"The other king's name, 'Darian the Twenty-Fourth-Or-Whatever-The-Fuck', had been passed down to him through the semen of old conquerers--" Grace began one night.
No. The name Darian had been passed along with the first (or however many it took to make another penis-haver) ejaculation of all the "Great Conquerers"'s (on that particular side of the world, anyways) semen--
No. Fuck.
Often it was on the golden throne, a symbol of agreed-upon value, that the next generation of "King Darian" babies was, were con--made--"
(We were drunk.)
("Why are you so committed to the sex metaphor here?" I said, words barely distinguishable from my rasping laughter.)
Because. I'm trying to show the, the fuckin', stupidity of the goddamned idea that there is a fucking right to tell other people what to do found in one special little spermy-boi that made its way into the unsuspecting egg, which, if we're making grand claims based on such a silly metaphorical personification of nature--which egg had no idea it was about to be merged with a little stringy bit of genetic material--it's fucked up.
Fuck.
Anyways.
Let's just get to the point, then.
The original ancestor whose name had been passed down was a Great King, and this is the definition the people proceeding him attributed to the name: "Great King". So eventually they ended up literally calling their leaders "King Great King".
So fucking stupid.
His name hadn't meant anything, Darian "The First"; just that the people who knew, loved, and hated him used the sound of it to call the Man inside the body.
The first king after the first Darian that gave meaning to the name (and this information was lost or destroyed from the histories, as most of it is) said that it meant "loved, after, by God". This Darian, the, uh...seventh one, maybe?--was also the one who took a great interest in the development of a set theology taken from the writings of the King of the Last War. It was he who is responsible for Faith's fate, as well as my own. But I suppose (no, I know) that it's futile to attribute responsibility for the events of Time's passing; and all these events of which we speak, as you will see if you haven't already, are responsible for one another in equal parts.
This final of the line of Darian of the Last War wasn't called all that often. The generals pretty much had the whole thing under control. Only those whose smiles acted as the curtains shading his view of the world spoke of him as King.
There is very little else worthwhile to mention of this man; just that his final decision was honorable in my eyes. I didn't even tell Anders what the name sounded like.
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Pale Fragments
Science FictionAn alien Robot came to me before she left to die. She sang to me the stories of how her ancient world and species ended, how she was created to travel through Time, how (in the far future) she met an essential boy named Anders, how she named herself...
