The sun was shining, the town was quiet, and Barbara Smith Gutierrez Doe was having a panic attack in the middle of the street.
Usually the best thing that could be said about the weather in Idle was that it was a dry heat. True, the sun always beat down upon the desert and scrublands like the eye of an angry god, but it was never truly muggy. The infrequent storms instead swept in with a howling crash and a blast of cold air, and the thirsty ground drank of the life-giving rain.
There was no rain, however, and the heat of the asphalt simply turned the remains of Barbara's father into steam.
Her heart was hammering in her chest. There was nothing she could do about that except sit, and breathe, and hope in the meantime that the Stranger didn't come back. She doubted it would; it hardly seemed to notice her at all and left without a backwards glance. Still, Barbara was not feeling very rational. The thought of that deadly, baking gaze being turned on her once again was enough to send her gasping for air that was heavy with water and hatred.
The asphalt and concrete dried, and her feet were uncomfortably hot. She managed a full, deep, and controlled breath. Another. Another. John Doe had been very good at remembering to breathe. Barbara liked to think she took after her father.
After a moment, Barbara managed to wobble to her feet long enough to go back inside her shop. The shade was blessed relief from the glare of the light, and Barbara stumbled over to the chair behind the register. The old wicker creaked and complained as she sprawled onto it; Barbara absently remembered it as a gift from Maria Sage, back in the 50s. Despite its age and rough treatment, the chair held firm. She gripped the armrests and breathed deeply, out and in and out and in.
Then, and only then, did Barbara begin to think.
Fable and John Doe had never been chatty about their own natures. Most of what Barbara knew about them came from observation and unrelenting questions. They had been even less communicative about what else might be like them in the world: Fable seemed to have a different answer every time Barbara asked, and John Doe seemed less unwilling to speak as unable to adequately describe the beings in question. They had always been quick to assure her that they were Capital-S Strangers, and Strangers had no place in Idle.
Still, decades of questions were bound to produce something eventually, and for so long Barbara had had nothing but time to ask them. What fragments she had gathered from them would likely be the envy of any respectable occultist, and tomes purloined from Fable's shop had enough detail to at least give the thing a name.
"The Dry Death," Barbara said aloud. The words were quiet, but seemed to fill the empty shop regardless. The heat inside grew even heavier. Barbara found herself shivering in spite of it.
It was an old, hateful thing, hateful in the way that John Doe and Fable could never truly understand. Fable and John Doe didn't hate each other with intention so much as they were diametrically opposed by their very natures: Fable, a story that gave life; John Doe, a life that stole stories. They fought each other like the twin suns of binary star, trapped in each other's orbit, tearing and dancing and hating and loving until the boundaries blurred together. Until they made something new and strange and named it Barbara.
There was no creation in the Dry Death. There was only an endless drought, and a glaring sun, and a heat that withered. It fed on hatred that burned like flames, and it could only ride the form of someone who hated so much that everything human inside them withered and died.
Katherine Paxton. Barbara leaned back in her chair and considered the dark, dusty rafters. John Doe rarely spoke about the man whose identity he had stolen. Sarah and Alma had been the same--Barbara did not know and would not ask, they would know but never tell. As a system for familial harmony it had worked for nearly 80 years. It had worked and worked until it very abruptly didn't.
