--The Somali: My harbinger of the reckoning, this next section is heavily ironic, included by the bard for the purposes of a comedic digression. Today, knowing The False Gate’s true identity, it seems that Justinian is granted a free opportunity by [word unheard beneath the enraged shrieking of a nearby combatant jabbing a stiletto into a captive’s face] to assassinate him. Such is the tragedy, Warmooge feels, of many who neglect the signs of fate. The person that you seek, the person that your soul most needs, is often right before your eyes. Please agree to my dinner plans.

  But before they found His whereabouts,

  They peeped behind a book-lined shelf

  And spied into a quaint café

  Where gathered scribes of global fame,

  Like Martin, author of Affair,

  And Silver Wolf, and Sweet Eclaire,

  All gathering to talk their plots

  Fantastical as Camelot.

  “Right here,” declared The Knight of Horns,

  Beside him peeping in the walls,

  “We will our knight’s crusade begin,

  By hacking down these dramatists,

  Our swords, once warmed by blood of geeks,

  Will chop on through The Tyrant’s keep;

  And before He can this Justice name,

  He’ll weep for rescue from hell’s flames.”

  Our knight of gold and God, alarmed,

  Restrained the goat from foolish start.

  “Be not too hasty, Satyr knight.

  If start we vengeance with these scribes,

  By time we find our target shade,

  He will have fled beyond our blades,

  And this castle fort, with soldiers crammed,

  Will end a suicidal trap.

  More yet, no piousness exists

  In murdering civilians.

  Why should these scribblers be disposed

  Unless we wish a saga wrote

  Of infamy and flagrant sprees

  That slander knightly chivalry.

  But if we leave them to themselves,

  We stand to gain a greater wealth;

  In flowery language, prose adroit,

  They will record our knight exploits,

  As witnesses to Christian swords

  Dispensing light to shadow lords.”

  Justinian and his two-horned brother

  Continued to debate each other.

  The satyr argued guilt be shared

  Amongst the authors plotting there,

  Whose profits channelled through a tax

  To fund His ships and swell his banks.

  Plus, as was told by sagely men,

  The sword is feebler than the pen,

  So might it not, by logic, go

  That authors were their real foe,

  That slaying pens, the greater might,

  Would better prove a hero knight?

  And more than these smart reasons shilled,

  All reading should be biblical,

  For any soul who cast their eyes

  Upon these scribbler’s books had shied

  Away from moral Christian gospel

  And on to fantasies demonic.

  This rhetoric was true and right,

  The Satyr Knight adept in Christ,

  Yet several hours did it take

  To settle their covert debate,

  And by this time, the author group—

  Promoters of His devil coup

  And owed Justinian’s sword in turn—

  Had for the evening spent adjourned.

  “Alas,” The Satyr knight did weep,

  “We’ve missed our shot at liberty.

  A Tyrant might we slay tonight

  But on the page He stays alive.”

  --The Butcher: And what’s the moral lesson here, good customers?

  --Stooges #1-2 (dead): …

  --Stooge #3 (crawling out from under the wagon now glowing a nuclear green as the tanks inside hiss a high-note of completion and spray putrid-scented fumes that cause the working alchemists to flee): …

  --The Butcher (shapeshifting into a completely different person): You must not fall for the legal ruse, for the authoritarian propaganda that insists that you can’t kill a civilian, for reasons, or stock an inventory of uninspected meats, for reasons, or concoct a bio-weapon, for reasons.

  --Stooge #3 (glancing inside the wagon, spotting the emerging abomination): AAAAAAAAAAAHH!

  --The Butcher (swapping outfit for an ash-grey uniform): The reason is only in their interest, not yours. Fate, when it presents to you these moments of seeming stupidity and danger, is placing the hottest tip right into your lap, is screaming invest, invest, invest, invest!

  --Stooge #3 (collapsing to the ground in shock, staring at the heavens glassy-eyed, hyperventilating): …

  --The Butcher (re-grabbing stray mastiff and summoning vines to teleport away): Yet, sadly, even the most faithful of us, like the knight, constantly refuse fate’s call, choosing from a learned terror of our own greatness to remain in our small-souled poverty. How pitiful. Thankfully, although our hero here may have conceded, fate with its infinite compassion has not, has continued to encourage him right up to this very day of redemption. Hold tight, good customers – there’s a final battle in this tale, against the other Him.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  --Stooge #3 (staring up at the emerging abomination’s dead-snake leg as it steps down from the wagon onto his face, a swarm of flies invading his mouth and nostrils to lay maggots that immediately begin feasting on his tissues as he chokes to death): …

  The stadium.

  The official broadcast kicks off. An Indonesian national anthem is led by an ill-prepared pop singer, attending with her friends and dragged in last second due to none of the organisers expecting the knight to reach the grand finale. Next comes the day’s twenty-something-th rendition of The Company’s ‘United Through The Storm’, played after previous samba and club remixes to violins soaring with a royal sweetness.

  The song—which many now suspect to have been authored by the polymath duellist—is taken up for the first time by the audience. Formerly, its polyglot lyrics about the necessity of tribulation to unlock higher states of peace have struck them as the insincere propaganda of his capitalo-imperialist regime. Now, the once-despised words, enchanted by the grandeur of his last performance, reveal their profound depths. Isn’t it true? the collective thinks. Only through a trial like his own can one obtain such accomplishments as winning fifteen tournaments. The millions singing for him in the stands and across the moon-lit field outside make for a soul-titillating scene.

  The crowd’s bias between the two competitors reveals itself in other ways: in the multiplying number of ash-grey flags, in the uniformity of wagers being laid at the bookies, at the renewed waves of cheering whenever the camera cuts to the duellist listening to their song and his stoic features break with an invincible wink.

  In the background of this fanfare, the guard officiating the series summons a gold coin and flips it to determine who’ll pick the first map.

  On the surface, there is no apparent sign of fate’s meddling. The coin is ordinary, the guard is ordinary, the flip is ordinary, the way the coin is called after landing in the guard’s palm is ordinary, the message notifying the contestants of the knight going first is ordinary. Everything appears ordinary because it is, in fact, ordinary. The knight wins this one fair and square, by pure luck, although if the coin had happened to have been spinning the wrong way, another guard pretending to film the flip might have given a corrective sneeze. As it plays out, however, fate doesn’t need to sneeze, and the guard trots off to the sidelines with a pet mastiff chasing in tow.

  The knight receiving the news passes through a minor crisis.

  His code of chivalry compels him, both out of habit and gratitude, to donate the choice to his opponent. But as he’s contemplating this, an ugly scent of death assaults his nose. Following the odour’s source reveals—dangling from a maze wall in the adjacent map—the forgotten corpse of a cobra, its spine partially severed beneath the head in a yawning pink rose-blossom of meat. A second, even-fouler breeze then tugs the knight’s attention to the other neighbouring spike-pit map, where a sneezing guard’s mastiff has just unearthed the putrescent ribbons of a shredded human cortex. The dog laps this up and gobbles it, bits of filth dribbling from its jowls. Spookily, the dog maintains direct eye contact with the knight throughout this feast, its expression flat and oddly reminiscent of the duellist’s. These omens, combining with the knight’s unconscious reluctance, cause him to break from the habit of chivalry and the self-defeat contained in it.

  No, he reasons to himself. The duellist would find the offer insulting - a knight best demonstrates respect by giving their opponent their utmost, even in these pedantic matters.

  The officiator is informed of his choice. The duel will take place right where he’s been practising for minutes, and for months before, in the humbling emptiness of the sand.

  An awkward hiccup for the broadcast follows the anthems. Alex Wong was scheduled for an opening address. But when the cameras switch to him pacing in his royal outfit around the ring, he shoos them off. He can’t handle these side issues now. Full concentration is necessary to evade the threats conspiring against his sword.

  The commentators fill the dead air by interviewing the people’s beloved duellist, who frowns at the interruption of his drills as if they’d urinated in his avant-garde drug tea. The distraction, for what it’s worth, has little relevance to the design, his flaws much deeper.

  One question, though, does flirt menacingly close to fate. The duellist is asked to explain how ‘luck’ arranged his prior meetings with his current opponent. The insinuation is that he plotted this himself, possibly hiding the knight for the purpose of the big-money bets he earlier confessed. The duellist, who did not arrange this, reels off an answer that talent has never been rare. The geniuses who gain recognition—including himself—are just a lucky minority who happen to have been granted favour by more complex, supra-individual systems of attention, investment, development, and promotion. The knight’s success in this regard is merely a transfer via proximity of the favours once granted to himself, a favour that could alternatively have gone to the other contestants that day or any number of talented individuals in the crowd. This is not not—to be clear—a depreciation of the knight’s achievements, nor an assertion of his own. Rather, it’s a testament to the universality of human greatness. His wish as a post-maximalist is that every man, woman, and child listening will one day be so lucky to unlock their neglected More.

  This answer earns fantastic applause, the audience celebrating the duellist’s so-noble humanism, acknowledged at last for its sincerity.

  The answer—under better scrutiny—also confesses something of his deeper mindset, censoring and omitting the alternative factors co-existing with those stated. The factor he actually considers most important—the obvious qualifications of the knight due to him enduring months of specialised training for this format across multiple re-attempts at the tournament—is completely left out because it too closely describes his own obsessional preparations. Severely downplayed as well is the genetic factor, the factor of talent and blood, the duellist growing an antagonism to the concept that rejects the mutancies of the knight and himself, which any rational analysis would conclude could never have combined by luck, especially with the other coincidence of atypical training. Luck, as much as he openly acknowledges this, receives no internal consideration from himself, nor does the fate or design that might be discovered behind luck. The duellist’s current stance might be described as radically anti-fate, where all improbabilities are not contemplated with anxiety, nor accepted, nor denied, nor embraced, but murdered joyfully. Accordingly, since there’s no way to joyfully murder the knight—even, hypothetically, if say the duellist hunted down the knight in their Offworlder universe, the murder would still be trivial—the anomalies surrounding the knight are incapable of sparking any excitement, thought, or action. The situation is bizarre to him, obviously, but so what? It takes more—like the swords, the nostalgia-driven vengeances, and the bloodbath of the semi-finals—to elevate bizarreness into the fate the duellist would most love to murder. None of these higher incentives are detectable in this duel, at least not to himself.

  Justinian notices the duellist’s irritation during the interview. He steps in like a knight protecting his sworn liege and offers to give his own replacement speech. The duellist encourages this with good humour as the stadium boos.

  As luck would have it, news at this very moment has reached the duellist about the presence of a certain trickster deity at one of the battles raging outside.

  The news makes mention of a demonic contraption and a glass scimitar. The weapon is recognised instantly by the duellist as Worldcleaver, witnessed by himself in the god’s possession two weeks earlier during his Earthfriend apprenticeship. The weapon’s appearance is noteworthy to him because—in a subtle detail known to nobody else—he has never owned it, unlike many of the other swords being collected - or recollected. The scimitar would bring him close to the full set.

  He quickly calculates whether the distance can be covered before his last duel starts, then whether forfeiting would be worth the trade. (The older thing, awakening slightly, files the information for later.) Concluding, correctly, that this would be a fruitless self-prank, he redirects a few patrols nearby to investigate, delegates the handling of the rest to a subordinate, and tells them to withhold all further updates until after his first match.

  While the right decision in certain layers of the design, it’s also a missed opportunity in others. If he’d delayed just a bit and allocated a greater number of troops capable of not merely monitoring the battle but halting it, they could have interrogated the various witnesses to the knight’s sung tale and reconstructed from it the plot directed against himself. In this path never chosen, fate has maintained its complicated pretence of impartiality. The duellist could have avoided his defeat by comprehending the larger thread that weaves all the absurdities, both distant and remote, into one soul-expanding design. He doesn’t do this, but he could have.

  The knight’s tale.

  --The Butcher (exploding out of the distended stomach of a human corpse): We’re cutting this one close. I’m going to omit the rest of The Somali’s commentary, unless some of you are as desperate as himself to hear it.

  Stooges #1-3, Hooligan Leader (all dead, being joined by the other combatants as the bio-weapon decimates them): …

  --The Butcher: I’ll take the silence as assent. Continuing with the two knights’ grand assassination plans:

  Continuing to sneak through darkness,

  They found the emperor in His garden,

  Withdrawing from a meeting done,

  Where no doubt evil plans He’d spun,

  Much like the kind monk’s execution,

  For which our knight sought retribution.

  Upheld by guards, He stumbled drunk,

  Besot with wine and power plucked

  From His domains of global spread,

  Enriched by murder, rape, and theft.

  “That is our man,” Justinian spoke,

  Addressing his companion goat,

  “That man with beaver on His crown,

  Who drunk cavorts while others howl!

  While Betruger under soil stirs,

  How gross He swaggers in His mirth!

  Five dragons have before I slain,

  And other giant beasts of late,

  Yet never more a monster hellish

  Has my pursuit thus far encountered;

  Small may it stand in size of body,

  But massiver in death and robbing!

  His eyes, those wicked-irised orbs,

  Reflect the glimmer of his hoard

  Despoiled from a planet’s riches

  By armies built of beasts and witches!

  I can from far this crevice smell

  The blood which He tonight compels,

  Can hear inside His chortling throat

  The future crack of charnelled bones.

  His every breath mocks suffering!

  Each happy step stampedes the weak

  And dances on their souls expunged,

  Whose howling mass includes our monk!

  No further steps, say I, Sir Goat,

  Who has with me this mission roamed

  In purpose of a vengeance lengthy

  But righteous, owed, and necessary.

  We’ll see how much His joy retains

  When our twin swords upon Him rain!

  Trot forth, Sir Goat! Attack this fiend

  In name of God and murdered priest!”

  And shouting thus, the pair of knights

  Emerged from out their hidden sight.