This is the world capitalists want to return to.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

You see—people who pick up this trade aren't quite normal. Normal people stay home and become the miller or the baker and raise a bunch of kids. Adventurers are almost defined by being a little different.

Like, take Lissar, our swordswoman. Big, buff, drinks a lot, what you would expect mostly. Doesn't talk about her family. Skittish about the full moons. Turns out that she got a bad spell for her gender-fixing and ended up with a nasty case of avolitional lycanthropy, which means that her girlfriend has to use a restraining collar whenever there's enough moonlight. (And no, I don't know if they do anything else with it, I have a firm policy that I don't hear anything that happens in other people's tents, even when I do. So don't ask. I also don't get the human gender thing at all. Sounds strange for a dwarf to say, but I almost think that the elves and their twelve-gender system make more sense, at least they're dividing people up based on actual traits that they have rather than vague physical generalizations that are sometimes dead wrong anyway.)

And me, I'm an absolutely normal dwarf, you think. Why would I go adventuring. Well, you may have noticed the odd-colored left eye, but you might also want to look at the things I do—the petty magics and the prestidigitation—and wonder exactly why a dwarf, scion of a decent family in a well-run cavern, would pick up what are essentially thieves skills—

And then you would want to mind your own business. Because that's the code. Everyone has some odd wrinkles in their backstory, it happens. It'll probably come out at the worst possible moment, too. But you don't pry.

So when dude shows up with a bandaged face telling us to call him Brother Healhand and using a bizarre mix of slang that spreads across the last three hundred years, if not more—we knew perfectly well that something was up, and we didn't ask.

Which works up until he ended up commanding, not turning, a full legion of the Smoke King's undead forces. That gets…hard to ignore.

"Hast thou a notion what I should do with these fuckers?" Brother Healhand asked me, sitting pensively on a rock. His bandages were disarranged enough that I could see glowing eyes, and the crystal on the end of his staff was a rather disturbing eldritch greenish purple rather than its usual soft white. I don't think I'm supposed to be able to see that color. I looked at the army of obedient zombies instead.

"Did you do the same ritual as the Smoke King?" Probably not what I should lead with.

"The blood rite of immortality?" Becoming a lich has a body count. A large one. That's why decent people don't do it. Brother Healhand looked away. "People change."

Can't argue with that. I've changed some myself.

For one thing, I'm talking to an undead rather than dying in a futile attack. That's a change. Dwarves have opinions about things that don't stay dead. (Except the Star-Jeweled King, who I think may actually be dead, but people hope he isn't—although even there, there's a kind of relief in the fact that he hasn't woken up, because that would be the Big One, the War at the End of the World, and we all know we're not all getting through that one.)

"You going to stand with us against the Smoke King?"

"Even had I not changed," Brother Healhand said promptly. "My kind are territorial and combative. And the Smoke King is just plain crass."

The enemy of my enemy is not my ally, necessarily, but he's still a guy you'd rather have around than not. So long as you keep an eye on him. "And these guys—"

"Spread the word not, I pray," Brother Healhand said, "but mindless undead have always slightly—bothered me. Nature abhors a vacuum. I feel that Things creep into the gap where the soul was. Which can lead to—unpleasantness."

And these zombies were old. "Do you think we can safely use them to fight the Smoke King's other legions?"

Brother Healhand was quiet for a moment. "I abhor the notion of being the distraction. However. Thou canst picture it, no? Another lich approaches, raises his banner, hails the Smoke King in his lair and threatens him with his own minions, telling him to come on if he thinks he's hard enough. Hardly a challenge any lich could or would ignore. Meanwhile a small team, slipping through the tunnels beneath the mountain— it could be done. Perhaps. The odds are not good but when have they ever been?"

I thought about it.

It might be the best chance we were going to get.

"No heroic last stands," I said. "You distract him and you get out of there, get it? We want to see you again when we get out."

Brother Healhand gave me a wry look. Which is difficult with eldritch glowing eyes. "I did not come to this state by loving the notion of death. I'll be there, with bells on. I would have thy promise of the same."

It occurred to me that given Brother Healhand's age—whatever it was—there might be significance in the fact that about a month ago, he switched to calling us all thou. I think most of us wrote it off as, oh, he talks like that. Maybe not.

materialist-scumbag

THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026

So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.

That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.

What the tick explains is the SHAPE.

Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.

The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.

(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)

So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?

You get a line.

You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.

The gate was the railhead.

This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.

Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.

And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.

(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)

So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.

It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.

And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.

The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.

Whereas the reality is far more like

(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)

Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.