Part 1 of the The World Can’t Wait series

UG woke up on the beach towel for the third morning running. The umbrella above him had held through the night, more or less, and Tangkresh was still standing exactly where he’d left it, a few feet off, doing absolutely nothing except being enormous and vaguely on watch, which was really all UG had ever asked of it. Beside the pillow lay an axe he had no memory of bringing, and a book with a cracked spine he’d been meaning to start for longer than he cared to admit.

The hammock, slung under the treehouse floor same as always, was still there and still worked exactly as well as it always had. He simply hadn’t fancied it in three nights, not since the pale thread creeping up toward the still-unopened door had put on what looked uncomfortably like a fortnight’s growth in under a week. Sleeping in a hammock directly beneath the thing had started to feel less like admirable commitment and more like an invitation, so the towel and pillow had come out onto open sand instead, where at least he’d see anything coming before it arrived.

He told himself this was temporary. He did not tell himself the other thing, which was that there was an entire war somewhere past the horizon that he had signed up for roughly a year ago and had, since then, found seventeen increasingly elaborate reasons not to attend.

The letter arrived before breakfast, delivered by the Brontosaurus mail carrier he’d bought because it seemed practical at the time and now half regretted, mostly because owning the single largest creature on the island meant there was no missing a delivery, however badly he might have wanted to.

UG,

Word reaches me you’ve taken up harpoon fishing off Zul’Aman. Good for you. Everyone should have a hobby, and I’m told the water out there is lovely this time of year, assuming you can see anything through it, which I understand is also part of the appeal.

I’ve had a look through what you’ve brought back. Mostly string. Some shell fragments, unclear purpose. One extremely fine set of shoulder pads, which I’ll admit look very well on you, and which I am reliably informed cannot be sold, worn by anyone else, or converted into gold by any method known to either of us.

I raise all this only because I understand there is, separately, a rather significant problem developing involving the void, possibly several dragons, and by some accounts the fate of quite a lot of things at once. I had assumed this would take priority over the shoulder pads. I no longer feel confident assuming that.

There is work. There has been work for some time. I only mention it because someone has to, and lately that someone appears to be me.

— Nobbybanks

UG folded the letter with the particular care of a man buying himself a few extra seconds, and watched the Brontosaurus lumber back down the beach, mail satchels swinging, at a pace that suggested it had nowhere else to be and several decades to get there.

He was still holding the letter when his eyes drifted, unbidden, to the barrel sitting a few feet from the towel — squat, faintly rusted, marked with the same dull green warning paint as the ones piled up at the dump back at Founder’s Point. He had no real memory of bringing one all the way out to Razorwind Shores, only a vague sense that it had seemed sensible at the time, the way most of his decisions did in retrospect. What he did notice, looking at it properly now, was the grass around it, gone in a neat spreading circle — the same thing that had been happening to the grass back home, where a whole row of identical barrels had been quietly at work for weeks. If it could kill grass here and kill grass there, with that kind of reliable, patient consistency, it occurred to him, slowly and with a faint flicker of something that felt suspiciously like hope, that it might do the same to a certain pale thread currently creeping its way toward a door he still hadn’t opened.

“Huh,” he said, to Tangkresh, who did not answer, on account of being a Voidwalker, and also because it had heard this tone of voice before, and knew exactly where it led.

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More in the The World Can’t Wait series

Next: II. A Controlled Experiment →