Saga Of The European King

Axe Axewound was so bored. He'd been on the Smith Expedition for a month and a day and basically nothing had happened the entire time. He had spent the better part of his adult life having adventures and messing people up. Sitting in a carriage while someone blew gently on his face was not his idea of a time to be had. He had settled into a routine of sleeping all day with his head on Astrid's lap and then sneaking out at night as a wolf, tagging a few of his animal friends and idly slaughtering any wildlife or cowboys he came across for experience points. It was dull and tedious and the experience bonus became less and less for every night he went out. His animal friends, trailing a few miles behind the Expedition, weren't much comfort either. They had run out of things to say to him. He didn't have the resources necessary to throw a party for them like he had in the old days. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with two thousand animal friends.

He wanted a quest – someone to save or a mystery to solve or an ancient civilisation's secrets to uncover. It wasn't that he wanted to tax himself mentally – Axe was the team's tank, after all, and tanks aren't intellectually curious, as everyone knows - but he did miss the satisfying pacing that came with a good mission. What he needed in his life was a simple set up that gave way to a larger problem that would be solved by cues he'd seen earlier and then progressed onto a series of fights of rising intensity until the final climactic battle and then a denouement that wrapped things up quite nicely and landed him or one of his friends with a nice bit of kit. Simple, repetitive killing didn't really do it for him, now that he'd gotten to grips with the control system of being a werewolf. Also, Astrid was on antibiotics so sex was right out of the question.

But he was glad that he was on the King's trail. Being angry with the King had been so hard. It had torn at his soul and made every waking moment feel like a dry sob. He had pushed himself to maintain the intensity of his anger, and had pushed harder with each passing day, because the King is someone you just can't be angry with. Sometimes he would quite unwillingly imagine the sound of the King's laughter and want to laugh himself and love the King, but his desire to be angry would push his good feelings down and then he would just feel cold and alone. Will Smith's song had shown him how he was feeling and washed him clean of that irrational, uncool desire to be pissed off. Thus cleansed, he felt truly sorry for all those villains and ne'er-do-wells who were always trying to be angry at the King for their own reasons – people like Terrorthaw and Oranje and Mystic Boy and Darkness Darkhaven and all the rest of them. He thought that he kind of knew what was up with them, that they had been messed up by the very same feelings he had felt. He shuddered to think what would have happened to him if Will Smith hadn't sung that song to him. Surely the other Adventure Friends would have brought him around eventually. Surely.

Being bored on the Smith Expedition meant that he had a lot of time to go through his memories. He remembered Trappy's words to him on that airship: “There is a great battle approaching, Prince Axewound. The King must fight in it, and so must you. It will be the hardest battle of your life. It will arrive to you in only a few moons. You must be by our King’s side by then.” He had supposed that the great battle had been the one they had fought with the Vikincas and Erik Rage-Eater!, who was certainly the mightiest foe that the King had ever faced. But when he thought about it further, he got the cold, hard feeling that he had been wrong. Erik Rage-Eater! could well have defeated the King, but the King, he knew, was more than just a man. He was Europe, too. Perhaps the battle that Trappy had warned him about was not a battle between the King and a foe(s), but a war for Europe himself. That scared him. It scared him because when it came down to it, he was just one man with a big axe. It scared him because he wasn't at the King's side.

He remembered the first time he had met the King. It was back in Celtland and things had gone from bad to worse with his big brother. The Blood Celts and the High Celts could no longer even see each other in the streets without a fight breaking out and his brother, who had been first in line to the throne, had forsaken the Blood Celt heritage that had held power for centuries and thrown in with the High Celts. All of Celtland teetered on the brink of civil war. Families were split down the middle, lands were divided up, homes became battlegrounds. It was teenaged Axe Axewound who had rode off in the night with his sister, Checker Axewound, and Duncan Horsesplitter, his best friend, to travel to Europe and speak with the King. This brought a further scandal upon the beleaguered Axewound house, as the nobles of Celtland had for centuries prided themselves tremendously on their refusal to communicate with Europe in any way.

He was in luck – the King had just returned from his amazing travels in the East with Sally Minefield, Brian Majesty and Colonel Glowfist (who wasn't a Colonel back then) He had enjoyed some good, rousing, teenage adventures in exotic locales that dealt with more mature themes and darker subject matter, but what he had really lacked in his life until that point was a serious political drama with blood and everything. He jumped at the chance to put things right on a national level and went with Axe and Duncan to Celtland along with Colonel Glowfist and General Majesty, who would teach the King about war and other big, adult things. Some real epic stuff happened – war broke out, Duncan was tragically killed while protecting Axe's family, the King arrived at a village too late to save it from being razed to the ground, the King got to make love to Checker, which made Sally so jealous, Axe's brother turned out to be beyond redemption and had to be thrown out of a window. In the end a bittersweet victory was won and peace was restored, but at what cost?

Now, Axe Axewound knew that what had happened in Celtland could never happen in Europe, but if he were to think of the greatest battle that Europe would be involved in, the only opponent he could imagine on the other side of that 'Europe VS ...' match-up was Europe.

He didn't like to think about that.

End Of Chapter 76