“Then it is settled!” Frem yelled. “Why should the future dragon emperor of the dragoons deny himself the splendor of his own plucking should he fancy a handful of seeds? Should he suffer his own desires in vain, unsatisfied?” He laughed a long, uproarious laughter. It kept going, and going, and going.

  When he was done, he looked at Windston, smiling, fangs bared. His eyes were crazed, his hair was wild, and his hands lit with a simmering blaze.

  “We are the most powerful boys in the world,” he finally said. “Super powered and free. I knew this as soon as we fought side-by-side for the first time.”

  Windston nodded, suddenly staring at his sword. He shrugged. “We are,” he said, nodding.

  “Damn right we are!” Frem yelled. “I can fly,” he said, leaping. “I can shoot!” he said, firing a flurry of blasts at the burning woods ahead. “And I will have nine dragons!” he yelled.

  “Or eight,” Windston said.

  “Why only eight?” Frem asked.

  “Because I'll need one too!” Windston shouted.

  “We'll take over the world!” Frem yelled.

  “And do whatever we want!” Windston yelled.

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  “We're super kids!” Frem shouted as loud as he possibly could. “Hear us roar!”

  Windston immediately fell backward in surprise. “Super kids?” he asked. “But I've been dying to be one for forever. How did you...?”

  Frem laughed and, with that, grabbed his bag and booked it north, Windston chasing after him. They found Rat Road, Old Rat Road and hauled butt. They ran and glided faster than they had ran or glided before in what became a race north. There were slices here, blasts there, and fists full of splinters from wild punches. Carriage folk they passed shuttered and quailed; horses flinched and whinnied; dogs, cats, raccoons and bears alike scattered in fright at the sight of them. The super kids were on the loose for the very first time ever, and they were having a blast – literally, in some cases.

  In another case, they got a little carried away. A wrestling match in the treetops ensued, and they were tossing and flipping and throwing one another. At one key point, they barreled down atop a campfire surrounded by men, and those men were bandits. They were still brushing embers and coughing as the scattering men regrouped. One of them let out a chuckle.

  “Didn’t you just say you were hungry for something that ain't fish, Tom?”

  “Hungry?” Frem asked. “Eat this!” he said and shot a blast right at the man's gaping mouth.

  Blood misted and the fight was on.

  Bandits are skilled robbers, muggers and fighters. But these boys were not the sort these bandits were used to messing with. Knives couldn't stick them, and axes couldn't cleave them. And yet the boys' own devices worked perfectly. A bandit exploded here, another there. Limbs flew and heads rolled. The boys were merciless and brutal. All of Windston's years of frustration and anger and rage poured out at once as the blood flowed and cries rang shrill. Frem had his own issues to work out.

  One last bandit stood, and he ran toward Windston raging and waving an axe wildly about. Windston grabbed the axe by the blade with his good hand and, with his left, punched the bandit straight through the mouth and out the other side. There he stood, a bandit dangling from his elbow, impaled through the face and head on his arm. It was as disgusting as it was glorious.

  By the time they were finished, they needed a bath and new clothes. Fortunately, a waterfall fell strong to the immediate north and east of the bandit camp, along a ridge of rock, and a stream trickled not too far south and west from it, one with fish traps full of wiggly fish.

  And there were chests in a broken wagon stuffed with garments and jewels. Frem grabbed a couple bracelets, and Windston took a woodpecker whistle Frank had given him off its twine and threaded it with gold rope. They were as clean as they were stylish, as full as they were satisfied, and finding more and more gold here and there as they searched.

  This bandit camp turned out to be a slaver camp as well. They found three very skinny people in a rusty little cage on the back of a small wagon. They let them out to eat but the slaves ran off screaming and moaning instead. Apparently, they had seen what had happened to their captors and didn't much approve, despite the freeing.

  Windston and Frem didn't care. They laughed as they stood on a nearby table, looking over their booty, their field of victory. This was step one of what would be their rise of power over the worldwide forces of evil. How lucky they were to have found bandits so soon, to practice their craft, the craft of slaying wicked men and women, and freeing the innocent.

  “Be you wary!” Frem shouted. “All ye bandits and pirates and scallywags! Avast! Ye shall find yer swift end at my hand! Repent! Give back what ye have taken, ye fleas, ye scourge!”

  “Ye varmints!” Windston added.

  “Ye mongrels! For I take pity not on you, but on your victims! Watch them flee in fear!” he yelled, looking down the road at the hobbling slaves. “Watch them stumble!” he laughed.

  Windston chuckled as one of the slaves tripped and fell because he had been looking over his shoulder rather than ahead.

  “Watch them, panic stricken and feeble. They art our flock! They art our peasant folk!”

  “Our sheep!” Windston said. “We are not wolves! The bandits are wolves!”

  “We are... their savior?” Frem asked, looking at Windston, who shrugged. They both laughed. “I think they're more scared of us than the bandits.”

  “I would be,” Windston said.

  “Which reminds me,” Frem said. “En Garde!”

  “Aye!” Windston yelled, blocking a very swift knife swipe from Frem. They were at it again, rolling and tumbling, dirtying their new clothes. They were ferocious, and vicious, and terrifying to behold. But even still, they were children. There was a lot they still didn't know, a lot that could come in handy on their journey. For one thing, rumors spread, and not all rumors come out at the end exactly how they start. For another, they were being watched by a living dead man.

  The boys didn't know that. Therefore, they didn't care. They were in fact as carefree as they were careless. They continued their brawling well into the night, breaking sword after sword, knife after knife, until they were down to their fists. Frem hit hard, that was for sure, but even he couldn't inflict pain on Windston. Windston, on the other hand, as quick as he was, could hardly land a glancing blow on Frem. Frem was like a cat whereas Windston was like a dog.

  The boys eventually tired themselves and crashed beside the dead and their dying fire. They dreamed of battling ghosts all night and awoke as tired as they had slept.

  Together, on a log high up on the ridge to the east, they ate jerky for dinner, honeycomb for dessert, and one after another of these very gushy fruits they had found by the box load near the slave cage. Each fruit was grape-shaped and about as big as a pecan, maybe bigger. The outside was very chewy, and the inside was liquid. The liquid burst in their mouths with each bite in what was a mildly sweet and refreshingly crisp explosion. Frem was the first to take a big bite. He laughed and handed a few to Windston, told him he'd had them before, when he was down south near the Southern Fall.

  “They're so good,” he said. “I had like five of them. Oh man. So good. But they make you drunk or something. Or maybe whatever it is you feel after you smoke. I felt so weird. Everything was so weird. But I never threw up.”

  The truth was that they didn't make you drunk. Nor did they make you high. Zephyr had its special maple mead, and Wile had its special grapes. These grapes really were grapes, only they were different. They were bigger, juicier, and zestier than normal grapes. And they were full of a chemical compound found in abundance in nothing else. They were potent. And they were a delicacy enjoyed by most within Gorrals, and the very rich within six-hundred miles of Gorrals thought they were worth buying by the barrel.

  After they finished the box, they launched themselves down the cliff and plopped hard on the ground. Windston spit grass and Frem plucked a thorny vine from his sleeve, both of them laughing hysterically.

  The trip north was also very funny to them, but very slow too, because they were so often teetering. They found themselves full to bursting of song... and piss. Lots of singing, lots of pissing. A song here, a piss there. About four miles in they realized they were headed south and turned around, which was all the more hilarious to them.

  By the time noon rolled around they were back where they started, where they decided it was about as good a time as any to stop for lunch, and maybe a couple more of those delicious berry things. Turns out, they had missed a whole box, which had been stashed under the slave cage. On it, Frem read the words, “Authentic Gooshberries of the Southern Wile,” and nodded. “That was it,” he said. “I remember that now.”

  They took a seat on the floor of the cage and had a couple more. They locked themselves inside to prove how easy it would be to get out, only it wasn't.

  But they did get out, after they realized an armed bandit had been sleeping behind the cage under a pile of petals and beside a toppled box of spilled gooshberries, and these ones were green.

  He was haggardly and old, his mouth all but vacant of teeth. He was hacking all the sudden, which was how they realized he was there. He was sitting up, and his eyes were crossed.

  “Check it out,” Frem said to Windston. “There's more,” he said.

  Windston noticed, although it was hard to focus on any one berry.

  He bent a bar, and then another, and tried squeezing out.

  The pressure was immense, and he got stuck for a minute; but with a few grunts and a lot of help from Frem, he fell out the other side and rolled over the bandit – who sat up swinging a dagger – and grabbed one of the green berries.

  Frem crawled over him and grabbed one too.

  The bandit, whose eyes still crossed, just laughed.

  “Well, I'll be,” he said. “Looks like you boys are thinking what I'm thinking.”

  Frem smiled at him. “Maybe,” he said, tossing back a berry. He laughed, his eyes narrowed.

  The bandit smiled bigger, revealing a mouth full of a mixture of gooshberry skins and flower petals.

  “We killed your friends,” Windston said.

  “Oh yeah?” The bandit peered over the bottom of the cage, through the bars at at least one dead bandit. “Well,” he said, his eyes wide, his head bobbing slowly this way, then that way, “you know what I say.” He looked at Frem, and then at Windston. “A friend's as good as a friend can be until they ain't yer friend no more.” He smacked his lips and nodded.

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  Windston ignored him, ate another berry. Frem did the same, only he was staring at the bandit.

  The two boys fell asleep where they were shortly after. When they awoke, the fire was going, and the dead bandits were gone.

  The live bandit was feeding the fire. He had found a fish, and it was stuck with a spit above the flames.

  “There they are,” he said when he noticed them.

  They were stumbling his way, smiling because, although the world was still spinning, they felt fine. In fact, they felt like having more berries. And maybe some fish.

  And so that's what they did. Fester, as it turned out he was called, was a very fine bandit. A very fine bandit indeed, Frem said with his arm around him. “You are a gentleman,” he said, poking his chest. Their eyes were locked in what was the most sincere and friendly moment either of them had had in their entire lives. “I mean it.”

  The three of them did all sorts of wonderful things that day.

  They danced in-sync with one another atop a shallow waterfall, something that involved swaying first this way, the arms following in a scoop, the feet stepping, and then the other, same thing – repeat.

  They peed over the edge of that same waterfall together, all at the same time.

  They drew animals and monsters in a cave, art that would perhaps be discovered during an excavation hundreds of years later and mistaken for ancient artifacts thousands of years old.

  They stood around all the gathered up boots and shoes of all the dead bandits, which they pledged they'd donate to the poor.

  They threw those same boots at what were at first angry, and then frightened, passersby from behind a giant boulder atop a low-lying cliff along the edge of Rat Road, Old Rat Road.

  They even found more treasure, a wagon full of crystals hidden beneath a black tarp. They were all red, all shiny, and all humming. They hid them in the cave they found nearby, blocked it with a pile of rubble and marked it with their new best friends forever flag, which was a bit of fabric they found near the slave cage they'd tied to a stick.

  Most interesting, though, and even a bit sobering, was when they spotted the thing in the sky. It was way up high. They saw it between clouds while they cloud watched. They had found animals and booby ladies and all sorts of other shapes in the clouds – swords and dragons and even a wiener – before they noticed this thing.

  “What do you think it is?” Frem asked, trying very hard to focus despite an odd sensitivity in his eyes.

  “I don't know,” Windston said.

  “Looks like... a basket,” Fester said. “A basket dangling from a balloon.”

  “A ba-what?” the boys both asked; and then they laughed.

  “A balloon,” Fester said. “It's like a bag of air that goes up, up, up.”

  The boys tried to focus on it again, only they couldn't.

  “I wonder what's in it,” Frem said.

  “No doubt treasure,” Fester said.

  “Treasure?!” Frem exclaimed, his eyes wide.

  Fester nodded. “Probably golden bunny rabbits or bushels of chocolates.”

  “Windston,” Frem said, pointing up and back, but not at all at the balloon. “We gotta get that thing down.”

  Windston wasn't looking at Frem. He was looking at what appeared to be more balloons. A lot more. They just seemed to come into focus, as if they had just appeared. Only, the truth was simpler: they fell slowly into view from very, very, very high heights.

  “Well,” Windston said, just as Frem said “whoa” at noticing more, “go ahead and shoot at em.”

  “Don't mind if I do,” Frem said, standing, teetering.

  “Steady,” Fester said. “Steady.”

  But that was an impossible request. Frem fired like mad, straight up in the air, over and over and over again.

  For over a minute.

  Finally, something popped. There was an explosion. A flaming balloon raced down trailing a giant woven box whose door flew open and shut.

  Its path led it directly over the boys, and it landed with a thud not too far behind them, against a rising cliff-face further east of Rat Road.

  Immediately, with a smile, both boys darted off, leaving Fester alone, who lay still and smiling as he stared up at the sky.

  Windston was the first to find the balloon, and Frem swooped down only moments after he realized there was no treasure at all.

  In fact, there were only bugs. Worms, to be exact. Or caterpillars. These larva things with six little legs at the front and whose ends smoked plumes of dusty black filth; they wiggled about rather than crawled, vomiting, stinking, pressing stingers out of their smoking butts at nothing and each other.

  “Gross!” Frem said, kicking the basket. Black dusty smoke billowed, covering them with what looked like soot.

  “Nice!” Windston said, shaking himself off. “You're an idiot.”

  “Who would do this?” Frem asked, gagging. “Like, seriously; who would put a bunch of worms up in the sky? And why would they do that?”

  “I don't know,” Windston said, but he had noticed something; a scatter of worms trailing back from where they'd come. Apparently, they had spilled out while they had fallen. They were probably covering fester.

  They followed the trail back to Fester. He was dead.

  Something had been standing over him. It presently walked away from him. He was slumped over and in a brown robe, pale white as if he was dead too.

  “Fester!” Frem yelled. “Holy crap! I think he's dead!”

  Windston just stared at the brown robed person, unable to speak. However, as it slipped into the woods and out of view, Windston forgot all about it. His eyes found Fester, whose face was purplish and whose eyes were bulging, glassy and reddening. “Looks like he choked,” Windston said, pointing.

  “He's covered in worms!” Frem shouted, brushing them off. “They're... eating him!” he said, batting more away.

  It was true. They were eating him. They were curled up on him like fire ants, their butts injecting him with venom and their pincers gnawing away.

  Frem spent the better part of a minute kicking and stomping at the worms. But it seemed like the more worms he kicked away, the more there were.

  And it was true. Windston couldn't figure out why until one landed on his arm. At first, he very suspiciously watched the crawling ground to see if he could see a hopper or two. But none hopped. Instead, they plopped – hundreds of them. They fell to and plopped on the ground by the dozen. He looked up and, to his surprise, saw more and more of those baskets, as well as hundreds of specks that were indeed worms.

  “It's raining deadly worms!” he exclaimed.

  Frem wailed in horror. He launched blast after blast skyward until half a dozen balloons came crashing down. The problem was that more appeared. More and more and more. Hundreds of balloons carrying boxes faded into view, appearing blue and translucent at first, almost misty, and then very clearly.

  Windston coughed.

  Frem kept firing. Windston coughed violently. And then there was what sounded like a faint bubbling. Or maybe it was a puttering. It was something rhythmic, but also quiet. But it was getting louder.

  It was growing closer. It came from their left. It was shrouded by trees.

  It got louder. And louder. And louder. And then it got quieter.

  “What... the freaking... heck?” Frem said.

  Windston scrambled up a tree. It was difficult to do so, what with all the teetering clumsiness caused by the berries. But he managed to climb.

  What he saw, far off, headed south and then wheeling west, was one very wide, almost rectangular, balloon. It wasn't like the others, which were a patchwork of red and white. It had a patch of green, a patch of red, a patch of white, and a patch of blue. Four patches bound by thread and fastened to the boxes by ropes formed one rectangular balloon. And something that made a putter, putter, putter, softly and quietly, but consistently, lay flat against the forward-facing surface of the box.

  It wheeled north. And then it rose. It rose high, quickly. It was a rectangular balloon with rounded edges, and, fastened by ropes below it, there was a rectangular box. It wasn't woven, like the basket from before; it was solid wood, more rigid, and there were windows.

  It rose high as if it had been caught in a thermal. And then it wheeled north, steadied, and tilted so that it faced downward at the boys. In front, over the windshield of what was a carriage of sorts, were two spinning fans, the source of the putter-putter.

  It was an airship, and it descended slowly their way.

  A chill ran down Windston's spine, but even it was interrupted by a very loud trumpet blast that came directly from the box.

  An arm protruded from one of the side windows, and it waved wildly.

  “Shoot it!” Windston yelled.

  Frem fired one shot. The box and balloon exploded in a sudden burst of planks and flaming fabric.

  One man fell as well. He kicked and squirmed, and then launched forward as a long and sharp flame shot out from a pack on his back. He moved faster than anything they'd ever seen, but only briefly, as his destination was the side of a very high cliff. There, he exploded, and bits of him fell to the ground.

  The boys panted heavily. Things had gotten very weird very fast.

  “We were having fun just ten minutes ago,” Frem said.

  Windston nodded, his eyes wide; he suddenly remembered the robed person and wondered how he hadn't.

  Frem gestured skyward. “But I guess we've got work to do.”

  It was just then that Windston glanced upward and happened to notice what looked like a giant something stretching out from behind a very puffy collection of clouds. It was so long, and so wide, the black stretching thing, that, by the time it was halfway out, it looked as though it would end up bigger than one singular cumulus cloud.

  “What is that?!” Frem yelled, fluttering to the ground and stumbling briefly to a fall when he got there.

  “It's like a flying boat,” Windston said. His heart was in his stomach.

  It was halfway out. It appeared to be concave underneath, the edges lower than the middle. The edges were bright, like cold steel, and the underside was a dull black. What Windston first noticed turned out to be the nose of this thing. It was flat, and its sides widened ever so slightly as it reached back toward the rear. On either side, the rear fanned out.

  Completely out in the open, it looked a bit like a flying kite shield with harsh angles, and there didn't appear to be any reason why it should stay airborne. No glow. No shimmer. No fan. No balloon. And it made no noise; there was only a low hum that reverberated deep in the bones that could've belonged to anything else.

  “Should I?” Frem asked, just as it let out a very loud, drawn out horn call that rumbled the tree beneath Windston's feet.

  “Yes!” Windston yelled, his hands clamped to his ears.

  Frem fired. He fired and fired and fired and fired. But when the blasts exploded, he stopped. They were like tiny pops against an invisible field around the massive hull, and they appeared to have done absolutely nothing to what was now, as it was close enough to hear, this growling, humming machine.

  It was three-hundred meters at its widest point and a kilometer long at its longest.

  There was another several calls that came along with the long grumbling one from above.

  And then there were dots that became more of the smaller manned balloon ships like the one Frem shot down.

  They let loose a flurry of something – flaming matter of some sort. And then the very large ship shot down twin rays of sustained green energy that cut into the ground like jets of water into mud, leaving smoldering trails of melted sand and flaming dust.

  Twice this ship shot down these green rays. They crossed this way and that like searchlights near the boys. Both times, the boys scrambled aimlessly.

  Finally, Windston gathered his wits and made a break for his sword, which he was pretty sure he'd left somewhere on the ground near Fester.

  Frem followed him.

  Both of them skidded to a stop atop the cliff where Fester lay.

  There, between Fester and them, hunched over and admiring Windston's sword, was a hooded and robed figure. Its face was shrouded, but its hands and arms, bared halfway up the forearm, were visible. There in those places, it was naked, and it was white, the gray-white skin of a dead or dying young man.

  It stood and looked at them, its face nothing more than a blur or a smear and swirling from the inside out with what could only be described as ambiguity in motion. It was not like smoke or anything like it, as it was not like anything material, but rather more unlike anything at all.

  “Oh my God,” Frem said in a panic, raising his arms and shooting at the thing.

  It held a hand out and the blasts slowed in a field of blurred air before fading.

  It stepped over the sword and toward Windston, a hand outstretched to him. Both boys recoiled in terror.

  The black ship continued to rain hell behind them, the bandit camp, and the field it was in, now a steaming pit of endless abyss.

  The being continued toward them and reached down its hand as if to steady Windston with a gesture. Windston froze. He felt sick from head to toe, and then there was warmth on his abdomen as all went black.

  Frem watched in horror; the creature had lifted its robe, revealing that it had nothing at all in terms of private parts. There was only smooth skin, as gray white as the rest of it. From its tailbone, a stinger protruded and throbbed rhythmically. As it squatted over Windston, its stinger dripped green smoldering ooze that pooled on Windston’s stomach. Where it leaked over his side, grass burned.

  There were voices overhead. Men from all sorts of box balloons dangled from them by ropes before dropping to a free-fall, boosting away as fire propelled then forward from their backs. They surrounded the boys and the swirl-faced being. They surrounded them and then launched an attack.

  The being sprouted wings like a dragonfly’s and flew upward with a buzz.

  Windston came to, grabbed his sword, and immediately began to fight. Men fell all around them, and there was a vaguely familiar voice yelling louder than a voice can yell from the sky, and in a language they couldn't understand.

  The black ship turned so that its nose was over them.

  The swirl-face launched downward at the boys, poised for attack.

  Just as it was about to fall down on Frem, a dead man all in black except for his face, leaped up and over the cliff-side and plowed foot-first into the swirl-face’s side.

  They both tumbled, and then they began to fight.

  The dead man wielded spikes, powder white, one in each hand, each three feet long.

  The swirl-face fought back with similar spikes that extended from its forearm at the wrists.

  They were fast, sometimes airborne, sometimes tumbling, but they always landed on their feet.

  During a pause, the dead man kicked Windston in the side, and used Frem, who flew after him, as a means to kick himself downward and toward Windston for one final blow.

  The swirl-face, who dived after Windston, found himself evading blasts from Frem instead.

  All four of them plummeted toward the pit in the ground where the ship had torn the earth.

  But the swirl-face flew up, and Frem flew after him as the dead man tossed a grappling hook and Windston sunk beneath the surface of the earth.

  There, he fell. He fell and fell as the dead man climbed and Frem chased after the swirl.

  After a brief skirmish, Frem fell too. He fell first, and then he flew after Windston, determined to catch him, stop his fall.

  But alas, deep beneath the earth, where the light could not reach them, he lost his way.

  Neither could see as they fell for what felt like an eternity.

  Into blackness, the unknown, they fell and fell and fell.

  The dead man watched. He watched until he could not see them anymore as he dangled from his hooked rope; and then he looked upward and listened, but there was no more fighting. There was only a steady humming that grew louder as it hovered upward past the boys, past the dead man, and into the light of day. It was shaped like a lozenge, crimson like blood and ten feet long at the longest. It rose upward into the shadow of the black ship while silent men searched for the swirl-face and the buzzing swirl flew away in a thickening rain of worms north, away from the commotion.