knights.
We are beings of fearlessness. Beings of honor. Beings of obedience. Beings of rage. We were designed this way, forged this way, by our history. Our lineage.
Decided by the will of those who created and trained us. By the will of our gods. For anger is necessary. And we have so many layers. Built one upon the other, layered like bricks to form a mighty tower of our rage. Our fury.
It starts at our birth, and only becomes more calcified with each passing year and stage of our growth. It is our armor, and it is our spur. It is our weapon, and it is our curse...
Sometimes I remember the tapestry of my life, intertwined in ways that did not happen, could not happen. My dreams are struggles, most days. At others, they are a clear pathway, a straight road, but always vivid. I find it difficult to sleep outside my sarcophagus. I find it impossible not to dream when within it. I am not strange amongst my kind in this regard.
This harkens back to the first time, of course. First, it all begins in the sarcophagus. Our new bodies, our new lives, our new dreams, our new duty. For I am a son of Gawain, the Knight of the Sun, and his power and his blood flow through my veins. I am a warrior of the Crimson Lions.
My dreams often take me back to that moment. The moment I knew I would be a Crimson Lion, or that I would die trying to become one. The moment my brother died.
It all happened so quickly. We were stood atop one of the many crags of the valley surrounding our small village, up high to see our prey. Alas, as I leaned forward I slipped. I should have plunged to my death to the cold stone several hundred feet below. Instead, Davos' face passed mine, as he leapt and grabbed at me and hauled me back to safety. But In this, he overbalanced, teetering at the edge on his tip-toes before losing his battle with gravity and plunging over the edge himself.
I scrabbled forward, only to watch his face get smaller as his arms fumbled in the air. But he did not thrash. His face was almost calm, placid. He made a choice, and he was at peace with it. It was Davos' wish, always his greatest dream, to become a Knight, he would not go a day without proclaiming it. So bold was he, that soon, none doubted it.
The day of his sacrifice, was the day the outriders came to our home to announce that the time of challenge had come, and the trails to become a Crimson Lion would begin. The irony...
I told my father the events of the day, and packed only that which I would need for the week-long pilgrimage to Solarius, the kingdom's capital city. My mother was silent. My father merely nodded his agreement.
The dream had to be made real if Davos' memory was to be upheld. He understood. Despite me being only a boy, he understood. Those days were difficult. I was scrawny, yet strong. Yet bruised and beaten by the harsh climate of our home, I was barely recognizable as human then. The trials were unlike anything I had ever experienced. So heavy, so brutal, so uncompromising. A mere fifty of us were chosen. Out of all of the hundreds who came, those who survived those bloody days.
But the fire of Davos was with me. I had somehow caught it when he grabbed me that day, when he saved me, his fire passed onto me. His anger. His anger joined my own. And it burned all at which we threw it. It is how we passed the trials against those larger or faster. Those older or stronger. We beat them down with our joined rage. More and more the challenges and tests continued. But in the fortress of the Crimson Lions, we were all in awe of the order then, being little more than feral slum dogs, but we were not given time to ponder.
The training was intense, and often deadly. All the while, we the denizens of Solaria, were small and often misshapen, pocked or afflicted by the harsh existence in our country. Yet the trainers were all statuesque, chiseled demigods, so noble of bearing, so handsome, so... Perfect. None of us aspirants could understand how we would turn into things such as they. But, eventually, we learned.
The final stage that would trigger our transformation and awaken our dormant magic would be the last and most daunting trial. Each one of us would be infused with the blood of our Archknight Gawain, and placed in life-supporting sarcophagi for a full year, in order to permit the change to take effect. As I stated, I was scrawny, and misshapen. As were we all. So you can imagine, the changes were drastic, took time. And were excruciating.
Our bodies were transformed slowly over that year. Our bones lengthened. Our muscle mass exploded. Our skins became calm and clear. And our very facial structures altered.
Endless months of slow agony and endless screaming. The kind of screaming that makes your throat and even lungs burn. When your head feels as if it is about to burst from the lava-hot sensation being channeled to it through the nerves. Such pain, without escape.
But the pain was not the only bedfellow locked into our sarcophagi with us. There were the dreams. Dreams of beauty. Wonders so various and splendid that it strikes one dumb. Visions of our righteous mission, and of the Arch-Knight himself, our father Gawain. Nightmares of betrayal and siege, and final failure. Of battle and of death. For with the blood and its changing ways, also come the memories of our lord Gawain. His struggles, his joys, his victories, and his final death at the hands of the great betrayer, Ultharion, the Litch King. The images, the dreams, the memories, the pain, the change, the year locked away. You go through the midst of madness, it's deepest, darkest well, only then to rise and go through to the other side.
All the while, the Lion Lord is there. From the second our magic is awakened, he is there. For it is the Lion Lord, his memory, his spirit, that meets us at the end of this journey, welcomes us back to the light of sanity, after just before the sarcophagus is opened.
Not all survive the ordeal. Many an aspirant have passed their last seconds enclosed in a sarcophagus. None have ever gone through the experience easily. All have, at least once in all that time, wished more than anything for it to be over. Regardless of how.
When that lid is finally lifted, slid off by a coterie of veteran Crimson Lion priests, what comes out does not even remotely resemble what went in, either physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. When I awoke, I was calm, and greeted those who exhumed me as "brothers". I soon looked upon my new visage. The perfect form, the incredible height and power, the clear skin, the golden eyes and sharpened teeth. Yet my mind had changed as much as my body. My interior, now matching my exterior. In every single way, I had been reborn anew.
Few talk of it, fewer even acknowledge it. The rage inside that box. Not just due to the inherited emotions of our father, not only due to the curse of our magic, and the subsequent curses from the enemy, no. But simply due to being locked in a box, and left in agony. For a year. Being shut away in the dark with nothing but pain and majesty. Like a thousand-folded blade, these layers of anger were not only added, but hardened. Forged into our very souls.
Our life had been pain. Our king had been betrayed, and our father, slain. The bright dream of a peaceful kingdom, stolen. The knowledge that my brothers and I were meant to be little more that glorified cannon-fodder. The knowledge that we would know no other joy than to fight and then die for the King, for our people, and our order. We sacrifice our humanity, our place amongst our people, for one reason alone. To defend them.
Rage.
We are the directed rage of a people in danger, a father betrayed, the Lion slain, a dream destroyed.
I, Leon Asterion, Captain of the Crimson Lions, a true son of Gawain, will never cease in my vigil. Nor would any of my brethren knights. For without us, without the Crimson Lions, without the Knights, the Kingdom of man...
Would fall.
