1.Ettin Rule Year One
In the first year of ettin rule, mankind became well acquainted with the two pillars of the new civilization: the ape and the apehunt.
Household telescreens on three continents broadcast in local languages the same message of moving images once an hour, every hour until the end of the Taboo Smashing Wars seven years later.
The broadcast began with a brief summary of the end of the Herrenhausen Campaigns in Vargia and the liberation of mankind from apehood.
But the narrator cautioned: "Man is still not liberated of the ape within; for man to become truly free he must rise from the rubble of his outdated anatomy.”
The broadcast images would become more vivid in color and focus.
A title card then read:
“BIRTH OF A GOD: THE STORY OF THE GROOMSLAYER.”
The teleplay unfolded thusly:
The screen's image shifts to a burning city. The Groomsmen, that murderous mob stemming from Southern-Vargia, march across the telescreen, explosive weapons in hand. A young blonde haired man in his living room, reading a book on his sofa is suddenly impacted from a fiery blast. His legs are no more. He bewails his fate. “First,” the narrator says, “The ape is brutally attacked by other apes. It is only natural in the apeworld. But there is a miracle solution: The Apegift.”
The limbless man’s telescreen flashes text: DO YOU ACCEPT THE APEGIFT???
“Yes!” he cries. He is escorted out of his cottage home by two tall creatures with glowing red skin and white eyes the size of billiards balls.
They bring him to a tall black box with a crimson eye burning at its top.
The man’s body is placed into the box, its interior white walled and serene.
Inside, a beautiful young woman with a graceful countenance greets him and says, “Thou wilt an apegift?”
“I do,” replies the limbless man.
“Very well. Thou shalt be granted a new incorruptible body and soul. Thou shalt no longer be an ape. Thou shalt become, indeed, god.”
She smiles again as the man says, “what do I need to do?”
With a wave of her hand a hologram floats within the space; a body.
“Your apegift, that is: your task, will be an apehunt. Simply, you must kill and eat some apes.”
"Which apes?”
“We gods are just in our retribution. Your apegift will be to slay those animals who took your legs from you.”
The woman tosses a black tarp over the man and removes it like a magician’s trick.
The man now has a pair of steely black legs and arms, his torso lengthened, his head and neck grown thicker, his blonde hair blowing in a sudden wind.
“Go forth, my Groomslayer,” says the woman saluting him.
He sprints across the little village, and reaches a shack in a murky alley, ripping its door off the hinges.
After some short bursts of yelping, he exits the shack with blood dripping from his new hands.
“It is finished,” he says to the camera.
The telescreen would then state for the viewer:
WILL YOU BE THE NEXT GROOMSLAYER??? EVERY HOUR 10,000 APPLICANTS ENROLL IN THE APEGIFT! DO NOT HESITATE!!! DO NOT REMAIN AN APE IN A WORLD OF GODS. SAY ‘YES’ TO YOUR TELESCREEN TO ENROLL NOW!
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2.Verity and Her Bodyguard
Behind the purple shroud at her chamber door awaited a new terror for Verity Countess von Herrenhausen-West.
Her tiny shadow shivering against the white candlelit wall as she froze in anticipation of what had come to her door.
Another shadow materialized, watching the fair woman- fear was its name and its companion’s was regret; Verity and her Bodyguard destined for the Eldermark with the Unghost and his thralls.
It had all been arranged neatly; decisively.
“Just get it over with,” she had said to her apegifter the night before, under the grins of thirty crimson masked creatures.
“You understand what this all entails then, right? Becoming an Empress of the Wildermark?” said the voice of the unseen apegifter.
“I understand. And I want it. Want my freedom. Want his head.”
The phantom Apegifter presented her with a jagged black dagger the length of an arm.
“Your Bodyguard,” said the phantom. “For his head you shall be rid of your apeshell, become a goddess as Dr. Geissler has arranged.”
Beautiful Verity, far lovelier than all women, whether a pauper or queen, her big eyes quivering as one breathed behind the shroud: It was her Bodyguard.
The Bodyguard's experience with the apegifter was much the same as Verity’s, requiring a murder to receive his request.
“I’ll do anything to be with her. Be with Verity,” he told the phantom within that dim, liminal obelisk.
“Kill a man," spoke the phantom.
“Give me a name and it’ll be done.”
“Etzel Dorn Galvan. Even that name?”
“Even that name.”
“Then the Countess and you shall be together.”
The Bodyguard spoke from behind the shroud.
“Verity. I'm here to escort you. An air obelisk is ready to fly you to the graduation ceremony…I’m your new Bodyguard.”
Verity knew the voice, a resounding cry from a lifetime ago, gentle yet commanding; the voice of a friend, of puppy love, of a passionate evening under August’s Sturgeon Moon.
And of silence; for years his voice’s echo returning only on dreary lonely nights, a dreaming of the ghost of their erstwhile eros.
She tried to forget it all, she longed in the bitterest tears to make it never again call for her.
Even there, so far away from home, in the Arctic Castle Herrenhausen, she could not escape that terrible, painful voice.
It was a trick. An illusion sent by the Unghost. A test---or something more sinister.
She pulled the black dagger from her bedside, ready for the offering, ready for liberation from the forces of her castle imprisonment, those monsters lurking in the castle; liberation from her Bodyguard.
Her Bodyguard had been, as long as the shadows on the wall had trembled, the same rotten creature known to millions as the Geissmeister.
The Geissmeister was a villainous oaf, a mass murderer, his bloody antics displayed on telescreens across Greater-Doggerland, from the Eastern Capital Heliopolis to the Western city of Lux Azzae, frenetic homes to ettin princelings and their simian slaves.
The Geissmeister's appointed position as the Countess von Herrenhausen-West’s Bodyguard was a mere formality, a noble title he had been awarded by the Groomslayer for his thousandfold bodycount in the Taboo-Smashing Wars.
He had met fair Verity once years before at one of Arnulf Margrave von Bloodfirth’s orgiastic fetes, that encounter enough for her to wish death upon him.
Despite the Geissmeister’s best efforts to woo her, his creator, Doctor Eugenius Geissler prohibited the beast from further courtship.
Geissler insisted upon a level of a decorum from his creations, and if even the Geissmeister, his muscular handsome pseudo-self, interfered in his pursuits, no hesitation would be necessary in tossing the latest model of the Geissmeister’s corpus into his office crematorium.
Thousands of apes on a full moon frequency were, under the Unghost’s permission, granted a seat at Geissler’s surgical chair, apes he merrily molded into his radiant masterpieces, bone, tissue, hair and teeth sculpted to his creative impulse.
In extravagant “graduations," lowly apes ascended into superlative gods and goddesses--- pejoratively known as ettins by the insubordinate.
Sadly, by Geissler's and many other deified members of the noble clans' opinion,
fair and beautiful Verity, still ape, had not fulfilled her potential as an archon of heaven and earth, refusing the apegift---until the night before.
Gripping the phantom’s black pulver dagger, she approached the shroud.
“You…you’re not my Bodyguard.”
“I am, Verity. I was recruited by General Orbaulker…and the apegift…”
Verity squeezed the dagger, tears pressing hot at her big, dark eyes.
“What were the terms?” she asked the Bodyguard.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does! Hellfire, don’t you know what this means??”
“Yes…to see you once more…”
“Did you know? Did he tell you??” said Verity struggling not to overcome to weeping.
“What?” asked the Bodyguard.
“Tell you that I got the apegift too! That I was told to…”
“Told to kill your Bodyguard?”
“Yes!”
“Yes…I know.”
Verity’s skin grew cold.
“If that’s what he took…I’d do anything, Verity…for us…our baby. I was offered to kill a man to see you again…”
“Who…” she was no longer speaking to the man, but her shadow on the wall, watching in terror.
“Etzel Dorn. And I agreed. What a cretin he was.”
The shroud was pulled open.
Dark eyed and haired, as handsome as she was stunning, Etzel Dorn in the black and red uniform of the Order of Azza stood like a hollow ghost, sorrowful, his pallor like a green spot floating in the eye of one who had looked into a candle’s flame too long.
Verity dropped to her knees. It was too late for them now, there was no return from the apegift and its insidious tools of death.
The dagger exploded from her grip, spiraling into the man’s heart.
Another explosion and she too fell with him, the shroud between her chamber and the long hall to the obelisk waiting for both of them torn apart.
A wiry figure, the genius Doctor himself, exited the aircraft and hauled both bodies into the obelisk to complete the apegift's terms.
He spoke to the phantom of the obelisk:
“She’s still alive, Lord. Her heart is ready for the next journey…her brain too. And those big, brown eyes. What a ghost she has. What a happy coupling they will have.”