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relied only as long as they survived. Their rough trade was a calling, not a career, and they were often regarded with a healthy respect. French expected a train soon, and his eyes flickered down the length of track, wondering how far away the inevitable conglomerate of rail cars and broken souls might be. He felt a kinship to the people who braved the dangers of overland train travel because he had been one such soul not a year earlier.
    French was born and bred to the westernmost portion of the Appalachians near what had been Asheville, North Carolina. His parents were, in their original incarnation, an artist and a college professor, but those occupations fell by the wayside when the entire world went to hell. Asheville resisted the fallout with stolid resilience. It may have been the excellent location, or perhaps it was the wildly-diverse artistic community with rustic skills that suddenly came back in fashion. No matter what confluence of luck and ability Asheville possessed, it worked. French’s parents were no shrinking violets, and the maxim he’d grown up with—never stop learning—became a fact of life that could, at the very least, preserve some sliver of hope for their familial future. From an early age, it became clear that he was a child who would need little in the way of encouragement. His parents mined every resource possible to salvage books, maps, and anything of note that could prepare him for the savagery that waited just outside the bucolic setting of the robust city in the forest. For nearly six decades, Asheville didn’t just survive, it grew. Twin landmarks on opposite sides of the valley were appropriated and developed as nerve centers. On one side, the vast sprawl of the Biltmore estate stood watch, its grounds teeming with activity as a market, meeting place, and nexus for local defense. Opposite the noble Biltmore was the other city sentinel, The Grove Park Inn. Both locations boasted excellent views, access, and naturally-occurring defenses that only buttressed the success of Asheville, and after fifty-nine years, it looked like the forests of Western Carolina were going to be the launching pad for a regional government.
    That dream ended with a roar. On July nineteenth, fifty-nine years after the first emergence of dragons, and fifty-eight years after the first hellspawn leapt upward to feed, Asheville was attacked by three—and only three—monsters of such hideous power that the land shook with their overland arrival. The first hint that something was wrong came in the form of nearly a thousand dead livestock tumbling down the confluence of the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers. Scouts at the limits of the defensive ring raised the alarm immediately upon sighting the gore-clogged rivers rising up their well-tended banks. Hogs, horses, and cattle of all sizes were gashed open, presumably drained of blood, and tossed into the river somewhere upstream. The pale, pink flesh of the dead animals was unnaturally light in color, and many were missing their heads. Crawling on and in each carcass were grotesque, misshapen lice, nearly the size of a lobster. More than one of the townsfolk went to investigate, only to recoil in horror upon examining the crustaceans. At the end of the waving tendrils that sprouted from their carapace, were human eyes and rasping feline tongues protruding from the general vicinity of their mandibles. They croaked and groaned, and one militiaman, a steady veteran of two decades, swore that the louse he picked up laughed at him. Rumor spread at the speed of fear, and there were no less than six sightings of a robed figure in the forest on the opposite side of the defensive lines. Panic was on the verge of dissolving what defenses Asheville had in place until the rather prosaic issue of the river and livestock caused the town to refocus on the immediate issue. Mass death was nothing new, but the volume of carcasses was so great that the river began to clog, and then