“Well, now,” said the king. “At last our day has become interesting.”

The path that brought Vari to Chitchén Itzá was a strange one. He had shed his name of “Stradivarius,” pretending to be the McGill when he sailed in the Sulphur Queen across the Atlantic Ocean, but that didn’t last very long. He might have been an excellent violin player, but he was a lousy monster. Still, he had seen the wonders of Atlantis . . . and then had been thrown out. He had seen the glory of Pompeii . . . and had been exiled from it. He had strode the halls of the great library of Alexandria . . . and had been tossed down its thousand steps and told never to return by the Afterlights who inhabited it.

While Pinhead—his second-in-command—had found a cushy job giving guided tours of the Tower of Babel, Vari had no such luck. Wherever he went, he eventually wore out his welcome because he was so painfully irritating. Sure, everyone enjoyed the melody of a well-played violin, but it was hardly worth putting up with the boy who played it.

He thought he might fit in with a horde of young Vikings because he looked somewhat Scandinavian. But after only a month, he was set adrift aboard a perpetually burning Viking funeral ship.

Eventually, he got picked up by the Titanic which had been taken over by a gang of angry dead Icelandic youth, who seemed content to do nothing but hunt narwhal . . . but since narwhal had never been known to cross into Everlost, nothing was ever caught. He got a gig as the second violin in the Titanic’s string quartet, but there was only so long he could stand playing “Nearer My God To Thee” over and over, with no actual hope of hitting an iceberg and sinking. Eventually he hatched a mutiny plan, which failed miserably, and, once more, he was set adrift—this time in a lifeboat.

After several months at sea, he landed on the Yucatan Peninsula, where he was caught by the king’s army and brought to the king. Vari quickly learned that his knowledge of the world made him a valuable spirit to the king. At last he was appreciated.

Since time immemorial, the king’s vizier had been a pudgy Toltec girl who told fortunes by reading entrails of goats—which were extremely hard to come by in Everlost—and while fortune cookies always yielded undeniable truths, goat entrails were a little bit iffy. Once Vari told the king about the Eastern Witch, the king (at Vari’s suggestion) hurled the Toltec girl into the Cenote and put Vari in charge of all prognostication. Now, as the king became more and more entranced by his statue, the kingdom fell more and more into Vari’s hands, which is exactly what he wanted. Things had been looking up for Vari. Until today.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]