It’s been aching and eating at him. Feels like there’s just a hollowness underneath the skin and in the bones. Sitting up, standing, walking, moving his arms…it’s all an effort, like dragging lead weights.

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The strange case of Bebary Bee began with one of the most mundane and innocuous objects: a spoon. Bebary Bee, like most good geeks, had gone to see the Matrix when it came out in the theaters, and like most very confused geeks, believed it revealed an astounding truth to him about the true reality of the world, which led shortly to his jumping off the roof of his school building and falling four stories to his early and untimely death in the misguided belief that a spoon (and old Uri Geller videos on YouTube) had shown him the truth of reality.

But the case of Bebary Bee didn’t end with his death. It started with it.

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Arumya was a warrior-prince of the great city of Davish, whose fighting legions were known for their discipline and virtue. When he rose to become king, he would lead the armies of Davish as his father led them now.

There was but one problem. Prince Arumya fainted at the sight of blood.

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I am Trallo, of lost Capathia, last city of the Lun belt, buried now by the sands for twenty storms. I am a free man, not a slave nor organ donor, nor breeder for mutants or food for monsters, for I survived the death of our false god and the horrors of the savage desert that came for me when our walls fell, where those others of Capathia did not, and so the mighty Mathes, god-king of Xan, saw my worth and made me a hunter upon the trade-roads, giving me concubines and slaves for my little seen home in his undying city.

Today, I hunt.

There is a new beast who prowls the road between Xan and Oph, wandered in from the desert seeking more sustaining prey, or awakened by some cursed foolish sorcerer in the wastelands. It leaves behind it a foul golden ichor that burns the rock itself and turns the sand to red glass. It has slaughtered two godless tribes living in the ruins of Marker Exvivtee, and attacked a caravan, which is what drew the attention of Mathes and the bitch goddess Ir-ut of Oph. The legionnaires protecting the caravan drove it away, but the god-kings wish it dead.

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Public Display of Shame I-V

This will not be funny. Oh, it’s meant to be, but it won’t be. It will be black and dreadful, full of morose angst and terrible failed attempts at clever wordplay and so forth, like puns that aren’t because I don’t really know how to do puns. Except for here and there. And that’s just blind luck.

It will be absurd, or so I will tell the legions of fans screaming outside my door…the ones in my head, who are keeping me from writing this novel. It’s them or the migraine. You see? Already, it is terrible. It will be a terrible, terrible fifty-thousand words.

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The dust had been swirling all day in small cyclones that lifted off the barren path outside her hovel, spiraling into the air and adding to the haze cloaking the distant purple mountains. Had the local priest of the shrine been visiting, he would have thought it a bad omen and said the desert spirits were agitated. Misha simply frowned and kept her passing superstitions to herself; she had enough to worry about.

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From worlds far across the desert sands they met, the dark girl with pale skin burying something in the ground, burning feathers and sticks that held a stench about them like that of carrion baking under the hot sun, and sooty, gray-white smoke rising up from their ashes to swirl in the breeze like tiny, angry spirits with terrible, fanged faces.

Perched above her in the branches of a strong desert tree — his graying once-red feathers hidden amid the patchwork green leaves, a tattered ghost of age and all the conflicts visited upon him during his time beneath the olive sky and black sun — the bird-man watched quietly. Much more quietly than the noisy girl below kneeling in the white sand, chanting and breaking, cursing and burning and pleading like a child sacrificing to the long-dead spirits of the desert wastes.

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“We have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Ossun’s gone missing.”

I lifted my head slightly to look out at the span of orange-twilight sky beyond the tent flap, and squinted at the painful light. I was spending too much time sleeping in the tent. It was the damn savanna heat. “What do you mean? Eaten by a lion? What?”

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Grabbing the cell phone was a last second decision. He almost walked out the door without it. He had his wallet, shoes, jacket, keys. Just a quick run to the store to pick up some condiments they needed.

He never made it home for dinner.

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Sing, poor Elvasa, sing like the wind across the dunes, sing to the bones of your father, and carry him with you all your life, until your children bear up your own bones unto the winds…

The song died away, drifting slowly away across the red evening darkness towards the blue edging upon the horizon and becoming lost in eternity. The gathered tribe drifted away, the ritual completed as Elvasa admired the shining ivory blade he now held, turning the thin crescent over to admire each side of the weapon…and to remember…

“Your father is with you now forever,” the old bone-singer’s voice broke into his reverie, and Elvasa looked up from the new blade into his milk-white eyes. The voice trembled with age, but there was still strength and tenor in it, subtle shadings of skill that remained eternally young lurking beyond the aged flesh. He wondered how the old man knew where to look without eyesight.

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