Scareship_Issue8

the lake, howling. Her burning hate caused the water to boil like a
cauldron, and she, no longer held in check by her father’s magick,
reverted to her true and terrible nature. She arose from the water a
great white serpent, big as the hills nearby, with gusts of flame
shooting out of her bristling nostrils, which were flared by the
presence of her most hated love, one Mad Gilly Games.
Now Gilly had never lacked for nerve, but this was something
else again. What could he possibly do agin’ such a creature?
Nothing else occurred to him, so he drew his pistol and, with five
beans in the wheel, let fly. All the bullets struck home but made
little impression. He was like a hound barking at a knot. Izzie
roared and came forward. Her giant head swooped down… and she
swallered Gilly up whole, in a single gulp.
Lesser men would surely have been discouraged by such a
turn of events but, inside the gullet of the serpent, Gilly had one
last card to play. He took Sunny’s talisman from round his neck
and stuck Inky’s bear tooth into the notch in its hilt. He then
stabbed it, tooth first, with all his might, deep into the tender
innards of the beast’s gullet, using the butt of his Colt to hammer it
home. The dragon Isabelle, violated in this unseemly way,
staggered and then vomited Gilly back up onto the shore. She
stumbled again, then stood up and, upon doing so… the mighty
serpent froze into stone.
Yep, ya heard me right. I said stone.
And so a new peak had been added to the Colorado
Piedmont… a great white butte rising up out of the edge of Lake
Thannat that would, in later years, come to be called Mt. Gil. And
jes’ beneath it, rising up from the mountain’s afterbirth, could be
found a weed of great and terrible power.
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