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A great warrior-poet once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Once you got out on your own, you had a lot of plans: five-year plans for jobs, ten-year plans for personal development, relationship plans across a whole lifetime. That last one fell apart first, catching you out of nowhere, knocking your feet out from under you. But you got up, kept going, even as your other plans stalled out. Work felt empty and meaningless. All those dreams of personal growth transformed under your gaze, becoming a pile of worthless self-help shit that no one with half a brain could believe. The whole world went gray and cold.

And then you met him: the traveler. He was in Las Cruces, where you were staying, down from the reservation to sell his jewelry at an outdoor market. People knew him and liked him, though they said he was always in trouble with someone, somewhere. Good with his hands, people said. You looked at him and his work, and it was like they were the only things in the world that still had color. Gold, garnet, sapphire, shining in the electric lights. He called himself Brian. Perfectly ordinary name. He said that he worked for a man who once stole power from a god, and that one day the god would come to get it back and make them both pay, but until then…did you want to travel with him, and help them stay one step ahead of their doom?

You hopped in his van that night.

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