(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 55 minutes)

Tame the Cock

The Wicky Sticket heard many bad ideas over the course of those two days, concentrated in the empty ballast tank where the challengers made camp, guarded at most hours by some of the collaborating eggties.

Suggestions swirled about the tiny table quickly cobbled together from scrap wood. The representatives of the Death-or-Glory gang suggested they kill Zamshy by dropping directly onto him knives in hand, hoping that one went deep enough into the neck. There wasn’t much confidence in the idea, as they recalled dragon slaying being a rather rare skill, and Zamshy was at least half dragon. His serpentine flailing could buck them all off before they’d found a good spot to stab. Too many variables, the Wayfarer and Vesperos agreed.

The Wayfarer suggested they use grit, either gathered from the dry dock or borrowed from Ludmenti, dropped during their fly-over as if dusting crops in order to blind Zamshy. Then, when his eyes were closed, they could appeal to the concertgoers to all attack him together. Not enough time, Tiddalik and Vesperos agreed.

“I know what to do,” Tiddalik stated, nodding along with his own strategy already. The others leaned in. “We flood the place.” They leaned out.

“And then what ya sloppy fool!?” Buffy asked.

“He drowns. A cockatrice does not have gills.” Tiddalik tapped what he often considered a genius mind.

“Nor do most of the innocent people going to that concert,” agreed the others and Vesperos. They all noticed the diminutive god was doing a lot of agreeing, and just as much nay-saying; their converging stares communicated that perhaps he should offer a plan. Their second night in the boat was all but over, and their dinner of tinned fish that might have been tinned mosquito larvae was not sitting comfortably in their guts. The aged lump of smooth Sardinian cheese from the Wayfarer’s bindle helped, but only made matters worse when it came to the odor-intensifying quality of the sealed ballast tank, which made smells echo just like the challengers’ muttering.

Vesperos did have an idea, and he had waited until the last possible moment to draw it from his quiver. With Psyche gone his days of love were long over. What had he to offer the small he was forced to join by his own reduction in relevance? Only heartbreak. Every couple he created, every argument he settled with stinging reminders of past affection, could be catastrophically undone by the much more powerful god of Little Wars. Conscription would tear them apart, and one might have to watch from the sidelines as the other was marched into a specific square, an invisible cage, where they would be shot, or dismembered, or eviscerated, or squashed, or cursed to an even more pathetic form.

Now he would have to admit that creating love took a lot out of him, and he wasn’t sure how much more he could generate before fading out of existence entirely. Little Wars had only increased the irrelevance of old pantheons, as now the people themselves could be the gods of the toy armies they wound up and marched into battle. First the revolutions of industry, and now H.G. Wells’s game for the slow killing blow that was still terrifyingly fast to those who had lived eons.

With a sigh, Vesperos reached over his shoulder. Then he showed his fellow challengers exactly how much love took out of him. One of his two remaining arrows was planted by its heart-shaped head in the wood of the scrappy table, deep enough to be held upright. This time the others leaned in without needing to hear any details.

Crystalline facets enclosed the venom reservoir, droplet of purplest obsession within, bubbles waltzing, fusing, splitting, failing to resist each other, and returning to the dance: pure liquid love. It was the drug of choice for mortals, their second blood, while gods sampled it on the tip of their tongue before ordering the musicians to play and engaging in revelry.

The other challengers knew what it was, but felt its nature all the more.

“We’d deemed it rude to ask,” the Wayfarer said, paw running down his sanded walking stick as the disturbed venom made him recall an old caress, “but this must mean you can still do it Vesperos. You can still make anyone fall in love with a single shot?”

“Two shots, now that my strength is reduced,” the bumblebee explained, his pink-tinged collar fluff oddly lifeless considering the praise and wonder inherent in his companions’ voices. “Love without a target is benevolence, altruism. That has no vice in it, and cannot be sustained. Someone struck with one of these arrows will be in a brief trance of stunned benevolence. While it lasts another living thing must be poisoned in the same way, and within shot of the first target’s senses. Then an eternal connection of love is formed.”

“It’s mind control, isn’t it?” Buffy posed. “Not that I don’t think it warranted in this particular.”

“I don’t see it that way, my dear toad.” The bee’s compound eyes lit up with the colors of his venom, hiding eyelids fully retracted. In his expression there could be a seen a nebula of love’s nuance, of all other emotions burning out in its cloying invigorating smother. Their color was a statement that life had required more than sex to truly flourish and differentiate; it had needed love and its fluctuating chromatic fringe. “My potion unlocks a specific capacity within all living things. Hate may feel eternal, but only because it can last a typical mortal life. Eventually it will die, and love will remain. Left alone with your enemy long enough, all their flaws will vanish, and they will become your greatest companion. These two shots can trap any two together, warp their perception of time’s passage until they become each other’s reliant worlds.”

“So if we hit the big chicken and his Brass nemesis with these they’ll fall in love with each other?” Tiddalik experimentally summarized. That sounded far more complicated than drowning both of them in a barrel.

“Yes,” the god confirmed. “That love will be so consuming that both parties will immediately lose interest in all their other affairs, for some time. Zamshy will not have the focus to intentionally petrify anyone else, and Brass will have no desire to retaliate. It is also my hope that, with hate temporarily banished from his heart, all the cockerel’s statues in Minimil will be undone.

No one will have to perish… but this poisoning will be against their wills. Their fate will be free range imprisonment.”

“Better than they deserve,” Tabitha asserted. Her frog eyes bulged at the arrow, possessive. Many who examined them wanted ownership, mastery, seeing them as tools with which they could finally control their own romantic prospects. Vesperos quickly snatched it out of the wood and replaced it in his quiver. Cooling technical details would stifle any obsessions.

“It is almost as bad a plan as any other,” he warned his fellow challengers. “I used to be strong enough to affect anything with a will, but now I am limited to those with literal heart organs. I believe both man and cockatrice have them. We cannot miss either shot, and they must puncture and drain into both targets within five minutes. Then one must see a bare part of the other.”

“Can’t we split them up into smaller doses?” the Wayfarer asked. “Their love only needs to be a dalliance that gets them out of Minimil’s doors. It’s fine if it fades once they’re locked out.”

“I’m afraid not. Without knowing we must assume the most likely character of their hearts. Brass probably prefers human women, and Zamshy eggty women. The potion must alter not only their preference for sex, but species as well. We must devote all of it to that cause.

These two arrows are my entire supply; my body produces it very slowly now. Perhaps there is one more dose in my sting… but if I use it, just as an ordinary bee does, it will be ripped free along with much of my internal anatomy… and I will die a common insect’s death.”

“No you won’t,” Tiddalik insisted. The others turned to see the source of his certainty, found another kind of love in his froggy basin-eyes. “We won’t allow it. Besides, after the last few days we got all our missing out of the way. The practice shots are done. Now the pair of bullseyes.”

The Wayfarer stood, spun his stick masterfully, showing them all a few weapon techniques from the many lands he’d coasted, before stopping it suddenly, horizontally, long enough for all of them to lay paw and claw on. Together, united, they did.

“To Minimil,” the rat dedicated and declared, a tenacious growl rarely brought forth from his nomad’s tranquility vibrating his whiskers, “and for kind Mrs. Toad. And to the bullseyes brimming with love.”

“Huzzah! Tomorrow we tame that obscene cock!”

…

The entire barn was hushed the night of the concert, in the hope they might be able to hear the melodies of Fadfid Paganinny ride the air of anticipation. Tickets had been absurdly expensive, the populace’s ire defused by many of the furthest seats being given out in a lottery, one tedious piece of wisdom Hestia had picked up long long ago.

Those abuzz were those ticket holders stood outside, in their fanciest suits, robes, and gowns, waiting impatiently to file in and take their seats. Their nervous fingers ripped and chewed at the edges of their programs like the buck teeth of condemned mice at their last meals.

“We’re going to have an awful view, I just know-“

“It says here that Ms. Paganinny’s violin was crafted from the shavings of a fairy realm sapling! Its dimensions calculated by none other than the famed Drosselmeyer, tinkerer to scheming fairies and Saint Nicholas alike. Its exact size grants it an entirely unique character of sound. Did you hear me, Wimblydon? Any smaller and the granularity of air flow would ruin every note! It truly is the world’s smallest violin, now and forever, among violins that sound any good that is.”

“Hopefully we can hear it from our awful view,” her husband grumbled. The Lilliputian couple was actually in their wedding attire, only slightly modified, as the outfits also counted as their uniforms in employment. Armfuls of Lilliputians were regularly carted off to England, going back to Gulliver, with British socialites not particularly caring that the miniature wonders weren’t actually of close relation to the fairies whose histories they’d been raised adjacent to.

It was just good social management to have a few of the little people at any party to indicate your status, be they flea circus performers or living decorations posing atop wedding cakes, which was the profession of Wimblydon and Marrymore Crembascone whenever they were not stuck waiting in line outside a tall box full of boots.

“Our ears don’t need a view,” she scolded him, smacking his sleeve lightly with her program.

“Couldn’t hurt. At least Mr. Brass won’t have a good look at it either.” The line shuffled forward exactly one step. How was an enclosed city so damn cold? the man wondered, embracing himself and rubbing his shoulders. It seemed barns were drafty no matter what.

Enticing as the instrument was, he never would’ve chosen to leave the ratcatcher’s headquarters at Ukridge. Life at the coop was nonstop luxury for those of the literally-ornamental class, barring outings like these where they traveled as Brass’s attaches. Minimil was less of a barn and more of a dump in his eyes, especially considering the venue.

Normally the Bootyard was simple storage for the footwear of one Formaldeheidi Dämonen: the witch who handled Minimil’s external meetings and affairs on the human scale. She was out, gone without trace or notice, the moment Hestia had been turned to stone hundreds of times over at just as many sizes. Wimblydon also didn’t like the look on the goddess’s biggest face when he happened to glance up: very judgmental.

Since the witch wouldn’t be needing her upturned boots, all the remaining shoes had been used as foundations to build tiered rows of seating ringing a circular stage. A widening wooden frame and a shallow basket had been added to the largest boot’s opening and centered between the seats, providing a comfortable nest for their host, whom they were warned would only arrive after everyone had taken their seats.

Opposite the cockatrice’s nest, but positioned lower against the dirt, was a square door to the outside world. Ratcatcher Brass was expected to use that as his only access to the concert, hardly large enough for a cat to squeeze through. The man would have to lie down the entire time, staring at the stars as if he was a work-clothes bumpkin who could afford no better entertainment.

The line moved another step, and finally this one had put them inside the Bootyard. The draft died down. A surprisingly polite, more and more polite every time he was tipped, shoulder devil handed the Crembascones a pair of flimsy yellow visors, which they didn’t want to take at first, given they appeared to be carved from human toenail. It was that or join the former ruler as a statue however, so they relented and moved on.

“Here we are!” Marrymore said once they reached their seats in one of the front rows. She lifted her dress to avoid stepping on it as she settled in. Wimblydon plopped down next to her, and then they engaged in several minutes of conversation that would have been droll to absolutely anyone else. Their ability to need no other company was the entire basis of their matrimony, so they succeeded in learning nothing more about Minimil or its citizens until the ominous sounds that heralded the concert’s open.

They came with the death of everyone’s conversations, even the Crembascones’, which was of a strain immune to most social cues and sprayed pesticides. There was such an overpowering quality to the sound of the seats creaking under the hatched eggty’s weight, like the evil twin of what they hoped to hear out of Paganinny mere moments from now.

The cockatrice was heard scratching over the outer walls, nestling down in his basket, ruffling his leather wings, clicking his toothy beak, and clearing his crocodile-turkey throat. Eggty escorts rolled into position around him on various levels, painted with arrows to remind the audience where to look: away.

Looking away meant seeing the square door past the empty stage. Moments after Zamshy was cozy the eye of Rea Brass appeared in the hole, opened wider in momentary panic when it spied the purple tips of cockatrice claws. His head tilted, eye replaced by sideways mouth and the teeth of the sort of person who used to be called the ratcatcher. Luckily when he spoke his breath was largely suppressed by the scent of shoe leather wafting up from under the seats.

“Greetings Minimil! If you don’t know me please allow me to introduce myself: I am Mr. Rea Brass, ratcatcher of Axminster for his majesty. Let me just say it is an honor to be invited to your renowned city, and for this concert no less!”

He paused to allow his host to speak, and so did everyone else who hadn’t already. Essentially no one who was not encased in eggshell had heard their new ruler’s voice; many had assumed he was only capable of cocking things up, then adoodling them, and then dooing at the end. Remember, they all warned themselves in lightning strikes of fear, do not turn and look, or your neck will be forever stiff.

“Welcome Mr. Brass,” Zamshy said tepidly after a deep gravy-boat breath. “The reputation of Ukridge Farms precedes you. Do lend us your most attentive ear during your stay.”

“Of course, of course,” the sideways mouth told the entire Bootyard, one higher tooth wearing a parsley corsage. “And I do hope you’ll lend your ear afterwards, as we have put together some fantastic proposals for our respective toy chests in the light of your ascension that I’m very proud-“

“Yes, but first! For the first time in Zamshy Lamshy’s Minimil! Everyone please, set your bickering, grumbling, and moaning aside, so you can best hear Fadfid Paganinny and the world’s smallest violin!”

Out from an oilcan dressing room strode a compact Lilliputian woman with dark slicked-back hair in a stormy blue smoking jacket with pencil-silver trim. In one hand she carried a case, which could only contain one thing; it was too small for anything else that shape. Silently she made her way up to the stage and set it down, gently, on the one stand available.

Everyone got their first good look at her face, prominent of nose, weak of chin, prim of lip, like it had been stretched toward her instrument every time she’d so much as plucked a string. Clasps clicked open. Hundreds leaned, even Wimblydon despite the lousy view. They were on pins and needles, pin drops being the only acceptable accompanying percussion, but the master of the music never accepted so much as a duet. When she played it felt like she played for you, and you alone, and the privilege never felt deserved.

“After…” Wimblydon whispered, “After this we’ll have to go back to drunken fiddles at weddings. I don’t know if I can stand another-“

“She’s got it! She’s got the world’s smallest violin!” his wife gasped, grabbing at his arm, shaking him back and forth. Paganinny lifted it out of the case in one fluid motion, started walking a circle about the stage, showing off the instrument upright for all to witness. Its lacquered wood was blue, the calm ocean underneath strings white as sunlight. Silver tuning pegs were barely larger than the sparkle in her eye, and far smaller than that in Brass’s backdrop eye, the pupil widening in pure amazement, which seemed to make the violin shrink even more to most of the Minimil onlookers.

Out came the bow, its construction more unusual still, surely utilizing a rare bird feather as its base. Drosselmeyer had outdone himself; this was superior to the elves’ factories at the North Pole and the clockwork cuckoo castles of the alps. Fadfid expertly turned the instrument on its side, placed it upon her shoulder and prepared to create the first melodies of the evening.

Brass’s eye disappeared in a streak of green, replaced with the shadowy depths of his ear, the hair trimmed and the wax removed for this very special occasion. As soon as Zamshy saw into the man he scratched at the bottom of his nest, a scraping sound heard only within the boot below: an order obeyed.

Now that Brass’s eye was gone, and would stay gone as long as the world’s smallest violin was everything promised, which it absolutely and rapturously was, there were none in position to see the toe of the boot, across from the square door, crinkle open like the mouth of a yawning turtle.

The violinist might have seen, but that was accounted for, as everyone knew, cockatrice included, she famously had her eyes closed during the entirety of her performances, yet another reason Zamshy felt safe to attend in person. Being a former eggty, he also knew why. Blindness enhanced the musical experience, and if he had a moment with her he would suggest she try submerging herself in a viscous medium for optimal resonance results.

In the shadows of the open boot Zamshy’s weapon was readied, its barrel aimed squarely at the square, into the very mind of Rea Brass. Yet it did not interrupt the quiet in the moments before Fadfid’s littlest bow sang across the littlest violin strings.

To do so would’ve been the most grievous error. The entire city had awaited the musician’s visit, and even a petrifying monster couldn’t put his eyes on every member of the violent mob that would form if she was denied the chance to enlighten them all with her play. So the cockatrice waited; a few songs would not do his revenge any harm at this point.

Finally, like the waters of heaven gushing down to the plains of the wretched Earth, in a deluge Tiddalik could never hope to match, music was created. Small, yes, the smallest, but not quiet. The Bootyard was filled with its vibration and they all instantly understood that, actually, air was only the best medium for sounds of this frequency. All symphonies had been written in the wrong part of the spectrum, and all their lives they’d been denied the superior music of the small.

Every eye that had a tear duct went into production, fueled by dredged sorrows turned to joy as they reached the light. No secrets were kept, they felt, for the song of the smallest violin in the world revealed to them the truth. Paganinny herself was not immune to it, only accustomed enough to continue playing, and to dance about the stage, back and forth, ensuring her audience on all sides were as close as they could get.

The composer too was small, working mostly with crickets and songbirds; the primary piece he wrote for Paganinny had an accompanying narrative of long separated lovers finally reunited. In a sense, that was what the party currently perched atop a nearby abandoned ant outpost planned to do.

They too waited, under cover of snuffed lights that weren’t their doing, all to put more focus on the Bootyard, for the violinist to finish at least her first piece. It would be impossible to meet their challenge if the public joined the side of Zamshy over a premature interruption.

“I’ve not heard such a siren song on any coast,” the Wayfarer told the very air, though his companions did hear and agree. For a moment they all forgot their plan, and why they stood on a dilapidated cold mound of dirt. Years ago divots had been built into most of the flat roofs of Minimil, providing a series of horizontal ladders ideal for myrmidons to traverse, and as such they no longer needed that particular underground exit. Its proximity to the strong scent of the Bootyard, which at other times was more foot than leather, and the constant shadow of the hayloft, kept it mostly devoid of life.

Dulled by the music, the challengers might have fallen into disrepair themselves, become nothing but the largest dirt clods present, if the moment was not cut short by the arrival of Lord Ludmenti’s promised assistance: a dapper bat with a silver collar and the levitating tassel of a carpet. It was the winged mammal that spoke for both.

“Ve are at your service,” he offered, “as long as ve are just dropping you off.”

“Only two of you?” Tabitha asked. “Can you carry our bikes?” With a sideways nod the bat indicated that the tassel had the strength to do so.

“In that case I’m up first,” the Wayfarer explained, stepping forth, so sure-footed that he didn’t dislodge any of the hill’s loose grains. The coasting rat had been judged the stealthiest of the bunch, adept at least at slipping out of a party and never being seen again by many people who wanted to say goodbye and wish him well and ask where he’d gotten that cheese or those olives, so it would fall to him to infiltrate the Bootyard, ascertain Zamshy’s method of revenge, and give the lay of the land for the others.

All of this information could be relayed via Vesperos’s divine antennae, which he tested moments after the bat took the Wayfarer’s shoulders in his claws and carried him away. They were off to a good start, as the connection was strong, likely aided by the piece of the bumblebee that the rat carried with him: one of their two love arrows. Once the rat knew how the cockatrice planned to strike Mr. Brass, logic dictated he would then be in the best position to alter the method of contact so it included their home-brewed love potion.

The flight was short, more truncated than bat or rat expected, as there was no silent circling needed to spy the best point of entry. Just behind Zamshy Lamshy there was a leathery pocket, part of the shoe stretched out of form by the basket-seat pressed into it; judging by the shadows it was a slide down into the shaft of the boot.

The Wayfarer pointed it out with his walking stick, which the bat understood as instruction to swoop low and drop him off inside. A thousand times the stowaway, the rat was no stranger to expertly slipping into a crevice, but just as with the trapdoor in Second Toad Hall, there was hardly an entry in all the world that didn’t creak or wobble, especially when entered at high speed.

On release the Wayfarer slipped behind the whole crowd, behind the rooster-wyrm, and down the shoe-chute. The footwear adjusted to his weight briefly, which was felt by Zamshy. He had no particular care for his citizens, Minimil would be nothing more than the premiere coop in a few months once the Brass business was finished and Aunt Elizabeth’s name was the broad side of the barn, but had been warned by his shelled associates that every statue was a permanent reminder of his so-far rocky rule, and he should make as few of them as possible.

Thus he had practiced turning his head slowly in response to various sounds and stimuli, barring those of imminent danger of course. That would give any of his citizens in the path time to move. If his neck had not arced so slowly he would have seen the tips of the Wayfarer’s ears slipping behind and ultimately under his feet, into the singular foot belonging to the witch Formaldeheidi.

As it happened the cock was disinterested in the hole, dismissing the slight adjustment felt as the result of a light gust.

When the Wayfarer landed in the fairer way of the soft dim sole everything was muffled. The spirited song of the smallest violin was yet alluring, leading him to the toe more so than the light. Curious though, that there was any light at all. A hole in the toe? As he crept forward the answer assembled itself piece by piece.

Jacks, one at each end of the toe, held it open, providing a view of both the stage and the hair-lined burrow that was Brass’s listening ear. Centered between the jacks was a raised platform, and on it was mounted a rather large, by Minimil standards, cannon. The Wayfarer recoiled, whiskers bending. Was Zamshy’s final revenge as blunt as a musket ball to the brain? It seemed rather barbaric in the face of the theatrical ruse of the invitation. Weirder still, the weapon was unmanned. Was the strike not imminent? There wasn’t even the sooty smell of a test fuse.

With little time to question, the Wayfarer crawled up onto the cannon’s platform and examined it, hoping he could remove the ammunition and replace it with the arrow; if successful it would both save the ratcatcher’s life and open the gateway of love, through which his fellow challengers would charge valiantly into battle.

He did what was generally considered unwise, sticking his head down the dark barrel, and was immediately struck, luckily not by a cannonball, but by an emerging man who, admittedly, had several obvious cannonball characteristics. Given these features, it was highly unlikely he was a Lilliputian, as the distorted shrunken image of man, often adorned with curious individual body parts and abilities, was usually a homunculus.

“Move!” the cannonball-ish man spat, emerging only enough to grip the edge of the barrel with all his fingers. “You’re in my shot.” The Wayfarer could now clearly see the polish on his iron skullcap, the soot in his pores and follicles, and a face that had been dragged by propulsion a thousand times. Whoever he was, he was both cannoneer and ammunition, who was to both do his duty and abandon his post with the same action.

“Begging your pardon,” the Wayfarer said, opening various doors in his mind in search of what to say next, even the broom closets. “You wouldn’t be ordered to kill that man on the other end of the stage would you?”

“Eventually,” the homunculus answered, proud and pleased.

“Isn’t a cannon meant to be a quick way to dispatch someone? You can call me the Wayfarer by the way.” The rat extended his paw. Stuck in a tube, and very unwilling to unstick himself in any way that wouldn’t obliterate the rodent’s upper half, the homunculus could only take it and shake, introducing himself, rather on the nose instead of the ear he targeted, as Manonball Evans.

“The cock ordered some torture,” Evans reported. In Minimil he worked as a guard, not a soldier, not a mercenary, under both the regimes of the Shoulders of Government and Hestia’s hearth-throne. Now, seeing as he’d been picked up by pushy eggties, who couldn’t be pushed back unless you wanted to be accused of assault and had the cracks presented as irrefutable evidence, it seemed he was employed once more. This boss at least put him in a cannon, where he was most comfortable.

Rather than move out of the way, the rat turned and looked at the ear, then came back to the conversation that wasn’t supposed to be happening, doubly so, since it was ruining the concert for the homunculus. He’d been told he could choose when to strike, as long as it was before the concert’s planned end time. That too was a calculated move, given that if any political forces objected to the strike happening so early they could post their complaint to Evans, who would be sloshing around in the ratcatcher’s head, perhaps back in England by then.

“How does this torture work?” the Wayfarer asked, trying to shut out the allure of the melody without using his paws to ball up his ears.

“I go in the side door,” Evans said, laying it out with a chop of one hand, “and I cause a ruckus. Smash things up. His homunculi won’t know what hit him or them.” The rat’s bewilderment seemed to be the reason he wasn’t moving out of the way, prompting a hearty grunting sigh from the not-quite-human cannonball. “You need speed to break in and become a faculty again, just like you need speed to come out and get a body.”

“Ahh yes, the theory of head trauma homunculus-crafting. I had no idea it worked in reverse,” the Wayfarer said, nodding, but not so emphatically as to grant a launch window.

“It takes an expert, but it works. It’s a bit like jumping out of a lake. Technically possible, even though it doesn’t really look it.”

“You’ve been told to meddle with his very thoughts until he goes mad I imagine.”

“Yes sir, then I kill him.”

“Won’t that kill you if you’re but a part of him?”

“I’ll probably get out, but if not, no matter. The fella I was originally part of was a circus performer, and before he sneezed me out in our worst head cold ever he had a death wish.”

“And that death wish is you, interesting. Most interesting.”

“It’s not going to be interesting at all if it doesn’t happen,” he snapped. “You’re in my way, and I wanted to hear the music.”

“Just one more moment of your time please.” The rat brought out the arrow, which glowed pink in the dark toe, turning shadows into nuzzling lovers. Evans had loved before, and lost, so to him the heart-shaped jewel tipping it was almost as beautiful as Paganinny’s passionate play. “I was wondering if you could deliver this to Mr. Brass’s soul for me.”

“What is it?”

“Can you not see?”

“It’s love.”

“Quite right. I’m terribly in love with one part of that man.” The Wayfarer read between the growing lines of Manonball’s forlorn expression. “You know how it is, so I’m sure I can trust you with this. It’s a sort of love letter, interpreted in jewel by a fairy friend of mine, but the sentiment is mine alone, I assure you. Could you deliver it to them for me, before your havoc sets in?

And,” the rat said, faking a quiver in his throat, choking back the false tears he sometimes used with lady rats who wanted to know when he would be coasting by that way again, “if you could perhaps bring her with you when you emerge, so that we might be… reunited.”

“Cock won’t mind a little love shooting out at the very end,” Evans sniffled, smearing smithereens under his genuine tears. “What’s her job in there friend? I’ll blast my way right to her.”

“She is Brass’s naivete,” the Wayfarer couldn’t resist adding, the most difficult part of his performance coming when he suppressed the wince of the bumblebee’s scratch on his mind, trying to chastise him for risking the ruse. “She is so sweet, and in need of a guardian.”

“And he’s on his way!” He took the arrow from the rat and tucked it into his shirt, which the previous holder did not object to, figuring the bee would buzz in his mind if such a plan was not an adequate delivery mechanism for the potion. “Clear the path Mr. Wayfarer. True love always flies straight!” Finally the rat stepped aside, quickly searching for a way to light the fuse, but Manonball had that capacity wrapped up in his body all the time, another manifestation of concept-become-physical.

Red fire ignited on the homunculus’s feet, and when he tensed them an explosive energy was unleashed, concentrated by the black barrel of the cannon until Evans was fired at full force, and at full volume too.

Several parties had chosen to wait to act during the concert, in reverence and prudence regarding Miss Paganinny’s instrument, but in so doing everything came to an arrow head at the worst possible second.

Fadfid swung the world’s smallest violin about with her spin, toward center stage, and then froze when she heard the cannon fire. Evans could not alter his trajectory with such a short flight path, so he had to take it straight on, obliterating the violin instantaneously, all its strings snapping with the very sound of the heartbreaking chaos that spawned evil in the early universe. Its wooden flakes, too insubstantial to be called chunks, rained down in a trail that followed Evans into the ear canal of Ratcatcher Brass.

The cock rose. Stood on long legs, wobbling in the loose mouth of the boot, he searched for what had gone wrong, hatred already bubbling in his most acidic gut. That homunculus they hired should have known better than to damage the violin, regardless of how much music it had just provided. How could he savor Brass’s raving lunacy if his kingdom furiously roiled until they’d boiled a whole chicken!?

That crowd also wasn’t shirking in their response. The throngs in their finery were out of their seats before the final piece of the violin hit the unworthy dirt floor of the Bootyard, panicking, screaming, stomping, some so lost in their anguish that they forgot they couldn’t look up, even with the reminder of their visors. When they saw the fully invigorated cockatrice, bellowing with his dragon’s crow, spreading the pinions and the wrinkled membranes of his purple wings wide, they became monuments to their own disruption. Divine Hestia had become gorgeous marble, but these lowly sorts became cheap limestone.

Peppering itself with pebbles only riled the mob further, and the scene was about to dissolve into pure chaos, but the challengers had chosen a more opportune moment to act than the fired homunculus. As soon as Manonball had assented to carry the arrow, Vesperos had ordered the rest to move out.

Once the cannon fired Brass would quickly enter the trance, and they would have but five minutes to walk Zamshy Lamshy down that same aisle and give him away to his ratcatcher groom. The bat had returned after dropping off the Wayfarer, next taking with him Tiddalik. Vesperos would use his own wings, stalling them over the Bootyard fence so their bumbling wouldn’t alert anyone, unnecessary as that was after the mob had been raised.

This left the mute carpet tassel, which capably lifted both the bulky toads and their even bulkier motorbikes, each of its many fronds snaking underneath and finding the perfect place to cradle the weight.

Their aerial convoy crossed the short distance swiftly, and dropped them off in the order they’d carefully planned, well above Zamshy’s squawking head, which currently failed to frighten his guests into submissive cowering.

First and second to fall were the Die-hard toads astride their vehicles, engines already puttering. Tabitha took aim with her handlebars, though of course it had been the flying carpet tassel’s precise release that allowed her to strike where she wanted. The polished bottle caps of her front wheel, and the whole weight of the bike and its rider, smashed onto the cock’s head, knocking him slightly silly against the wooden benches of some lower seating. The beast bit his forked tongue, cutting off his last squawk, turning it into a gurgling choke.

Tabitha couldn’t keep control of her bike after such a fall, so she threw it out in front of her while keeping hold of the handlebars, allowing her to hop down the benches on her own toad legs, then force herself back atop the bike once it landed on the dirt. Now the engine could really rip. Steam billowed out from the tailpipe as she streaked her way around the stage, drawing attention away from the stunned Zamshy…

Who was about to be stunned a second time, by a second bike, and an even larger toad. Buffy had an easier time landing on a cranium that was already concussed, and pulled the same leap-launching trick to get settled on both her wheels. Together the pair ripped around the Bootyard dirt, raising clouds that would help obscure Zamshy’s gaze. At the same time they would begin to menace and corral the audience toward the exits, as only an emptied arena would be safe enough for Tiddalik to inundate with powerful water surges.

Made of mythically tough stuff, no longer a helpless fragile egg, the cockatrice recovered from the blows quickly. While trapped and blind in his shelled infirmity, his dear first mother Aunt Elizabeth had perished. Now all he had to protect was his second mother, Mrs. Toad, and the other sibling she had hatched, his vengeance. If he had to fight for it himself, with beak and claw, all the better, all the more proof that he had burst out to master the cruel world.

His opponents landed on either side of him, tiny among the tiny and just as harmless. One harsh glare should freeze them in their foolery forever, so the cockatrice narrowed his eyes, first upon the pinkish bumblebee bearing a bow. The little insect didn’t lose his warm luster; it almost grew, inflamed by righteous anger.

Actually bothering to observe now, Zamshy saw this creature had superfluous, until just then, eyelids, and they were shut tight to prevent petrification. Pure idiocy it seemed, as the best it could do was delay destruction by seconds, when the gorgon’s beam would be swapped out for a hammering tail or rending hooked talons.

Zamshy decided on the tail, but the diagonal strike broke nothing but wood as it made contact with the seating, Vesperos having jumped aside, buzzing as he drifted to a new position, bow and single arrow locked onto his foe. So, even with eyes closed, the invader could sense him. It didn’t matter how, not to the bird’s imminent rampage, but the degenerate god was using his supernatural attunement, detecting only the love around him.

The gamble had rolled in his favor. Zamshy Lamshy was a great contrast to most of the surrounding beings. Vesperos saw everyone else as pink blurs, like a meadow’s worth of blossoms blown onto the surface of a coursing river. As they fled down their own currents one black boulder parted them, shaped like a cock.

The villain would never know it, but he was all but devoid of love. What of it he had was naught but twisted separation, an egg pulled from under its mother’s warmth. In his heart made monstrous he harbored mostly hunger for recognition, exacerbated by none being able to look upon him. I must be too radiant then, the cockatrice had told himself. As I light the world, some will inevitably burn.

And so Vesperos saw Zamshy’s every move as an adjusting hole in the world. It was enough to keep himself from getting smashed, especially with the beast’s attention divided, but was it enough to aim his only shot?

Once his tail strike missed, Zamshy switched targets, only to have to untangle what he saw, something that had the identical effect of neutralizing his petrification. Tiddalik the frog was also poised for battle, his greatest handicap the need to constantly remind himself not to spit anything up at all. The others had incorrectly insisted he couldn’t wash this winged problem away, and he had agreed to humor them in solidarity.

Besides, if he hosed their foe down now he would pop the five concentric bubbles he was using as helmet to distort his vision and keep from turning to stone, which must have been working, because the cockatrice had turned around, probably, and the frog didn’t feel the least bit stiff.

He could still be turned into a stiff of course, if any of the beast’s blows were allowed to connect. One was headed his way now, so Tiddalik leapt with preternatural ability, sailing over Zamshy’s head, making clear that he wouldn’t have needed the bat’s help in entering the Bootyard at all, and that it was more a matter of his fellow challengers keeping an eye on him, just enough petrification to keep him from flooding the place.

Down the arena Fadfid silently scooped up pieces of her instrument, oblivious to the developing battle, and past her the ear of Rea Brass had not moved, as if he’d fallen asleep instead of getting shot with a cannon. Just outside the wall of the barn nothing seemed amiss to the three other human officials who escorted the ratcatcher. They all stood around in the chill, regretting their lack of coats, having assumed they would be invited into some warm nook of Minimil. One of them drummed their fingers on the attache case used to transport the Lilliputians and eggties that were now part of the scrambling audience.

They had heard the cannon shot, like a cork pop on their scale, and the ensuing silence, but they figured it for a break in the performance, and they didn’t want to interrupt Mr. Brass, who was staring into the indigo sky and stars above transfixed, wearing the grin of a man washed up on a shore populated solely by beautiful women and strawberry tarts.

That was the effect of the arrow; he felt an unfocused love of the universe. If one of the constellations managed to propose to him, even Cancer on five bent knees, he would have agreed. The man’s many internal flaws could not be quelled long however, soon geysers of pomp, arrogance, and devious opportunism would bubble up once more. The window of time was now as small as the one to which his ear was pressed, just three minutes.

Much of the audience had fled, to the vexing of the Minimil citizenry milling around outside, hoping to eavesdrop on the concert. The rows between the Bootyard’s seats, where feet had been firmly planted as the concertgoers leaned in to hear, were now clear enough to be navigable by motorbike. The Death-or-Glory toads had kicked up their dust, wheelied their way back up into the stands, and tried to do their part in attacking Zamshy Lamshy.

They were joined by the Wayfarer, up from the dark of the boot, twirling his walking stick with much skill, unclear as it was if that was merely a skill of showmanship or something that could be translated into a rising welt on the rooster’s toe. Feeling the tick of the clock with every beat of their hearts, the challengers finally converged on their obscenity.

Each sought a great distance from Zamshy’s snaking eye, avoiding his gaze and leaving the bulk of the body open as a target for Vesperos. First a motorbike ran straight over his tail. Then another streaked by, its rider tossing a pair of heavy opera glasses at one of his delicate knees. A walking stick whapped several toes. A pair of frog’s legs bounced on a winged wrist, bent the limb uncomfortably.

All the while the bee crept closer, fostering the growth of the dark hole at the center of his vision. When he could see nothing else, could not possibly miss, he would fire. Briefly it felt like victory was inevitable, but it was not accompanied by any thrill or vindication, instead something cold grew in Vesperos’s chest. Was this now the best use of love? A mere assassin’s dagger lodged in the back of statesmanship? Was he already gone, a mercenary of the gutter? Had Psyche left him in order to avoid this muddy puddle of a fate he had plopped right into?

He wondered if it was the duty of a god to die, rather than to start meddling in a petty and small fashion.

Zamshy Lamshy looked empty to him, but the cockatrice still saw an entire life ahead, whereas there had been none inside his shell. The world was kindling to warm him, now that he could feel it, and these pesky raindrops were not going to douse him. He heard the skittering of a rat leaving the fresh knots on his feet. Cleverly the cockatrice put his face where it wasn’t expected, snaking his neck down between his legs and getting the view only the cloaca had normally.

Caught unaware, the Wayfarer looked over his shoulder and met Zamshy’s eye. Then he was gone from the battle, present only as a lump.

Witnessing this was Tiddalik, who saw through the bubbles only the rat’s color change to inert gray. He was not an ill-tempered creature for the first few centuries of his existence. Then the other animals started complaining, interrupting Dreamtime, just for the offense of him getting up to take a drink of water in the midst of it.

After that there was nowhere to go. Eventually complaint followed him. In Minimil it had found him quickly, with only Mrs. Toad providing a reprieve, and to a lesser extent his new friends of the Challenge Obscene. Every grievance of Minimil had been momentarily brought to a hush as the world’s smallest violinist played a grateful truth, and it had been good, but now the silence spread to those he cherished, those for whom he would wring himself dry, if only they asked where others had berated.

His many helmets popped as a torrent broke free, blasted Zamshy Lamshy in the face. Waterfalls spilled down the stands, but the monster’s claws were deep in the wood, and he did not slip. Instead his nimble head broke free of the waters, stopped Tiddalik cold with a glance. The frog was now a statue, but more of a fountain, as the waters did not cease flowing from his open mouth.

This inundated the stands, slowed the motorbikes terribly and unexpectedly. Buffy was in the midst of streaking by the beast, throwing something else she hadn’t bothered to identify, when her vehicle slowed to a crawl. Zamshy was able to pick her off next, having not even blinked since landing his ethereal blow on Tiddalik.

Most objects touching the body were petrified as well, magic tended to sort out those details admirably, but the motorbike was too large to accommodate. It kept on going, handlebars now rock solid in their orientation. Without intervention its statue rider would go tumbling with it off the end of the seats and break up, never to be properly reassembled.

Tabitha couldn’t allow that to happen, so she raised a wheel, jumped up several rows, right under the cockatrice, and gunned her engine to catch up, high water be damned. The window was narrower still than the one for their shot. As soon as she was close enough she leapt off her bike, aimed squarely at her comrade.

With arms wrapped around as cushion, the toad pulled the bike over, took the full weight to keep Buffy in one piece. She was successful, but vulnerable, and Zamshy too ensured her solidity with his narrow black pupil.

Vesperos had gleaned from their utterances that they had dropped like rocks, one by one, and there were no distractions remaining. He couldn’t afford to get any closer, had to fire now. The godly bee drew back his bow, wished the new couple his best, and loosed the arrow, aiming for the blackest part of Zamshy Lamshy’s corrupted heart.

The cockatrice beat his wings. Their gale sent the matrimonial missile spinning off course. It fell between the seats, disappeared.

“Surrender!” the cock ejaculated, to no response. “You’re alone.” He stalked forward, head low, dragon’s features exaggerated in possessive malice. “You’ve lost.” Zamshy Lamshy knew this insurgent, no matter his reasons, had but one option left to him. Flee. Seek either oblivion or lost arcane powers of destruction, as he had. Make a deal with a dead devil, cadaverous hand perpetually reaching out of the grave for the desperate living to shake. Give in to dark impulses, to your own whispers never heard by anyone else. See what you could do in the name of a distant mother.

Another step forward… but it was not Zamshy’s. Vesperos walked toward his own doom, faster than the doom approached him. Faster still. Running now. The cock shrank. Had he gone insane? No, he was just a bee, and they were always suicidally insane. He already had his distant mother, some queen that had produced thousands. Zamshy flailed, flapped to retreat faster, perhaps catch the bumblebee’s wings and blow him away.

Unrelenting, Vesperos pumped his arms to build up speed. The arrow was lost, but not the love. There was still plenty in him, contained in the stinger that suddenly gleamed in the eyes of Zamshy Lamshy. The cockatrice feared some ace in the hole, a potent venom. Yes, the bee had lost, and thus had nothing to lose, while Zamshy had an entire kingdom and a burning vengeance that had to be continuously fed.

One thing only had changed in the moment the cockatrice stared down the blind bee. Vesperos had seen, in the periphery of his vision, pink blurs. The crowd was gone, the populace distant. Locked away in stone, his friends’ hearts still burned, for their loved ones, for each other, for the task at hand, that busied their hands, that kept them from embracing what mattered most.

They yet lived, as did their love, even brighter now that they were restrained from acting upon it. Vesperos had assumed his diminutive form was a weakness, a sign of his approaching demise. He would shrink beyond the human eye and vanish, as had so many gods unable to keep from disappointing worshipers who bore such unattainable and unsustainable dreams.

As he charged forth he knew it wasn’t true. The small were no less than the large in their hearts, and they beat faster in their often lessened spans. The smaller the body the easier it was to burst the seams with the spirit, to break out of mortality and into meaning; that was how his challengers now silently cheered him on.

His love was no less potent than it had ever been. If restored to full strength and given the opportunity to sacrifice himself so that Psyche might go on in his stead, he would. Zamshy’s hate could be felled in her name, in his own, in Mrs. Toad’s, in all those who wanted the fighting and politicking of callous and wasteful Little Wars to end.

Was the bee not meant to have an outsized sting?

Zamshy was no god, could never muster one’s certainty, which bent the very rules of the world. He was nothing more than a threatened animal, and acted just as they do when cornered. Unable to back up any further, as his foot had struck the Wayfarer’s statue, which felt like so much more of an obstacle in the moment, Zamshy changed tactic to a threat display. Out shot and stretched both wings. His fleshy comb and crests inflated and he crowed so hard his crow crackled.

Least impressive in the threat display was the instinctive raising of his tail, straight up, exposing the cloaca underneath. Everyone averted their eyes from such things without the threat of petrification, so the power it bore in the cockatrice’s anatomy was rarely explored, never transmitted throughout history, deemed too unsavory.

For if the eye cast a petrifying beam, in an opposite of ingestion, then the cloaca was its opposite, liberating from the effect in an opposite of excretion. It was the reversed eye at the other end of the body, the other pole of the magnet, and no less powerful. The cloaca involuntarily stared at the Wayfarer, almost lovingly, and he was freed from imprisonment as if breaking out of a sugar cube.

Now all his passion could act again, and he used it to smack the back of Zamshy’s legs. Startled, the cockatrice whirled around, not thinking to drop his threat display. Thus his tail and beaming rear end were swung across the battlefield, unlocking any stony jackets they crossed. Indecision over which threat to face quickly got the cockatrice outnumbered, and united all the challengers once more.

The Wayfarer scampered up his body while Tiddalik blindingly sprayed him with barely parted lips while Tabitha and Buffy rode in on the same bike and bound his legs together with a chain while the buzzing bumblebee shrank the final gap. Like an ignited earthworm, the cockatrice flailed, crowed, begged to not be unseated despite the agony of ruling from a twisted and hunchbacked watchtower.

Vesperos ignored him, hearing only the racing of the cockatrice’s heart. The little god leapt and flew, prepared to jab with his stinger as soon as his antennae made contact with flesh, to ensure he didn’t waste his love potion and his life on the striations of a bench. Zamshy Lamshy shielded his chest with both wings.

Stinger tore through membrane. Pure pressurized love was pumped into the cock, and in the ecstasy of victory, Vesperos’s sight behind closed eyes became the woolen purple-black blanket of his Mother Nyx, tucking him in lovingly for the final time. The outsized sting stung, just another shooting star out of the maternal night sky, always meant to be smote upon the flesh of the Earth, where the mortals could wish on him, then dance, intertwine, and forget they were supposed to worry the schemes of gods above.

Goodnight Nyx. Goodnight Aphrodite. Goodnight Hestia. Goodnight Psyche. Goodnight challenge, so infatuating to rekindle.

…

Darkness that he supposed would never become anything again became his great aunt’s face. A final memory perhaps, the view from his cell’s balcony that set him off on the challenge? As detail returned he saw she was not a stone giant looking in on him. She was reduced in size and grandeur, to her most comforting form, of a simple homemaker with frizzy hair, each strand pulling her to another corner of the home that needed attention.

This was a disguise of hers; it had gone by the name Dubiny Marood in Minimil before the ignition of her hearth-throne. Her humblest hand, the color of something swept under the rug several times but never swept out of the home, emerged from her sleeve and rested on the blanket, which rested on Vesperos’s body.

The bee remembered his eyelid maintenance, sat up from his bed, and rubbed the sleep out of them. Then he was able to see the rest of his cozy cell around him, orange, brown, and amber, glazed pottery scattered about, some of it full past the brim with domed honey and fresh water. Rest receded and he felt soreness in his abdomen, the kind felt when exercise had to be rescheduled due to an overly enthusiastic initial stretch.

“Hestia? I’m still alive… did I fail?”

“My presence says otherwise.” Her smile put him at ease, but her Lilliputian form exaggerated a fatigue behind it.

“Then how?”

“When you dropped your friends stole you away from the Bootyard, and found a shred of Zamshy’s wing around your stinger. You successfully delivered your venom into his bloodstream, but because the membrane was so thin your sting had nothing to anchor to. It tore before you did.”

“The luck-“

“Was on your side. It was about time it did its part, after all the work you put in to free me. Thank you nephew; I will never forget what you have done for me and my home. Rest easy, you are safe now, and this trial is over.” Her last words implied more to come, and he doubted it would just involve the establishment of educational program to warn the next generation of tadpoles about unscrupulous eggs asking them to take a seat.

“What of Zamshy? And my challengers?”

“You have done as you set out to do. What I couldn’t glean during my petrification was explained to me by the toads and rat.”

“One of them is a frog.”

“Yes,” she managed to chuckle, “and a nuisance at that. A creature out of the Dreamtime… which I must discuss with you… but as with the dawn first comes the cock’s crow. Zamshy did see Ratcatcher Brass through the Bootyard’s side, and the two have fallen in love. They left not long ago, the man carrying the chicken, cooing to it, kissing its little beak.

After it happened it was easy to convince Zamshy to direct his backward eye at his creations and free them, as a gesture of goodwill, and in exchange for not charging him with a crime for his coup. That should keep relations between Minimil and the crown stable for the time being. They’ve gone to live at Ukridge Farms, and I imagine Zamshy may actually manage to improve the conditions there for the eggties. We’ve been invited to the wedding.”

“Wedding plans already? How long have I been asleep?”

“Days, dear nephew. I expected longer. Did you see any other gods in your dreams?”

“My mothers.”

“Then it is they who have returned you to us so promptly.” Hestia stood and walked to the open window, surveying her city, eyes darting between specific vacant spots, as if she still saw her aspects in stone littering the landscape. “While imprisoned I was able to explore the Dreamtime, learn more about the worsening state of the world. I know you’ve felt it too.”

“It’s not a world for gods anymore. Little Wars makes gods of men, and machinery is built into the gaps.”

“Yes, but there’s more to it, more under it,” she insisted. “Something is waking from its own long slumber. Those of us equal to it, or perhaps beneath it, feel it as nightmares, as shared themes in our nightly expeditions. Your friend Tiddalik’s presence here is more evidence of it. Australian gods have long pulled the dream world into the mortal one, to temper evil with rest. If creatures touched by it are leaving, discontent, then it is because of this fitful sleep into which we all have sunk.”

“What is this force?” the bumblebee asked, unsure how much he cared. The throne was full again. His business could go back to flowers, and perhaps, if he felt ambitious, to the lovesick plucking and counting their petals.

“I do not know, but I fear what will happen when the sleeper wakes. We are too diminished to fight what used to be our rivals… I’ve been considering becoming a syncret.” That perked up Vesperos’s antennae. Syncretization was as much of a death wish as the little cannonball-man fired into Brass’s eardrum.

A syncret was a hybrid god, but not offspring. Divine magics could mingle and fuse without the need of entire generations, at the cost of the ingredient identities. Two weakened gods could become one, if both were willing, killed and reborn via the process, into a single entity of resurgent strength: a being called a syncret.

“I am so much less than you, and I have not considered it,” Vesperos said to warn her off the idea. It was tantamount to outright death.

“No, but you have considered going quietly into the night,” she almost snapped, “forgivable given that is your mother’s breast. It is not to be my fate.” She tore herself away from the window. “But you’ve only just come back. Yours is the subject at hand. Everyone knows you are the hero that has allowed them to look up once more… Many remain sore though, over your team’s destruction of the world’s smallest violin.”

“I don’t suppose an apology to Miss Paganinny will do much.”

“If it would it has already been done by your friends. I’ve been in contact with Drosselmeyer; he and the musician agree that the instrument was singular and it cannot be replaced. He is instead constructing for her the world’s smallest cello.”

“That doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

“Yes, that’s the point. People would only compare and gripe if it did. Personally, I think I’ve heard more than enough on the subject. My point is that Minimil will settle on a heroic memory of you if they don’t have to see you, and instead see all the empty sky you created. It would be best if you got out of the city for a while.

There’s a Little Wars convention approaching, many nations to attend, ours included. I’d like you to go as my representative, not a combatant of course, which isn’t to say there won’t be any danger. You’ll be aboard the maiden voyage of the Wicky Sticket, whom I’m told you’ve already intimately visited.”

“I will happily defer to your request Aunty. I feel full to bursting with love once more, seeing you back.”

“Please Vesperos, think of yourself. Better yet, I’ll force you to. It’s high time you were drowned in some of the love you’ve tended and dug out of this garden.” With a flick of her godly wrist the hexagonal waxen door of his cell was flung open, and in poured many friends, most of whom were minted by the bumblebee in a mere week, faster than the whole hive could make honey.

Chief among them were his challengers. Tabitha and Buffy leapt onto the foot of his bed and shouted his name, clapping their floppy paws. Tiddalik brought him a big glass of water, more of a bucket really, which he would only pretend to sip at it, given the high likelihood it had been spat up. The Wayfarer had the food, from his travels, from donations, and some of it freshly browned up in a pan by the rat himself. He patted Vesperos on the shoulder so many times the bee thought he would never stop feeling it.

Then there was Mrs. and Mr. Toad. The former was more of herself than he had ever witnessed, bearing the widest amphibian smile, the sort that parted the mouth so aggressively that swimming with it would force her to surface. She babbled, a tangled ball of story and gossip threads that made it clear she was considered a crucial element of the Challenge Obscene, and that Second Toad Hall, even under the enemy’s eye and in partial ruin, had been the headquarters of their mission.

She must have thrown a good deal of that newly acquired social muscle around to uproot her husband from the Hotel Trogolo. He looked miserable and downtrodden, but also fearful enough to not speak. A visit from Hestia would be so much more persuasive than another compensated room courtesy of the fairy with the turquoise hair. After receiving a jab from his wife’s elbow he muttered something of thanks that might have included an invitation to dine at his home, once it was fully repaired of course.

The crowd around his bed did not stop at that. Many more minimils stuffed themselves into the room. The atypical eggties from the dry dock had to make an appearance, as well as Lord Ludmenti who bore a bottle of kelp and coconut rum as gift. After him were faces he barely recognized, people they had merely passed in the course of their challenge. If any of them were there to chase fame Vesperos wouldn’t know it. Everything felt genuine.

The cock had his daybreak, but now the night fell, and Hestia’s warnings sank in. If there was to be a war of dreams, of bolting out of bed and firing at the cause, they would need the best bedfellows they could woo.

The End

The Challenge Obscene continues in

Challenging Ass