Saga Of The European King

“So you met Trappy too!” mused the King. Axe Axewound had just told the King about his miraculous resurrection. He had met Trappy and King’s Dad in Heaven, who had stopped being King of Europe a while back and had become the King of Heaven, replacing his own father in the position. No one knows what had happened to the King’s Granddad when this had happened. Logic dictates that he would have had to go on to become King of something, but what?

“Yes, but I didn’t know then that it was the same old lion that you have spoken of so fondly and so often,” said Axe Axewound, wanting very badly to go to sleep. “We met again, but –“ as Axe paused to yawn, the King grew impatient.
“Well, no use sitting around in this tree house any longer. We’d better be saddling up the armadillos, waking up your friends and riding out towards Lamanai. I can’t wait to meet my father’s old nemesis, Erik Rage-Eater!, and maybe beat him up.” Said the King. Axe Axewound groaned, rolled over and tried to go to sleep. Then the King’s words caught up with him.
“Erik Rage-Eater!?” said Axe Axewound. “The Viking warchief? The Rapist Pirate-King that every baby Celt was told to be deathly afraid of, lest their bravery at the mention of his name caused him to come back and leave nothing of Celtland but ashes and misery?”
“Yes, he’s the one. While I was imprisoned, I overheard the guards’ conversations from time to time. When the Vikings left Europe long ago, they came here to the southern continent of the United States Of America. Erik-Rage-Eater! is still ruling over them, despite being nearly four hundred years old. He rules from the fortified Mask Temple. We should be there in a day or so. I’m expecting quite a fight when we get there. Come now, get out of bed, you lazy dog.” But Axe Axewound was no longer sleepy. He had encountered dangers innumerable on his journeys with the King, not to mention his times in the Bird Wars and his most recent adventures as a werewolf messiah. None of those dangers could compare with the stories he had been told about Erik Rage-Eater! He was anxious and sweaty just at the idea that he would be meeting such a monster.

“How about I finish my story first?” blurted Axe Axewound. He was hoping to stall the King as long as possible. It was a good try and he had noticed that the King was no longer wearing his Ring of Diplomacy, so he knew that there was at least a chance that he could trick him. But even without his magic ring, the King knew about feelings, because he was in touch with his and with everyone else’s.
“No.” said the King. “We have to ride. I have to get my gear back.” Axe Axewound gasped at that. He had no idea that the King had been stripped of his entire inventory while he was in prison. Aside from his new hands and the clothes on his back, the King had nothing. No potions, no weapons, no armour, no items, no gems, nothing at all. Axe Axewound felt stupid and foolish for putting his own unholy terror in front of his King’s gear. He had never known the King to be so weak and vulnerable. He wept. The King went on silently making the bed.

Feeling guilty, Axe Axewound continued his story anyway after an hour of silent armadillo-riding towards Lamanai. He was glad to break the silence and perhaps take the King’s mind off of his terrible situation. He was coming to the best parts of his story, in any case. He told him about the many-headed dogs that dropped jewels that turned him from a werewolf to a werebear to a weredragon, about the crazy robotic dragon-snail that he killed while deep underground the ruined city. He told the King about his journey to the evil circus that had settled just outside of the city and how Dr. Tchaikovsky was acting as the ringleader of that circus, which actually was just a front for Dr. Tchaikovsky’s toxic slime production. The toxic slime turned normal Europeans into mindless slaves loyal only to Tchaikovsky. Axe Axewound and his animal friends put a stop to the whole operation, freed the slaves and destroyed the circus, but Dr. Tchaikovsky got away again after they destroyed his big sludge-powered mechanical suit that he had built with science. Axe rescued a couple more girlfriends along the way, too.

For many months, they followed hot on Dr. Tchaikovsky’s trail as he ran riot across Europe. Axe Axewound, the shy rabbit, the bloodthirsty bluebird and the adorable baby fox became the best of friends, though they were all pretty good friends with the ever-growing number of animals that they’d rescued. The adorable baby fox learned to pilot a experimental flying-machine that they had found in one of Dr. Tchaikovsky’s many laboratory-towers. With air power at their command, Axe’s troupe was able to keep right up with Dr. Tchaikovsky, who was becoming ever more desperate to get away from these terrible beasts of vengeance. The machines he fought them in were becoming ever more bizarre and experimental. He tried to fight them while sitting in a giant mechanical hammer, or in a rocket ship with a spring attached to its base so he could jump around in slow, easily-predicted patterns. The whole situation was becoming ridiculous.

One by one, Axe Axewound recovered the members of his wolf pack. He had a special bond with his pack, because he was kind of like a wolf. When he’d completed the set, they could all have parties again. It didn’t matter where they were – whether they inhaling the sulphur-fire fumes of Western Italy, or way out on the ice floes and whalebacks of Finland, Axe Axewound and his animal friends would party every night. The parties kept them going strong, even though their journeys had been long and taxing and quite low on nutrition (for the herbivores at least. Ha!)

Anyhow, one day, they all found themselves at the top of one of Dr. Tchaikovsky’s Natural Philosophy Castles, which had a basement full of hostile experiments and zombies in the hallways and such. Axe Axewound had been carving his way through the enemies with no real trouble, as usual, thanks to his furry army helping him out in every conceivable way. They confronted Dr. Tchaikovsky at the top of the castle and there, after Dr. Tchaikovsky had merrily shouted, “WELCOME TO YOUR DOOM!” was a fight with him in one of his fiendish machines, as usual. This time, he was sat in a big, circular drilling machine with large hands and an attack that would electrify the floor. The fight was over quite quickly because the bloodthirsty bluebird could perform a homing attack that ignored all of the machine’s defences. When his machine blew up in dozens of tiny explosions, Dr. Tchaikovsky ran off down some secret passage in his castle. Axe Axewound ran after him, of course, but Dr. Tchaikovsky was just fast enough to reach his escape vehicle. This time it was a strange, oblong machine with four wheels and a flat, transparent screen that you could see out of. Dr. Tchaikovsky crammed himself into the cockpit of the machine while a metal door opened out to the castle grounds. Axe Axewound arrived in the secret chamber just as Dr. Tchaikovsky sped away in his strange machine. He felt defeated for just one second before he saw that there was another machine quite like it, but red, parked in the secret room. Axe Axewound figured out how to open the door, put himself behind the control system (it resembled a ship’s wheel), pushed some pedals with his feet and eventually found himself racing after Dr. Tchaikovsky in hot pursuit. There was music coming from the back of the vehicle. Dr. Tchaikovsky had composed it himself. The tune had no end. It would repeat and repeat and repeat. There was no way to turn it off. Axe’s animal friends were all crammed in the back seats of the vehicle. It was a tight squeeze. There were thousands of them.

By looking out of the transparent screen mounted in front of him, Axe could tell that he was in some kind of city. He hadn’t seen the city from the front of the castle, but he reasoned that he had been too busy fighting Dr. Tchaikovsky’s Metal Axe – a robotic werewolf designed to mimic all of his moves. He knew that if he were to find Dr. Tchaikovsky, he’d have to cover the whole city. He got to grips with the controls of the vehicle. He found that he could drive forward, turn around quite quickly, fire oil out of the front grill and leap about twenty feet into the air. This was useful for reaching the upper levels of the city and also very useful, he soon found out, for avoiding cats. There were cats everywhere in this city. They were just standing out in the middle of the roads. Axe was a good guy and he couldn’t bear to hurt a cat, especially since he had a score of them in the back seat and they would complain. Making things more difficult, there were other vehicles like his rolling around the roads. These vehicles were blue and had flashing lights on top of them. They seemed intent on destroying him. Axe guessed incorrectly that they were being driven by evil robots. He dealt with them by shooting oil at them and smashing them right off the road. There were some close scrapes.

When he had covered every inch of the city, he resigned to the fact that Dr. Tchaikovsky had eluded him. He drove out to the next city, which he recognised as being in France. He was amazed that he had travelled there so quickly. There were more cats and flashing-light cars there, and he also found a balloon, but no Dr. Tchaikovsky. He drove on and found himself to somehow be in Southern Celtland. Something was up. He suspected the vehicle of being intensely magical. That would explain the endless loop of tinny music. He was considering giving up on the vehicle and going back to travelling on foot, which was a way of moving about that he was used to and didn’t involve put so many cats in mortal danger, when he caught sight of Dr. Tchaikovsky’s car, skidding around in the distance. Dr. Tchaikovsky was skidding around because he was trying to avoid a large metal spike that kept thrusting up through the road. They were a danger in just about every city. Axe Axewound gunned down one of the pedals and closed the gap between them. Dr. Tchaikovsky spied Axe Axewound too late and caught several globs of oil under his car’s tyres. He span out of control and Axe smashed him right into the spike as it burst out through the concrete. Dr. Tchaikovsky’s car exploded into many fragments that turned into hearts and drifted slowly to the ground. They found Dr. Tchaikovsky, bloody and limping, a few hundred metres down the road. He was laughing. Axe Axewound pulled up alongside him and stuck his head out of the car’s window.

“Where are you going, Dr. Tchaikovsky?” he said, casually. Behind him, his animal friends were laughing and whooping, a noise that thankfully drowned out the incessant music.
“Fool! I’ve nearly made it! I’m nearly in the Recovery Zone! Nothing can stop me! Hahahaha!” the doctor said. Axe Axewound nodded, swerved the car around to block Dr. Tchaikovsky’s path and got out of the vehicle. His thousands of animal friends swarmed out of the car also. Dr. Tchaikovsky was surrounded by an army of wildlife. Axe Axewound’s axe appeared in his hand. It flamed menacingly. They were going to eat him. It would be over in seconds. A shadow passed over them all. Dr. Tchaikovsky smiled. When he did this, his moustache jutted out from his face at a strange angle. There was a humming noise, then a sound like someone saying “Wah wah wah wah” in a funny voice. Dr. Tchaikovsky disappeared. The city disappeared. The car disappeared. Axe Axewound and his animal friends found themselves in the middle of a lecture theatre. Axe’s one remaining captive girlfriend was strapped to a table. She was screaming. All around and above them, behind an invincible transparent screen, were rows and rows and rows of seats. In each seat was a stout gentleman in a lab coat. Dr. Tchaikovsky was standing behind the screen, too. He was laughing harder than he’d ever laughed before. If you looked through the windows at the top of the room, you’d see only clouds and sky.

They had been teleported onto the Natural Philosophy Community’s flying airship. They were trapped and were about to be experimented upon and dissected before an auditorium full of old men. A heavily-armoured Natural Philosopher with a huge spring-loaded scalpel bore down upon them with a scream. Axe Axewound twirled around, spun his axe elaborately and shouted his catch-phrase so that everyone could hear it:

“I’m going to axe you – TO DEATH!”

It wasn’t a very good catch-phrase, but it was often quite accurate.

End Of Chapter 61