(This is the story text from the corresponding Radio Cataclysm podcast episode. If you prefer audio, you can subscribe here. Read and listen early on Patreon.)

Before they left, Sheryl and Bob laid Jim's body on the fire. His mask was cracked from his fall, but they took it off and laid it on his chest anyway. They took the ammunition out of his broken blunderbuss and laid the gun next to him. Bob and Sheryl both saluted.

Lastly, Sheryl activated the emergency beacon on the paddywagon. “This way,” she said, “maybe the Arterians will look for us here first. If they think we've stayed put, it'll buy us some time. We need to move, though. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

Meat carried Burts piggyback style. Zeck was allowed to keep his satchel, minus acoustic pistol and anything else that looked like a weapon. John kept his staff.

Sheryl took the lead, setting a moderate but steady pace. Bob stayed at the rear, where he could keep an eye on all the prisoners. “Anyone tries any funny business, they get wrapped,” he said, patting his spider gun. The horses needed no one to lead them; their programming told them to flank the group on either side, providing cover from anything that might attack from the side.

They marched in silence for a while, conserving their breath while they put some distance between them and the wagon. Zeck was the first to break the silence. “What if it was an ashmara after all?” he said.

“What if what was?” said Matthew.

“The giant shadow snake,” said Zeck. “Ashmara are essentially nightmares caused by psychomagical static energy stored in volcanic dust that's blown across hardened lava. These plains cooled a long time ago, but we could still be susceptible to ashmara out here.”

“I'm not saying we couldn't all have ashmara,” said Matthew. “But that's not how they work. Maybe one of us could have a dream like that, or even a hallucination. I've even seen whole groups of people hallucinate at the same time. It's... horrible. And dangerous. But they all see different things. Maybe you'd see a giant snake and I'd see a wolf, and Stephen would see a cluster of spiders.”

“What about a wizard?” said Zeck. “John, do you remember what you were dreaming about before I woke you up?”

“No. I don't remember my dreams,” said John. “You want my opinion? You're all jumping at shadows. Somebody says, 'Holy shit, a giant snake!' and points at a dust cloud, swirling in the breeze. Somebody else squints at it and says, 'Oh, yeah, that does kind of look like a snake.' Then the more panicky types come over and ask, 'What are youse two staring at?' to which they reply, 'A giant snake, being ridden by a cyclops with a warhammer, and they're coming right for us!' Next thing you know, somebody's screaming their head off, waking up a tired old man right in the middle of a REM cycle. No hallucinations. No dust dreams. Just a shadow, blowing in the wind.”

“I don't jump at shadows,” said Bob. “It was likely a weak magical attack from the Arterians, targeted at our location. They can't spare any more Pneuma to attack us, so they sent that thing. It was meant to frighten us, but it only lasted for a few minutes before it went up in a puff of smoke. If that's all they've got, this war is going to be very brief.”

“I suppose that's possible,” said Zeck. “But suppose it was an ashmara?”

“Oh, here we go,” said Steven. “Give it a rest.”

“No, hear me out,” said Zeck. “John, you say you don't remember your dreams. Perhaps that's because, as a wizard, you're inclined to externalize them. It's been known to happen; there was an incident involving llamas at a school in New Mexico. Perhaps the psychomagical energy stored in the dust out here gave form to your dreams. You are a herpemancer. Perhaps you dreamt of an enormous snake, and the snake formed. When you woke up, the dream ended, and the snake vanished.”

John paused before responding. “I hate to agree with a chatty jackass dressed like a pirate, but you may be onto something,” he said.

“Even supposing that it was just a dream woven in dust,” said Zeck, “do you suppose you really could summon a serpent like that? Perhaps one that we could ride? It would make this trek a lot faster.”

“Ain't no snakes like that,” said John. “I don't create the snakes out of thin air. I summon them from another dimension, one that's chock full of snakes.”

“A lot of garters in that dimension, are there?” said Zeck.

“Bite my butt,” said John. “You think it's easy, plucking a creature from another world?”

“My apologies,” said Zeck. “Please, go on.”

“So, Feralda is what wizards call the beast dimension. It has its own name, but not one you can pronounce with a human tongue. All sorts of scary shit there. There's run-of-the-mill animals, like squirrels, beavers, coyotes. Bigger stuff, too, of course. Bears, lions, elk. There's also plenty of mythical beasts you don't usually find in our world. Gryphons, dragons, chupacabra, that sort of thing. But there ain't no snakes there that you won't find on Earth, except one. She ain't a snake, really, but that's the form she takes in Feralda. You might call her a goddess, but that ain't the right word for her. Some people call her the Mother of Serpents, but that ain't exactly right, either. Seraphanta is her name, or at least the name I can say with my human mouth. She's not as old as snakes, but she's older than humans. She didn't create them. She only looks after them when it's convenient for her. Or when they really need her. She mostly stays in Feralda, but she'll slip into our dimension from time to time. Some say she's looking for something, or somebody. Who knows? I've been looking for her for thirty years, following rumors across the continent. I've never seen her, but I've been close enough to hear her, and hear the screams when people see her.”

“Why are you looking for her?” said Meat Rom.

“It's a long story,” said John.

“We've got a long walk,” said Meat.

John was quiet for a minute before he continued. His staff glowed gently. “She mostly don't eat here. Seraphanta. She eats roc eggs in the beast dimension, and roc eggs are very filling. But sometimes she'll come here, and when she's needed by a great number of snakes, or when she's very hungry, or when she sees something she just feels needs to be eaten, she'll open her mouth and swallow it.” John paused. A tear rolled down his cheek, barely visible in the blue light of the Moon.

“You don't gotta talk about it if it's painful,” said Meat.

“No, it's all right,” said John. “It happened a long time ago. I had a little brother. Three years younger than me. We grew up in Delaware. After our mom died, I dropped out of college and we moved to Chicago and got an apartment together. We were both working two jobs to make ends meet, trying to get into comedy in our spare time. We did stand-up together. He was a lot funnier than I was, but we played off each other well. We had a pretty good act. He really could have made it, I think. He was a talented guy. Had a good head for business, too.

“When the war broke out, the Churlian War of Expansion, we both went straight down and signed up to join the army. We never would have considered it normally, but with the carnage and turmoil on the East Coast, we couldn't very well not join. A lot of people felt that way. Long story short, they took him, but they turned me down. I didn't pass the physical. This was at the beginning of the war, before they'd waived all those requirements and just started taking anybody who would join the fight. Anyway, he shipped off for boot camp, and I was stuck in Chicago, twiddling my thumbs. Kurt, that was his name, Kurt was all I had. Our dad was a deadbeat. He left when we were real young, and our mom passed a couple years before the war started. We didn't have any other family we were close to. It was just the two of us.

“When I found out they were shipping Kurt home to Delaware to fight the incursion, I couldn't just stay in Chicago and wait to see what happened. I went and joined the Pyroclasts.”

“What are the Pyroclasts?” asked Bob.

“They're a faction of magic users that formed when the war started. 'Pyroclast' means 'broken by fire.' The ones that started the faction had all been affected directly by the big eruption in Philadelphia. They lost their homes, their families, everything they had. Of course, they welcomed anybody who was willing to learn and had even a modicum of affinity for the magics. A lot of them leaned toward the elemental, particularly water and ice magic. I suppose they thought they could fight fire and lava with ice and water. And they could, to a certain extent.

“I joined a group of aquamancers. I took to it pretty well. I learned how to control the water nearby, turning it from liquid to steam, then back to liquid, then freezing it. Eventually we learned how to summon water from the Raw. Feralda is a world of beasts. Raw is a world of basic material elements, all just sitting around in vast deposits. Huge oceans of water, continents of all the minerals you could want, including gold. Precious rocks, like diamonds. Some people have tried to use it to get rich, though it's not as easy as it sounds. We didn't care about gold. We were focused on summoning water. We could make it rain on a sunny day. We could flood a room in a matter of seconds. Together, we could turn a valley into a lake. I thought we were all ready to fight the Tephra. Controlling lava doesn't do you much good if somebody can just come along and pour an infinite amount of water on it.

“Of course, as we learned during a training session with some pyromancers, if a fire is hot enough, water will just split apart into hydrogen and oxygen. At that point, you're just adding fuel. We had to learn something else before we were ready to fight. Something awful. We started with sponges. Soak a sponge with water, then draw all the water out of the sponge until it's bone dry. That's a misleading phrase, though. 'Bone dry.' Bones contain moisture, too. We found that out when we moved on from sponges to slabs of meat from the butcher shop. I tell you, it's hard to draw all the moisture out of a piece of meat without getting some blood and fat along with it. That's even truer when you're doing it to a live subject.”

“You practiced on living things?” said Matthew.

“That look you're giving me,” said John, “that look of disgust and horror, is a look I'm very familiar with. It's a look I saw on my own face in the mirror every night back then. I didn't like it then, and I'm not proud of it now, but you weren't alive during the war. Maybe you don't understand what it was like. I don't mean that as an insult. I'll be very happy if you never have to find out what it was like. Pieces of your country being eaten away by monstrous flows of lava, soldiers in spider masks marching across the place you used to call home. It seemed like the only response to horror was more horror. So I kept practicing, dessicating caged rats and chickens and other creatures. I didn't like it. I didn't like what I was becoming, but I didn't stop. I just stopped looking in the mirror.

“I finally got to fight the Churls, but that's another story. That's something I ain't ready to talk about, and maybe I never will be. I fought right up 'til the war ended, and I probably would have kept fighting, like some people did. I didn't care much for that treaty then, and I don't care for it now. I would have kept fighting Churls until they burnt me up and buried me in lava. But when the courier brought signed orders for us to lay down arms, he also brought some letters and packages he'd managed to get from what remained of the postal service at the time. There were a few letters in there from my brother, which I read right away. And then there was another letter. A form letter, with my brother's name and a few other details filled in where it was appropriate. They sent out millions of those letters.”

“He was killed in combat,” Sheryl said.

John nodded. “I didn't find out until later how it happened, but it didn't matter right then. As soon as I opened that envelope and saw his name there, all the fight went out of me. I guess for some people it might have had the opposite effect. I don't know. I just didn't have anything left to fight for.”

Zeck handed him a clean handkerchief from his satchel. John took it, wiped his eyes and blew his nose.

“I'm sorry,” said Sheryl.

“It ain't your fault. You weren't even born when it happened. None of you were. Or if you were, you were just little.”

“What does all this have to do with the snake?” asked Burts.

“Like I said,” John said, “I didn't find out until later how Kurt died. The official report was sealed. I got the story second and third hand in bits and pieces. I found one soldier who was there when it happened, but he was so shell-shocked I didn't believe what he told me. I thought he was nuts, until I heard a similar story from an army doctor who worked on the wounded from that battle. Finally, I found a reporter who'd written a piece on the battle, but the Empire had come and confiscated it and made it very clear he wasn't to publish it anywhere. I pulled in a favor with a mesmerist to get the story out of the guy.

“Kurt's platoon was part of an operation meant to take Mount Philada. It was one of the last maneuvers the North American alliance attempted. They had intelligence indicating that Philada was where the Empire housed its most powerful mages. The Americans thought if they could take Philada, they could turn the tide of the war. Taking out their best mages would be a huge blow to the Churls. They'd lose a major part of their offensive and defensive capabilities. Maybe they wouldn't even be able to control the lava anymore. Of course, not all of that was true, but the Americans didn't know it then. They just hoped.

“Turns out the Churls saw it coming a mile away. They had better spies. Better mages. And they had something else, too. It has a thousand names, most of them in languages long dead. Scythe of the Ether. The Blade of Everwhere. The Key and the Lock. The Pyroclasts just called it the Bugger Knife. I've never seen it, and nobody agrees on what it looks like. We know it's a blade, and it has a handle. We know it was forged a very long time ago, maybe not even on this world. We know it can be used to cut a hole in the fabric between dimensions. When wizards summon beasts or matter or magical fields from other dimensions, they're tearing a tiny hole in that fabric. It's in the natural order of the universe to seal those tears straight away. It takes a great deal of energy and strength to keep them open for more than a few seconds. The Bugger Knife can make a hole of any size, to anywhere you like in any other dimension, and keep it open. The hole only shuts when somebody uses the blade to uncut it.

“The mages atop Philada had this blade. They summoned minor beasts and warriors and shades to keep the American soldiers on the mountainside busy. The mages lured them in, made them think they were putting up a good fight. They waited until the mountain was covered in soldiers, thousands of them on all sides. Then they took the Bugger Knife and opened up a massive doorway to Feralda. The most savage beasts poured out, mundane and mythical alike. Wolves and bears, but also werewolves and bearskinners. Scorpions and wild boars, but also dragons, manticores, unicorns. And yes, snakes. Vipers and constrictors. All hungry, all angry, all confused because they'd been torn out of their world and hurled into chaos. Where so many snakes cried out in anguish, Seraphanta couldn't help but follow. She didn't come through the same way; she makes her own doors. She came from the bottom of the mountain, and devoured her way up, swallowing everything and everybody in her path, including my brother. That's why they never sent his remains home. They were... not available.”

John fell silent. Everybody walked in silence, waiting for him to continue, until it became clear that he wasn't going to.

“So, what happened then?” said Zeck. “What about Seraphanta? What about the mages of Philada?”

“Heh? Oh, er, the mages saw her coming up the mountain. They didn't mind, because she was eating so many of the soldiers that had come there to attack them. So they waited until she got very close to the top. Then they closed the door to Feralda and opened one to the Raw. Rained down sulphur, which they set alight. Seraphanta vanished, taking a bunch of the snakes with her, I suppose.

“I wasn't there, of course. By the time I found all this out, I'd left the Pyroclasts. They'd scattered to the winds, anyway. The war was over, so they had to disband, or appear to disband. Most of them got jobs doing magic for domestic purposes; hydraulic power, garbage incineration, Las Vegas, things like that. I was ready to give up magic altogether, get a job driving a cab or something. Maybe try to get back into stand-up again, but nothing seemed funny anymore. Nobody felt like laughing for a while after the treaty. When I finally found out the truth about what happened to Kurt, I changed my mind about magic. I'll never truck with aquamancy again, that's for sure. I don't even like drinking water anymore. I've gotta eat loads of salt and dry foods to make myself so thirsty I can't help but drink. Otherwise I choke on it. I turned my back on the elemental schools, and developed an interest in something a little different.

“I couldn't stop thinking about what happened to Kurt. I had visions of Seraphanta swallowing him up, along with his whole platoon. He's trying to run away, turning this way and that, but no matter which direction he goes, she's right there behind him. Then darkness swallows him up. This was before I learned to forget my dreams. I'd wake up screaming from nightmares. Even worse, sometimes I expected to wake up, but I couldn't.”

“And then the nightmare would start all over again,” said Sheryl.

“Yes,” said John.

“Or you'd think you'd woken up, but you were still dreaming, and then you'd wake up again, relieved, but you were dreaming still,” Sheryl said.

“Over and over again,” said John. “And you'd finally wake up in the morning more tired than when you went to sleep.” He paused again. “There was nowhere to turn but herpemancy, but I couldn't think straight most of the time, let alone learn a whole new branch of magic. I met up with a friend from the Pyroclasts. The same mesmerist who'd helped me with the reporter. He understood. I asked him if he could hypnotize me or something to stop the nightmares. He said he couldn't, but he'd been dabbling in somnambulism. Not sleep walking, but dream walking, mind you. He said there wasn't really an easy way to stop nightmares, but he told me he could go walking in my dreams, and if he could find a certain door in there, he could shut it, and it wouldn't stop the nightmares, but it would stop me from remembering them. I didn't hesitate; I said yes. It took a few tries, but it worked.

“He and I moved in together for a while. It was a little apartment, smaller even than the one Kurt and I'd shared. We helped each other study. He, his dream walking. Me, my herpemancy. I drove a cab for money. He'd trained as a massage therapist before the war, and he did that, freelance. It was all right for a while. We got along good. We didn't talk much, but we already knew what each other would have to talk about, I guess, and, well...” John trailed off. “Ah, anyway, he just up and disappeared one night. We went to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning, he was gone. A few of his outfits were missing, too, and all of his belongings except for a little wooden carving of an owl he always kept on his bedside table. I was surprised, I guess, but I knew what had happened right away. He found a good dream, or he made one, and he went walking, and he kept walking, and he didn't come back. I knew it would happen some day. He never said it, but I knew.

“I had nothing left to stay for then. I took my robes, my books, and my staff, all the cash I had, and the owl, and I just took off. I've been rambling ever since. Looking for Seraphanta.”

“It's very dusty out here on the plains,” said Zeck, wiping his eyes.

Nobody said any more about the snake. Nobody said anything for a while.