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America

The cluster of modified, patched together trailers moving slowly across the desert horizon looked like something out of a fairy story that's taken a turn for the trashy. Howl's Moving Trailer Park or something along those lines. She'd ask Tubadiah about it later. He was a reader.

The singed remnants of America's robes flapped as she skid down a small cliff and raced toward the structure. Beside her a line began to grow in the sand and soon a massive emerged long enough for her to give it a fond pat and a few saccharine coos before it burrowed back into the cooler depths of the earth.

Bumble Toes was her favourite mutant sand worm thing, but she got on well with most of them, at least after figuring out they were much the same as any minipet in the times before. Just...much, much larger.

One of the trailer doors opened, and several small figures ran to greet her, one of them carrying new clothes and a pained expression. "Moooom, put some clothes on, nobody wants to see all that."

"Excuse you," she took the offered clothing from the boy and hugs from the rest with a grin, "lots of people would love to see all this and be dang lucky if they did." It was all said with the air of tradition, something to ease the tension of what her singed, nearly naked appearance meant: their mother had been hurt badly enough to be forced to burn up again.

"Go on now, run and tell Popstya to angle Rosie east." The massive worms they used to pull their home across the wastes were strong and steady, but it was slow going. They'd have to change course now to avoid the trouble brewing north.

They hadn't planned on collecting a family, not at first. The dreams of a home and future and children she couldn't have had only begun stirring within America when the world had changed. At first had just been about surviving, and taking care of those weaker than then wasn't in anybody's survival handbook. There was a place in America that was cooly comfortable with this aspect of survival and it wasn't something she, ever honest, would deny.

So it was a surprise when one day, caught in a firefight over a warehouse that still held crates of dried beans, that she died protecting a little boy who'd tried to sneak through and steal a bit for he and his. America could still recall the shock of it, her own gaze meeting Konstantin's one time in sheer, disbelieving surprise before everything went dark, her life extinguished and not even a chance to apologize for finally succumbing to the unpardonable act of dying.

That'd been the first time she'd died, but not nearly the last.

Merging with a phoenix had its perks. Even if they came at excruciating cost.

Ashery

(f u i broke my world rules i don't care /cries)

It starts with a gentle rumbling beneath his feet, the concrete shaking in its foundation. It grows, treacherous and calculated, swelling with the force of a church choir singing a well-rehearsed hymn. He hears rocks crumbling in the distance, and the alarm starts up, sounding off in a shrill, continuous whine. He knows this whine, recognises it from the last riot that had turned south and left a hundred dead.

It's an air raid siren, and its meaning is clearer than crystal. Disaster. Emergency. Code Red.

Ashford braces himself against the wall of his little shoebox cell, riding out the waves, watches the base of his bed fracture like its thin ice instead of poured concrete, hairline cracks spreading across its surface. He forces himself to breathe, to soothe the adrenaline already flooding his veins.

Because Ashford Charles? He's a peaceful man, these days. Fifteen years into his life sentence in supermax prison had calmed a fire in him that had never known respite, stamped on it till the embers were nothing but ash. Some of the prisoners devolved, did terrible things to themselves and to guards and to each other to get a little human contact, to get a few reactions. 23 hours a day in a cell stripped them of their dignity, made them lose the few scraps of humanity they had left.

Not Ash.

Quietly, he'd traded with the other prisoners to get a little block of wood, a scrap of a knife, a bit of black paint, and he had painstakingly carved himslf a little statuette. Kept to himself, but the gangs and other inmates just couldn't leave him in peace.

So Ashford had taught them all their lessons, one at a time, showing them that he wasn't to be ******** with. That he was a force of nature, with the strength of a hurricane and stoic enough to be carved from marble.

Conversations resulted in faces slammed into tables, goading ended in torn out throats done with nothing more than his bare hands. Ashford crushed bones to prove his strength, ruined a man just to get some peace and ******** quiet.

The courts extended his sentence again and again, and the stories throughout the prison about him grew in size and proportion as his acts escalated, little statue on his person at all times, kept warm in a pantspocket he'd sewn himself.

There hadn't been a worse Charles since Manson himself, they said. Couldn't kill him, couldn't hurt him, and with the notoriety and the hate came a god-like status that made him larger than life.

And then, one day, Ashford had stopped the violence altogether, refusing to come out of his cell, now at peace with himself and the world at large. He prayed to a god long forgotten, to a creature that watched over him in dire times.

(Sixteen years old, not yet ruined, not yet pushed to the brink, fake IDs and ink needled into his skin, sprawling black of three reared heads all along his back, with slavering maws and red eyes and he had never seen anything better--)

And now those times were over at least.

The cacophany around Ashford escalates, the war cries of the country's worst criminals escalate, yelling and screaming and howling at a deafening level: like animals, like beasts, like they had never been human at all. A copper tang hits the air, blood surely running as deep and wide as the river Nile. All the while, the air raid siren goes and goes and goes.

Amidst it all is a laugh, soft and calculating and it sends a shiver down his spine in the best way. It sounds like a child's, but he knows better. He reaches into his pocket, rubs his thumb over his carved idol's face, over its ears, all three and six of them respectively.

The floor quakes like a ten on the richter scale, but still, it doesn't split. Ashford half expects it to turn into a gaping ravine leading all the way down to hell-- no, to Tartarus itself. There's a metal door in front of his cell bars, to provide extra security to the guards, and he watches in sick fascination (and unadulterated pleasure) as the inches of steel crumple like paper, watches it get yanked away by a force not yet known to man, plumes of dust rising as concrete crumbles into sand all around him.

Ashford pulls himself up to his full height, proud and tall, all six foot eight of him, muscled like an armoured tank. The clouds of debris settle, and he sees a figure, petite with a presence is larger than life itself.

He didn't cry when they'd sentenced him to a fate worse than death, didn't cry when his parents murdered friends in front of his eyes and expected him to do the same, didn't cry when he'd lived up to their hopes and dreams and taken them apart, piece by piece. Thirty years and Ashford hadn't cried: but he does now, falling to his knees and weeping at this man's feet. Caramel skin and hair darker than coal and eyes glinting like mismatched amethyst, frame slim, a crown balanced atop his head, a cape behind him dragging on the ground. Everything is shades of purple. Ashford's shoulders shake, because it's him, he knows it down in his bones, in the remains of his heart, in the small piece of him that feels.

"You came," he whispers to the floor, big hands curled into fists, white knuckled and tense.

Between the crown and locks of hair are ears, black and pointed, beneath the cape is a tail, black and silken soft, Ash can tell from how it looks. He doesn't dare to touch.

"Of course," the figure says with a voice silken smooth, reassuring, excited. He lays a hand on Ashford's cheek. "The world is changing, now, you know." He smiles, white teeth pearlescent and the howls he hears are different, now. They aren't human at all. The howls turn into barks and yips and snarls, the thud of padded feet against the floor hit in rhythms of four instead of two.

He gently tugs Ashford upwards, raising him as he'd done so many years ago. "It's not your time now. It wasn't then, and isn't now, so don't worry, Ash."

Ash breathes, cheeks wet with tears, smells sulfur and brimstone and smiles in a way he hasn't for years. The words are filling him until they want to spill out of his edges, to split all his carefully stitched seams, but the King of Hell merely places a finger to his chapped lips, mismatched eyes bright with mirth.

"I know, it's okay. It's time to go now; there's work to do." The King pulls the key from his neck, large and wrought from old steel, metal older than human civilization itself, and presses into Ashford's hands.

The key is heavy, but it is a burden Ashford gladly carries. He withdraws the statue from his pocket, sets it atop his broken bed, the cerberus balancing oddly on three wooden feet.

The figure shakes from its place, shivering to life and expanding in size until its a full-sized Hellhound, snarling like the turned prisoners down below. It takes its rightful place by Thackery's side, listening for half-whispered orders in playful tones.

Ashford follows the King out of his cell, eyes alight with purpose, witnessing a revolution before his very eyes.

He feels it in his bones: welcome to the new age.