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The Bogus Wars (pt. 1)

King Dude the Hella Rad looked down on the battlefield, at the dead strewn from corner to corner, the groans of the nearly dead and dying floated up to his ears so that he could hear them later on the many sleepless nights he would suffer until he joined them in their dying.

“Wack.” The King said, sadness draped heavily over the word like so many thick blankets on a winter bed.

“The most wack your Radness,” agreed his attendant Robin the Sicknasty, “King Badass must be stopped. His army threatens all people, his men are monsters and lame jerks. Though it is most un-rad to die it is much less rad to die without fighting against lameness.” Robin had never seen her King like this, full of doubt and negativity. It was most unlike the King to be anything other than radical, Robin could not help but think that moping was anything but radical.

The King sighed as he dropped from his saddle, “Word Robin, spoken most wisely. But I still wonder, what brought us to this? How did we fall so far to be so (dare I say it?) lame?” the pain was obvious in the King’s voice as he removed his helm and placed it on his saddle, he wanted to see this with eyes open and unguarded.

Robin gasped, “My liege! You are not lame!” she said as she dismounted her own horse, tying her own lead as well as the King’s to a nearby post (the last remains of the command tent now buried in mud and trampled over by man and beast alike).

The King rounded on Robin, his arms swept wide in defiance. “Is not war lame? Am I not making war? Are not the people that I swore to always protect dying in the lamest of ways? Am I not alive to walk and enjoy the world while they are to be buried in pits of twenty each?” he pointed out at the field of the dead, Robin averted her gaze (in shame or in fear she did not know), “I am LAME Robin, lame as fuck!” The King’s anger rose like an turbulent sea and just as quickly ebbed out leaving only the high tide of sadness upon the monarch’s face. “I am the most lame.” He whispered to the wind as he turned to walk down to the field.

The mud had started to solidify but was still lose in many places from the churning of hundreds of feet and the rain of falling blood, of both man and horse alike. Their suffering would stain this land for years to come (if only in the King’s own mind). The King’s boots squelched through the mud and gore as he looked on the faces of the men and women who had died in his stead. “A liar is what I am,” thought the King to himself as he tried to burn the faces he saw into his mind, “a liar and a coward. This should never have happened, it never would have happened at all if…” his thoughts trailed off as he saw something that drained everything from his body, a corner of red cloth sticking out from under a pile of dead soldiers.

The King ran, falling and flailing through the mud and bodies as he fought his way to the pile of corpses. In the distance, as though in another world, he heard Robin’s voice calling to him (or someone else, or in general, he did not know) but all he could hear was the vigorous pumping of his own heart in his ears. Like the beat of a funeral drum, like the scream of cannons, like his father’s feet upon their home’s floor when he came home stinking of drink, the banging of his heart could not silence the thought that was clawing its way up his spine into his mind. Cold and sharp it rose, like a whisper, not loud enough for understanding and only just loud enough for hearing. When he reached the stinking pile of limbs and offal he grasped at the piece of red cloth, his gauntlets making his fingers clumsy and unwieldy. He stripped the gauntlets from his hands and threw them away behind him only vaguely aware of the scratches that the expertly crafted metal had left on his royal hands. Blood already welling to the surface was ignored as he plunged those same hands deep into the intestines of a man with a scar across the entirety of the right side of his face, not caring whether he was one of his own subjects or one of King Baddass’s he threw the ruined remains aside. He dug, he dug through blood and bone, all the while the voice grew louder and louder, colder and colder, it was still beyond his hearing but was beginning to clarify. Finally he reached the bottom of the pile and, like the sun rising above the horizon, he could finally hear the word as he looked down on the ruined corpse of his own son. “Bogus!” screamed the voice, “Bogus!” screamed the crushed face of his beloved Seth, “BOGUS!” screamed the King as he knelt in the blood and mud. Tears began to streak down his royal face just as the rains began to fall.

Today was truly the most bogus of days, a day of bullshit that would be known from that point forward as the day King Dude the Hella Rad swore to kill King Badass no matter the cost, the day that The Bogus Wars truly began.

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