The Slave Knight Part 1: The Dagon

Chapter Two: The Contract

"Sign here and here Meister Kevin," Meister Dudden pointed at loose leaf papers strewn across Meister Kevin's desk, as Sir Wallace waited beside them impassively. The dawn air was heavy with dread, as the Wild Boars had sullenly drunk their way throughout the dreariness of the night. They could do, nor say anything regarding their unnamed dead and unbound brother. Instead, they drank away their sorrows through the nightly gloom and into the morning madness. Meister Fripp was also present pacing about impatiently. "Initial here and here," Meister Dudden continued, pointing a long and curled finger at the parchment curling on Meister Kevin's desk. "With these signatures, you agree to be bound by a debt to the Poxies, consideration being only by completion of the task through destruction of the Dagon, or otherwise."

"And what reason are we believing it prudent to kill a mythical being such as the Dagon." Meister Kevin mused off-handily scribbling letters and words across the forms before him. He stared intently at the indecipherable script, his glasses glaring in the yellow candle light, with a stern look upon his face. He was trying to truly fathom what nonsense he was getting himself and his warband into. He knew not the half of it.

I wish there was a better way, he thought to himself, remembering that there probably was a better and easier way to get the finances to purchase new slave knights, yet it was a way that would mean dejection and possibly desertion.

Kidnapping crews, he thought quickly, yet threw the thought away as quickly as it came, knowing his control of the Wild Boars was tenuous at best, and making such a move would do nothing to increase his status with his warband. He decided to think of those things less and focus more on the tasks at hand.

A scrib stood idly by, next to Meister Kevin picking up the papers and storing them away as they were signed, dated, and initialed. "In truth, I don't have the damndest clue what Overlord Baal wants with a dead Dagon. All I can give you are rumors and conjecture, both of which we know sorely of. Am I right, Meister Kevin?"

The decimation of the slave knight warbands, Meister Kevin thought quickly, and nodded slightly grabbing another piece of parchment.

"Anyway, no you already signed that one. Scrib, you bumbling idiot be more attentive. Yes that one. Thank you." Meister Dudden had the tendency to say his "thank yous" more like "fuck yous," and most who heard it, could feel the tinge of annoyance in his voice. It was his staple as a meister, and many spited him for it. The scrib continued to pass papers between the meisters and himself. Meister Kevin paid little mind to the papers, the scribblings of the scrib before him, and their contents. He knew it was all procedure and pomp and just wanted the whole damned thing over with, so he could be rewarded with his new slave knights. Over an hour later they got to the final step.

The binding.

The world revolved around binding and unbinding principles. Magics were the principal force to enforce bindings and unbindings and focused strictly on binding the supernatural to the natural. The spiritual and the physical. The unseen and the seen. Forces of unknown darkness of things people can only dream of are unbound in the ethereal realm, the spiritual realms, as some scholars or more learned people would know of. While there are hints of bound things between the spiritual and the physical, in the spiritual realm, in the unseen, the true essence of the physical realm remained unbound. Magics are about creating a connection between the physical and spiritual realms. This connection is created through binding.

For example, suppose you want to conjure fire. Well you can conjure fire through mere physical means in the physical realm with flint and stone and tinder and kindling and what have you, but barring that, your ability to conjure fire is quite limited. However, if you can understand the true essence of fire, not just its physical characteristics, but also its spiritual and ethereal characteristics, you can bind the ethereal, the spiritual, the unseen to the physical and the natural and therefore you can create fire out of air, literally. To bind the fire to the air, the meister or mage or what have you, would need to know the binding links and essences of both what you are binding together in the physical realms and in the spiritual realms. Many a magician or sorcerer or witch, have begun and ended their careers in magics by mistakenly binding essences to themselves that are better left unbound. They cook themselves alive, or earth and rocks burst through their own flesh, or they drown themselves despite being leagues from the nearest and shallowest pond, or they suffocate themselves with no clear binding, pardon the pun, around the neck or throat.