Horatio stared at the clouds.
He did this unmoving. His mouth was slightly agape. His expression was blank. Ash fell on his glassless window. The cool breeze of the sea was colder than usual. The sun was gone. He had seen this already.
“This is it.” The figure behind Horatio asked while knowing. Horatio nodded. He didn’t make a sound. The sea reflected the black sky. The rain had stopped this morning. It had been raining for three days. There was ash coating every surface beneath the sky.
“It is upon us then… what will you do?” The figure asked. Horatio answered, “What I can.”
Grunch sat at the fire. Horse stood by the fire, rocking her head up and down. She and Grunch had rags on their shoulders because they had been rained on quite a bit. Grunch paid the innkeeper extra for having her inside. The innkeeper hesitated and insisted that the Stables were nice and safe but Grunch wouldn’t have it.
So now they sat there, soaked by rain and dirtied by ash and heaving and sighing… like.. horses. They sat and they waited and the longer they waited the more they sat. The waiting got quite tiring and Grunch was looking all around and inspecting the lights made by the fire and counting the floorboards between them and the fire and thinking about the if floorboard wideness was reused for measuring the distance of floorboard length and he accidentally invented standardized measurement all on his own but nobody noticed because he was very quiet about it.
Dumay said, “I think I’d like to tell a tale, fellows, a good tale fellows I swear it! This one I heard from my father, and he from his father and so on from his father before him, and he from an old vagrant in the century of 800! A great joke tale about a horse in a tavern! And about other great things, life and grudges and madness. It goes something akin to this:
“Once Upon A Time, a Horse Clopped Into a Tavern… in this Tavern, the Barkeeper Was a Jolly Fellow, a Kind Fellow. His Name Was William. He Liked to Make Conversation, and So Conversational Was He, that He Chose to Greet and Conversate with this Horse. To the Horse He Said, ‘O Welcome, Welcome, Fellow! Why the Long Face?’
So the horse looked him in the eyes with its horse eyes and stared really long until the barkeeper looked nervous and the barkeeper wiped his nose from the worry and cleared his throat to speak. Then people laughed even though the horse’s face is naturally long. The horse said, ‘It’s a perfectly normal face for my kind you dickhead.’
William tried to make amends, ‘Oh horse, I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you more it’s just that you looked sad and I realize I chose the wrong words to ask, please forgive me dear horse.’
Suddenly, at the end of William’s apology, the horse bit his nose clean off. So William stood there dumbfounded and surprised before realizing he was in terrible pain. This was the worst moment of his life. He was ruined and embarrassed in front of all his patrons.
So William gave up the Tavern work from sheer embarrassment. He left to go improve himself and he sold his tavern. His wife stayed in their hometown alone and dejected as he felt he was wholly defeated, by a horse no less.
And William went on to become a lumberer, and a fine lumberman he was, he chopped and chopped and chopped and he got so good at chopping down wood that the local forestfolk burned his house to the ground. So impactful was this act of retaliatory hatred that it inspired in William a whole new sense of anger against that horse who had wronged him.
So William left the forest and left the great Brythonnic Kingdom entirely and he went on outwards into the central lands. In this place he met some great fellows, among the beautiful pastures of Gaulicia. He met this fine fellow, a Gaul all in all. He was a farmer and he asked William what brought him so far and William told the fellow his story.
The Gaul had some sympathy so he took in our William and taught him the ways of farming. And William worked hard as a farmer for years, working so hard that he outworked all the peasants and caused a crisis when the Lord who owned them punished all the other farms for not performing like William’s farm. So the peasants all took up tools to go butcher the fellow before he decided it all became far too much for him and he left on from Gaulicia.
And through Visigothica he strode, confident and strong and intending more good. Here he met a battlement man, who stood guard against invaders. William told this fellow his story and the fellow heard him through and he said, ‘goodness fellow, you should flatten that horse with a rock!’ And so he showed William the ways of siege defense.
William learned every method of hurting fellows from the walls. And he was so learned that when the time came and a siege was put up against their castle by the Gauls, he stole all the glory of the Visigoths and was celebrated as the savior of their city. William thought this was great but really he was burning with revenge so he went off to the East into the remains of old Romagna.
The elves were rude as always so he didn’t stay long. He called them all cunts! And he walked on to the uplands of the Kobatoties and he met a mean fellow who was seeking his own revenge, and they drank and they laughed and they cried together and the fellow said to william one day: ‘You know fellow, I suppose the real love and friendship we find along our way to vengeance is far more meaningful than the revenge itself. So William kicked his ass and left and made his way up the Great Mountain and its icy slopes and its goatish mountain spirits and its legendary stone.
On the Great Mountain of the inner uplands William found the Oracle state of the Kobatoties. He demanded the seers to tell him his future and what he must do to get his revenge and they refused to answer him. He waited outside their temple for thirteen days and thirteen nights for the oracles to answer him. And on the thirteenth when he was hungry and cold and sick and dying he was welcomed within the halls of the oracles’ temple. The Great Temple of Duu Mogüt.
He healed for several nights, tended to by the holy seerservants and when he healed he was finally seen. He begged to know how he may take revenge on this terrible horse who disgraced his name. To know the beast’s name and know that he was just. He said, ‘Please, holy ones, let me be seen, let me hear of my future and know the truth to come, let me know what I must do to overcome my enemy, tell me his name,’ The head of those seers, adorned by a black veil crown, told him this:
William, fellow, your conquest of vengeance is justified by your own judgment. The gods have no say in this affair, your fate is yours to choose. Know this, child, the key of your revenge lies within you and you alone. Be well and be true. Also, his name is Barbarister the Incredible Horse, he’s quite impressive.
Now our William fellow did not take this well, in fact he took this quite terribly. So he sulked off down the mountain and back through the Kobatoties where he apologized to the vengeful fellow, and he went through the pompous ruins of Romagna spitting at all the elves, and between the old castles, welcomed and cheered by his old comrades. And then on through the gorgeous pastures full of angry Gauls he ran, and then back to his homeland of Brythonnia, and now he returned to his home with nothing but his old lumbering axe and he found this place deserted.
His home was a mere shadow of its former self, the people were all sick and tired and war had swept through and taken up all the boys and put them to death for war glory. So he came here and sat in his home and he found his old tavern all abandoned and empty. He came here and he set up and made things nice again and he worked.
And then, when everything was cleaned, the most terrible thing happened. A horse appeared. But not just any horse. The horse. The Horse, Barbarister, walked into his old tavern and said, ‘I’d like a beer.’ And the horse sat in front of the bar and waited.
William stared and stared and he cautiously grabbed his lumbering axe and our noseless protagonist worked up the courage to say something, anything, and eventually he said, ‘Horse, I just have one question for you.’
And William, he said, ‘Why did you bite my nose off all those years ago?’
And the horse thought deeply about this, recalling the long ago event which had impacted himself so little. William thought terribly hard about these years, his hard work trekking through nations without a horse because he was eternally afraid of them. He thought of the long nights in shady places and warm homes on his way to this very moment. His dedication to finding his revenge with the help of the Oracle’s knowledge, he braced himself for the answer.
Barbarister breathed deeply and made a little pshhh sound with his lips and he said, ‘Well, I thought you were somebody else.’
Grunch stared at Dumay for a moment and didn’t say anything. Dumay failed to suppress a wide and very amused grin and giggle.
The innkeeper asked with sincerity, “Is that it?” Which burst the dam of Dumay’s hand over his mouth and he began laughing uncontrollably hard at his own awful joke tale.
Grunch started laughing because he got the joke. In fact, he laughed so hard that he fell off his chair and slowly rolled on the floor, trying to regain composure while he laughed harder and harder.
The innkeeper said, “Don’t encourage him! That wasn’t funny at all!” And Dumay was doubled over laughing as well. Grunch was laughing so hard that he was now in pain and crying. He slapped the floorboards with hysterical laughing despair and struggled to do anything more than laugh.
Horse rocked her head back and forth and whinnied and neighed to join in on the fun. The innkeeper, unamused and quite annoyed to have his time wasted, went to the kitchen to escape the madness taking hold within his workplace and home. Grunch would eventually stop laughing with hurting sides and heavy breaths and a tight chest all full of giggles. Dumay asked, “How was that fellow? Good one, eh fellow?”
Grunch nodded and giggled and laughed some more and said, “Good one, fellow. Great one.”
