Saga Of The European King

Turns out that Erik Rage-Eater! wasn’t in that particular temple. That was okay with the King. It had been kind of a long-shot to ask the temple guards to grant him an audience with their leader right away. They would have to ride for three days on armadilloback before they reached the Parliament Temple, where Erik Rage-Eater! lived.

The King was also okay with that, too. Those three days on armadilloback gave him a good opportunity to catch up with Axe Axewound, who had met up with the King in a corridor. He had been on his way to rescue the King with two thousand forest animals at his back. Turns out that his whole trip across the greenlands of Europe and the badlands of the United States of America had been for nothing. Oh well! At least it was good for the King to see him again. He urged Axe Axewound to tell his curious story and explain the presence of the thousands of animals that were following them. Axe had not spoken European for two years, so it took him a while to work up to the telling, but he was eager to let the King in on his awesome solo adventure.

Axe Axewound had left the Adventure Friends in Romania because of urges. Ever since he had become a werewolf, he’d been coming to turns with the fact that his sex engines were all totally out of whack. He’d made wolf-love to Sally Minefield while they had both been wolfing around. That had been a big deal for him. Once it had happened, he couldn’t really get into the frame of mind that human urges were good and that wolf urges were kind of embarrassing. With his heightened senses, he could tell exactly where and when some wolves or other forest animals were having a good time within a one hundred mile radius. You have to remember that the King’s disappearance was a real low-down bummer for the Adventure Friends and Europe as a whole. There was no one left to fight in Romania with all the Draculas gone. The Adventure Friends kept on getting into arguments. Axe Axewound felt useless and fed up. Five months into the Adventure Friends’ journey to Portugal, Axe Axewound had caught a whiff of a big wolf sex party with flowers and dancing and everything and had disappeared to live a completely different life.

Let’s talk a bit about Medieval ecology. Basically, the King and his fathers before him made real sure that, no matter which part of Europe you lived in, there was always a forest handy. This was because forests were a useful source of adventures, dashing outlaw gangs, low-level monsters, witches and gold. All of these things were an important part of the Medieval economy, so people weren’t allowed to cut down too many trees or burn down these forests too much. A lot of the preserved forests linked up with each other, so they were like a parallel Europe, in a way, where instead of Italian and Spanish and Cyprian people, you’d instead get wolves and bears and mushroom-men. Make no mistake, the King still had ultimate jurisdiction in the forest-Europe, and it all definitely belonged to him and him alone, but he was pretty cool about it, on the whole.

Axe Axewound was an immediate and big hit with the wolves he met up with in the forest. They danced and ate and Axe challenged and killed the head wolf and became leader of the pack. The other wolves were pretty happy about this. The last leader of the pack had been a real asshole. Axe wouldn’t revert back to his human form for a long while, but he was able to think and act like a man when he wanted to. He used his human intelligence to forge alliances with the bears and the rats and the wildcats and the mushroom men and the insect unions all of the other forest animals. Before long, they were having parties every night. The forest creatures did their bit for society during the day and, because of the emphasis on logistics, had the whole night free to kick back and relax and not get eaten by anyone or anything.

Axe counted these days as the happiest time of his life. Everyone in the forest loved him and respected his leadership as being awesome and beneficial. He’d receive presents every day, and they weren’t the crappy kind of presents that you’d expect one to get from strangers, but gifts that showed love and thought. Axe even went so far as to dig a great hole and bury his flaming axe, symbolising his acceptance of his new life wherein axes weren’t necessary. It is quite difficult to bury a flaming axe, but this made the metaphor even more powerful. There were greater powers in Medieval Europe, though, powers that even Axe Axewound’s iron will could not ignore. The King was missing, and Axe had abandoned his Adventure Friends. Some nights, Axe would pad out to an isolated clearing or icy mountain peak, let his guilt take over and just howl and howl and howl until morning.

One morning, returning to his pack after a long howl, Axe found the familiar sleeping spots of his fellows were empty. He smelled that his pack had been absent for many hours. He noticed other things very quickly afterwards. The forest was silent. No birdsong, no chants from the insect unions, nothing. He realised that he hadn’t seen another creatures at all on his way back from the night’s howling. Then he smelled the explosions. They were old, but their olfactory presence was so troubling that Axe let all of his guilt and fear and shame well up all at once and he turned into a naked, ginger man and cried. His wonderful new life, for which he had sacrificed so much, had been stripped away in the space of a night’s howl. He cried for many hours, and was still crying when a baby fox crept up to him and curled in his lap for comfort. The baby fox was crying, too. He was the only animal left in the forest. Axe Axewound knew this instinctively, and this only made him cry harder.

By the time the night had come round, Axe Axewound had cried out all of his tears. He picked up the baby fox. He asked it what had happened.
“We were all just dancing around, having an awesome party like we do every night, being free and wild and happy, when his fat guy showed up in a rocket ship, threw some bombs around, then piled everybody into the back of ship before flying away, laughing.” The baby fox sniffed. “I didn’t get caught because I was hiding behind a rock,” he explained, sadly. Just then, there was a loud buzzing and Axe and the baby fox turned their heads to see three man-sized mechanical insects covered in guns fly right at them.

Axe dropped the baby fox, who scampered behind his legs. His axe appeared in his hand. It was still on fire. He allowed himself to look really mean for a few seconds before hurling the axe in an arc that destroyed all three of the mechanical insects at once. They exploded. Out of their husks fell a pig, a bluebird and a rabbit – one critter for each insect. Axe Axewound strode up to the dazed and slightly singed animals and interrogated them as loudly as he could.
“What manner of forest animal are you, who would dress yourself so fiendishly in this most dark of hours?” he screamed. Take note that, while Axe Axewound’s screaming was hundreds of levels below the King’s vocal abilities, it was still really intimidating, especially to the rabbit, who was shy. The bluebird was the first to answer, being the least concussed of the trio.
“We were dressed so against our will, sir, entirely! Last I knew, I was being put inside that thing, which had up to that point been an inert clump of metal. Once I was inside, it moved and shook something awful. I am so very grateful that you released me, and I should think that my also-fated companions are too.” Axe Axewound was surprised at this. He didn’t know that bluebirds were so good at talking Forest. But the bluebird’s words struck a memory in him. He thought of Terrorthaw and several of his evil schemes.
“I’ve seen this dark wizardry before. You were being used as a power source.” Axe Axewound paused for one instant, then, “I must put a stop to this. I must save my pack and I must save the forest.”
“We’ll come with you!” sang the brave little baby fox from somewhere about his ankle.
“Oh yes,” chirped the bluebird, “If anyone is to aid you in the evisceration of the devil that did this to us, I hope that I will get a good many pecks in myself.”
“Good.” Said Axe Axewound, somewhat impressed with this bluebird.
“i want to help,” said the rabbit, “but not too much.”
“I will help you because everyone else is doing it!” said the pig.

Oh man, did they have themselves an adventure.

End Of Chapter 58