Additionally, as that last duel draws near, observations will have to swing on occasion back to the stadium lest anything vital be missed. Between both settings, fate’s uncanny pattern should hopefully become steadily more visible.
A knight’s tale, with irregular commentary from a Somali roleplayer desperate for acknowledgement and additional commentary from an anarcho-capitalist butcher addressing a group of middleschool boys during a battle.
This next strange fantasy that’s sung
Comes from the town Byzantium.
Its hero is their golden knight,
And it tells his origins and plight,
How dwelled he first in foreign countries,
How saved the knight a Christian brother,
How both adventured wide and far,
How his good friend would come to harm,
How the knight in pain would visit hell,
How there a monstrous saint he found,
How suffered both their deathly blessings,
How got he next a vampire weapon,
How with this blade our knight conspired
To slay an unnamed ‘Him’, The Tyrant,
How failed he that and here was sent
Until he can fulfil some bet.
--The Somali: My prophetess of destruction, as remarked with the knight’s monologues compiled earlier, the Him/Tyrant referenced here is not that Yahuza dog The Second Gate - this tale is composed well before recent revelations. In this confusability, the ironies of the speeches and His joining the knight’s slum commune gain a deeper comic layer in this story. The coincidences would seem too hard to believe at times. Warmooge, if you’ll entertain his superstitions, senses the potential influence of an inhuman agent, perhaps satanic, acuudu billaahi.
--The Butcher: Commenting on Warmooge's comment, we get our first taste of some of the meta-themes that stand above the tale itself and connect it to the last duel, from the confusions caused by constant misidentification of who is who, to the constant economic implausibilities. I imagine Warmooge's superstitions would be even greater if he’d had the foresight of the grandfinale, where the knight and the duellist finally converge after the fulfilment of all the other circumstances necessary for the bet.
--Stooge #2: What bet?
--Hooligan Leader (shrieking underground): STOP QUESTIONING HIM, YOU SHIT!
--The Butcher: Indeed, be patient, my good customer. The bet and its coincidences will reveal themselves in due time.
Of these, this romance tells the truth,
Without embellishment or dupe,
For every fact portrayed resounds
From the knight of gold’s own gospel mouth.
If false be any sentence said,
Do not your anger misdirect
Upon a bard who just reruns
A fable shared in hours drunk;
Full honour, blame, and jest belong
To this tall story’s champion.
Before Justinian came to Saana,
He’d sat the table of King Arthur,
That noble lord of Brittany
Whose every toe treads chivalry.
With Lancelot, he’d shared a home,
With Gingalain, The Fair Unknown,
With Urien, from Ancient North,
With Tristan, Percival, and Tor.
--The Somali: My princess of poverty, praises of Allah to your sweet-scented rags, either the minstrel has fabricated this fairytale background or Justinian has since dropped it from his character out of embarrassment, for no record of it exists in my other researches. Regardless, it offers a highly-productive angle for our parody - and, oh, I do wish it would be ours. Reading of this King Arthur fellow, I am confident of playing on your command any of his Christian infidels, if not the King Arthur himself. The task will be no challenge for Warmooge, wa billahi.
--Stooge #3 (in Offworlder slang): Why’s this Jocko so famished?
--Hooligan Leader: SHUT UP!
--The Butcher (gazing fondly at dead camel parts): Such is the derangement of non-pecuniary desires. Have you boys been anointed in love’s madness yet?
--Hooligan Leader: DO NOT ANSWER!
--The Butcher: Well, one day, if you meet this other fortune…
Our good knight served a humble troop.
Crusades he fought, and ogres slew.
Five dragons, beasts of great renown,
Were by his blade cut to the ground.
--The Butcher: This dragon-slaying acts as one comedic refrain, presumably due to the dragons of your Offworlder universe also having been hunted to extinction to make luxury goods.
--Stooge #1 (idly as he watches another boy die from getting shot with an arrow): Actually, we’ve never had dragons.
--The Butcher (astonished): No dragons? No wealth-on-wingers?
--Stooge #3: Yeah, they’re just fictional. Like ogres.
--The Butcher: You have no ogres either?! Then…no ogresses?
--Stooge #2 (in Offworlder slang): Nevil.
--The Butcher: Nevil…wow…wow…well, that’s tragic. They’re an excellent market for the enterprising cosmeticist – infinite amounts of skin to cover.
--Hooligan Leader (returning in between combat orders): STOP!
--The Butcher (whispers to not offend his ogress customer sidebase): Not to mention the horrifying deformities.
From warlocks vile, he’d been the saviour
Of Camelot’s most fairest maidens,
Who’d given him in thanks of help,
Their wishes to become his spouse.
Yet to these promises of marriage,
To other treasures for his actions,
He’d bowed a-shy his golden head,
For loved he not these vice of men
But only virtue, Christ, and liege,
To whom all knights vow chastity.
--The Butcher: This chastity business is foolishness, if you ask me, guarding your loins like a state guarding inefficient industries from the friction of competitors.
--Hooligan Leader (shrieking underground): DO NOT ASK HIM! ANSELM, STAB ANYONE WHO MAKES ANOTHER COMMENT! THAT APPLIES TO YOURSELF!
--Stooge #2 (drawing a sword silently): …
--The Butcher (not being asked, soul steadily deflating): …
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Such was the history of our sir,
Without a match upon our earth,
Except King Arthur’s fabled group,
Whose membership himself includes.
One pleasant eve, in Camelot,
While tired from some evil stopped,
Beneath an oak, he went to sleep
And had a disconcerting dream.
It squeezed him through a rainbow tunnel,
Whose warping made his stomach rumble;
Its flood of demon sounds and sights
Would almost devastate his mind.
But in this nightmare of despair,
He heard God’s voice, with tranquil care,
Commanding him, “Becalm your woes,
For the world ahead to which you go
Has need of not a coward soul
But a knight whose heart in strength resolves.”
--The Butcher: The Somali commenter inserts an amusing tirade here calling the knight a blasphemer for making up that order. The accusation dumbfounds me. For one, these theatre-hobbyist Offworlders make up plenty of fantastical things. For two, this thing’s not that fantastical. I talk to gods myself regularly, and they’re usually quite liberal, if not verbose, in their communications, especially when angry. This Offworlder god fellow seems if anything too concise and vague. Why does the world need a knight? Who is his dragon-slaying sword supposed to fell? My instructions, if I were a god myself and not so wary of the cops, would’ve been much more definite.
--Stooges #1-3 (curious but held to silence by the threat of sword): …
--The Butcher (soul continuing to deflate, loneliness setting in, sighing, turning to the tale and surrounding violence for spiritual companionship): …
He found, on waking from this rest,
Himself in strange environments.
To foreign lands, he’d been bestowed,
This foreign world, where monsters roamed,
Where magic ruled, where quests abounded,
Where goodfolk slaved for heartless scoundrels.
Be sure, his home had all this, too;
Adventuring was nothing new.
Our knight, prepared in Camelot
And by his orders straight from God,
Would gift this troubled world of Saana
His Christian sword and Christian armour,
For wheresoever maidens weep
Must quest a knight of chivalry.
--The Butcher (tripping and falling down hole with no visible bottom, yelling up as he disappears to the hooligans abandoned to deal with an ambush): Hold tight, good customers – my services return shortly.
Setting One: The Stadium.
The knight of chivalry continues to tumble through the sandpit with his imitation zweihander, his every move under the scrutiny of the duellist’s co-leader dressed as a king and drinking a coffee destined by fate to stain his regal outfit.
Alex Wong is still asking whether this could possibly be a coincidence. A stiffness in his posture suggests a growing dismissal of that explanation.
He can feel the uncanniness of some higher agent’s manipulations, for sure, and he knows that it’s not collaborating in his favour. It is impossible, however, for him to formulate an accurate picture of how these elements connect with each other into any coherent scheme. His imagination is restricted by, amongst several factors, a success-induced hubris. Years of uncontested political domination by the duellist’s side have given him something of a god-complex - Alex Wong regards himself and his co-leader as the sole agents capable of spinning design into the ruse of fate. He deduces, accordingly, that if it is not himself plotting these coincidences with the knight, then it must, by elimination, be the duellist. That deduction is wrong. Consequently, the rest of his paranoid thinking that spirals afterwards is wrong.
In fact, Alex Wong has always been slightly wrong, many of the schemes for which he considers himself the designer having never been entirely his own. He still, most grandiosely, believes himself to have orchestrated the relocation of the tournament to this setting of the last duel, to have pulled an irritating trick upon the duellist. That belief is correct, in a proximal sense—Alex Wong is the one who gave these orders—but it misses the design’s larger causal matrix. It misses the continuity of this decision with the earlier publicity scandal between the duellist and the local cannibal warlord, plus certain frustrations established at the previous event location that’d made Alex Wong subliminally disdainful of it. The belief misses, likewise, the flagrantly out-of-character move of the duellist not to deny the relocation. It misses, even more embarrassingly, the reason for this out-of-character move, which has been presented openly by the duellist to Alex Wong and to the other the sub-leaders of The Company, along with an identification of the other agents of fate conspiring with and against them. Alex Wong cannot connect what has been revealed in detail to himself to the present absurdities because he’s never fully grasped the depths of the insanity plaguing his duellist friend, who contemplates their actions not according to the struggles of a tournament but to the more immortal struggle of life against its fate, of man against his mountain.
All Alex Wong, barricaded from the higher layers of comprehension, can fathom is that something here beyond the knight and his sword has the fraudulent gloss of a duplicity, a deception, a device. (A design.)
“Why are you training so hard?” he probes the knight. “You know you’re about to get shitstomped avant-gardely, right? I’d relax. Have a pre-duel beer to dull the humiliating edge. Maybe rig a profitable throw – many are doing it.”
Yes, many are rigging profitable throws.
Justinian answers cooly. “Some would hide from their defeat behind comedy and self-sabotage. A nice excuse for massaging the ego later. ‘The outcome would’ve been different if I’d tried.’ Not me. I’ll confront my defeat giving my all, for that is what least humiliates and what most honours myself and my opponent.”
The knight, who’s picked up while training with the duellist some of the latter’s ideological persistence against fate has given this response while continuing to drill with his shield, another bestowal from the duellist. Both of these acquisitions are, naturally, also part of the design. Through his increasing persistence, he competes to his fullest where others might’ve hedged or forfeited. Through the shield, and the accompanying usage of this shield taught to him personally by the duellist, his laughable roleplay-fighting of old has been rationalised out of its self-handicapping, allowing the blossoming of talents formerly obscured. For the duellist to donate these without suspecting their antagonism to himself, many coincidences must align without appearing to align: a unique sympathy for the knight being seeded at one point and grown over multiple arguments, the team-membership to eventually act upon these sympathies with corrective teaching arranged at another point as the duellist’s preferred selection were held up by ambushes, the timely-arranged readiness of the knight himself to exchange his habits for the duellist’s better ones. But, as impressive as these coincidences are, they still—as will be observed in the knight’s history—only float upon the surface layer of the design, representing merely the final steps of its sequence.
Alex Wong, sensing vaguely the danger of the knight’s persistence, continues attempting to dissuade him. “But your honourable opponent loves comedy and self-sabotage. Aren’t you watching that?” He gestures to the overlooking hill map, where a dozen troops are receiving medical treatment after being injured in the duellist's warm-up – from behind them, rising over the hill’s crest, a flailing body rockets into the sky and smashes against the ceiling of the glass dome, exploding into a mist of crimson vapour. “That brother—AH!”
He trips, accidentally stepping into a tunnel hole, placed there by design to interrupt him from further pursuit of a dangerous tangent about sandbagging. As he pulls himself out, his imperial robes covered in the destined coffee, he swears at a platoon in the adjacent arena to hustle over and fill this hole they supposedly missed from the earlier battle.
The knight’s history continued.
--The Butcher (rejoining the stooges from the flaming doorway of a building in which a party sent for reinforcements are being maced to death): Sorry, good customers. Needed a coffee break – got to lubricate the throat for all this singing.
--Stooge #2 (hiding in a barrel): How did you go from the hole to there?
--The Butcher: Who am I, a humble merchant operating beyond the state, to explain the mysterious workings of fate?
--Stooge #3 (hiding in the same barrel): Fate? What does fate have to do with this?
--The Butcher: Exactly. There is arguably—and this may be the central theme of this knight’s tale—no fate, the idea being just like ‘equality’ and ‘rule of law’, empty concepts disguising the insidious machinations of those who shun identification.
Adventures bore him trial to trial,
Across Togavi’s western isles,
Until, in Kirschrot’s windy vale,
He met a monk by horde assailed;
Amidst a village torched to toast,
The priest was fending off his host,
His sword against their larger pool,
Much like a half-dead, ant-swarmed bull
Which with its dying ounce of brawn
Shrugs off and breaks their tiny forms.
A thousand spears, our knight did count,
With warlocks, too, and war-trained hounds;
A thousand spears for one man’s blood,
For felonies mysterious.
--Stooge #1 (sitting dazed with a missing arm being regrown by a medic): A thousand guys is a lot…
--The Butcher: Perhaps, but there are many more to come.
The good knight, puzzled, asked the mob,
“What crime has this priest done to God?
What charge would justify these tactics
Instead of honoured single battle,
As is the way of knights in stories
Who shun such dastardly misglory.”
“A scum fanatic,” quoth a spearman,
“His God is gross, his worship queerer;
The king, for suchly crimes of faith,
Has placed on him a bounty great.
As for our mob, he’s far too strong,
Empowered by his chosen God,
And no man single could withstand
The sword he twirls within his hands.
So join, good knight, if do you care,
There’s plenty in the prize share.”
--The Somali: My empress who eats the unworthy earth, Justinian’s response here betrays the first in a string of misunderstandings that, by their flagrancy, defy all sensible explanation, in character or out of character. In the interviews with his peers I have conducted, some insist his character is satirical, while others believe it to be sincere, explaining these events as an attempt to dig himself out of an initial hole of error. Regardless, I have confirmed, with the footage, that he carries out this next idiotic interference.
--The Butcher (tapping a Memory Sphere projecting said footage): What this critic neglects to convey is the impressiveness of this interference.
Our knight, himself a zealot squire,
Commiserated with this friar.
When try he spread his Christian word,
The heretics had cursed their church;
This foreign land had many griefs,
But all sins paled to disbelief.
So waited he for knightly chance,
Then leapt in, prayed, began to dance.
--The Butcher (emphasising the knight dodging through a thousand-strong horde): Look at him go!
--Stooge #1 (impressed): Wow…what the hell…
--Stooge #3 (approaching from the barrel): Bro’s an idiot savant.
--Stooge #2 (rushing over after assisting another hooligan by thrusting his sword into a pinned enemy’s mouth): Jesus.
--The Butcher: Yes, our knight does seem to be blessed by this Jesus deity.
His sword, which had five dragons smote
—Yet not the sword he’d later own—
--The Butcher (pointing at the knight’s sword with his glass scimitar): There’s a different sword in the tale to that thing…much more powerful.
--Stooge #2 (remarking on the butcher growing a third arm to use the scimitar, his hands already occupied with a harp and the notebook): Yo, what ability is that?
--The Butcher: You ever hear of
--Stooge #2: Nevil.
--The Butcher: Well, Nevil, look that up first. This is the nerfed, PG-13 version:
--Hooligan Leader (screeching underground after returning attention from delivering orders for manoeuvres): FUCKING STOP CHATTING WITH HIM!
--The Butcher: True, you brats are causing me to lose all focus, too – another theme in this knight’s tale. Where were we…'his sword, which had five dragons smote—yet not the sword he’d later own—'
Was sharp enough to clear a space
And save the priest from death’s embrace.
Into a forest, both then fled,
Pursued by hounds, by cursing men.
Along the way, the monk blacked out,
From wounds incurred throughout his bout.
Our knight, who would no priest forsake,
Bore on his back the doubled weight.
Yet slowed by this, their end seemed nigh,
The hunters’ dogs mauling their thighs,
But nearing capture, both were saved,
Through prayers to God, of endless grace,
Who’d made a stream beneath a cliff,
--The Butcher: It was absolutely not an earthly god who spawned this river, which the bard has mislabelled as a ‘stream’ to squeeze into the metre.
Its waters white and rapid swift,
Which swept them after jumping down
Away from chasing spears and hounds.
The Butcher: Now, in this opening act of salvation, we have just been introduced to Justinian’s first teacher, Swordmaster Betruger, whose name has been mentioned in several previous duels of the knight against Old T as part of an enigmatic grudge against Him.
--Stooge #2: Didn’t know they’d had previous duels.
--The Butcher: Joseph please...yes, there have been multiple, multiple duels preceding this last duel, all connecting to it as part of its rich, fate-contrived history. This is what I’m talking about. The Urkel is your own historical ignorance. Urkel and more - you'd deserve much fouler slurs if you weren’t my flawless customers beyond all moral reproach.