When the Year is not Kept

and a Book Falls up a Staircase

Not many things lived in the Shedlands, and even fewer of them retained a form of sanity. A good deal of luck was involved when, having not yet determined a path more specific than moving away from Compassleaf, Hygenis and Loric encountered their first resident of the area.

It rounded an orange rock, lazily even though this was an attempt at ambush. The creature was unsteady on its feet, five trembles for every step. Being a mammal, it was fully under the curse of the Shed, and likely had been for some years with its drooping ears, lips that looked moth-eaten, and warty, red, irritated hide.

A swollen tongue lolled out of its mouth with every breath, the tip of it retaining enough fluid to make it balloon. Swallowing it back down looked impossible. At first it appeared to retain some fur on its tail, but upon closer inspection it was revealed to be nothing more than a clump of sticky buildup, equal parts weed fibers, scabby excretions, dung, and twigs.

The disease had made its breeding utterly indistinct, but the humans sensed that the creature was something of a mongrel in the first place, long divorced from settlements but perhaps not from taboos. Perhaps he was a mutt forged from a great rift, a dog to a bear, a coyote to a stoat, a badger to a wolverine.

The thickness of beity blood occasionally allowed such leaps, though distant hybrids rarely attained any status and often suffered the opposite. His birth may have been enough to get him shunned, all the way into the Shedlands perhaps. Even though he showed himself as a predator, baring what teeth he could, the humans felt only pity at his presence. Better they reason with him, even if his capacity for it was minuscule, than to have either side suffer the pathetic slings of such a fight, where neither side’s lives were respected by the world at large.

“You’ve got arms to lay down,” the mongrel said, his voice as lowly as his demeanor. It was emitted with the mind rather than the throat, so its timbre had nothing to do with his ragged physical health. What they heard was the tensile strength of his sanity, and what they heard could not hold up a spider. He sounded like a lost puppy, but rather than a thicket he was lost in the concept of reason itself, confused by his own soul, whipping around to try and catch sight of it like he was chasing his tail. “So I can finally say lay down your arms. I’ve always wanted to say that.” The sun continued to bake all three of them.

“Well, are you going to say it?” Loric asked, clutching his dental mirror in a fashion as close to Hygenis with her hook as he could manage.

“Didn’t I?” The mongrel’s eyes rolled up into his head in search of the memory, finding a reassuring nothing.

“We will no sooner lay them down than we will the ones we’re attached to,” Hygenis warned him. “We have no quarrel with you. Are you so hungry that you will try and bite into a metal blade?”

“Mmmm… no,” the mongrel moaned, having expended all the energy he had for his ambush. There was a rocky overhang a few steps away, so he ambled under it and collapsed in the shade, swollen tongue bouncing off the ground once. “If you were polite you’d turn your backs and let me get you.”

Having been in much closer scrapes already, both humans had no trouble joining him in the shade, sitting right next to his head with the ears practically melting into the clay pebble soil. Hygenis spoke first, but without words. Her hook did the talking as she brought its head to her own, dragging its inner edge across her scalp and cutting her hair away in large bundles.

“You don’t have to do that,” the mongrel told her, yipping in his throat. “People can’t get the Shed.”

“Better safe than sorry,” was all she said at first, letting a pile build up between the two of them. “And I do it out of respect for you, so that you won’t have to look at it while we’re traveling together.” Loric remained quiet, trusting that she had one of the hundred strategies she’d already employed in his defense at the ready.

“I can’t go anywhere,” the ragged beast said, eyes scanning the distance, nose twitching despite it being much drier than it should have been. “Neither can you. It’s all rocks and thorns. And bones that don’t know they’re bones yet. Wish mine would figure it out.” His flank quivered, prompting him to scratch at a patch wildly. Thin blood was drawn, allowed to leak to the ground.

“I wouldn’t expect you to help us without compensation,” Hygenis offered. She stopped shaving briefly so she could pull out another sliver of metal from the hook’s handle, like the one used to distract Grinjipan’s gums. She held it out in the sun, twisted it back and forth so the light would catch and sparkle.

“It’s pretty, but I can’t eat it.” The mongrel’s eyes disappeared into their lids again, checking to see if he’d ever eaten anything like it. He found nothing, which made him forget he’d ever asked the question and brought about a calming wave of ignorance, a vital tool to make his body forget the intolerable unending itching.

“It makes eating easier,” the dentist claimed. “I’m a medicine woman, and my weapon is just a larger version of this. I take it you’ve never had a visit with one of my kind before?” He looked at her with doleful eyes, which served as answer enough. “Your skin may suffer, but your teeth don’t have to. If you help us I will give this to you.”

“I have fewer hands than I do hairs.”

“You’ll need a friend to help, a small lizard perhaps. Tell them to take up this needle, crawl into your mouth, and chip and scrape at yellow gunk between your teeth. Doing this regularly will protect them and make your mouth healthier. Only the yellow between you understand. Not the yellow on.”

“What happens if my lizard friend scrapes the yellow on?”

“They’ll drill holes in your teeth.”

“Oh… does it come with a lizard friend?”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“No. We’re on the run, didn’t have time to make any friends big or small, until now.” The mongrel looked around for these friends, but couldn’t find them, which wasn’t distressing because he found his inner eyelids again.

Assuming that was the wretch’s version of mulling the offer over, Hygenis returned to her work and finished off her own crop, looking to her companion as soon as she had. Loric sighed and shuffled in front of her, leaning on her chest. Taking away his only hat under such intense sunlight was a recipe for a terrible burn, but he still felt he owed her at least a hundred instances of silent obedience for ripping her out of her old life with much less finesse than when she did the same to a molar.

He watched his hair leave in the mirror, wondered how long it would take to grow back, and where the pair of them would be when it did. It was his responsibility to come up with something. His invocation meant Hygenis had to stay with him until his goal, which had not yet been set, was achieved. She would essentially be forced into servitude if he picked something that would take the rest of his life, or that could not be reasonably achieved.

The idea of such abuse made him shudder, which resulted in a smack against his shoulder: a penalty for risking a cut. Aside he set the mirror, bringing out the bottomless book in its place. A search began in earnest.

“You’ll have to be on the run faster with that,” the mongrel commented, recognizing it only as a machine of some sort. Perhaps it printed lizard friends.

“Does it offend you?” the dentist, almost finished being a barber, asked. Even she did not know what weight a Forbidden Thumb could press with out in the Shedlands. All of the Wild Trinity was clad in fur, but their divine nature might have protected them from all disease. They were not immortal in struggles with other beities, but aside from challenges to their power nothing seemed capable of harming anything other than their pride.

“I don’t think so,” the mongrel said, though it was clear from his fluttering eyelids that the search for the answer was ongoing. “Tensilharp the sharp won’t like it one pillbug, no she won’t.”

“There is still that matter,” Hygenis reminded Loric in her gravest tone.

“But she’s away,” the mongrel added. “Been east she has for a time now.”

“How long?”

“I can’t judge too well, don’t have much time in me. How do the wealthy measure it?” He sighed, which, paradoxically, gave them the sense that the wretched creature had nothing but time and that it all stuck together in an itchy ball like a colony of fire ants rolling across the desert. “She’s been gone so long that there’s some machine trash around here that hasn’t been cleaned up.

She thinks it’s her job here in Baldy Town because no mole has surfaced here as long as I’ve been here. They have fur too. She picks up machine litter and all the scraps of cleverwood too, dumps the stuff where the moles can get to it.”

“That’s good news,” Hygenis told the storyteller, “but she might not be too far to sense that this one is moving now. She’s been after it long enough that it likely has a special place scorched into her rage.”

“Are you two hungry?” the mongrel asked. “Does one of you want to go halvsies with me on the other?”

“What about the offer?” Hygenis asked, already far beyond the ability to fear the pathetic animal.

“Hmmm… something about catching lizards?” he struggled to remember.

“Close. We’ll give you this shard you can clean your teeth with if you guide us through the Shedlands, help us avoid getting eaten or winding up on a path with no water.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“The shard dearest, the shard that cleans your teeth.”

“Oh because I have teeth. After everything I still have something, and it’s teeth.” He wheezed, what was left of his laughter.

“And the shard… if you help us.”

“Right, well you two better stop laying around and building nests out of… whatever that is,” he chastised, pointing his snout at their combined pile of hair. Now it was Loric’s turn to roll his eyes. So much for solidarity as a negotiating tactic. “We’ve got a somewhere else that needs being in.”

The pile of rash and bone stood and stepped out from the shade, balloon-tongue lolling as his head swished back and forth. He asked which direction they wanted to head. Hygenis told him their only heading was away from Compassleaf, as long as he was sure he knew which way that was. She quickly stuffed all the shorn hair into Loric’s pack to help prepare for a journey that still had the potential to bring anything.

Maybe it was tinder for starting a fire somewhere distant and cold, or insulation for their clothing, or material for a facial hair disguise when crossing the paths of beities that instantly confused human females for males as soon as there was a mustache. Maybe they would actually sell it as nesting material to a little songbird that could give them directions.

Loric still didn’t know what its most likely use was, because he still didn’t know where they were going. Even as he stood and followed his dentist, who in turn followed their guide, he kept his face buried in the bottomless book, searching its archives for some sign as to his ultimate goal.

“Do you have a name?” Hygenis asked their leader, not out of curiosity, but out of the sense that the mongrel had to be kept talking to remind him that he both was in the presence of others and had a task at hand.

“Hah!” he wheezed. “What’s lower than a low name? If you called me anything it would be an insult.”

“Fair enough. I am Hygenis, and the walking cataclysm behind me is Loric.” The jab did draw a response, but it wasn’t audible. The storyteller was flicking through records even faster. “I give you these names out of kindness, but I expect you to forget them as soon as we separate. Various parties may come looking for us.”

“That won’t be a problem,” the mongrel assured her with another wheeze. “Once you lizards got to Baldy Town you stopped existing. It can be nice. All those old Tame-jockeys got what they wanted. Nice and dead now that nobody has to remember them. Peaceful as a planet too sunk in the night to see.”

“Oh they’re still around,” Loric finally voiced. “Still saying what they said back then. Still confused about what’s happening, even though it happened eons ago.”

“What’s there to be confused about?” scoffed perhaps the most confused beast in the history of the world. “The old Tame was too much for them. They cracked like eggs and leaked it all over us beities. Now it’s ours. We don’t crack eggs; we know how to sit on them and bring out the future rightly.”

They didn’t contradict him; as far as they knew it was possible there was a platypus somewhere in his lineage and any attempt to sire another generation could result in an egg. The most likely result was that he was infertile, unless propagating madness could count as reproduction.

“Not a one of them knew what the Tame was,” Loric explained, having found a perfect example in the records. He tried to summarize it, but Hygenis stopped him, encouraged him to read the whole thing word for word, thus removing the burden of keeping the mongrel listening and engaged from her shoulders. “Keep in mind this isn’t one of my stories; it’s just what one man wrote in a machine journal. It could use a better title though. Perhaps… ahh…