Prologue: "What are we needed for?"

Sky is turning an orange tint on the eastern horizon. A mist softens the stark outline of the trees, bare branches almost otherworldly through the haze. Predawn silence is broken by the sharp clack of hooves on gravel. In the midst of mist-shrouded birches a shadow, a black-on-gray silhouette, takes shape. It is a pale man on a black horse. Hooves click on asphalt now as horse and rider emerge onto Fourth Street. The man reins in the horse on the front lawn of a yellow house.

The front door opens. A red-haired man steps out onto the concrete porch steps. He takes his pipe from his mouth and casually waves it in greeting.

“We are needed,” the man on horseback says.

“What about my kids?” the man on the porch asks.

“Got that covered.” The man on horseback gestures behind him, and from the dissipating mist a gangly creature bounds. Barely four feet tall, it wears farmer’s overalls that sag on its lanky frame. Its skin is mottled like a mole, and it has a long aardvark’s snout. “Quirt.”

The man on the porch regards the strange creature a moment in silence.

Then he says, “Quirt will scare the kids.”

“You’d think so,” the man on horseback replies. “But actually children really take to her.”

The man on horseback wears a long black duster and a matching Stetson hat. He is Rider Oz, a seasoned rider who has crossed planes nearly thirty summers.

The man on the porch wears casual, earth-tone clothes and a brown tweed cap on his head. He is built lanky, almost reed-thin, but in his breast he harbors the spirit of Visigoth. He is Rider Dyb.

“What are we needed for?” Rider Dyb asks, tamping the ashes from his pipe on the porch’s spare iron railing.

“Torfuck is up to no good. He’s forded the River of Potentialities. He cannot travel back in time, but he can bend the future and thereby alter the course of the past—our present—to align with his twisted eventuality.”

Rider Dyb’s eyes light up. “Then we are fighting for free will.”

“Indeed.”

“I don’t have a horse.”

“That, too, has been taken care of.”

An appaloosa, spotted brown on white, trots from the last whirls of morning mist.

“Lemme introduce Quirt to the kids and grab some stuff,” Dyb says and promptly disappears back into the yellow house on Fourth Street.