What do you do when the neighbor’s dog takes a chunk out of some kid’s leg?

Do you grab a shotgun and put a slug in the back of the beast’s head? Or do the deed with your own two hands? Maybe you try to circumvent the guilt by poisoning it? Or are you the kind of coward who does nothing hopes that someone else does the dirty work? In the end it wasn’t the dog’s fault. It was a dumb animal pulled from the wild and domesticated over the course of ten thousand years or so, poorly at that, a confused mess of mixed signals trying desperately to understand a world that was in every sense of the word beyond its comprehension. Maybe if the dog had been a little smaller and a little cuter it would have gotten away with the crime, but Dog did not understand these nuances any more than it understood why it was bad to chew on one person’s leg but not the others.

Dog needs to put down, that much is clear, but what of the owner?

Renard Shurelian was of the opinion that and owner should take part of that responsibility, for not leashing their untamed beast, for not putting the fear of man and god into it. And as the thing what dared to call itself Xelas began its feast along a long since abandoned corner of the Central Finite Curve his attention turned towards its master. If it consumed Earth-F67X then that would be just another version of Earth that among a trillion that had suffered the very same fate, what loss was there, so for the Val’gara and so for all things that stood in its path. Lysander would tend to the hedges and if he failed at that then he would be one in a thousand Lysander’s to have died in the line of duty. More probably. But there was something much more diabolical at play here than a gnawing hunger at the fabric of reality, than the same shit different day of an unspeakable horror trying unravel existence, it was a man who had spent far too long being allowed to nurse his mad quest to reshape reality without anyone telling him to stop.

That in itself needed to stop; “Magnus.” There was no telling where the fallen angel was hiding, it was no doubt perilous and it was no doubt full of traps, but the ethereal serpent slithered on. “Your precious pet is running wild, Magnus, what do you intend to do about it?”