The Knight’s Tale (a dog-sized rat dragging a wounded combatant out of the melee by the leg and eating their face off to the side).

  His brother knights betrayed their cause,

  Togavi’s hills replete with scores,

  Especially of a zealot kind:

  Foreseers of disastrous times,

  Islamic duellists, prank devotees,

  And shamans draped in bear-skin clothing,

  --The Somali: My usheress of uncreation, this section’s opening stanza seems to allude to yourself. Have you ever met this joker knight in your own adventures of this heathen-riddled isle? Are there some past conflicts we might draw upon for the sketches? Also, it confuses Warmooge as to why the bard makes a distinction between our sect and the Islamic duellists.

  --The Butcher (scratching his blue Togavian hair under his hat): As someone who has sold merchandise around the region, the confusions are both the bard's and Warmooge’s. The former presents a unity to Togavi that does not exist. The region, beyond its mountainous issue, is archipelagic, rough seas dividing most of these sects and preventing any interaction. It’s only, really, the humourists that are universal.

  --Stooges #1-3 (out of earshot, one dead, the others hiding in the backline of a mass struggle of combatants eviscerating each other and tumbling as they lose their footing on a soil made slick by layers of human intestines): …

  --The Butcher: Warmooge, in turn, has failed to understand that the seeress to whom he sucks up is a divergent offshoot of the region’s now-much-smaller faction of duel-cultists under The Second Gate. That guy, or character, does not preach her core message of apocalypticism because his lineage is technically post-Islamic. It springs from The First Gate, a Persian reformer that believed the Hidden Imam, a.k.a. himself, would usher forth a greater religion peacefully unifying the world rather than the Islamic eschatology of destruction and resurrection.

  --Stooge #2 (captured scrambling on wet knees through the intestines): Help! Someone!

  --The Butcher: Sister Gate’s teachings could be regarded thus as a revision of a revision, or perhaps a revision of a revision of a revision of a revision if we add the modifications made by The First Second Gate, a.k.a. the duellist, and The Second Second Gate, a.k.a. his Dutch imposter.

  --Stooge #2 (reaching beseechingly to The Butcher, a halberd severing his arm): Butcher!

  --The Butcher: Due to this tangled nature, it’s hard to fault Warmooge’s error. From my experience with similar sectarian bewilderments, the best response is to just compassionately study the novel market niches generated and play the factions off each other during bidding wars.

  --Stooge #2 (imitated by The Butcher): You Winston Gaspard, can’t you zap it up? As much as our anarchic hearts identify with the Sis, your wafty intro’s nixing us.

  Stooge #2 (real one, going limp as his captor snaps his neck, another enemy using the power of teamwork to cave open his young chest with a spiked-hammer, dying): …

  --The Butcher (wincing): My Brad, good customer. Let’s shuffle on with the knight's adventures after the monk's death:

  Justinian, a knight before,

  His faith in Camelot first born,

  Continued unperturbed in Christ,

  Retaining faith in heart and mind,

  Betruger’d also left with him,

  In case his life was early quit,

  A key carved from the monk’s own thumb,

  Which opened up a buried trunk.

  Inside was stored a range of maps

  And letters in his master’s hand.

  Betruger, from beyond the grave,

  Dismissed the mourning of his fate,

  The faithful’s death no tragedy,

  But progress to a higher scene,

  Where angels sang and harpists plucked,

  Where man rejoiced transcendent love.

  And after other saintly words,

  The monk, whose soul to God returned,

  Instructions left, if our knight sought,

  To carry on Christ’s vengeful cause.

  Their ghoulish curse, Betruger wrote,

  Had in its source been diagnosed;

  It was produced, with Satan’s help,

  By Gutkonig who’d slain himself.

  And cure was to be found—no fraud—

  In sending that king to the Lord.

  --The Somali: My heroine of the hereafter, it seems the monk arranged a vengeance plan, expecting the possible failure of his satanic rituals. A highly-flexible skit idea from this: we revive him and give the knight other demonic orders under mock Christian pretence. Please do discuss with me, in person, whether this is as genius as it seems to Warmooge. Your blessed presence is delivering me to the heights of creative inspiration.

  “Praise Jesus ruling in the clouds!”

  Justinian said, on this news swell,

  “Betruger’s dead, but not his spirit,

  Which from above sends heaven’s mission!

  He teaches how to fix these ailments,

  The one of flesh, the one of Satan!”

  The first of his dead master’s maps

  Dispensed him to a dangerous land,

  A forest where the trees decayed

  And packs of wolf-like spiders chased.

  A secret cave, he there explored,

  Behind a putrid waterfall.

  Inside was hid an evil statue,

  With witch robes, claws, and cultish tattoos,

  Its features warped in smile corrupt,

  Its feet upon a base of skulls.

  --The Somali: Here it seems that Justinian encounters a statue of one of Saana’s pagan deities. This being, after an assumed prior communication with his demon-worshipping mentor, exploits the knight’s gullibility by pretending to be Christian as well. There are no available records of a god fitting this description. Nevertheless, what’s available in the following comedic conversation is I believe sufficient to create an interesting witch character for yourself, if you so please.

  --The Butcher: The exchange does have its humour. But, I will forewarn, like many a dodgy investment on the apparent rise, it has an abrupt nosedive into bankruptcy and violence.

  His entrance made it glow with life,

  And speak to him to calm his fright.

  “I know of you, fair knight of gold,

  Betruger of you having told.

  Your feats, he shared, of chivalry,

  Like dragons slain and maidens pleased,

  The swiftness of your two-hand sword,

  Which by the monk to you was taught.

  But highest praise of all he spelled

  Was that you in our faith excel.”

  “How can you, witch,” Justinian spoke,

  His voice constrained by doubtful note,

  “Proclaim to know the murdered monk,

  As well God’s teachings sent through son?”

  “No witch am I,” replied the statue,

  “But, like you, hexed to voodoo aspect;

  An angel was I, in this world,

  Until the war with Lucifer,

  Who cursed a servant of The Book

  To live with this unholy look;

  That fiend, to multiply offence,

  Would freeze in rock my ugliness.

  Ten thousand years, I’ve prayed for cure,

  But, as of yet, the curse endures.

  My sentence, then, has been to wait,

  Until I meet a knight of faith,

  Who might through tasks of chivalry

  Release my tainted angel wings.

  Could that be you, I wonder now,

  The knight who’ll break me from this spell?”

  To our good knight, this story stunk.

  “You talk a friendship with my monk,

  But falsities besmirch your claims.

  Ten thousand years, you’ve said to wait,

  Yet since God spoke creation’s light,

  A mere six thousand have transpired.

  What’s more, if you an angel be,

  Then surely prayer would set you free.

  Why would our lord maintain this curse

  After defeating Lucifer?”

  “The time,” explained the statue witch,

  With base of skulls, demonic grin,

  “I’ve only guessed from in my cave,

  Where sun does not expose its rays;

  The calendar by which I count

  Consists of dark and bat-flapped sounds,

  And with this sorry fellowship

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Ten thousand years have seemed to drip.

  As for my prayers for help denied,

  You know as well our God, The Christ,

  Behaves in ways beyond our knowledge

  Yet ever right and ever sovereign.

  I question not our lord and liege

  But bow to thank his sacred scheme.

  His some-millennia delay,

  This meeting with Sir Knight arranged,

  For purposes unknown but sure

  To prove, by end, of intent pure.

  If such small faith, the knight rejects

  Another million years I’ll rest,

  Until one comes who God believes

  And doesn’t doubt his—[mysteries?]

  --The Somali: My Gate who unlocks Heaven with the blood of disbelief, the next chunk of the knight’s tale, the middle chunk, is lost due to a drug-fueled brawl that broke out between two rival gangs, one of which the recording judge happened to be a member of.

  --The Butcher (cooking a skewered skunk in the fire of a burning palisade): These interruptions by random fights seem to be a regional hazard, don't they, fair customers?

  --Stooge #3 (unhearing, hiding under the wagon on the hooligan leader’s orders as an enemy platoon attempts a flanking manoeuvre to break a siege around the site): …

  --The Butcher: It’s one of the few downsides of operating a business away from the cops. Warmooge continues:

  --The Somali: I have contacted the bard in an effort to recover the contents. The song itself has been erased due to him deleting his avatar to respawn in a region less plagued by banditry and corruption. The bard did recall, however, a series of misadventures by the knight, who is guided by this witch statue and the dead monk’s maps to gather rare supplies, stealing feathers from giant birds, completing dungeon quests with groups irritated by the hardcore roleplaying. The culminating act is a kidnapping of Justinian by a group of cultists and a demonic sacrifice of him that teleports his soul to a region he presents as Shaitan’s abode of Jahannamo, which the bard interpreted similarly as a bizarre cross-universe fabrication akin to Camelot but which I’m guessing is Saana’s infernal plane. In the infernal plane, he meets a demoness, who is either the witch statue or a mutual ally with the dead swordmaster. The exact identity is unclear due to her repeating the charade of Christian gullibility by insisting that she’s the saint Joan of Arc, sentenced to hellfire and disfiguration for being a Roman Catholic.

  --The Butcher: The commenter here seems to miss that this is probably the demon the knight’s master died trying to summon, both subservient to the witch god. He continues:

  --The Somali: This fake Joan of Arc unlocks for him a Legendary class, the details of which are unfortunately forgotten by the bard and which can’t be reconstructed from later passages that have ceased to describe its abilities. Justinian, lastly, in the final preparations for his mission of revenge against King Gutkonig, uses this class to solo a 500-man dungeon and acquire the Legendary sword, Worlddrinker, the sword at the centre of the tale and his vow, the sword which, today, no longer belongs to him.

  --The Butcher: But instead to Him.

  --Stooge #3 (not responding to the emphasis of the ambiguous pronoun, watching as the flanking enemy platoon is incinerated by a volley of spells, the air growing thick with flesh-smelling smoke): …

  --The Somali: The cultists are a total mystery, none of his former bandit gang being aware of this episode. Inductive reasoning—Warmooge’s own, not the unbelieving bard—suggests this other group were coordinated by the witch statue to utilise the materials gathered by the knight to perform their ritual. The recording, picking up after the judge wins his gang fight, resumes at a section where Justinian is celebrating his obtainment of the weapon and foreshadowing its ‘theft’. The bard had been singing without interruption during the gang fight, apparently remedying a case of stage fright by shutting off his senses and reciting blindly from a Mental Library script. He only realised the omission later when his competition score was tanked by the inability of anyone to follow the already absurd narrative. The refusal of the judges to listen to a subsequent petition prompted his abandonment of both this cursed region and his singing hobby.

  --Stooge #3 (startled as a bear apprehends his older brother fighting with the other hooligans): ...

  --Stooge #3 (imitated by The Butcher doing a hip middle-schooler dance on the roof of a turret, thrusting his hips and elbows at a wider horizon of thousands more rushing over): Yo, this script is Tucker. I was kind of basting for the whole nine yarns on the sword.

  --The Butcher: You’ll never survive the market with that downer mindset. Learn to reinterpret every loss as an opportunity, as fate teaching and guiding you to future riches – that’s another of the tale’s meta-themes. In this case, the loss of the middle section is if anything economical: there’s only so much detail we could discuss before the last duel starts. Moreover, as those wisened in these freest of markets know, life’s neither about the end nor the journey. It’s about the longer-lasting properties acquired during the journey through voluntary exchange and the choices made in the absence of monopolist interference to leverage these properties for the ultimate prosperity of all through self. With the knight, his property is the sword picked up questing—or it was—and that should be our focus.

  --Stooge #3 (horrified as the bear chews through his older brother’s helmet and crushes the head inside like a grape): …

  --Stooge #3 (imitated by The Butcher, jumping back down to the wagon): Yeah? Then what is this knight Clifford’s investment scheme with the new stick?

  --Stooge #3 (weeping): …

  --The Butcher (flicking through pages of the notebook): We’re getting to that part of the tale. Let’s see…the romance resumes…several skippable lines of praise and lamentations for the sword…

  --Stooge #2 (imitated, the dead boy’s severed arm picked up by The Butcher wading through the troop mass and raised in questioning): Wait, Joe, we’ve skipped way too much! What 500-man dungeon did this lucky Derek filch the sabre from?

  --The Butcher: Another detail, good customer, that sadly isn’t in the stock of this notebook or myself, who is but a humble peddler of unregulated meats. A dungeon with skirt-wearing warlocks and dragon-riding maidens - let's fill the gap with that. So, where were we? Yes…yes…our knight has acquired the sword and is finally off to start the vengeance spree that leads to Him.

  With vampire powers, with vampire sword,

  Our knight of gold pursued his—

  --The Butcher (groaning as he catches an arrow between his arm and armpit, pretends to be hit, falls dramatically into a ditch where an orgy of entwined combatants pant for breath between stabs, and feigns death as he disappears amongst them): Please, God Christ of this tale, I can’t go yet…there’s still more of it to be told…still more exotic meats to be sold…

  Stooges #1-3 (two dead, last one hiding and weeping): …

  The Stadium, the advertisements rolling to their close as the last fated meeting with Him nears.

  All the morbid debris of battle has been removed. The arena, beyond a couple stains, stands in its original condition - glossy and clean, ready for the next soul-expanding round.

  The knight, utilising the opened space, dashes with his fastest strides around the sandpit arena, rolling where he stops, batting air with his shield and finishing it with thrusts from his imitation zweihander. The other arenas have since become available, but something has held him to this single, emptiest of spots.

  That something is his intuition of the design’s contingent factors. On anywhere but this one map of sand the knight loses, the duellist delaying fate just long enough to formulate a counter and reverse the outcome in his favour. The knight thus must use this one spot, with this precise state of immersion and preparation, at this precise moment in the duellist’s tantric cycling of the weekend’s extended combats.

  The knight doesn't himself know he has no other opportunities beyond the sand, nor that the sand is an opportunity. Due to his code of chivalry, he’s never developed the habit of intensively scrutinising settings in the way of the duellist or those like the grandmother imitating him, a knight accepting battle wheresoever a liege or a god delivers him. Even if he had possessed such a scrupulousness, most rational analyses—unable to account for the other contingencies—would still calculate him losing a duel anywhere, whether here, in the streets outside congested with war, or on the desolate surface of one of Saana’s triple moons. A further, much more mundane obstacle to these considerations is luck, it being seemingly pointless to over-invest in the selection of an arena when a coinflip might hand that selection over to the duellist – although, as fate decrees of that small impediment, the cointflip won’t.

  Despite these obscuring factors, the knight has attached himself to this single setting with the unwavering strength of destiny. He finds in the sand, after it has provided his greatest successes of the weekend, a vague sense of security that contrasts with an off-putting silhouette of intimidation cast across the alternatives. These intuitions, by-passing any rational self-awareness, speak to the knight in the language of his roleplay and his history. Digging through his thoughts, he’s perceiving the arena according to the local symbolism, where sand and blood and even the clay of the filled-in tunnels are invested with generations of meaning. He feels, as the sweat of drills begins to flow and drip into the sand, that he isn’t exercising in an arena sandpit anymore but that more timeless desert of myth, a place simultaneously of extinction and religious purity, of brutally-hot days and frigid nights beneath the open stars, of endless thirst and the ecstatic relief when the caravan stumbles on an oasis. Tugged back and forth between these paradoxes, between his doubts and his heroic calling, he wanders ever deeper into the austere spirit of the desert, the sun purging his excesses until he is refined into a sword without personality or history or destiny.

  He is not the first to make this journey. The question is who goes further—goes thirstier, goes higher—at the right moment and at the right place.

  Fervent claps announce His first direct appearance on the scene.

  The duellist squats, suddenly, on the hilltop overlooking the knight’s arena. Alone, he stares at the thousands in the stands. He has the vacant, satisfied reverie of a carnivore digesting a feast, his clothes soaked with litres of blood and human fat.

  The cheers grow shrill and feminine as, waking from his trance, he plops down a bucket of soapy water, strips naked out of his armour, and begins the compulsive motions of his cleansing ritual.

  Many are confused. They wonder if the adoration of the masses has swung him too far from earlier privacies into exhibitionism. Such a deranging oscillation can occur when a person formerly denied something gets their first intoxicating taste, true self-inhibition failing to develop in the absence of temptation. Those few attuned to the lower layers of the design understand better - nudity in his state can be neither embarrassing nor thrilling; it is, after the much greater exposures of the soul, an act of desensitised triviality, the mere forgetting of a habit done for the comfort of others.

  A higher comprehension yet of the design shifts the focus away from that distraction to the cleansing itself, which is being performed at the wrong time. The real mess is not behind the duellist but ahead.

  An entourage of soldiers establish camp around him, unwinding from the action with several barrels of liquor gifted by the boss himself. They have the exhausted cheer of fratboys who’ve survived an initiation by hazing. Though silent due to orders of censorship, their telepathic channels are abuzz with conjecture. For them, especially, the duellist’s assertions of retirement have been thoroughly discredited, and they are debating internally as to the form of the next stage whispered sarcastically throughout the lies. Now that the hydra who once acted as their army’s invisible brain has gained an equally-powered corporeality, how will it continue to employ them? Will they stand side-by-side this monster on the field? Or will it range further ahead and trail them behind it like an empire-length cape dangling from the shoulders of an all-conquering titan?

  The knight is watching this scene in the sand below. His thoughts are not as adversarial as might be expected by his place of nemesis in the design.

  The soldiers collected around the duellist remind him fondly of himself and the other amateurs who’d similarly followed these past weeks as the duellist mentored them with tips and wisdom. It occurs, not for the first time, that theirs has only been a temporary companionship, a privileged borrowing of the duellist from this larger-scale role that finds its true equality with armies and empires.

  Or with gods.

  The knight has come to know a genuine holiness inside the duellist, one radiating out through the pretentions revealed to be a mere mask, or container, suppressing this superhuman quality that the duellist is reluctant to claim ownership of. The trials of today are nevertheless forcing this quality outwards in a way increasingly recognised by those cheering fanatically in the crowd. One feels a growing impulse just to sit in the duellist’s presence, to be blessed through proximity alone into blooming like a flower ennobled by the sun.

  Justinian comprehends his own journey in these divine terms, accelerated as he’s been in a fortnight from a no-name slumdweller to a grandfinalist on the world’s grandest stage. Is that not a miracle? How else can one sensibly explain this?

  The miracle-working duellist might be a messiah, thinks the knight destined shortly to prove the duellist’s human imperfection.

  From the ringside, Alex Wong misinterprets the knight’s glance of admiration. He sees in it a potential refutation of earlier claims of ignorance, a gratitude for their conspired loss against him. Hesitant to directly address this in case it triggers a counter-move, he attacks them from an angle, petulantly lumping the knight with the cheering crowd and the fawning soldiers that have increasingly ignored his own commands throughout the day.

  “Scammed!” he gives a surmising sweep of everyone with his doomed sword, Worlddrinker. “All you young sycophants are victims of the scam! You’re not seeing the danger in admiring my friend. The lighter qualities that give him some relatability are just him imitating myself. My friend—as you’d know if you’d been there when I found him—is a born misanthrope, his sole goal in life being to trash others wherever he can hunt them out, whether in a tournament, a campaign, a painting competition, or a conversation. If he befriends anyone, including me, it’s only because a cost-benefit analysis has determined that this will result, somewhere deeper in the chain of scheming, in even greater quantities tasting his boot. There is no further interest in humanity beyond this. ‘Humanism’ – that’s a joke inverting the polar-opposite intentions.”

  Justinian, the only person listening to this rant, feels not anger—the duellist blessing him into a state beyond that petty emotion—but embarrassment and disappointment.

  He reflects mutely that the accusations of falsity laid against him in his previous match have been directed at the wrong person. That such an undeserving, greedy, bumbling clown as He would be the duellist’s closest ally is inexplicable. Worse, that this clown has not matured from that privilege, that he seems even to have regressed into greater pettiness since their last encounter, is a tragedy amongst tragedies.

  Alex Wong, reading the moralistic contempt, sneers at the knight's ignorance. “You’ve never met my friend in the off-hours. All the empty rhetoric gets turned off the moment he leaves the stage, at which point the irritation of human resourcing is delegated to my handling. That’s why I’m the public face, that's why I had to pretend to be ‘The Tyrant’ – it’s not charity by him, or humility, or repayment, or even necessity. It’s just anti-social pragmatism. Celebrity is annoying and pointless by his judgment, and he considers my pursuit of it a deserved self-own. If now, he’s suddenly inviting the fame, then that just means the calculation has shifted. You, who’ve all been marked, are marching like lemmings into the next phase of the scam.”

  Justinian laughs snidely and resumes his silent work. For a moment, he imagines a new target for his cuts, zweihander clashing against zweihander. His vision and focus, however, are brought straight back to the duellist by a minor stumble, the knight’s foot catching on a boy-sized arm missed under the sand by the clean-up crew.

  Alex Wong is left meanwhile to ponder his own raving, which confesses an anxiety he has before only privately contemplated, an anxiety beyond and behind the anxiety of the sword.

  The position granting him the privilege of such treasures is no longer guaranteed. The cards he has been symbolically returning to the duellist have, in actuality, slipped from out of his control already, and the duellist—as former commitments based on their history of friendship dwindle in importance—retains him moreso as an employee, one who would be replaced if not for his social networking and the levity he grants their empire with his event-planning and silly wagers. Alex Wong—not that he would try, constrained as he is by emotional group loyalties that find his greatest success in his guild’s success—knows the impossibility of restoring the lost equality between them. Over the previous months of ‘reformation’, he has witnessed the duellist’s shadow politicking, the entrapments and downfalls of leaders much more competent than himself. The outcome of treason would be losing everything, including the sword.

  Oddly, though, Alex Wong can feel secure for some of the qualities correctly identified in the duellist, who is, indeed, merely feigning a flirtation with leadership.

  This truth can be seen in a re-examination of the duellist on the hill. He is amongst his soldiers but not with them, their slaps against his soapy shoulders reciprocated with vacant-eyed nods. As the others enthusiastically contemplate the future of their guild, the answer, missed by them, is stated in the fact of the blood being scrubbed from under his fingernails belonging to them, too. At the heights to which the duellist returns, he has no further strength to carry the dead-weight of companions, nor any vision of a single day beyond this one. Why would he care for what happens after? There is nothing after the mountain. His darkest wish is to remain up here forever, if not as an immortal then as a beautiful young corpse struck down by lightning and preserved in ice.

  Although that indifference secures Alex Wong’s job, it unfortunately does not apply to the sword, which won’t be entering on the same side of the misanthropic equation.