with the cancerous lumps on her chest that were glaring malignantly at me, I stepped past the woman and… oh, God. Why did all the females here have such great cancer?! Off to the far left was a lower area of this place, where I could see men and women dressed up in weirdly erotic costumes marauding about. Further beyond, there were women dancing on poles and in cages as weird music played, music made of sounds the likes of which I’d never heard. They too had great lumps on their chest. 

But here, in this elevated part of the building, it was just a large, large bar, mostly filled with men serviced by bare-breasted waitresses. I thought, Wow, this place must earn a ton of tax write-offs for hiring all these disabled workers, just before I realized that even the women who clearly didn’t work here had them too.

The way each such lump was tipped with a nipple suddenly made me think about something. Could they not be cancers but instead be some sort of grotesquely oversized mammary glands, swollen because this is their mating seasons, like the ass of a horny she-monkey? It was a weird thought, since the bulbous sacks of what were likely just fat must have weighed beyond reasonable weights, and I could easily imagine that many of the women should have been hospitalized with chronic back pains for such mammaries.

Taking a long, hard breath, I refocused on the task at hand. Past all the tables and patrons and booths was a long bartop counter, the bartender a woman who didn’t look like a spring chicken. I walked to her, ignoring the many, many weird looks I got. Not one of the people here had naturally tanned skin like I did.

“What are you having, stranger?” the surly bartender maid asked with a species of curiosity in her voice normally only found in cacti.

“I know not,” I replied. “You have food and drink, I presume.”

“Yep, that we do.” She looked at me, and when I said nothing, she rolled her eyes. “House special tonight is a steak. Drinkwise, it’s scotch.”

“Yes,” I said, my own tone sounding amazed, like a child whose realized the utter lack of inherent value in sentient life. A part of me noticed that the chatter and noises beyond me were getting quieter. “I shall have one of these steaks, and I shall have a glass of scotch. While I eat and enjoy your fine services, I would like to hear about this strange city within the husk of another, much deader city.”

The place got quieter as she spoke back. “I don’t mean to be hostile, stranger, but how do you expect to pay for this, eh? You seem to me the kind of who’s not got a sure grip on his cash.”

Reaching into my bag, I brought out a gold coin, holding it betwixt two fingers. Some folks gasped as I brandished it, and some more gasped when I set it on the counter. “Will this cover it?”

She looked down at the coin. “We can’t make change for gold here, desperado.”

“I never expected it.”

The woman gritted her teeth, like the gold offended her deeply, even if it clearly was to her benefit to posses it. “Fine,” she spat out. “How’d you like the steak?”

I blinked. “Medium… rare.”

She nodded knowingly at that. “You’re not as bad as I’d originally thought, stranger. No one who takes their steak medium rare can be all that bad.” And she walked off to speak with a man through a little hole in the wall and grab a drink.

Taking a seat at the bar, I listened to men and women jeer at me from behind. I turned to them, and they didn’t stop. My eye did turn, however, over to the far, dark corner, where a woman sat in corner booth, her hands folded together and resting on the table as her dusty amber eyes looked out at me.

“Is there a problems, gentlecolts?” I asked.

One man, big, hairy, and looking like he’d just got fisted by an ape, barked something that I realized was a strange species of laughter. Well, more like a cousin of laughter who was always stopping by to borrow money he never returned. “A problem?” he asked, looking innocently around. “No. Just some brown-skinned punk Toitcher mozzies on into our fine establishment and flashes his wealth like ’tweren’t nix.”

Toitcher? I thought, and then realized it was just Teutscher but with the R pronounced. His last word, nix, I recognized well. It was a teutsches slang word that meant ‘nought’; nix was also somehow the root of the Pig Equestrian word ixnay, somehow. As in, ixnay nonay ethnay peakingsnay Igpay Questrianey.

“And that, gentlemen, is a bit rude, don’tcha think?” he finished, provoking agreeable murmurs.

“Yhar,” a rat-haired woman called out. “Why not nar skidaddle on outta here ’afore the likes a ya gets hurt.”

“Settle down, Eisla,” another bloke with a keen brogue said before calmly drinking from his mug. “Or do you all forget how you hated me when I first showed up and acted like him, and how now I’m a friend of you all?”

“Ayuh, we remember, O’Sparkler,” another man spoke. “But you’re good, clean, Orish folk. They’re honest, hardworkin’ folken a man can respect. You ain’t no Toitcher punk.”

The O’Sparkler bloke pointed his finger at the last speaker and said, “That’s a double negative, Dazzler.”

Near to me, a burly man in black leather stood up—the one who’s spoke first. “Listen here, Toitcherman.”

“Teutscher Mann,” I corrected in a calm voice.

The man grit his teeth as his two buddies, who looked like him minus the muscle and general disposition of having been raped by an ape, stood up from their chairs. “Whatever,” he growled. “I ain’t gonna take some brown-skinned punkass bitch dressed like some wannabe gunslinger in my hangout, mocking me and my friends with everything he does.”

A glass was placed on the counter as the surly woman filled it with scotch. She pointedly said nothing as I thanked her kindly for the drink. It was always important to thank folks who provided services, like waiters and others, because you might just be the only person to thank them their whole day.

“So, Toitchsie,” the man spat. “Why don’t you get out of here now? Y’know, ’fore your foreign ways get you hurt. Folken ’round here don’t take kindly to your kind.”

Sighing, I spun around from the little bar stool and got to my feet. The sensation that flesh feet within leather boots gave me was a comfortable one. “I’m sorry, gentle…men. But do you have some sort of problem with my kind?”

“Didja not hear a thing I said?” the man demanded, taking a step towards me, his buddies backing him up. “Or maybe it was that you can’t get it through your thick head that I’m trying to be subtle.” His voice came in whisper-like and throat, akin to a dog trying to recite his ABCs. “Get. The. Fuck. Out.”

My eye flicked around, examining his body, comparing it to what I knew this body could do. Flexibility and articulation of the joints were different, pressure points as well. Hands in my pockets, I just looked him over.

“Do I have to repeat myself? Or do I got to use my fists to persuade you?”

“Leave him alone, mate,” said O’Sparkler.

He whipped his head around. “Dammit, I am sick and tired of you enabling this freak, O—” But that was as far as he got.

Kontaktkampf worked on all sorts of things. In this new body, using just a few alterations, I figured I could make it work here too. But though the fighting style born and taught in the Reich was rather fun to use for its devastating counter attacks, because the look of surprise on the faces of ponies bigger than you was always priceless as you kicked their ass, I figured that this would be just as fun.

It was a swift kick to the side of his knee. He gasped, flailing as he lost balance and collapsed. Hands still in my pocket, I stomped down on his wrist as he landed, the blow landing with a satisfying crunching sound so fun to hear that I couldn’t hold down the lunatic grin of my face. Before he could even scream, I rammed the steeltoe of my boot into his friend’s groin; and since his friend wasn’t smart like me, he wasn’t wearing a codpiece.

“Oh, man, what the fuck?” the third one was saying just before the steeltoe of my boot became best friends forever with his chin. Quick as lightning, a hand shot out of my pocket, grabbed his face, and thrust his head into the table before letting him drop to the ground.

I looked out at the tavern and shrugged—“Some people, huh?”—and sat back down. The men were groaning with that sense of agony that just made me smile as I took a sip from my shot glass of scotch. “Ah, my compliments to the house,” I said to the surly bartender.

She gave me a look like she was planning to spit in my steak.

“It’s funny,” I said, shrugging my left arm and shoulder, not looking at the people behind me but speaking loud enough for them to hear. “Everywhere I go, it seems like somebody wants to do me woe. I walk through the ruins of this place, and some crazy guy jumps me. I step through a doorway-mirror, and I get accosted by Elkington’s boys. I enter some odd bar joint in this city I’ve never heard of until yesterday, and some racist blokes try to attack me. Honestly, it’s like I’ve got some sign on my back that reads ‘I eat babies’ or something. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m still standing, and all those who’ve picked fights with me aren’t.”

Someone slammed their hands on the table. “Yhar, well, maybe that’s ’cause ya just look like a cunt!”

“You shouldn’t say such words,” I remarked. “It’s degrading towards, uh, towards women.”

“Fuck you, I’ll say whatever I want, Toitcher!” he snarled. “You and your elitist cunt-kind just sicken me to the core, waltzing around like you own the whole damn world! You think nar ’cause ya carry around guns makes you look tough and scary? Fuck, I bet they don’t even work!”

I shrugged. “Good for you.”

“It’s not like there’s many a working gun left in the world outside the hands of the government, let alone two in the hands of some punk faggot.” He laughed. “You count your lucky stars that you got a rotten cock and not some sweet little butter cunt, bitch, or else me mates and I would teach you a lesson in being arrogant!”

I grit my teeth, saying in a calm voice bereft of almost any emotion, “You think they’re fake guns?”

“Yassuh, ya cunt faggot.” As he spoke, the rest of the tavern was speaking in more agitated whispers, slowly riling up. “Just look at ’em. The damn things are so big they’re clearly toys.”

“My,” I said, still calm as sin, “your wife and kids must be so proud to have you in their lives.”

“Shit, I ain’t got no family,” he replied in a guarded tone.

I glanced at him to gauge his location, just a far few tables away. In a single, fluid motion, I pulled out the revolver in my left hand and pointed it at him, thumbing back the hammer and cocking the weapon. “How unfortunate for you.”

Without looking, I pulled the trigger. There was that deafening roar of the weapon that sounded orgasmic, then came the sound of a chair falling over, and a large, fleshy object hitting the ground. Gasps and even some screams, but nobody ran to help the man, no. Instead, too many of them were staring at me, transfixed as I worked my finger magic, reloading a bullet into the gun with the one left hand as I finished my shot of scotch in my other. The people gasped ever harder as I reloaded the weapon and put in back in its holster.

“How in the Fathers’ names did he do that?” one man whispered with horror.

“I don’t know!” another hissed back at him. “But he just shot a man’s head off!”

“Aye, he did, but no one really liked the bastard. I say good riddance.”

“I think I got some brain in my beer. Can I get another one?”

Looking back over to my countertop in my lonely section of the bar, I found the surly woman refilling my glass as she set down a meaty steak before me. Her expression was flat, if mildly sharp, as she set down a questionably clean fork and knife before me. My reflection in the utensils was marred by little specks.

Clumsily, I grabbed at the utensils, trying to figure how just how the hell I was supposed to hold them with hands. No, that was felt clumsy. No again; this just looked silly. I didn’t even want to think about my third attempt. Defeated, I looked up and asked, “how does one hold these things?”

The surly woman blinked. “What? Do they not have forks and knives in Toitschland?”

“N-no…?”

She gave me a puzzled look as folks snickered somewhere. Then the snickers stopped, replaced with agitated little sounds. “Shit, is she getting up?” “The Warden’s lass?” “Ain’t never seen her get up.” “Why’s she going to meet the foreigner?”

I turned just in time to see that dusty-eyed woman from across the tavern sit down in the stool next to me, her opal-colored dress slightly sparkling in the light. She was some sort of long blood-red bandana around her neck, its tip ending midway down her breast, the way it was tied around her neck creating two lengthy tails behind her that must have looked pretty cool when the wind picked them up.

Beneath her dress, I could see, she wore a tight-looking bit of clothing that ran down most of her upper body, stopping just above where I was pretty sure the navel was; the way it hugged her chest pressed against those sizable fatty mammary glands, holding them up and perky, and I could easily imagine that it hurt like hell to wear. Why anyone would wear something like that was beyond me. Perhaps she belonged to some weird masochistic cult that demanded constant chest pain.

When she caught where my eye had gone, she chuckled. “Eyes up here, fellow. But I know what you’re thinking, and yes—” she winked “—the breasts are real.”

I looked her in the eye. “You have two chests?” That’s when something inside me clicked, like the sound of cocking my revolvers, only worse and was likely to cause my hand to turn into a pink lobster excited about the upcoming spring fashion season. I recognized her voice from somewhere.

The woman laughed. “In a way, I guess.” She reached over and grabbed my utensils, holding them in a queer sort of way that at once looked impractical yet really supporting the tools. Then she set them down, looking expectantly at me.

With all the speed of a deadly grannie, I picked the utensils up, holding them as she had. “Hands are weird,” I commented. “Weird and feely.”

“You say it like you’ve never had hands till now,” she said in a tone that gave me chill bumps. Not the good kind, either; the kind you get when you know your estranged aunt is coming over and is going to pinch your cheeks before demanding you go on an epic quest for her. I’d gotten these particular ones only once before. But, to be fair, my aunt was locked up in a mental institute for being criminally insane, so I didn’t know what good the bumps did me. Still, it was interesting to note that skinwalkers also got chill bumps.

“You want something, don’t you?” I asked in a tone two drops too venomous for what I’d been aiming for.

The woman with the voice I recognized sat back, cocking a brow as she put an elbow on the counter. “Can’t a girl—”

“No,” I interjected. “I don’t know what it is, but no. Not in a place like this. Not with that tone. And not because I’m trying to propagate a patriarchal culture that oppresses females and doesn’t allow you to do things.” I cut off a piece of steak and bit down into it. The thing tasted a bit like cardboard that’d been soaked in the rotten digestive juices of a deer before being shoved into a mincemeat alongside a few good slices of flesh. “You’re clearly here because you want something of me. Now, I don’t know who or what the Warden is, but based on that one line I heard randomly, I’m going to assume it has something to do with him. Or her. I don’t rightly know.”

“Him,” she said. “He’s been looking for a type like you. Stranger. Out-of-towner. No local ties.”

“And he is?” I prodded, cutting the steak into ribbons. This really was rather efficient. I wondered idly if I could cut people up as nicely as I could this steak using these hands.

“The Warden is the local warlord, if you will. Leader of the Wardens, the gang currently in protective charge of New Pegasus, tasked with safeguarding it from outside threats.”

“Yeah—no,” I said. “I have standards. They’re vague, but they’re there. Generally speaking, it’s bad form to accept work from warlords and gangleaders. If you want me to ferry your drugs for whatever reason, I’m right out; there’s no way I’m shoving bags of drugs up my ass for some man I’ve never met.” I rubbed my back. “It’s bad enough when I have to hides knives down there, so your drugs are right out. Look, I’m a violent sort, but I’m not passing through because I’m lost. I mean, I am a bit lost, but that’s not the point. Nor is the point carrots, so don’t be thinking that, either. I’m just passing through on my way to Sleepy Oaks.”

“Easy,” she said with a shrug. “The Warden and the task he’d ask of you lies on that road.”

I looked the woman with the voice I recognized, thinking of the mare whose voice hers had belonged to in my where. How that girl could end up here and doing this was beyond me. “Do you just sit in here all day, waiting to ensnare random travelers with random sidequests?”

“I just look after the Warden’s interests: I watch, listen, and send interesting folker along his way.”

“The answer’s still no,” I said, and shoveled meat into my mouth like some sort of homophobic joke that I was too tolerant to make. Most of the steak was gone by now, because I was the fattest man ever.

“Such a shame,” she replied with a frown. “You’d think a man as smart-looking as you would know not to pass up on such a lucrative deal.”

She went to say more, but I cut her off with a sharp gesture and said, “I have no interest in currency.”

“Well, currency is one thing,” the woman went on casually. “The Warden is a generous, clever man sure to be able to find and acquire for you the things of which you desire. And, to top if off, you’d be doing a good, heroic thing.”

I grunted. “You’re trying to tempt me, this I can see, but you make the mistake of thinking you have something worth lusting after. This is a great fallacy, ma’am.” I continued looking ahead, observing her out of my peripheral vision. There were doubts that she even realized I could properly see her like this.

For a second, the woman bit her lip and thought. Making a face like someone about to take of a bite of fried bull testicles, the lady whose voice I recognized took a breath. Then she flashed me a little, almost malicious smile, like she’d sensed my weakness for syrupy waffles and was going in now for the kill. The syrupy, waffle-ridden kill.

“Are you so sure about that, stranger?” My muscles tensed as her hand grabbed my leg, herself leaning over and giving me a little pleading sort of look that sat in my gut about as well as would a pineapple made of spiders. In fact, as she angled herself weirdly to expose more of the so-called breasts, I couldn’t help but imagine that they were actually just filled with spiders. So many spiders like I couldn’t believe. Oh god, the spiders!

“Please, won’t you reconsider?” she asked in an almost childlike voice, jostling her shoulders ever so slowly, reminding me of that one epileptic whale. “It’d make me so happy.”

I cocked a brow. “My, how this world changes those we think we know.”

She gave me a puzzled frown. “What?”

“Well, I could explain exactly what that means,” I said, “but the story’s so strange and bizarre that were I to tell you, you’d be forced to think me mad.” I drank half the glass of scotch in a single swing. “Suffice it to say that I kenn you from another where, and I find it sad and not a little bit shameful that now you’re working for some ganglord in the ruins of whatever this place is when you’re clearly meant for better things. I’d ask how you befell such a fate as this, but I figure it has something to do with the fate you ended up with in my where. Tell me, ma’am: after your life first went to shit—shitter than it’d been under your abusive father, that is—how’d you get over the alcoholism here?”

The woman took her hand off my leg and leaned back, her jaw hanging open by an inch as she fidgeted with her bandana. “How in the Founding Fathers’ names do you even know any of that? I never told anyone!”

“Like I said, I could tell you of my bizarre adventure, but then you’d think me a nutter.” And with another swig, I finished my scotch. “But see here: you’ve got far too much pride to be doing what you were just doing, that much I know. I suspect it was some sad attempt at seduction, right?”

She sat silent, staring at me.

“And see, the last time you tried that in my where, it was because you were so terrified and desperate that you were willing to resort to it as an option, for you and everyone else there seemed to think that sex equated to instant control over a Mann. The circumstances are different, but for you to present yourself to me like a whore begging for a client must have taken a lot of pride, if you’re anything as I know you, which means that you’re just trying to play cool, that you think that without me assisting your boss, something terrible awaits. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

The woman said nothing. She only swallowed, still fidgeting with her bandana as if she were afraid it would tall off.

“So, because I’m still fond of you in my where, I’ll bite, girlie. What kind of job does this Warden wish me to do? More specifically, what kind of dirty work is involved?”

She took a deep breath as she looked at me. “It might involve some people needing to cease being.”

“Killing, you mean?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Yes.”

And finally! Life was back to normal, with random people whom I didn’t know, or at least who didn’t know me, walking up to me out of the blue and asking me to murder some people I’d never met for a reason or cause I had no true stake in.

“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so?” I asked.

“Huh?”

With the speed of a fat kid with honey on his legs being chased by a tiger, I leapt up out of the seat and pointed a finger at the ceiling. “I’ll take the case!”

Whatever I’d been expecting, this wasn’t it.

The woman with the voice I recognized had led me a sizable distance through the streets to this place. It was a ways away from Double D’s, past the city’s great railyard and and place called “Doc Holiday’s Hospital”, which was more a clinic than a hospital. From the outside, the overbrown building it looked a cross between a scavenger’s castle and a government building. Inside, it looked much the same, bearded men in junk armor standing guard in places or generally milling about. Here, the flag with the wingéd silvern eye could occasionally be seen, with none of Elkington’s manjis here to stand against it.

Most unexpectedly of all was the final room. It looked like a throneroom that’d been haphazardly built into a large courtroom. Men and women sat or stood all around the room, like courtiers in a feudal court, all leaving a large alley where no one went from the doors to where a judge would have sat.

There was a man there, big and burly with a great beard and long hair, sitting upon a gigantic black cat. His armor looked like proper steel armor to me, except for one thing. Upon his head, fashioned together with leather thongs, was a crown made entirely of live flying squirrels that seemed to have long just accepted their position in life.

“So, you have been brought to me!” the man called out to me, sounding as if he were trying to speak from inside a barrel of fish. His tones, though, were oddly flat, like he was a good actor poorly trying to imitate the stiff way that bad actors spoke. “This is good, yes.”

A little girl who’d been playing with a little toy wagon on the floor looked up at me for a moment before laughing. “Really? This is the warrior we’ve been looking for?” she asked through her laughs. “He looks far too skinny to even hold those guns at his hips.”

“Girl child,” the man snapped. “Be quiet. If she, the Warden’s Hand, found him and brought him to me, clearly he must be who we’ve been looking for. Why must you insult our guest?”

“Because just look at him!” The child pointed at me.

“I see a character like those in the storybooks I read to you,” he said. “Clearly, it’s a good sign.” The various courtiers murmured their agreement. I just stood there, staring at the court.

The girl rolled her eyes. “That’s exactly why this is all ridiculous. He looks like one of Geremiah’s Knights of the Round Table, down to the duster and look of the guns.”

“Hmm. Is he maybe just a really convincing cosplayer?”

“A cosplayer would imply he’s a wannabe nerd.”

The man upon the giant cat frowned. “I thought cosplayers were people from storybooks who came to life via magic.”

“No, that is not what a cosplayer is.” She looked around and gave a ‘give me a break’ shrug.

“So, he’s not a cartoon or comicbook character either, right?”

“Does he look like he’s of a different graphical style than the real world?”

He squinted, leaning his head forwards. “Hmm. I don’t know. I may need my glasses to be sure.”

“You don’t wear glasses,” she said plainly, arms crossed.

“I don’t? Then what the hell have I been wearing on my face these past few months?”

“Nothing. You have been wearing nothing.”

The Warden titled his head. “Huh. Well, this is news to me. So, in that case, no, no he doesn’t have a different graphical style,” he said, and the people in the court murmured agreements.

I shifted my weight, looking around the old building and its barbaric kingdom-esquer refurbishings. The guards eyed me, and I waved at them. One of them even waved back. He was my favorite guard.

“Huh,” said the man on the cat. “Well, I suppose we can’t just kill a man for cosplaying, can we? Is that against the laws?”

“You have never codified any laws against any sort of cosplaying or dressing up,” she offered. “Although your passing of a legal casual Friday was much appreciated for everyone’s morale, though not so much for saving lives when our patrols have to fight on those Fridays.”

“You know much, female child,” the man said, stroking the squirrels in his crown. “I have taught you well.”

“Oh, whatever. Why not just kill him anyways?” the girl asked. “You’ve been killing a lot of people recently, including my parents.”

“Well, after I butchered them for siding with the Medasin Men, I thought you were so cute that I took you in and raised you as my own. Isn’t that enough to earn your forgiveness?”

“No, not really.”

The man sighed. “Fathers, I’ll never be able to understand women. If you had a penis, you’d’ve forgiven me by now.”

Besides me, the woman whose voice I recognized cleared her throat. “Um, Warden?”

The Warden blinked, them seemed to remember I existed. “You there, cosplayer! Why are you here?”

“Um, the lady here brought me after I beat three men up in a barfight, then shot a man in the face-head with my gun,” I said. “I guess that qualified me for this job, which must mean you have terrifically low standards.”

“You have no idea,” the girl groaned, rubbing her eyes.

“His guns do work, and his aim is beyond keen,” the woman offered. “I saw him do it with an uncanny speed and agility, and knew he was just the kind of man we were looking for.”

“Ah, so you’ve done good, my Hand,” the Warden said, scratching behind the ears of his giant cat until I could hear it purring. “The girl child is for once incorrect in judgement, which is cause for celebration. But till this day of partying, I must ask whence such a man as you comes.”

“In a word, I suppose, I’m from Teutschland.”

“Ah-ha!” he yelled. “I knew you were Toitcher based on your skin.”

The courtiers gasped, mumbling amongst themselves things like “He knew!” and “He knows!” and, as one exclaimed quickly and to which everyone vigorously agreed, “We truly are blessed to have such a wise and all-knowing leader.”

The little girl put her face in her palms, shaking her head. Next to me, the woman—the so-titled Warden’s Hand—gave the girl a look that said, “I feel your pain.”

Rubbing my neck, I asked, “So, Warden, I don’t suppose you could tell me what’s going on around here, could you? What’s with all the ruins and gangs and whatever, that is. I come from somewhere far beyond, and have no real knowledge of your land.”

His eyes widened far. “Yes, I could.”

When he said nothing further, I spoke again. “Are you going to—”

“Many years ago,” the Warden declared in a dramatic voice with those same weird tones as before, “this was the nation of Olympia, a city building above the clouds, flying, where men and women lived and worked. Then… then came Elkington, the man who turned his back on the Congress for his own brutal expansion.”

He stopped. Just as I got the awkward feeling that I should speak up, and not a second later, he went on. “In the end, Elkington had conquered Evesland, and only Olympia stood against him, the last bastion of freedom. Our warriors were mighty and feared, our city would fly around and do cool tricks that sometimes ended with people falling off, and we were rich. The greatest of men, like my grandfather, were the Squirrel Knights.”

“Squirrel Knights?” I asked.

“The Squirrel Knights!” he bellowed. “It was a name feared by our enemies. Men, the greatest of men, would train their whole lives to ride the great flying squirrels of Anhkbod. They would fly around to defend our skylands, ridden upon by mighty knights. Of course, they would eventually have to land, because giant flying squirrel can’t really fly; they can only glide for a really long time. We would rain down death from above, eventually land, and our Squirrel Knights would ride their squirrels up tall trees to hide where our enemies couldn’t find us. We had never lost our wars, always preserved our independence. We were strong, mighty! And we grew arrogant.” He sniffled, wiping away a tear. Many of his courtiers were barely holding back sobs. “This arrogance was our downfall.”

“What,” I said flatly.

“Before the city fell, we stood up for Evesland, for the Congress, and our great city flew to war. We laid siege to Songnam, but… Elkington was prepared for us. He cut down the forests near where we were coming from, and he built a giant whistle. Whistles… the giant flying squirrel’s only known weakness.” He looked around and sighed. “We attacked, but he had foreseen our attack and whence we’d come. We’d never fought on a battlefield before, only upon battleforests. Elkington himself blew on the giant whistle, and our squirrels fell to the ground. We tried to fight back, but there were no trees to scamper up. He… he cut us down like calebs. Only, calebs that didn’t bark, wag their tails, or play fetch. And, really, why you’d kill calebs is beyond me. I mean, I’m a cat person, but even I don’t see the deal with that metaphor.”

Calebs are dogs? I wondered.

“Just call them dogs, Warden,” the little girl said in an exasperated tone. “Your new word for them is never going to catch on.”

“My new words are the bomb-diggity!” he shouted at her. “Everyone uses them.”

“No one uses them,” she said.

“I say caleb,” some courtier said, and then the whole court burst out into statements like his, as well as people asking each other about each other’s calebs. One female courtier even asked, “What’s a dog? Is it a type of caleb?”

“Oh good fathers,” the little girl groaned, dropping limply to the ground and sighing.

“Um, is it always like this here?” I asked.

The Warden’s Hand sighed. “Oh Fathers, yes. It always is. B-but if you really got to know the Warden, you’ll find he’s… good at keeping things as is. I mean—” her voice dropped to a whisper “—he’s something of an idiot savant, really.”

“Uh-huh,” I replied. “How’d be become the warlord of this place?”

She shrugged. “Well, he followed the time-honored position of being the first to apply for the job.”

“I… what? How the hell does one apply for being a warlord? ‘Oh, hello. Yeah, yeah. This is the Office for Barbarian Warlords. Ah, yes. We’ve read your application, Mister Warden, and we think you’d make a lovely brutal barbarian king of a ruined city in the middle of nowhere. Welcome aboard.’”

“Hey, don’t look at me!” she snapped. “That’s what he tells people, and I’m pretty sure that even if it’s not true, he believes it himself.”

“I see,” I replied.

“Enough!” the Warden bellowed. “Stranger, after our legions of trained Squirrel Knights—but not trained squirrels, for even though we rode them and tried for centuries, you cannot tame giant flying squirrels—had been defeated brutally, we tried to run. Only, Elkington’s elite Carolean recon super sniper demolition team of ninjas got into our city, and blew up the great city’s core, built by the Old Ones before mankind walked the earth. The city fell, and only by sacrificing a legion of virgin goats to some pagan god nobody cared about did we slow the fall enough so that the impact didn’t murder us all, only most of us. Thus fell Olympia.

“Now,” he said, scratching the bellies of the tiny squirrels that made up his crown, “we once proud Olympians scrabble over ruins, forming petty gangs of crime and evil and raiding in our dead city. Thanks to my crown of squirrels, signifying my respect and power, nobody can stand up to me and my gang, the Wardens. But now, we need your help.”

“And, uh, why’s it named ‘New Pegasus’?” I asked. “Whatever happened to Old Pegasus?”

He shrugged. “New Pegasus was the flying city’s military district, where man and squirrel lived together as one with only occasional bestiality, which made it perfectly fine.”

“That’s doesn’t make it fine at all!” the little girl snapped. “Just because it went on doesn’t make it right.”

“Yhar, uh, well,” the Warden stammered, “the ancients of Hellamatra used to sleep with little boys, and today we respect them for their sense of freedom and democracy. Now, why anyone would go to bed with a little boy who wasn’t, like, your own baby you’re holding at night is beyond me. But, since they did it, it’s totally fine for me to round up all the boy children and use them as blankets. Right?”

“No! J-just no!” The little girl fumed, pulling at her hair. “I hate everything!”

“Well, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with sleeping with little boys, as I see it,” the Warden said, and I just gawked at him. My hands were ready to go to my guns.

“Just because you have no concept of the birds and the bees doesn’t mean you can just go around saying that,” the little girl said, throwing her hands up in the air.

“I don’t like bees. Or birds, for that matter. Can we have cats and squirrels instead?” he asked, and the courtiers also voiced approval for this chain of events.

“Oh, for the love of!” She covered her mouth with her arm and screamed. “I’m only twelve and yet I’m still gonna be the one who has to teach you what the birds and the bees are.”

“The cats and the squirrels, you mean?”

She didn’t reply. Instead, she curled into a ball, put a hand on her toy wagon, and drove it back and forwards in utter silence.

“Anyways, buddy,” he said to me, “I need some stranger with a gun to kill somebody and his evil gang before they destroy the whole city and bring about the end of the world. Any questions?”

I started. “Wait, what?”

“Courtier number eleven-point-five,” the Warden said darkly, “drop me a beat, just as we rehearsed.”

A man wearing a poor jester’s costume stepped out of the crowds, covering his mouth with his hands. “Bum-tish-bada-bum,” he sang like this, making up random sound effects as he went.

Meanwhile, the Warden stood up and jumped off his giant domesticated cat, hitting the ground with an expert roll. The cat, however, seized this opportunity to jump up onto a broken section of the wall, then leap up to a balcony, where the people up there screamed as the cat ran amok through them.

“My name is the Warden, rap master of Blackwatch Keep. I’mma teach you a lesson in rap, stranger.” And he broke out into a stylishly unstylish dance, spinning and jumping all around as he sang in a weird tune.

“This be the story of the city
And with an evil man who’s kinda shitty.
He be ballin’ with the Blackguards,
He be up to no good,
So ya gonna stop by ’n’ give ’em my deathly regards.
We got the swag,
This bitch be in the bag.
Now go kills some people you don’t knows
And save the world to get all the hoes.”

When it was over, he was laying on his side and looking at me. “You have your orders. Hand, take him out, show him what’s what, and—” he took a long, hard, deep nasal breath “—save the world!” He smiled. “And remember: now you’re friends with the Warden. Holla if ya need me.”

“What the hell did I just witness?” I asked dumbly. “Because I feel violated and in desperate need of a shower.”

“Hold on, I’m coming!” the Warden’s Hand called out. C blew air through his lips and shook his head as I sat upon him, arms crossed, waiting for the woman. She was running out from the building towards me. “Wait, wait, wait!” she yelled.

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said loudly as she finally got to us. Despite the run and her armor, she wasn’t panting as hard as I’d’ve expected. “And that’s what you’re wearing?” I asked, cocking a brow.

Gone was the dress and weird tight tanktop thing, replaced by this. It looked like some kind of light armor, starting with the strangely wingéd shoes on her feet to her gray-black pants. Mind you, they were pants with a gap partially up the leg and were only connected to the waist-covering parts with visible black garter belts. Then there just was this gap of armor, exposing mildly tanned white flesh from low on her waist up to just above her navel, like she was trying to expose the most possible skin so that attackers would know exactly where to stab her, because she was just nice like that.

Above her navel a shirt picked back up, studded in places with black leather, exposed with a large V-cut on her chest that exposed an unsettling portion of her bust, complemented by another cut that exposed small parts of her side. Although she was still wearing that bandana, just that she’d angled it to make sure as much breast as possible was showing. At her hip was a sheathed sword, which likely went with the little shield on her back.

She frowned. “What’s wrong with it? It’s comfortable and mobile; it’s what I wear when I actually plan to go out, not just sit in a titty bar all day and stay atop all the freshest rumors. Plus, I look good in it.”

Shaking my head, I said, “For God’s sake, woman—for all the protection that offers, you might as well be wearing a bikini. Look at all the exposed flesh? The menfolk here aren’t wearing revealing outfits like yours.”

“So?” the Warden’s Hand demanded, crossing her arms.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just, like… ‘Chainmail Bikini—plus five armor, minus five cold resistance’. Seriously, ma’am. If you’re going to wear armor, the least you could do is wear armor that actually protects you.”

She only glared at me.

I sighed, rubbing the side of my face. If her looks here are interpreted the same way by her fellow skinwalkers as they are when she’s a pony, then… “Look, just because you have a great body and a tight ass doesn’t mean you should be trying to flaunt them when folks are trying to kill you. It means you should wear armor to protect those goods so that you can live another day for people to leer creepily at you and think dirty thoughts. I’m just concerned and trying to look after you, for what little it’s worth.”

Her hard glare softened considerably. “Look,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck, not looking me in the eye, “I… I think it’s kinda uniquely sweet that you’re trying to look out for a stranger, even though why you know so much about me is still freaky, but I’m a big girl and I can handle myself.” She finally looked at me with her dusty eyes. “Hey, uh, what’s your name? I never asked, and if I’m going to be filling you in on what the Warden wants of you, it’d be handy to know.”

With a wave of the hand, I brushed the remark off. She’d never asked me my name in my where. “There is power in a name,” I said. “Forgive me for being superstitious, but I’d rather not give it.”

She glanced around. “Well… I still need to call you something. And, well, you do kinda look like the ancient paladins of Geremiah, so… how’s about Gunslinger for a name? Can I call you that? Because you sure as hell look like one.”

I tried not to laugh. “Reminds me of what they called me in the place I was in before this one; they said I looked like a bladeslinger.” I shrugged. “So, tell me about this man I am to kill, little skinwalker.”

The woman blinked, taking a step back. Then she glanced around as if to see if anyone was watching her. For some reason. I expected her to shout “Surprise, you said the secret word of the day!” because it sounded like something the Warden would implement.

Instead, she asked in a low voice, a palpably apprehensive look on her face, “What did you call me?”

“Skinwalker,” I replied in conversational tone. “Is this not what you are?”

“No! Fathers, no! Why would you—I’m not a skinwalker! Why would you accuse me of that?”

I shot the woman a puzzled look. “So… you and I are not skinwalkers? I thought this was the name of this species in this tongue.”

“No, we’re werekind!”

“Where-kind?” My thoughts went to C, whom I was still riding. “So… what’s a skinwalker, then, and why do you suddenly look so scared?”

“To even mention the word is to invoke them!” she hissed back at me. “And I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want in my life is to even be within a thousand miles of one of those unholy abominations of legend!” As she finished, I chuckled. She was literally within spitting distance of a skinwalker. “Why would you even mention one of them? Who gave you the impression werekindred hight those?”

“Strange,” I said, ignoring her question. “I met a skinwalker once, and he was a fairly chill bloke… if mind-bogglingly terrifying.” C the Horse beneath me made a horsey noise that, I thought, conveyed vague annoyance.

Her face grew dark, like there was a sudden cloud obscuring the sunlight above us. “What? You… you actually met one?”

In my mind, I jostled about what I should tell her. Finally, I grabbed my right sleeve and pulled it up, revealing the limb mutilated with all sorts of symbols. Her dusty eyes ran across the arm before going back to my lone eye, her brow furrowed with puzzlement.

“What’s with the tattoos?” she asked.

Tattoos? Huh. So, these… uh… werekindred have a name for the mutilations. Tattoos. “Must have been about three weeks ago,” I said. “This arm was infected, blood poisoned. I was forced to cut it off, cauterize it, even. As I’m laying there, dying, the skinwalker finds me, stands above me, and tells me a former confederate of mine asked him to look after me. So, he cut off his arm and gave it to me.”

“That’s…” the Warden’s Hand trailed off. “That’s impossible.”

I smiled. “Take out a knife, ma’am, and stab my arm. Watch as the arm regenerates, and the mark where ’twas cut seals with a new tattoo.”

The woman looked at me like a small child looks at a very large knife, full of apprehensive thoughts yet a vague intrigue about how the child could use this knife for evil. I offered her my knife, and she took it, taking forever to just stare at it and admire the suicidally sharp thing. When she looked back up at me, I nodded, gesturing my eyes to my tattooed arm.

It took her what seemed like a minute of soul-searching—the kind wherein you remember that your daddy touched you and that you secretly always hated the color purple for some reason—before she did it. The Warden’s Hand plunged the dagger into my arm. She let go and let the blade stick out of my flesh.

Gritting my teeth, I tried to pretend it didn’t hurt like the ungodly pain that it was. She looked up at me like a dog looks at its master after it shits all over the carpet and eats the furniture and also may have fornicated with your daughter somehow. With a soft smile, I grabbed the hilt and pulled it out. Lots of blood was to follow, the pain burning and intense.

Her eyes widened as C’s arm did its thing and healed itself. When it was over, there was a new tattoo, and it depicted a bird flying at the looker, its wings twisted so that the bird looked like the outline of a skinwalker… of a werekind skull.

“Oh my Founding Fathers,” she whispered.

“If you cut any other part of me, I bleed and do not heal like it does.”

“So,” I said in a cheery voice, “would you like to get on my horse, tell me what I’m to do, and then go your own way?” I held out my hand to her.

After a moment’s hesitation, the woman whose voice I recognized smiled and grabbed my hand. I helped her onto the skinwalker I rode.

“He is the Black Man,” she said to me as C merrily trotted through the streets, past the many people still within the settlement of New Pegasus. She sat behind me, still in the same saddle. I could feel her body pressing up against my back. “Some call the Black Man the Black King, which is to say, the King of Outlaws. But whatever you call him, he is the leader of the Blackguard.”

“I absolutely love how people just respect the written language these days,” I remarked as I saw a small sign. It was nailed to the side of a building, and it read ‘Whalz iz teh awsum’. “Really, it’s pride to your national and ethnic heritage that you care for it so.” I sighed. “But what’s so special about this Black Man that the Warden needs a crazy foreigner to deal with?”

She seemed to ignore my comment, which made me frown. “Simply put, the Blackguard are most vile gang of outlaws in the world,” she said. “They’re also one of the two biggest gangs in the ruins of Olympia, the other being the Wardens. We stand for peace and protection, to bring back and hold a civilized life for the survivors of Olympia; they seek an end to all things. Their raids often go far beyond Olympia, and are known to rape and destroy farms many, many miles away. They’re a local terror, and we needed a knight such as yourself, a proper gunslinger, to take them out.”

“Might I ask why my guns make me so special? If you know what they are, surely you must have them.”

I felt her shrug, her bust uncomfortably rubbing on my back. God, how did these people live with such sacks of fat weighing down their chests? “Well,” she said, “most guns nowadays are produced for and exclusively owned by Elkington’s government. Most guns otherwise are so old that they’d never work. That’s why Elkington managed to conquer Evesland so easily; his was the only faction able to produce firearms at all in a time when everyone still remained true to the sword and bow. Not to mention his Caroleans, who were the only army trained to use guns. So, to see two working revolvers—six-shooters, no less, instead of the modern three-shooters—in the hands of normal person is literally the stuff of legends.

“Many local tribal warlords, in fact,” she went on, “got their starts because they owned a gun, which was more than most anyone else had. Papa Bear, leader of the Medasin Men, in fact, has an ancient scattergun, as the rumors say. So, if you’re not a part of the government, the old tools of steel are still your best friend.”

“Hmm,” I grunted. “And so this Black Man, his raids are just so vile that he must be stopped? That’s the reason?” She had mentioned that they committed rape, and if the Black Man sanctioned it, I had no choice but to stop and kill him and his gang. As I thought this, we crossed the threshold of gate, not the one I’d entered from, this one was along the path to Sleepy Oaks, and towards the Black Man.

“Not exactly,” she said in a teeth-gritted voice. “The Blackguard are fanatics. When they kill you, rape you, even torture you, they believe that they claim your soul, which they believe grants their victim unquestioned entry into High Haven, a sort of paradise after death.”

“Like Fiddler’s Green?” I asked.

“I… suppose.” She shook her head as we slowly rode past armored men in fortified positions on the road outside the city gates. None of them were wearing chainmail bikinis. “The Blackguard are convinced they have a holy mission, and that is to bring le Cœur back to life, and then overdrive it so that it goes supercritical, explodes, and annihilates all life within the hemisphere.”

I made C stop. “Wait. What?”

“Le Cœur was the heart of Olympia: built by the Old Ones long before us, it was magical device that kept the city in the sky flying, kept the air breathable, the winds low so that they didn’t kill us. He and his gang want to get le Cœur up and running again, even though Elkington sapped it so hard that it will never work perfectly ever again, and then he wants to charge it up so much that it explodes, killing most of this part of the planet, and taking him and his cultists to High Haven.”

Turning my head around, I came face to face with her dusty eyes, out noses almost touching. Granted, that was the first time I’d actually taken notice of this new nose between my eyes, and so I tried not to stare at it, but the point stood. As we held eye contact, I could see the wind playing with the twin tails of her bandana.

“Is that the gist of what the Warden wanted you to tell me?” I asked.

She nodded, her nose rubbing against mine in the action. “I’ve told you where it is, how to get there, and why we need a man with guns to take care of this: lead beats steel every time.” I continued staring in her eyes. Eventually, as she stared into my eye, she said in an almost absent-minded tone, “You know, your eye is really pretty. It’s a real sin that you lost the other. Two eyes like yours would’ve been the kind that so easily got pretty little pairs of legs to spread wide for you, huh?”

When she continued to stare at me, I cleared my throat. “You’re free to leave now.”

“Wha’?” she said in an almost slurred tone. The woman blinked. “Oh, I, uh, just… Sorry. Phased out there. Was just thinking about the sound of gunfire, the smell of gunpowder, the sight of a gunslinger of old gunning down monsters wearing the skin of men. And, call it girlish, but I always loved the stories of those knights.” She fidgeted with her bandana. “And there’s just something darkly romantic of a gunslinger wandering into town and saving the world, y’know, Gunslinger?”

I continued looking at her. “So… what you’re saying is: bitches love guns?”

“Pretty much,” she said with a laugh, then fell silent.

“Are you going yet?” I asked. “You told me what needs to be told, and I highly doubt you have any interest in going out to the Cœur to help me out there, since your armor is so revealing that it’s bound to be no help.”

She fidgeted once more with her bandada and looked up at me much as I looked down at her. With a steady, but not forceful resolve, she said, “No, I don’t think I’m leaving, Gunslinger.”

I cocked a brow. “Why?”

“Because I still know the way better than you, know all the little hiding places, know where all the good viewing spots are, et al. If you get lost, we’re screwed. Plus, when I was a little girl, my father worked in the Cœur, and I learned a bit about it from him. If you want to deactivate the Cœur and then take it offline permanently, I’m your girl, else you’ll just be fucking with things you don’t know of. No offence, Gunslinger.”

A little smile crept across my face. Everything she’d just said had been bullshit. It was true, I was sure, but still bullshut. Just using to truth to support her bullshit conclusion. “In other words,” I said, that same grin on my face, “you want to come with me?”

“Is it so wrong that a girl gets off to gunslingers shooting bad guys in the face?” she asked with a shrug.

I laughed, and C made a weird animal noise that was probably also laughter. Or a rape threat. I couldn’t rightly tell. “Well then, milady, welcome aboard Team Gunslinger.”

“Huh,” I said, looking around the street. Around here, the buildings were taller. Or, had been taller once upon a time. Fragments of that tallness remained in the still-standing skeletons around me. From seemingly everywhere, green plants and vines sprung up, trying to claim these lands for the evil that was nature. “The streets are empty… They must have known I was coming.”

The Warden’s Hand stretched out her arms and back, yawning. “Nah, not really. This part of town is just terrifically haunted.”

“Oh, that makes it all better,” I sighed. “How’d it get haunted, anyways?”

“Well, in the final moments of Olympia, thousands gathered around this part of the city, linking hands and holding loves ones, all in prayer that the Cœur would start up again, that the city wouldn’t die.” She hesitated. “When the city crashed, this area was hit with the brunt of the force. The people were turned to paste, their bones to dust.” The woman swallowed. “Nobody came ’round here till Elkington’s engineers were trying to build a railroad through the city. As it turned out, absolutely nothing remained of the dead people here, save for—look, there! One of them.”

I followed where she’d pointed. It was like a figure standing there by the alley, only without the figure. A shadow, really. It was like a literal shadow had been burned into the ground and part of the wall. More likely, I figured, the city had some very creative graffitists.

“The shadows there, without bodies, will still rotate around the center, where once their body was, depending on the position of the sun. And sometimes, you can see the shadows move, and often they disappear and move around when no one’s looking. Like, on the anniversary of the day Olympia fell, at around twilight, you can see all the shadows of the dead people here. In the right light, they say you can even see the people themselves.”

“Huh,” I said. “How dreadfully spooky. Remind me again why you took me to the place where some demonic little ghost girl is going to come out and rip my face off.”

“Because the gangs all avoid this place,” she replied. “Most out of fear of the ghosts, and the Blackguard avoid it because they view it as holy ground. And because it’s so close to the Cœur, it makes an ideal back entrance into Blackgard, the fort they have at the Cœur.”

“So… let me get this straight. The Black Man leads the Blackguard out of Blackgard?”

“Pretty much, yhar.”

“Great,” I sighed. “It appears that everyone here has the naming ability of a very angsty preteen. ‘Let’s make it all black, because black is hardcore. Also, let’s name everything else after blood and demons and fire, and we’ll have blood fountains, wear all black, and-and-and also, no girls allowed.’ I mean, good golly, Miss Molly, this just sounds silly.” Glancing off to the side, I swore that I saw a shadow turning slowly to watch me go by. I glared at it, shaking my head. That would teach it not to stare at me.

“Hold up, stop here,” she commanded, and I brought C to a halt. “Over there,” the lady said, pointing off to a large concrete building. “There’s a little way through there, up across that, into that building, and then sneak the Cœur district, avoiding the brunt of the Blackguard as we slip into Blackgard.”

Her indicated route took us for stories up the concrete skeleton of a building, then across a fallen tower of metal that had once formed a weird and super narrow but tall pyramid thing that formed a bridge across the street, into another building, and then wherever. The reason, it seemed, we didn’t enter the second building first was that its base was covered in concrete ruins, making entrance likely impossible. When I got a good look at the first building she wanted us to enter, I gave a loud groaned.

The fallen sign by its side labeled it as the “Heaven’s Hospital”.

“Great. A haunted hospital. Nothing can possibly go wrong here.” I looked down and around to the Warden’s Hand. “If my genitals end up getting possessed and turning into a serial killer, I’m forever blaming you.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine. I’ve been here a few times, and I only got attacked by a poltergeist once after staring for too long into a haunted mirror,” she said, getting off C. Without any hesitation, she strolled up to the wiry mess that had once been what I imagined to be some kind of front doors. “Are you coming, Gunslinger?” she called out.

“Uh, do give me a moment. I have to whisper to my trusty stead.”

“Cool, whatever,” she replied and ducked under a fallen steel beam, disappearing into the building. Well, I could still see her through the mess, but hardly.

Getting off C, I asked, “Do you sense any problems?”

He looked at me. From a headlong view, his eyes looked like they were bulging out of his face with pure horror. “I am a horse,” he replied. “But, I can sense a pack of feral dogs roaming around.”

It occurred to me that while my voice had a slight echo in these empty streets with this looming shells of buildings around me, C’s voice did not echo in the slightest, like the quack of a duck, if that duck were a horrific flesh-eating abomination from beyond your worst nightmares. “And what if I need you later on?”

He shrugged in a way that I was sure his horse body was never meant to move. “Well, just whistle. You know how to whistle, right?”

“No,” I said, and his ears drooped.

“Oh, God damn you, tsaius.” He sighed. “Look, if you need me, just… uh…” C looked around, licking his eyes with his ludicrously long tongue. “Yeah, I got nothing. I’ll probably just randomly appear whenever I appear randomly.”

“That’s so thoughtfully generous of you that I’m shedding invisible tears,” I said flatly.

“Oh, whatever. Get on out of here. You have a bad guy to kill, and I have a pack of dogs to invite to a tea party.”

With a nod to the skinwalker, I turned and went after the Warden’s Hand, into the hospital where some demonic little girl was doubtlessly waiting to tear my face off.

Inside, I saw the woman scrounging around boxes and loose articles within the great front lobby of the building. Bits of the wall had caved in in places, broken chairs were about, plants grew in places, and the glass of a great ceiling window had shattered long ago. A bird flew around somewhere up by the tall ceilings, flaunting the fact that vengeful spirits never bothered taking out their vengeful fury upon random birds.

“Oh, there you are!” the lady called out. “Was wondering when you’d stop talking to your horse.”

Walking up to her, I asked, “What are you doing down there?”

She shoved over an empty tin box full of broken coffee mugs before she stood up. “Well, since no one ever comes here, this part of the old city is still a great place to loot and look for supplies in. Plus, I’m pretty sure the ghosts like to restock this looted stuff every few weeks. Like, this one time I found three bullets in a locker, then a few weeks later I wander in here, accidentally open up the same lock, and find a stimpack that totally wasn’t there before.”

“A stimpack?”

“Yhar, you know. Scary needle things that deliver healing potion stuff straight into your blood and body.”

“Ah, you mean like a Muntermacher.” I reached into my bags until I found one of them, one of my very last. It was a syringe filled with a red liquid. Oddly, in the hands of this much bigger body, the Muntermacher looked tiny, as if using it would be like shooting myself up with some make-believe drugs. I moved it around, wondering if the red liquid inside the syringe—an extract from the Doktorkäfer, the doctor bug—would even have the same effect on a werekind body.

I could just picture myself using it to heal a wound, and all it would do was give me a nasty case of hives and also melt my left lung and only my left lung, because my left lung was my only good lung. My right lung was still the lung pierced by the bit of metal when I’d fallen off that balcony trying to kill Elkington way back when. I actually found myself massaging that part of my chest just then, or at least what felt like that part of my old chest on this new chest.

Putting the Muntermacher back, I realized that the lady had wandered off. I followed her through a broken set of double doors, followed as she swung a left into a dark and scary backroom, lit only by faint cracks in the wall and from the outside halls. In here, she tried a seemingly random door, only to find it locked. I didn’t ask questions as she kicked it open. She pumped her fist and arm as she looked into the newly revealed stairwell, lit only by faintly glowing paint.

“You know, I swear on Geremiah’s grave that this door was open last time. Unlocked, too,” she said, crossing her arms and looking into the darkness within. “Well, onto the fourth floor. C’mon. The livebox tower’s our only way across.

She went in, but I paused. Turning around, I saw several imprints of children’s shadows standing behind me that were not there earlier. With a hissing noise, I said in a low voice, “Back, demons! Back, I say! For I’ll have you know that while I may not be a priest, I am carrying several bottles of sulfuric acid that I had a priest bless, making me the sole man in the world likely carrying holy acid.”

Making an ‘I’m watching you’ gesture at the shadowy imprints, I backed into the stairwell. With a final frown of disapproval, I shut the door. That done, I proceeded to bravely scamper up the stairs partially to the third floor, where the lady was. If any ghosts tried to eat my face off, I would grab her, toss her at them, and run like hell, as any brave stallion would do.

“So,” I asked, trying not to think of children’s ghosts following me forever, watching me trying and failing to figure out again how to properly urinate with this body’s weird anatomy, “who’s this Geremiah fellow I hear so much about?”

The woman glanced at me as if I was begging her to teach me how to breath. “Geremiah the Great. Don’t they at least teach you about him in Toitchland?”

“Nope,” I replied with a spring in my step.

She sighed. “Well, uh… In short, Geremiah was an outlaw from the plains to the west who gathered up an army of one hundred men, himself included, with proper working guns about twelve hundred or so years ago. Those were his valiant, heroically romantic Knights of the Gun. Then he managed to unite the countless tribes of Plainsmen in the West under his banner, crossed through the Great Divide and into Evesland, where he conquered and settled all the land before submitting to the Congress, whereupon the Congress crowned him the President of Evesland, bringing back civilization to a ruined, lawless land.”

“Well. That sounds interesting,” I said. “I’d love to learn more.”

“Yes, but we don’t have time for a history lesson right now, thank you very much,” she said, opening the door onto the fourth floor. I followed her out, since she seemed to know where she was going.

As we weaved through the broken building with holes in walls and gaps in the floor and hospital beds scattered about, I made sure not to pay attention to any of the things moving out of the corners of my eyes, the phantom sound of distantly laughing children, or the teddy bear with a knife through it and the words “Play With Us” written in blood behind it. The Warden’s Hand explained that away with the always comforting dismissive wave of the hand. Plus, with all the brokens bits of the building, we were never too far away from sunlight, so there was that.

And finally, there it was: a huge tear in the building Façade where that weird tower of metal had landed, creating a bridge between this building and the next that certainly wouldn’t randomly break and kill us for seemingly no reason. And to keep the feeling, somebody had taken the time to lay down planks across the tower, nailing and tying them down just so perfectly that there are parts of it that you almost didn’t see the ground through. Totally the antithesis of a death trap.

It was behind a door, though, to what had once been a patient’s room. The room had windows thereinto, and when my guide peeked through them, she grunted “Shit!” under her breath and dropped to the floor.

Crouching down, I gave her a look like a hamster trying to contemplate modern art. “What’s wrong?”

“Three of them,” she hissed. “And don’t you dare say ‘I thought you said nobody ever came here’, because I don’t know why they’re here, either!” She blinked. “Oh, wait. You have a gun.”

“Two of them, actually. Revolvers.”

She smiled. “What am I worrying myself over? Go out there and shoot them in the face.” Then she paused, gnawing on her thumb. “Wait, no. Bad idea. The sound of gunfire would likely reach Blackgard from here.”

I shrugged. “Allow me to solve your problems, milady,” I said, suddenly remembering that I still had a sword with me. Plus, blades had that unique advantage of being silent and never needed reloading. I stood up, standing behind the door as my hand went to the sword. Fingers prodded the hilt, wondering if the grip would even work so well with hands.

“Wait, what are you doing?” she demanded.

Nevertheless, some flourish was called for. So, I pulled my hat forwards to hide my eyes, put a hand in a pocket, and opened the door. With a cool, almost casual demeanor, I strolled to the edge of the room and took a tentative step onto the makeshift bridge. The three men, each loosely dressed as soldiers of old with swords, shields, bits of chainmail and leather, however, paid me no mind. To top it off, they were wearing black neckerchiefs and black capes, because black was the new black.

No, they were too busy staring downwards, pointing and gawking at the horse sitting in the middle of the street. Only, it was sitting at a sizable table, drinking tea with eight dogs of various breeds, all strapped into the chairs and freaking out in what was either pure terror or terrific under-the-table blowjobs given by a many-mouthed tentacle monster who may have very likely been an extension of that horse they were drinking with. Also, they were all wearing tophats and monocles.

“Oh, Founding Fathers,” one of the men was saying in a tone like he had a nasty tummyache. “This place really is haunted!”

A twinge of irk coursed through my blood. I had intended to meet these men head on, act all cool, then quickly kill them in a badass duel. But since they were ignoring me, and never being one to refuse taking advantage of serendipity—for if serendipity were a mare, I’d probably be a sex offender—I just promptly walked up to them, loudly greeted them with a “Hi!”, and then watched as two of them accidentally threw themselves off the end while I lazily kicked the last one over. Far less badass than I’d been hoping for.

On a related note, I did get to watch C salute me, then gallop over to the dead bodies. He promptly picked them all up, and dragged their bloody, gooey corpses under his tea table to do whatever with them; I didn’t care to contemplate.

When I went back to the Warden’s Hand, I found her standing by the open doorway, fidgeting with her bandana. “Well, that went over a lot differently than I’d expected.”

I shrugged. “It thought it was find of amusing. Plus, it was easier than stabbing them a lot.”

“I see… well… we probably should get going.”

“Ugh,” I groaned, my back against the stone wall. I dared not look down as I made my way to the right. “Why must there always be a narrow ledge above a bottomless pit,” I asked, still not looking into the black void of nothingness further down here in this building, “and why must I always cross it?”

To be exact, it probably had a bottom. Just that it was a murky pit of blackness wherein there was only rape and darkness to find. It looked bottomless, though. And no matter the cowardly thumping in my chest, the woman stood on the other side of the ledge, where the building once again had a normal floor. Through a crack in the gray concrete wall, a ray of sunlight illuminated the dust floating lazily behind her, giving her a cherubic halo that did not match at all that almost psychotic grin on her stupid face.

“Oh, come on,” she said with a wave of the hand. “You’ll be fine.”

“Are you enjoying this?” I asked, scooting along the ledge, worried more that I’d lose my hat than my life. I was just another hero killing people I didn’t know for people I didn’t know for reasons that I didn’t fully understand; we were a dime a dozen. Now, fine hats on the other hand…

“Mmm, a mite bit,” she chirped. “It’s a rare thing to see a gunslinger squirming like this. Rather amusing to see.”

With a quick leap, I scrambled up to the more solid ground. “And I think watching parents smack their snotty, self-entitled, misbehaving kids is exhilarating—but you don’t see me slipping kids some money in exchange for them misbehaving till their folks snap. Not often, at least.”

She giggled at that, but I only sighed, a question forming on my lips. “How many more ruined buildings do we need to crawl through?”

“Yonder,” she said, pointing down the hall. “Through a hole up here is the central location of the Paradise in the Skies Theatre. Should still be in the haunted part of tome, but through it is a direct way onto the roof of a building in Blackgard.”

So I followed her down that way. Save for me getting into a staring match with a strangely placed bucket of fresh turnips, there was nothing odd in these ruins. Well, not until we stepped through the hole in the wall, onto the fourth floor of the theater. For before us was a huge atrium that went up even higher than the fourth floor, although the fourth floor clearly was the highest floor here.

At the center of the atrium’s floor was a twisted, gnarled old white oak tree without any leaves. Around it, the floor which had clearly once been a pristine checkerboard pattern of tiles was now covered in bits of the fallen ceilings, parts of the upper floors, weeds, and half of the floor had been thrust upwards but half a foot from when the city had fallen. Light filtered through the twisted, broken bits of ceiling onto the popcorn stand at the tree, where a man clad in dark blue robes stood.

To be more precise, save for a small radius around the old tree, the whole of the ruined floor was covered with men and women wearing a all sorts of paltry, scavenged-looking armor, their only distinguishing features being black bandanas around their necks or faces.

More Blackguard, I thought. At least now we know where those other three had wandered off from.

These Blackguard took up space from the little vomitoriums leading into various theaters to the mound of rubble that created a ramp up to the second story. Around the edges of the second story, they all stood, staring at the tree in the atrium. There were even Blackguard on the third floor, most of their arms crossed as they looked down, their armor still looking laughably makeshift.

Silence was the king of this place. Silence… save for the quiet but echoing sobs of the naked woman tied to the tree, her limbs splayed open. Although hard to make out from this height and the considerable distance, I could see her dark blue hair, and her white flesh looked dirty or mayhap bruised.

The man standing nearest to her, the fellow in the dark blue robes with the pointed hood that concealed his face, rose a hand into the air. “Brothers and sisters,” he said with a vague hint of a drawl, his deep voice reverberating all throughout the atriums and sending a chill down my spine. He paused to looked at the naked girl. “Near are we to bringing the Cœur back to life.”

“Near are we to being utterly genocidal psychos, more like it,” I mumbled under my breath, the Warden’s Hand and I crouching up to the fourth floor’s railing. Thankfully, up here, the railings were more like short walls in terms of looks. Visual cover it was. Although we’d gone to the left upon coming through the hole in the wall, I saw, if we’d gone the other way we could have walked down a set of rather broken stairs. But my guide had wanted to go this way, and so had we gone.

“We are mayhap nar a few days from ascending into High Haven,” he went on, bits of the ancient metal superstructure to this once grand building creaking off in the distance. “For the safety and ascension of all pious persons, we gather here, in this holy place of haunting for that most ancient of traditions: sacrificing this unsullen, this virginal beauty to the Old Ones, those who constructed the Cœur in the before times, in the hopes of earning their favor yet further.”

The woman sobbed, but she did not struggle. A pit in my gut told me that she’d long been forced to accept that there was no other option, and I could easily imagine that her ankles and wrists had been worked raw from struggling already.

“Sister, would you do the honor of playing the tarot to determine who amongst us shall be granted the sacred privilege of burning her?”

I didn’t hear a response, but out from the shadows stepped a woman wearing black robes and a plague mask. Seeing her, my blood ran cold. She make a flicking gesture with her hand, and immediately the crowd took a step back from the tree. The woman pulled out and shuffled a deck of cards, then set down seven of them.

She turned them over, one by one, accompanied only by the sound of quite, defeated sobs.

“The Sorceress,” came the woman’s voice, sounding far more youthful than the cobweb-genitaled crone I’d been expecting as it echoed through the atrium. At the card’s name, I suddenly had a sick feeling in my stomach.

“The Gun.” My hands caressed the revolvers in their holsters.

“The High Priestess.” My mind went quickly to Snechta, and then to the card of same name that Felicitat’s so-called oracle; that card back then had displayed a mare that was, when I thought about it, a deadringer for Snechta.

“The King.” Much like the stallion in the oracle’s card, my right arm was now slightly darker than the rest of my body, both as a werekind and a pony.

“The Murderer.” That card had looked like it was displaying Cards. I didn’t know what the card that this witch was using looked like, but a sinking feeling in my gut told me that it would display girl who would look exactly like a werekind Cards.

“The Liar.” Thoughts in my head went to C’s grotesque, unnaturally huge smile, the one he’d worn when I’d first laid eyes upon him.

Then the woman paused, seeming to hesitate as if confused. It was hard to exactly tell, what with her plague mask. Then, with a sudden jerk, she looked straight up at me. There was no way she should have seen me, but I could still feel her eyes boring into my face. Eyes that I just knew had to’ve been blue.

She held up her hand; betwixt two extended fingers were two cards. She took one of them, shook her head, and ripped it. At last, she held up the last card, its face towards me, holding it sideways. “The Fool, lengthwise.”

That was what had separated the tarot reading of Felictat’s oracle from the one the Blue-Eyed Lady had shown me. The oracle had said I was the Hanged Stallion. But the Blue-Eyes Lady had called that wrong, had labeled me as the Fool, even though she’d called me “Hanged Stallion” until just then.

“You,” the woman yelled out, looking directly at me. The mayhap hundreds of people in the room turned to follow her gaze, and a good many of them reached for their swords and axes. “You shall be the one to show us fear in a handful of dust.”

I glanced to my companion, who was alternatively peeking over the edge towards the tree and looking at me, fidgeting with her bandana. From somewhere off, I heard the sound of heavy bootfalls. My hands went to my guns as I saw the flickering light of a torch upon the wall; they were coming up from the broken steps.

“Shit!” my companion hissed, looking not at the stairs but down the other narrow way. Creeping out from a stairwell was a host of Blackguard, swords and axes drawn.

Jerking my head to the stairs again, a look on my face like a rooster finding himself tarred and feathered, I saw the host of men. All wearing their makeshift armor, black neckerchiefs or bandanas around their faces. Well, all save for the one carrying the torch. He was wearing black robes sans hood and ridiculously thick glasses, a wicked grin on his face that just screamed “my favorite pastimes include punching babies and raping slave boys”.

Now, I wouldn’t pretend to know anything about math, but based on a mere headcount—which I had to restart twice because I lost my place by thinking of cats in leather jackets eating chips—I quickly found that there were far more men than I had bullets for. At most, I had twelve shots between my two revolvers, and I suspects that wouldn’t be enough. Mayhap if I could do a full reload, but by then, they’d be upon me. While my duster would easily protect me from being stabbed and cut and even shot with arrows, the duster only prevents the cuts; it did not, as much as I’d’ve wished for, stop the crushing, blunt-force trauma from those kinds of wounds. Trust me, even if the axe doesn’t cut you, axes hurt!

For some suicidal reason, rather than fire at will, I glanced over the railing to the atrium. Then down below me. The drop would kill anything. But, there was a snag. Literally, a snag. The floor below me jutted out just slightly on a little lip, still far enough down to break your legs, but this was where the snag was. See, there was nopony on the edge of the third floor beneath me; instead, there was a huge pile of rubble, including a savage-looking metal pipe sticking out. It was my snag.

“Girl,” I said to my companion, and she snapped her head towards me. “Give me your hand.” Hand extended, I smiled at her, standing up.

“What are you…?” she tried.

“Grab my hand, girl.” I winked. “Trust me; we’ll be fine. Well, you’ll be fine. I don’t know about myself.” Glancing to the women tied to the tree, I took a breath.

“But what are…?” She bit her lip, tugging on her bandana. The Blackguard were taking their time, slowly lurching towards us, the man with the torch and the pedophile glasses still smiling at me.

“Trust me,” I said calmly. “You do trust me, your Gunslinger, right?”

The woman hesitated before taking a breath, standing up, and grabbing my left hand.

I turned towards the atrium, gripped the woman’s hand as tight as I could, and vaulted over the railing, taking the girl with me down the four stories to our death.

She screamed, and I screamed, but for entirely separate reasons. Blood, hot and red, was leaking down my tattooed arm as I tried not to scream. I swung my feet forwards, grabbing the third-story ledge, and hauled the girl up to the railing. She frantically grabbed onto it, like a wet cat in a waterpark, and scrambled over it.

Gritting my teeth, blood dripping from a new gash in my cheek, I scanned the floor. No Blackguard. Good. Now, for the pressing matter of how I was still alive, if barely.

My right arm, as I looked at it, suddenly reminded me of a mouse caught in a trap. Only, instead of normally crushing it to death like any sane person would do, my arm had been skewered like the world’s bloodiest marshmallow. Also, my right arm didn’t taste very good. I would know; I once chewed it off.

Looking at the limb, I could tell that it was only held on my tendons and muscles and flesh. Compared to normal, the arm looked freakishly long. The force of the fall had torn the arm from its socket , and I could feel wetness inside the now dislocated joint. Whether that was blood or synovial fluid, I couldn’t say, only that it burned like that time a priest dowsed me with holy water, only for me to find out that it was actually holy acid, because the priest was a crazy pony. I still kept some of the stuff in my bag, just in case vampires needed to be taught the true meaning of religion.

But, neither of those were quite the worst parts, even though the gashing pain was so tremendous that my first scream had torn my vocal chords, no. The worst part was when I tried to blink away tears in my eyes from the pain, and realized that I had blinked with both eyes. One eyelid caressed a lovely eye; one eyelid caressed a cold tip of metal digging into an empty hollow.

Suddenly, I realized that the blood on my cheek from where the metal pipe had gouged and still stood wasn’t entirely from the gash in my cheek. In fact, I was sure that I could feel a line of surgical stitching dangling across my cheek. So, yeah. This was fun. Because even when the plan is terrible, I still always found a way to end up worse than I’d’ve figured possible. Especially when the plan succeeded.

“I like how you’re just standing there,” I croaked to my companion, who was pretty much doing just that: standing there and staring at me with a face like she’d just walked in on her parents engaged in hardcore BDSM sex, and they had seen her, and they had decided that they wanted her to watch.

Extending my left arm, I grabbed onto the railing, not paying much mind to the shouts of the Blackguard below me on the ground floor. The first thing I did to free myself of the savage steel snag was to jerk my head, getting the metal bar out of my eye. With how deep it was, I mused, it was probably better that I had no eye there left to pierce.

The only thing was, with the way I’d moved, my eyepatch was now hanging slightly off as blood dripped down my countenance. When I tested out by blinking the wounded eye, I found that it didn’t blink quite right because the metal pipe had ripped my bottom eyelid nearly in two. The girl was staring into the empty socket before she leaned over and vomited out something that was oddly bright orange .

“Help me,” I whimpered, and, slowly, the Warden’s Hand spat out a last bit of vomit before grabbing my free arm. I tried not to look at the way the metal snag weaved in and out of my grotesquely elongated arm, through muscle, bone, and flesh. Together, as I tried to drag myself over the edge and she pulled me, the arm was slowly freed.

The sound was as deafening to me as it was quiet to most everyone else, I figured. There came that teeth-grinding sound of squeezed metal being dragged, that high-pitched whine like a very angry and clawed kitty attacking a chalkboard. But that was nothing compared to the sound of the wet flesh, the blood now rushing out; it was like the sound of mud dropping into a puddle—schlop and schloch!—only I had the fun knowledge of knowing that sound was my flesh and muscle.

As the blood ran out of the newly metal-less wounds, which had been stemming the blood flow, I suddenly felt woozy. Like, the kind of woozy where all of my thoughts revolve around half-mad musings about genitals. The first of these thoughts was that the sound my arm was making was more akin to the sound of a very tenacious stallion trying to brutally fornicate the lifeless, half-liquidated-by-rot corpse of his grandmother at her wake.

But with a sound like finally getting your foot dislodged from the mud wherein it’d been stuck, the metal snag finally popped out of my body, and I tumbled over the railing. I was pretty sure that I got some of my companion’s vomit on my cheek when I landed. Coincidentally, with the gash just under my eye, that meant I got some lovingly orange vomit in that cut, which was fun. Infected wounds? Hi, hello; yeah, it’s me. Table for one, please!

Still, it could have been worse, as the sudden mental image in my head depicted. That is, I had the sudden mental image of me falling down, scraping along the ground, and all of my companion’s vomit getting scooped thereby into my empty left eyesocket. At that thought, I jumped up off the ground and onto my feet, my arm just gushing red, myself having clearly nicked the same artery several times over.

“Oh my Fathers, are you okay?” my companion demanded, and I just looked at her.

“Well, I could do without your vomit in my wounds, but other than that, I’m positively peachy, love,” I said flatly, staring intently at her with my good eye and my empty socket.

She covered her mouth with her hands, and at just that moment, someone yelled, “I got ’em!”

I looked around, seeing distant outlaws ascending the stairs far off to one direction. When I tried to reach for a gun, I grunted hard. I realized two thing just then: one was that my gored arm felt pleasantly numb save for the burning area around the shoulder, and the other was that my right arm didn’t work. At all. It just hung limply, like the world’s saddest penis—

“Dammit!” I hissed at myself. “We are not going through this again.”

“Wha-wha’?” the Warden’s Hand stuttered, reaching out to me.

“Not you, girl,” I spat. “I’m talking to my brain. We are not going through another period where every other thought involves the word ‘penis’, are we clear?”

Go screw yourself with a breakfast cereal composed entirely of somewhat sharp-looking rocks.

“I’m glad we had this chat,” I replied. Then came the sound of an arrow whizzing near me and hitting one of the large stone columns that held up the ruined building. Also, oddly, there was the hissing sound of a fuse whence had come the sound of the arrow hitting.

The Hand’s eyes went wide as she shouted, “Oh, fuck me with a rake!”

“You know,” I said, body slightly swaying, “I like you and all, but don’t you think you’re pushing this relationship a little too fast? I haven’t even bought you dinner ye—”

I realized about then that the girl had grabbed my good arm as she went running towards the wall and away from the railing, and I was coming with. Still dragging me alongside, she dolphin-dived behind a rusted snack cart whose label advertised cotton candy. Landing besides and almost atop her, I noticed that some artist with a rudimentary sense of humor had crossed out the “candy” part of the ad from this side of the cart, replacing it with a new word so that the ruined thing now advertised “cotton pussy”. That was lowbrow. Nothing at all compared to the rigidly high-class standards of incoherently babbling out the word “penis” whenever it crossed the mind—now that was proper humor.

An explosion suddenly tore me away from my musings upon the high arts just as the third-floor lip we’d landed on cracked, splintered, whined, and tore itself free from the rest of the floor. It was like a beautiful butterfly, except that it was mostly made of debris, and it didn’t fly, and it probably killed a bunch of people when it hit the ground. Yay, butterflies. So majestic.

I glanced over to the distant place where those Blackguard had been coming up from, and they were still pleasantly jogging for us, the dust still hanging, the air smelling of explosives. Just as soon as those men were yelling and pointing at us. My eye fell to my right arm, still mangled and hanging out of its socket, still bleeding, but the bloodflow was beyond reasonably controlled. One of the perks of having some skinwalker freak’s arm replacing your own.

Standing up, I tried to control my breathing as I clamped a hand over my dislocated arm. Fact was, I could manipulate it past the elbow, down to the hand, but it was still otherwise useless.

“C’mon, Gunslinger!” my companion urged pointing down the walkway that slowly curved around the atrium, the opposite direction from the oncoming outlaws. Still holding my arm, I tried my best to keep pace with her, leaving a trail of blood as we sprinted.

Arrows shot past us, a storm of running boots rang in my ears, someone threw an ugly baby doll onto the third floor, and men and women were screaming for our blood, many calling calling us “Profligates”. So I ran as if the Korweit Himself were after me.

What the hell am I doing here? I found myself thinking as I scrambled over a pile of rubble on the floor from a fallen bit of ceiling. The men were still chasing after us, and when I glanced into the atrium, I could still see that tree with the nude woman tied to it, that women in the plague mask silently watching me. Still, I had my hat, and it wasn’t as if I was going to groan and say, This can’t possibly get any worse. That would have just been tempting—

My companion and I slid to a halt as we turned a corner around the next column, and came face-to-face with a huge wall of rubble.

“Oh, come on!” I bellowed. “That was just an example; I didn’t actually say ‘Ugh, this can’t possibly get any worse’!”

A roar erupted from far behind us, pretty much exactly like the sound of a heavy gunshot if that gun were fired from inside a wooden barrel. My companion looked pale and said, “Shit, that sounds like a scattergun!”

“Oh, no fair, fate!” I shouted. “That’s just cheating!”

The Warden’s Hand spun around, and I followed her gaze as she examined the wall of rubble. “Shit… shit… shit…” She clasped her hands together. “Okay, idea—see that little hole in wall?” She was referring to narrow space between the debris and the floor, one of the several little holes in the unsturdy wall, but mayhap the largest. “Look, I’ll try to squeeze through there, and-and-and I’ll see if I can find a way to help you get on through.”

I just looked at her, briefly glancing to her chest. “Are you sure you could even fit with those?” I asked. “They don’t look very agreeable to squeezing through tight places, and rather uncomfortable to have to crawl upon with.”

She stamped a foot. “They’re only size C; I’m not some boob monster, dammit!”

Suddenly, I had the image in my mind of the Warden’s Hand taking off her clothes, and on her chest were just two of C’s faces smiles at me, and trying to engage each other in small talk. In that moment of silence, she threw herself to the ground and slowly, with grunts and groans, went about squeezing through.

I turned around to face whence the Blackguard would come. With an effectively useless right arm, this was going to be about as fun as playing Pin the Tail on the Pony against a blind kid. And blind kids cheated! Taking a breath, I grabbed a revolver and held it in my left hand. Of course, there was this little snag about not having a left eye wherewith to help me aim the damn thing, and I could only hold it in one hand, not two like any sane person would have done. Pulling the hammer back, I listened to the nearing shouts, waiting for them to turn the corner.

And then they came, just four men here. They caught sight of me. One of them called out, “You shoulda stayed home, Toitcher!” as he raised his axe and shield, the four of them charging.

My first bullet hit his buddy in the throat. His neck twisted unnaturally as he fell down, convulsing and drowning in his own blood. Second shot went wild. Cursing, I pulled the hammer back. The next two bullets struck true, the third was false, and the final bullet hit the last man’s raised shield. I watched as it punched right through a rather thick-looking bit of steel, and then got to see his arm split open a bit like a banana as the bullet went through his arm and ended its journey in what I thought was some part of his lower throat, the part that was purely inside the body.

I barely had any time to reload the revolver before the next wave came, only three this time. Out of the six bullets I fired, only two of them struck true. The last Blackguard rammed into me, carrying a sword in each hand, but the blades just harmlessly knocked the everloving wind out of me, sending my gun flying and skidding across the floor towards the railing.

“Hold on! I think I can move this!” the Warden’s Hand called out through the rubble.

A swift and desperate kick to the groin stopped him in his tracks, letting me kick his legs out from under him. Ah, testicles: they were like a big pair of self-destruct buttons placed at the most conveniently kickable place ever, especially on these werekindred. So, when he crumpled to the ground, I stomped on his neck for all I was worth. According to the several stomps I had to make before he finally stopped struggling, I was worth about the same as a small Neighponease girl-child.

Panting so hard that I coughed, I barely heard the ferocious locking sound. I looked up from my kill to see a man who looked like the Black Knight if he’d blown his knees out, nursed himself back to health on nothing but the tears of orphans, and then killed a man over a game of blackjack. His black outfit looked hand-sewn, ditto for the black poncho slung over his shoulders, and the black hat on his head that was of a suspiciously similar design to my own. Then there was the long twin-barreled gun he was aiming at me.

Before even thinking about it, I dove to the right, towards the wall as his gun went off. The twin barrels went off with flash. It sounded like thunder if it had been wielded by God and was made of pure rape and malice. A train of pellets slammed into the concrete rubble behind me as I rolled around the floor like a fat walrus attempting to learn the Stop, Drop, and Roll method.

When I managed to spring back up to my feet, the man was laughing. “Boy, I hope you like the sight of your own blood,” he said to me, fiddling with what I was now sure was his scattergun. At first I thought he snapped it in half, but when two spent red shells sprang out of the opened breach and I saw the bandoliers of similar red shells around his chest, I realized that this was how the scattergun was reloaded.

The man let out a roar, springing forwards and charging me as he tried to fit a red shell into each barrel. Soon the roar was replaced by a howling laugh. When he ran, I did the first thing I could think of. Because, sometimes, the best plans were the instinctual plans you made without thinking about them because you simply had no such ideas.

This wasn’t one of those plans.

The first thing that occured to me was to run as hard and as fast as I possibly could. To run like I’d never run before, with all the fury of a fat man who’d just dropped his bag of chips behind the couch. So I did just that, he got nearer and nearer, and I ran and I ran and I ran… straight into the wall.

Well, more like I ran into it at a funny angle with all my might, ramming my shoulder straight into the wall. It felt like a thousand razor blades soaked in cherry sauce were digging into the socket of my arm as the sheer force of blow shoved the dislocated bone back into the socket. Cherries had the most damaging effects upon my psyche nowadays, you see. Lemons were too easy, those sluts. So when I cried out in the wet pain of it all, salty tears threatening to form in my eyes, the scattergunner howled and whooped like a banshee, which was good. He was bringing himself within striking range.

Although I was just some idiot pony in a strange werekind body, I did have that one superpower of mine that C’d given me, and by God I was going to abuse and cheat with that until the universe found out how to screw me over for it in the end. And it was going to screw me over in the end, make no mistake. C’s arm was probably going to end up actually giving me that eyeball on the edge of my penis that I was always ranting about, only it’d have tentacles, and would fly, and would constantly speak in really racist, offensive jives.

So, when his gun was almost in my face, I put on the biggest, scariest smile I could muster, the kind that would get most people locked into a room with soft, white walls, and I thrust my right arm forwards, grabbing the barrel of his gun. At that exact moment, the gunbarrel to my left erupted in that same thunderous sound, the pellets hitting my arm point-blank, the arm practically melting as the shot tore it to pieces.

I didn’t stop moving towards him, arm extended.

His laughs died, his smile turning upside-down so fast that I wished I could have taken a series of pictures. And it was all because my arm was reforming before his very eyes partially around his gun. The man seemed as if in a daze as my hand reassembled around the gun’s triggers as I tore it out of his grip. By the time everything seemed to register to him, I was spinning the gun, still partially in his hands, around to face him.

“Wells, looks like the ball’s in my court now,” I said in a calm voice, pulling the trigger. The pellets literally tore the top third of his body off the rest of him.

“Looks like the ball’s in my court now?” I asked myself, shaking my head. “Really? That’s the best I could come up with?”

“Holy shit, he just killed Brother Maximus!” a man shouted. I looked up at the gaggle of gangers standing there, who’d clearly been watching our fight instead of helping.

I knelt down, popped open the scattergun’s breach, grabbed two shells from the corpse’s bandolier, and loaded them in. At this range, a spread of pellets seemed to liquefy the men, rendering their steel armor beyond worthless. The range of the scattergun was considerable, given the evident spread of its shot.

With some gore, it was impossible not to throw your head back and laugh maniacally as you reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired. “I’m bad at recalling strange people, even though you faceless outlaws all look vaguely familiar, so I’m sorry to say that I dismember you!” I yelled at one wave. “Wait, no, that’s a terrible pun and I apologize. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer concerning how I can make up for this grievously atrocious pun.” The idiots kept on coming, being blown apart by the scattergun; it was as if they’d been specific bred to forget a little thing called ‘self-preservation’ was.

I felt, rather than heard, a block of concrete from the wall of rubble behind me falling over and onto the floor. “There!” the Warden’s Hand panted just as I’d gone through the twelve shells in the bandolier. She was covered in splotches of chalky dust like she’d just spent the worst day ever teaching voracious kindergarteners not to play in the meat-processing factory. Judging by how much more I could now see of her cleavage, I presumed she’d taken off her red bandana for whatever reason. “Fucking finally got it out of the way, so c’mon!”

Tossing the now-useless scattergun to the side, I scrambled around for the revolvers that’d been knocked out of my hands earlier. They were a bit more important than the girl was, after all. When I squeezed through the gap in the rubble she’d made for me, she grabbed me and nearly pushed me down as she tried to speed me up.

When I looked down at the end of the causeway, I could see why. A huge pile of rubble lay further up ahead, easy to climb up, being composed of the upper floor and bits of the roof. At the top of the debris was a hole in the wall, and a way outside. With her practically dragging me along, we sprinted for it.

I found myself thinking about how hellish it must have been trying to get through that wall of rubble behind us. It was a miracle that the girl was still in one piece and had everything. A part of me could easily see myself losing my hat after doing that, not noticing until now, and then demanding we go back and get it. Of course, nobody was that dumb, and—

“Oh fuck, we gotta go back! My bandana!” she shouted, grabbing me and dragging me to a halt.

I stood corrected. Goddammit, I hated when that happened. Why did I always have to be wrong about everything? Let me guess: her bandana was some sort of priceless heirloom or precious memory-related treasure, and there was no way that she’d go on without it, and so I had no choice, so I might as well just agree and go back now.

“You don’t understand, Gunslinger!” she pleaded. “It-it means more to me than anything!”

Goddammit, why did I always have to be right?

Without asking, I spun around and sprinted back the other way, trying not to cough, the once-pierced lung still as fussy as a cat soaked in barbeque sauce. I could see a strand of red in the little slit wherethrough my companion had slipped under the wall of debris. The only way to get it would likely be to hop around to the other side of the wall and fish around for it. I’d say something here about the universe hating me, but, to quote a local saying, that would just be beating a dead horse.

She was at my heels as I jumped through the gap in the rubble wall, which meant she got a first-class view when someone hiding behind the wall reached out and grabbed me. This wasn’t any sort of normal grab, either, no; the robed man’s fingers went into my eyeless socket, curling around and digging into the wall of my eye cavity with two fingers, a third pressing into the deep gash beneath my eye. The sudden eruption of pain combined with the force of his tug and speedy maneuvering knocked me to the ground.

My companion might have done something about it had not a warhammer from some other bloke hiding behind the wall smashed into her breastplate, clotheslining her to the ground. Before she could even choke out a scream, he had a boot pressing down on her throat.

Quicker than greased lightning, the robed man with his fingers in my eye reached down to my belt, and I was convinced that this man was somehow, like, Cherry Berry’s father or something. Because that wouldn’t actually surprise me at this point. But instead, mercifully, he only grabbed one of my guns—the one with actual bullets therein, no less.

With a smile on his face revealing black teeth, because black was black was black was black to these people, he cocked back the hammer of the gun as shoved the pointed into my eye until it reached and pressed into the back of the socket. He whispered to me in a warm, friendly voice that was a dead ringer for Cherry Berry with a penis:

“Do you feel lucky, friend?”

With all the grace of a fat man in water wings, I was thrown to the ground. As I rolled to a stop, I heard the sound of my revolver being manually decocked, and felt it thrown at me. From here at the floor of the atrium, the ceiling looked like it was about ready to fall down and bury me. The farthest edges of my peripheral vision were taken up by the boots of the Blackguard.

When I looked down at the revolver that’d been tossed back at me, the robed man said, “You came to the wrong neighborhood, pup.”

Whereto I replied, “Yes, well, I’m a member of the local homeowner’s association, and I’ll lobby the local government to create laws that will mildly inconvenience you.”

He barked a coarse species of laughter at about the same time as I realized that I had my guns and could use them. Grabbing both guns, I leapt to my feet, mindful of the agony my shoulder was in. I was pretty sure that slamming your shoulder into the wall was not how any sane doctor would recommend fixing dislocated limbs, and I was pretty sure it was reattached incorrectly. The inside of the socket felt like it was made of sandpaper.

Holding a gun in each hand, I realized just how stupid this was. How the hell could I aim with two guns at once? And for that matter, I still had to reload one of the guns. But, it didn’t really matter to me. I’d chewn my arm off to get out of bad situations before; I was sure I’d find a way out of this. Still, and though I’d never pretend to know much math, but assuming every single bullet of mine that the Blue-Eyed Lady had given me hit and killed a man here, I wouldn’t have nearly enough ammunition to kill them all.

Why did there have to be so many of them surrounding me? Why couldn’t I have been attacked by, like, an army of toddlers whom I could just walk across, but then angst about later because I’d’ve inevitably ended up hurting those kids? That would have been fine.

Looking over, I saw the man with a warhammer slung over his back holding onto the Warden’s Hand. Her eyes seemed gaunt, her pale skin ghostly, and there was still sweat on her brow. The man who held her was pretty much fondling her bosom, the way he was holding her, and the girl looked about ready to vomit again from the way he touched her. But, at least the brute had been nice enough to fetch her bandana and put it back around her neck, so even though he was probably a rapist, he wasn’t all that bad. Still had to die horribly, though.

“Oh, what are you gonna do?” the robed man asked me, smiling as I turned my attention back to him.

“Well, I’m not going to lie: the thought did cross my mind.”

“And?”

“And it’s a pretty terrible plan, I admit.” I gestured my guns to the crowd of Blackguard forming a large circle around me. “The moment I open fire, about a few hundred morons are going to rush me from all angles.” With a shrug, I pointed my guns back at the man. “How many people are here? Mayhap two-hundred?”

“Two-hundred-twenty-four,” he assured me. “It was about two-hundred-fifty, but you seemed to have taken a weed whacker to the ranks of our chapterhouse. I doubt that the Blood Knights chapter of the Blackguard will ever fully recover. You even killed our leader, Brother Maximus, and his scattergun will be missed, now that there is no more ammo.”

I smiled at him as I reloaded my empty gun with just the one hand, eliciting few startled responses from the so-called Blood Knights Blackguard. “So, it’s just one little old me versus a full two-twenty-four of you? Well now, that just seems like an unfair fight.” I cocked my revolvers. “For you.”

A woman laughed from behind me, and I spun to face her. The Blood Knights of that side of the circle had pulled back, creating a little alley between me and the white tree whereto the naked girl was tied. “Spoken like a true gunslinger of yore,” the woman in the plague mask said, holding a burning torch up in one hand. “More belike nar a rhonin.”

“I don’t understand a thing you just said, witch,” I spat, “but I’m pretty sure you were hitting on me. And while I appreciate the thought, I’m not exactly in the market right now for dames that are keen on setting other dames aflame.”

She let out another laugh. “You are an amusing sort, are we not? Sadly for you, your cards have been dealt, and you have been chosen, ye Fool.”

A stern look on my face, I said to her plainly, “You had me at hello.”

“But… I never said ‘hello’.”

“Which explains why you don’t have me at all,” I replied in a terse voice.

She stared at me through her plague mask as she slowly walked towards me, the light of her torch flicking off her black robes. The woman never flinched as I kept my aim on her head; in fact, when she approached me, she willingly stepped up and pressed her eye into my gun. “You are going to put your guns away. You are going to take this torch. And you are going to set fire to our sacrificial lamb upon the tree.”

“I’m not partial to lamb meat. Mayhap if she were some kind of deer, I’d consent, because venison is kind of tasty, but lamb? Not a chance.”

“Joke as you will, the cards picked you. Fate chooses you for this; there can be no disagreement. You have no choice.”

“We Teutsche don’t believe in fate and destiny; they are the false musings of those too weak to see the world on their own. There’s always a choice, witch.”

She said nothing, just held the torch up for me.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” I said.

The witch tilted her head, and the Warden’s Hand suddenly cried out. Holding onto her, the man was squeezing and fondling her hard. “Gunslinger, I’m sorry! This is all my fault!”

“Simple,” the witch went on in a plain tone: “consent and burn our lamb of your own volition, or see your companion violated, then watch it happen to yourself, followed by getting to die horribly together. I understand there’s a woman here who’s always wanted to fuck a man in the eye, and your lack of one would surely please her.”

I held eye contact with her, or as best I could, seeing as how her eyes were covered by that mask. There was always choice: I could shoot her dead and try to kill as many Blackguard as possible before I died, or I could take the torch and burn to death a girl I didn’t know. Those were the obvious first choices, but there are always third, fourth, and often fifth choices, such as taking the torch and using it to set the witch aflame, or shooting my companion in the head so that they couldn’t harm her before going for a last stand myself. Although, in truth, I wondered what they’d do if I stripped naked and screamed a lot while rolling around the floor. That actually seemed like a good option now.

“Don’t you touch me there, you fuck!” my companion yelled, and I could hear her struggling.

“And if you play nice,” the woman before me said, “I promise you, you both shall live this day, absolved of your sins against the one truth faith. It shall be worth your while, for we couldn’t do away with those given unto us by destiny.”

“You just used the passive voice, which is inherently less powerful than the active voice,” I said. “You bitch.”

She never stopped looking into me.

Under her gaze, and with the sounds of my companion struggling and fighting in vain behind me, I holstered my guns. I swore that I felt her smile as I snatched the torch from her hand.

It felt dirty to hold, its heat washing over me as I walked towards the tree. I ended up standing by the ruined popcorn cart near the tree’s base as I looked up at the girl. Weakly, she turned her head to look at me, her eyes cried out as she muttered a dull whimper.

“Sóc una perdrera…” I heard her whisper.

The robed man from earlier came up beside me with an odd little bucket. He reached into the popcorn cart and gathered up a bunch of rather fresh-looking popcorn. “You can have some when she’s burning,” he said, and shoveled the food into his maw.

Looking behind me, I caught my companion’s eye. She bit her lip, then hung her head limply, not offering any protest to either me or the man holding her. So that brought me back to the sacrificial lamb.

“Es tut mir leid,” I said to the girl, and I set the torch forwards. The tree’s base and then the tree itself caught fire almost immediately.

The girl screamed bloody murder as the flames licked her feet, and she kept screaming when the fire consumed her whole body, screams which pierced my very soul and rang in my very core even when she paused to breathe in more air for another scream. Her roasting flesh split and crackled open like a hotdog over a fire, and it gave off a sickly-sweet aroma as the white flesh went to pink to red to black, as layer after layer was charred off, revealing new layers for the inferno to burn off until I was watching her very muscles undulate and sizzle as they seared. Her eyes became like hard-boiled eggs before they popped under the immense heat. She never stopped screaming, not until her internal organs had lost their muscle and her open wounds had wept out all her internal fluids into the fire, wherein they sizzled and turned to steam.

All of it was my fault, I kept thinking, watching it all with a blank look on my face. Every single second of her agony was because of me, because that was the choice I’d made. Arms crossed, I made eye contact with her until she had no more eyes, just thinking that over and over. A pang of regret gripped me in that moment, but then again, I got a lot of those these days; where was the harm in just one more little regret? Just another to toss onto the pile and burn with others, just like the girl herself.

Really, the one good thing about this was that the popcorn my neighbor offered me was actually pretty good. Totally worth going for seconds as the girl screamed herself to death.

When it was almost over, I didn’t know how long of a time it was, I turned around to see all the Blackguard down on one knee, hands clasps before their foreheads in prayer. My neighbor was amongst them.

I heard a person coming up from beside me. And before I could turn around, I heard the witch’s voice whispering calmly into my ear fourteen words that changed everything.

“I know who you are, Marked of Kane, and the angel sends his regards.”