Cobe II

Chapter 1: Hello, I’m Cobe, or at least one time I was known as Cobe, then I took to calling myself Jinx, and now through a series of unfortunate events, my name is Lucky. You can’t see this, but I’m a dog. No, I don’t mean I chase every female I can find in search of s*x… which I do, but that is beside the point. I am a real dog, fleas and all. A one-eyed, one-eared, one-balled dog named Lucky. Can you see the irony? See that woman walking ahead of me… of course you can’t. This is a book, but trust me, she is the love of my life. Dogs usually walk in the front… I prefer the view from the rear. I watch over her literally from behind whenever possible. Because of her, or in spite of her, I was saved from an eternity of Torment to go on living after death. I serve Potent, the sleeping god of my world, or as I like to think of him, Im-Potent. I can’t call him that aloud, I’m on probation. Bad things can happen when you piss off the beings in charge. In this world, after death you are greeted by a never-ending line, at least the humans are. Im-Potent granted us souls he can play with. The dragons don’t have them. Dragons hate to be reminded they were created as the first mistake, to be replaced by humans, the second mistake. If you really want to get under a dragon’s skin remind them of that. Most mortals don’t know this information or any information. They are too busy trying to scrape a living out of the dust. You see, many things here in the land of Im-Potent are broken, and this makes life difficult for the men of the world to survive. The first thing that is broken, or at least bent: Our male god has decided in his infinite wisdom to have wealth and power pass down from mother to daughter. Men are left without… well without power. As a man, I find that in extremely poor taste. I mean if Im-Potent were a woman, you would kind of expect it, but since he is a man, for him to favor the women over men makes me believe he has serious mommy issues. I can’t confirm or deny the rumor, but maybe our Lord walks like a Lady instead. All this struck me hard. It wasn’t until after I died that I learned this information. I’m a fixer, so my job is to fix things. I travel about human- and dragonkind setting things right… as a dog. I understand the whole thing seems strange, but I guess the powers that be decided it would be easier for a dog to move about and right wrongs more than… I’ve devoted too much time thinking about this, but I feel a creature, ten-foot-tall with leathery wings made of iron, that flew in and stopped all sorts of disagreements would be best. If anyone argued with the creature, he could shoot lightning bolts out of his eye to smite any disagreeable sorts. That is my idea of a fixer… but no one asked for my opinion. I did suggest it, but I was ignored. I digress… Our bent/broken world has a significant number of fixers and other levels of creatures that go about putting all the messed up half-baked parts of our world right. I have a vulpine friend called Smigget; he looks like a short red dog with unkempt hair. His job is a simple one, to go about pissing on mushrooms. That’s his entire existence in the afterlife. To urinate on mushrooms with his urine that smells of rotten cabbage. That, my friends, is a broken world by anyone’s standards. To keep track of all these fixers is a vast bureaucracy to ensure the world we protect does not come apart at the seams. Layer upon layer of supervisors. I work for a b***h called Kampot. She’s not a dog but a crazy old woman that tricked me into being a dog. As you might guess, I don’t like her much. Thinking back, I had little choice in my decision to become a fixer, but I could’ve been recruited by anyone but Kampot the Crazy. I understand you might think a paradise awaits all those that serve the sleeping god, as set forth in the holy scrolls and passed down by the priestess of the faith. Believe me, it’s all a lie; the whole story is a grand marketing scheme told by the temples to extract as much coin as possible from the faithful. I was not one of the faithful but one of the blasphemers, the foul-mouthed, and the disrespectable. I was destined to wait in line on the floor of Torment for a body. My soul would never be reincarnated, a body would never open up for me. I might have stated my displeasure for the current state of affairs more than once… All right it was thousands of times in my short life. (Trust me, I saw the list. I found the scroll awe-inspiring.) Listen, I could go on about what happened in the first book, but is that really necessary? I’m sure you finished it, only moments ago, and have since begun this book… If not, what is wrong with you? You will miss the meet-cute between myself and Adriana. The death and destruction that happens along the way, plus how I became the one-eyed, one-eared, one-balled dog. Who would want to miss that? Some things you need to know: Im-Potent sleeps for thousands of years at a time. No one knows where he came from, and he isn’t all here in the brain. Our world will one day collapse because of the inherited errors built into the system. Things need to be fixed, yet we only hold the systems together by wrapping them with twine… metaphorically speaking. Not all the fixers get along swimmingly. There is a rumor that can only be whispered in the darkest recesses of the world that a group of fixers are rebelling, but you didn’t hear that from me. I’m sure I left something out. In this world, important details seem to continually go unnoticed or get left out. You might guess I’m not one of Im-Potent’s loyal followers, and you would be correct, but I’m not stupid enough to fall in with any rebellion against a god. Insurrection is a path that will only lead to really bad things happening to myself. Now I need to follow Adriana. She heads for the desert, and I need to go search for these butt-ugly sand squids that will pull your ass right under and have you for breakfast. I find it a pleasure to follow behind this woman. She has problems talking to others, but the swish of her hips is enough to make even an old dog stand up and take notice.