Saga Of The European King

The next morning, after the King and Colonel Glowfist had spent all night planning, the King and his trusted companions rode off on donkeys (because they were humble, even though they could kick ass), leaving the King’s soldiers to ride onward to the North on Gappy. The King was a bit worried about leaving the soldiers on their own, because what if they started acting up? So Colonel Glowfist cast a really big hypnosis spell on them all that he’d been saving up for weeks. The idea was that they’d be fine so long as they thought that the King and his guys were with them the whole time.

Okay. So the King and his companions were looking for Terrorthaw, the King’s nemesis. He’d been imprisoned in the depths of the Earth for crimes against Europe, and because he’d been the King’s closest childhood friend as a boy and had gone and grown up to be evil. In their first battle, when they were just babies, Terrorthaw summoned the baby demon, Agaroroth, to destroy the whole crèche where the King and Terrorthaw were being friends in. The baby King stopped the baby demon Agaroroth, but he lost his hands in the process. The baby demon Agaroroth collapsed a tree on them, you see, and they were crushed.

It looked pretty bad for the baby King then. Terrorthaw had escaped and now he had no hands. But then, the baby Mechanicus, who was a genius even as a baby, used the very wood from the tree that had crushed the baby King’s hands to make him new, awesome wooden hands. The wooden hands were quite bad at first, because Mechanicus was just a baby, but every year, on the King’s birthday, Mechanicus would give him a new set of wooden hands that was better and more awesome than the last.

The King never let the loss of his hands bring him down or even piss him off. He was better than that. He tried even harder than people who had perfectly fine non-wooden hands to do cool things with his hands, like magic tricks and lighting a cigarette in just a certain way. By the time he was old enough to be in our story, the King was a master of everything to do with hands, despite his hands still being wooden. He could crack safes and do amazing coin tricks and shuffle a deck of cards in no time at all and give scalp massages and play TV games and everything. He had spirit, and sometimes spirit is more powerful than having hands that aren’t messed up.

Ever since the baby Terrorthaw had summoned the baby demon Agaroroth, he’d been fighting with the King just about once every year or so. He’d always come really close to winning, but then the King would use psychology or wisdom to win, because they had been friends once and he knew how Terrorthaw would act and think most of the time. Psychology was Terrorthaw’s greatest weakness. Though last time they had clashed, Terrorthaw had used a special anti-psychology helmet and had nearly won that time, but Colonel Glowfist had shot him in the shoulder with a nine and he lost control of all his summoned birds and they’d turned on him. Though Terrorthaw survived that and went to trial for his crimes, there were still lots of birds all over Europe. They would lead the King and his companions straight to Terrorthaw, because birds have immaculate senses and would just know where their master was no matter what.

“I think I see a bird, Your Great Highness,” said Sally Minefield, pointing to the sky.
“Do you see any birds, Colonel Glowfist?” asked the King, because he remembered then how Sally Minefield had occasionally said mean things on the playground to him and his friends when they were growing up. The King had been quite fat when he was a boy, and Sally had called him names. Colonel Glowfist had never called the King fat, not even when the Colonel was an angry teenager and called everybody else he knew by mean names.
“mirr’s,” said the Colonel through mouth full of half-chewed birds. He meant, “Birds,” and that was enough for the King.

“East!” He bellowed.

End Of Chapter 8