The town of Agua Ligeramente Helada was your classical western hellhole, placed amidst an arid desert, that sported dried out carcasses of bovines and outlaws and wild dogs with big fangs and bovine outlaw wild dogs with big fangs all over the place. It had been named by madmen that spouted pure unintelligible nonsense, so its name only coincidentally resembled Spanish. You wouldn’t find slightly frozen water anywhere in there. You would be pressed to find unfossilized water like, at all.

Through this valley of death and charring sunlight rode the cultivator. The hooves of her fully automatic spirit horse chastised the dusty road, elevating a cloud of particles whenever it stepped.

“She’s back,” whispered the lips of those that knew her.

“Why make a horse out of guns? Showoff,” Said aloud those of the people that hadn’t had the pleasure to meet her yet.

She came across the local outlaw at noon. His cloak waved in the wind because it had nothing better to do. His face was covered with a red scarf that wasn’t made of puppies nor human skin.

“This town is not big enough for both of us, outsider,” his hand quickly reached for the iron of his hip, and a bulled ripped out, striking true on the cultivator’s forehead.

And bouncing harmlessly.

“Trying to shoot me is like trying to drown a fish by holding it’s gills underwater, pal. “She said taking off her hat and throwing it to the side to unleash her long hair.

The outlaw kept shooting, aiming all over her body. The bullets kept bouncing off of her without doing the minimal damage.

“I am riding a horse made of guns, what makes you think guns can kill me?”

The man kept pulling the trigger until every chamber of his revolvers was empty, and then he grabbed his spare revolved and kept on trying.

After seven emptied out guns, the man exclaimed with his roughed-up voice “Impossible, you are immune to bullets! There’s no way all forty-eight shots were flukes! Are you…”

“A mother looking for her daughter. Have you seen a girl called Crusadina around here? She’s fourteen, looks an awful lot like me. Most likely because she came out of my cunt. Seventy-three hours of grueling labor, pal, I almost shit out my very spirit while giving birth to that brat….”

The man examined the sides with scared eyes, searching for an escape route. “I… I don’t… I need to…”

“...a legendary amount of chocolate milk was bled that day. I was so scared and pained that my vital energy went haywire, preventing the doctors from making a C-section. Heaven aided me and my little bundle of murderous joy that day, pal. You should have seen her, all little and pinkish, drinking from momma’s tit like it was full of beer instead of plain milk…”

The townsfolk that watched from the windows of houses and the saloon closed their eyes and shook their heads. That was one good outlaw gone to waste.

“You come to take me alive or dead, right? Could it be dead? Like, please, let it be dead.”

She pulled on the bullet-strap-reins of her horse and began circling the sweating outlaw.

“Tsk tsk, no, I just came to look for my daughter. I have no interest in you, pal.”

“Well, then, can I go? I have a family to feed.”

Polvorina raised her eyebrows. “Oh, so you are a daddy?”

The outlaw dismissed that with a gesture of his hand, as if wanting to fan such a terrible fate away. “Gods, no. Hostages. I don’t want them to die. It’s bad for the trade. There are standards I am held to, miss.”

“Ah, that’s right. Can you ask them about my daughter? If so, I will let you go. And follow.”

“Sheriff!”

The sheriff popped his head out of his office window, his hat getting stuck on the frame. “Yes?”

“Shoot me dead!” The outlad demanded.

“Shoot me dead what?”

The outlaw closed his eyes and nodded. How could he be so rude to the old sherrif? “Please, be so kind to shoot me dead.”

“Fine.” The sheriff whiplashed his arthritis-ridden hand and a bang was heard. Slowly, a thread of blood began coming out of the gunwound, dramatically.

The outlaw stared up, annoyed. “You missed! That’s my arm!”

The sheriff shot again, hitting the gun horse in his tiny, hidden safety bar, making it instantly unload most of his bullets —his lifeblood— over the ground, killing it and making Polvorina jump from its back, as annoyed as the outlaw. “Oi, old man, a gun is not a toy!”

“And old age is not a blessing. Third time is the charm, though,” he said with his voice, before taking aim again and pulling the trigger.

The shot struck true. On the wrong place, but true, in the sense that it did strike something. Specifically, the little statuette of a golden… golden… golden… a golden c… a golden fel… a golden statuette considered a symbol of good financial luck, that was placed atop a barrel outside of the saloon.

“Well, there goes the charm,” commented the outlaw, and then stared long at the bullet hole in his arm. “Anyone with a good aim to kill me? My kingdom for a bullet to the melon.”

“I can kill you if you want.” Polvorina offered, putting an understanding hand on the man’s shoulder.

The man kindly grabbed her hand and took it out of his shoulder. “No, thanks, I cannot burden a worried mother any further. I’ll do it myself. ”

The man grabbed his eighth gun and gestured Polvorina to give him some space, as he didn’t want to stain her jean jacket. Then, he blew his brains off with his six-gun, unceremoniously, letting his limp body fall in the mid of the road, upon a stain of brain matter and blood and chocolate milk.

Polvorina poked him with her boot to make sure the man had expired. Then she took her hat off. “So long, cowboy.”

She rode the air up to the saloon, forgetting her horse had died and disappeared, vaporizing back into vital energy. She burst through the batwing doors, three sets of them: If one set was cool, three had to be absolutely thrilling.

The atmosphere inside was the usual for such a den of reprobates and whores and reprobate whores. The bleached skull of a vampire dog hung on the wooden wall, over the heads of smelly gamblers that were at least three whiskeys past human rights. Every head that could turned to see at her who walked into The Sexually Assaulted Ferret with such a confident step.

The woman behind the counter —whose arms had gotten as wide as the tankards of beer the less refined patrons drank from due to years of having to throw people out not one, but three sets of batwing doors— grunted in annoyance as she recognized Polvorina. “Have you come to pay your tab at last?”

“I am looking for my daughter, Petraia, have you seen her? She’s like a little me… probably a young me by now, she must have undergone the grow spurt associated to puberty already. Maybe she is taller than me.”

The woman’s eyes became thin lines. “But will you pay your tab?”

Polvorina took a seat in the first four-legged stool she found and looked at the bartender dead in the eye. “Those days are behind me, Petraia.”

“The days of paying your tab?”

She nodded, gravely, as if she was confirming someone’s death. “Gone with my old self. I am abstemious now.”

Petraia examined her up and down with a single eye, hands placed over the counter to support her weight. “Abtemerous? You fear six-packs?”

Polvorina straightened her back, confused. “No. I love six-packs. On men. On men without Fursuits, if possible. Abstemious means I don’t drink alcohol.”

Petraia gasped, starting a chain reaction that extended out from her and made the rounds, causing everyone else in the bar gasp thrice, like a falling domino of gasps whose pieces got kicked in the balls as soon as they stood back on their foot. “You what?”

“I don’t drink anymore,” she said, putting on a nervous smile.

“Not vodka? Not mead? Not apple cider?”

“No alcoholic drink. None.”

The bartender’s face was a testament to the fear of the human soul. “Not even wine?”

“I drink water, sodas, milk, and energy drinks. No alcohol.”

The rusty, erstwhile caramelized, wood planks of the floor —don’t ask, just… don’t ask— got domestic violenced by Petraia’s heavy figure when she fainted.

Without saying another word Polvorina stood from her stool and strode towards the door, but a hand came out of the whiskey miasma to her left, grabbing her arm.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Listen, pal, I am not giving you a coin nor sleeping with you, so let me go or you die.

But what came out of the cloud of brown vapors was not the voice of a degenerate or a beggar. No, it was that of a man who had smoked it all. It was the voice of the monster that inhabited the space under the beds of tobacco plants. “I can take you to someone who may help you find your daughter. You made Yellow-teeth Jason kill himself, and I saw it. It’s the least I can do for you.”

Polvorina doubted for a second, unsure of the man’s intentions (that were just being a mysterious figure shrouded in alcohol vapors, most of the time). But anything that got her closer to Crusadina was worth the try, at least.

“Fine, lead me to them. But you trick me, consider yourself promoted to a wildlife sanctuary for spiritual bullets.”

----------------------------------------

It was in a dry and rattlesnake-laden basement that the man claimed she would find the old crone who could help her. Luckily for Polvorina, the rattlesnakes had fallen into the most dormant of states. They seemed to not be even breathing. Truth is, they weren’t. They had died in their sleep, and couldn’t be assed to do the paperwork so their bodies would decay, so you had mummified rattlesnakes over the barrels, along the tool shelves, and even inside other rattlesnakes. Her boots made the mummies crunch as she intruded the murky environment, holding an oil lamp in front of her to drive away a bit of the darkness. It would have worked better if the oil in the lamp had been ignited previously, she thought. Ah well, as they said, hindsight was always in her twenties.

She expected the old woman to appear from many places: that hole in the wall, that suspicious mound of dead rattlesnakes, or maybe even from behind the working table in the middle of the room. It had not occurred to her that she would come out of a barrel’s frame. No, not the barrel’s interior, the frame. This woman was that thin.

“The spirits told me you would come, Polvorina of the vicious Uzis”

Polvorina’s expression was crooked. “Those damn spying spirits better not be watching me while I take a shower.”

“I assure you: they are. They say the contour of your ass is unrivaled in Valelike Vale.”

The woman harrumphed a bit, and, producing a box of matches out of her rags, she ignited Polvorina’s lamp. “There you go, darling. Now you can admire my humble abode.”

The extra illumination didn’t help to make the place less tenebrous. If anything, the orange glow added an old-school Egyptian-setting horror feeling to the dusty atmosphere. Like some human mummy would come out of a barrel, and reveal this was an ancient pharaoh’s tomb, belonging to the one who drank so much his sarcophagus was replaced with a wine cask.

The snakes were already there, it just lacked the beetles and locusts and frogs and cats. And gold. And cats. And gold. And… And…

Forget it, I am not strong enough.

Oh, but the closest thing to a human mummy there was the old woman, with her matted hair, with her randomly distributed balding spots, with her eyes entering Polvorina’s soul like armor piercing rounds.

“Then, Darling, you have come looking for someone. Someone who parted, correct?”

“My daughter isn’t dead! She just ran away.”

The old woman’s pupils made their ways to the top of her eyes. She scratched her chin as she listened to… something. “I see, I see. Old granny needs to you, young fanny, the wisdom of the spirits.”

The medium led Polvorina around a mound of barrels, where she had prepared a small circular table with a mantelpiece full of holes —someone had to feed the moths— and a crumpled ball of porn magazines stuck together with copious amounts of glue.

“Oi, why do you have a sphere made out of pictures of nude women?”

“She’s time-honored porn actress Coriander Crystal, and this is my ball, young lass.”

Polvorina didn’t know what to think about this woman. If the crone could convene with spirits, maybe she could get some lead on Crusadina’s whereabouts. On the other hand, she could just be nuts. Not in the Yggdrashell sense, but rather in the “Absolutely crazy” sense. She reluctantly took a seat on a small barrel that believed itself a chair, left the lamp over the table and crossed her arms.

“Show me you can hear some beings from beyond the veil,” Polvorina said, resisting the urge to get her boots onto the table and lean back, which would have been pretty hard to sustain while sitting on a barrel.

The medium placed her hands over the ball, without touching it, and closed her eyes. After a few seconds, with a voice full of unnatural echoes, she finally spoke. “You… like bananas.”

Polvorina adjusted her hat. “Like most people. That’s not something you need divination power for. I assume you are a fraud, hag, and this lady doesn’t like frauds.”

“As more than friends,” she snapped, and Polvorina’s face went communist.

“My husband left me! I am a single mother, okay? I don’t have time to go around dating.”

“Your husband didn’t leave you. He got smoked with the fags,” the medium scratched her head. “Why did you marry a furry, girl? You are a bombshell. Do you hate yourself that much?”

“I had my reasons. Reasons of the heart that don’t pertain the head. Reasons of the nether regions that pertain other sorts of heads. Are you contacting him? Are you talking to my husband you… emm… name?”

The hag scratched her scalp. “Mine or your husband’s?”

“I think I remember my husband’s name. Yours.”

“Ah, well, that will be a problem. Spirits, what’s my name?”

The spirits stirred around the ether and raised their paws in confusion. Yes, paws: all of them were furries. Why? because there was a god that prevented furries’ souls from dispersing after they died. Some sort of all (anthropomorphic) dogs go to heaven deal. And if you allowed the ones dressed as dogs and foxes and wolves why not the ones dressed as hyenas? And if you accepted hyenas, that aren’t canines, why not accept feline, pinniped and ursine ones too? It seemed like the logical extension. And so the Overton Window of acceptable furries in heaven moved until they drew the line at scalies in the afterlife. But if it is a dragon with hair or fur, guess what? It goes to heaven too. It’s a mess, and it’s not in accordance with my beliefs, but it is what it is.

“The spirits don’t remember my name. Alzheimer’s seems to be shared between dimensions through our bond.”

Polvorina scratched her cheek with disinterest, “Or they just don’t care. Put me in the line with my husband.”

“One claims to be him. Was his name Furtherknot?”

Polvorina sighed out of exasperation. “Can’t you be normal a second, Ferold? You had to use the name of your fucking Fursona? Really?”

The medium extended a hand and caressed the gun cultivator’s arm. “It’s normal, dear. The spirits are suspiciously fond of the names they went by at furcons.”

“Okay, ask him… or I guess he can hear me, correct?”

“Ask ahead, darling. The spirits need not ears —but they do have fluffy ones— to hear about your concerns.” She grandma made a dramatic pause, the wrinkles on her face deepening. “Ah, yes, your daughter is dead.”

Polvorin’as face froze as she leaned forward. “What?”

“Furtherknot says—”

“Ferald. Call this deadbeat motherfucker Ferald. And tell him to stop joking about such a delicate subject.”

The old grandma dared slap the cultivator. Polvorina easily avoided the slow as molasses swipe of the old woman. “You have the reflexes of a scallop, dear. And that’s a compliment. But the spirits are bound to tell the truth.”

“He lied about his name!”

“Or maybe he considers his fursona his true self.”

Polvorina covered her eyes as she broke into an ugly cry. “I hope he gets the worst coming to him. He is my husband, there’s no way he isn’t him. How can he be so casual about our daughter?”

“He says you also were pretty casual about it.”

She lashed out, standing from her barrel. “While talking to children! We cannot show weakness before death in front of the children. Less so in front of one that wants to be immortal like that Kalon laddie. We are all adults in here.”

“Some of the spirits are furry children.”

Polvorina breathed in and out, slowly, she was ready to explode.

“And your husband wonders why you aren’t lamenting his death.”

“Because he sook it, I bet. You know nothing about the fetishes this motherfucker fostered.”

“Wait, he’s telling me something. “the woman made a pause, listening intently.” Let’s keep the conversation, he says, orbiting the matter of your dead daughter. Murdered, daughter, in fact.”

“Ferald, after we see this parenting matter through and through, I want the divorce.”

The old woman joined her trembling and raisin-textured hands as a signal of concern. “Darling, he is dead. You are widowed. Marriage is only until death does you part.”

Polvorina’s forehead creased like a poorly built street during an earthquake… “Yeah… that… let him explain. Be good for something, deadbeat.”

The medium’s face was a veritable spectacle as Crusadina’s father explained that they had taken some very particular vows. When he was done, and after her brain could process what she had had heard, she slowly slammed both hands on the divination table.

“Out. You get out of my house, and he gets out of the spirit realm. Shoo!”

“Tell me who killed my Crusadina first! I shall take revenge. If two thirds of my family are dead, I’ll see to not bite the dust before the one who took my little girl from me lies deep underground.”

The old woman closed her eyes, breathed him and out to calm herself, forgot she was angry due to dementia, looked around a bit to get her bearings, and said, “Well, he tells me the murderer is named Cutbastra. A follower of the road of the Homewrecker who—”

“I know him,” was her dry answer, and it came before a gulp and a turn on her heels. “He’s cute, the bastard.”

An ethereal figure in a green fursuit appeared in front of her, using his paws to stop her advance, placing them on her chest. “Damn, I miss these.” He muttered, and then looked at his wife in the eyes. “Don’t go, darling. You cannot best him. No married man or woman can.”

She clawed the hyena head of her husband, and her hand went through it as if it were but mist. “It’s my duty. You didn’t give birth to her! You didn’t suffer to bring her to this world! If Cutbastra took my girl from me, I will take his life from him. Or at least try, till the Earth drinks my last drop of blood and chocolate milk.”

The husband put his hands away and stepped to the side. “I don’t have the means to stop you, Polvorina. But, please, don’t name the chocolate milk when swearing vengeance, it makes the whole ordeal sound like a joke.”

“Sometimes life’s the joke, and we are not the ones meant to laugh,” the medium whose name had been lost to time said, and suddenly remembered she was angry with them. “Out of here!”

Ferald’s form and image vanished, and, burdened with a teary face and the grief of a death hope, Polvorina parted, leaving the burning old lamp over the table and kicking the dead rattlesnakes as she shuffled her feet out.

“I will find him. Or… or he will find me.” Her smile widened under the presence of the thoughts of a madwoman. “And I will lose me.”

“Wait, no, Polvorina, love, don’t resort to her. Innocent people don’t need to die. Other people’s sons and daughters don’t deserve to be collateral damage to your revenge.”

But she wasn’t listening. Like possessed she grabbed her hat tight against her head and rushed off, reaching the desert out the town in less than a second. In it, under the gaze f a lone Vampire dog that hadn’t made it to his lair before dawn and was now trapped under a cactus’ little moving shade until nightfall.

She raised her spirit Uzis toward the tyrant sun and pulled the triggers. “Come out and play, Mic! Use me as a vessel, Avatar of the Road of Lead!” She said, calling the Road of Freedom by its official, unfunny name.

The energy bullets ripped upwards, piercing a lone cloud or two and losing fervor as they ascended. Eventually, a thousand of them remained suspended in the high atmosphere, spinning as something inside beat. That something inside was eagles, tearing out of their little lead prisons and spreading their ample brass wings, growing too big to ever be contained inside a bullet. The sun reflected on the eagles casing-feathers, casting sparkles like stars upon she who, with arms thrown to the sides, watched form below.

“Mic, come down, let your fury rain over me! The world is yours if so is my enemy!” She called to the skies in ecstasy. This was it. She was handing her avatar total control of her fate, in exchange for power.

The eagles listened and cried with eagerness, twirling in the air like vultures would. They gazed far below with laser-pointer eyes, and they all converged on her. Soon, fueled by greed and with their wings folded they plummeted, beaks open, cloacae spraying and praying into the firmament, claws of titanium aching to dig into Polvorina’s flesh.

In the last second, as they obscured the skies above the cultivator and closed in, a thousand eagles extended their talons of nightmare, and they dug into their target, making her squeal from pleasure. The eagles’ wings beat in unison as their bloodied claws lifted a laughing Polvorina from the ground.

“Mic! Defeat Cutbastra and the world is yours, Mic!” she exclaimed, consumed by the deepest madness, as the sphere of birds closed around her, as the flesh was torn from her body and replaced by guns made out of her very spirit. Soon, all that would remain from Polvorina would be her purpose, and her anger.

Soon, everyone, even Cutbastra, would regret having messed with her little daughter.