Two men sat by a lake, silently fishing on a breezy Summer's afternoon. Strapped to their backs were large hexagonal shields that almost seemed to glow in the sunshine. The closer you came to the men, the more you could feel the energy radiating from their shields. Even humans could sense that there was something otherworldly about them. They were no ordinary pieces of armour.
“The rule of Equilibrium is flawed,” said the first of the men to the other.
The other laughed incredulously. “How do you figure that?” he asked.
“Well,” the first man began, “the rule of Equilibrium is that the deadliest sword cannot defeat the strongest shield, and the strongest shield cannot defeat the deadliest sword, right? Well, it's wrong. The swordsman would win.”
At the other man's puzzled look, the first man explained, “They may be equally strong, but think about it. They have different objectives. The objective of the swordsmen is to win, but the objective of the shielders, our objective, is only to stop the swordsmen from winning. If the swordsman makes a mistake, they only get pushed back, but if the shielder makes a mistake...well, they're dead, aren't they?”
“But that's just it, isn't it?” the other man countered. “They don't make mistakes because they are the deadliest and the strongest.”
The first man pondered this. “I guess that's true,” he said.
“And the shielder's objective is the same as the swordsman's,” the second man continued. “His objective is also to win, only in a different way. The swordsman is trying to kill the shielder in order to get past him. The shielder's objective is to push the swordsman back so that he cannot pass. And if he pushes the swordsman back far enough, he has won, don't you see?” The second man turned his gaze back out to the lake, quiet now.
The first man was once again silent. “But what if,” he began again, breaking the silence. “what if the rule of Equilibrium didn't exist?”
The next morning, a fisherman came across the bodies of the two men, floating face down in the lake. The fisherman gasped as he saw what was written on the armour of one of the men. Roughly translated into this language, it read;
The forest has ears and the lake has eyes. No one questions the rule of Equilibrium.
YOU ARE READING
Defying Equilibrium
FantasyWho would win if the deadliest sword was pitted against the strongest shield? One might say that neither could win, and so the fight would last to eternity. That is Equilibrium. Until the rules were broken.
