Serializations of the Hitherby Dragons novels

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Posted by on Jun 8, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Chapter 5, Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Epilogue

Posted by on Jun 9, 2013 in Stomping the World Round, Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

An Exceptionally Sharp Goat, by Anthony Damiani

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Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Jane shuttles through a series of increasingly baroque and terrifying foster homes. Eventually she banishes her latest family — a collection of evil Taoist demons — into a special Hell, and she runs away while this distracts them.

She staggers through the streets of Gloucestershire. Bits of used newspaper cling to her hair.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Jane encounters an Agency social worker. She leaps out of a shadow at him. He screams, drops his coffee, and runs away. Possibly he was not actually an Agency social worker.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

The knowledge that in less than four hundred and ninety-seven years Heaven will send its finger to destroy her weighs heavily upon Jane. She is acutely aware of her immortality and she knows that, like all immortal things, she must eventually die.

. . . or something like that.

The nervous feelings that run through her are not 100 percent precise.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Jane finds herself attempting to build up her stature with Heaven by performing good deeds and exorcisms. Heaven does not obviously care. She joins a small detective agency but then they fire her for having bits of used newspaper in her hair. Possibly they were not a small detective agency but rather some sort of bakery. She isn’t sure.

The job lasted long enough. It served its purpose.

She’s picked up a lead on a sene-goat.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Jane sits in an alley by a fire that she ignited with her Taoist immortal powers. (The Tao precedes both alley fires and non-alley non-fires, so this requires no real effort on an immortal’s part.) She meditates on what she has learned. Her third eye opens and pierces the boundaries between being and non-being.

The goat has chewed its way upwards through all the layers of the underworld. It has mauled through the army of the dead. It has pierced the Great Gate, though it soaped it, and gotten past the centipede.

It has come up to Earth, she realizes. It has taken human form. It is standing right behind her

“You bastard!” she says.

She elbows Martin in the stomach. He oofs and bends over. He collapses to his knees.

That isn’t a sene-goat at all!

. . .

Posted by on Jun 10, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

“If I were a snake,” Martin mutters, after a while, “I could have bit you.”

“If you were a goat, I could have cut myself!”

. . .

Posted by on Jun 11, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Martin giggles. “It was just so cute seeing you divining stuff there. What happened to the other one?”

“Other one?”

“You know,” he says. “The sun-eating wolf!”

She punches him.

However, such is her immortal compassion that it does not hurt.

“All right, all right,” Martin says. “Sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“I was worried,” Martin shrugs. “One day I realized that I was raising a gigantic sun-eating wolf. I thought, oh, man, people are totally not going to understand how this happened.”

“How did it happen?”

Martin waves a hand vaguely. People wouldn’t understand.

“The point is,” Martin says, “I absolutely had to go and study killing gigantic wolves at the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth. There was no alternative! I mean, they actually have a program. I missed you too, you know.”

“You didn’t absolutely have to,” Jane says. “That’s just your phrase for what you decided to do!”

Martin sighs. He pulls a bit of newspaper out of Jane’s hair. Jane is ridiculously startled, having forgotten that things like that can actually be removed.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 11, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Martin sits down.

“Anyway,” he says, “I graduated! I got a certificate and everything.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “That’s useful.”

“Aww,” he says. “Does someone not have a certificate from all her years of shuttling between increasingly baroque and terrifying foster homes?”

She squints at him. He shrugs.

“Your sources of knowledge disturb me,” she says. “Are you a Taoist demon?”

“It’s a good school,” Martin says.

“A goat?”

“That’s just mean,” says Martin.

“You wanted me to think you were a goat!”

“That could have been anybody,” Martin says, “interfering with your divination like that. We should form a crime-fighting duo and hunt the real culprits down. Or a detective agency!”

“Really,” she says. She sighs.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 12, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

The fire flickers.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 12, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

“Want to go back to Bibury and live in a nuclear wasteland?” Martin proposes, after a while.

“Nah,” Jane says. “Three eyes is enough already.”

. . .

Posted by on Jun 12, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

“Ipswich?”

Jane looks at her toes. She wriggles them. “I have feet,” she observes.

“Showoff.”

She squints at Martin. After a moment, she nods. “Let’s Ipswich!” she agrees.

. . .

Posted by on Jun 12, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

She’s really quite awfully peeved with him; even still; but sometimes you have to let the little things go.

Posted by on Jun 12, 2013 in Stomping the World Round: Epilogue | 0 comments

Rock