It was not a rare occurrence out there and they were not unduly worried. The clochards continued to drink and watched as the first golden symbols began to dance like fae lightning on the horizon. Tildes and pilcrows and polygons burst and popped as the storm moved across the plains, and in its wake they began to hear the sound of swords clashing and enormous feet slamming against the ground. Esther slumped and curled down on the ground with the bottle of Sticks held in her hand, and it was empty. Mathieu could see her, walking away, crossing the street at a green traffic light as cars waited like beasts of the plains, puffing steam.

Some of the others were slipping away, too. It was only he perhaps who remained mostly there. He thought he saw a small wagon traverse the ghost road, following its crazy curlicues, pulled by donkeys. The donkeys strained to run, and behind them he thought he saw giant stone feet rise and fall, rise and fall, until at last the wagon was forced to abandon the ghost road and travel in a straight line, and then it was engulfed by the storm and he did not see it again.

In the night he heard inhuman laughter fill the air, and awful silence, and the baying of animals. At last he drank enough of the Sticks that he, too, went to that other place, and there he huddled with the others under the awnings of a shut store, until morning rose about them and a policeman shooed them away.

Then they hopscotched and jump-roped through the cracks of the world and woke up a second time, blinking sleepy eyes at the plains. A snake slithered under a stone and was gone. They drank their breakfast and chewed on dried beef and old bread and then by unspoken agreement they left the high places and went back down to the plains. They were natural scavengers and it was well known one could pick up materiel in the passing of a storm, the incomprehensible leftovers of the battles of the Titanomachy.

But it had not been a battle, Mathieu thought uneasily as they descended. And indeed, when they began to search the ground, they found no transmutations or metamorphosis, not even a cockroach turned on its back. It was only later, when Bill spotted the crater, that Mathieu realised that what he had witnessed in the night wasn’t, indeed, a battle at all. It had been a hunt.