The snow had awakened yet again, falling deftly in the air, the frost on the window panes of the restaurants they wished to come inside to collecting like crystal dust, looking like the PCP they once had to get away from their troubles. The sparkled light seared through their eyes, as the snow turned into piles to rolling hills into mountains, Vector sleeping in his soggy cardboard box he called a home, the chills gathering inside his body. How they moved with their clammy feet! He shivered, he shuddered, he wished to be away from this awful winter and into a warm restaurant, a warm home, a warm mother and father! But they had scorned him, hated him! Satanic Wiccan! The fires kept burning in their homes, the incense he called "golden amber", and he wanted the home to burn down, as the trees had burned down their clothes, becoming naked in the stark, cold morning, their arms reaching towards the sky, praying to God for forgiveness. He could smell the scent of the wet leaves underneath him, rotting into the ground, the clothes they had sacrificed for sanctity. He shivered (heart shuddering), as the cold wind began to envelop him, the morning sun rising out of the hill and it had stuck out its thorny red tongue…

Espio was awake, brewing a cup of instant coffee by a flaming pit inside a trash can. He stole the instant coffee from the store and managed to get out of the prison deal safely, thinking why he didn't steal so often, as no mortals could deal with a god who was hungry, but he thought it was a violation of his code of ethics. The code of ethics he had broken too long ago.

Feeling sunburned from the UV rays reflected from the snow, he had yet another squirrel roasting on the kindling fire. Yet more burnt organs, more burnt tail and burnt meat for them to eat. It seemed so small, so meager, for their big, shriveled stomachs. Their stomachs that were pruned skin.

Vector awakened as the snow continued to roar over the cityscape of the heathen city, and he swallowed the burnt squirrel whole. They both fought over the only meal they would get for a long time, Espio claiming he was starving more. "But I'm a big guy," Vector had said. "I need enough food for me to grow. You're always going to be a scrawny lizard, aren't you?"

It was too cold to argue. The snow billowed around them, collecting many crystal piles of glass around them, the colors reflecting off their translucent skin. Vector had found half of a cigarette, and began to smoke, his pack a day habit he had always kept for many years. The promise had to be kept. Otherwise he would've went insane and killed Espio. And then off himself with a gun. He thought it was the true ending to all the world's problems.

Men were awful creatures. They always damaged the world further into its decay. And he believed he wasn't any better. A god, fighting with other gods, and he was suffering, starving, dying, and the ashes of the cigarette was never enough to feed him. To please him. The snow was much like his cigarette ashes, and he imagined God up there, smoking and smoking, as he coughed and hacked and spit out some phlegm, as he had smoked for years. When God got angry, he wanted more cigarettes, and Jesus took the last pack. He thought his analogy was humorous, but he knew no one would care to listen, not even Espio as he sipped the last of his coffee and thought over their plans to keep surviving, and fighting to keep himself alive, the Satanic Wiccan who once sang a sorrowful song for all the world to hear. The snow got colder with every inch of their icy fingers, the winter cascading more of its breath on them, the chills running through their veins, their bodies feeling sick and anhydrous.

Vector coughed out his cigarette. He imagined he was becoming sick with lung cancer. And he thought that was good. Because he would soon no longer be homeless. He would be in his true home, in the dirt underneath their feet, letting the homeless worms feed on his body. He's got to feed 'em. They shit out more dirt for the world, make it a better place. The worms had to eat. They had to split in two to eat more than they could handle.

He thought of himself as a worm, and he split in two to make Espio. And now they were eating the waste of the world, the dead people and the dead things. Worms had to make the world a better place for the humans to live in. And he knew the rumored rat society underneath Seattle was much that way. He wondered if he could live there someday. Live among the useless and broken creatures.

Espio and Vector lived only as useless and broken creatures. They both flunked out of high school, Espio getting a GED short moments before dropping out, but had no use for it now. They never planned on going to college. They simply lived on liberal media and liberal gods, with their minds growing weaker and faint the more they smoked the roll of weed. Their breath stank of it, their words drolled as they spoke, and soon, they were abandoned by their parents, never given another chance to try again at their life. They were homeless teenagers, dead and praise-less. No one cared that they were young, that they were still imbued with life. They were simply starving savages, whom only wanted to eat other mortals to dissolve their grovelling stomachs. Vector only hoped he could have it like in the olden days, of smoking the sweet leaf, of not having a care in the world, because their parents were going to take care of them. Even if he disagreed with his parents' views, he yearned he could be back with them, especially during the holidays. However, he called her, hoping to get a taste of turkey melting in his mouth, and they hung up on them, on Christmas day. Left them lying in the cold dirt, as the snow gathered around their skinny, desolate bodies, on Christmas day.

They thought over their cold and icy minds about that bird lady who once saw them, who longed for revenge on both of the hedgehogs, her rage and pyre fire anger high, her knives so sharp to slay them, her brother, still completely dumbfounded and clueless as to what she will do. They were so happy when they left. Happy. Something Vector never knew. He once had a hint of happiness when he was about 6. But nothing more. He only had a brief taste of it. For the rest of his life, he was scorned by his mother, and was often told he was never a good child. He didn't fulfill the needs of the American dream. The dream that was garnished by FOX News and McDonald's fries, as he searched in the trash and ate one, lukewarm. He was lucky it was even slightly warm in his mouth. It often tasted stale, eating cardboard in his fangled mouth. But cardboard or no, he had to eat it, like the lowly worm he was.

His fingers were blue, a pale blue, eaten by frostbite, as he listed of the various ways he wanted to die. Get in a car wreck. That was fun. Or jump off a bridge. He feared pissing off the drivers who had to go to work, who didn't care at all he wanted to jump. Eat cyanide. It was better than nothing at all in his stomach. Get a rope, tie a noose, watch his breath get loose. He made his own nursery rhyme to sing about his death. Children will love it. A crocodile had one snaggled tooth, he decided he wanted to have his neck choked in a noose. Crocodile, crocodile, have you not learned the truth? That the Man will only cut you loose.

He used to play in a band, he used to write songs, play the piano, play the guitar, along with Espio.

Their music sucked. It always had. After hours of music research, stringing guitars and playing the drums so loud Espio could swear his father was deaf, their dream was lost in delusions that they would come back together, they didn't care at all about their futures but the futures of the band. Life had come together to segregate them. The only band members who were left were them, Vector and Espio and the blue-lipped and nearly skirtless bitch that Vector had often bragged about having a one night stand with her while Espio had never got laid in his life, and they were nothing without the rest of them, without that simple magic pilfering throughout their fingertips.

There was a woman who used to sing for the band. The lead singer. She sung about false idol practices and doctrines, and false idol gods the human beings worshipped. Her name was Myra, and he claimed he loved her. His heart still beat quietly for hers. But she never came back to his life. Myra the blue-lipped tight-bit bitch. Stiletto heels that made her a few inches taller than Vector, and her fishnet stockings that she bought from Hot Topic for too much what they were worth (but never cared, cause it was the place where punks and Goths worshiped their own form of Jesus by walking around the Mecca of the store, the black jewel of Nightmare Before Christmas, Invader Zim, and Rocky Horror Picture Show merchandise.)

She slipped in his reptilian grasp. He was now a worm, without a lover to mate and produce more of his own.

Or he could produce more worms by cutting himself in half.

And he once tried to, a long time ago.

Myra called him a "punk-ass bitch" what seemed to be a year and a half ago. Shattered dreams, she stomped on the glass and made the ribbons of light dance around her heels, and cut strings of blood in her feet. He couldn't remember what happened, and he didn't much cared to hear what happened that so-called year and a half ago. The blue-lipped bitch danced around him, seduced him into sex, and now she hated him and said his band sucked ass and he would never get a successful career as a musician. What luck! What fun! The bitch ran out on his life, before he could fuck her again! The vodka he could still taste in his mouth as he smoked his cigarettes and watched as the lady with her Sex Pistols tattoos turn the smoke a cobalt blue, flipping him off with a finger that had the nail of a dragon. He asked her if she wanted to smoke some joints with her, and she said to go fuck himself, and his crazy ass shock therapy-addled brain that was fried and couldn't remember painful things.

Very painful things. He could see bloody rivers in an arm that belonged to someone familiar. Someone who was deeply in despair over a death. Mourning with the loss of his blood.

Ride the lightning. Let it shock all the hurting memories away. Let them scab in his brain and heal up to be disgusting scars.

And he sold his guitar for pot money that Christmas eve, and he soon was completely broke as he and Espio drowned out all the plants, their sweet leaves, and he sat as idly as his idle gods, hoping one day, he could be with Myra, knowing she would never want him now. His teeth yellow and looking like orange rust, his eyes decayed inside his skull, his will and passion deflowered. He was dead inside, and he knew Myra was never going to trust him, a homeless crocodile who ate from the same trash that carried in its wired cage dirty diapers and cigarette ash, as he waited for the words to come in the snow, the ice worms that would eat his face with frost.

He shuddered, shuddered, wondering if Espio, or anyone, would save him. Especially Chip, that bastard he knew had eviler intentions, intentions that were derelict from being the sovereign ruler of Earth, the guardian of those who needed guarding. Children who didn't know any better. Myra later had a child. He saw it on her Facebook. The blue-lipped bitch was experimenting with another woman, one who claimed that she was the only one who lit up her soul. The act was fake. He could tell. He knew the relationship couldn't last more than a year. She certainly wasn't gay, or bisexual.

Still, the slap in his face made his face red and sore, opened up to more diseases in the winter air. Myra oh Myra, when will you return to suck his dick?

He wallowed his eyes, and cried, howl to the sun that was covered with freckles of snow, his fingers torn by frost, his teeth rusted corroded steel, his body crumbling apart with the force of the almighty God, his hands and fists made with the crust of the stars.

"Vector, what the hell's the matter with you? You're not dying, now come on and let's find a Demon Egg. There's one not too far away from this park. Aren't we lucky?"

Vector continued to breathe with gasps, as the wind had covered him with a shawl of ice, feeling his bones rusted and old, turning to icicles. His organs were beginning to freeze under a sheet. His blood turned cold, into a frozen pond that was royal with the sea of life.

"Come on, hurry before we find another god who takes it away from us! We need to eat. We need this more than anything, Vector."

His senses were broken, shattered ice in his skull, as he rose from his decrepit crunch of his back in the snow, and he had turned into Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god who had a society full of savages, full of men who ate hearts and had the organs of other men for their collective art pieces and furniture. And Espio had turned into Xiuhcoatl, a serpent with a turpentine body, with eyes made of shard glass and his skin of malachite and fluorite, and they swam in the freezing February air, the snow collecting on their skin, their mineral bodies chiseling, as the sun moved further into the Earth, the day collecting on their eyes.

They saw the demon egg perched in the street of 7th Avenue, rested between two silver-barked trees that glittered in the absconding sun. They saw a purple cat near it. Her eyes were full of remorse, sadness, as the gods had got closer to her sanctum.

She turned those eyes to black granite, as she heard their footsteps becoming louder in the blue-soaked morning, her hands shuddering, shuddering, and they could see the hint of fangs, sharp moons that had wished to cut through them.

The cat had gazed at them with loathing, hatred, the gods were devouring her every chance of becoming more alive, no longer doll-like in her sanctity, her righteous influence tried, it colored a pure snow-white, her innocence as sparkling.

The crocodile could see her mind, her mourning making her desire to be the new Timekeeper. It was her agenda, to become the god that many would pray to in their leather-bound Bibles, hearing her screams, her cries, her decrees of injustice committed against her soul! Her purple fur, how it shined in the hateful sun, seeing the purple blazes, the hints of flames sapping the cold air of snow, and her eyes glowed like a blacklight, the germs of all Vector's hacking and Espio's eating of dead animals becoming evident. She could see their sins. Their flaws. And they felt naked against her.

Their skin was only just so deep, her claws reaching in, pricking them, slowly of small, even holes, seeping their contentment with their sad lives…

They could sense the cat, named Morrigan, wanted to become the new Timekeeper, to regain all the pieces to her scattered heart, the heart that continued to beat inside a flower, somewhere in Seattle, that was as colorless as her innocence…

Becoming the new Timekeeper? What would she want with a job like that? She trusted Chip, she trusted Chip with her merry and flaming soul, and he promised her, if she killed someone, someone who rebelled against him for the longest time, the crow that survived in the winter starked daylight as the sun had glowered with a florid and fluorescent orange and pink, the crow who flapped his wings and had claimed the lives of people she loved, in that daylight that felt as cold as her eyes, those little black rings of misery.

The cat's eyes, as black as sadness, as black as full-blown suicidal depression, was casted on them, her fingers of lead, her hair of black thick strangling wires that was whipped upon their throats. She was Morrigan, the Celtic god of death and battles and war, and her eyes had seeped of death, her heart never beat, her grip was as strong as cast iron, her scream pierced through the day, through the shadows of the world, and they clamored to find their right places before the light of the world. She was no longer a purple cat that protested royalty to this disgusting society, she was an old, wretched maiden who wanted revenge, revenge of her last dead love, who rotted in the ground, who was eaten and torn apart by worms, she had blown both the Aztec gods away as she ignited pestilence on the land, her deaths becoming louder as many humans had grown old and cold and died. Vector's teeth was falling into his hands, the orange shit-colored fangs loose (tie the noose), and Espio had heard the cry of her sadness, her forlornness at this wonderful, brave creature who had protected her, parented her, guided her, yet he couldn't get her to say who it was that was murdered in cold blood, as she gripped on the demon egg, crushing it into many dissected black pieces. She had asked them of the murderer's name, the name that she had to seek. She asked them of where he was, with his bloody red wine knife, his eyes glazed with alcohol, his head swimming with pride and madness.

"Horus."

They coughed, their lungs collapsing before them, as the winter continued to lap their oxygen and warmth in luxury, and they said, "Who?"

"Horus." Her eyes flared, the black fire rising from her skull, the grip grasping Vector's scales and his shoddy body, as the withering woman disappeared from her face, and she became the cat again, the cat who had too many lives to spare to anyone. Nine was simply too much for her. So was two.

"Where is Horus?"

They knew of Horus, the Egyptian sun god. The green, drunken and idiotic bird had done many awful things; he had drunk the splendor of the defeat of many gods, the murder of their sacred golden blood. Vector didn't know of where he went, his sun-skin disappearing in the shadows, an eclipse. His wings were not built of sun, but shadows. He thought Horus was supposed to be a good, righteous, cheerful god, but he was instead selfish, greedy, and a liar and a thief. The god had taken many bottles from the wine racks, trying to feed himself with nothing but liquor, his eyes swelling up of red wine and whiskey, the alleyways always smelling of his piss as if he was a dog marking his territory. He believed differently about Horus. The good god was a very flawed, very dark, very evil god, and he wanted him dead, and he hoped that this goddess could take her shadowed knife and cut across his golden one, then to his neck, letting all the red wine and whiskey and bloody mary's bleed from there, his folklore, gone.

He didn't know. And he wished he knew, as the woman continued to breathe fire on his neck, the icy cold grasp as cold as the winter that was howling around them.

"I need to know where Horus is. And his damnable sister and brother. I don't know where they could be, but once I see them, I'm going to murder them as they rightly deserve to be. They have caused nothing but sin in this world. Despair. Betrayal and hate. They don't deserve to live, to grace this Earth I will rebuild with my prowess of the minutes, seconds, and hours. Days, years, millennia. Make everything go by smoothly, they said. Make sure none of the time is trapped up in there, in that little vial. Chip…I trusted him. I always trusted him. Become a timekeeper if I can kill all those who wronged me, he said. There's the crow. The sun bird. The thunderbird. The three birds that are keeping me from living the life I want: full of happiness, never any sorrow left in my eyes. A man I knew for too long and too harshly killed my first life, as he birthed a new civilization. Yehl, the crow god, killed my second life. And Horus, oh Horus, killed my most precious, my golden third life, and I cannot let any more lives of my Nine Lives be killed. Be culled to darkness.

"And with said, my slothful fools, I can do anything. My hands are mighty. I am ice and fire. I am decay and life. I am a mistress and a slave, a queen, a saint. I will take care of the world. I will take care of God. I will take care of my god."

Her tongue spoke and hissed like fire. Her gaze was cold, entrapped in golden ice. The winter's deathly touch was nothing to her. She wasn't fazed. She had no life inside her, the goddess of death. The goddess of battles and wars. She lived on injury and bloodcuts and the fallings of her loyal friends. Except one. When he died, her heart had died with him.

She had let go of Vector's colorful body, hissing, hissing, his tongue poking through the frozen air. Xiuhcoatl had simply lied, waiting for her next movement, knowing this goddess was too powerful for them. With just one prick of her fingers, a stitched scar had bled through. Her beauty was her vengeance, her plea to remain as immortal as a god truly could be.

She knew time was running out. Horus had tried to kill another god, and she could see his seams ripped through, yet another stuffed animal for her to fix, her friend, Aceso, the sewing needles of Fate that had stitched across the stars and had pattern the universe with only nothing but thread and a sewing needle. God had sewn the world according to His own image, and she had small, deft hands to create the right threads, the right patterns, and He knew what to do for His little universe, with His pincushion strawberry that lied on His desk, adorned with quills like a hedgehog.

"Horus will die. I will make sure he dies on this awful, filth-ridden planet. I will kill Yehl too. I will make me and Aceso the Women of Fate. Our thread is invisible, but seen at a certain angle, it shines in colors like an opal. We are simply spiders. Spiders like Anansi, when he had webbed for you his song of lies."

Her eyes had turned amygdala, gold and rustic, and her breath was spoken from her when she had left the two reptiles alone in the street, as the people passed by uncaring and unwilling to hear their dramas. She slipped between the row of cars that gathered near the street lights, the green, yellow, and red shining in her eyes, the life of the street sparking from her feet, from her hands adorned with flames. She watched the sun sinking down further, the lotus flower that she collected somewhere, beginning to close its pale petals, the heart beating slower, with the pace of the sun's feet.

Chilled to his dehydrated body, his shards of forgotten bones, of this creature, this woman who had collected the encroaching flames on her royal black dress, the princess of another dimension, he sat as he watched the cars go by, the blind deaf and dumb people going on with their lives, their feet seeming so small in this world, this world garnered by gods.

"Another demon egg, slipping from our grasps, just like that. She was powerful. More powerful than us."

"And we didn't do a damn thing about it. We should've done something. But we didn't. What a bunch of pathetic losers are we?"

Vector coughed up phlegm in his throat and spat it to the ground, as he saw the men and women of the working world trying to get their paycheck for the day, their reasons for living, and he snorted, thinking "the battle" wasn't much of a surprise.

"Of course, because everyone else is stronger than us, Espio. We're jokes. We can't beat any god for any demon egg at all. We couldn't even beat Anansi, and he didn't even fight any gods. He just wrote. All he wanted to do was write."

Vector had read his short stories. They touched him, and he didn't mind at all about him being a recluse and choosing instead to spend time with his typewriter, because he was a damned good writer, and if he didn't die off so quickly, he would've had a future. As a lot of unpublished writers, those who chose to not let their voice be heard by greedy publishers.

"I didn't much care for them, Vector," he said, reading his mind as he thought again over his stories, the ones he gave them for only a quarter.

"They were too decadent. Too sweet. Mind candy that sickens the soul. We need to go back to the park and suffer like we used to. We may never find another demon egg. And that may be it. I would rather die than be starving all the time."

Their only path was starvation, to have their folklore gone. Vector couldn't win against anything, and he believed that Quetzalcoatl was a very weak god, but he was mighty in his myths. No longer did people believe in the Aztec gods anymore. They were useless prophets of the beginning of a savage future. Tearing people's hearts for sacrifice. He was sure they used their skin of the dead for furniture too. Or was it a psychotic man who had done that? Aztecs were psychotic too. There wasn't much of a difference between the two.

Death was something they weren't afraid of anymore. They knew it was probable since they were born. Their mothers had always told them their sons would die, so quickly and so pathetically, without achieving anything of worth in the world.

And that was it. That was their destiny. To be useless. To leave their mark on the Timekeeper's chart that they had done nothing but scared a little blue hedgehog to the point that he had become a very mighty god.

(He was scared enough, Vector thought subconsciously.)

They trekked back to Denny's Park, the snow falling gently, soothingly, to the city of Seattle, dressing the trees in a white silk dress, the maidens of the world lying asleep for the forgotten gods, as they rolled up in their newspaper blankets, closed their eyes, and had a cold, desolate sleep.

They had heard the sounds of boots passing by the park, little imprints of bloody marks drawn on the snow. His dagger was gold, his influence superfluous and grand. People all over the world had loved him, and he didn't know why.