Cats have five digits, right? Yeah. Or wait, do they?

Comic 33! Babysat a cat this weekend. She had the same coloration as the erstwhile Jang, may he rest in peace, so I kept getting this creepy feeling all weekend when she would scamper by. You know this feeling. The subtle eerie sensation ofHOLYCRAPONAPANCAKEITSAZOMBIECAT!

The windsor is half full.

Comic 32! Did you know that our modern word for necktie, cravat, comes from hravat, the Croatian word for Croat (which means that "Croatia" could be considered "Tie-land")? Did you know that this dates back to the Thirty Years War, when Croatian mercenaries wore bright neck cloths as part of their uniform? Did you know that this esoteric trivia doesn't impress as many people as I would hope?

And now for something all-encompassingly different.

Ok, so YEAH, there is no comic today. I'm working on that. Also, I've been working something else! I took my unfinished fantasy story out of the bottom drawer of my hard drive, blew off the dust, and I have been rewriting it again. Hey, hey, where are you going? You run for the hills any time someone says "here's a fantasy story I wrote whaddya think"? What follows is the first 2 pages of approximately fifty, perhaps more by the time it achieves Final Form (think: Power Rangers Megazord). This would be the third draft, by the way. Just something to show that I have NOT been slacking off. If you have comments, critiques, or general enthusiasm about the piece, make sure to tell me!

A Conversation with Death

This man is about to die.

He does not believe it.

In the past, as now, the opposition of fact and belief creates powerful and dangerous human emotion. Hope.

However, in this case, hope is positively hopeless. Dismal as it may be, no corner remains for hope in the sad and unavoidable equation. Because, as it would happen, there is not a force in the world that could deter Fortune’s Wheel in the execution of this man’s fate. He is to be wed to Death, and Death is coming for him as ineluctably as the slow pull of gravity. The clock has struck midnight, his neck is in the noose, the guillotine is poised, his name is being written in the oldest ledger of the world – all of this is figurative language of course – this man is about to die. His name is Vance Von Pancillo.

Vance clutched at the handle of his sword, still hidden in its scabbard. His hands were swampy with sweat. “And now our mighty hero brandishes his peerless weapon,” he thought miserably. With a click, he drew the sword, and the sound of its metallic glide was soon drowned out by jeering laughter. A hand’s breadth from the silver cross-guard, the blade was snapped off, broken, worthless. He looked at the cracked edge and muttered, “This is not how a man faces his end. First should be the evening feast of cooked meats. Then the night of a hundred women. Then the donning of great armor with long spears at dawn’s hillock, a few more women, then the last fight. Not in a pit with…a circumcised scimitar.” His conscience chided him for fantasy in the face of imminent peril. He sighed, dropping the sword to his side. “At least I can still keep my promise.”

His left arm was fitted with a large shield, so he had to use his sword hand to clumsily brush the dust off of his pale red tunic. The shield had been furnished by the duel mediator, and it was little more than a leather hide stretched over a scaffold of woven reeds. The blood of its former owner was brown on the inside, and its size proved awkward instead of protective. Vance looked down. “Pity that I’ll bow out looking like a ragamuffin. This beggar shirt is hardly a flattering funeral gown.” He glanced up and squinted to focus through misty gloom. Past the gathered onlookers, past the sand and dirt stained with old, coagulated discord, Vance’s gaze fell upon the mountainous form in shadow across from him. “Never have I danced with a partner such as this. I wonder if he’ll step on my toes.”

The behemoth at the other end of the narrow arena exhaled abruptly, flaring its nostrils. Grey-purple smoke whorled out, and a twinge of flame flashed. A man dressed in the lustrous blacks stood in front of the beast. He uncrossed his arms and pointed with two fingers. The creature shifted its ponderous weight to the other hoof, and a spiked battlehammer was lowered on ropes into its right hand. After arming the beast, servants dropped the ropes and scattered from their rickety scaffolds, clambering down makeshift ladders. They were frightened and rightfully so, because once unchained, the monster had a reputation for violence indiscriminate. It examined the weapon lazily with black eyes – lightless, sinister orbs shot with orange veins. Another exhalation of acrid air. It approved. The dryblood floor between Vance and the fiend became contaminated and mephitic as its foul breath soaked in. The monster, now satisfied with its oversized armament, hunched over. The chain attached to its wrist-shackles clanked with funereal dullness. It leered attentively towards Vance and smiled.

It was going to kill Vance. Soon, and likely in one easy swing of its arm. Vance looked at it bemusedly. The low-hanging vault of the underground duel-pit gave it little room to move. At full height, the fiend’s horns might have broken through the chain-crossed ceiling, extruding into the palatial gardens above like poisonous trees. The mediator bellowed, “This is a fight to the death. May flame cradle the shamed, and the Princess rest his soul!”

A servant, at a nod by the nobleman, hoisted a crimson flag. Head bowed, she ran across the middle of the arena, the pennant flapping angrily behind her. The behemoth exhaled one final caustic cloud and took the first step into the duel. Vance remained at his side. Because honestly, why seek death? You will see it someday. Vance examined the meager, fractured sword in his hand. It vibrated musically with each louder and louder hoofstomp. He smiled stupidly. “I doubt that I can even use this thing anymore,” he thought. “Mine is more of a theatrical sort.” Dust particles and sweat moved through diagonal streaks of light, giving grainy texture to the grim arena. The fiend approached; Death approached. Vance watched the frenetic loops of a nearby bilebug’s flight, and he marveled at the beautiful chaos of its movement.

The End of Life is odd. At every other point in their brief lives, people hasten through the quotidian errands of the day. The present is stagnant and boring, and they sincerely believe that the next moment holds a promise of something better. Young ones yearn to indulge in adolescent vagaries. Youth envy the power and responsibility of adults. Adults simply want the serenity of elderhood. Lacking contentment in each life moment, people find that time sails by like a skyship. Not so with the death moment. Quite conversely, the End of Life throws into stark clarity how important this moment is. Every love and fear that you have ever felt could be revisited here in an instant. You realize how the simple, subjective second is the only true thing in the universe. You see how, if you concentrated, this death moment could last a lifetime. Wishes for a better future whiten and vanish – this moment is perfect and true and eternal. Vance considered this mystery leisurely. As his Death approached, so inevitable and hairy and ugly, Vance’s sense of time began to expand. With the end so certain, he found that he had all the time in the world to think, to reflect on what had brought him to this moment.