Painting: Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon by Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1630
The night has brokered this flesh.
On this night, the eighth night of Feastfell when the Nieten Tree’s shadow lurches into full dark over the Dyserian kingdom of Ovilin, the first nocturnal joust of the festival readies to begin.
Torch fire hisses beneath a black sky and an inflamed slice of orange moon. The audience in the stands murmur and writhe, repressed, orgiastic. Two knights sit restless steeds on either end of their jousting lanes. Their steeds, reared on red, thirst for the blood of humans and elves. Their steeds are arachniphants, with long prehensile trunks and eight heavy yet spidery legs.
Assembled with the masses are the smells of their ripe, unwashed skin, a menagerie next to which the patchwork of perfumed, water-scalded nobles and merchants seems a shabby facade.
The arachniphant of Sir Ullfur snorts. Its huge ears flap. The many eyes, though, stare implacably, like eyes out of the abyss. The taste of blood won’t challenge those eyes.
Gerfinlander, master of arachniphants, waits in the wings in the event he’s needed to protect riders from their own mounts.
Sir Ulfur’s black and yellow armor favors rotted flesh in the low light. A presage of what’s to come, perhaps.
The other knight is a mystery entry, a common enough recurrence. This knight’s armor resembles the bark of the Beroht Tree. Bone-white sheathes of bark-like plate overlap each other, and the pauldrons on either shoulder are laden with clusters of pearls, like fruit. The helmet resembles an agonized face caught between four twisting branches that continue into horns.
The audience has a notion of how this will end. The mystery knight will reveal themselves if they win. If they lose, the other knight will reveal them to the audience.
A herald dressed in leaves and bells blows a trumpet. The short tune is filled with spice, joy, and a dagger-twist of decay beneath the sweetness.
The two knights take lances from attendants, circle, charge. The Beroht Knight unhorses Sir Ulfur in the first charge.
The Beroht Knight dismounts, draws a longsword. The blade is a deeper hue of bone, marbled with red. The audience gasps, as though real bone had been laid bare. The Beroht Knight waits, patient, for the other to regain his footing. Sometimes jousters tumble from steeds and break something in the fall. Sometimes they don’t get up. Sir Ulfur is sturdier and knows how to fall. He’s seasoned. He draws a clobberer of a broadsword, nearly as wide as his own ample head. What it did not cleave in twain it would shatter. The audience cheers to see it naked again in the harsh, low light.
Sir Ulfur swings this blade around, and the air moans with its passage. By the time he brings it down upon the head before him, the Beroht Knight has already stepped aside.
A stab here beneath Sir Ulfur’s arm might maim him, but still the Beroht Knight waits.
Ulfur audibly grunts and swears darkly at gods high and low as he continues his assault. The Beroht Knight parries with their longsword and sidesteps. Some in the audience snap shut their drooling mouths—low and highborn, empty pocketed and full pocketed alike—mesmerized. They forget, for a moment, the hoary-haired skull thing waiting at the terminus of the dance.
Sir Ulfur tires, chest rising and falling with the intake of breath, and the Beroht Knight does not draw it out any longer than that. The Beroht Knight steps in and, flicking the huge blade aside using its own momentum, puts a foot under Sir Ulfur’s and a hand on his wrist, shoving. Sir Ulfur falls on his back with a clatter of arms, his sword hurled from his grip.
Now the audience remembers. Their lips part to bare teeth, as they cheer and howl. “Kill,” they say in different languages, for the night jousts of Ovilin’s Feastfell draw audiences from near and far, not only humans from other Dyserian kingdoms but elves from the Southern Occupation as well as the Fusorian Empire. Even some separatists of the Lost Bastion of the Undivine are in attendance. Some were only present with little decrees of momentary peace, allowances just for this festival. Not in the audience, however, are the king, the queen, and the princess of Ovilin.
The Beroht Knight does something unexpected.
Rather than claiming the life before them first, as was due, the Beroht Knight proceeds to remove their own helmet.
Silver-laden, ivory agonized face with branches for horns gives way to long hair that spills out as a wine-dark sea flows. Here is a visage that you see walking or riding down thoroughfares, surrounded by guards, retinues, and sometimes parades, that you see painted and hanging in a way opposite of those destined for the gallows. Not everyone recognizes her, indeed many of her own subjects have yet to behold her, but soon someone shouts, “the Princess!” in low Dyserian.
Sir Ulfur still lies on the ground. The customary thing for him to do would be to get up, even if no strength remained, and kneel. He should receive the death blow with all the grace he could muster in defeat. Add to this the fact that his princess stood before him, and there was even more reason for him to rise.
“I will not take the life of one of my subjects,” Princess Irene proclaims. “Not unless I absolutely must.”
The audience is stunned. This is a significant breach in tradition, and by their own princess.
Gerfinlander, master of arachniphants, whose job it usually is to protect jousters from their own steeds, also takes that moment to do something unexpected. To Sir Ulfur’s arachniphant he whistles a command.
It cocks its many-eyed head, and then it rears up on its hind legs and tramples Sir Ulfur with its forepaws. Blood and meat squeeze out the openings of the knight’s plate armor. Screams sound the chambers of his helmet. Even when those screams are done, the creature does not cease its attack.
Seizing Sir Ulfur’s corpse by the neck with its prehensile trunk, it raises the body up and dashes it against the ground again and again.
The audience cheers each time the armored form is dashed to the ground. Children holler with glee and begin miming the motion. A larger child seizes a much smaller one and plays at dashing him to the ground like the arachniphant is doing to Sir Ulfur.
But it’s no longer Sir Ulfur. It’s gone far past that.
People begin chatting idly. Relief sets in between the lines. Princess Irene’s breach of tradition might even be overlooked as the next joust gets underway.
“Hold!” Princess Irene shouts. She shouts it with such authority that even the arachniphant drops the meat-caked metal thing that had once been its rider. With its fangs, though, it quietly begins to root between the metal for the meat. Cloaked but partway in dark, it feeds on the mutilated remains of its rider.
Princess Irene gets back upon her own arachniphant. She rides over to a surprised attendant and takes another lance from the racks.
“My contest is not done. Lord Onzo Jurthin Forganda, my newly betrothed, is in the audience today, isn’t he? I was shackled to him in a union to which I did not agree. You are not privy to this, nor would you be, but my betrothed is a Necromancer Lord of the Lost Bastion of the Undivine. I was wed to him in a dark plot for the Lost Bastion to instill rule in Ovilin.” Here Princess Irene points her fresh lance at where Lord Onzo sits in attendance.
Onzo and his retinue are disguised as silk-clad merchants, but the severed ears fashioned into earrings that dangle from either side of his head make it a poor disguise. Ears upon ears and eyes upon eyes, goes one of the mad, irreverent hymns of the Undivine.
“Since your assassins murdered my mother and father,” Princess Irene says, “don’t feign surprise, I know them to be yours because my torturers got it out of them—my betrothed, it is left to me to give you your dowry.”
Princess Irene lowers her lance, charges her arachniphant at the audience. The crowd screams. Her mount crushes only Lord Onzo’s retinue, however, and just before her lance skewers her newly betrothed, she enscorcells it with magic. Magic is not dead, not yet. Dying, yes, but there were some like Princess Irene who were sourcelines because of their bloodlines.
Lord Onzo chants crudely in Undivine esoterica under his breath as the lance tip pierces his body.
He is impaled and lifted as Princess Irene crunches her mount through the stands and beyond, riding off into the countryside.
Lord Onzo continues to chant as he dies. Within the hour of Princess Irene riding nonstop with Lord Onzo’s dead body skewered on her lance–her magical enhancement also made it light as a feather for her–his eyes snap back open. He was a necromancer, and now after using his own magic upon himself, is a revenant.
She expected this. Planned for it.
“Good,” she says. “We’re ready for the next step on your road to perdition.”
Across the land they journey, Lord Onzo’s undying corpse upon Princess Irene’s lance like an unflapping banner. His mouth flaps. He utters curses and hexes and promises abominable acts upon the princess’s surviving kin. He promises to piss into the open jaws of her subjects while slitting their throats. But he swears, as he bobs on her enchanted lance, to keep her alive for a very long time.
Princess Irene smiles sinisterly. “How very unoriginal,” she says.
Stabling her steed in groves and leaving Onzo hanging there impaled upon her lance, she stops at inns and taverns. The princess puts a cloak over her armor so she will not be known, and she goes inside to rest, drink, and eat. She feeds and waters her arachniphant and gives it time to rest as well. Occasionally her arachniphant nibbles with its fangs on Onzo’s legs, for which she chides it because a weird, ossified growth appears in the removed parts’ place, stronger than what was there before. She has knowledge of this potent revenant magic, has expected it from Onzo, who holds a reputation as one of the Lost Bastion’s most exceptional necromancers.
“You are no necromancer,” she taunts at times while he howls obscenities. “Nothing but a mere revenant.”
On their journey, over land and sometimes sea, her paying gold and rubies for discreet passage on a ship with a hold for her arachniphant and the object she bore upon her lance. Sailors stare coin-eyed at this and make signs but mostly they look away, as does most anyone else seeing the figure impaled upon her lance. Nasty things crawl out from cracks in this land, as the saying goes, and it is best to find another crack to crawl into until they pass.
Onzo rots on the lance, persisting, but growing ever more quiet.
Ultimately, they arrive at the western frontier.
Five days through the desert they journey. On the third night, Princess Irene wakens to a wild-haired old man wearing naught but a hair shirt. He’s pouring water from a flask into Onzo’s open mouth.
“Don’t waste it on the dead.” She rises from her bed of sand, it falling in lines of grit from the armor she slept in, and she puts a hand to her sword hilt.
The old man flees cackling into the desert night. Was it some acolyte of Onzo’s or a random passerby, and what was this old man doing in the desert?
When she inspects Onzo, it appears to be blood dribbling from his open mouth, not water.
Onzo leers up at her in a way neither dead nor alive. A fly alights on his rotting nose.
Then, on the fifth day, she sees the figure.
Naked, bestial, and like a mirage. Heat and sand appear to shift around it.
Perverted by magic. An idol made flesh. A messiah. A weapon.
She rides up to the creature, dismounts. Now, at long last, she speaks the words to remove the enchantment on her lance. She lowers the corpse of her once betrothed to the sand before the figure.
The creature smiles a pit of teeth.
It walks obliquely towards Onzo. The revenant tilts its head up. Was that an expression of doubt? Of fear? Onzo’s features are too rotted by now to be sure.
With long, pointed fingers, it plucks apart the spokes of Onzo’s ribcage. Does he still feel pain? Difficult to tell. Somewhere something is shrieking.
It takes out Onzo’s heart. Begins to eat of it.
Onzo jerks involuntarily. “What’s happening to me?” he says.
Princess Irene leans close to whisper in his ear. The severed ear still hanging on an earring below, ear upon ear, does not deter her. “Eternal suffering.” she says.
After it finishes consuming Onzo the revenant’s heart, the creature makes a cavern of his chest and burrows inside.
