Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 36. In Which Destroyer Betrays His Employer

Once he had recovered consciousness, the wizard hopped back on his horse and immediately ordered Destroyer to ride to Sycamore City. And Destroyer had obeyed. To a degree.

The wizard had been easy to fool. That's a natural consequence of being a nigh omnipotent dick who gets whatever he wants whenever he wants--you don't take the time to figure out how the world works. The wizard didn't know where the sun rose and set, he'd never looked at a map. Compass? Why use one when you have a galloping GPS with an unerring sense of direction? Unerring, to be sure. But now? Also deceiving.

Because they were on the featureless plains behind the ruins of Hawk Mountain, Destroyer could keep riding diagonally across them, cutting back around whenever he sensed the wizard drifting off to sleep. He kept this charade up for days.

Yes, Destroyer would absolutely get the wizard to his destination. Just not right away. He would continue taking this circuitous, decidedly unscenic route back and forth across the steppes until Marbles and his crew deactivated the Horse God, whose nostril waterfalls powered Sycamore City. Once the Horse God had been deactivated, Destroyer's corporeal form would dissolve back into the noble equine ether where all horse spirits run proud and wild, freeing Destroyer out from under the literal asshole of this figurative asshole.

It would have been even easier without the golems, who jogged miles behind Destroyer in a single file line, the magic glass lava golem in the lead. Their footsteps rumbled like a thundercloud always on the horizon, like a train with a lava locomotive running through a wasteland of windswept grass.

The golems looked way more badass now. They'd run through a rainstorm, and their ludicrously low sticker prices (which were insanely high if you adjusted for inflation after a millennium in the mountain), had washed off of their stone shoulders, leaving them the gleaming, clean colossi they'd been designed by dwarves to be. They left bigass footprints, otherwise Destroyer could have just run back and forth across the same narrow tract of land for days on end. Instead, running at full speed, Destroyer zigzagged almost across every inch of the prairie, from end to end. On the fifth day they came upon the grove.

It was strange, Destroyer should have been able to see the grove from miles away, or smell the wisteria hanging heavily in fragrant, pale, purple, wet tresses from the top of trees that Destroyer couldn't readily identify. Their canopies were wide, with bright golden leaves. Persian honey locusts? But these trees sported plums instead of seedpods. Lush, bigass plums that felt preternaturally chill on Destroyer's haunches as he daintily shouldered his way farther into the grove, avoiding the thick, wicked thorns that bleakly wreathed the trunk of of every tree.

"Spooky," said the wizard wetly around a mouthful of plum. He and Destroyer looked out over the large pool at the center of the grove. It was crystal clear, with three giant ivory white fighting fish circling an unlit, moss-drenched stone lantern at its center.

"We're definitely camping here tonight," said the wizard, mentally bidding the group of golems, who had just now caught up with them, to form a protective circle of glaring stone anthropomorphic automatons around the grove.

"Well, here it is," thought Destroyer. "Our first landmark." He still couldn't explain to himself how he had missed this disconcerting oasis. It should have been visible to him for miles. He must have drifted off to sleep himself, and run automatically towards the scent of water.

They were not alone in the grove. A tinker's wagon sat hitched under one of the trees, its owner snoring on the ground, his back propped against the wagon's wheel.

"Oh shit," thought Destroyer. He had hoped that Aloe would be his normal antisocial self, that he would crawl into his tent, slip on his VR goggles, and pump a million multiverses worth of pornography straight until his brain until he groaned once and started snoring. But not this time. The wizard slid off of Destroyer and gamboled over to the sleeping tinker, excited to talk to someone after days of riding and scrolling through #thickness on Instagram.

"Oh fuck," thought Destroyer as the wizard and the tinker began to talk animatedly next to a leather map pinned to the side of his wagon.

"Hey Destroyer!" shouted the wizard, motioning for the horse to come over. Destroyer nodded and walked over, which impressed the tinker to no end. "Hey horse," said the wizard, grabbing Destroyer's reins gently with his left hand. "Me and the tinker were just talking, and he was showing me his map. And do you want to know what I found out? Do you know what was really interesting about that map?"

The tinker was visibly confused at this point, he thought the wizard was about to make an example of him or something. Was he talking down to that horse as a proxy for the tinker? Acting like the horse understood him instead of saying what he really wanted to directly to the tinker? The tinker wouldn't put it past this wizard though. The dude did give off that kind of vibe.

But no, Destroyer understood what the wizard was getting at perfectly, and he started to panic a little, rolling his eyes back and jerking his head up and away from the grinning wizard. Destroyer wasn't proud of himself, but what could he do? Panicking is part of being a horse.

"Shhh," said the wizard. And wouldn't you know it? Destroyer responded to that too. Sometimes he just hated being a horse. Feeling resigned more than calmed, he lowered his head to the wizard's left shoulder and stopped hopping nervously from foot to foot.

The wizard closed his eyes and concentrated on gripping the heavy Colt Python .357 Magnum caliber revolver that he had manifested in his right hand. It had a six inch barrel and a nickel finish, and was fully loaded. He pressed the gun's barrel against Destroyer's head and blew that horse's traitor brains all over the goddamn grove.

The fighting fish waged a graceful war over the tidbits of horse brain that had rained into their bright blue pool. The wizard scampered back from Destroyer, whose head was still spraying blood as his body slumped to the ground. Destroyer died knowing that he had been a bad horse.

Though brain dead, it still took a little while for the heart of an animal as big and beautiful and healthy as Destroyer had been to give out. You could still hear it beating for a long ten seconds. That poor, vainglorious gourd. When Destroyer's heart stopped, a sudden, deeply cold gust of wind shook the trees throughout the grove. The sound of Destroyer's heart was replaced with that of big plums thudding down into the hissing grass.

The wizard then walked over and shot the tinker, and both his mules too.