"My father didn't get shot down at El Alamein for some cock-sucking velociraptor like you to go chewing me out today!"
Max caught the raptor's outstretched jaws in his hands, grappling the beast's dangerous snapping maw to the ground and stamping the spur of his boot into its cold, calculating eye.
"Unlike the Phoenix - whose name this very blade takes after - I hope you don't rise again."
He drove the wicked sword down and through the blinded beast's thrashing neck. The ever white hot steel hissed as it cut through Cretaceous hide with ease. He felt the warm splatter of dino-blood on his face, and what he felt wasn't dissimilar to the spurting relief of ejaculate.
His companion, a low, degraded peasant girl with great weals and untreated boils about her face, hobbled up beside him, cackling to herself with what was once coquettish mirth, but had long since descended into abject madness. Max remembered his first days in the realms about Excilian, and the waspish young naif of a girl who had tailed him about on his boyish adventures againsts Magnus...after some thirty years here with no sign of home nor end to his perpetual questing he had seen here wearied and worn to little more than a complaining bed-mate. She danced and prattled at his side, but he thought nothing of it.
"There will be more of these terrible lizards about," he sighed, reaching into his battered jerkin for a crumpled pack of cigarettes. "Let's just hope the cavalry arrive in time."
He lit up and took a long inhale. Then he jerked his sword free, and swung it over his shoulder.
On the far grassy ridge, the arrowed and pointed heads of more raptors were emerging, stalking over the rise and snapping at the air where they smelt the rich stench of Max, ragged adventurer and endless thorn in the side of the Dark Lord Magnus...Magnus, Max thought with a shake of his head. Even as a child I should have known it. Magnus...Max...one and the same. The dark lord that arises the day I arrive in this godsforsaken little fantasy wankfest. He's the me that wants to grow up. To write serious literature. To go to that little grammar school in Dorset and do Linguistics. Write biographies of Proust. Or Pound. He's the dull dull future I don't want to grow into. Fuck, I've been in comatose shock since 1942. I saw that in the Emerald Mirror Orb on the Westerlands of Erllinquis. But I don't...want...to...wake...up.
The raptors snarled and howled and began their loping, scrabbling charge.
Max continued to smoke his cigarette with a grim calmness, the fiction of his being assured but embraced at once. He ran a hand over his rough, stubbled jaw, and fingered a puckered scar that stretched from ear to chin.
A raptor sprang, feet away now, long teeth hinging open for the closing of the trap. The stench of its brother's blood splattered about Max's face made its nostrils flare wide and engorged with frenzy.
Max did nothing, but stood and smoked and stared gloomily back.
There was the sound of a roaring zephyr and a shrieking of a multidinous aviary and the raptor erupted into a shower of thick crimson and stringy entrails. Behind it the others of its brood did likewise, in various other degrees of erupture and contortion, their clunky large and flayed body parts strewn haphazard and spinning about the bloody field.
Overhead the bizarre canvas contraption soared past, the great wicker cages stocked full of all colours of all kinds of parrot and canary and winged fancy, carrying the strange aeronautic bombadier on his way. He waved to Max, who nodded distantly back. The thing was one of Max's more inspired suggestions to the Excilian state, in some part designed after an aeroplane Max once say fly over his country house in the dreary 1930s. He had got the science of the thing wrong someways, but it didn't matter all that much.
He finished his cigarette and began to trudge onwards, making his way through the bloodied scraps of dinosaur flesh. He felt a little melancholy today. But then again, fantastical adventure does that to a man, after awhile.
Hey. Thank me whenever.
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