Jericho

by Crushric

Chapter 32 — Oaken

Victory.

Hail victory—Sieg Heil! Hail to the King—Heil, König, dir! Hail to the Reich, to the Father. Blah, blah, blah, typical patriotic nothingness. To me, victory existed almost as a kind of given, provided I worked hard enough. Failure was for villains or people trying to dress up their dicks to look nice. Look, guys, I understand what you’re going for, but there’s nothing you can do to make something that looks like it’s hanging out of a shark’s mouth look any better, not even if you put it in a little velvet dress.

But as I stood in the City Hall of Sleepy Oaks, concluding a short summary of why I was here to the massive crowd of some five hundred people—nigh five times more of the town’s pony population before I slaughtered every last stallion, mare, and child—I felt a sense of victory, one properly earned after my failures with Frosty Winds, Lightning Dust, and Taran mere hours ago.

“So, I came to stop the Backbone, save the town, and then probably ride off into the sunset, never to be seen again, as we fancy gunslingin’ types are wont to do.” I bowed my head. “Thank you much for time, folker of Sleepy Oaks.” I walked off the front stage and into the back rooms of City Hall, where a man with glasses and a flat-brimmed hat met me.

“I can’t believe you’re real!” he squee’d. “I-I-I heard the legends, even heard the stuff on the livebox, but to see an actual knight of the gun here in our town… The Founding Fathers have answered our prayers!”

“You forget that I am a Teutscher,” I said in a toneless voice. “My deity is the Lord.” I looked around. “Now, where is that Sheriff woman?”

“Her? Well, that’s why I’m here. Right this way, Mister Gunslinger sir.” I followed him out of the building, down the lamplit streets, and towards a well-lit concrete building of about three stories.

“You are a deputy, then?” I asked.

“Aye, sir. One of two, minus the Sheriff herself. Well, used to be more, but then the old Sheriff got axed, then a bunch of other deputies got dead quick. It’s only me, my friend, and the new Sheriff these days.”

Old Sheriff? So, this world’s version of Stronghold was dead, then? Interesting.

“She does her best,” he went on, “and she’s the only one we got willing to stand up for this little town since Elkington all but abandoned us. Well, we had those two agents from Songnam, those guys you saw crucified out there—Agent Boulder and the Recon Elite Sniper Captain hight Marty Stew. Stew said he was a half-wolf, half-demon dragon king sent to save us, and, well, he had a good show up until those bastards up and murdered ’im.”

Then came the building. I swallowed as I entered it, for I knew this place well. When last I was here, it was a ruin, and the front desk had been empty. Now, there was that little woman with the red-with-black-streaks hair. She was chewing on a pencil with a fazed-out look in her eye. And as I entered, she spat the pencil out, gasped, and then somehow managed to knock her chair over backwards.

The woman sprang to her feet before I could ask if she was alright. I saw gauze wrapped around her midsection.

“OhmygoshohmygoshohmygoshohmygoshohMYGOSH! You’re the Gunslinger!” She practically bounded over the front desk and up towards me. “I know I saw you and you saved me earlier, but still!” She made a high-pitched cheering noise. “Hi! I-I’m Cards—” it took every ounce of willpower in my body not to suddenly darken my expression “—Cards Greaves.” Wait. She had a last name in this world? “And did he tell you his name? He’s Glasses!” Again, it was all I could do to stop from frowning at this little ball of excitement and starry-eyed amazement.

Jayne whispered, “Can you shoot her? I think she’d be adorable, bleeding out from a stomach wound, don’t you?”

“So, uh, Mister Gunslinger, after you went inside, I took your horse to the stables, and got him all ready for when you need him again. Oh, and Doc Dome helped patch me up in the building’s clinic, which is why Sheriff Blackout’s here instead of town hall, she needed to get patched up.”

“Sheriff Blackout,” I mumbled, the mechanical eye feeling heavy. I think I liked Blackout better when she was a bludgeoned-to-death mare lying at the hooves of Cards.

“Yeah; she’s my mom!” She faux coughed. “But, um, you didn’t hear that from me. Doesn’t like being called that, especially not since… since Dad died.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure where your father is, he is well.” Which is to say, he’s currently alive and trying to kidnap your mother into the world whence both he and I hail.

Cards thanked me, and then Glasses led me through the building, up the stairs till the third floor. I saw the door to Strong’s office had been cordoned off with black and yellow tape. “I can find her office from here, thank you very much,” I said with enough force to ensure he wouldn’t question. And indeed, her office was exactly as it’d been last time. I knocked on the door.

“Come in,” came her voice, and I did. Her office was as spacious as I remembered it, decorated with a few photos, bookshelves, and a painting of Blackout with a hairstyle identical to that of her daughter. It could have almost been Cards were it not for the pink eyes. On the desk were two revolvers, a bottle of red wine, and two glasses therefor.

“I’m glad you could make it, Gunslinger,” she said with a smile. Blackout grabbed the wine and poured herself and then me a glass. “Please, have a drink. There’s not much we can offer you in our poor little town, but we’ll do ya what we can.”

“I take it Cards is your daughter, then,” I said, and gestured my head over to the painting.

“Yeah, so she’d be. Poor little thing.” She sighed, looking down into her wine glass. “I do what I can, but I won’t lie: I’m a shitty mother. I wish I could be better, but ever since her father died, she’s… been distant, and I don’t really know how to reach out to my sweet little Cards. She was closer to her father than to me.” She sipped. “It’s been hard for everyone since her father died. Even the guns here, nothing like yours, were his guns, and they were the guns of his father, and his father before him, and so on and so on.”

Oddly, I wasn’t sure if she was telling me the truth about Cards or not. She’s seemed like a psycho bitch mother back in my where. Could she actually be a decent person in this world?

“Funny that you should mention Sheriff Stronghold,” I said, my voice coming out slow as molasses, almost with a drawl. “Because he was the matter at hand wherefor I’ve come to this town.”

She seemed to freeze like a deer about to be hogtied and used as a piñata full of scorpions for a fat child. Then: “What’s that look in your eyes mean?”

“I’m debating how much to tell you, Miss Blackout,” I replied simply. “And then, were I to consider telling you the whole truth, how much thereof should I obfuscate with specific wording so as to make my tale seems less crazy.”

Blackout said nothing, just stared at me as I pondered.

“Stronghold isn’t dead; he’s well alive, and he’s coming here,” I finally admitted, and she jerked up a knee, hitting the desk.

“What?!”

“To be precise, he possesses something which belongs to me, a book of great power. He wishes to use the power of this book to take something back with him to whence he hails.” I shook my head. “When I acquired the book and took it to the Crystal City… well, I won’t pretend I understand how, but it allowed him to come into your world. In a way, I suppose I should cry your pardon for raising the dead.”

Her eyes were wide. “They… they mentioned a great sorcerer with a mysterious book.”

“Who did?”

“That man with the mouths for eyes. Said with his power behind the Backbone, they were going to destroy Evesland.”

I took a moment to consider this. “Then Stronghold is already nigh, and if what they said was true, then tomorrow is when they attack. I know not how be came to service the Backbone, no know I what his means will be. What I do know for certain is this: I will defeat the Backbone and protect you, then I will subdue your husband, and then I will likely need to return to Elkington, for the good king indirectly sent me on this mission, as he did in the where whence I hail.”

“And Elkington will reward you?”

“Beg pardon, but I don’t see how that relates.” I paused. “Though were I to stay around, I imagine he might. Were he to get over the fact a comrade of mine executed General Parishioner. Tomorrow, though, comes a black day. I have traveled long and far this day, and though I might be what my people call a Schlafchauvi, one who takes pride in getting little sleep, I would like to rest my head for the night, hoping to wake up early tomorrow and ready myself and mayhap this town for the coming storm.”

She rubbed her forehead. “This is… a lot to take in.”

“But you need not take it in alone, ma’am,” I replied. “I’m here to help you, for I suspect well that he is after you and you alone.”

Blackout blinked. “Me?”

“Yhar. And since I brought him into this world, through failures on my part, it is my job to protect you and your daughter from him.” I shook my head. “Think not of him as your man, for he is not this man. He is like him, but not. Confuse them not.”

She nodded and took a drink of her wine, finishing the little glass. Blackout looked as if she were locked in internal dialog, debating with herself about what to say. At the end, she cleared her throat and looked to me. “Any other earth-shattering revelations and information?”

My right arms comes from a skinwalker, I’m actually a unicorn, in my world your daughter bludgeoned you to death right over there in your own office—and when I was just a boy, my father and King Elkington teamed up to teach me the bad touch. I shook my head. “None that you would like to hear, and none which would actually benefit you to know.”

“Right, right.” She was silent for a moment. “Well, as for your lodgings, there’s no real inn anymore in terms of beds. Long story short, there just aren’t any. Tavern, yes. Inn? No. ”

I grunted. “I don’t need much to fall asleep. Not even a bed, though one would be nice. You’ve no idea of the places wherein I’ve rested my weary head, like within… certain organs of a freshly dead whale, though I admit to not exactly knowing what it was till the morrow after.”

“Well.” She bit her thumbnail in thought. “There is a guest room in my house, if you can call a room full of boxes as such. I could set it up for you, I guess.”

“That would do fine, ma’am.”

Blackout pulled out a map of town, a town much bigger than I recalled it being, and marked her house thereupon. I thanked her and left the office, with the understanding that I would be at her home at a specific hour.

As I found my way back to the front lobby, I found Cards and Glasses excitédly conversing amongst themselves and… that small girl from earlier? Yes, it was clearly the one who’d been cowering behind Cards.

As I walked by, Cards took a step while turning, walking straight into me. She froze, looking up at me as I gazed down at her. Cards opened her mouth to speak, but then the little girl immediately shoved her out of the way, looking up at me with sparkling eyes.

“Gunslinger!” she cried out, and then grabbed my legs. Either she was trying to take away my title by killing me in honorable combat, or she was hugging me. It was hard to tell. “You saved my life, Gunslinger! Thankee, thankee, thankee!”

Something about her voice made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, shrug, and then go back to sleep. I crouched down to ruffle her link pink hair. But as she squeaked and giggled with glee, I froze. I knew her voice. Knew it well.

Her name was Blossom, daughter of Doctor Dome. Before mine eyes I could see it, her body torn in half, my sword dripping with her blood. She was the first child I killed that dark day nigh a month before. Then I saw myself building a pyre, muttering in a voice schizophrenic with clashing tones, “O fire, be the cleanser of my sins!” And her flesh, with that of her mother and of her father, burning therein. I’d given her that much. And she had to burn. Because if I didn’t burn them, then Cards and Dust could have come back and seen what I’d done. Seen the broken Code. Seen the—

I took a deep breath. “Hey there, little girl! What’s your name?”

“I’m Blossom Dome! My Daddy’s Doctor Dome, and he’s super awesome, but you’re also awesome too!”

“Hey, where’d your daddy go?”

“Daddy? Oh, he went off to go get some things from home. Says he needs ’em for the coming fight.” She frowned. “He’ll probably take forever. Momma says he’d be late to his own funeral, but I don’t really know what that means.”

That nearly knocked me off my feet. Not because of the information in what she said, but in what she didn’t say. The spark in her eyes said she was lying; she knew well what a funeral was. Curious, though, that she’d say otherwise.

“Hey, so, uh, Blossom,” Cards said, rocking back and forth slightly on her feet. “So, ya wanna learn to play poker like I promised I’d teach ya?”

“No,” she said in the flat voice of disinterest only a child could muster. “I wanna talk to the Gunslinger!”

Cards visibly seemed to deflate. So, I smiled and said, “Hey, while nothing’s going on, I was going to get a drink. Anyone want to join me? Like, say… you, Blossom? I saw a little malt shop down the way, and thought to stop there. What say you? Want some ice cream?”

“Boy, do I!”

I looked up at Cards—now that was a weird thought. Looking up at Cards—and said, “You can come too, if you like. I’ll buy you a treat, too.”

She perked up almost instantly. Then she frowned. “Wait, no. I, uh, I wouldn’t want to impose on your wallet.”

With a quick gesture, I pulled out a gold coin, and Cards gasped. “Well, Miss Greaves, there’s a reason that I travel in silver and gold along my dusty old road.”

So, that was that. Glasses refused because he had a date with the grindstone and his father’s sword—which I really hoped wasn’t some terrifying metaphor for attempting to reenact my childhood—and Cards and Blossom went with me down the street to the malt shop. Though they were closed, the store owner gleefully opened her doors for me.

Blossom basically got a tub of some terrifically unhealthy ice cream, and I imagined that her parents didn’t want her eating such sweets, but I was nothing if not a bad influence on children. Cards, I observed with horror, got a strawberry banana smoothie. Dammit, Cards! Now was not the time to be earning my sympathies. Though why smoothies were in a malt shop, I didn’t question. In fact, I didn’t know what a malt was, although I assumed it was a milkshake for whatever reason. I myself also got a strawberry banana smoothie—because after all my months of searching and rambling about such smoothies, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to have one, Cards be damned!

The store owner offered the goods free of charge—since what was the point of money if she was going to die tomorrow? And what more was the point to charging the hero who was going to ensure that her money was worth something?—but I refused to accept her gift. I set down the gold coin, winked, and said, “Because I literally don’t have any smaller unit of currency than gold. Well, there’s silver, but gold is so much flashier.”

When Cards put a straw in her smoothie, she paused to look at my drink. “Hey, you got one too? Awesome! Nobody but me ever orders one of these things around here!”

I just stared at her, drinking my smoothie as I sat down at the table with her and Blossom. “Aww,” I said to the smoothie, “this tastes like sadness and crushed dreams of being a malt shop tycoon, not strawberry banana.” It didn’t stop me from drinking. Because even though this smoothie was poorly made, it was the symbolic nature of finally completing my long held quest to obtain a smoothie, to conquer and vanquish the evil that was a strawberry-banana smoothie-less life that… wait, what was I talking about again? Oh, now I remembered. I was talking about how one of the smoothie flavors on the menu was ‘Cherry Berry’.

“Eh, I don’t see it,” Cards replied with a shrug. “Tastes normal to me.”

Because you are nothing but sadness and crushed dreams! “Which is why you’re a deputy, not a connoisseur of all things thingy.”

“I like things,” Blossom chimed. “Especially the thingy things.”

Cards and I exchanged glances, and she giggled. Jayne groaned and muttered, “I really don’t like her. Really? A sex joke from that? What is she, fourteen?”

I continued drinking, constantly trying not to stare at Cards. After one glance too many, Cards brushed some hair out of her eyes—I’d forgotten how long her mane had once been before she cut it after I’d murdered Glasses—and offered me a weak smile. “So. You’re a Teuton. I-I’ve never met a real Teuton. Heard of them, sure. But seen? No.” She took another sip as I said nothing, though at least now I had a reason to look at her for a prolonged period of time. “I know a few Teutonic cities, sorta. Like Zentrum.” I bit down on my tongue; it was all I could do not to wince at her solarische mispronunciation of the word. Our Z’s went TS, not like the Equestrian Z! “Or, how about Cullen?”

“Never heard thereof,” I replied. “But I presume this is because your people have different names for our cities than we call them.”

She frowned. “How about Menk? No? Studyard? Brimborough? Midgard? Kingsrest?”

“If you mean Königsruhe, then no, I hail not therefrom, but I think I know thereof.” I accidentally kicked the metal support for the table. Thankfully, steel-toed boots really helped keep away any chance of foot pain.

“Uh, then, uh…” There was something cute and sad about watching Cards rub her forehead and try to think. She’d never struck me as a particularly smart girl back whence I hailed; but then again, I’d never given her a chance wherein to be smart, nor had such an opportunity arisen while she was under my watch. I shuddered slightly as I considered the possibility that Cards was actually much smarter than me, just that she was ruled by sad emotions and had never been given the great education I’d been given.

“Are you from Esztergom? Tanelorn? Orlais?”

I held up a hand. “Don’t hurt yourself. I suspect that the last was close enough to where I spent much of my earlier life. Die Stadt Neuorléans. I always spell it with an accent mark over the E because I’m a fancy man. Same for why I generally referred thereto and to its folker by the Frankish terms.” I nodded. “Yhar, Lysjana was a fine state.”

“You’re making my head hurt!” Blossom whined.

Cards chuckled warmly. “Right, right, boring stuff. I know.” She took a long drink of her smoothie. “So, Gunslinger, how do you plan on beating the Backbone?”

I shrugged, putting my smoothie down on the table. “Misdirection, confusion, mobility, Blitzkrieg, and bullets, but especially confusion.”

“What do you mean?”

I mulled over how to reply as I idly looked around. “As Skantarios once said, and as Viktor once spoke in more moderns times, one would do well to keep one’s enemies perpetually baffled. That’s why it helps to be a little bit random, a little bit crazy, a little bit psycho.” I smiled. “If your enemy can’t figure out what the hell you’re doing or what you’re wanting for, they won’t know how to stop you, nor will they even know what you’re going to be doing. Makes good sense; sometimes the best course of action is to perform seemingly pointless actions, even ones that seem to actually hinder you.” I raised and lowered my brows rapidly, tapping a finger on the table for effect. “Which is why I’m treating us all to sweets instead of actually doing anything productive.”

After a pause, Cards asked, “Why’s your left eye a different color than your right?”

“Well, mostly because of that psychotic train—”

“I resent that!” Jayne hissed.

“—but also because it’s not my eye. I’m just borrowing it till I can get a proper eye back.” I jabbed myself in the mechanical eye, and Cards flinched with a wince. “It is metal and machinery, not flesh and… whatever it is that eyes are made out of. White goopy stuff? Squishy un-pokey stuff?”

But as I rambled, Cards gave me a wide-eyed look. “You’re a craftling?” she finally said.

“Beg pardon, Fräulein?”

She shook her head, but still was staring at my silvery left eye. “A craftling. A voltblood. A steelman. Half machine, half man.”

I nodded. This was a concept I’d see before in my comicbooks—nerddom, you have saved me from not knowing what things are yet again! “You mean a Stahlblüter, steelbood.” She nodded. “Though it’s just the eye, nought more.”

“Wow,” she cooed, putting her elbows on the table, head in hands. “I’ve heard of those, but not since the days of eld have they been more than a myth…” She tilted her head. “What other impossible things are you?

I shrugged, looking at our little table. Part of me wanted to see if I could scratch my name thereinto with a toothpick. “Would it be terrifying were I to tell you that my right arm came from a skinwalker?”

“Probably,” she said in a suddenly weak voice, her eyes mixed with a drop of apprehension in a sea of amazement.

Balling my right hand into a fist, I set my elbow down on the table. Then I flexed its arm and rolled up its sleeve to reveal the myriad of tattoos on the utterly hairless arm, for this section of the arm’s bandages had somehow  been torn earlier and needed to be redone. My left arm, I’d come to realize some time before, actually had coarse black body hair, however sparse it was. I smiled at Cards’ slowly paling face.

“I do not believe in fate, Cards, for it is like a heresy amongst my people,” I said, purposefully just trying to sound much darker and more dramatic than I actually was. “But had I such beliefs, I would say that fate has given me ample second chances at my failures and mistakes, let me live where otherwise one such as I should rightly die. And with these opportunities I have been given, I will defeat the Devil’s Backbone and save your life, Cards.”

“Me in particular?”

I gave Blossom a woeful glance as she wolfed down her ice cream like it was in some sort of competition. And the prize for winning was more ice cream. And stomach cancer, probably. “Hopefully them all, for I have failed once before, but you in particular.”

We finished our sweets and went on our way back towards the sheriff’s office. I found the good doctor there, and I handed his daughter off to him. When Cards noted that her shift was over, I offered to walk her home in exchange for her simply filling me in on details about the town and the Backbone. She giddily accepted my offer.

Of the town I learned nothing new, or at least nothing I found noteworthy. Of the Backbone, I merely learned that he’d been more active in killing people. When I thought back thereon, Duke Elkington had only agreed to help and work with the Backbone as a way to appease the monster, to keep him from harming anypony in the short run, while in the long run buying time to learn how to defeat the Backbone. Funny how some random stranger from a faraway land just waltzed in one day and killed the Backbone, huh? All those years of evil work for nought. Still, if this mass slaughter and open abduction of people to turn into monsters was the alternative, mayhap Elkington really had made the smart move.

Of course, maybe Elkington was just a crazy pony who wanted Celestia in a corset and socks before him so badly that he had developed a hero complex, because he really had the hots for the mare who probably never ever put out. And when all his heroism pays off and Celestia comes to him, he learns that it was only because her clittorcock yearned for blood! That was my mind’s ending to terrifying story of love, treason, and giant genitals upon females.

At one point, I stopped to read an old, faded flyer posted on a wooden pole. “All männ ar tu riport tu the Taun Hall—bai orders ʌv Shärriff  Stronghold. The Dävill’s Bæckbon is cʌming; wi mʌst rädi sords ænd shields.”

“The hell kind of written patois is this?” I asked.

“Something that needs to be taken down,” Cards said with a sigh. When I repeated and clarified my question, she blinked. “You can’t read standard Songnam spelling?”

“No, only standard… Eveslandish.”

“Weird,” she said with a shrug. “This is the official spelling as advocated by Songnam. Tends to make a lot more phonetic sense.”

We went on our way. But as Cards prattled on idly, I felt off. Like, something deep inside my bowels was having a Teutonic sparkle party with me. And I loved Teutonic sparkle parties. Then the feeling spread to my arms, and it felt as if I’d actually been jackhammering them away at sharp rocks all day long in the vein hope of striking it rich that I might earn enough money to not feed my kids. Because screw those ungrateful cretins.

“So, about that, uh, the Black Crusade?” Cards suddenly asked, and my mouth turned to cotton. “The, uh… the schwarz Kreuzzug?” It was all I could do not to shudder at her absolutely atrocious mispronunciation of Teutonic words. But on the plus side, I now knew what to expect from an Equestrian accent, and they were truly terrible in Teutsch. “I heard that was an important thing, Dad talked about it a few years back, and even the King made a big deal about raising supplies and munitions for the Rike, though nobody really knows anything about that weird war. I think one of my classmates said the whole war was a government conspiracy to raise taxes. But then she licked one of those Marolina parakeets and they’re poisonous, so she caught rapidly multiplying eye plague and died. But it was okay, ’cause she used to make fun of me a lot.”

I suppressed a laugh at her matter-of-fact tone. “Well mayhap we don’t like talking about that war,” I said, trying not to grunt from the sudden internal strain in my gut and arms, but it was about as easy as trying to get Cards laid. “The Reich’s population stands at about sixty- or seventy-million folks, by recentmost estimates from before I left.” Cards nodded. “A few years before that, not all that long ago, the census reported that slightly more than a hundred million people lived in the Reich. You do the math.”

“My Fathers,” she muttered.

I almost said, “Fathers? Well, I figured your mom was a slut, but that’s ridiculous!” But, well, for some reason I didn’t. Probably had something to do with being more concerned with the burning feeling in my arms and bowels.

“I was a trooper in that war,” I said, stepping over a weird little ditch in the road. “Higher education, like high schools, were taken out of service to free up manpower, boys and girls ages fourteen and up were encouraged to join the Rheinwehr and defend the Fatherland, child labor laws were temporarily abolished in the interests of the manufacturing, and the Reich likely spent most of the world’s money on the Dark Crusade. Years of ice and snow came, too. We hight it Todeswinter, dead winter. No sunlight through the ash and clouds, just dead winter, rationed food, and hard times. But we Teutsche would have all fought to the death to defend our Fatherland, and many did.”

I checked my weapons to try to take my mind off being serious, looking them over without real intent upon them. I’d been acting too damn seriously. Needed to loosen up. Punch a demon. Wear his organs as a fancy hat. Catch some sort of disease from all that raw demon blood. Now, cooked and pasteurized, demon flesh and blood was good eating and drinking. Symbolic of our dominance over the denizens of Hell and Anderwelt. Plus, demon was high in nutrients!

So, check. Two revolvers. Skybane, which I’d taken back from Frosty after Jayne ate her arm. Lastly, there was still my sword, the one which Snechta had made such a big deal of. That museum had dressed like a slut and had it coming, I swear!

Cards stopped walking as I finished looking over my gear, my arms still burning and itching. But when she stopped, I didn’t. I took one step, two steps, and then a ferocious kick-in-the-gut-like feeling erupted in my bowels, and I just collapsed.

“Gunslinger!” Cards cried as I spat out blood. She rushed to the nearby building’s door, opened it, and dragged me inside. Or tried to. She grunted and strained herself, but I hardly went anywhere. Poor, tiny Cards. “Hold on, I’ll just bring you into my house and… and something!” It wasn’t Cards’ house as I remembered it back it my where. In fact, it was an entirely different building.

Trying not to grunt I forced myself onto all fours, looking like some wretched animal. “I cry your pardon, Cards. I… I just need to change my arm bandages.” She helped me up, then led me upstairs into what must have been her room. I could tell it was hers from the peculiar female scent of it all, different but so alike to the female scent her room had had in my where. Also, because the room was little better than a pigsty, with clothes all over the floor and bits of food wrappers here and there.

I removed my coat and shirt, Cards watching me with gritted teeth. The bandages on my arms looked terrible, oddly colored in all sorts of places, and there was the spot on my right arm where I’d somehow torn off the white gauze. When Cards asked if she could help me, I growled for her to leave the room, and, after long hesitation, she did.

Sighing like a bloated seacow, I set to work undoing my bandages. My arms, I found, looked discolored in several places, with a few cuts on them that should not have logically been there. As I finished with my right arm, I paused to look at where my body ended and C’s flesh began. Seams, almost. Not those of sewing, but those of flesh. My tannish skin and C’s darker flesh mixed and matched poorly and raggédly where the two parts connected. And considering how I’d hacked off the infected limb whilst delirious and infected, the ragged nature made sense.

“Cancer, I think,” Jayne chimed as I banged my right  arm with fresh, white gauze. “I was doing some scans, and I believe you’re suffering from notable throughbright burns, which likely caused cancer, amongst other things. While performing that surgery, I administered some drugs to help with that, but I am a train.”

“And I am a horse,” I said back.

“That’s C’s line,” she huffed. “And you have no idea how much he enjoyed using that while we were riddling.”

“Oh, sod off, Jayne.” She played a sound that was exactly like a hissing cat, and I sighed. “If only I hadn’t been dicking around with the Cœur—that’s whence I got this.”

There was silence. “Cœur?”

“Yes, I reached thereinto.” I shrugged. “The Black Man said it gave him those black eyes like shadowy whispers, but I think he was just… tainted with disease the likes whereof I freely admit to not comprehending. Like one of those disease from the jungles of the Elfbone Shore.”

“Shit,” she muttered. And before I could ask, she demanded, “Take out your knife and cut your left arm!”

“What?”

“There’s no time! Do as I say—I swear I’m not just saying it because blood makes me hot! It’s the only well to tell if you’ve contracted forrot!”

I hesitated for a long moment, thinking it over. Then, as if in a trance, I pulled out my knife—the blade honed to the point of  nigh invisibility—and effortlessly cut a line on the underside of my arm. At first, there was blood. Then came the black sludge. No, no, it wasn’t a sludge—it was like a whispering shadow, with tendrils of darkness. It was that same shadowy material that had made up the Black Man’s eyes.

“Fuck,” Jayne murmured. “That’s not throughbright poisoning, that’s forrot! Corruption!”

“Huh, that’s neat,” I said in a blasé voice. “So. Forrot, then?” Before mine eyes, I saw the black tendrils warp and weave themselves around the cut, forming into a cloth-like scab. The scab pulsed and burned, and then chipped off into a powdery substance. The wound was gone, save for a thin red line the likes of which my body could likely heal itself in a matter of days.

“It’s a lingering, soul-rotting condition that my makers documented at length,” Jayne said.

“You know, all this serious ‘blah, blah, seven days till death, and I just killed your hamster’ stuff is really bumming me out. Can you tell a joke or something? Seriously, this day is without any humor since I lopped Frosty’s arm off. At she least was fun,” I said lazily.

But she ignored me. “My makers went through extensive werekind testing, and noted… while what I managed to steal and hack away is vague, they noted it had several terrible effects. Madness, manifestations of monsters, corruption of the very soul and body, and… in one case, they noted it melted a man, and what was left exhibited ‘skinwalker-like’ traits.”

An image flashed in my right eye of a man, his body mostly liquid and melted into metal grates that made up the floor. Then the image moved as the man smiled, raising a bloody, torn up hand towards me. The hand was healing itself with the black and red mass of nebulous material, like C. Then the room erupted into white fire, and within moments the man was ashes.

“That was a white book of that incident,” she said. “What of any other wounds you might have? Please, check them.”

With a grunt, I removed my shirt, looking at the scars of my body, whereof the recentmost was the one I’d gotten from falling down two stories onto a metal pipe. Slowly, I removed my pants and looked at my legs. The scars along my legs were worse, a reminder of why it was a bad idea to piss off a griffon, and how I’d killed her for this back in Chausiku’s shop. I traced the leg scars with a finger, feeling the tissue like a man feels all that jelly he’s drowning himself in.

“My Fathers,” I heard Cards whisper, jerking my head up, I saw her standing there in the doorway. She, well clothed, and I, nigh naked but for my hat and underwear. Hello, creepy setup for the world’s worst porno magazine, which, come to think, Cards probably had a lot of under her bed. “All those scars…”

I grunted. “If one wants to keeps one’s skin beautiful and if one wishes to fight for the innocent, one must choose betwixt them. I chose to fight.” I reached into my bag and pulled out more gauze, proceeding to wrap and bandage my right arm. As I bandaged, I noticed Cards slowly creeping forwards. When I was done, she was standing right before me.

“How did you get all of them?” she asked in a distant voice.

“Mostly by being an idiot,” I said resolutely.

“Oh.”

I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of Cards’ room, and by extension, the scent of Cards herself. “Look, I’ve been being far too serious with you, Cards. Too dark and brooding. Now, I may not be long for this world, but I’m being mean to you if I’m too serious.” I smiled wider. “Because if I don’t smile enough, don’t joke enough, I start to remember the monster I am. And that’s no bueno, Señora Naipes.”

She had a finger outstretched towards a scar, and I took her hand and touched her finger to the white flesh, then let go. “This one was from long before I became a gunslinger, from that time in Songnam wherein I thought it’d be a good idea to jump off a balcony. Well, to insult some guy to his girlfriend’s face, and she tackled me over the balcony. Fell two stories. To this day, I still sometimes have trouble breathing.”

“You survived falling two stories and piercing your lung at the same time?” Cards asked with a glint of amazement in her eyes. Or maybe she was suddenly on her period. Hell if I knew with these werekind women. I contemplated asking her if God was currently punishing her with the Time of the Blood, but I didn’t.

“Of course I survived,” I replied. “Had I died, the universe would have lost her favorite plaything. And the universe enjoying your torment is just as important a factor to surviving as throwing away food wrappers is for preventing ants. And no one wants ants, Cards. No one.” I looked around Cards’ floor, and all the wrappers thereupon. Raising a brow, I let her hand go. But she did not turn red and go to clean her room. Instead, she caressed another scar.

“And this one? Where’s this one from?” she asked, and I grunted.

“This was from my ex-girlfriend. She was holding a candle and tripped down the stairs. I caught her, and her candle sort of really stabbed me. The wound bled and then was cauterized at the same moment. I laughed it off, though it freaked her out to no end.”

“And this?” She fingered gently at the scar with two fingers, as if rubbing it for good luck. Because I was a genii in a lamp now, I guessed. And Cards’ three wishes would all be ‘Can you make people want to sleep with me’, but such a miracle would be beyond my powers.

“This one? From falling up a flight of stairs.”

“Up?”

I nodded. “Yes, up. Part of my old job in the Reichskriminalamt was to investigate and put an end to the supernatural—demons, monsters that ate people, weird things like stairs that make you fall upwards when you trip on them. Hell, my partner agent, Spezialagent Rosen, was actually a trained priest. Helped me out, that fact did.”

“It did?”

I looked to Cards’ window, out at the dreary town. With demons and monsters lurking about, you’d think she’d close her blinds. “For one, he could help perform Exorzismen, and in order to become a priest, you need some other training. He chose a holy path the Maschinengeist loves well, so Rosen had a degree in mathematics as well as criminal justice. Had his calling been professional study of the sciences instead of that of a Special Agent, Rosen could have easily been a saint, up there amongst the ranks of Saint Heinrich Bessemer, the Mann who invented the way to cheaply mass-produce steel, wherefor the Church canonized him.”

Her hands went down and seemed as if to grab my upper legs, one for each hand. Cards was bending forwards rather far, her long hair falling over her shoulders. “And… all these wounds?”

“A griffon.”

“They’re amazing. Really. So… beautiful, like your flesh were a patchwork quilt of stories.”

“Aye,” I said, and nearly slapped myself for the word. Damn you, ability to pick up on language! “Whence I hail, such things are a mark of such deeds. To a warrior such as I, they are sacred, holy… heilig,” I finished in the growl-like tone I adopted when speaking Teutsch to foreigners. “Heilig sind die Wunden auf dem Leib vor dir.”

Whence I sat, I could see clear down Cards’ shirt. Her shoulders squeezed her demure bosoms, almost swelling them in size. When she looked up, our eyes met, and she saw where I’d been staring.

Cards’ fingers tightened on my upper legs as she licked her lips. “I, um… S-see anything you like?” she asked with a terrified, hopeful little smile, a little line of red forming on the flesh under her eyes.

I levied her a hard glare. “Cards.”

She jumped back, putting her hands before her. “Ah, I’m sorry I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—”

“Did somebody put you up to this?”

The woman groaned weakly, putting her hands behind her back. “N-no.”

“Because you have the look of someone who does not want to do what they’re doing. Yet, a part of you does. Was it your mother?” I pressed on, and she swallowed.

“I… this is her house, too. And when I told you I’d brought you here, and…” She swallowed, face turning even redder. I thought she looked like a giant, terrible zit that just needed to be popped. By a snapping turn. “I mentioned you’d paid for the smoothies in gold, and she just got this look in her eye, and I… she… I’m sorry, I just… and you… I… She says I have to… with you… because it’s the only way to make sure you’ll stay to protect the town, and b-because whatever reward Elkington gives you, it’ll probably end up being a position of power, and she… she says that I…” She flinched under my gaze. “So… she says that if I don’t, then… then… so you and I have to… y’know… Don’t throw me out!” Her voice softened. “I couldn’t do anything to save Dad, and if this helps me save M—Sheriff Blackout, I’ll do it. She’s all I have left! Please. I don’t wanna keep being her little fuckup!”

I grit my teeth. “Cards, know that I would never take advantage of you or any other girl.” But, I thought, using her own daughter in a game of manipulation and control does sound like the Blackout of my where. Treating Cards as a poker chip, a bargaining tool. So, that familiar sliminess is comforting. “And if you think I’ll stand for this, you are wrong.” And if you think I’d let Blackout win, you are wrong.

I pulled my pants back on and secured my gunbelts low on my hips. Aside from pants and my guns, the only thing I wore was my hat. Standing up, my body towered over Cards’ little form, both in size and sheer mass. I pulled my hat low over my eyes and said, “Where is your mother?”

“I-in her bedroom,” she said with moist eyes.

“Thank you, Cards. And no matter if you did throw yourself at me for your mother, know that I respect you too much to do such a sin unto you as take your virginity.”

She blinked. “You… how did you know I’m a…?”

I smiled. “Because some things remain constant throughout the multiverse.” And under my breath as I left the room, I added, “But other than that, you’re not the emotionally scarred wreck I’ve come to know and love.”

Hat, fingerless gloves, bandaged arms, pants, and gunbelts. That’s all I had when I burst into the master bedroom, a frown on my face like that time I had to eat seven badgers. There she was, pink eyes, her blonde-and-black hair, sitting on her bed. Lipstick, mascara, a tight corset which pressed her breasts so tightly that I was sure they would explode, a red thong, stockings and garter belt, and red-and-black socks.

“Blackout,” I said harshly.

“Ah, why it’s you, Gunslinger!” she said, then made an effort to cover her breasts and groin with her hands. I had to give her that, she was far more woman that Cards was, a body much like that of Taran. If she was like she had been in my where, then this was probably supposed to be very hot. “You’ve caught me at a terrible time! I was undressing and preparing for bed! How improper of you to see me like this. Why—”

I slammed the bottom of a fist into her dressed. “Cut the crap, Blackout. I know what you’re doing, but I’m not falling therefor.”

She fluttered her lashes, because epilepsy equalled sex. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

“Cards,” I said. “You know well what she just tried on me.”

Blackout put an arm across her lap as she put a finger to the edge of her lip. She innocently titled her head in confusion as she shifted her posture to expose her groin. I could see the very outwardmost edges of that which underwear was meant to hide. “My daughter, why… Oh, she didn’t try anything rash, did she? She’s been so lonely since her father died, and I think she just really wants a strong, handsome male figure in her life to make up for him.” She shrugged, folding her hands across her lap.

I gave her a grunt I walked over to her red-sheeted back. Now I was right before her, and she was looking up at me. “Mister Gunslinger,” she huffed, “how improper of you!”

Quickly, I reached out and grabbed her chin, forcing her to look straight into my eyes. “I don’t care, let me state that simple enough. The man whereof you speak is, in a sense, alive out there right now, and he is the greatest danger to your little world. I don’t care about your petty scheming, the same way you schemed to get your husband to marry you. You’re not a good person, Blackout, and you can’t lie to me. So I’ll say this once, and I’ll say this clearly: scheme not, for it works not upon me; and leave Cards out of this. She’s innocent and has no place in your wicked ways. Such a shame she had a witch such as you for a mother. Now, are we clear on this?”

Blackout smacked my hand away and spat, “Get your hands off me!”

“Are. We. Clear?”

“Of course she’d fuck up and tell you,” Blackout growled. “That’s all the little bitch is good for. All she’ll ever be good for.”

I glanced back at the door to make sure Cards wasn’t standing there. “Whence I hail, Blackout, there’s a reason you died.” She blinked. “Whence I hail, the town of Sleepy Oaks is dead,” I went on through gritted teeth. “It is dead because I killed it. I failed. I will not fail again, and I will save all your lives. It may not restore perfect the Code, but it will be penance enough. So, leave Cards out of this, and we shall have no more problems betwixt us.”

She sneered disgustédly at me.

“Right,” I said with heavy emphasis on the T. “Now point me to my quarters for the night, and we shall conclude our business in peace.”

The night was shorter than I’d hoped, like that really delicious sandwich you spent all that time making, only for you to chew it down in a few bites because your girlfriend was hungry and so you offered her most thereof. Look, point is, it was just past dawn when I found myself out of bed and cooking breakfast.

Cards came down dressed in nothing but skimpy panties, half asleep and yawning. My first thoughts when I saw were, oddly, for I knew better, Hey, look—a werekindess without cripplingly massive chest tumors.

When she saw me here in the kitchen, she seemed to remember she wasn’t wearing a top, and rushed back to get something, which turned out to be an oversized shirt with the words “Downhill: That’s how I roll!” I put the eggs, bacon, and pancakes on her plate without comment.

Her mother, on the other hand, eyed me as if I were trying to murder her with a rolled-up newspaper filled with hamsters as I gave her breakfast. “Aren’t you going to have some?” she asked through narrowed eyes.

“I haven’t eaten since that steak I had in New Pegasus some two or three days ago,” I said. “I’m not hungry; and were I hungry, the pain would feel good. I’d welcome it.”

I left the two women to likely have a very awkward conversation by themselves. I imagined it’d go like, “So, Mom. None of us managed to seduce him last night, huh? Does that mean we’re both equally failures here?” Whereto Blackout would slap Cards and tell her to go to her room without supper, because Blackout was never taught what breakfast was in wherever she grew up.

Outside at the town’s stable, I found C the horse with a frown on his face. People were walking around the streets with a semblance to normality, many of whom smiled and waved at me. Still, I didn’t think too, too much thereof when I asked C, “Why the long face?”

“I am a horse,” he sighed. “But also because Debra—” he pointed a hoof to a palmito horse standing in another stall “—is a preppy bitch who’s too good for me.”

As I watched, Debra kind of just shat herself, letting it all fall to the ground. “Right,” I said, “and she’s quite a catch to be without.”

He sighed again. “My powers of seduction have failed me yet again. I don’t think I’m long for the love game, man.” His ears perked up. “So, today we save the world?”

“And kill some bitches!” Jayne roared. “So awesome!”

“I suppose. We mayhap stop the Backbone, stop Stronghold, stop Strong’s intentions for his wife, and stop by Songnam for our ride out of this where.”

“You said stop a lot,” C said in a plain, helpful voice. “Consider a different word for more varied sentence structure.”

“Oh, sod off,” I huffed. “Let’s just ride about town, scouts things out, and set up a position wherefrom to fight the Backbone.”

“This place is so much bigger than I recall it being,” I said idly as C walked down the streets. Sunlight flickered through cracks in some of the wooden buildings, none of them looking older than mayhap a decade or two. Either this town had some really shoddy builders or the local termites had suddenly got a hankering for exotic hole’d wood, like that cheese nobody likes. Nobody.

Dark alleys between buildings were filled with either nothing or old wooden crates. When I pried ajar one such crate, I found it filled with mummified hamsters. My guess? These had all been Cards’ pets at one point, and, as with that dog she once mentioned having, she had never realized you were supposed to actually feed your pets.

A passing man offered me something when I asked him. He said, “Yon boxes were originally for transportation back before the Backbone upset most all trade. And yeah, it is kinda suspicious that these are all just… here.”

“If you’ve had no trade, how are you all still alive? Foodwise, I speak.”

He shook his head and said “We’re nigh starved out, Gunslinger,” before walking off.

“Nigh starved out?” I asked the air. “But Blackout had enough for a decent breakfast of eggs, pancakes, and bacon.”

“Oh, the corruptions of being in charge,” Jayne said with a chuckle. “That’s why I’m happy as a train, where the amount of harm I can do is… oh so pathetic and minimal.”

C and I went on our way. In one lonely part of town where all the buildings had broken windows, ragged roofs, and rundown walls, C said, “Have you ever heard of the Eternal Champion?”

“No, not really,” I replied, hat low over my eyes, but still scanning the rundown skidrow like how a beaver scans for victims wherein to lay his beaver eggs. “Why?”

“Well,” he went on, “as the stories of my people went, the Eternal Champion is a hero who exists in every time, world, and dimension, for he is a type of constant, an agent chosen by Oz to serve the great cosmic balance, fighting for either Chaos or Order, whichever one has gotten too strong.” He whinnied, and we turned a corner. To our right was now the shores of that murky lake which lead into the swamp with that really long name I couldn’t remember. “But despite his chosen nature, the Eternal Champion often knows not of his true purpose, sometimes even fighting it, but the Champion can never succeed in fighting what he is.

“The Champion, they say, may appear as many people of either gender, though saying he is easier to say. He is a warrior without peer, and none may stand against the him.” C fell silent as a little boy walked alone down the street. The boy looked at us with starry eyes, and just as he was about to speak, C stamped his hooves and bellowed, “No one will believe you if you tell them of me!”

The little boy quickly ran away, crying.

“Sorry,” C said with a laugh. “I’ve always wanted to do that! Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, the Eternal Champion. The title can pass on, they say. Once, when I was but a boy, Mother said those dark times wanted for a Champion. That’s part of the reason why I became skinwalker. That even if I was not some hero, I could help my kind. ”

“Skinwalkers are made?” I asked, looking at an empty house lot which was just filled with empty bird baths and one framed photo of a squid.

“Aye, in a matter of speaking. The form you know me as, so alike to these inferior werekindred, was the form they gave me upon becoming skinwalker: designed for superb endurance, great strength, supreme dexterity, and being tall and scary.”

“So. You had another body before your current one?”

“Yes, that is the truth.”

I adjusted my bandana. “Was your original body anything like that of these werekindred?”

C burst out with a throaty laugh. “Me? Like these inferior werekindred? Not in the slightest!” He shook his head. “The one which I was born with, were you to have seen it, would have proven to be utterly unlike these werekindred. By birth, we called ourselves Maíthur, which… which I suppose would translate into something like ‘the Most Beautiful Children of God’. We bear no relation to such an inferior species as those of this where. No relation to such an inferior species. They’ve no more in common with me than they have with Satan.”

“Satan,” I said, my mind thinking about the word. “Who is Satan?”

“Should be spelt S-A-T-A-N,” he added, and I furrowed my brows in confusion.

Then I blinked. “Zah-tahn? That’s how her name is said, not ‘Sey-tin’. At least in my language.”

“I was going on how it’d likely be spelt in Equestrian,” he said with a shrug.

“Well, in any case… Uh… Well, I don’t know how she—Satan, the Queen of Graves—would look like.” It dimly occurred to be that if C’s knowledge of things stemmed from his consumption of tongues, that he should have logically had no knowledge of Satan, the Queen of Graves, for she was a Confessionist concept. Unless he got her name from consuming the tongue of the original Devil’s Backbone, that is. “Although I imagine it must be horrible to gaze upon.”

“Why say you so?”

I looked down an alley wherein there were more big, ominous crates. “You mean, ignoring now the fact that she’s supposed to be dead and has been for a few thousand years?” I asked, he said nothing. I sighed. “In the Book of Chains, it states that after Satan gathered up the Antiker, the Ancients, and lead them against Heaven in a great rebellion, the Lord defeated her. Thereafter, He was so enraged that He both utterly wiped out most all traces of the Ancient’s mighty civilizations and rent Satan’s soul and body asunder. The Queen of Graves survived, but was horribly… destroyed therefrom, in a sense.” I shook my head. “Point is, I don’t know what Satan looks like, so the comparison you made was null.”

C uttered a dark chuckle. “Well, with the way the world’s moving these days, something tells me that won’t be the case for long.”

“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” I said.

“Of course it is,” he almost snapped. “I’m bored so I’m trying to foreshadow all sorts of things that aren’t real, because what else am I to do when I’m bored?”

“Yhar, you make a good point,” I said with a nod. “Er, back on topic, how does one even become a skinwalker?”

C twisted his neck around to look at me, a smile on his face. “I was made to butcher my own mother and consume of her flesh. And then I made to slay and consume of the flesh of many innocents, from children to the old. This was both a part of the ritual and because such sins would force me out of my highborne caste. I was cast out of the kingsblood, a prisoner, a convict, and I fulfilled my end of the dark pact. So became I C the Skinwalker. All fed by Mother’s stories of the Eternal Champion.”

“And,” I said with hesitation, “you tell me now this story because you… you think I am the current incarnation of the Champion?”

C spun his head back around and guffawed with great fervous. “Oh God, no! No, no, and no!” He laughed some more. “Though they are not much like the Eternal Champions of legends—those such as J.C. and Roland—I believe I have found whom this when would call its Eternal Champions.”

“Plural?”

He nodded. “No legend says the Champion was to be more than one individual, but nor did any say it was impossible. Granted, they’re not much like those of my legends, but they’re close enough for government work. Literally. They are six figures, six mares, whom I intend to keep tabs on after this little excursion. The tongue of one whom I ate just before entering Calêrhos seemed to have a few words in her diction regarding distant speak of such ponies about whom nigh naught is known, and they interest me. Oz willing, you may even meet such mares.”

“It is a sad fact, then, there is is no such thing as fate,” I replied dryly.

“Think as you will; it matters not in the end, for reality will begin as it ended.”

“With the Allfather opening the Door?” I asked.

C snapped his attention to me. “‘How do you…?” He shook his head. “Yes, in a sense. That is one way in which the world may end. But, uh, I brought up the Champion for a reason. And that reason was because I’d just thought of a joke about that, but, well, since now I had to explain the background of the joke, it won’t be funny.”

“Oh,” I said. “That was anticlimactic.”

I found Cards sitting in a café nigh the town center. I waved at her, calling out her name till she snapped out of a thought-trance. She scurried over towards me, waving back.

“Hey, Gunslinger! What were you up to?”

Quickly, I summed up the nought I’d be doing and learning over the past hour or so. I helped her onto my horse, and she rode with her body uncomfortably pressed up against my back—we were both wanting to head nigher the town center, although I suspected she only said as much because I had mentioned going there.

When we reached the center, we both got off. Cards saw something and quickly ran off to help some old woman who proceeded to wail on Cards with her purse.

“So, Cards is as Cards does,” C muttered, never taking his eyes off the little woman as she curled into a ball on the ground, and the old woman walked off triumphantly. “Ever interesting girl, that Cards. Lots of things right about her, wouldn’t you say?”

“Too many things right with her,” I said with a dark chuckle. “She’s not the emotionally scarred Cards I kennt and helped create. This is a Cards, not the Cards I really care for.”

“Interesting,” C muttered, still staring at her. And though people were passing by, none seemed to notice the muttering horse but me. Which was good. Although what they’d do if they learned C could talk I knew not, but it likely wasn’t good. Just as there were reasons I kept secret my mad hacky sack skills. The world just wasn’t ready for some things.

“Ugh,” Cards said, brushing dirt off herself as she came back up to me. She found me sitting on a bench under the shade of a great oak. “That was old woman Jispeange. She’s a real monster, she is. Also a literal witch. Or she was, one. Always trying to befriend and help her, but she, uh, she keeps a purse full of pine cones and small rocks for a reason.” She frowned, taking a seat next to me. “Me.”

“Witch,” I groused. “When you hight her so, my first reaction is to draw steel and end her.”

“Why is…” She looked at the Iron Cross hanging around my neck, laying just upon Dust’s red bandana. “You’re a Confessionist, right?”

I nodded. “All who perform magic must die, so said the Prophet. Holy is technology, wicked is the spell. After all,” I went on, “you never hear of demons entering the world via technology; demons and monsters enter our world through magic and magic alone.”

“Then… if you believe all that, how come you’re not trying to kill her right now?”

With a shrug, I drew a circle in the dirt with a foot. “Because I am a hypocrite. I am too practical a Mann to deny that magic can have its uses. I have seen that magic will always do more harm than good, no matter what. But so too am I currently questing after a magical reward to heal my old wounds. Thereafter, well… we’ll see where hypocrisy leads me.”

I watched as C wandered off and proceeded to bug a man carrying a barrel. “I recall once in the Reichskriminalamt, Rosen and I had were sent out into the bogs and bayous of Lysjana, and we found a whole clan of magicfolk. They’d been burying their dead in such a way that they came back as guardians of their own crypts, and had been attacking local folker.”

“You speak with a vague Olympian accent,” she said, and I blinked.

“Sorry, I picked up some jargon when last I was there. I pick up on local accents a bit too easily at times.”

“Aye,” she said. “Most people ’round here just say ‘folken’ or ‘folks’, not ‘folker’.”

“Aye,” I replied, “I’ll keep what your folken say in mind. Anyways, Rosen and I fought the magicfolk, and when the dust cleared, the adults were dead but we had a bunch of children to deal with, all whereof had been weaned on magic.” I sighed. “Lucky for them, the state was kind enough to round them up and send them to be forcibly reeducated.”

“That’s terrible,” she muttered.

“Huh? Why would them being reeducated be terrible? It was a mercy, is what was. They probably ended up thanking the state for being so charitable. Had the kids been slightly older, the state might have demanded their execution based solely on the sins of their fathers. But the Reich is nothing if not kind and charitable, so we sent the kids off to be reeducated, and then gave them a future. It’s not like the state makes of habit of reeducating everybody; it only offers this courtesy to children poisoned by magical parents.”

“That place you worked for,” she began.

“Das Reichskriminalamt,” I offered. “Or ‘RKA’ for short.”

“Yeah, that. Seems like a terrible job.”

C galloped around the town center, jumping into a pond and knocking over a lady walking five dogs. The dogs scampered and one probably ate a pigeon. This pigeon was likely a loving father, and all his children soon starved to death, and his stupid pigeon wife drowned in a birdbath.

“Hmm,” I hummed. “I wonder if there exists some sort of way to draw the Backbone out, to make him fight us on our terms.” As I looked around, I noticed they’d taken down the crucified agents. That, and C was trotting up to us with a bag. He set the bag down before Cards and whinnied triumphantly.

“What the…?” Cards muttered, bending forwards and taking the bag. “It’s… full of muffins. Chocolate chip, it seems. Mmm! These are good.”

I glanced up at the heavens. The sun waded through the clouds, casting shadows that told me it was about eleven AM. “C,” I sighed. “I take my eye off you for second, and you come back with muffins. Whence came they?”

Cards shoved a muffin into my face. “Try. One!”

With a groan, I did. After all, healing potions wouldn’t work without some food. C lay down before the bench and panted for no good reason as Cards and I munched.

“So,” Cards eventually said. “Your arm and eye aren’t yours?”

I gave her a look. “No. Mine arm hails from a skinwalker; mine eye from a terror train.”

“Representing!” Jayne cheered.

“How does one ever come by such an eye? I think you said something about it before, but, well…”

I leaned back and sighed. Then I told her a very abbreviated story of Frosty and the Terror Train, neglecting to mention anything that made me look as wretched as I was. “And then the train said she'd follow my orders, and that's how I got a craftling eye. Basically speaking, of course.”

She shot me a puzzled look. “I don’t get it. If the train can make craftling body parts, and it swore to obey you, why didn’t you order it to make a voltblooded arm for your friend Frosty?”

That… Well, there wasn’t anything I could say to that. Somewhere in the back of my head—which was to say, my left eye—Jayne snickered and said in a singsong voice, “She’s smarter than you.”

I slammed a fist into the bench, roaring, “Shut up!”

Cards flinched back, holding her arms up to protect herself and shaking.

Jayne giggled, and I slugged myself in the eye, bellowing, “Ta gueule! Halt verdammt noch mal die Fresse!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Cards sputtered in a pleading tone. “I didn’t want to—”

“No, no, not you,” I said. “It’s the Jayne.” I poked my left pupil… thingy. “She’s laughing at me. The eye does what it wants sometimes, just as my right arm does.”

“Oh, I, uh. Sorry. Usually whenever somebody yells, it’s at me. ’Cause I suck. So, I thought you were angry with me.” Cards shook her head. “Still, for you… that just sounds… terrible. To think that you couldn’t control even parts of your own body. That’s incomprehensibly horrible.”

I narrowed my brows, but not at Cards. “C, what are you looking—stop leering creepily at Cards!”

“You talk to your horse a lot,” Cards added.

“Because he understands me,” I muttered. “And no, I won’t explain that.” I tapped a finger to my jaw as C got up and trotted off to wherever it was C trotted off to. “Hold up—idea time fun extravaganza. What if I helped set up defense for the town, then just, you know, left to meet the Backbone in his lair like last time?”

“Last time?” she asked with a frown.

“That’s it!” I slammed a fist into a palm. “You can trust me on this one, Cards. So worry not—I’ve done this before,” I said. “It has only ended in tragedy once. So, who’s up for round two?”

Then I looked up and saw a man in white robes, the front open enough to reveal his black shirt and blue jeans. He was standing a few yards before us, look on his face that just said “Huh. I wonder how many squirrels I can fit inside that.”

“It would seem we were fated to meet again,” the man said, his red eyes glistening in the late morrow.

Cards gasped so hard I was sure her throat had imploded. “D-Daddy?”

“Shut up, freak!” he hissed in a tone so festering with loathing and hatred that even I flinched. “I was speaking to the so-called Gunslinger.”

“Stronghold,” I said, standing up, hand to my hip. “So this is your form.”

He spat on the ground. “I had heard tell that you’d followed me. Though I must thank you; I am only here because of you.”

“Daddy?” Cards whimpered. “Daddy, is that you? Daddy, why are you being so mean? Why are you back? Why—”

“Be silent, bitch!” he growled. “I have a daughter and I love her very much, and you are not her.”

Before he could even turn his attention back to me, I drew my revolver and cocked it. “Be she from another where, she is still your progeny of a sort.”

Stronghold threw his head back and laughed. “Is she now?”

“Aye,” I said. “So, for all the hell you’ve made he go through, tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you in the gut right now?”

“Because,” he said—

“No!” Cards shouted, scrambled in front of me and my gun. “You can’t kill him! He—I—he!” she sputtered.

“Vacate thyself from before me,” I said to her in a low voice.

Stronghold laughed warmly. “She’s werekind, and werekindred ain’t real. How have you not gotten this yet? You and I? We’re real, of true flesh. So, go ahead. Shoot through her to hit me. I am her father, am I not? You’ve my permission to blow her lungs out and hit me through her.”

“Wh-wh-what?” Cards asked weakly, tears in her eyes as she turned around. “Daddy, what do you…?” She choked up.

“Yes,” he said. “I have a daughter whom I care deeply for, and you’re not her.” He looked at me. “It’s not even a person, just a thing, Gunslinger. I don’t see why you must stand in my way, but you’ve gone this far, so no doubt you’re here to do just that.”

“If you speak true,” I said in a calm voice, “if you do love Cards, why are you here?”

His expression didn’t change as he shrugged. “Because I need a Blackout, even if it’s not my Blackout. The Backbone promises he can make her real if I use Calêrhos to aid him, so I’ll get to take Blackout back with me in the form she had back home… before you murdered her!”

I didn’t have the heart to correct him, as hilarious as it would be to give him a personal vendetta against his daughter. “Translation: you are here because you are weak and selfish.”

“Maybe, but you’re still a murder!” he shouted. “All those poor denizens, even the children—butchered! All at the end of your blade!”

As much as I wanted to, I refused to ask how he know that. Mayhap he’d seen me. How was I to know? “And so you come to another where to do thereunto harm, Stronghold?”

“No,” he said. “It’s like when you kick a dog; it can’t feel pain; you’re not harming anything. And this is the same with these werekindred.” He smiled. “Love drives me, Gunslinger. What noble cause do you call yours for what you’re doing?”

“I am the knight here, you the enemy. Ich bin der Ritter und Ihr der Feind. I am here because those who would do evil in any land are mine enemies. As Elkington counted the Backbone his enemy foremost, count I thee today mine enemy likewise. I come to return thee to whence thou hailedst with me, and to prevent unto the innocent harm. My heart may be corrupt but it beats true. Canst thou the same say?”

He blinked. “The hell kinda needlessly archaic speech was that?”

I cleared my throat. “Sorry. I get like that when I feel dramatic or emotional. Not the girly, touchy-feely emotional, but in the angry sort of ways. Or nervous. Really, I just like the way archaic speech sounds.” I looked at Cards, her body still before me and her father. “Oh, yeah. I forgot. You’re not looking at me.” I stepped to the right. “Problem solved.” And I aimed at Stronghold.

“I came here to see my beloved once before we sacrificed the town to the Backbone, but I suppose this is the end of this little excursion.” He gave me a halfhearted wave. “Ciao.”

“Indeed, you will make for good dog chow—wait a minute!” I stamped a foot. “This is an astral projection, isn’t it? And shooting you will make the bullet go through you and probably hit Blossom or some other small child, right?”

“Probably,” he said. “Or—because teleport!” He snapped his fingers and vanished in a cloud of frogs. Literally. The ground was now covered in very confused frogs. They hopped around and ribbited, and one of them died then and there of frog ass cancer. Or so I presumed.

Cards stumbled backwards and onto the bench, a baffled look on her face mixed with tears. She stepped on a frog as she fell, and I was about to yell at her for not caring about the lives of innocents frogs when I remembered that I didn’t care.

“The Backbone is going to attack soon, I feel,” I replied, walking around and herding the frogs into a pile. It was surprisingly easy. “We have little time to prepare.”

Tears in her eyes and rolling down her face, Cards looked up at me. “‘She’s werekind, and werekindred ain’t real.’ What did Daddy mean? Why… why… I am so confused.”

I looked around to see the almost fifty people around the town center who’d stopped by to watch. With a wave, I tried to convince them to leave. Then I took a seat by Cards, watching all my herded frogs escape into the wild.

“Cards,” I said, “neither that man nor I are werekind.”

She looked at me, squinting as if she needed glasses. Or had just been hit in the face with a bat. “What?”

I sighed. “Swear unto me that you will take everything I say here as gospel, as fact without ulterior motive, and acknowledge that no matter how crazy it will sounds, it is the honest-to-the-Allfather truth.”

She performed a series of motions, saying alongside them, “Aye, cross my heart… hope to fly… stick a cupcake in my e—oww!” She rubbed her jabbed eye. “Owie, owie, owie. Gunslinger, why does everything hurt? My heart aches, my stomach hurts, and now my eye hurts.”

Cards twitched, then put her head in her hands and just sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed.

Well, guess who wasn’t dealing with any more angst? This guy! I’d been so brooding and everything that I had no patience for other people trying to brood. Only I got to be edgy and angsty. So, I figured I’d just wait out the angst storm by leaning side to side and trying not to dance to this catchy dance beat I suddenly had stuck in my head.

C the Horse walked over, have us a confused look, then horsily shrugged and went about eating all the frogs alive.

“I… I just don’t know what to do,” Cards sobbed out.

“Well, don’t look at me,” C said casually. Cards bolted her head up and looked at him. “I refuse to repeat myself.”

And that how how Cards passed out, landing face-first in the dirt. She twitched, rolling herself over, a bit of foam coming out of her mouth.

“What’d you do to her?” C asked me, shaking his tail around for no good reason.

“Eh,” I said with a shrug. “I told her that I was pregnant, and that she was the father, and I wasn’t going to let her have custody.” I sighed. “See what I mean? This Cards isn’t used to dealing with my bullshit; she loses it too easy.”
Sighing again, I looked down at the girl. “We should probably take her home.”

“Hers or ours?” he asked. “Because this Cards looks like she’d make a great rug.”

“While I agree, I think she should take her to her home.” I stood up. “Okay, help me out here, mate.”