Friday, April 25, 2014

The Sayings of Succo

The Sayings of Succo
by
Bobby Derie

"There is no idea so sacred as to be beyond question." -Succo, Sayings

Gaius Gallus Succo (b.134, d.79? BCE) was a scholar of Roman Greece. Little known even during his own life, Succo was virtually unknown in post-antiquity until rediscovered in the twentieth century when six copies of his Discourses on Prostitution were discovered in the Villa of the Papyri during the excavation of Herculaneum. This sexually explicit scroll, still unavailable in English except for excerpts, prompted a more thorough search of surviving ancient sources for references to this ancient scholar, and turned up a number of quotations and glosses in contemporary texts in and around Corinth, where Succo is presumed to have been from. These quotes have been compiled from several sources, and scholars are in general agreement that they represent three distinct works - the Discourses, the Sayings, and an unknown (and possibly banned) philosophical and religious work attested to only in a rebuttal from an unknown pontiff, retained in the Vatican Library.

"I do not see why there must be something sacred about sex that precludes it as a profession; certainly there are many who pursue that employment without joy, but only for the income it brings, and in that they are no different than the vast majority of the employed. For those rare few that are paid for doing what they find pleasure in - well, then your definition of 'whore' must be extended to every artist, writer, professional and tradesman that pursues their craft." -Succo, Discourses on Prostitution

Opinion remains divided on The Lost Book, which shows some clear influence from Greek mystery religions and Greco-Buddhism; based on the arguments of the pontiff decrying it, the text seems to have been written in response to the social tensions in Corinth in the generation following the Roman conquest, the pull between Greek nationalist interests, the sometimes harsh administration of alien Romans, and the wider world of learning afforded by contact with Rome.

"I would I had an empty page, to pour out my heart upon it; to wrap in words vain and bereft ambitions, and friendships lost to neglect, and all the weight of ennui that builds from things left unspoken, undone, unrealized. To recount small sins and small penances, and common dramas and tragedies of vulgar people who all dance together toward ultimate destruction, engulfed in petty things. Yet it would be incomplete, without an audience, and perhaps 'tis better not to unload on those who carry their own burdens, but to set the page in the fire, and with a blank sheet, try again." -Succo, The Lost Book

"It is a long road and I have set my foot upon it, and though I race at no pace other than my own I grow weary with the days and miles, but would not count myself content if I were to rest. Better then to finish on this path, and work through the bitter stretch, and know I have accomplished something for all I've done." -Succo, The Lost Book

"The great downfall of every religion is the acceptance by the masses. For any group of individuals, whose needs and wants are so diverse and different, the message must be so altered or watered down that the religion is either destroyed or the masses pay only lip service to its tenants, going about their daily business. Fanaticism, it must be understood, is a lonely preoccupation - and thankfully so." -Succo, The Lost Book

"I will not live a life without regret, for every action has its price and consequence, and many are irreversible. But I also will not let regret stop me from living my life. My god, what I have done? Damn god, I have done what I have done, and if I shed any tears it will be while doing something else." -Succo, The Lost Book
"To have the courage of your convictions means much more than being willing to die for what you believe; you must also be willing to live by the same tenets you ascribe, to know your philosophy well enough that you know its weaknesses as well as its strengths, to answer the questions of hesitant converts and ardent detractors. And if in examining that your beliefs are false, it also means you have the strength of character to shed the errant convictions - for while some may ardently fight to support what they know to be a lie, only a coward could try to live a lie." -Succo, The Lost Book

"Some find joy in achievement, and others in the process; these I understand well. Yet I never could conceive those who take joy in doing nothing, in accomplishing nothing, to wile away the hours and days without purpose and be content." -Succo, The Lost Book

"There's a part of music where the singer stops trying to express themselves in words, and you pass into a place where regular human language fails - and they sing screaming, wailing, moaning, howling, growling, purring, mewling. Wordless songs, but songs nonetheless. How marvelous." -Succo, The Lost Book

The Sayings, by contrast, appear to be simply a collection of common wisdom attributed to Succo, or else excerpts from his work or an oral tradition related to his speech and writings, and have been discovered, often in mutated form, in texts from late antiquity, though often without attribution, and only identifiable when compared to documents that quote Succo more directly. A few of the Sayings have been argued to actually be direct excerpts from The Lost Book or the Discourses.

"Life is in media res." -Succo, Sayings

"Gaze not too deep in shallow pools." -Succo, Sayings

"You are not required to complete the task, yet you are not free to withdraw from it." -Succo, Sayings

"Ignorance is not the same as innocence, nor is it any protection against the world." -Succo, Sayings

"The greatest leap is from competent to good." -Succo, Sayings

"Obscenity is technical language. It's usage must be controlled, or else it loses its efficacy and meaning." -Succo, Sayings

"It's good to have a temptation close at hand, just in case you need it." -Succo, Sayings

"I spend a great many words very carefully not saying certain things." -Succo, Sayings

"A snake is still a snake after it sheds." -Succo, Sayings

"A book is not fully enjoyed until it is shared." -Succo, Sayings

"To define a thing is to change it." -Succo, Sayings

"Foolish decisions should be made while young enough for the wounds to heal up in time for the next one." -Succo, Sayings

According to the Vatican manuscript, the two major works of Succo were suppressed, his religio-philosophical work more successfully than the Discourses, as the very act of banning it appeared to assure its continued popularity. Succo himself is thought to have survived until the destruction of Herculaneum, where he had fled to avoid persecution in his native land.

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Friday, April 18, 2014

The Truth of Lightsabers

The Truth of Lightsabers
by
Bobby Derie

The night was old when Eiven Task left the Green Sith on the rocky outcropping by the beach, drunk on his home-brewed silva and staring up at the stars. The small brown alien had regaled Task with the tale about how he'd found a burning blade and it had destroyed him; then he issued the warning which had confirmed the bad feeling the human had been having for days: tomorrow, a few hours from now, his fellow prisoners were going to gang up and kill him. Fallen Jedi or broken Sith didn't matter; in the melting pot of this prison, philosophies and religions boiled down to their essence. They feared him. They were right to do so.

Somewhere up above, he knew, the Jedi were watching. Once, this remote island on Dantooine had been a training facility. Long abandoned and forgotten, it had been repurposed to jail the Force-using criminals too dangerous for regular prisons, but not worthy to merit outright execution. So no walls for a couple dozen Force-adepts and Sithspawn, no guards with vulnerable minds to be tricked or throats to be choked from afar. Just cold stone cells without power in the planet's temperate band, supplies dropped off once a week from low orbit, and a hundred miles of flat grey ocean in any direction.

Task walked towards the complex of ancient buildings where most of the prisoners were sleeping. In his right hand he fingered the shiv he'd made on the first day, the sharp metal point and edge held lightly in his palm. The human's left arm was long gone; a line of scar tissue tracing down from where his neck met his shoulder down to his hip, the pale skin to the right of it marked out with dark tattoos of blocky Sith runes. He had been bisected in a lightsaber duel in his youth, back when he had been a student of the New Order. For years he'd had a cybernetic prosthetic, but now even that was gone, leaving only the empty socket, and a few plastic and ceramic ribs holding in his artificial organs.

He could feel their fear, as he got nearer. Eiven's vision had slipped into black-and-white in the darkness, lit only by starlight, but he could sense each of them by the way they touched the Force. That was part of the reason they hated him, of course.

Task's old injury had decimated his talent; for a while he thought he'd lost all connection to the Force at all, until in a drunken stupor he'd managed to reach for a glass with his missing arm - and surprisingly managed to lift it, in a small display of telekinesis that had brought him back from the brink. Not to go back to the Jedi, but to find his own path, sifting through the ruins and trash of the old empires and orders, finding bits and pieces - lightsabers, training droids, old armor and damaged texts. Eiven had dug up graves and pilfered tombs. More than once he'd fought to keep what he found, or killed someone else for a holocron.

Sifting through the garbage, he had found treasures, and taught himself a few things. The Sith runes were more than just decoration, they were part of a piece of old Sith magic fueled by what was left of his ability, to hide him from the Force-senses of others. They couldn't feel him, not through the Force or through their foresight. None of the fellow prisoners could sense him coming, he was the blank space in their precognitive flashes, the unpleasant surprise that always was where they didn't expect him. The more puissant adepts figured out what was going on, and thought Eiven was hiding his true power; the less skilled just knew that his mere presence irritated them. Task might have laughed at how scared they were of a one-armed human with less raw potential remaining than most apprentices. Instead he went to where the Sithspawn were sleeping and fingered his shiv. There was a lot of work to do before morning.

*

Task sat shuddering in the morning chill. An early morning swim in the ocean had washed the blood from his body and clothes as best as could be done. Now he sat in the middle of the courtyard formed by the buildings, where the ex-Jedi camp typically came to do their exercises. The prisoners filed out and looked at him strangely, sitting there all alone, but none of them made a move directly towards him, at least not until the Voss came out.

Taller than Eiven by almost a full meter, the Voss was built like a mountain with red skin stretched tight over bulging muscles and weird compound orange eyes that burned from within when she channeled the Force. She was unofficially considered the most powerful of the adepts here, and headed up the Light Side Gang. He'd never learned her real name.

As she approached him, the rest of the prisoners stretched out into a circle. Hands went to hidden folds and pockets, fingering their own shivs; a few surreptitiously stretched to loosen their muscles up for the upcoming epic beatdown. Below it all he could feel their fear tickling at his backbrain, and almost taste the Force begin to pulse among them as the anticipation began to build, three dozen adepts scrabbling for a glimpse of the future and finding uncertainty.

"Bitch," the Voss said in clipped Basic, using the name she'd given him the day he got here. "Ready to die?"

Task, still seated, held up his empty right hand to head height. "Can I say something?"

The Voss nodded. Eiven's tongue was thick in his mouth, his heart unconsciously started to beat faster, and his sphincter clenched, but he'd taken the time to go before he'd sat down. There was nothing left to vent.

"This is all bullshit." He began. "This is the crap that Jedi and Sith have been doing for centuries, killing each other to prove who's the best. We pride ourselves so much on our foresight and intuition, but too often we get so caught up chasing prophecies that we can't see past our own blades. As high and mighty as either side likes to dress it up, they all seem to think that the truth of the Force comes down to might makes right, and that the proof of the argument comes at the point of a lightsaber. Well let me tell you the truth," and he raised his voice and started locking eyes with the people in the crowd; the Green Sith, nursing a hangover, had waddled in at the edge, "about lightsabers."

"They're not magical swords of flame that only Force-attuned can wield. They're just nasty weapons, and there's nothing special about that. Like any other weapon, the moment you draw it you're taking a tense situation and changing it into a matter of life or death." Task dropped his hand, and tossed his shiv at the Voss's feet. "Somebody once told me that winning a fight starts before you ever flick on your lightsaber. I though he meant training and preparation, but it's more than that. Its about knowing when to fight more than how, and knowing that drawing your weapon eliminates any non-violent solution. The Jedi call it Form Zero; the Sith call it something else. They each put their own spin on it - diplomacy, intimidation - but the outcome is the same. We're all prisoners on this piece of rock, far and away from the traditions - let's do something different. Let's not fight."

Eiven pointed at the piece of sharpened metal at Voss' feet.

"Some of you are scared of me, but I'm here to tell you there's nothing to be scared of. I'm a one-armed human without even a weapon. I'm not a Dark Lord of the Sith or Jedi Master, I'm just a drop-out who ran away from the academy and spent most of my life on the run. I'm handy with a lightsaber, but in case you haven't noticed, I haven't got one. I'm never going to be the most powerful Jedi in the universe, and I don't want to be. What are you afraid of, that I have secret special powers? That I'm going to go from cripple to berserker and kill you all? I don't want to. How long are you going to be ruled by your fears? Let's just drop it, here and now. We can all walk away from this. No one has to die here."

Task looked around at the crowd, but all eyes were on the Voss. Slowly, she reached down with her left hand and picked up his shiv, an oversized metal toothpick in her massive red hand. Then the hand closed into a fist around it.

"No."
*

Still sitting, Eiven stepped outside time.

The Aing-Tii call it flow-walking. The H'Drachi Seers had their own name for it. The holocron that had taught it to Task described it as an extension of a Force-user's precognition, allowing the self to step outside their frame of reference to examine future and past as an observer. Whatever the case, it worked. Powerful Sith and Jedi were said to 'walk centuries ahead or behind, to stand witness at critical moments of history. Task could 'walk about a couple minutes in either direction; far enough to win a fight, but not far enough to avoid one.

Normally battles between Force-adepts had something of a dance or chess-match about it, each side fighting by instinct and intuition as much as by tactical skill and planning, instincts driven by precognitive flashes, dueling views of the future coming together in a clash of burning blades. This fight was looking to be much the same, except for two things: Task could see farther ahead than the others, play and replay the battle-to-come from every angle - and of course, the other Force-adepts couldn't see the human in their precognitive visions at all.

The Sithspawn, of course, weren't Force-sensitives. They might have been a real problem. Which is why Eiven had gone around at night, and killed them as they slept with his little shiv.

It might have evened the odds a little, if there weren't thirty or so former Jedi and Sith left. Task played through the options, choreographing each move, dodge, and attack. He knew in the end, there would be too many, even for him, but if he was going to die he was going to take as many of these bastards with him as he could.

*

In the present, Task spun from a sitting posture to pile both feet into the Voss' left knee, which buckled under the blow. The red-skinned titan collapsed like the fall of empires, instinctively putting her arms and hands up to cushion her head and body, getting ready to roll with the impact when she hit the ground. Forgetting for the moment about the sharpened shiv in her left hand. She didn't scream when the sharpened spike of metal rammed into her eye socket; was too dazed from pain to notice when Eiven rolled over and quickly rammed her head downwards, driving the shiv straight into her brain. Her form shimmered for a moment and then vanished, her empty prison clothes lying on the ground.

The shock of her death rippled through the crowd; half of the first rank were moving forward with shivs bared as the rest made sure to close off any routes of escape. Even if they couldn't predict where he would be or what he would do, most of them were trained fighters - and could be faster and stronger than he was, if they drew on the Force. Task spun around on the ground, keeping his distance as they tightened the net, waiting for the first opening...he could take out one, maybe two before they started to get their shivs in him. In his mind's eye he saw himself ripped apart a thousand times...

"Bitch, catch!" A deep warbling voice cried out. Instinctively, the one-armed human stuck out his hand, felt the impact up his arm as the hard metal hilt slammed into his palm with Force more than any thin brown arm could manage on his own. Eiven tried not to think of where the little alien had hidden it, though the stringy brown goop clinging to the handle was a clue. Heedless, the first rank took it as a distraction and came on as a wave.

The burning red blade erupted with a black cloud of burning shit, the meter-long crimson blade vaporizing skin, muscle, and bone as Task whipped it around him.

The other prisoners stalled as the first six hit the ground in smoking sections, and Eiven task laughed as he lunged forward towards the other prisoners, who began to scream and shout instructions. The Green Sith was already at the back of the crowd and running away as fast his shuffling waddle could take him.

He knew, as his heart beat so fast he almost thought it would bounce through his chest, that it wasn't a lightsaber. It was a force saber, a product of a fallen empire before there had been Jedi and Sith. The fiery blade was rough and unrefined compared to the brilliant, clean core of the lightsaber blade, the burning cloud that surrounded it could blacken skin even on a near miss, and his own hand blistered from the waste heat. More than that, all the fear and rage he'd built up since he'd gotten here seemed to explode at once. All the emotional pain he'd suffered - the loneliness, the anger, the rejection, the thousand tiny slights and insults and embarrassments were fresh and raw in his mind. Fear and anger gave him strength and speed, and the blade burned brighter as he fed on it.

Even with the reach and deadliness of his weapon and his foresight, Task knew he was badly outnumbered. Instinctively, he moved into the aggressive Juyo form, slashing boldly and moving fast, trying to keep from being surrounded as the Light Siders fainted back from his attacks, only to try and bum-rush him from behind. In less than a minute, most of them were smoking piles of meat on the ground, save for the few who had vanished on death.

"Now!" someone shouted behind him, and Eiven twirled, instinctively raising his blade en garde.

A dozen prisoners - the Dark Side Gang - stood together, hands raised. Blue white lightning arced from their fingertips and palms a series of split-second electrical displays that left burning auras and glowing shadows in Task's vision. The first bolt Eiven caught on his force saber, the burning blade absorbing and dissipating the energy, rage fighting rage. Others hit him in the shoulder and leg, wet clothing exploding in sudden bursts of steam as the flesh beneath boiled and burned. None of the bolts were very powerful or very controlled, but there were many of them and even with his Force- and adrenaline-fueled reflexes the one-armed human could not catch. Things exploded in the left side of his chest, where cybernetic organs began to short and fail. Still, he walked forward into the hail, Force-visions guing each step, bringing his blade up to catch the blasts as best he could. The Dark Siders, for their part, did not flinch at Task's advance.

Then he took the final step and was among them, crimson blade burning through grey prison garb and into the flesh beneath, lopping off hands and legs, stabbing at eyes and faces. The leader of the Dark Siders - a slim human woman with filed teeth - held up both her hands as came in for the killing blow and Eiven froze, stalled in place as she held him telekinetically, the burning blade inches from her face. Task himself imagined his left hand around her throat, and was rewarded by the sudden dimpling of flesh at her neck. It was a losing struggle, her oxygen-starved brain unable to break his force choke and fend off his burning blade. After a long minute, her eyes fluttered, and Task envied her for blacking out before the blade burned through her face and skull, causing her brain to boil and explode.

For a moment, the courtyard was still and silent as an abattoir except for Eiven Task's labored breathing. Then he caught the faint flicker of the survivors, the ones who had fled. He smiled, and knew they would never feel him coming.

*

Task found Greenie on his rocky outcropping by the beach, drinking silva and watching the sun set. The black hilt of the force saber was still in his right hand, that was scarred and pitted where the heat blistered had popped and scabbed over. His breathing was labored, his left pseudo-lung refused to inflate, and he limped. There were burns along his head, chest, and legs, and a shiv still stuck out of his back where it had lodged in his left shoulder where he couldn't quite reach it.

The Green Sith sipped his silva and watched him, and offered Eiven his cup.

"Good for Force-hangover."

The human nodded, and painfully sat down on the rock. He had to force his cramped fingers to let go of the hilt of the force saber, which rolled between them. Task took the cup and drank a long pull of the green booze. He made a face, but didn't stop.

"Thanks," Eiven said. "and thanks." He nodded towards the hilt on the ground.

The little brown alien's head bobbed, big eyes staring up at the sky. Somewhere up there, the Jedi would be staring down at the massacre. Somewhere past that, the Green Planet hung in the heavens. Task passed him the cup back, and the brown hand with the dark grey Sith tattoos filled it with more silva.

"Good speech," the Green Sith said.

"Meant every word," Task said.

###

Friday, April 11, 2014

Mapping Lovecraft Country

Mapping Lovecraft Country
by
Bobby Derie

Blackened words scribbled in darkness, calling back to the mad scratching of a time-lost monk in an age of small-minded theology, black marks on vellum that echoed (or would echo) the wind-swept and tide-washed runestones on the shores of New England, curious artifacts without provenance, that did not exist yesterday and yet tomorrow will have been there for centuries so that Indians may scratch their heads over them new antiquities deposited on their shores from some future time. In another time white-bearded scholars rub leather elbow patches to debate the etymology of Shub-Niggurath, alien chrononauts driving their failing meat-sacks, the original intellects encased a hundred million years earlier to record their mundane secrets, only to return at some later date with nothing to mark their sojourn except an inexplicable fetish for rugose clones. Where once the worms and moles were masters of the primeval forests of Maine and Vermont (another construct of contemporary newthink; the pilgrims wandered through gardens of cleared fields left by the millions wiped out by plague, and feasted on the corn of the dead) now there lurk pits with strange amoeboid children crying out their first (and last) words, the echoing TEKELI-LI dribbling up through the floorboards mistaken for the mumbling of devils and the settling of the earth by those who find comfort in superstition and science. Saint Brendan on his leather-hulled canoe will brave the tides only to hear the Call of Cuitiliú in his dreams as he floats, with dry and bitten lips over the deep city of Y'ha-nthlei, caught in fever-dreamlands of islands beneath the sea twisted with the half-pagan imagery of a tortured Christ in the pale robes of Adonis and Osiris. What Old World ghouls left their ancestral cemeteries for the broken mounds of Lovecraft Country? Perhaps the strange wendigo, their cousin, put them up as Boston spread over the salt marshes, and cannibal vintages matured (slate markers in place of labels) to their tastes, the old Arab ghuls wiling the midnight hours away debating which grave to pop open tonight. For certainly there is a strange gravity that draws all these things into its orbit, a quaint and forbidden country squished into the geography, the Miskatonic carving a riverbed through time and space and imagination, sinking ever deeper into the sub-strata of myth and reality, so that even now tourists wandering through middle Massachusetts keep out a sign on the highway, hoping to see some weed-choked pull-off and a hand-lettered sign for Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth. Physical existence is just a skein to be drawn aside, walking tours of Marblehead and Newburyport and Salem dragging the eager seekers behind the scenes to the desolate and decrepit docks, the witch-haunted lanes with the odd attics and forbidden corners, the somber university which houses in its moldy bricks horrors that more ancient and authentic institutions cannot match - what is Oxford and Cambridge to the dark glory of Miskatonic, no matter how more grand their catalogues? Miskatonic is the university as dreamed by he who never went to university, a grail of all possibilities unaccomplished, shelves stocked with the secrets of the universe denied by frail body and pitiful mind, and so its shelves stretch out in non-Euclidean dimensions, poor Dewey running out of decimals and resorting to arcane runes to map the twists in that collection, where sorcerous ourangutans flit in the deeps between literary universes, and somewhere poor Borges set down his book and never did see it again. Like a tumorous colour from out of space has that strange region metastasized beyond the Aylesbury Pike, colonist spores spreading through the Severn and Sesqua Valleys, creeping eerily into the edges of Weird Westerns and Nazi Occultism, until ancient Sumerians sang hymns of Sentinel Hill atop their ziggurats, and worshipped unseen (and unseeable) Xoth with grim sacrifices. From one corner of the globe to another archaeologists spades clink against the remnant of a thousand ancient races, turning over the soil to reveal the latest octopoid carving and tentacled idol to set next to the others in their crowded secret museums. (What did they unearth at Herculaneum, that so set in motion the Victorian censors - and so spurred a tide of pornography and taboo lore that has never quite abated? How pale and quaint a scene as the satyr mounting the she-goat, compared to the six-breasted goat-women, vaginas dilating in strange rhythms, that dance through Machen-hills, among the druidic standing stones which must have been erected before even St. Brendan made his journey, a thousand years old as of last week.) Like the prisoner of R'lyeh the tentacles of that strange country reach out to past, present, and future - ever outward do cold mechanical eyes probe into the darkest reaches of space, and ever new dark planet in our system is a whispered Yuggoth on the lips of the many disciples, as was foretold with the discovery of the Ghooric Zone in in 2337 (1977).

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Friday, April 4, 2014

Draconis Soccus

Draconis Soccus
by
Bobby Derie

The realm of the dragon Califrax (of the line of Gammilus, whom the Romans had known of old) was in the nation of Britain, 224 Moat Lane in Finchley, North London, beneath the stairwell, in a dead space behind the drying machine. Like all of the Gammilic dragons that had come to London in the last few centuries, Califrax was a hoarder. As a wee wyrm she had curled beneath the machines of laundromats, drawn by the pleasant heat and rumble and prospect of lost coins, but the bulk of her nest consisted of socks of every size and variety. A good part of her time, when not out hunting, was spent in her nest sorting through the pile of (always clean and dry) foot coverings, burrowing through piles of wool and nylon and cotton, shifting the pattern of her scales from laundry whites and blacks to stripes and argyle.

Now it must be said of the line of Gammilus, that the last male had died out in about 300 AD, speared by a Roman legate as he tried to drag the heavy armor back to his hoard. Yet Gammilus laid her clutch, and those daughters looked just as she had; and when their time came they paired off, daughter and daughter, to act out the mating play and spur ovulation. Partheogenesis, the loremasters call it, and those that took the male role they called bulls, and those that took the female role they called cows, though all were ultimately daughters of Gammilus, and tended to alternate in the roles as hormones surged through them. And though they were all female, a dragon's instincts are strong, and they all wished to woo and be wooed, by the size of their hoards.

So it was with Califrax, in the bullish part of her cycle, did desire a mate. She struck out farther on her expeditions, beyond the laundry rooms she knew, dragging a clinking sock of change with her. To the airy rafters were wyverns hunted bat and pigeon, but they did not care for her cash; so too did the fat wyrms of Bank Street turn up their snouts, for their nests were bundles of cheques and pound-notes and bits of expensive leather stolen from wallets and suitcases. There was one hoary old cow who lived beneath the pubs, taking in the bar tokens and scrounging vending machines, who sniffed with interest among the coins, but she was long past laying another clutch, and Califrax went back heartbroken to her nest.

Yet though she had chosen her hoard-sock for its strength, as she dragged it along it snagged and ripped, and the dragon stopped and worried over the coins poking through the netting, for she knew that the weakened fabric would not last the rest of the trip, and her careful hoard would be lost. So did the argyle dragon fret, and finally covering the sock with an old newspaper set out to find a replacement sock. There were dim prospects in that North London street, no laundromats at all, just kebab shops and pubs and newstands - and not even that, for the Waterstone's had closed - but there was a lingerie store, and Califrax well knew the strength of silk and nylon.

So it was that Califrax snooped around the back alley, claws scrabbling on the pavement, sniffing at the scents of human and cat, before seizing on the bin behind the back door. Knocking it over with one deft swing of her tail, Califrax began rooting through the spilled garbage - the remnants of old lunch curries and packing materials for the most part, but here and there a ruined bra or ripped pair of panties. At length, she triumphantly squeaked as she found an opened box with a pair of long silky black stockings, and quickly hurried back to her hoard, her prize grasped in her jaw.

Yet where it had been, it was no longer; the newspaper was still there, but the sock was gone. Releasing the stocking for the moment, Califrax opened her mouth to taste the air - and quickly picked up the trail of another dragon. Not just any dragon, either, but a cow. Recovering the stocking, Califrax continued on the trail - for with the hoard-sock in the state it had been in, the cow-dragon could not have gone far. The scent led through a long-abandoned doggie door through a small bathroom that had seen better decades and few plumbers, whose sole human-sized entrance was long painted shut.

There it was that Califrax first beheld Arnifar, of the line of Gammilus, in her realm - a nest of stolen silks and and polyester, a veritable mountain range of brassieres arranged into a nest around a small heap of loose coinage, which Arnifar was dutifully attempting to add Califrax's swag to. Her scales were the shades of satin and rayon, and she could have hung unmoving and unseen among the racks of frilly lace, long elegant neck ready to dip into passing purses for change.

Their eyes met. Toes curled, nostrils flared, tails stiffened, and a croaking hiss started to build in the throat of Califrax.

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