One particularly dark and stormy night, around two in the morning, Venn was roused from sleep by a frantic hammering on her door. By the time she had finished putting on pants and opened the door, there was no one there. Venn thought this was suspicious because she lived on a small farm which wasn't exactly placed in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, so someone went out of their way to wake her in the asscrack of dawn during a thunderstorm and then disappear. She did discover, however, that there was a soggy lump of cloth on her doorstep. When she brought it inside and unwrapped it, a beautifully elaborate amulet fell out; covered in gold and rubies and with silver filigree inlaid all along the edge. Something about it suggested a great destiny; this was the bauble of a king, or a powerful wizard, or even a legendary hero. Being a practical woman, Venn promptly went back to bed and forgot about it until the next morning, which happened to be market day, so she sold it to a travelling curio collector for enough money to buy a new set of farm tools.

     A month went by.

     Venn was out in the field, hoeing the dirt. Her hoe was almost brand new and felt sturdy and comfortable in her hands. It was much stronger than the one she had had previously, and its edge broke the dirt apart with an efficacy that put its predecessor to shame. Venn paused and wiped the sweat from her forehead. The sun beat down viciously and even her wide brimmed hat was but a small comfort. Venn looked over the field at what she had accomplished, then in the opposite direction to see how much work she still had left to do. The sight prompted a sigh, and she raised the hoe and jabbed it into the dirt.

     The dirt responded with a dull thud and the hoe shuddered in her hands. Figuring it was a rock, she bent down to dig it out with a trowel pulled from her pocket. She shoveled the dirt out of the way, uncovering a patch of burlap. She squinted in the sunlight for a moment and then continued to dig. More and more burlap was revealed as she dug, until she had a long and slender object wrapped in a sack on the ground next to her. She unwrapped the cloth to discover a sword, identical in design to the amulet she had sold, gleaming like a bard's toothy grin. It occurred to Venn that this turn of events was most unusual. She didn't know much about swords, but she was fairly certain they didn't grow out of the ground. The very next day she took a trip into the local town, where she asked the blacksmith about the likelihood of subterranean weaponry and its relation to root vegetables. He replied that he was but a simple blacksmith and therefore the specificities of probability escaped him, but he supposed that in an infinite universe anything was possible, if only mathematically speaking. This satisfied Venn for the most part, who traded him the sword in exchange for some horseshoes and leather straps.

     This time, she made it forty-eight days with no strange occurrences.

     She was in the kitchen of her small home, peeling potatoes and dropping them into a pot full of water. The water boiled merrily, causing the potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables to dance merrily with the exuberant roiling of the surface. Venn whistled a tune while she worked. She had finished her chores early and spent an hour relaxing, reading a book on the finer points of knitting; a hobby with which she held a fascination that only the truly lacking in talent may possess. Nevertheless, Venn was a determined woman and had sworn that someday, somehow, she would knit a sweater that had the kind of proportions that would fit a human being and not, say, some kind of aberration with three shoulders and a head the size of a watermelon.

     There came a rapping at the door, frantic and staccato. Venn considered the fact that this was the second knocking in three months and wondered what she had done to make herself so popular, as she crossed the living room to see who was there.

    When she opened the door she found a tall man in a brown robe on her doorstep. He gripped a staff tightly in his hands in a manner that suggested there was something wrong. An expression of worry was painted across his face, sandwiched between a long gray beard and a hat that, to be perfectly honest, made him look a bit foolish.

    "I'm so glad we found you, madam!" he said hurriedly. "There are great matters which must be discussed!"

    Venn continued to look the man up and down. She noticed that his pants were ragged and worn, as was his robe, and mud clung tightly to his boots in great clumps.

     "Cabbages?" asked Venn.

     The man looked taken aback. "I beg your pardon?"

    "Are you here about cabbages?" Venn asked again.

    "Well, no," said the man. "I have momentous, dire news that I must share with you. It is of grave importance!"

     Venn scratched her head thoughtfully. "Carrots, then?"

    "Madam, please, you must understand!" he insisted.

    Venn realized that there were two very short people peering out around the man's legs, previously unnoticed due to his ankle length robe. They were the height of a child but covered in hair, and with paunches that curved impressively out from their overalls. Venn decided that whatever was going on here, it could feel free to leave and go on someplace else.

   "Sorry, I only do vegetables," said Venn, and closed the door.

     The man continued to knock for a further ten minutes, which Venn pointedly ignored while she whistled and made her stew. After that, she took the bucket of water that she had left over from dinner preparation and emptied it out of the upstairs window onto the man's head.

     Once again, Venn awoke in the night. It wasn't knocking this time but it was loud; a sound that she couldn't quite place. After several minutes of clearing the sleepy delirium from her head, she realized what it was: the sound of a crowd. She could hear the stomping of the horses, the rustling of clothing, and, when she had crossed to the other side of the room, could see the light from the torches. The gathering in front of her farmhouse was easily the most people she had ever seen in one place before, bigger than the crowd in the nearby town on market day right after the big harvest, and even bigger than the one day that that poor wandering jester had had the incident with the sack of crawfish and the stepladder.

   After another moment's thought, Venn threw on some pants and a shirt and went downstairs to see what all the fuss was about. She grabbed a hefty soup ladle from the kitchen and pulled open the door, contemplating the alarming frequency at which she was being bothered and thinking to herself that this had better be good.

  She exploded into the night air, grasping the ladle's handle and stomping off of her front porch toward the masses. As she drew closer, she realized that they were as far from human as they could possibly be. She saw skeletons, orcs, trolls, knolls, and horned demons; and those were just the ones that she could put a name to. There were other things lurking in between the bone and chitin; things with scales and wings and too many eyes.

   If any of these things bothered her, she didn't show it.

     She marched, making a beeline for a rider on horseback who was placed at the forefront of the assembled army. He wore a suit of the blackest armor, almost invisible in the early twilight. His horse was less like a horse and more like some ancient titan, standing easily as twice as Venn was tall. It was a black that matched the armor of its rider; ghostly and shimmering with the light of the moon and the flickering torchlight. As Venn approached, the rider dismounted.

     He was enormous, the biggest man she had ever seen. He wielded a sword as long as he was tall, with a serrated blade that was licked by purple fire. His armor seemed to whisper like the beckoning of a haunted forest and when he spoke, his voice carried with it the agonized wailing of a hundred thousand lost souls.

   "Why?" he asked.

     Venn looked straight up into the black void where his face should be and squinted.

   "Why what?" she returned.

    "Why do you constantly defy Destiny?" he hissed.

     Venn dug in her ear with a pinky. "I haven't a clue what you mean."

   "Do not play dumb with me, woman!" The roar hit like dragon's fire. Cracks rent the ground where he stood and even his dread army cowered and stumbled as if struck. He leaned down and spoke directly in Venn's face. "The Amulet of Subeth. Moonblaze, the blade of Odax the Valiant. Even Glingold himself, the mighty mage whom I despise with a passion that only the unending eons can know, even he is shunned as if he was a filthy whelp! I have glimpsed these things with my evil magics and found them shoved away as one would dispose of the bones of a chicken!"

   "Yeah," replied Venn, wiping her finger on her pants.

     "You do not deny it!" howled the giant man. "I demand that you tell me why!

     "None of your business," said Venn, bluntly. "But I'll tell you this; if your boys don't stop trampling my crops, someone's going to be sorry and it won't be me."

     Some of the skeletons had the decency to look embarrassed, insofar as an expressionless skull can convey embarrassment, before the Black Knight's unearthly howl knocked them off of their feet and sent them sprawling. Not a single one of the army remained standing; even the horses found themselves lying in the freshly churned mud. The only two left were the Dark Giant and Venn, who stood with her fists on her hips, looking put out.

    The Black Knight hefted his sword, blazing with fury, and waved the demonic weapon over his head.

     "You will face me now!" he asserted. His armor shone with the beauty of an oil slick and his glowing eyes became visible in the otherwise featureless void of his helmet. He grasped his sword with both hands and brought it around to cut Venn into pieces.

     WHACK!

     Venn's ladle smashed into the side of his helmet, knocking him off of his feet and sending him crashing to the ground. He lay there for a minute, crumpled and dazed.

     "Ow," he said finally.

   "And there's more where that came from if you don't take your folks and get off of my land right this instant," said Venn.

     The Giant pushed himself up on his arms. "You DAWE to-"

   WHACK!

     Venn hit his helmet again, making him fall back into the mud.

     "'Scuse me, 'scuse me," came a voice from behind a contingent of orcs. "Pardon me."

    A winged demon pushed through the ranks, now back on their feet, and fluttered his way over to the prone warlord. He landed and whispered something into his ear.

     "Uh huh," said the Giant quietly. "Yeah. Yeah."

    There was a pause in which the demon glanced at Venn, then the whispering resumed.

   "Okay," whispered the Black Knight back. "No, no, that's good. I like it. Okay, bweak."

     He lifted his huge frame back onto his feet, once again towering over Venn, and leveled one mighty finger in her direction.

    "You have bested me, mowtal, and fulfilled youw Destiny! Twuly, youw skills awe incwedible! Once again, I am banished into the eldwitch void fwom whence I came!" He backed away, toward his mountainous steed, and swung himself up onto its back. "But do not think me defeated fowevew! I shall wetuwn in anothew eon to wweak my vengeance upon this plane!" He put spurs to his horse, a little more quickly than was dignified, and turned to vanish into the night.

    "Hold it!" Venn barked, and to a man, the army froze.

    "What?" asked the Insidious Conqueror. "I alweady said that you bested me."

     Venn gestured around her with arms wide open. "You see this mess? You and your boys have absolutely destroyed my farmland."

     The army looked around itself and saw the crops, which had been coming along nicely, trampled and broken in the mud.

    "Somebody's going to fix this, and I'll be damned if it's going to be me," said Venn.

    "What?!" Roared the Giant. "I am Gilgamous the Black! I have bathed in the blood of my enemies as I oblitewated their homes from existence! I have gwappled with gods and slain demons whose names and deeds you could only begin to imagine! I am a plague upon this wowld, unkillable, cuwsed to fowevew be undone and bown anew to continue my cycle of destwuction! And now you expect me, Scouwge of Heblavva, slayew of Vewgeddin the Wowld Titan, holdew of the Quawtz Gem of Dindallion, to plant cwops?!" Hot steam rose from his black armor, creating a thick vapor which rose ominously into the chilly night.

     "Yep," said Venn anticlimactically. "And if you don't..." she smacked the end of her ladle into her open palm. "I'll find some other way for this to be fixed."

     Gilgamous was silent as the tomb, his armor glinting in the moonlight. His army shifted uncomfortably behind him, and a few murmurs could be heard here and there.

     Finally, he spoke, in a voice that had set innumerable masses trembling with a mere word. "Whewe do we stawt?"

     Venn relaxed on her porch, feet up on the railing while she sipped a mug of tea. Her soup ladle leaned against the side of her chair.

     The sun had just risen, casting a light the color of golden amber throughout Venn's plot of land. She watched silently while the dread army hoed, shoveled, seeded, watered, and generally did their best to make the farm as good looking as possible. They milked the cow, tended to the goats, fed the chickens, fixed the holes in the barn, and had even harvested some honey from the various beehives around the nearby treeline. A faint buzzing could still be heard from the skulls of a few of the skeletons.

     With the unintentional thudding of heavy footsteps, Gilgamous approached. If he had a hat, he would have been wringing it nervously.

     "I, uh..." he said, unsure of how to start.

     "Looks like you're just about done," said Venn, still looking out over the farm.

     "Yes." Gilgamous held a broom in one boulder-sized hand. "Um. Ma'am."

     Venn took her feet off the the railing and stood. "Well, I can't invite you in, because there's just too many of you, but I found an old cauldron given to me by an aunt who thought she was a witch, and I brewed up some tea for you and your boys. I can't let you go off without something warm in your stomachs."

     Gilgamous didn't know what to say.

     They formed an orderly line, each politely taking a mug and shuffling off, carefully avoiding stepping on any of the freshly-hewn lines of seeds. With any luck, the plants wouldn't be too far behind by the time harvest season came.

     Venn and Gilgamous stood side by side; Venn doling out tea with her ladle and Gilgamous gently pinching the handle of a mug between a thumb and forefinger. When it was all said and done, the dishes washed and the cauldron put back into the attic, the army mounted their horses and prepared to leave.

     "Well," said Venn. "You trampled my farm to mush, but you also did a damn fine job fixing it back up again. I reckon we're square, Mr. Gilgamous."

     They shook hands, with many hearty goodbyes and thanks given for the tea, and she sent them off with a slap on the back and a promise to drop by next time they were in town.

     She watched them disappear into the early morning mist, and then then Venn, daughter of a bloodline of legendary champions whose deeds were sung of the world over and even in some other planes of existence, went back into the house to catch up on her knitting.