King of Swords 6-57
Chapter: 6
“From this hour forward the gates of the city will be barred to my kin. Do not underestimate them. Do not commune with them. Do not give them offerings, or give them bread or Ajash if they visit you disguised. Many of them have a sweet countenance and a honeyed tongue. They will say their wish is to be a teacher of men, to spread messages of peace. In an earlier age, this was true. Now dogs and worse have crept into their ranks. Madness has consumed them. Their only passion now is a lust for blood and power.”
-Proclamation of Au Vam
One can measure a man’s soul by knowing what disgusts him…or fails to do so
You can also measure a man’s soul by its weight in gold. Did you know that a soul has a non-zero weight? Many religions, which I see as more rational than the muscle-worship and idolatry common in Throne, hold that a more righteous man has a weightier soul, making it more valuable. All things can be bought and sold, if you use the right currency.
Hrmm… Good to see that you are moving up in the world, esteemed Elevator Banker. I understand that elevator banking has its ups and downs though…
>.>
Well played Preem Jet, well played.
It is true that the righteous feel guilt more keenly, but does this mean that their souls are weighed down more, or simply that their ability to carry their soul’s destruction is less?
A soul is a strange thing. The more fragile it is, the heavier it weighs. Especially noble and valuable souls must be carried in their own cases, like works of art
I guess multi-limbed stances by humanoids were in vogue in those days. You don’t see them so often anymore. That’s a real shame. More arms means more to love, you know?
Odd that this is your gripe, considering baked goods’ general lack of any limbs.
Who doth bake the multi-limbed gingerbread man?
Then Pazuto has been going to all the wrong bakers
Desecrating oven-made goodness is my job. And I love my job, of course. But it’s not the only thing I love. I have goals and aspirations that have not a whole lot to do with wheat. There’s so many places to go and people to also go. And other stuff.
What I’m saying is that I’m into ladies with more than the standard package. Imagine a girl with at least six pairs of hands and feet. I’d give an arm and a leg to meet her.
Well, it needs only ten people like you, to each give a leg and an arm to that one girl, and there you have your her, owning six pairs of feet and hands.
She shall FEAST on that amount of flesh.
Ay, there’s a dream. I wonder if she can play the cittern very well…
Among both true divinity, and those who hold pretenses of such for themselves, arms have a great symbolic importance, representing the scope of their power, such that they may reach in many directions at once, and wield the all the implements of their role at one time.
But that is mere symbolism. In the more practical realm, additional arms are simply a convenient way to drive your claws or blades through the throats of others.
Personally, I feel the five limbs currently in my possession suffice to achieve many of my desires.
That makes sense with the symbolism and utility thing. I do something similar for my work, but it’s not arms. I just never put the pieces together.
Just in case you didn’t know, you should check your extra appendages regularly. I’ve known some dealers that hand out ones with dead nerves. Really easy to get an infection. But if they’re incorporeal or ethereal or whatever, don’t sweat it probably.
This Scribe is Curious as to the looks on the apprentices. Does the Second Apprentice look with jealousy at the First? Or concern? Does the First Apprentice look on the battlefield with serenity? Or fascination?
The second gazes with scorn and fear.
The other with hidden desire.
One observes and wishes to learn, the other sees and wishes she had chosen differently.
Incubus: “I can do that”.
Gods with the power to remove an old lady’s beauty mark!!!
Looks more like a wart to me.
’tis the Art of Cutting, the mole is in this dimension one moment and in another the next
It’s /mole/tidimensional!
I’ll see myself out.
I like Meti’s style.
The common ancestor of all weaponry on Earth is a single sharpened rock buried somewhere in East Africa.
The sophisticated folk use a rock to shape another rock and keep the result as their weapon.
Steel is a very sophisticated rock indeed.
as is refined plutonium
Incubus and Maya are following Meti, everyone with its head shaved.
*Prepares for the worst*
Ah, the rock. The original assault weapon. No ammo capacity problems, no form or style to master, ubiquitous in its availability, amd eternally underestimated. Wars may not be won with them; but they are fought for, over, through and started by them.
Consider this, three Universal Wars have been fought over a mass of rock, tastefully disguised as a throne.
No form or style Velarn says. Velarn clearly hasn’t seen the sublime devastation wreaked by Palm Boulder Style
The sharpened rock, indeed, is a weapon sublime in its simplicity and efficacy. It is the purest and more primeval expression of Man’s desire to heap death upon fellow Man. Or, at the very least, some prey animal or another.
They have matching haircuts. Nice.
Has Meti shaved her head or does she have a wig? Whichever, she has no visible stubble while her students do.
She is far more skilled a cutter than either of them could ever hope to be. 100,000 foes, 100,00 hairs, it makes no difference.
Meti shaved her head, but perhaps she did not require herself to use a rusty old sword to do it.
This suggests that it is possible to use the power of creation for anything else. How nice.
How did Incubus get his hair back later in life? By the looks of it, he scalped himself, and that doesn’t heal well. (Can’t grow hair back when you’ve removed your skin, hair follicles included.)
Regrowth of scalped hair is among of the lesser known and more mysterious powers possessed by wielders of the Keys of Kings.
As a “usurper” and thief of thrones however, it is entirely possible Incubus simply grew his long hair over the missing patches to disguise their absence. None have made an investigation of his scalp and lived to tell the tale.
Truly his luscious locks are the most fearsome of the Glitter God’s many weapons.
Didn’t look like total scalping so much as careless shaving; head wounds tend to bleed more distressingly than they really are.
Oh wig
Also, we haven’t seen his full glorious hair, have we?
There are locks falling down from under his cowl, which indicates that at least SOME of his hair has grown back, and he cultivated that. Until he removes his cowl and reveals his head, we can’t be sure of anything.
And the most powerful magic stuff must have restrictions and/or side-effects. Like scars that don’t heal properly.
That speech is actually pretty powerful. Specially the lines in the last panel.
I know, right? I want the text of this page framed, to hang on my wall. I want it quoted in books and protest songs.
There’s nothing that quite makes you question the merits of war quite like a reminder that so much art and skill is directed towards the task of butchering one’s fellow man.
When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
The War Prayer, by Mark Twain.
“Anything can be a weapon, if the man or woman who holds it has the nerve and will to make it so.” – Robert Jordan
and
“Anything can be a musical instrument” – Mike Ross
I prefer the later.
A fragment of the universal song brought Zoss to Throne. The blade of want slew the prime angels.
A chunk of matter is a musical instrument and a weapon. It takes a wielder of names to divide purpose from purpose and wield the result as they see fit.
Have you ever been impaled on an oboe? It stings.
After being impaled on an oboe, a true master will be able to play an exquisite melody with said oboe.
It seems Maya’s stance viz a viz shaving with a sword was shifted by Incubus’ persuasive demonstration.
For all that she later claimed to be close with him, she looks… less than pleased with him here.
Philosophy, culture, intelligence, music, artistry – all things we clothe ourselves in in attempt to cleanse the stink of the monstrousness we must embody to finish the fight.
Hmm,I like her.
The supposed “divinities” of the second conquest fell far from their hallowed halls, these self-proclaimed philosopher kings became nothing more than ravenous beasts, obsessed with dominating all those around them. And while they’re destruction was inevitable, for violence is inescapable, it was truly a wonder to have witnessed their glorious works come tumbling down.
Ah, the name of ‘Beast’.
So warm, so comfortable; so easy to slip into and so hard to doff.
Who are these two kings and gods which fight before us?
Each one of them is ‘Beast’.
A such beauty! Look how these kings go into battle and butcher men by the thousand fold. Watch as they bring their own order upon the worlds and the many enemies before them. This truly brings this fool back to when he served his old empress.
To be completely honest, the power to make and unmake reality is not unlike the power of an especially sharp rock.
It’s a matter of scale.
And of pretension.
At least the one holding the rock is brutally honest about their intent.
I understand the moral complexity of reality and all that, but Au Vam’s quote indicates there was a time when the Demiurges could legitimately have been considered heroes.
There was such a time, once. The Demiurges were not just warriors, but also philosophers, scholars, diplomats, teachers.
Those times are long since past. Only the slithering snakes of the seven-headed Beast remain today, but the heroes died long before that.
Ah yes, the fool’s realization that fighting is not really gracious and dance-like.
I once stumbled upon a nigh forgotten world where practitioners of the fist arts never go, there was a plethora of martial arts which were famed and mystified due to their appearance in the world’s many stories, said martial arts claimed invincibility and supreme strength for their practitioners.
Till one day a respected grappler and a few businessmen decided to make a competition, only a few ground rules were put in place to stop participants from killing each other, the many masters of the thousands upon thousands of martial arts came together to show their prowess and the valor of their art.
The tournament proved the one thing that many suspected, those fools who claimed themselves to be supreme fighters were charlatans and the winner of the tournament was an unnamed folk boxing style that was particularly brutal.
In the years after the tournament the fools claimed the whole afffair was an uncivilized sham and kept claiming their supreme prowess, but it was too late, their arts died out, and in their place, practical and brutal arts flourished.
Is there a way to turn men into ghosts without touching them?
Elementary my dear, simply throw you sharpened rock of choice.
I am told that uranium is also good for this if used correctly.
It does make the ghosts kind of weird sometimes. Extra haunty, ya know?
But other than that, yes, superb.
Ha yes! You just start ignoring their texts and calls out of the blue
When learning under my master, one of my fellow students met a man she despised in the streets, and lied into truth his death. Yet though her hands did not touch him, she saw blood on her hands, and could not for much longer study the Art.
by whatever means violence is done upon another, it takes a skilled liar indeed to claim thry are not touched by them. My master has lied lead into gold, but not even she had mastered the art of lying herself into the untouched.
Best to find another way.
That’s called Royalty: the ability to kill with a word, a glance, even without moving or signaling in any way. It takes a very Royal man to kill millions without a thought, but the nature of Royalty is that one dies and another replaces him.
Such it is: the wheel spins on and eventually Royalty becomes ash and ash becomes Royalty. And who knows if the next spin will turn up your name, or mine?
Rock. Steel. Glass. Fire. The air in one’s lungs, in the hands of a Liar. One’s own hands, if one masters themselves for such a purpose. Even a single tooth, I once witnessed.
In the abyss that is my existence, I have seen so many ways to separate a man’s soul from his flesh. All just as ugly as one another. Such is the Law of all things.
But sadly, cannot reach heaven without violence.
“Even a single tooth” – reminds me of Lemuel’s near-death experience in the latest update of Unsounded. Always beware of dental shrapnel!
Even blood, if in excess . . .
A bell within a tower tolls
Ten to twenty on three rolls
And you shall rise like spark from coals
Aye, what does that remind me of…
“Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade,
Beauty and fool together laid.”