Star Knight Lore: The Sons of Ken

Earth in Galactic Christendom is directly held by the Church, headquartered out of the Holy See (i.e. the Vatican). Most of the nations of Galactic Christendom maintain households planetside for the specific purpose of maintaining diplomatic ties with galactic neighbors. However, there is one nation that calls Earth its homeworld: the Sons of Ken.

Most people have never seen a Son by the dawn of the 4th Millenium, and when they do it's usually in the company of an Inquisitor or a Brother-Knight of Saint George. They are a nation whose unique calling concerns the supernatural, specifically the killing of it, and their continued existence is a reminder of the previous centuries of high weirdness as giants and other monsters once strode across the land and Mankind was on its heels prior to re-establishment of the Church by Pope Simon I, The Miner's Son.

The Sons tell the tale that their father was once an ordinary man, born and raised in the final years before the Cataclysm, who could not--and would not--conform to the sick spirit of that age. Ken wandered the land, stalking the monsters that preyed upon Mankind as they preyed upon Man, often getting little but appreciation and assistance escaping from the corrupt officials hunting him.

But Ken's true calling came after the Cataclysm. It is said that he was the only man burned by the flames that was not consumed by them, but instead transformed- first by the flames, then by the deadly-cold frost of the depths of Winter. He assumed the mien now famous among his kin: skin white like a winter wonderland, eyes burning like a thousand suns, nails become talons, teeth become jaws. Soon thereafter, having found himself surrounded by the undead hordes of The Necromancer, he took the last tool of terror from that first Dark Lord by consuming the consumers of human flesh.

He was not acclaimed. He was not beloved. He was feared at first, and in time respected, but no honor came to Ken until his own time had come. An aged Simon came to him, long after the Necromancer's fall, and took Ken's final confession before the father of monster hunters died in the manner rare to his own: peacefully, in his sleep, in his own bed, of old age. Ken was 120, and 80 of them were after the Cataclysm.

By then he had sons and grandsons, and the truth of his blood bore out: his sons were like unto him, while his daughters merely carried his traits dormantly and were otherwise as ordinary women. Despite the fates many would meet over the centuries since, the Sons fought in every Crusade and would set foot across the galaxy in pursuit of ever-rarer prey, and as such the Sons are spread thin. However, by decree of The Miner's Son, the lands of Ken's origins deep within North America would be recognized as the homeland of the Sons and no one has ever been crazy or stupid enough to encroach on a nation where every boy is raised to stalk and kill as a way of life.

And soon the Sons will be needed in strength yet again.

Miscellanous Setting Notes for the Feudal Future

Space is Big, and Writers (Typically) Have No Sense of Scale.

So, if you don't mind my indulgence, some setting notes.

• Earth has a population of 10 billion people. Yet most people are not urbanites. Those on Earth proper are spread out across all of its landmass (including Antartica) and do not cluster in coastal cities, reducing the congestion of population accordingly. Further relieving this pressure are the floating settlements on the oceans, and their seabed counterparts deep below the waves. High-speed rail transit forms relgional networks that link up at major hubs into a global network. Air travel links with orbital connections to complete the Earth transit network. The orbital habitation is half the population, clustered around the Lagrange points using the model from the Universal Century timeline of the Gundam franchise (sans terminology).
• Mars and Venus are similarly populated, maintaining familiarity with Earth-normal living standards for extra-planetary populations; this practice repeated itself outside of the Terran System. Terraforming efforts are minimized by preferring Earth-like planets when viable, but the means to change a planet into something suitable for Mankind does exist and has for some time- including the means to increase or decrease the gravity of a world into Earth-friendly ranges.
• Faster Than Light Travel exists. Multiple forms exist, but most people know only of the hyperspace travel that requires starships with FTL drives. Gate-based travel exists. (Yes, that means that the gate at Garmil's Gate is a literal stargate.) The reason for both FTL travel and space-based population expansion stems from the same reason as the following technologies: The Nephalim and their Fallen Angel fathers.
• Mecha: Powered armor arose during the Wars of the Damned in the era immediately after the Coming of the Azure Flames. It was the best option to leverage a reduced Mankind's odds against the undead horde of the Necromancer, allowing a single man to fight against a thousand or more at a time- unarmed. Armed suits increased the leverage yet again, reducing the hordes from billions to nothing within a few generations, a deed done when The Emperor arose to establish the Empire of Man over the ruined Earth and bring war to the Nephalim. Giant robots arose when they became needed to fight the great monsters as well as the Nephalim and their fathers face-to-face. First those of the Real Robot sort, and then when the Church escaped its hobbling it joined in earnest and the Super Robots came in their wake to allow Man to fight Angel on even footing.
• Blasters: Arose when the need for firepower exceeding what then-conventional firearms allowed, with the creation of practical plasma-casting technology. Using the existing infrastructure to minimize downtime during the turnover, and increase redundancy, a situation akin to the 19th century's introduction of the metallic cartridge occurred. The first generation blasters were conversions of conventional cartridge firearms; the second generation were purpose-designed and built to use plasma cartridges, but could use more conventional ones if required. Eventually blasters became the norm, and the older firearms became historical relics like those they formerly displaced. Newer technologies are eliminating the need for shells, but those are naval technologies only at this time.
• Cloning/Drones/AI: Either banned or highly-regulated by the Church. Bodies with ego but no soul are ridiculously open to demonic possession, so to prevent demonic Terminator incidents these are banned from usage or highly restricted. Alas, this ban passed only after a high-profile incident in the past; the possessed AI warship is still out there, and still seeking to Kill All Humans. The use of cloning is strictly and tightly regulated, allowing for medical usage so long as it is neither contrary to dogma nor otherwise a criminal act. In either case, the Inquisitors are not shy about nuking the site from orbit just to be sure. This means that vehicles of all sizes still have men at the controls, with only some levels of remote piloting allowed.
• Personal Weapons: Most people carry a knife, or walk with a cane or staff. Those able to afford a blaster pistol carry it, and few places are so foolish or venal as to ban the practice and try to enforce it. Beam swords are commonplace for noblemen, knights, and those aspiring to such status (often gentlemen).
• Medical technology: In a properly established and maintain facility, almost nothing immediately fatal will keep you down; gene therapy (see Cloning), self-derived clones of vital parts (clone your own liver; swap it out for a damaged one), and similar such technologies along with therapeutic techniques to support recovery make many injuries survivable. Lost limbs remain an issue, but for now cyborg replacements are the norm and are fitted as soon as possible.

And that's just some of them. Merry Christmas, folks.

Making the Setting: The Villains of the Piece (Part One)

This post follows on from this post I did a few weeks ago. Since that post, there's been one change worthy of noting here: the agreed-upon title is "Archduke", not "Duke"; the former is for the head of the house, while the latter is for the heads of the vassal families immediately under him as well as that of the heir apparent.

There's a thread running through this setting from the ancient past to the far future: the consequences of Genesis 6. The angels that went AWOL on God because the local women were too hot to resist never repented of their errors. Instead, they lied about it, doubled-down, and projected their failings on to others. In the time immediately before the Coming of the Azure Flames, these angels returned to the world and renewed the very activities that got them imprisoned in the first place. It is due to their actions that an otherwise flawless plan by the other notable bunch of fallen angels to do their Pinky & The Brain impression failed so dramatically and unleashed the worst of the Nephilim--the demon Legion--upon the world (in the form of a zombie apocalypse). (Lew's not happy about that.)

During these times, some peoples took the promises of false gods and other saviors and escaped certain death in exchange for loyal service; many of these were also of that same bunch of fallen angels, playing those roles, aiming to establish herds of their own to play with as they wish. The more far-sighted and capable of them took their herds off-world, establishing Conveniently Human Aliens for Mankind to encounter once Earth got sorted and going to the stars once more became a viable course of action.

What does this do?

• A single point of origin for Evil.
• A single point of origin for "non-humans": they're corrupted Men. (Hybrids, if you will.)
• A believable explanation for other setting elements: a lack of AI (too easily possessed, as they are soulless egos), why undeath is a bad thing (it's not really you, but a specific demon running your body like a corpse-puppet; think like you're playing one in a game), Full-Conversion Cyborgs require the blessing of the Church (too close to death), a taboo on the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction (part practical and part dogma; irradiated land can't be settled, and "Steward of Creation" dogma applied on the stellar scale)
• A Big Bad you can punch in the face, good and hard, like Superman can do to Darkseid. Even if you can't truly destroy them, you can beat the crap out of them and put them down for a long time. (And I haven't decided if true death is beyond a protagonist to do or not, yet; this is just for necessary reader morale purposes.) If Tolkien can do this with Morgoth and Sauron, I can do this sort of thing too.

The fundamental thread here is that of violating taboos in the name of some seaming good because the consequences cannot be seen, or if seen then accepted. Fear, pride, envy- all common elements in tales where these guys have a presence, even when not literally present. Same as it ever was, but concrete in forms that the Fall From Eden is not to a lot of people. From here, we can branch off into other themes and motifs.

Looking Ahead to the 2017 Publishing Game

The publishing game changed a lot over the past year. The old certainties are no more. The new possibilities are still making themselves known to most people, but I think we're reaching a critical mass of adoption for both writers and readers and next year will be when the jump off hits and there is no going back.

I intend to be ready. Shit I've sat on this year (for one reason or another) I want done and out, now that things I've been missing got found and put into place, and that means that when the manuscripts are ready I'll be looking for help on things I can't do myself (covers in particular) as I'm able to keep my head above water.

But right now it's Christmas. I'm going to enjoy the season, and then New Year's, and once the holidays are over and 2017 is here then it'll be time for putting plans into action.

World Building: The Hidden City & Its Defenders

The Hidden City is one of the successors to the Old World destroyed by the Coming of the Azure Flames, and like the others it had ties to the twin conspiracies that foolishly destroyed that world in their hubris. In this case, the founder of the Hidden City was a programmer, engineer, and occultist by the name of Roger M. Ire. Inspired by Disney's Tron as a boy, he pursued programming and engineering as he got older; these lead him into philosophy as a sideline in university, which is also when he got into the occult and recruited to DARPA.

Once initiated into the Deep State, Ire would gain access to secret information Disney used to inform Tron, going on to realize the concept and figure out how to make real the postulated digitization of real matter into a digital construct. In doing so, he pushed for and contributed to several patent-making advances in computer and network hardwarve, software, and firmware; these patents allowed him a passive and clean income that freed him from needing to maintain a cover identity as most do.

The occultist side of the twin conspiracies saw the potential in his work, and gave him the cover he needed to get out of the known hubs of IT and engineering in favor of hiding in plain site in Minneapolis. He hid his work under the guise of medical technology research, gaining access to power and network resources needed for his laboratory; in this lab, he did what--again, through Disney--was fictionalized in Tron: Legacy: the creation of a virtual city-state that people could freely transit to and from.

But Roger Ire, by now, was no naive idealist like fictional Kevin Flynn. His studies of the occult led him to conclude that programming was so much like sorcery that they had to be related somehow, and his presence around medical research of all sorts lead him to conclude that DNA has to be some form of code--therefore, a symbol representing a thing that has effects in reality, which therefore can be manipulated to make effects that he desired. He concluded that the solutions to several long-standing known issues of Mankind could at last be solved, permanently, and drew up a few plans to do so.

That was when his contacts in the occultist conspiracy also informed him of the Grand Ritual plan. He--like Solador's Archmage--saw through immediately as hubris destined to fail and bring ruin, and he moved to execute a survival plan. He took a big gamble, as he suspected that the Minneapolis area was a convergence of hidden energy, and devised devices that he--at the time--did not fully understand to tap into it to use as emergency power to keep the Hidden City online.

When the Azure Flames hit, he sealed the lab to all physical access and put the taps into place before taking one last trip through the transit portal to the Hidden City and hoped for the best. Instead of facing oblivion, he found himself faced with a crisis of power surging into the system; he was right about the power source, but had no idea that it had been dormant and came to live in the wake of 90% of Mankind being either nuked to ashes or consumed in the waves of blue-white flames that followed. The Hidden City, then a small thing, grew into a gleaming metropolis in the blink of an eye as Roger struggles to use what threatened to overwhelm him in maddening sequences of program resolution and iteration from the inside.

To cope with the surges, Roger connected to the Internet knowing that the Deep State installations meant for Continuity of Government would be online, connected, and hardened enough to stay up. With the power at his command, he got into the local systems and usurped their automated tools so that he installed and integrated additional transit portals throughout the world and then secured these facilities to his command alone. It was during this crisis that Roger became aware of what went on outside in realspace, becoming aware of The Necromancer and the undead horde he controlled.

At this moment, Roger had a sudden thought: "This is my mission, to reformat the whole of Creation and bring it into the perfect system."

The Hidden City would, over the years, grow both in virtual and real population. During the time of The Necromancer is when Roger--now known as The First Founder--started recruiting real people to operate in realspace as his agents. (N.B.: This is a big part of the Solador story; Roger sends an agent to overthrow The Archmage.) It is here that Roger, and his growing body of disciples, turn the power of The Hidden City to making super-solders.

Roger and his disciples created their first model based on a need for deniability and concealment, but when action became necessary great power could be put to hand. As this first cadre was a small one, a focus on quality in power to make competency in acumen was the goal and (as all of them were survivors of the Old World) they used a Japanese model as their basis: The masked heroes of the tokukatsu genre and their animated counterparts.

They then blended this model with an older American one, that of DC's Captain Marvel (a.k.a. "Shazam"), giving each agent a secure passcode keyed to their unique genetic code- a sample of which Roger kept on file as a security failsafe. Later iterations and revisions would refine this concept until there was a clear gradation of power, granted by demonstrated quality of character as well as loyalty to The Hidden City (and, by extension, to Roger), and Roger decided to foster this via deliberate generational eugenics improvement. The goal? To create the ideal agent of the City and its interests as the Guardians of Civilization.

And, unnoticed by most, this was when Roger's fall into hubris became complete.

(World Building) The Necromancer

The Necromancer is the first of the big players to arise in the wake of the Azure Flames. Like all of the others, he is a consequence of the pre-cataclysm conspiracies to establish a global tyranny. Unlike them, he is a consequence in the most literal sense: he had no ties to either of the conspiracies, and instead arose because of the effects of their failure.

The Necromancer was a ghetto kid, son of a waste of a mother and abandoned before birth by his father, and kept in check only so much as it kept his mother in the good graces of the authorities. He got shot when a firefight between street gangs broke out over a particular corner of the drug trade, and the gang-bangers (being notoriously incompetent shooters) cared not where their fire went. As he got rushed to the hospital, the cataclysm began; he was abandoned at the operating table, dismissed as a worthless punk kid better off dead, and left to die.

As he died, Christopher Walken appeared to him. Only it wasn't Walken, but someone appearing as Walken did in The Prophecy, calling himself an angel of God and offering the boy a chance for revenge- to make the world feel his pain, listen to his word, and obey his commands. The boy agreed, and the angel--who is Satan--gave the boy over to Legion.

Legion is the source of The Necromancer's power. He does not control the boy, as the boy is not dead and Satan forbade Legion controlling the living. Legion abides because his desires are being fulfilled, as he now controls billions of corpses, but chafes at being subject to a boy's borrowed authority (as he serves as Satan's anchor on Earth). Satan is the deniable Grand Vizier to The Necromancer, playing the boy like a fiddle as he knows the boy's psychology and pushes his buttons as a master pianist plays the keys.

The Necromancer has other henchmen at his disposal, which are the damned souls of the worst of Mankind allowed to take up the dead flesh at The Necromancer's disposal and walk the Earth once more to fulfill The Necromancer's will. Other damned souls are yoked to serve as immaterial shades, advising The Necromancer. All of these are withdrawn once Satan removes his support, albeit not at once, and their removal serves to track progress in the war against The Necromancer; until that support is withdrawn, they return time and again to menace the enemies of The Necromancer.

The Necromancer, billed as "Master of All Flesh", endures for as long as he does because he and Legion cooperate. They erect a worldwide Empire of the Dead, complete with ziggurats and sacrifices, following Satan's advice. However, Satan (being the Supreme Deceiver) ultimately betrays both his human and his demonic ally once their usefulness is at an end and he shifts his allegiance to the Empire of Man. Knowing his allies' weaknesses, Satan elevates the Empire and enables their conquest of The Necromancer; providing verifiable proof of The Necromancer's actions drives the Empire of Man's propaganda efforts that galvanize the people to support the Emperor. The Necromancer ends his life as it began: mortally wounded, on a table, and abandoned to die. The Emperor, at the final moment, recognizes that his enemy is truly at his end and gives him the mercy of a swift, painless death. The Necromancer then goes to Hell.

The final death of The Necromancer marks the end of the first phase of the world post-cataclysm, and the shift from surviving in a hostile ruined world to the rise into a recovered world filled with terrible purpose and horrific fury at that which ruined what came before.

(World Building) Timeline: From the Coming of the Azure Flames Foreward

This is a rough timeline, the purpose of which is to stake out temporal territory for certain stories.

The Coming of the Azure Flames is an event that destroyed the Old World (our world) and its civilization, so we're starting from a ruined state and initial stories set in this period are about survival and adaptation as the last of the Old World disappears and the new age completely supersedes it. This is when Ken's post-cataclysm stories occur, after his transformation into the father of the nation of men that bear his name. This is when The Necromancer arises and he becomes a recurring antagonist to Ken and others, and his rise and fall mark this era.

Overlapping this is the rise of various rivals to The Necromancer. The Archmage of Solador, coming to dominate Cascadia, is one of them. The Founder of The Hidden City, which is able to operate world-wide due to enduring Old World architecture that his people go on to rebuild and expand, is another. These folks go on to be the players in The Wars of the Damned, ending with the rise of the Empire of Man (which throws down The Necromancer).

The Empire of Man goes on a crusade to purge the world of all that is unnatural and inhuman, creating a one-world state and religion that runs a wholly authoritarian and totalitarian police state. Yes, even in the undersea and orbital reaches, as the aim of the Empire is to fully subjugate the Earth before taking the crusade into space. Stories here mark the transition from the false hope of a false prophet through to the creation of a resistance that persists in persecution until a successful contact with sympathetic external allies brings forth a true savior that makes real the dream of freedom upon which the Empire's religion feeds.

Overlapping this is the Diaspora of Man. The Hidden City leads an exodus once it becomes clear that the Empire will win on Earth. Using what they recovered from ages before the Old World, they establish extra-planetary colonies elsewhere in the solar system starting with Mars and Venus, and spread out from there. It is during this period that they come into contact with the allies that would later break the Empire on Earth, but not before their own nation undergoes its own period of unrest and transformation.

The timeline from there I have yet to set down. The trend, however, is meant to echo real collapses and recoveries with some exaggerations for effect. The span for this period is about 500 years on the outside; once I'm satisfied with how specifics shake out, I'll revise this timeline with something more specific in terms of dates. For now, I have just a start point--a point of divergence--and I will work forward from there.

The Big Ideas in My Works: The Solador Series

I'm using posts here to flesh out elements of my fictional world that won't gt a lot of attention in these manuscripts. A lot of the stories I'm writing tie together via the cataclysm that destroyed the old world and created this one, mostly through the common connection of the conspiracies behind that event.

The Solador books (currently) work around the idea in LeGuin's "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas", but what is forsaken is inverted: instead of a forgotten child left to suffer in darkness, the sacrifice is of a designated hero who is elevated to celebrity status (and dehumanized accordingly) and upon whom the community piles on their expectations at the prompting of the Solador leadership: The Exalted. This figure is meant to represent them to the Exalted, as go-between bridging the ordinary and the supernatural. Said leadership installs the hero, manipulates his rise and controls him with rewards given to such heroes in the mythology that these leaders deliberately copy. When the hero becomes too unstable to control, they orchestrate his fall and elevate his replacement to ensure that this control mechanism continues.

Of course, the protagonist is that hero. The deuteragonist is another pawn who figured it out and aims to put this scam to an end. The Antagonist is the leader of The Exalted: The Archmage. Other figures mentioned or featured include The Necromancer, the other Exalted (The Champion, The Devil, The Hierophant, and The Physician), and Master Bradley of The Hidden City. The hero's wife, children, and his dog Han are minor (but significant) players in this story.

The theme of the Big Idea (occulted schemes of control) continues in Solador's signature feature: "The Blessing of the Unconquered Sun". This is a full-body augmentation, centered around a gem implanted in the forehead. From this gem--the Soul Gem--comes a woad-like full-body tattoo made of gold and silver. The system exists to prevent one from being turned undead; the means is by incinerating the corpse as soon as life stops, in a manner that resembles a program's deresolution in the original Tron, leaving only ashes and dust behind. There is a secondary effect that the body's resilience is greatly improved, akin to wearing well-padded armor. Implications are addressed, and intended by the creator: The Archmage.

So: trauma-based mind control, active perception management, culture-level political manipulation, wars meant to be sustained to control internal population, occult powers used to set up and sustain a false religion, and what it takes to keep that going vs. how fragile it is if at all vulnerable. That's what's going on here, while writing about adventures involving undead hordes, fighting against terrible odds, treachery within, and the inevitable victory of Truth over Lies.

Future History: The Coming of the Empire of Man

This is typical of father-to-child home instruction in the Empire, which is the most education on history that most Imperial children get and is mirrored in Imperial propaganda (i.e. all their media), and differs only in the tone and vocabulary used. This would be typical of a doctor to his children, or someone of similar rank, but not part of the Empire's true elite.

What is now called "The Old World" or "The Age of Wonders" ended in a cataclysm, the Azure Flames. What we now know, centuries later, is that this was a divine subversion of an infernal conspiracy's attempt to utilize a mass human sacrifice to power a ritual summoning to bring their master into this world. The ritual failed, the destruction ruined a corrupt civilization, and allowed for the release of a different infernal entity: Legion.

It also put down a judgement on all alive past the age of reason, condemning their corpses to Legion upon death. It also allowed Legion to take any other man's corpse that it slew as the beast it was, but we know now that there was a catch: Legion had to use a human agent and work through him. No agent? Banished once more to realms beyond Man's reach. This is the origin of the villain and traitor known as "The Necromancer", and the source of his immense power.

The infernal conspiracy had its turncoats and sandbaggers. Two of them we now know as The Archmage of Solador, and the Founder of The City-State. We know of the existence of a score of others. These would become, along with The Necromancer, the Dark Lords that dominated the era after the Coming of the Azure Flames known now as "The Wars of the Damned".

The chaos brought about by the rampant sin of our predecessors had one mercy, now also known to be divinely granted, in the transformation of one righteous man into the legendary Ken, father of the race that would allow our Emperor the time and territory needed to gather the remnant of the faithful together into our glorious Empire and build us into a single nation capable of winning our world back from the Dark Lords.

Now, as we near five centuries since the Azure Flames ended the Age of Wonders, the Empire put down The Necromancer and ended Legion's threat. Other Dark Lords hide from the Empire, knowing we are mighty and armed with more than muscle and machines. Their ruinous powers cannot withstand our faith. One by one, we shall put all of them to the sword and burn their blighted lands to ash before claiming them as our own once more. Go forth, my son, and serve the Emperor with all your heart. The Emperor will lead us to victory, to true freedom, and bring cleansing fire to all who defy what is commanded of us.

Note that this is not the actual truth of the Empire of Man. The actual truth is that it is another "Dark Lord", born of the same conspiracy that caused the cataclysm. The Empire deliberately models itself on Warhammer 40000's Imperium of Man, and its own inspirations, and as its technical proficiency increases more things out of those inspirations appear. However, the Empire does have one quirk of its own: it does not have a military- it IS the military; there is no civilian life. Every man is a soldier. Every woman is a nurse. This grants total control over the population under permanent wartime conditions, and permanent subjection to military authority; the religious overtones are the mockery of a true faith, with the Emperor as a Priest-King. While talking a lot about purity and opposition to the supernatural, it harbors a hidden elite with powers of their own. Thus the Empire is, in truth, a militant cult- one that officially celebrates and unofficially hates its allies.

The End Began in the Middle-12

As I write this, that girl's mother stands by. I am indeed very old now, and it hasn't been long since that wedding. Ken came and went a few times since, and he's back now. This is it. He knows it, and so do I. When I finish this, the last of my memoirs, I will go to bed that night and I will not wake up. I will expire, peacefully, in my sleep. As soon as the point of death is had, Ken will prevent my turning.

I don't know exactly what that means, and I don't want to know. I can't really stop him from eating my body, so I never bothered to argue that he shouldn't. Maybe he will. Maybe not. It's irrelevant for me to speculate. All I know for certain is that the one concession to convention about kingship--a worn thing symbolzing who is king, a crown--will be taken from my head and placed on my son's head. The mother of my grandson's wife will do the placing, and Ken will pronounce my son as king. "The king is dead. Long live the king." being traditional, that is what I expect will be the ritual phrasing.

Word went out of my approaching death and my son's succession. The households under my sword, as it were, are awaiting the news. Fortunately, they appreciate my son much as they do--did--me so I don't expect much trouble out of them after I'm gone; if there is trouble, it will be after those great-grandchildren are born and they turn out to be boys. Being ruled by mutant corpse-eaters may be a bridge too far for many of them, and they'll have to be dealt with.

I did not expect to live to 100, nevermind past that, and yet here I am- barely. The high technology I once took for granted is long gone now, and the digital world I once expected to be my Heaven has vanished. Instead I struggled--when not butchering men or monsters--to retain all the useful knowledge I could, and pass on that and the importance of its preservation to those after me. With an illiterate woman birthing my future heirs, I am concerned that they will be unable to read these words and thus come to understand the man that made their inheritance possible- or the world he came from.

Yes, I survived. Yes, I brought down a corrupt and degenerate world. Yes, I built up a robust and sustainable kingdom out of those ashes, but I am unsure that whom I pass this wealth down to will appreciate it or be able to preserve it against the threats that now exist. The end for me comes, and I have made my peace with that. What I cannot--will not--accept is that my legacy will be as easily reduced to ashes and dust.

All men die. Yet only when a man is forgotten is he truly destroyed. "Christopher I, King of Laketown" is far better than "Christoper Holm, some guy who wrote books and shot traitors" at being remembered.

Remember me.

The End Began in the Middle-11

I had the word about the wedding put out to my people, commanding the attendance of the households, and they did as I expected: grumble, but comply. All that butchery left a lasting impression, and they did appreciate my aggressive efforts against The Necromancer, so they sat down and shut up about my ties to Ken and his people- amongst other things. Soon I got replies and when the date got settled that too went out, and when the date came my people showed up to witness the future of my kingdom come into view.

It was, for the most part, a good wedding. Food (for those of us that could eat it) and drink (ditto) aplenty, a respectable turnout of household heads or their agents (some took ill; I verified that), toasts and boasts and games to cheer and thrill one and all. The bride had the time of her life, which was not hard to do: she could not read or write, and spent her life to this point in the middle of the woods living in a cabin that had no heat or electricity so my "castle"--a run-down lakeside resort hotel repurposed into a fortified manor--seemed like an enchanted palace of gold and diamonds to her eyes, but she knew her wifely arts well and thought my grandson to be a true prince out of the stories her mother told her.

That talk about women would be coming after the wedding night. At least my son and I had prepared him that much.

The cost for this wedding came with taking in the girl's mother also, and she I installed as my caretaker to keep her out of my son's way and keep her influence over my successors to a minimum. I knew how to handle a woman like this, so I did just that; it helped that I had secrets of my own that I kept all these years, including the means by which I kept folks just down enough to prevent them from using my sleepy time to meddling in my affairs. (Sure, I used it also way back when to keep bothersome folks asleep while I did what I needed to do to properly put them down where they deserved to be, but fortunately that was a rare occurrence- but it was also very lucrative.)

The wedding came and went. The feast came and went. I did enjoy myself, as best I could, in both happenings. My new grand-daughter-in-law even smiled at me, as only a truly innocent young girl just married could, and kissed me on the cheek. "I promise, sire, to be the very best wife I can to him." she said, as only a girl like that could. For a moment, I remembered a better tomorrow that never came. Heh. Even now, after it all, I still want to believe.

As for the girl's mother, she too turned out better than I expected. That night, as she helped me to bed, she engaged me in idle chat.

"Well, I didn't expect my girl to end up here."

"How so?"

"Ken said you were a hell of a man, a butcher, a pig-headed bastard, and terrible with women."

"All true." I said, "Still. You're just behaving well."

She laughed, and I could tell that she got exactly what I meant.

The End Began in the Middle-10

"Everyone can see that you're setting up that boy of yours to be your successor." Ken said, "Your own son is okay with that?"

"He'll play seat-warmer for a while. He'll officially be the first successor, but he's really just finishing the training I began. When Jeremy is ready, he'll take the throne; this marriage is meant to cement that future."

"You're banking on the rumor about my genetics."

"That your sons, and their sons, turn out to be just like you and your daughters carry that trait to give to the sons they bear? You got it."

Ken chuckled. "Your descendants will not go hungry."

There was not more to say after that. Ken knew the real reason that I had him come to me: to fulfill the other favor I won from him all those years ago, which was to prevent my reanimation after I died.

One thing I knew for certain is that everyone alive at the time of the apocalypse who survived that would, inevitably, become a zed when they died unless they somehow got around being a normal man or woman. (Ken, for example, would not because he's a corpse-eating mutant freak.) What I came to suspect is that those born after that wouldn't automatically turn into zeds, but it was useful to keep up the practice anyway just in case so I did not ever tell anyone this suspicion other than Ken.

"Well, at least you can enjoy one more wedding before the end."

"Yeah." I said to the big snow-white man with no hair and sunken yellow eyes, "Just one more."

The End Began in the Middle-09

Eventually I sent my son off to sleep also. I stayed up; being king has its perks, even in the most primitive of conditions.

So many dead at my hands over the years. I didn't bother telling either of them about the fighting and killing I did as a youth; after all the epic slaughter before and after the apocalypse, a handful of shankings when I was a kid doesn't merit inclusion outside of my memoirs- not that writing means much anymore, but I do it anyway.

I got bored and slept in short order. The next day, over breakfast, my son and I broke the news to Jeremy. He took it far better than we thought.

"So, you want me to go look up old Ken, see about a daughter, and then bring them back here?"

We nodded, and that was that.

Now, being old and such, I really can't say for certain what it took to get that done. What I know is what Jeremy and Ken told me, which goes something like this: Jeremy took a man with him and they set out for one of the regular haunts that Ken would visit at that time of the year. They arrived to find a woman roughly his mother's age and a girl a few years young than himself tending to a cabin that wasn't there when I was there last, which was many years ago. The woman was one of Ken's concubines, put there to be a custodian year-round, and the girl was his daughter by that woman. It turned out that Ken arrived with a few others in his train the next day, and when the two had their sit-down Ken altered his plans right away to come see me.

So, all told this errand had the boy away for a month and most of that was evading zeds too troublesome to take on. The marriage was agreed to, and thankfully--again--the girl took a liking to my grandson. While my son and her mother negotiated details, Ken and I had a nice little reunion of sorts after many years going our own way.

"You're dying." Ken said, "I can smell it."

"I'm old, you corpse-eating freak. It happens to normal men."

"What do your people think of this marriage?"

"I don't care. They'll go along with it or the zeds will eat them, and then my progeny will eat their animated corpses."

"Now that's the right bastard I remember."

The End Began in the Middle-08

"Father, I heard you talking about the limits of what a hard man can hold. I think we're at that limit given our own band of men. We have control over all the lakes and our base here on Mille Lacs allows us to feed from the lake's fish year-round as well as take advantage of the fresh water. We're not likely to do much better than this, not with the pressure coming from the Necromancer to the south. I think we should reconsider future plans."

"You're reconsidering whom to marry the boy off to."

"We're not going to make it as just ordinary men. We can't keep up the numbers, or the material, for much longer. As soon as whatever it is that consumes The Necromancer's attention is done, he'll turn again north and come at us with a tidal wave of zeds to wash us away. We need to take any advantage we can get if what you carved out of the ruins is to endure well into Jeremy's lifetime."

"To what do we turn then?" I said, "We sell ourselves to some witch? That will go well when Ken hears of it. The natives fled deeper into the wilderness, those that survived, and that meant going further north so they're out. Are we to produce nuclear weapons out of tinfoil and beer? Come on, son! There is only one option of that sort open to us."

"Yes. One."

"We'll tell the boy tomorrow after breakfast. It'll give him time to prepare."

"For what?"

"The journey. He's got to be the one to go bring Ken back. You're going to be too busy keeping the place going to go running around the field."

"You know what else that means, Father."

"Yes, and I know that some of the homesteads aren't keen on Stalkers. Too bad. It's join Ken's people or die out, and I'm not one for dying out- even if I don't have much longer myself to live."

"It's decided then?"

"Hell yes it is. Ken's got to have a daughter by now. Jeremy's marrying her and breeding heirs, like it or not."

The End Began in the Middle-07

"You talk a lot about men, Grandfather."

"That's because men have depth to them. Women don't. Women are simple creatures, and should never be trusted to be anything but a woman. That's how I stayed with your grandmother for as long as I did."

"That's harsh."

"Only because it's gotten a lot better since the Old World died in fire. The women that survived had to clean up and get back in line if they wanted to live, and the girls born since--like your mother--weren't allowed to degenerate into the wretched whores that their mothers were. For all that got lost, what's come in its wake proved to me that this was the best thing that could have happened to Mankind. The natural order is back for good."

The boy nodded, but I knew he didn't get it yet. Fortunately, he didn't have to get it just yet- and I'd be deciding on his wife anyway, so all he had to do was follow orders until he grokked it. It's not like there's a lot of available women around to mess him up in the head or otherwise make a mess of things.

"Enough. Bed. Now."

Jeremy did as I told him, and off he went to bed. Shortly thereafter my son came in with a mug of brew and sat in his place.

"Telling him stories again, Dad?"

I cupped him for his manners.

"Sorry, Father."

"Better, and yes- because he asked, and he has a need to know now that he's coming into manhood. He's got to know why things are what they are if he's to rule well when the time comes."

"I don't recall you ever being that dismissive with Mother."

"Because your mother, at the time the world ended, was still a child. Her parents got eaten by zeds, and Ken took her in thinking he could groom her for a mate. He traded her to me in return for taking him in and healing him up after that incident with the witch in the lighthouse and the crazy cult that arose in her wake. When she was ready, I took her as my wife and that ensured that I didn't have to clean out bad programming."

I saw on my son's face that our age difference never crossed his mind. She was born on the cusp of the millenium, and I took her as she came of age. Well, after the end of the Old World no one in their right mind balks at young women married to mature men. Sure, I put three children to her in five years; we needed numbers, and that's why I married her. Love had nothing to do with it at all; I needed a loyal wife who I could train to be a competent wife and mother, and she did just fine.

"And-"

"Yes, son, when I made that deal for your wife I had the exact same thing going in my mind: getting a young woman that could be readily trained to be good at the jobs needed of her. It helps that she actually liked you. Your mother respected and appreciated me, but that sort of thing never existed."

"Widowers both we are now." he said.

The End Began in the Middle-06

"So everything was coming together to blow it all apart?" he said, and I nodded.

"Yeah, that's it exactly. While it still held together, I took as much as I could from the dead and used it to prepare for this." I said, waiving around the room we sat in, "Not that most of those cultists had any sense to prepare for anything like this, so looting their corpses and then their accounts was a lot easier than I expected. Soon I had all of this land, the buildings, the stores, and so on ready and waiting for the shit to hit the fan. All I had to do was get out of the Cities and make it here, and I knew I had it made."

"How long?"

"Ah, now we're moving from 'How did I destroy a social cancer disguised as a movement?' to 'How did I found a new kingdom out of these ashes?' A good time for that transition, since there's not much else to talk about in terms of how I contributed to the burning to ashes of the Old World- and why it deserved to die screaming for its mother like the pathetic bitch it was."

He chuckled.

"Well, as dramatic as hacking my way through a sea of zeds would be, that's not how it happened. I got a tip from someone I knew who went into the Spook world that something big was due in three days, and I should bug out. I took that warning seriously, cleared out my place in town, and then I fled the Cities and came here. I didn't warn anyone else, because fuck them. Whomever managed to not get eaten and still made it I'd consider letting in."

"And?"

"Twenty got here. I put half of them down because they got bit and lied to me about it; that's where the bone pile started. After that first winter I started going around to the others nearby and gave them the choice, and that's when I began building the kingdom that you have been born into."

"And become king of in time."

Now I chuckled.

"If you live long enough to succeed your predecessors. For all that your father and I made of our killing powers we are still mortal men- we do have limits. Don't be like the dumbasses who thought that words had power by themselves; real power, real ruling, relies on hard men ready and willing to kill and kill and kill to get and keep that power. That means that there is only so much that one hard man can rule; to do more than that you need loyal men, and that means finding men worthy of your loyalty. That, my boy, is the real hard part. Kingdoms rise and fall by the power of the king to find and keep good men at his side."

The End Began in the Middle-05

"So much killing went on in the months before the end, Jeremy." I said, "Lots of it was simple and crude, much of it done incompetently and opportunistically. I didn't care for that stuff. It was all amateur hour antics, and yet even so they got far more done than generations of bullshitting ever did. The best part was that the Internet covered all of it pretty much as it happened, sometimes with the killers streaming the killing as they did it."

"Dad says that it seemed like a madhouse."

"At first, sure, but that's because most people had lived so long in that illusion of permanent peace that they couldn't deal with the real world when it shattered those illusions and proved to them just how wrong they were. The stronger ones adapted quickly and did one of the smart things: ran or fought back. Most of them knew enough about themselves to know that they couldn't really fight back, so they ran like hell and got out of wherever they were in favor of someplace else. Those small groups that got rolled by roving gangs, or zeds, or anyone else with the good sense to not be pussies? Born of those thinking that they could always run and hide."

"What about the police?"

"They didn't like dying anymore than anyone else did."

"Really? It's that simple?"

"After just enough people lost their fear of the cops, due to seeing just how incompetent all but the best of them were, the slaughter of anyone in a cop uniform was catastrophic. The ghettos, where the street gangs had their presence, turned into killing fields overnight once that happened and it happened after I'd already swamped them with my own work. City cops, then deputies, then state patrol, then Feds- and man, the cascading effect once the people saw that the Feds were just dudes with suits and guns and so on turned already bad scenes into total collapse. Governments big and small dropped all pretense of being 'for the people', and just took care of their own openly- like that made it better."

"So the end began in the middle of the country?"

"Yeah." I said, showing some pride, "I guess you could say that it did. Long overdue, by the way. Too many folks forgot the way this shit really works; too big a claim of turf, and too little real power to make it stick. Collapse like this had to come sooner or later, and it was on its way even if I didn't start clearing out the crap."

"How so?"

"The world's economy was about to fall through the floor, and World War 3 was already shaping up."

The End Began in the Middle-04

"The freakouts were fantastic to witness. All the screaming about people being gunned down in places where guns were already banned, knifed where knives were banned, and so on only to scream that the bans need to be made worse- as if that would solve the problem! Morons. Fucking retards, the lot of them!" I said, "In their desperate, yet futile, attempt to make their feelings the law of all they abandoned all reality and embraced their collective insanity- as if they were nothing more than overgrown children. Reaping them like wheat before a thresher was more than punishment- it was judgement."

"But there had to be more than that?"

I smiled again. "True, there were plenty more, and after I executed that first gang at that convention more took up my path on their own- I never met them, never knew who they were, and never heard from them. They just picked up the gun and began executing the enemies in their neighborhoods as I did to those trespassing in mine. Most of them would get caught by the police state, and gunned down themselves in time, but those who--like me--showed their quality by staying inside the enemy's minds and thus avoided the traps set for us, quickly came to clear out their neighborhoods."

"A purge, then?"

"The likes of which no one then alive in this land had ever seen."

"The ones buried deep into the power structure proved hardest to take out, as they expected people to try killing them, so they took some work to handle. I resorted to using them as secondary targets when I went after more available targets, like the dumb twats trying to ban everything. I'd also picked off some opportunity targets, and settled some long-standing scores, as I went about the bigger business."

I looked again at the boy. I looked deep into his eyes, as I did when I gave the watered-down version to his father years ago. I saw there what I expected out my own son, that he got it, that he comprehended what all of this killing meant- why it was needed, and better than the alternative.

"Is that how you became king?" he said.

"Not directly." I said, "But it was the start of how I became king. I killed all of the invaders, the liars, the whores, the crooks, everyone who dared step foot into my land and mess with what is mine- I killed them all, and I am damn proud of all that butchery. When the apocalypse came, I knew that I would not be one of the weak pussies that got eaten by the horde. I knew--well before the event--that I would become one of the masters of that world, and when it came I became one of the happiest men in the world."

"Ken would be the other?"

"Yep. We got along fine for that reason."

The End Began in the Middle-03

"The entire community where I worked could not believe that someone not only exposed them, but delivered judgement. The government promised to 'find the killer', but never did. In part because I knew how to ensure that none of their investigations would amount to anything, and in part due to me knowing how limited their resources were. I buried them in corpses, so to speak."

"Dad said that once something got you mad enough, you couldn't be stopped."

"Your father doesn't know the half of it." I said, satisfied with myself, "It's something I figured out when I was a young man: the secret to killing your way to victory is to outpace the other side. That's very hard to do when the other side is a bunch of dead shamblers, but next to them is an omni-present police state. Same skills needed, however."

He gave me that look.

"If I overwhelmed the ability of the cops to keep up and investigate, then I could proceed with impunity. So I did just that; I kept stacking the corpses like cordwood, executing one or more of the enemy every day and ensuring that the continuity continued. Five in a game studio's offices, three at a movie party while the party went on, a dozen at long range with a rifle when they wandered off in a big park, several home invasions, and so on. I got a weekly count of 100 once during this period."

Now the realization came over the boy as he saw his aged, elderly grandfather as the experienced and remorseless manslayer that I really am.

"How long did you keep it up?"

"I started on the first weekend of July that year. I won by the end of August. Eight solid weeks of daily killing, the latter part including me taking the fight to them across the country. Generations of social infiltration and degeneration wiped out in two months. Two months, my boy! All my life I'd been lied to about the power of killing, and I proved them all wrong--permanently, eternally wrong--in just two months! Had the world not come to an end when it did, my part of it would have been able to stage a counter-revolution that would've cleansed the country by the end of the following year. A flood of blood so great it would have sated the thirst of the worst of vampires."

The boy looked at me with a mix of awe and fear. Good. You respect your elders for a reason: they've spent a lifetime mastering skills that you barely know exist.

"Do you know how-"

"One thousand, four-hundred, fifty-six." I said, "The last one I did live on global television, and I still walked away as if no one saw me- and that's because no one did. I shot one of the leading mind-fuckers, a high priestess of this cult, as she gave an interview to one of the major media networks' prime-time news anchors. Her head exploded like a popped balloon and got brain, blood, and bone all over the newscaster."

I chuckled. I had a livestream of that interview going, muted, to ensure that I dialed in the target properly without taking any shots so I saw that I got it right when the chick's headless corpse flopped to the floor like a sack of cement and the chatroom's collective freakout got me rolling with laughter. Right then, I knew beyond any doubt that victory in this culture war was mine.

The End Began in the Middle-02

"You killed two guys-"

"No, lying whores. A pair of lying, thieving, gold-digging whores playing the men like fiddles and laughing about it all the way to the bank."

"Bad girls?"

"As far too many were at the end. My execution of those two is my contribution to the catalysts that would set off the end."

"How?"

I could not contain my glee. Finally, I get to tell it all: "No one ever expected an outright execution to happen to two popular whores in a St. Paul hotel near the airport, so when their corpses got found a few minutes later--remember, zeds didn't exist yet--the reaction was a total freak out. Yet, by then I found the hotel room this gang shared. I had a key, so I let myself in and executed the rest of the gang in their room. In and out in moments."

I paused a moment. "Let that sink in, boy. To start fixing a problem caused by liars, thieves, and predators corrupting good people into being more of the same a good man had to get mad and start popping those bad folks right in the brain. Sound familiar?"

Jeremy chuckled. "I thought you said zeds didn't exist?"

Good boy! You got the point! "Not literally so, but when the apocalypse hit I found those habits and practices worked just as well with the dead as the living."

He laughed, and that made this easier.

"You remember that we had newspapers, TV and radio places that told the news, and all that?"

"Yeah."

"Well, my assassinations so shocked everyone that they led the news for a week- and shut that convention down for good, along with all of the others run by the same group."

He gasped.

"So, as I continued to track down and execute the rest of the leading crooks in the area, never getting caught and leaving the same signs behind to show continuity, I had everyone of them freaking out- and me, hiding in plain sight, planning which of them to take out next."

"Like when Ken the Stalker is around the smarter zeds?"

"Exactly!"