Sir Broderick summoned all of his declined faculties and writhed around in a fishlike manner, full of fear and putrescence. He turned over and spat in the woman’s face, sending her reeling back just long enough to pull himself up and scurry towards the woods.

“Halt! In the name of the Royal Gourd!”

WWWHHSHT

She’d fired an arrow straight through Sir Broderick’s hand, pinning him to a nearby tree.

“Hamnation!” he screeched.

His flask had fallen out of his robes as the arrow pierced his left palm. In a snap and a spurt Sir Broderick yanked out the arrow and swooped down, clutching his flask and drizzling its contents down his gullet. He noticed his hand bleeding profusely and growled.

“Well done missirrah! Now I’ve got to waste some of my liquor!”

Sir Broderick poured a conservative splotch of grain alcohol on his searing hand wound and wrapped his snot covered kerchief over it with a quick knot. The woman stood there in bewilderment.

“Well?” he wretched. “Got any more?”

TWWWTTTCHH

An arrow sailed right past his face, piercing his left ear and sending it flying past him into the woods with a painful rip.

“Cock hammit! Motherclucker!” he cried, running hapzardly through the brush and colliding with more than a fair share of spiky trees, poisonous clovers, and thorny vines.

The woman fired one more decisive arrow, this one penetrating Sir Broderick the Shitfaced’s left butt cheek.

“Ohhh cluck you!”

She lowered her crossbow and squinted with intensity. Another armor clad woman stepped out from the Belligerent Bar-D. She was twice as tall, twice as muscular, and twice as smelly.

“What was all that about?”

“I just saw one of the Skyrates.”

“Dead?”

“No, very much alive. I took his left ear off. He ran into those woods.”

“Those woods? You mean the Wayword Woods?”

“I guess so.”

“Pamela, you clucking ingrate,” the ginormous woman muttered under her malodorous breath, “Nobody gets out of the Wayword Woods alive. You have to be a wizard to take more than twenty paces through it without something at least attempting to disembowl you. You’d of known that if you’d have only read the placard over there.”

The hulking beast pointed to a small bronzed cupboard fastened to a nearby tree, with engraved letters reading: WAYWORD WOODS — DON’T COME HERE IF YOU LIKE BEING ALIVE.

“It’s a very popular location for suicides,” she added.

***

Sir Broderick the Shitfaced was well buzzed off the contents of his flask, but unfortunately at the moment he was only shitfaced in title and literally, that is to say due to the actual horse shit smeared on his face. He was very much feeling pain. Pain where his left ear had been. Pain in his left palm where the arrow had been, and before that skin. Pain in his left ass cheek. Psychological pain for the loss of Sassafrass, the ass he had left outside the Belligerent Bar-D.

As Sir Broderick fumed about the audacity of skyrates, the Wayword Woods did its best to outright murder him.

The luring landfish of lakeview lanterns conjured up images of Sir Broderick’s favorite alcohol, fantasy everclear. He would have immediately been entrapped had he not been thinking of hood comebacks to say to the skyrates after he bested them in a duel.

Of course he could have easily stepped into the ready and waiting jaws of the gigantic invisible Martian human trap plants, of which there were thousands dotted all over the wood, but his slight inebriation mixed with the discombobulation of his left inner ear on the removal of his left outer ear had Sir Broderick bobbing and weaving in such an odd, uneven pattern that he was impossible to place, impossible for the gigantic invisible martian human trap plants to sense.

Even with all of that luck there was indeed still the human eating eight legged bear wolves, but Sir Broderick was so unabashedly boisterous and looked through them with such careless intensity, and the human eating eight legged bear wolves were indeed so abhorrently stupid, that they thought Sir Broderick must have been some sort of bipedal human eating bear wolf himself. That is, except for one very intelligent human eating eight legged bear wolf, which saw through the entire charade but was itself a vegan and therefore over the whole thing.

There were countless other creatures trying to murder Sir Broderick but somehow he bumbled his way through more than a hundred lousy paces before collapsing on the forest floor in a haze. He would have had a moment to realize where he was, the dreaded Wayword Woods, had he not heard the most horrible groaning imaginable coming from a nearby clump of bushes.

“Oooooohhhhhh…hood Gourd….”

Sir Broderick vomited in his mouth a little bit, then pulled himself as together as a man without a left ear and with an arrow in his ass could and trudged over to the bushes.

“Who the clucking hen are you and why won’t you shut your gobble?” Sir Broderick spat, not even looking at the figure he was berating.

“Please….Please have…have some kind…nesss…”

“Kind…Ness? What proof is that? 90? Oh what the hen I’ll take it either way!”

“No, no, kindness! Brotherhood! Fraternity!”

“Oh. That’s not my flagon of ale if I’m being truthful, sirrah,” Sir Broderick relented, looking down to see a crumpled mess of body-odor-ridden human flesh. It was an emaciated old man, crumpled near into a ball like a circus contortionist. He was missing two teeth.

“What the clucking hen happened to you?”

“Had a bit of a tumble.”

“A bit of a tumble? It looks like hamn near half your bones are broke! I’m honestly not sure how you’re alive!”

With a chuckle the old man twirled his right pinkie, his only unbroken finger, and a small rainbow shot out of it into the air with a light farting noise.

“Oh gourd. A wizard. A clucking wizard, just what I need, and a hamn show off at that. I’ll be on my way now.”

“Wait wait wait wait! Don’t go! I need your help!”

“Oh, let me guess, twenty pints of sapphire for ten easy payments of my first born child and half my kidney. I’ve heard it all before, you miserable wretch. Go stimey some other blimey.”

“That’s not…I don’t…please! If you help me now I’ll forever be in your debt!”

“I don’t want some creepy old freak indebted to me! Go make someone else nauseous!”

“You keep telling me to leave, yet I can’t even move! If you must, stop torturing me and just go!”

“Fine by me. Hood day to you, sirrah.”

Sir Broderick sauntered off, only to step into a thicc pile of sluggish sand. Immediately it sucked him deep down so that only his head was visible.

“What was that?” chuckled the wizard.

“Nothing!” croaked Sir Broderick, as the incredibly fast moving sluggish sand choked his throat like a serpent.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing! You sound quite stuck to me!”

“No! Not at all!” crackled Sir Broderick’s voice box as his face turned purple.

“You sound like you’re being choked. There isn’t any sluggish sand nearby, is there?”

“N-n-n-” with a squeeze, Sir Broderick couldn’t even make a sound. He was once again faced with tunnel vision, though it wasn’t due to his favorite mind altering substance this time.

“Stubborn as a horse,” sighed the wizard. He moved his pinkie in several circles, twice counterclockwise, thrice clockwise, then thirty thrice counterclockwise, then once clockwise, then twice counterclockwise, and then he flexed his pinky outward, and then he moved it thirty more times counterclockwise.

With a hissing sound, the sluggish sand melted away from Sir Broderick and fizzled into dusty, normal sand of no speed at all. Sir Broderick hacked up a lung almost literally.

“Th-thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Sir Broderick slowly pulled himself back to his feet, crackled his knuckles, and then began to walk away from the wizard in the bushes.

“Um, hello?”

Sir Broderick said nothing.

“Hey! Hey! Come back here!”

He walked further away.

“Why don’t you help me? I just helped you! Hood will towards hen and all that funk!”

“I have no time for creepy old men pleasuring themselves in bushes! My ass has been stolen, I’m all out of liquor and the Royal Gourd just tried to murder me in lukewarm blood!”

“You know you’re in the Wayword Woods! You won’t last five seconds without the help of a wizard!”

Sir Broderick the Shitfaced nearly shit his pants, and his shit covered face turned to shit covered stone.

“Excrete me? Did you just say what I think you just said?”

“Yes.”

“Well might you say it again just to be sure?”