Reborn as the Black Knight

 

The anqas plod steadily along the winding road, their massive feet muffled by the dust that blankets the landscape. Hero rides, looking confident as always, but Dandy glances around nervously, her heart sinking further into uncertainty with each passing moment. Silent houses line the road, their windows dark and gaping like lightless, hollow eyes. The once vibrant village they’re passing through is now just empty. Not a whisper of chatter breaks through the heavy air, only the distant flapping of leaves blowing in a tireless breeze. There are no people, no dogs, no birds—nnothing. “Where is everyone?” she asks, her voice trembling under the oppressive silence. Dandy's grip tightens on the reins, fingers brushing against the smooth, warm leather while dread coils tightly within her stomach.

“Where is everyone?” mutters Dandy to herself, her eyes scanning the world.

They’ve been riding for days now toward the west from the border, and for days now, there have been fewer and fewer signs of people.

There are no patrols belonging to the enemy kingdom that they’re deep in the heartlands of, no soldiers. The towers they had planned to sneak by at night had no watchmen, upon further inspection. One could have assumed that the men and women there had been stationed elsewhere, if not for the fact that the contents of the such places look entirely undisturbed.

It’s as if a shadow had swooped in and swallowed them whole.

She gulps.

Hero reaches out, a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Dandy,” he says.

She wishes he’d follow up on that with some reassuring information, but he doesn’t, simply keeping his eyes forward as they ride on past a cluster of abandoned houses that make up a farm.

“Hello?” calls Dandy out loud, hollering somewhat as she holds a hand by her mouth. “Hello?” But there is no response, apart from the jingling of a bell. The two of them look, turning their heads to a pasture where cows graze idly by themselves, as if they had been forgotten by the darkness that seems to have taken everything else in the world. “It’s all gone,” she mutters.

“I can only assume that this is the work of the wretched queen,” remarks Hero confidently, the priestess nodding in agreement. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Hey, Hero,” says Dandy nervously. “Are you sure that... that I should be here?” she asks, looking at him. “I mean, this seems really... really serious, actually,” she expands, the sweat on her brow more than obvious.

He shakes his head. “You’re stronger now, Dandy, than you were when we met.”

“That was only a few weeks ago,” she mutters.

“I saw you fight those zombies,” he adds. “You’ve changed.”

"Oh, come on. That was just some... basic level ten spell,” she notes. “I mean, you’re strong and all, but I don’t see how I’m supposed to be useful here?” she asks. “What am I supposed to do against Herr Ritter or his cult?” She holds a hand out, gesturing to an empty garrison. “They must be so powerful to do something like this. The entire region's... there must have been tens of thousands of people here and now there’s just ze-”

“Hey,” interrupts Hero. She looks back at him. “You wanna run away together?” he asks.

Dandy blinks. “Huh?” she asks, taken aback.

He nods, pointing straight ahead of himself in the way they’re already heading. “We’ll go this way,” explains the man. “As far as we can,” says Hero, eyeing the horizon that she is pretty leads to the black-queen’s palace. “Until we find something interesting and then... I guess we’ll just make it work somehow,” he notes, as if pondering a very good idea. “You and me.”

She sighs, and then starts laughing. “Are you trying to trick me, Hero?” she asks, taking a second after she calms down. “That’s not very saintly of you.”

“’Trying’?” he asks, shaking his head. Hero looks back behind himself and then points down the way they came. “Way I see it, it’s working,” he explains. “You’ve already come this much further.” He looks back at her, holding one eye playfully closed. “And if you wait a minute, I’ll have something really neat to show you,” he promises.

Dandy droops her head to the side, looking at him. “Let me guess. It’s the next bit of distance after that last one?”

“Am I that easy to read?” he asks, crossing his arms.

“Like a picture book, Hero,” replies Dandy smiling as they ride. “Do you like stories?” asks the priestess. He looks back her way rather sharply in a manner that does actually surprise her, as if she had said something off. Dandy lifts her hands “I wasn’t sure, because you’re in so many of them. I guess it might be... exhausting,” she supposes. “Sorry.”

But then, a massive, bright smile crosses his face. “No, no, I love stories, Dandy,” he replies and she slumps in relief, thinking she had done something wrong for a second. “Do you know any?” he asks, pulling his anqa in closer to her, their legs bumping together.

“You’ve come to the right woman, Hero,” replies Dandy, not pulling away. “You’re looking at a girl who spent the most important years of her life doing nothing except rotting inside a monastery library,” she explains, almost proudly, as she flicks her hair to the side, looking back at him. “I have a lot of stories. More than you could ever hear in a lifetime,” she admits proudly.

“Good for me that I have a few of those,” he replies, and she laughs, shoving him lightly with her right arm before she starts playfully thinking of the first one to tell.

“Okay, so here we go,” says Dandy. “It all began.”

And the two of them ride off toward the west, toward the palace of Acacia Odofredus Krone, so that they might bring to justice the black-crowned queen.

 

---

 

 

How perplex.

In the eyes of God, as declared within scripture, this realm he finds himself in ought to be declared the enemy of the faith. The use of... unnatural magic by the princess to gain her power should well be decried, and a crusade began from the Orthodox Church to rid the world of her blight, lest she spread her witchcraft to the innocent.

And such was his own mission.

Zabaniyah presses the rapier forward through the straw heart of his opponent and then steps back, letting go of the blade and starring at the training dummy.

His decree from the Orthodox Church before he was sent out was that he was to put an end to her — Acacia — and bring back her dripping, rotten heart to their table of council as proof of the deed. And in return, he might keep his honor and title as an inquisitor within the church, something he had spent his entire life working for, despite all the barriers in place.

If he fails to do so, then he will be exiled from the church and, well, also the nation. His entire life, his calling — all of it will be lost forever.

So what does he do?

Zabaniyah lifts a hand, holding a palm out toward the training dummy, the blade still stuck in its breast. The air around him crackles at first with magic, but then with metal clanking against metal as a thousand rapiers manifest out of thin air, and then with a release of his fingers, shoot forward and create a mass that is nothing but sharp metal. The dummy can no longer be seen, as its cut completely apart down to its smallest fiber. Swords fly, clinking and ricocheting off of the cobblestone ground, spinning and hurtling from the force of his spell and flying off in all directions.

“That’s quite unsafe, Mr. Zabaniyah,” says a voice from the side of the training grounds within the fortress courtyard. Acacia stands there, leaned half over a garden wall with crossed arms, her eyes following glints of metal that catapult out over the castle walls, spinning out of control. “Any hunters in the woods would do well to beware this hour,” she remarks, as a rain of thuds come from beyond the walls as blades stick into trees and the ground. A flock of disturbed birds flies up and out of the woods toward the sky.

Zabaniyah takes off his hat, holding it in a flourish as he bows.

“Please. I appreciate the ceremony, but must you do this every time we see each other?” asks Acacia.

This is the third time today that she’s run into him around the castle.

Zabaniyah finishes and places the wide-brimmed, red hat back onto his head. The feather wobbles as he adjusts it and looks toward her.

“I’m afraid I have no better way to practice,” he explains. “Good training has to be a little dangerous.”

His orders are to kill her because of her treacherous ways and restore the light of God to the northern world. But… He’s not seen the same creature described to him by the elders of the Orthodoxy, and so now he’s stuck here next to the person he was ordered to kill, who he had spent months traveling to across the continent in order to do so. And he’s just living in her house instead, eating from her table, and developing a bond with her servants, who ought to be black-hearted beasts.

So what does he do when his orders don’t make sense in the context of what he himself has learned? He can hardly go back and tell the elders that they were mistaken about the princess. But he cannot stay here forever either, can he?

“Your magic is quite unusual. I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” remarks Acacia, walking down and around the wall now that the hailstorm of metal has stopped. “How did you come to it?” asks the princess, leaning down to pick up a glinting silver rapier and looking it over as it then slowly starts to dissipate within her hands, fading into a fine dust that carries away in the wind—aas do all the rest of the weapons.

Zabaniyah reaches down to his belt, pulling out a single sword that is very real, and then flips it around in an artistic display, holding the hilt out for her to take. “I could say the same of you, Princess.”

“Acacia,” she corrects. “My title is for my servants,” says the princess, holding the sword out toward him in a particular fighting stance taught to the nobility of the north. “Not for my dueling partners.”

Zabaniyah tilts his head. “These are real blades, Your Majesty,” says Zabaniyah. “To spar with them would be quite dangerous,” he explains, a fresh rapier manifesting in his hand. “Shall I grab a training weapon from the wall?” he asks, the streak of metal from his hands intersecting against the side of her rifle. The two blades are held together just below their ends, and as Zabaniyah prepares his posture in a manner that is very different, the schools of fighting with such a weapon vary across cultures significantly.

“Good training should be a little dangerous,” repeats Acacia with a flash of a smile before her boot shifts an inch and she presses forward, the two of them striking toward each other in an attempt to gain a first strike by surprise.

The difference in fighting styles is immediately apparent. The northern style of nobility reflects a distinct emptiness and coldness to it; her posture is maintained stiffly, with sure footing that keeps pressing forward in an attack. The aim of the style, practiced solely amongst nobility, is to establish a display of honor over the enemy, as such duels are often held in public noble courts amongst a crowd of regal onlookers. To humiliate and disarm the enemy without ever so much as breaking into a sweat as they aim for the heart and neck alone is the goal.

“My father was a smith,” explains Zabaniyah, metal striking against metal, the feather on his hat billowing to the side as they meet swords and rotate places. “But poor Zabaniyah, his hands were much to delicate to follow the trade,” explains the man. “But one day, I found a weapon in the pile that amazed me because of how it felt.”

“Let me guess,” says Acacia, the two of them leaning in as they try to press the other off of their footing with their body weight. “A rapier?”

“Uh? Oh, no-no-no,” says Zabaniyah, shaking his head.

His knee strikes toward her exposed gut, which Acacia sees coming and tries to block with one palm as a shield.

— Acacia stumbles back, losing her footing as she wobbles on one leg, but her raised back foot lands down on the stones, and she spins a single spin, ducking as his sword follows after his and then flies just past where her head was. Her sword presses up, stabbing through the fabric of his hat.

She smiles, the two of them pulling back into stance, except now she reels in his hat and sets it onto her head—aa move that within the context of a noble’s duel would have flustered and embarrassed the opponent to no end.

But Zabaniyah steps forward again, one hand in the air as a sort of shrug. “It was a warhammer. Much, much too heavy for poor Zabaniyah,” explains the inquisitor, shaking his head.

Whereas the southern style of dueling—Zabaniyah's— with a rapier is not an establishment of nobility but rather of the zealous faith. Inquisitors are given such sleek weapons to help them as they break into the alleyways, corridors, and passages of law-forbidden temples and churches to fight against the non-believers who are equipped with any manner of weapon or implement, from wayward farm tools to magic. While Acacia keeps pressing forward, never turning her foot so much as to the side unless to train her blade towards him, Zabaniyah has no qualm about standing with splayed feet and legs that allow him to dodge and parry her attacks with ease as he isn’t artificially limited in mobility, but pays the price in giving her the attacker’s edge as he focuses on opening counter-attacks to her strikes. Acacia, adjusting the stolen hat, smirks and holds herself ready for another bout. The two of them clash. “So, when others got their magic and learned to heal and to burn,” explains the man, the two of them weaving between each other. “These are things that do not fit me, Zabaniyah thought to himself, yes,” he explains, their blades sliding along each other down the hilt in another clash. But Zabaniyah reaches out with his gloved hand, grasping her sword and ripping it from her hands, throwing it into the air as he arcs his elbow back for a fresh strike of the blade as she’s unarmed.

A black portal appears in a second, followed by a flash of glinting metal and then a sharp screech as the two swords meet again. Acacia had pulled the weapon back to her hands with a void spell, diverting his lunge as the two shoulder-checked each other. He lifts his open hand to her face, wiggling his fingers. “So, Zabaniyah prayed to God to give him something that he can hold in his hands, something that fits,” explains the inquisitor, and then reaches over, plucking the hat from her head before she can stop him, both of them initiating an escape counter at the same time to get distance from each other. “And because of his rare gift, doors were opened to me that were closed for many others.”

Zabaniyah walks in a half circle, his weapon trained her way as he spins his large hat on his other hand. “Quite the story, Mr. Zabaniyah,” says Acacia, pulling her black cloak free from over her shoulder but not unfastening it from herself.

“And you?” he asks as the two of them get ready for a fresh bout.

“I suppose you could say that we’re not so different,” remarks Acacia. “I also asked for something.”

“And God replied to you as well, I see,” he answers.

Both of them move at the same time, lunging forward in a feint and then swiping to the side. A flash of red fills Acacia’s eyes as he whips the long hat toward her, but his own vision is obscured as the black fabric swipes past him in an obscuring mirage that made it look like she was weaving left, when she actually went right. Two swords flash in the morning sun.

A white feather falls apart, cut in half from the hat.

And a slice of black fabric billows away, drifting in the wind.

“I didn’t ‘ask’ the gods,” remarks Acacia, the two of them standing next to each other, with her looking over her left shoulder and him over his right.

It’s a religious difference in wording.

In the Orthodox Church, there is a belief in a single, all-powerful maker, God. In the Holy Church of the North, there is a belief that many gods came together and collaborated to create the world. The concepts of creation, heaven, and the place of man in the world remain the same.

“Oh?” remarks Zabaniyah, the two of them stepping apart without a clash and refacing again from a standard distance. “Did you tell him, then?” he asks, setting his cut hat back onto his head. “That seems more fitting for you.”

The air around them glows as one rapier after the other appears, floating in mid-air. Zabaniyah starts to walk up the improvised staircase, and Acacia follows suit as one manifests ahead of her head as well, the two of them rising up to a thin, precariously elevated arena that is nothing but a ring of twelve floating swords with a fall in-between them back down toward the ground below.

“I appreciate your consideration of my pride, Mr. Zabaniyah,” remarks Acacia as the two of them stand there, suspended in the air, facing each other. “But the truth is, as I said. I didn’t ask,” explains Acacia. “When I called for Sir Knight, I was crying and begging like a wretch,” she admits. “In public, nonetheless.” Acacia shrugs with a single shoulder, undoing her cape. The black fabric flies off in the wind that surrounds them, drifting across the castle courtyard.

The two of them move, metal flashing against metal, sending glints of light sparking all around the castle as they fight, pressing in a circle around the levitating ring that offers only a few inches of footing at best with every step.

Summer winds blaze past the two of them, the gale rising through the fabric of their clothes as they fight, circling back and forth along the bending metal of the floating swords that give way under their weight standing on them, creating a slip downward, until after a few minutes of this back and forth, there is nothing left to stand on except the unbent hilts themselves—aa single step wide each.

“Surely then this is proof to you, or?” asks the man as he stands on one single hilt and she stands on the other, neither of them having space for two feet as they hold themselves against each other with the crossed swords. “Of Heaven. You could convert, Acacia,” says Zabaniyah. “The church would agree to it.”

She smiles confidently, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “Please, Mr. Zabaniyah,” she says, almost exasperated. “After I conquer this kingdom, I will be taking the Empire, and then your country next,” she explains very confidently as she watches his eyes for a sign of weakness. “When my banner flies over your temples, then I will allow your church to convert to belief in me.”

He holds a hand over his face, turning dramatically to the side. “What is poor Zabaniyah to do?” he asks. “Heaven guides the hands of the cruel princess,” he sighs. “But the Devil has her tongue.”

“How about we just call it a tie for now?” suggests Acacia. “Let’s get something to eat.”

Zabaniyah lowers his weapon. “It would be best for us to diverge, lest I become provoked by your heresy and desire to fulfill my mission after all, Princess.”

“— Acacia,” repeats Acacia, lifting a finger as she lowers her sword, flips it around, and hands it back to him as well. She plants a step back, her foot hovering over thin air. “I’ll go get Chicory to join us then,” she offers. “To keep you in check, lest I begin to find your zealotry tiring.”

“Ah, that's—I mean -”

Acacia holds her hands out at her sides as if she were a benevolent master. “See how good I am to the people, Zabaniyah?” asks Acacia, that serpentine smile having never left her face. “Unlike the gods, you don’t have to ask me to get what you want.” She looks at him, nodding once. “Because I already know,” she finishes with a dark overtone. Acacia steps back and vanishes into a black hole that appears, and then reappears down below on the ground, picking up her cloak and slinging it over her shoulder as she walks away without a second look back at the man behind her tasked with taking her life.

Zabaniyah scratches his head, watching her go from up above.

“She really does somehow always sound quite evil, doesn’t she?” he mutters to himself, unable to deny that as he begins to walk down the swords back to the ground. They vanish one after the other, dematerializing.

 

---

 

Acacia maintains her composure as she walks with her head held high out of the gardens and around the bend, in through a garden entryway back into the castle.

A second later, the instant she’s out of sight and earshot, she keels over, covering her mouth and gasping for breath. In the same second, a wet, red dribble leaks through her fingers and drips to the stones, causing her to splutter messily. Droplets press through her fingers, spraying on the wall as she braces herself. A pressure knots inside of her chest; the air she’s trying to take in is not entering in well as it seems to get stuck by something blocking her airway and the little bit of it that does make its way inside barely seems to satiate her desire for breath.

The pain of the Consumption runs through her body every day now, but the numbing medicines she takes in the morning prevent her from feeling most of it. Other than a passive hum, she’s become good at pretending she doesn’t feel it.

Her hand smears against the wall as she tries to pull herself back up straight, fighting her body’s urge to stay folded over as it tries to purge the pooling liquid inside of her lungs in some instinct to cough it out.

But there’s no point, she knows it. She can cough and cough and hack her airways for a day and a night and not a single drop of the drowning will fly out — only the discarded dried and caked bloody discharge of her throat and some spit at best. But the sensation of drowning on dry land, on a warm, clear summer’s day can’t be just spit out.

It’s rooted in her body.

“Hey, hold on,” says a voice appearing out of nowhere at all in the blink of an eye. “I got you,” says Sir Knight reassuringly, two hands helping her stand up straight again and then pulling out a cloth. Acacia leans back against the wall, her hand pressing down against her chest as she forces herself to go through a stiff series of raspy, deep in- and exhalations. Sir Knight dabs her face clean. “You should go rest,” he says, says the black shadow that had appeared from every crevice and corner of the garden room at once, summoned to her beck and call not by a single word or cry for help, but because he felt the weakness course through her body. “You shouldn’t exert yourself like that,” he says, shaking his head.

Acacia looks at him at takes the cloth from his hands, whipping it out as she wipes her own face clean. Thick, red and black smears stain the cloth in broad streaks, like a brush dipped into rotting paint. “This was hardly an exertion,” she says proudly in tone, but her words don’t really match her state as she tries to take a step and then falls over. He catches her as she stumbles, one arm around her stomach and the other around her chest.

“Come on. You’re done for today,” he says, taking a step to lead her to walk.

Acacia looks back at him with a razor sharp expression on her face. “I have an engagement, Sir Knight,” she says in a snip. “Return to your duties and leave me be.”

“Hey,” he says, shaking his head as he looks at her. “You don’t need to impress me,” he explains. “I already am,” he consoles.

Acacia opens her mouth to give a venomous retort nonetheless, but then stops herself and closes her eyes. She’s very tired. This kind of weakness, this inability, in any house of nobility would be turned back against her as a dagger to her heart. It’s the same weakness, her illness and inability, that caused her sisters to make her childhood hellish.

“I won’t let it happen again,” she says, forming the crown on the inner thoughts that he can feel into words. Acacia looks at him, pulling herself up straight despite the fire eating away at her core and the desperation that her mind is signaling to her that she isn’t getting enough air. That torment she went through, she promised it would end. She’ll never let anyone see that kind of weakness again, because they’ll pounce on her like wolves.

“No,” replies Sir Knight firmly, picking her up in his arms. “I won’t,” he says, looking down at her. “That’s what we agreed on. I do the fighting. You’re the princess.”

Acacia reaches up, a hand grasping the clasp of his cloak. “Are you saying that a princess can’t fight, Sir Knight?” she asks, her mind racing to defend her pride, even with him, as she’s in a state of vulnerability that her memories and senses tell her she has to pretend not to be in. Like a sick animal, she’s becoming more and more aggressive in an overcompensating show designed to fool the world of her vitality, so that they won’t come after her. Even next to him, the safest person in the world for her, she has the urge to bite and scratch so that he won’t look at her with pity. “I’m the strongest person here, Sir Knight.”

He pulls her hand off of his clasp and shakes his head. “I’m saying that I don’t want you to be,” explains Sir Knight. “Because you wouldn’t need me if you were.”

Acacia stares at him, but because of the tone of his words, can’t maintain her glare any longer and then gives up, slumping against him. She sighs. “I’m sorry,” apologizes Acacia, returning to her forced breathing. “Please take me to bed,” she asks as the two of them begin to sink into the shadows of the room together, before vanishing. “And handle the matter here, yes?”

And Sir Knight obliges, going so far as to even bring her her favorite stuffed toy duck.

 

---

 

Chicory walks out into the courtyard, lifting a hand to wave somewhat to Zabinayah. “Sir Knight told me you were waiting here for me?” she asks.

Zabaniyah wants to retort that actually the princess was supposed to come back with her, but then stops himself, resigning himself to the fact that this was just another one of her cruel tricks.

“What happened to you?” asks Chicory, looking at his sliced hat as he takes it off as she approaches.

A dab of blood runs across his cheek, where he had been cut by a blade just before.

“Training can be very dangerous,” he explains, flourishing to her. “Would you like to go have lunch?” he asks, as if it were his idea.

“Sure! I’d like that,” replies Chicory, the two of them walking together over the crumpled and punctured remains of a training dummy that probably isn’t going to get back up again anytime soon.