The Sunlit Flower Prologue
The Sunlit Flower Prologue
Warnings: not much. Some mentions of gore.
This is the intro for a story I'm working on. I'd really like to know what you think. Constructive criticism is appreciated.
~*~*~
Jon wasn’t allowed to be armed in the temple. At least not for another half hour or so. It was considered disrespectful and there were stringent rules governing who could carry weapons and what sort of weapons they could be. Guns and swords - not ok. Shoestrings and ballpoint pens - those were alright.
Luckily for Jon, there weren’t any rules about strapping a portable CD player to his empty gun holster and listening to music during the service through a single earbud that ran up under his jacket to poke out of his collar. They must have thought that this rule was obvious.
He made it through most of the service without anyone noticing, but then his favorite song came on and maybe his head bobbed a bit more than could be passed off as natural.
His Aunt Lydia turned to him for one of her habitual attempts to straighten his bright red uniform jacket, and paused. She furrowed her eyebrows together, then dropped her voice to an angry hiss. “Are you wearing headphones?”
He gave her a look out of the corner of his eye, not wanting to turn to face her too much and allow her to see, not wanting to speak because if he opened his mouth he might be sick. She didn’t buy it and leaned forward in her seat to grab his chin and turn his head.
She made a noise of severe disapproval and outrage, while his Uncle Eustace chuckled from his other side.
“Take it off. Take it off right now.” His aunt’s hiss dropped in volume, but raised in pitch, unintentionally making it carry farther, making it sound more frantic.
The man seated in front of them shifted and cleared his throat, annoyed at the little family’s constant whispering and fretting, but too polite to do anything more than exchange eye rolls with his wife. Most of the congregation was there for the holiday service. Not for Jon’s knighting. Or at least he hoped they weren’t.
Lydia made a grab for the cord, but Jon caught her hand easily and swatted her away with a touch of annoyance. She jerked back, as if she were frightened that he would hit her, and her eyes widened as she tried to push the sudden, irrational fear away. Jon hated it when she wore that face. And lately it had been happening a lot. He opened his mouth to try to reassure her, to apologize for… whatever it was that had scared her, but he immediately felt sick again and snapped his mouth closed. “I’m sorry you’re afraid of me,” would be a stupid thing to say.
He ducked his head and slipped out the earbud, nestling it into his collar where he could easily get at it again if she stopped paying attention.
“Turn it off too,” she growled. Her tone was a tad hesitant, while her demand told him that she was sorry too.
He grimaced and grudgingly reached for the CD player against his side. It wasn’t hard to find the buttons through his jacket. And then he was alone, unable to distract himself from the service and suddenly unable to regulate the moisture in his mouth.
Eustace chuckled harder but stayed silent, leaning forward in his seat and clutching his chest as he wheezed, prompting Lydia to shush him loudly, and the people around them to shift once more.
“What are they even talking about?” Eustace complained, leaning sideways to whisper to Jon and cocking his head to the side. “Do you know what’s going on?”
Jon shook his head. It was easier than explaining the story behind the song the choir was singing.
“Did we miss it?” Lydia asked, bouncing up in her seat to try to get a better look. “Did they call your name already?”
“Can’t have,” Eustace said, his eyebrows pulling together in uncertainty. “They’re not going to call his name, anyway. That’s not how these fancy things work.”
Lydia frowned, then turned back to Jon, this time trying to straighten his hair. This was part of why Jon chose to sit in the back of the drafty, stone temple: there was no one behind them to witness his aunt and uncle’s behavior.
He didn’t like having people look at him. It made him nervous, and he was nervous enough as it was. Now he didn’t even have his music, no tiny little voice to reassure him, nothing to keep his thoughts from growing dark.
This whole ceremony was a travesty. It was an outrage. It was yet another mistake on the king’s part, yet another mistake that Jon was just going to go along with.
He only hoped that this one wouldn’t end up killing almost ten thousand people.
Maybe they’d forget about him. Maybe the rest of the service would take so long that they would run out of time. From the small amount of haphazard information they’d given him about the ceremony, Jon would have believed that it wasn’t important at all. Knights didn’t really do anything anyway. It was more like a pat on the back and a way to get him out of their hair, a way to get him to disappear.
He swallowed thickly and considered just leaving. It would be a nobler alternative to going along with this idiocy. But then he’d likely be arrested for insulting the king, and Lydia had too strong a hold on his elbow, and Eustace had far too much pride in his eyes.
This was another reason why he hadn’t wanted them to come. They were blocking his escape path. He didn’t want them to witness this, but they had a bad habit of reading his mail and when they found out about the ceremony they were too excited for Jon to burst their bubble.
The congregation was instructed to kneel. Jon didn’t hear the request, but everyone in front of them knelt, so he guessed that it was what they were supposed to do. His knees cried out in protest as he sunk onto them. Part of the knighting ceremony involved spending the night before hand praying in seclusion. He was supposed to spend the time communing with Cyllene and purifying his spirit or something. Instead he’d spent eight hours kneeling in a drafty temple until his bones ached and his legs burned as he tried to figure out why all this was happening to him and what he could possibly do about it. He hadn’t come up with anything. The goddess hadn’t lent him any wisdom.
At least he had been able to get breakfast with his family before the service, although his uncle hadn’t let him pay. The pancakes were good and he’d be passed out right now if he wasn’t strung out on coffee. Maybe that was the silver lining to his family’s presence. They provided him with a sizable caffeine fix.
After several minutes of chanting prayers that Jon didn’t well know enough to recite along with everyone else, they were allowed to be seated again. He didn’t need the nudge in the ribs that Lydia gave him or his uncle’s excited pats against his arm to recognize the song that began playing. It was a blessing on the heroic, a tune played mostly during parades. It was his cue, and with more bravery than anyone could realize, he stood from his seat, slipped out of the pew, and marched up to the front of the temple.
The benefit of sitting in the back was that people weren’t looking at him the whole time, but the down side was that absolutely every eye was on him as he made the long walk to the altar. The crowd’s heads swiveled as he passed, like tall grass moving in waves in the wind.
He pushed down his anxiety into a tight, nauseating ball in his stomach and kept his eyes on his destination. The head priest stood behind the altar, a stone monstrosity that rumor said was the site of ancient human sacrifices. They said that the victims’ blood had seeped into the crudely cut stone and on bad days you could smell it. Jon didn’t believe it, or rather he didn’t really care what people got up to a thousand years ago, but at the moment he imagined that he could taste blood in the air.
In contrast to this morbid tale, the altar was covered in blue cloth in honor of the season, embroidered with cheery, white flowers. The head priest smiled at him, a matching blue stole draped around his shoulders, one of his fingers slipped into the pages of a thick, closed tome to mark his place. Jon couldn’t drudge up the enthusiasm to return the smile, but the priest took his renewed grimace as a typical sign of nerves rather than what it was: tenuously controlled panic.
Just to the side of the altar stood the king, a tall, broad man with a firmly set jaw hidden beneath a neatly trimmed beard, dressed in elaborate, navy robes meant to be worn only on these occasions. He held a sword casually in one hand, the one he would use in the dubbing ceremony, the one that would shortly belong to Jon. A possessive streak ripped through his belly to see someone treat his sword so flippantly.
As he drew closer and passed the last of the pews his view opened up to show the massive pipe organ in all its glory, lit in purple and orange and green splotches from the morning light through stained glass.
The royal box came into view at the same time. Crown Prince Theron looked just as bored and distant as he had every time Jon had laid eyes on him during the four years of the Goblin War. Only the very rich are able to get away with wearing as impressive a suit as the prince wore, much less one that’s blue. Theron not only pulled it off, but he did it with style to spare as if he did such things all the time. Which Jon guessed he did.
Sitting next to him was Princess Eleanor Rose, or “the sunlit flower” as people tended to call her when being overly dramatic. Her long, thick hair of gold and copper shone as if kissed by the sun - thus the sentimental epitaph - and somehow she had enough of it to let it fall loose in perfectly formed curls and still pull a large portion of it back into something elaborate and swirly. She and the prince had the same sharp, blue eyes, the only difference being that hers look mildly interested in a very polite kind of way.
There were rumors that she was one of the most gifted sorceresses alive, but she spoke so infrequently and was so modest and reserved in public, that no one was really certain. At least not anyone Jon knew. He didn’t really care either way. Grand sorcerers were a concept nearly as distant in his life as Cyllene.
Her blue grey dress was modest enough for a demure princess, fashionable enough for royalty, and so unobtrusive that she seemed to melt into the background like any one of the marble statues set into the temple’s columns. Or maybe it was her face that reminded him of a statue, pale, almost translucent skin, and a smile so tranquil it was almost unnatural, a smile that didn’t convey happiness, but didn’t show any other emotions either.
Jon absently cursed whoever made the decision that his dress uniform should be red. He was going to stick out, and he felt an odd sense of jealousy for the princess’ ability to disappear. It was a silly thought really, as he was going to be the center of attention no matter what he was wearing.
He climbed the first of the broad steps and dropped to one knee. Although the position was slightly more comfortable than the rest of the kneeling he’d been doing lately, with the bile oozing into his chest, restraining his lungs, poisoning his heart, it was hard to notice. He bowed his head and stared determinedly at the king’s shoes.
Clenching his teeth, he took a deep, preparatory breath.
The priest’s voice rang in his ears, far louder than he would have thought possible a minute ago. He could hear the smile in the words, throbbing against his eardrums, beating him down into the stone steps. The temple was a place of stories, the priests duel historians and entertainers, snatching at the excited heartstrings of their congregation and weaving them into elaborate tales colored by the emotions that beat through every thread. They wove magic into their stories. They wove music. They wove until there was no longer simple speech, no string of words that the listener could follow. The story surrounded them, engulfed them, made them a part of Jon’s tale, vivid and terrible, the sounds of metal striking metal and metal ripping through flesh, the sweet smell of decay and the salty smell of blood.
And the fear. The fear of the goblin horde as they approached, a black mass over the dunes. The fear of the first realization that the Massif Kingdom was outnumbered and out classed. The fear as the monsters ripped apart comrades without mercy or hesitation or the slightest hint that they felt pain. The fear as death’s certainty paralyzed the mind and body, leaving behind only a feeling of coldness.
And in the center of it all was Jon. Jon and his wild, single handed battle frenzy. While his fellow soldiers fell like leaves behind him, Jon threw himself into the goblin horde and carved a path through their ranks. He left nothing but death and stink and flies in his wake.
Here the story took a turn. It wove together a tale of Jon leading the army to victory after victory, filling the listeners and the characters with pride and confidence and elation, casting Jon as a hero.
This was pure propaganda. There was no victory to be had in the desert. The goblins had laid waste to their forces and then feasted on the rotting, shredded corpses. Whatever small successes they had were exaggerated by the hands of politicians and the voice of a master priest.
The story turned to the final battle, to the last confrontation. Jon against the Goblin King in single combat.
He squeezed his eyes and fought the urge to shudder as the Goblin King’s stink assaulted his memory, eyes wild and rolling as they faced one another, a beast nearly twice Jon’s height with jaundiced eyes and flying saliva and a great, spiked war hammer.
He watched, growing more and more horrified as the scene played out, as the Jon in the story and the Goblin King circled one another, as they spun and clashed, as he kicked the beast onto his knees, disarmed him and cracked off three of the horns sprouting from his head, an act so dishonoring that the congregation let out elated gasps, filling the temple with a growing ring of triumph jarringly at odds with the pain in Jon’s stomach.
Defeated and humiliated, the Goblin king admitted defeat. And Jon accepted it on behalf of the Massif Kingdom and managed to leave the arena before he lost consciousness, before the goblins could see his weakness. He had nearly died later of blood loss and sepsis, but that part was left out of the story.
Other points were left out as well, such as the fact that Jon’s duel with the Goblin King was not the natural climax of the war, but was instead a last ditch suicide mission. Goblins followed whoever was strongest. It was their way. If Jon could defeat the Goblin King, then he would be the strongest and the horde would follow his orders long enough to evacuate what remained of the Massif Kingdom’s forces. It was the only way, and Jon had to go along with it if he ever wanted to go home. He would go home or he would die trying.
Only through pure, dumb luck had Jon come out victorious, and the horde had honored him. Not the Massif King, or the prince, or the generals.
Him. Jon. A shepherd from a tiny southern town.
He knew the Massif King took this as a personal insult. He was the king, while Jon was worthless. He should have been able to save his people. His people shouldn’t have even needed saving in the first place. Everything should have worked out the way he had intended.
His frustration and self-loathing boiled within him until he could no longer contain it, at which point he focused all his poisonous hate onto an external source. Onto Jon. The king had started the war, he had lost the war, and Jon had saved his ass.
Such humiliation was unacceptable.
So now Jon was not being sent back to the desert to keep an eye on the horde, or even being transferred to a border town so he could be nearby should anything happen. And something would surely happen. The goblins would rise again if they ever felt Jon’s strength had waned or if they ever felt that their own power had grown.
Instead, Jon was being honorably discharged, knighted, and pushed to the side in hopes that the whole sticky business could be forgotten. The king wanted to forget. He wanted his people to forget. He wanted to make it so it never happened.
But that would be impossible. Too many sons had died. Too many people came back scarred. And the king would not allow the lingering fear and anger to be directed at himself.
No. Those feelings of loss and betrayal would slowly turn towards Jon, the publicly announced Hero of the Goblin War, the war that didn’t deserve a hero. There was a strand in the priest’s story, something subtle, something that the audience wouldn’t pick up on in the moment, but they would look back and feel a twinge, feel that something wasn’t quite right. They would look back and wonder why Jon had survived when their loved ones had not. What was wrong with him? He must be inhuman. And that was partially true.
He became a monster. Everyone else was slaughtered.
This was a theme that would be picked up by traveling bards and minor magicians, who were in the congregation to learn the tale and spread it through taverns and town squares across the country. And then the people of the kingdom would look at Jon and feel ill at ease.
While the priest hadn’t personally used the nickname the generals had given to Jon, it would crop up in the retellings.
The Shepherd of Death.
The priest’s story dissipated, and Jon tried to swallow. He tried to face his fate with courage, but it was hopeless.
The king looked rather grim as he stepped forward recited the oath for Jon to repeat. “I, Jonathan Shepland, most honorably swear-“
Jon blinked. His last name wasn’t Shepland. That was the name of his home town. Like most people in the countryside, he didn’t have a last name. If it was really necessary, people would add “Eustace’s boy” onto his name. He clenched his jaw and wondered if the king was aware of this error, or if he knew and didn’t care.
“I, Jonathan Shepland,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, like it wasn’t his own. It crackled and he cursed himself for going so long without using it. “Most honorably swear-“
“To defend the hopeless and the weak-“
“To defend the hopeless and the weak-“
“The downtrodden and the poor-“
“The downtrodden and the poor-“
“To face all danger with bravery-“
“To face all danger with bravery-“ To the point of stupidity.
“To speak only the truth-“
“To speak only the truth-“ Because that’s possible.
“To be devoted to Cyllene-“
“To be devoted to Cyllene-“ And already he had broken his oath about truthfulness.
“And loyal to the crown.”
With a sense of morbid finality, Jon gave up.
“And loyal to the crown.”
The king smirked, something like victory dancing in his eyes, and in that moment as their eyes met, they both knew exactly what the other was thinking. They both knew that the king had defeated him, that the Goblin War would be pushed out of sight and out of mind lest the country remember the king’s defeat, that Jon would be ostracized, and that despite all his strength and bravery and heroic deeds he was powerless to hold back the future.
The king taped the sword against each of Jon’s shoulders. “I dub thee,” tap, “Sir Jonathan Shepland,” tap.
Jon stood, and with a bow, he took the sword that was offered to him. It was a symbol that there would be no true victory in this life. It was a symbol Jon would carry forever.
Warnings: not much. Some mentions of gore.
This is the intro for a story I'm working on. I'd really like to know what you think. Constructive criticism is appreciated.
~*~*~
Jon wasn’t allowed to be armed in the temple. At least not for another half hour or so. It was considered disrespectful and there were stringent rules governing who could carry weapons and what sort of weapons they could be. Guns and swords - not ok. Shoestrings and ballpoint pens - those were alright.
Luckily for Jon, there weren’t any rules about strapping a portable CD player to his empty gun holster and listening to music during the service through a single earbud that ran up under his jacket to poke out of his collar. They must have thought that this rule was obvious.
He made it through most of the service without anyone noticing, but then his favorite song came on and maybe his head bobbed a bit more than could be passed off as natural.
His Aunt Lydia turned to him for one of her habitual attempts to straighten his bright red uniform jacket, and paused. She furrowed her eyebrows together, then dropped her voice to an angry hiss. “Are you wearing headphones?”
He gave her a look out of the corner of his eye, not wanting to turn to face her too much and allow her to see, not wanting to speak because if he opened his mouth he might be sick. She didn’t buy it and leaned forward in her seat to grab his chin and turn his head.
She made a noise of severe disapproval and outrage, while his Uncle Eustace chuckled from his other side.
“Take it off. Take it off right now.” His aunt’s hiss dropped in volume, but raised in pitch, unintentionally making it carry farther, making it sound more frantic.
The man seated in front of them shifted and cleared his throat, annoyed at the little family’s constant whispering and fretting, but too polite to do anything more than exchange eye rolls with his wife. Most of the congregation was there for the holiday service. Not for Jon’s knighting. Or at least he hoped they weren’t.
Lydia made a grab for the cord, but Jon caught her hand easily and swatted her away with a touch of annoyance. She jerked back, as if she were frightened that he would hit her, and her eyes widened as she tried to push the sudden, irrational fear away. Jon hated it when she wore that face. And lately it had been happening a lot. He opened his mouth to try to reassure her, to apologize for… whatever it was that had scared her, but he immediately felt sick again and snapped his mouth closed. “I’m sorry you’re afraid of me,” would be a stupid thing to say.
He ducked his head and slipped out the earbud, nestling it into his collar where he could easily get at it again if she stopped paying attention.
“Turn it off too,” she growled. Her tone was a tad hesitant, while her demand told him that she was sorry too.
He grimaced and grudgingly reached for the CD player against his side. It wasn’t hard to find the buttons through his jacket. And then he was alone, unable to distract himself from the service and suddenly unable to regulate the moisture in his mouth.
Eustace chuckled harder but stayed silent, leaning forward in his seat and clutching his chest as he wheezed, prompting Lydia to shush him loudly, and the people around them to shift once more.
“What are they even talking about?” Eustace complained, leaning sideways to whisper to Jon and cocking his head to the side. “Do you know what’s going on?”
Jon shook his head. It was easier than explaining the story behind the song the choir was singing.
“Did we miss it?” Lydia asked, bouncing up in her seat to try to get a better look. “Did they call your name already?”
“Can’t have,” Eustace said, his eyebrows pulling together in uncertainty. “They’re not going to call his name, anyway. That’s not how these fancy things work.”
Lydia frowned, then turned back to Jon, this time trying to straighten his hair. This was part of why Jon chose to sit in the back of the drafty, stone temple: there was no one behind them to witness his aunt and uncle’s behavior.
He didn’t like having people look at him. It made him nervous, and he was nervous enough as it was. Now he didn’t even have his music, no tiny little voice to reassure him, nothing to keep his thoughts from growing dark.
This whole ceremony was a travesty. It was an outrage. It was yet another mistake on the king’s part, yet another mistake that Jon was just going to go along with.
He only hoped that this one wouldn’t end up killing almost ten thousand people.
Maybe they’d forget about him. Maybe the rest of the service would take so long that they would run out of time. From the small amount of haphazard information they’d given him about the ceremony, Jon would have believed that it wasn’t important at all. Knights didn’t really do anything anyway. It was more like a pat on the back and a way to get him out of their hair, a way to get him to disappear.
He swallowed thickly and considered just leaving. It would be a nobler alternative to going along with this idiocy. But then he’d likely be arrested for insulting the king, and Lydia had too strong a hold on his elbow, and Eustace had far too much pride in his eyes.
This was another reason why he hadn’t wanted them to come. They were blocking his escape path. He didn’t want them to witness this, but they had a bad habit of reading his mail and when they found out about the ceremony they were too excited for Jon to burst their bubble.
The congregation was instructed to kneel. Jon didn’t hear the request, but everyone in front of them knelt, so he guessed that it was what they were supposed to do. His knees cried out in protest as he sunk onto them. Part of the knighting ceremony involved spending the night before hand praying in seclusion. He was supposed to spend the time communing with Cyllene and purifying his spirit or something. Instead he’d spent eight hours kneeling in a drafty temple until his bones ached and his legs burned as he tried to figure out why all this was happening to him and what he could possibly do about it. He hadn’t come up with anything. The goddess hadn’t lent him any wisdom.
At least he had been able to get breakfast with his family before the service, although his uncle hadn’t let him pay. The pancakes were good and he’d be passed out right now if he wasn’t strung out on coffee. Maybe that was the silver lining to his family’s presence. They provided him with a sizable caffeine fix.
After several minutes of chanting prayers that Jon didn’t well know enough to recite along with everyone else, they were allowed to be seated again. He didn’t need the nudge in the ribs that Lydia gave him or his uncle’s excited pats against his arm to recognize the song that began playing. It was a blessing on the heroic, a tune played mostly during parades. It was his cue, and with more bravery than anyone could realize, he stood from his seat, slipped out of the pew, and marched up to the front of the temple.
The benefit of sitting in the back was that people weren’t looking at him the whole time, but the down side was that absolutely every eye was on him as he made the long walk to the altar. The crowd’s heads swiveled as he passed, like tall grass moving in waves in the wind.
He pushed down his anxiety into a tight, nauseating ball in his stomach and kept his eyes on his destination. The head priest stood behind the altar, a stone monstrosity that rumor said was the site of ancient human sacrifices. They said that the victims’ blood had seeped into the crudely cut stone and on bad days you could smell it. Jon didn’t believe it, or rather he didn’t really care what people got up to a thousand years ago, but at the moment he imagined that he could taste blood in the air.
In contrast to this morbid tale, the altar was covered in blue cloth in honor of the season, embroidered with cheery, white flowers. The head priest smiled at him, a matching blue stole draped around his shoulders, one of his fingers slipped into the pages of a thick, closed tome to mark his place. Jon couldn’t drudge up the enthusiasm to return the smile, but the priest took his renewed grimace as a typical sign of nerves rather than what it was: tenuously controlled panic.
Just to the side of the altar stood the king, a tall, broad man with a firmly set jaw hidden beneath a neatly trimmed beard, dressed in elaborate, navy robes meant to be worn only on these occasions. He held a sword casually in one hand, the one he would use in the dubbing ceremony, the one that would shortly belong to Jon. A possessive streak ripped through his belly to see someone treat his sword so flippantly.
As he drew closer and passed the last of the pews his view opened up to show the massive pipe organ in all its glory, lit in purple and orange and green splotches from the morning light through stained glass.
The royal box came into view at the same time. Crown Prince Theron looked just as bored and distant as he had every time Jon had laid eyes on him during the four years of the Goblin War. Only the very rich are able to get away with wearing as impressive a suit as the prince wore, much less one that’s blue. Theron not only pulled it off, but he did it with style to spare as if he did such things all the time. Which Jon guessed he did.
Sitting next to him was Princess Eleanor Rose, or “the sunlit flower” as people tended to call her when being overly dramatic. Her long, thick hair of gold and copper shone as if kissed by the sun - thus the sentimental epitaph - and somehow she had enough of it to let it fall loose in perfectly formed curls and still pull a large portion of it back into something elaborate and swirly. She and the prince had the same sharp, blue eyes, the only difference being that hers look mildly interested in a very polite kind of way.
There were rumors that she was one of the most gifted sorceresses alive, but she spoke so infrequently and was so modest and reserved in public, that no one was really certain. At least not anyone Jon knew. He didn’t really care either way. Grand sorcerers were a concept nearly as distant in his life as Cyllene.
Her blue grey dress was modest enough for a demure princess, fashionable enough for royalty, and so unobtrusive that she seemed to melt into the background like any one of the marble statues set into the temple’s columns. Or maybe it was her face that reminded him of a statue, pale, almost translucent skin, and a smile so tranquil it was almost unnatural, a smile that didn’t convey happiness, but didn’t show any other emotions either.
Jon absently cursed whoever made the decision that his dress uniform should be red. He was going to stick out, and he felt an odd sense of jealousy for the princess’ ability to disappear. It was a silly thought really, as he was going to be the center of attention no matter what he was wearing.
He climbed the first of the broad steps and dropped to one knee. Although the position was slightly more comfortable than the rest of the kneeling he’d been doing lately, with the bile oozing into his chest, restraining his lungs, poisoning his heart, it was hard to notice. He bowed his head and stared determinedly at the king’s shoes.
Clenching his teeth, he took a deep, preparatory breath.
The priest’s voice rang in his ears, far louder than he would have thought possible a minute ago. He could hear the smile in the words, throbbing against his eardrums, beating him down into the stone steps. The temple was a place of stories, the priests duel historians and entertainers, snatching at the excited heartstrings of their congregation and weaving them into elaborate tales colored by the emotions that beat through every thread. They wove magic into their stories. They wove music. They wove until there was no longer simple speech, no string of words that the listener could follow. The story surrounded them, engulfed them, made them a part of Jon’s tale, vivid and terrible, the sounds of metal striking metal and metal ripping through flesh, the sweet smell of decay and the salty smell of blood.
And the fear. The fear of the goblin horde as they approached, a black mass over the dunes. The fear of the first realization that the Massif Kingdom was outnumbered and out classed. The fear as the monsters ripped apart comrades without mercy or hesitation or the slightest hint that they felt pain. The fear as death’s certainty paralyzed the mind and body, leaving behind only a feeling of coldness.
And in the center of it all was Jon. Jon and his wild, single handed battle frenzy. While his fellow soldiers fell like leaves behind him, Jon threw himself into the goblin horde and carved a path through their ranks. He left nothing but death and stink and flies in his wake.
Here the story took a turn. It wove together a tale of Jon leading the army to victory after victory, filling the listeners and the characters with pride and confidence and elation, casting Jon as a hero.
This was pure propaganda. There was no victory to be had in the desert. The goblins had laid waste to their forces and then feasted on the rotting, shredded corpses. Whatever small successes they had were exaggerated by the hands of politicians and the voice of a master priest.
The story turned to the final battle, to the last confrontation. Jon against the Goblin King in single combat.
He squeezed his eyes and fought the urge to shudder as the Goblin King’s stink assaulted his memory, eyes wild and rolling as they faced one another, a beast nearly twice Jon’s height with jaundiced eyes and flying saliva and a great, spiked war hammer.
He watched, growing more and more horrified as the scene played out, as the Jon in the story and the Goblin King circled one another, as they spun and clashed, as he kicked the beast onto his knees, disarmed him and cracked off three of the horns sprouting from his head, an act so dishonoring that the congregation let out elated gasps, filling the temple with a growing ring of triumph jarringly at odds with the pain in Jon’s stomach.
Defeated and humiliated, the Goblin king admitted defeat. And Jon accepted it on behalf of the Massif Kingdom and managed to leave the arena before he lost consciousness, before the goblins could see his weakness. He had nearly died later of blood loss and sepsis, but that part was left out of the story.
Other points were left out as well, such as the fact that Jon’s duel with the Goblin King was not the natural climax of the war, but was instead a last ditch suicide mission. Goblins followed whoever was strongest. It was their way. If Jon could defeat the Goblin King, then he would be the strongest and the horde would follow his orders long enough to evacuate what remained of the Massif Kingdom’s forces. It was the only way, and Jon had to go along with it if he ever wanted to go home. He would go home or he would die trying.
Only through pure, dumb luck had Jon come out victorious, and the horde had honored him. Not the Massif King, or the prince, or the generals.
Him. Jon. A shepherd from a tiny southern town.
He knew the Massif King took this as a personal insult. He was the king, while Jon was worthless. He should have been able to save his people. His people shouldn’t have even needed saving in the first place. Everything should have worked out the way he had intended.
His frustration and self-loathing boiled within him until he could no longer contain it, at which point he focused all his poisonous hate onto an external source. Onto Jon. The king had started the war, he had lost the war, and Jon had saved his ass.
Such humiliation was unacceptable.
So now Jon was not being sent back to the desert to keep an eye on the horde, or even being transferred to a border town so he could be nearby should anything happen. And something would surely happen. The goblins would rise again if they ever felt Jon’s strength had waned or if they ever felt that their own power had grown.
Instead, Jon was being honorably discharged, knighted, and pushed to the side in hopes that the whole sticky business could be forgotten. The king wanted to forget. He wanted his people to forget. He wanted to make it so it never happened.
But that would be impossible. Too many sons had died. Too many people came back scarred. And the king would not allow the lingering fear and anger to be directed at himself.
No. Those feelings of loss and betrayal would slowly turn towards Jon, the publicly announced Hero of the Goblin War, the war that didn’t deserve a hero. There was a strand in the priest’s story, something subtle, something that the audience wouldn’t pick up on in the moment, but they would look back and feel a twinge, feel that something wasn’t quite right. They would look back and wonder why Jon had survived when their loved ones had not. What was wrong with him? He must be inhuman. And that was partially true.
He became a monster. Everyone else was slaughtered.
This was a theme that would be picked up by traveling bards and minor magicians, who were in the congregation to learn the tale and spread it through taverns and town squares across the country. And then the people of the kingdom would look at Jon and feel ill at ease.
While the priest hadn’t personally used the nickname the generals had given to Jon, it would crop up in the retellings.
The Shepherd of Death.
The priest’s story dissipated, and Jon tried to swallow. He tried to face his fate with courage, but it was hopeless.
The king looked rather grim as he stepped forward recited the oath for Jon to repeat. “I, Jonathan Shepland, most honorably swear-“
Jon blinked. His last name wasn’t Shepland. That was the name of his home town. Like most people in the countryside, he didn’t have a last name. If it was really necessary, people would add “Eustace’s boy” onto his name. He clenched his jaw and wondered if the king was aware of this error, or if he knew and didn’t care.
“I, Jonathan Shepland,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, like it wasn’t his own. It crackled and he cursed himself for going so long without using it. “Most honorably swear-“
“To defend the hopeless and the weak-“
“To defend the hopeless and the weak-“
“The downtrodden and the poor-“
“The downtrodden and the poor-“
“To face all danger with bravery-“
“To face all danger with bravery-“ To the point of stupidity.
“To speak only the truth-“
“To speak only the truth-“ Because that’s possible.
“To be devoted to Cyllene-“
“To be devoted to Cyllene-“ And already he had broken his oath about truthfulness.
“And loyal to the crown.”
With a sense of morbid finality, Jon gave up.
“And loyal to the crown.”
The king smirked, something like victory dancing in his eyes, and in that moment as their eyes met, they both knew exactly what the other was thinking. They both knew that the king had defeated him, that the Goblin War would be pushed out of sight and out of mind lest the country remember the king’s defeat, that Jon would be ostracized, and that despite all his strength and bravery and heroic deeds he was powerless to hold back the future.
The king taped the sword against each of Jon’s shoulders. “I dub thee,” tap, “Sir Jonathan Shepland,” tap.
Jon stood, and with a bow, he took the sword that was offered to him. It was a symbol that there would be no true victory in this life. It was a symbol Jon would carry forever.