We swept the town, clearing our way down the street one building at a time. The livery stable was filled with undead horses and a loft full of zombified lizard folk. We cleared it out by the book, taking down zombies with headshots.

The saloon held patrons still sitting at their tables playing cards though undead. When we entered, it triggered a bar fight. It was a bizarre juxtaposition, like the Western bar fights I've seen in dozens of movies, with cowboys and bargirls in short skirts upending bottles and chairs, but all of them aliens and all of them undead.

I scrutinized each location, looking for clues. We had zombies; we had galactics. We weren't learning much in terms of a scorecard. I was hoping after we cleared the town, something would appear to give us a clue.

The little church was entirely empty of zombies, which made me think it might be important. I had Chavez, who had our best Inspect skill, look it over but he didn't spot anything.

At last, we reached the far end of the town: the train platform and station. The wooden water tower beside the tracks dripped into the dirt. A mailbag hung from a wooden pole sticking out over the track. I eyed it, wondering if there might be a clue in there. "Let's check the station first.”

We approached. There was no sign of life. I drew my gun and stepped through the door into the station. A creature stood behind the counter.

He looked up as I entered. It was a coyote standing on two legs and wearing buckskin. I blinked and he was gone. What stood behind the counter now was clearly a man, and he was Native. He looked about 30 years old and reminded me of my grandpa, with two long dark braids falling down his back.

This was our first hint of someone or something not dead or alien. I holstered my gun, knowing I could Quick Draw it at a moment's notice, and approached the counter.

"Can I help you?" the man asked.

"Maybe?" I was trying to keep it casual.

Behind me, more of my team entered. The man's eyes flickered. He glanced over them, resting on Frank for a minute. "Have we got a problem that needs the law?"

"No, no, just passing through," I assured him quickly. "What happened here in the town?"

The man tilted his head. He peered at me. "I can sell you a ticket back where you've come from," he said. He laid down long, thin white pieces of paper on the counter. I made no move to pick them up but read them over. One said Ganymede, another Arizona Strip.

I looked up at the man. "You're him, aren't you? The fragment."

He just looked at me. "I prefer to be called Coyote," he said.

It started to click into place. The setting, the man. In many of the legends shared among various tribes in the southwest, Coyote was a trickster character, sometimes on the side of humans and sometimes not. He bore a few similarities to the Norse god Loki. But they're not the same.

Interestingly, my grandpa never liked those stories much. He'd rant about how other people had picked up on those stories while ignoring thousands of other legends and decided they were representative of a whole culture. "Like if you reduced all of English literature to nothing but Robin Hood," he'd said on more than one occasion. Besides, the Paiute didn’t really have Coyote stories.

“Okay," I told the man, "you're in charge here. What can we do to prove ourselves to you?”

“Bring me an offering if you want my help." The instant he said it, Coyote disappeared. A hot wind whistled through the cracks in the boards, kicking up a little dust devil on the floorboards. Other than the papers on the counter there was no sight he had ever been there.

There wasn't room in the station for all of us, so we retreated back outside and circled around and took stock.

"I'm pretty sure that was an aspect of the entity controlling this fragment," I told the team. "He's taken on the guise of Coyote, a trickster character from various native legends."

"Oh, hey," Chavez said. “There was a book in the back room of the church, well, a shelf of books, but one of them was Legends of the Southwest or something like that.”

"Take second squad and go check it out," I said. They hurried off.

Meanwhile, on the outside wall of the station, I found a large map. I studied it, correlating it with my mini-map. We were near the middle; the track cut diagonally from southeast to northwest. The river we'd crossed earlier wiggled along the opposite diagonal, cutting the land roughly into quarters. There were several buttes marked out in the southwest corner. It was a horseshoe-shaped ring of mountains with an X in it. I peered closer. Lost Spaniards’ Mine. In the southeast of the map, a tall spire. The Trickster's Ascent.

I pointed out the interesting features to Major Armstrong. "So what's the point of playing this game?" Major Armstrong asked. “That was an embodiment of this fragment right there. It wasn't enough to flush him out for Kronos?”

“On the missions I've conducted before, I almost get the feeling that we're having to prove ourselves, as Kronos' agents, to the remaining fragments of himself.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"How does a, for want of a better word, demigod fracture into pieces like this?" Armstrong asked.

"Well, you have to remember that he's a billion-year-old relic of all the thoughts and memories of the progenitors who went into this reality engine and never came back out," I said. "From what I gather, the progenitors thrived billions of years ago until something made them all retreat within their reality engines.”

“I got that briefing,” Armstrong said, “but go on.”

“What I think happened," I said, "is the same thing we're seeing happen to our people. A lot of them got content just living in a dream world, having everything taken care of for them. They had no incentive to do anything with their lives because it wasn't real. Over who knows how many millennia, they stopped even bothering to reproduce. They gave up using bodies and their minds completely merging with the engine itself and then with each other to become the entity we now call Kronos.”

Armstrong shivered. “Remind me not to stay plugged in too long.”

I had to agree with him there. “But anyway, Kronos was created by those millions, billions, even trillions of individuals slowly merging with each other, losing their personalities. The being we call Kronos is just the largest agglomeration of those lost personalities. These fragments represent clusters of," I shrugged, "I don't know what you want to call them, remnants. Remnants of a group who had different goals than Kronos. For him to reclaim the fragment, on some level, he's got to convince them that what he's doing with us is right. Based on what I'm seeing here, if I had to harbor a guess, this fragment represents the part of the reality engine that really resents the Galactics and what they did."

"I don't blame it," Armstrong observed.

"Me neither," I shrugged. "Sometimes I forget we humans weren't the only ones they barged in and upset. Kronos was waking up on his own when they got here. They slapped on a slaver program and tried to break him to their will. They failed, but they still want to try again. If this piece is representing the anger he has toward the Galactics, maybe we can use it, but it might be hard to persuade this fragment to play ball."

Chavez and the others got back. He handed me the book. It was called Folklore and Sacred Stories of the American Southwest. I flipped through.

There were a handful of Coyote stories I recognized. A Prometheus-type legend of Coyote wresting fire from supernatural people to give to humans. Another where he played tricks on other animals, one where he punished a wicked woman. I flipped through quickly.

The very last story in the book was titled "Coyote and the Man.” I paused and read it. I wasn’t an expert on the Coyote stories by any means, but I didn’t recognize this one at all.

It told the story of how long after the People had turned their back on Coyote and all he had done for them, they were attacked by shining warriors riding four-legged demons.

Probably a reference to conquistadors, I thought. Interesting.

They fled their homes as the warriors burned and pillaged, breaking pots and poisoning wells. They fled to hidden cities in the mesas, but the shining warriors hunted them down. One by one, the People were murdered or taken into slavery.

Finally, only a single warrior and his family were still free. They were running low on food, so the man harvested their last corn. His wife ground the ears into flour and made him cakes. Then Man took the cakes and set off to find Coyote.

He asked Raven for help, another standard character from the folklore, usually represented as a wise guide. Raven said he had soared high for many days but not seen Coyote. He offered Man a long black feather from his wing and wished him luck.

The man kept on. He found a ruined village where a very old woman sat weaving and asked her. She said all of her grandchildren had gone looking for Coyote many days ago and not returned, but told him what she had told them, that they would need to find Coyote's drum and take it to the sacred peak. She offered him her weaving, a blanket with a sacred design that could ward off demons. The man took it and continued.

The sacred drum had been stolen by the invaders. Man found the place where they had scratched a hole in the earth and forced the prisoners they had taken to dig out gold for them. They were using the spirit drum to keep the prisoners in line.

The man waited until darkness, then, wrapped in the blanket, snuck into the camp. He used the raven's feather to wake the captured chief. Together they freed the prisoners and killed their captors. The chief led the people away while the man took the spirit drum and hurried to the highest peak. There he beat the drum and Coyote appeared.

By now the whole group was listening as I read off the story. I found myself adding some expression as I read the dialogue here in the climax verbatim.

"Why have you summoned me?"

"We need your aid, now, for we have an enemy we cannot defeat."

"You have turned your back on me."

"My fathers were foolish, but we are your people. Come back to our aid."

Then Coyote looked at the man and laughed. "It is you who have come to their aid, not me. Nevertheless, I will give you what you need." And so Coyote came down from the mountain. He snuck to the fortress of the Shining Warriors and released all their four-legged demons, chasing them into the mountains. Then he returned to the man.

"I have taken their demons for you to tame."

And so the man went down. He offered one of the demons the corn cake his wife had baked. And after the demon had eaten it, it transformed into the first horse. The man and the people he had rescued mounted horses for the first time. With the Shining Warriors' demons changed to their own friends, they chased the demons from their lands forever.

I looked up. Armstrong was eyeing me.

"Well," I shook my head. "It's got a lot of traditional elements, but it's definitely not a story I know. I also see resonance with our own situation here. I think this is our key."

"What, we're supposed to go tame some horses?"

"No. There were specific quest items in that story. An ear of corn, a raven's feather, a blanket, the spirit drum, and a location, the Sacred Peak." I pointed back at the map on the wall. "There's the mine that it talked about in that story. There's the Sacred Peak. The corn or maybe the blanket would be associated with the village. Not this one, I think. We'll want an abandoned native village." I scrutinized the map, looking for a likely place, then spotted a small dot in the northwest that said "Indian Caves."

"That'll be it," I said confidently. "As for the raven," I shrugged. "We'll have to take that as it comes." I hesitated. This was vital information. If we were all forced to respawn, I didn't want to have to find it again. "Come on, let's leave ourselves a message," I said.

We walked back into the town. I took the book and laid it on the speaker's rostrum of the church, open to the story about Coyote. I found a pen and underlined the key items, then wrote “See map at station" on the title page for that story. Then we went back outside. I pulled a can of orange spray paint from my inventory and sprayed a big arrow on the wooden steps of the church, pointing inward.

"There," I said. "If we respawn, we'll see that."

"Assuming we come the same way again and that the changes we make here are still visible," Armstrong said.

"The world changes should stay persistent," I said, though I wasn't 100% confident in that. It was how everything else I had done so far had worked. "Let's just try not to die.”