The Book Burning Maggots, a You Can't Spell Hatred Without Red Hats

The Book Burning Maggots

Chapter 1

The wind bit like broken glass across the salt flats, shrieking through rusted street signs and cracked satellite dishes.

Once, this place had been a shopping mall — an American sprawl-palace of food courts, cinema screens, escalators, and retail religion.

Now, it had sunk into disrepair, then ruin, then ice-choked apocalyptic desolation. Its roof was long gone, peeled away by time and tempests.

What was left had become a kind of open-air Human bazaar, stitched together with tarp scraps, hollow refrigerators, and tent poles.

A sun-bleached banner flapped listlessly overhead. It read:

HOLY FIRE TRUTH MARKET — BURN THE LIES, CLEANSE THE MIND.

The wind howled through the shattered remains of the building, a monolithic skeleton jutting from the ice-blasted Earth like a broken tooth.

Ancient steel and rusted rebar framed a vertical slum, a jagged jumble of corrugated iron, tattered awnings, and re-appropriated industrial debris stacked upon itself in defiance of gravity.

Once a bustling shopping mall, now it stood hollow and wind-bitten, the bones of civilization reanimated as a scavenger’s shantytown.

Somewhere in the ruins, muffled by snow and rot, a wolf howled.

Somewhere closer, a generator sputtered to life with a whirr-klang-sput-KA-CHUNK and bathed the streets in faint neon hum.

Quaraun had parked his pink candy-coloured, gold-embellished vardo just outside the skeletal tavern, nestled between the remains of a half-crushed bus and a crumbling concrete wall tagged with glowing graffiti that read:

EAT THE RICH (unless they taste like rats, in which case, EAT THE RATS).

A string of solar fairy-lights, scavenged and re-wired by GhoulSpawn, draped the awning of the vardo in a soft pink glow. On hand-carved cherry wood shelves, resplendent bolts of embroidered silk shimmered with iridescent hues, folded with maddening precision and sealed beneath domes of transparent polymer to keep out the snow. Bars of rose-and-sheep-milk soap arranged like apothecary specimens filled the air with a heady floral tang. Beeswax candles in twisted pottery vases glowed faintly, their flames flickering beneath protective glass domes.

Beside the vardo, a robin-egg blue 1968 VW Bus, rebuilt a hundred times with mismatched alloys and ancient auto-parts, belched out mouth-watering smells and white steam from a retrofitted rooftop chimney.

BoomFuzzy stood in his apron — black leather embroidered with purple tartan ponies— tossing pizza dough in the air, its rotation hypnotic. His dreadlocks were wrapped in a feather-adorned purple turban to keep them out of the way, his beaded great kilt sweeping the slush as he danced from oven to counter.

“Come get yerself a slice o’ me mushroom special, or fancy pineapples with roasted green peppers? No rats in it, I promise!” BoomFuzzy bellowed cheerily, tossing a slice of steaming pizza to a soot-smudged Human child bundled in garbage bags and thermal wiring.

The child caught it.

Drooled.

Ran.

“For fuck’s sake, Unicorn!” Quaraun hissed through a frozen sigh, his dainty gloved hand brushing crystalline frost from a silk scarf. “That was the seventh free slice this hour. The seventh, Unicorn. Why even set up your truck if you shall simply dispense free food like some Saint of Starvation?”

“Ain’t starvin’ if I’m feedin’ ’em, eh? We got more cheese than yer got silk, and I ken bake another crust quicker than ya can plait a bloody ribbon, JellyElf.”

Quaraun’s long rabitty ears twitched.

Tinkle-tinkle, went the long dainty silver chains connecting Quaraun nose rings to the earrings in his foot long ears.

Tinkle-tinkle-tinkle.

“My silks are an ancient craft refined across eons. My silk is art. Art, I say. Art and craft. Craft and art.”

“Aye, and ya’re craftier than ya are charitable.”

“One must not encourage indolence. Indolence begets sloth, and sloth begets ruin, and ruin begets ruin. Ruin and ruin. Mmhgff — ”

BoomFuzzy stuffed a mushroom topped pizza slice into Quaraun’s mouth.

Quaraun chewed.

Quaraun scowled.

Quaraun swallowed.

Quaraun nodded.

“Mmm. Acceptable.”

“Acceptable my arse! Ya love me pizza and yar ken it!”

A loud crash and an avalanche of clattering junk interrupted their exchange as GhoulSpawn tripped over a pile of upturned chairs and staggered into the camp, a tangled net of electronic guts dangling from one horn.

“Dudes!” he said breathlessly. “Yo! So like, I just found, like, three server towers, two broken solar panels, a box of VHS tapes labelled Unicorn Porn volumes 1 to 4, a generator that smells like rotted cheese, and — wait for it — a full, working microwave.”

BoomFuzzy paused in mid-cheese drizzle.

“A microwave? What’s it microwavin’? Zombies?”

“Nah man, it’s clean! Like, barely exploded! Gonna use it to build a cryo-wave food dehydrator. Might finally reheat that 700-year-old expired Twinkie I found last Tuesday.”

Quaraun raised a brow.

“You are not placing that aberration of nuclear tampering anywhere near the BioDome. No. Absolutely not. Not and no. No and not.”

“Too late, I already soldered it to the compost processor.”

BoomFuzzy stared.

“Did ya — did ya melt it tae th’ poo unit?”

“I mean… hypothetically.”

“I eat out o’ that dome, ya daft shaggy goat.”

“I’m a sheep.”

“Ya daft either way!”

“I’m, like, ninety percent sure it’s safe now.”

“Ya were ninety percent sure th’ vacuum ya turned into a bidet was safe.”

The Goblin working alongside BoomFuzzy spoke up: “I still cannae grow eyebrows.”

“Eyebrows and regrets. Regrets and eyebrows.” Quaraun muttered, watching a pigeon try to steal a pink silk ribbon.

A ragged Human trader approached Quaraun’s vardo with a tattered tote bag full of broken glass baubles and twisted copper wire. She held up a cracked magnifying glass like it was a holy relic.

“I found coloured glass from a church window,” she said. “Will you trade it for one of your soaps?”

Quaraun leaned in, squinting.

“Cathedral grade stained glass from a Rose Church?”

“Yes. It’s blue. Very blue. And not blue pills!”

“Blue pills?”

“Aye. I need the red glass for me red pill projects, but I don’t want to blue glass. So If you got anything to trade for the blue glass, you can have all I gots.”

“How lovely!” Quaraun examined the glass. “I shall take it. But these are worth far more then one soap. Coloured church glass is very rare.”

BoomFuzzy gave away another slice of pizza.

Quaraun’s eye twitched.

His ears twitched again.

Tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle.

• 1 Pizza Slice (Mushroom) Added to Stomach
• +4 Broken VHS Tapes: “Unicorn Porn” Added to Inventory
• +1 Working Microwave of Questionable Origin Added to Inventory
• +1 Bag of Blue Glass Shards Added to Inventory
• Achievement Unlocked: “Saint of Starvation” (Give Away 20 Slices Without Profit)
• Quaraun gained +5 Moral Outrage
• BoomFuzzy gained +3 Pizza Charisma
• GhoulSpawn gained +1 BioDome Hazard Tech
• Moral of the Story: Charity might feed a belly, but it starves a merchant’s soul.

Chapter 2

Several hours had gone by.

The bustle of morning market goers had died down. BoomFuzzy had run out of people to give free pizza to and was now cooking up large batches for feeding the UnSeelie Court when they got back to camp.

Quaraun was nearly sold out of his wares, and had instructed the Goblins to pack his goods away to get ready to leave, while he went to see what was going on in the other side of the ruins where a large crowd was gathering.

Quaraun stepped lightly over a snow-dusted traffic cone, his pink silk robes swishing with every graceful stride, his jellyfish-hair glimmering in the late afternoon light like stinging tendrils of frozen fire. His cane clicked daintily against concrete.

Click-tap.

Click-tap.

Click-tap.

His nose was wrinkled in distaste.

His ears twitched violently.

Tinkle-tinkle, went the long dainty silver chains connecting Quaraun nose rings to the earrings in his foot long ears.

“I detest this place,” Quaraun muttered to himself. “It is uncouth. Uncouth and base. Base and uncouth.”

“Oi, SugarPlum, where ya goin’?” BoomFuzzy called, jogging behind him with two steaming mugs of chicory-hot chocolate, one of them already half gone.

“Humans are gathering over there. I want to see what is going on.”

“Ah. Well, I made ya some hot chocolate. Found some Human bragging o’ trading goat meat for soap. I want to check it out, before we leave. Want I should wait on that til ya done here?”

“Okay. Take Glinta with you for the goat deal.”

“Gotta find him first. Ain’t seen him for the past hour. Some blokes swear they seen Ghouly crawlin’ outta a trash compactor with a toaster strapped tae his arse.”

“Toaster? What is he doing with a toaster?”

“Probably turn it into a teleport device, knowin’ ‘im.”

“You tell him not to build another hover-bidet,” Quaraun snapped. “And I do not need another laser beam shooting microwave, either!”

“Aye. I’m sure he’ll listen real well tae that.”

Quaraun stopped. His delicate pink nose twitched. There was a smell in the air.

A stench.

A scent of charcoal, ash, and tragedy.

Then —

Crackle.

Hiss.

CRUMP.

“I hear books being burned!” Quaraun gasped.

He turned sharply.

A crowd of ragged Humans had assembled in the mall’s centre court, huddled around a large oil drum, the kind once used to store industrial chemicals, now converted into a makeshift pyre.

Within it, pages curled.

Words blackened.

Covers blistered.

The fire roared with heat and ignorance.

Books.

They were burning books.

Real books.

Thick ones.

Old ones.

Hardbacks.

Quaraun’s heart stopped.

His breath caught.

His inner goddess did somersaults while turning red, white, and blue with rage.

His face contorted with a look of horror usually reserved for baby seal clubbings and limited-edition silk being used as bandages. His ears stiffened straight up, like antennae seeking reason.

He stormed forward.

“Why are you burning books?!”

The nearest Human, a soot-covered woman wearing a gas mask and a necklace made of bottle caps and chicken bones, turned to him with suspicious eyes.

“They’re evil,” she said.

“Evil books?”

“Possessed by demonic knowledge.”

“Demonic — what? These are books written by Humans. Demons did not write these.”

“These books are demonic!”

“These books?”

“These books!”

“They do not look like necronomicons or grimoires. They look like high school science books.”

“Sorcery.”

“What is?”

“Schools!”

“You do not believe in education?”

“Government lies.”

“Well yes. It would not be a government if it was not lying, but what does that have to to with you burning school books?”

“They’re cursed.”

“The government?”

“The BOOKS!”

“These books are cursed?”

“Yes!”

“Who cursed them?”

“The evil libs who wrote them?”

“Libs?”

“Dirty libs.”

Behind the woman, the crowd of Humans started chanting:

“DIRTY LIBS! EVIL LIBS! BURN THE LIBS! BURN THE LIBS! BURN THE LIBS!”

Quaraun’s foot long, pointed ears flatted back low. The crowd was becoming hostile and he was uncertain why.

“What is a lib?” Quaraun asked the woman.

“Blue pills!” The woman shouted.

“What?” Quaraun asked, now even more confused.

“Blue pills!”

“I assure you I am not in need of viagra.”

Behind the woman, the crowd of Humans was chanting:

“BLUE PILLS! BLUE PILLS! BLUE PILLS! BURN THE BLUES! BURN THE BLUES! BURN THE BLUES!”

“Uh-oh,” BoomFuzzy said. He turned to one of his Goblin footmen. “Start packing up. Get the food truck and vardo back to camp. Pack up everything. Hurry. Get every one out of this area. Tell every one to be ready to bug out fast.”

“Trouble, your Majesty?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Not sure yet. Tell Quaraun’s handmaids to get the children packed. We might need get out of here fast.”

The Goblin quickly scurried away to spread the word through The UnSeelie Court.

Meanwhile, the Humans in front of Quaraun continued chanting:

“BLUE PILLS! BLUE PILLS! BLUE PILLS! BURN THE BLUES! BURN THE BLUES! BURN THE BLUES!”

BoomFuzzy, legally blind from birth, born with ocular albinism, was standing too far away to see the Humans whom Quaraun was talking to. But he knew the chant. He had heard it before. He adjusted the settings on his cybertech VR goggles so as to get a better look at the crowd.

“Are you left or right?” The woman asked Quaraun.

“I am neither,” Quaraun answered. Confused, Quaraun held up his bionic gold-plated prosthetic mechanical hands. “My hands are crippled.”

Behind the woman, the crowd of Humans were now chanting:

“LEFTIES SUCK! LEFTIES SUCK! BURN THE LEFT! BURN THE LEFT! BURN THE LEFT!”

“Why do they not like left handed people?” Quaraun asked the woman.

“Quick! Tell me! Red or blue?” The woman demanded.

Quaraun blinked.

Then blinked again.

He looked at the woman.

He looked at the crowd.

He looked back to the woman.

“I do not understand the question,” he said.

“Which pill do you take?” The woman asked Quaraun.

“I take no pills. I am not sick. I am an Elf. We almost never get sick. If we get sick, we use herbs and elixirs. We Elves have no need for pills.”

BoomFuzzy moved closer to Quaraun and took his arm.

“Love, we should leave.”

“They are burning books,” Quaraun said obstinately.

“Are you red or blue?” The woman shrieked at Quaraun.

“I am clearly wearing pink,” Quaraun said to her.

BoomFuzzy leaned close to Quaraun's ear and whispered: “Look at their hats, Love.”

Quaraun looked at the woman.

She was wearing a red hat.

Quaraun looked at the crowd.

They were wearing red hats too.

Quaraun had not noticed the sea of red hats.

“Red hats.”

“Aye.”

“Maggots.”

Quaraun looked back to where his vardo and BoomFuzzy’s food truck were parked, at the crumbling concrete wall tagged with glowing graffiti that read:

EAT THE RICH (unless they taste like rats, in which case, EAT THE RATS)

Quaraun looked at the flags on the ruins:

EAT THE RATS

From the TV screens in the ruins of the mall’s electronics store a familiar shock of orange hair on top the bloated face of a Lich bobbed at the Lich railed his speak of racism and hate.

God King Snollygoster.

“Oh dear. They are followers of Snollygoster.”

“Aye. Bloody Maggots. That’s why all the ‘Eat the Rats’ signs flying around. I didn’t pick up on it earlier. I thought they meant actual rodents. Didn’t realize it was gang flags talking about a rival gang. I keep forgetting Humans dived up into these weird hate groups.”

“Reds and Blues.”

“Aye.”

“The Maggots are Red. Are the Rats Blue?”

“Aye. We should leave, Love.”

“But they are burning books.”

“Aye. And ya ken how the bastards get about needing a detailed list of every sex organ everyone has.”

“But they are burning books.”

“And ya gots too many types of genitals for this crowd.”

“I can not allow books to be burned.”

“Love, ya gots both a penis and a vagina, and these Maggots are members of the cult what slaughters people like you.”

“But they are burning books.”

“Ya’re intersex and transgender, they’ll burn YOU!”

A SWOOSH of the flames roaring higher, distracting Quaraun’s attention away from BoomFuzzy again. The crowd was throwing more books into the fire.

“STOP THAT!” Quaraun shrieked as he swiftly hobbled closer to the flames. “STOP BURNING BOOKS!”

“Gotta burn ‘em.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re books.”

“I will buy them from you.”

“Can’t sell ‘em.”

“Why not?”

“They are cursed!”

“Why?”

“Because they are books!”

“I know they are books! Why are they cursed? How do you know they are cursed?”

“One of ’em told my cousin the world was round.”

“Round?”

“Round!”

“Blasphemy. Sacrilege.” Quaraun gasped, clutched his chest. “Sacrilege and blasphemy.”

“That’s what I said!” the woman crowed. “Every one knows the world is flat!”

“No. You are doing the sacrilege. You are blaspheming knowledge itself! You… you… you… you imbecilic, idiotic, illiterate, innocuous, ignorant, insipid, insolent, indolent ingrates!”

BoomFuzzy cautiously sipped his chocolate.

“Here we go…” he turned to another of his Goblins. “Up the alert. Get the women and children moving now. Head towards the river. Get them as far away for this area as you can. We ain’t getting outta here without a fight. Move. Now!”

Quaraun grabbed the nearest intact book from the stack awaiting cremation. It was a warped and partially mouldy copy of The Advanced Mechanics of Geothermal Condensation: Volume II. He held it aloft like a prophet with a holy tome.

“Do you know what this is?! Do you know?! This is a thousand years of intellectual progression distilled into diagrams, formulae, and annotated footnotes! Do you even know what a footnote is?!”

“Look at the evil secret codes of Satan on the spine!” One man yelled as he pointed to a little white sticker attached to the bottom of the book Quaraun was holding. “It’s the mark of the beast!”

“That is the Dewey Decimal System! It is not a secret code! It is a filing system used by libraries, to know which shelf to put a book back on after you have finished reading it. Did you idiots steal these books from a library?”

Another man in the crowd — tinfoil hat perched on top of his red Maggot hat, tattooed with semi-triangular T-shaped runes drawn in red Sharpie — pointed a shaky finger.

“That book right there tried to teach me about steam power.”

“You say that like it is a bad thing?” Quaraun said, his voice now higher pitched.

“Steam is Satan’s mist!”

“Steam is not Satan’s mist, you leprous brained, ludicrous lunatic, it is the evaporation of heated water!”

“Exactly! Sorcery!”

“Sorcery? Sorcery!” Quaraun let out a strangled sound halfway between a sob and a shriek. “You imbeciles would not know real sorcery if marched up to you and slapped you in the face with smoldering hot chocolate!”

BoomFuzzy gently plucked the mug of hot cocoa from Quaraun’s trembling hand before he could hurl it at the mob.

The crowd began chanting:

“Burn the books! Burn the lies! Save our souls! Blind our eyes!”

“You should not burn things!”

“Burn the books! Burn the lies! Save our souls! Blind our eyes!”

“You will never learn from the past if you burn the records of your history.”

“Salvation! Burn the books! Burn the lies! Save our souls! Blind our eyes!”

“You cannot save your soul by destroying truth!” Quaraun screamed. “That is not how salvation functions! Function and salvation. Salvation and function! There is more truth and functioning salvation in my nipples then in your bigoted, biased, bumbling, bungling brains!”

BoomFuzzy casually handed the mug to a confused child and took Quaraun’s arm before his husband could start laser-beaming people with his nipple rings.

“C’mon now, me wee Pink JellyElf. This mob ain’t gonna learn. They’re too far gone tae understand the Dewey Decimal System, let alone geothermal thermodynamics.”

“But they are destroying knowledge!”

“I ken.”

“Rare knowledge!”

“I can see that.”

“Rare and precious!”

“Ya need to calm down before ya blow up the whole building with that crazy lil JellyBrain of yars.”

“I do not have a brain! I am a JellyFish! We do not have brains!”

“Ayeyep. I can tell.”

“I ought to blow up the entire building! These books have endured a thousand winters, and now — now — these simpletons reduce them to kindling?!”

One of the conspiracy theorists shouted.

“The books talk to me in my sleep!”

“That was probably the tapeworms, ya walloper,” BoomFuzzy yelled back at him.

“Tapeworms?”

“Yep. Yar belly’s right full of ’em. Ya’d know that if yar were reading science books instead of burning ‘em.”

“It’s Satan I tell you!”

A teenage boy wearing a welder’s mask held up a copy of Astronomy for Children and asked.

“This one’s got pictures of the moon. That okay to burn?”

“My Moon!” The old Moon Elf lunged, snatched the book from the boy’s hand. “You were going to burn the Moon!” Quaraun cradled the book against his chest like a wounded puppy. “You will burn this over my cremated corpse!”

“But you said we should not burn things!” the boy whined.

“Yes! Because I am not flammable knowledge, you walking sinus infection!”

Quaraun pulled out his Rainbow Wand and flicked the switch to Black Death Ray. His flamboyant nipple rings calibrated to the same setting.

Just then, GhoulSpawn arrived, dragging a sled made from two shopping carts, overflowing with broken TVs, wire coils, and a box of spoiled cheese. Coils of Christmas light strings hung from his big round ram horns. His cloven hooves clinked across the mall’s broken tile floor as he approached Quaraun.

He looked at the scene and blinked.

“Uh. So, like, is this a cult, or, like, a literacy awareness rally?”

“They are burning books,” Quaraun squeaked hysterically, voice cracking. “And not even for warmth. They believe books are the work of Satan!”

GhoulSpawn dropped his sled.

“Oh hell no.”

“They are insane!”

“Look!” one of the Humans yelled, pointing at GhoulSpawn. “It’s Satan!”

“SATAN!” another Human shrieked, also pointing at the big cloven hooved, curly horned Satyr. “Quick! Burn books faster! Satan is trying to stop us! Drive Satan out! Burn ‘em!”

“Ah!” GhoulSpawn said, nodding. “I see what you mean.”

“Why do Humans always think you are Satan? You look nothing like Satan.”

“It’s the cloven hooves,” GhoulSpawn said, pointing down at his hooves. “And the horns.”

“But Satan Claws is a Leprechaun. He doesn’t have either horns or hooves.”

GhoulSpawn shrugged.

Just then, a flaming book flew past his head.

“Take that Satan!” A Human yelled, throwing another burning book at GhoulSpawn.

“I need your sled and some Goblins,” Quaraun said.

“Why?”

“I have books to save.”

“Oh. Okay. Let me go unload it. Be right back.”

• +1 Partially Burnt Copy of Astronomy for Children Added to Inventory
• +5 Shattered Hopes in Humanity Added to Quaraun’s Emotional Baggage
• +3 Tinfoil Hat Conspiracists Added to Annoying NPCs List
• Achievement Unlocked: “Rage Against the Readingless”
• Quaraun gained +10 Melodramatic Outrage
• BoomFuzzy gained +2 Mug Recovery Reflex
• GhoulSpawn gained +1 Trash Cart Sled Building
• Moral of the Story: When you burn books, you light ignorance — but not in a good way.

Chapter 3

While Quaraun continued his book saving mission, BoomFuzzy returned to his food truck to help the Goblins pack everything up.

BoomFuzzy’s nostrils flared.

Something stank.

Not the usual Human stench of sweat and self-importance, nor the acrid stink of cheap cologne and tinned ravioli. This was a wrong smell.

A metallic tang mixed with blood.

He sniffed again.

Then snarled.

“Sumthin’ ain’t right,” he said, voice suddenly stripped of its usual singsong and dipped instead in molten fury. “Somethin’ wrong’s happenin’. Goat blood. Fresh goat blood. The goats! I plum forgot about the goats!”

He dropped a half-finished pizza in the snow and stormed across the concrete ruins like an oncoming thunderstorm wearing combat boots. His long fluffy purple tail bristled with rage. His boot-steps echoed off the skeletal remains of a collapsed parking garage.

GhoulSpawn, who’d been arguing with a vending machine about metaphysics and why it should not be withholding Moxie cans from him, blinked and trotted after the old Phooka.

“Wait, dude, like — what? Goat blood?! What’d’y’mean goat blood?”

“Some one around here just killed a goat. I can smell it.”

“Why would any one kill a goat?”

“Goat meat,” BoomFuzzy spat. “Humans say they’re tradin’ it. I heard ’em. Talkin’ about goat meat steaks, like it’s a shiny trade good. Murderin’ beasties for bartering.”

GhoulSpawn’s hackles rose under his shaggy golden fleece.

“That’s so not groovy.”

They rounded the corner. A Human street vendor had set up a makeshift stand beneath the shattered shell of a stairwell. A rusted grill crackled over scavenged wiring.

Flies buzzed.

Hanging on meat hooks, half-skinned goat carcasses swung gently in the wind.

BoomFuzzy saw red.

Not just blood-red.

Rage-red.

Unicorn red.

Screaming Unicorn red.

The red of ancient wrath.

Of forest fury.

Of old magic older than the moon and twice as cruel.

The vendor looked up from his grisly work.

“Hey there, friend!”

“I am not ya friend. I am King Gwallmaiic, Elf Eater of Pepper Valley, Lich Lord of Fire Mountain, King of The UnSeelie Court, Protector of the Animals.”

“Uhm… Okay. Lookin’ to trade? Got fresh cuts. Nice haunches — ”

SHRIIINK — BoomFuzzy’s machete hissed from its sheath. A wicked gleam danced along the blade’s edge.

“I ain’t yer friend,” he growled.

“What? Wait, now — hold on, let’s talk — ”

The vendor’s words were severed mid-sentence.

Literally.

BoomFuzzy didn’t pause.

Didn’t explain.

Didn’t give mercy.

Steel sang.

Limbs flew.

Screams echoed.

Heads rolled across the ground.

Blood splattered across the snow like abstract art painted in vengeance.

By the time GhoulSpawn caught up, dragging a modified shopping trolley fitted with speakers and solar panels, BoomFuzzy was already unhooking the remaining goats — alive ones, shaking and bruised, hidden in cages behind the stall.

“Oh my god,” GhoulSpawn whispered, eyes wide. “What did you do?”

“Saved ya wee lil goat friends. They were eatin’ ‘em.”

“They were gonna — “ GhoulSpawn’s eyes met the dead goats hanging from hooks. “Oh no. No no no.”

He rushed to the cages, fumbling the locks with trembling fingers, babbling in a panic.

“Hey there, little guys, you’re safe now, it’s okay, we got you, like, no more horror stew for you, you beautiful woolly souls, come on, come with Uncle GoatSpawn — uh, GhoulSpawn — dammit I’m upset — Boomie can we take them back to camp?!”

“Aye.”

BoomFuzzy’s voice was low.

Deadly.

Reverent.

“Every single one.”

GhoulSpawn scooped up a terrified baby goat and held it close to his chest.

“I swear, if they touched a single ear on these precious babies — ”

“They’ll nae be touchin’ nuthin’ again,” BoomFuzzy said grimly.

The two herded the small rescued flock back toward the vardo encampment, with GhoulSpawn singing a weepy rendition of Goat Riders in the Sky.

When they arrived, Quaraun looked up from where he’d been lecturing a conspiracy theorist about atmospheric pressure and lunar tides, his hands still smudged with ash and ink from salvaged books.

“You are covered in gore,” Quaraun said as BoomFuzzy sauntered up to him.

“Humans were butcherin’ goats.” BoomFuzzy grunted.

“Oh.” Quaraun blinked, then nodded solemnly. “Did you chop them to pieces? The Humans, I mean.”

“Aye. For the goats.”

“Good.”

“Yer covered in ash.”

“Humans were burning books.”

“Aye. Where’d they go? The Humans. Ya had a whole mob here about to toss ya in the fire with the books.”

Quaraun pointed to the smouldering piles of blackened ask. A tin foil hat was sitting, unburned, on top of one of the black ask piles. A charred gasmask sat on another.

BoomFuzzy looked around at all the stacks of books his Goblin servants were rushing by with.

“Considering we seem to have added quite a few pallet loads of books, I can assume ya incinerated the Humans and rescued the books?”

“Of course.”

One of the baby goats bleated and licked Quaraun’s hand. He gave it a piece of freeze-dried apple from his inventory pouch.

“Little darling. Precious and small. Small and precious.”

• +1 Shopping Trolley Goat Sled Added to Inventory
• +9 Shivering Baby Goats Added to Caravan Herd
• Achievement Unlocked: “Bleat the Butcher”
• BoomFuzzy gained +12 Righteous Goat Rage
• GhoulSpawn gained +9 Animal Rescue Hippie Karma
• Quaraun gained +2 Goat Cuddles and Apple Bits
• Moral of the Story: If you kill goats, BoomFuzzy will kill you.

Chapter 4

A few hours later, back at camp…

The pink silk tent flapped gently in the midnight breeze.

Ice winds howled outside like vengeful ghosts too poor to buy shoes, but inside the shimmering folds of Quaraun’s glitter-drenched canopy, it was a boiling mess of partly burned books, baby beasts, and bubbling baby bottles.

Quaraun sat in the middle of it all like a livid librarian at the heart of a riot. He was buried — enthroned — in teetering piles of salvaged, soot-smudged books. His twelve-foot jellyfish-hair writhed in mild indignation as he flipped through a scorched chemistry textbook with singed corners and soot-stained pages.

“The audacity. The ignorance. The unforgivable foolishness,” Quaraun seethed. “Burning books! Burning knowledge! Pages and parchment! Manuscripts and maps! Entire volumes of research and records and recipes and romanticized regional rhubarb rituals! Lost! Lost and burnt! Burnt and lost!”

His hair hurled a melted paperback across the tent, where it harmlessly bounced off GhoulSpawn’s head.

“Dude!” GhoulSpawn yelped, stumbling backward into a pile of blankets, a goat, and a very startled chamber pot.

“Get those goats under control!”

“I’m trying!” GhoulSpawn shouted, as nine baby goats exploded through the tent, like chaos wearing hooves. “They’re like, turbo-charged or something! I think one of them just ate a glow stick!”

“Good. Then it shall be visible,” Quaraun snapped, flinging another scorched tome over his shoulder. “For I am losing track of the quantity! One, two, three, four — Where is the stripey one?!”

“She’s under your embroidery frame!”

“Blast!”

A goat bleated from beneath a pile of brocade as Quaraun’s long ears twitched furiously, silver chains jingling like angry sleigh bells. He reached down and retrieved the stripey goat, which promptly head-butted a jar of ink off the low table and sent it rolling across the pink silk rugs.

BoomFuzzy, somehow calm amid the storm, sat by the tent’s stove. A battered copper kettle steamed gently beside him. He stirred sheep's milk in wide-necked glass baby bottles with a long-handled spoon, pausing only to add a dollop of powdered kelp or a pinch of powdered apples.

“Milk’s ready, me wee Ghouly,” BoomFuzzy said over the din. “Come get it ‘fore the tent becomes a petting zoo in a blender.”

GhoulSpawn dove, skidded, rolled, and popped up holding a bleating goat under one arm and a bottle in the other.

“Operation GoatSnack is go!”

The tent filled with squeaks, bleats, and satisfied glug-glug-glugging sounds as the baby goats swarmed GhoulSpawn like soft hooved piranhas. He fell backwards, laughing helplessly as tiny hooves climbed him like a fleece-covered jungle gym.

BoomFuzzy handed Quaraun a steaming mug of rose petal tea.

“I saved the page o’ pie crusts from that cookbook, love. Tucked it in yer embroidery basket.”

“Blasted Humans!” Quaraun shouted, snatching the mug and taking a sip. “Ruined knowledge! Irreplaceable lore! Ignorant imbeciles with no reverence for the written word! I incinerated them! Incinerated and turned to ash! Ash and fire! Fire and ash!”

“Ya melted their faces, aye. Good bit o’ barbecue vengeance.”

GhoulSpawn sneezed as a goat tried to eat his sleeve.

“I’m not even mad about it,” the Satyr muttered, still pinned under several bleating bundles. “Book burning’s like, totally the dumbest crime ever. And, like, these goats are healing my soul.”

“Feed them slower,” Quaraun ordered. “They are bloating. Bloating and gassy. Gassy and bloating.”

BoomFuzzy set down the last bottle, pulled a baby goat into his lap, and leaned back with a tired sigh. He gave Quaraun a sideways glance and a teasing grin.

“Well, we saved books, burned morons, rescued goats, an’ now ya’re sleepin’ in a silk tent full o’ cuddly baby bleaters, ya mad wee Elf. Life’s nae half bad.”

Quaraun blinked, looked around at the sleepy chaos, and begrudgingly sighed.

“I suppose.”

One of the goats curled up beside him.

Another was nibbling his slipper.

“Do not eat that.”

“Come to bed, me Sugarplum.” BoomFuzzy yawned. “Let the books rest, let the goats snuggle, an’ let tomorrow deal with the madness o’ Men.”

GhoulSpawn, buried in bleating fluff, gave a sleepy thumbs up.

“I second that… But like, in a pile of goats.”

Quaraun gently moved the books aside, wriggled under the mountain of quilts, and nestled between his lovers as the last of the goat bottles clinked empty.

Outside, the snow howled.

Inside, the goats snored.

And so did the Elf.

• +1 Baby Goat Milk Warmer Added to Inventory
• +300 Singed Textbooks Saved from Idiocy
• Achievement Unlocked: “Goats Before Bros”
• Quaraun gained +10 Furious Bibliophile Rampage
• BoomFuzzy gained +6 Baby Goat Milk Alchemy
• GhoulSpawn gained +9 Goat Tamer’s Reflexes
• Moral of the Story: Save books. Save goats. Burn morons.

A note about the inspiration for this story: 

What are right wings, left wings, red pills, and blue pills, and why should I care which colour pill is taken by which wing?

Do Political Americans not realize how much nonsense gibberish jibber jabber they use when ranting politics?

What are right wings, left wings, red pills, and blue pills, and why should I care which colour pill is taken by which wing?

Do Political Americans not realize how much nonsense gibberish jibber jabber they use when ranting politics?

You know what I wish political Americans would talk about?

I wish they would take a deep dive into explaining what even are the meanings of 90% of the words they say, because they forget that only 2% of the planet are American and the 98% of the rest of the world are watching them talk gibberish nonsense about red pills, blue pills, red states, blue states, left, right, democrats, republican, maga, ect…

…and most of us are so hung up on trying to figured out what the fuck even are the slang meanings of these words that are so very blantly NOT being used by the definitions found in the dictionary, and any message the Americans want to make is lost because we are trying to figure what in the heck is a red pill and why is a left wing fighting with a right wing, what the fuck bird did they take the wings off of, or did they take them off of planes and that's why they had 15 plane crases in 20 days?

I do not understand what “left, left wing, or leftist” means, nor do I understand what “right, right-wing, rightest” means. I do understand left = democrats and right = republican, but what the flying fuck is a democrat and what the flying fuck is a republican?

What is this weird use of words like “wing” and “pill” that clearly don’t mean wings or pills but who the heck has any clue what they mean, its just Americans making themselves sound uneducated and illiterate by misusing words far as I can see.

You know what I found out when I tried to look those things up? That there are SEVEN parties, not two, and that there isn’t one single person who calls themselves a democrat who believes or practices one single solitary thing the democrat party means, while there isn’t one single republican who believes or practices what republican means.

Plus people who voted for Trump are idiots:

People who voted for Trump are idiots
…and only voted so they could have the right to harassing others without repercussions.

An while I now know what republican and democrats means, I still don’t know what left or right mean, or pills or wings, or red or blue, and… and I’m left wondering WHY do democrats believe and practice what is the meaning of the word republican, while republican believe and practice the meaning of democrats?

I am Scottish.

My native language is Scottish English, which most Americans call Pidgin.

I live in America.

I live in Maine.

Yaya Mills! She should have punch that transphobic bastard America has for a president in the face.

It’s hard enough for us Scottish to understand a word the British say, but the American English is so far removed from anything even remotely recognizable to us Scottish as English, that we struggle to understand the Americans even when they are NOT talking about politics.

And every time an American talks politics, we are just lost because there ain’t no American dictionary which explains the political slang meanings of left, right, red, blue, wing, or pill — I’ve bought 41 American dictionaries so far, trying to figure it out.

I read a lot of political articles lately, and a lot of them are so full of American political street slang gibberish jibber jabber nonsense words with no meaning (like red pills and blue pills and left wings and right wings) that I end up leaving before I finish reading, simply because I can not understand what the writer is trying to say.

I often feel like the writers never went to school and never learned how to read and write, but only in the political articles.

I never went to school, and I can read and write in TWO languages better then they can in their one native language!

And while you see street slang and jargon talk show up in every topic, no where is it such a big issue, that is makes the reading illegible, like it is in the topic of American politics!

It a really big problem, one Americans don’t seem to even notice, with political articles not just here on Medium but on TV news and every platform, and a lot of them are so full of American political street slang gibberish jibber jabber nonsense words with no meaning (like red pills and blue pills and left wings and right wings).

Americans writing political articles and hoping to get non-Americans to side with their point of view, need to try using words that can actually be found in American English dictionaries if they want us to have any clue what message they are trying to get across.

When someone says:

• “NAME is against gay marriage, and OTHER NAME plans to fight him on this”

… I understand that. But most articles say things like:

• “The lefties are taking their red pills on the LGBTQAI+ community today, all them blue states cheering them on, all them red hats hating on the red pills in the red states…”

…which leaves me asking what the flying fricking fuck, these jokers don’t know their fanny from their bahookie.

Of course Americans don’t know the meaning of the word fanny either, it’s always funny when they find out what fanny, a word native to Scotland, actually means, and how laughably wrong they use it.

Americans think fanny means bahookie, arse, ass, ya bum.

That ain’t what fanny means.

They come to that conclusion because of the phrase “Sitting on ya fanny like a wee lass”.

Fanny means = VAGINA, not bum.

“Sitting on ya fanny like a wee lass” means “Sitting on ya vagina like a girl”.

Ya see, aye? I kin bust oot o’ me bleedin’ Scots an’ give them feckin’ Yanks a right proper meanin’ o’ wot me words do be sayin’ when I ‘ave tae, for de sake o’ them what’s readin’ me bleedin’ words. Ain’t no skin off me nose. I ain’t so daft as tae think folk from aw o’er de world gunna ken every wee turn o’ phrase what dribbles oot me gob, aye? So I put me mind tae it, an’ I lays it out nice an’ clear when need be. Ain’t ‘ard, innit?

But, blimey, I done come across a right few them Yank bastards what cannae be arsed tae do de same. Proper lazy gits, they is. Too busy whingin’ an’ bellyachin’, moanin’ an’ groanin’, like some bairn what’s lost their sweeties, ‘stead o’ jus’ puttin’ in a bit o’ graft, aye? They sit there, gobbin’ off ‘bout ‘ow hard it be, ‘ow unfair it is, ‘ow they don’ see why they should lift a feckin’ finger tae meet a body halfway. Eh?

But that’s the thing, innit? Words be for sharin’, no for hoardin’. Aye, they got life in ’em, they do, an’ if ya ain’t willin’ tae stretch yer noggin a bit, tae bend an’ twist wi’ de tide, then wot good’s it do ye? Nuffin’ but keep ya stuck, that’s wot. An’ I ain’t got time for that kinda daftness. If I kin take a moment tae throw a bone tae me readers, sure as shite they kin do de same. Eh?

I’m Scottish.

I’m not American.

I' was born in 1975 and I had my first face to face encounter with an American in 2010, and have had fewer then a hundred face to face encounters with an American in my entire life, so I struggle deeply to even understand the most basic NONE political thing about these psychotically deranged bizarre CREATURES that call themselves Americans, and I say CREATURES because Americans are so deep end deranged that I struggle to think of them as being HUMANS.

I’ve a wee bit of a trouble understanding you Yankee words to begin with without you flinging it full of red pills and blue wings.

If I can take the curtsy to translate the Scottish street slang out of my writing for the sake of clarity to me readers, I’d expect other writers to do the same. But when it comes to American politics, I find few care if their readers can understand them or not.

There are far too many political articles that try to sound hip and cool and jive with the street slang, and it just leaves most of us thinking they are too clueless to know how to write clearly for their readers, so they probably are too clueless to know the politics they are talking about, and that is probably not the message they want to send.

If they want to use weird nonsense gibberish jibber jabber jargon street slang, they could at least do the curtesy of giving us footnotes with meanings for the crazy political slang words they use.

Footnotes, that’s what I would like to see more of in political articles. Footnotes for every street slang word so we readers could understand what the articles is even about.

I can not care about your red pills, because I do not know what the fuck your red pills even are! How do you expect me to care about a thing if you can not even be bothered to tell me what the fuck it is you want me to care about?

I have no clue where I would fall in the whole liberal vs conservative thing.

I know I don’t fall neatly into either.

I’m Scottish, but over on Twitter most people don’t know that, and for some reason everyone on Twitter assumes every one else on Twitter is either a Republican or a Democrat, and doesn’t know that Republicans and Democrats are things ONLY AMERICANS can be, but also doesn’t know America has seven other political parties in addition to those two.

So… I will post something on Twitter and suddenly it gets bombarded with comments from Republicans calling me a woke Democrat.

But then I’ll post something else, and it’ll get bombarded by comments from Democrats calling me a traditional Republican. Weird thing is neither post was anything related to politics at all, and I’m always left trying to figure out “what makes this post woke, Democrat, liberal, or even political?” and “what makes this other post traditional, conservative, Rebecca, or even political?”

I’m afraid I simply do not know either side well enough to know what it is that defines either. And it’s pretty clear from comments I get, that some things I do or say are deemed firmly conservative, while other things I do and say are deemed firmly liberal.

I grew up in the 1970s, on a hippy compound, which I was born in, so I seemed to have a weird blend of “traditional family values” that includes polygamy, bisexuality, and transgender; which I’m realizing is too traditional for Democrats and too woke for Republicans, so, I’ve no clue what I’d fall under.In other news…

I asked Bing CoPilot “Give me an illustration of Americans gathering.” and it gave me this:

What I wish people would talk about on Medium…
…need useful health information that is ACTUALLY HELPFUL… been searching all day and apparently it does not exist on…

This story is published in:

• Savage Wilderness

---

Includes the following stories: The Savage Wilderness of the Post-Comet Earth The Terror Bird Lost, But Never Wrong Acrophobia The Herd Approaches IkuTursu’s Cursed Depths of the Swamp Where Pine Boughs Whisper Wind and Hematite on the Cliff You trust that nonsense over a map? Not Little Red Riding Hood A Twisted Tree A Tumble In The River Turquoise The Book Burning Maggots, You Can't Spell Hatred Without Red Hats Drowned Dead Beneath The Ice Inner Fortitude Amidst the Dread and Drear and Death Midnight silk whispers In the Depth of Winter’s Grip Cane and Gold He Was Not Built To Be Small No Place for Birth

---

The Pink Necromancer, Moon Elf silk weaver & merchant: Quaraun on Noodle Beach. His master chef Phooka turned Lich husband: BoomFuzzy with his 1968 VW Bus Beach Noodle Food Truck. And their on again/off again mad scientist Sheep Demon lover: GhoulSpawn with his 1974 AMC Gremlin time machine. Time Travel setting swings back and forth between 40th century Maine after a comet hit the moon decimating the planet, and the 1970s, Maine. Quaraun in the main character, he and BoomFuzzy are a married gay couple. GhoulSpawn is their shared live-in lover. Art by Wendy Christine Allen.

BoomFuzzy

Quaraun

Faeries vs Elves (In The Quaraun Series) A Pink Necromancer World Lore Post

The Pink Necromancer: The Adventures of Quaraun The Insane aka The Twighlight Manor Series

🌸🦄🌸 Furry Yaoi Fiction about Elves and Faeries and Satyrs and Demons and Unicorns and Technomancer Wizards and Liches living in a Lighthouse and surviving as Travelling Merchants and Food Truck Chefs in Cyberpunk Dystopian 40th Century Maine, and Zombie Apocalypse and Time Travel but it’s Slice of Life Vignettes of Mundane Daily Lives of The UnSeelie Court’s Royal Family trying to survive after a comet hit the moon and turned the Earth into a CyberPunk Ice-Age. 🌸🦄🌸

• eBook Editions from this series can be found on: GumRoad

• Kindle, eBook, Print Paperback, & full colour illustrated Hardcover Editions from this series can be found on: Amazon

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