In that kingdom shining of glistering gold and pristine marble was a capital of no equal at its heart. Its walls lined from gable to gable with filligree too intricate and frescoes too theatric to resemble anything plausible in nature. Amongst the denizens of this locale were the monarch and her bethroved. Though born into nobility, their titles are no more than a myriad of responsibilities the two fulfill until the inevitability of their deaths. In the halls of the royal manor where they abide in treks the young princess, firstborn of their royal family.

On most days, the young lady follows her scholarly pursuits, as is befitting of a noble of her adolescence. On other days, she makes her rounds of the royal grounds, reliving the same scenes and sights, oblivious to the history that surrounds her.

At a distance, a humanoid mechanism resembling the young princess’ own tithe, slender physique stands by with a guard’s eye. The contraption towers at a near five heads taller than the princess with the mechanism’s own head being smooth in silhoutte disturbed only by a pair of bulging horns carved in place of the forehead. This harmonic symmetry of construction ran downwards even onto the fabric that draped over the body from the base of the neck. Sharing even the same embellishment of features of the capital walls, having no less the same propensity for sophistication.

Beneath the fabric hid the bulk of the contraption’s form, proportions like that of nothing else, distinctly and uniquely its own. Attached to the neck was a steel frame curved like the pod of seeds encapsulated in the same lustre like that of the head. From the sides stretched two long, drawn out arms, as if their bones have been flattened and pulled apart to length.

The full reach of these contortions would only extend with its armaments equipped, as the young princess would come to learn when the sharpened steel within came unsheath and dripped with crimson from their impalement through the skulls of wolfdogs. Her legs stood frozen in place and her breath drawn from her lungs whilst the young pups be made dead and her skirt slathered in coats of the canines’ fluids. Before her child mind had compressed the flashes of sights, sounds, and smells of viscera the contraption had its armaments withdrawned and its position returned and simply waited for the continuation of their trek.

She never much left the royal grounds after that day.

It was only a decade of years ago that the younger princess would run her fingers under lines of words as she read them during lessons of history, reading accounts of a queen two generations before her sharing the contraption’s name.

By the text of books, QUEEN AMIETA would be known for her aptitude for persuasion and politics, compelling her enemies to work against their wills even in the midst of heated battle only for them to lay down their arms with no hesitation.

In truth, the once queen kept the quiet of peacetime to the extent her people’s lusts would permit, never was her patience to cajole not tested. In the fervor of war, her savage freneticism became the first to penetrate the oppostions’ rank and file, the habit of marring defenses with barrages of engines of siege and soldiers of war became as familiar to her as the act of breathing. In her final hours, in her push towards the enemy against unforgiving decline, she arrives at an exchange— victory at the cost of her own life and the lives of her company.

With death came burial, and with it came mourning, and the nation did mourn when their queen was laid to rest dressed in her attire of armor in place of the sordid melancholy typical of a royal coffin, as was traditional of a warrior. Along side her the flag of her nation laid over what remained of her now sallow face, an attempt of vanity to hide the deathblow of her demise.

Upon her epitaph sat the words—

AMIETA, 44TH QUEEN OF GEUPHIA, THE BULL OF HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL REGIMENT AND GUARD.

Loving Mother and Wife.

Mere days after the late queen’s demise, THE KNIGHT OF AMIETA became unveiled to the nation, a walking cenotaph to fuel the furore of lust for the retribution of their queen’s demise commissioned by the king himself to be made. Naturally, this was a hunger well sated when the instrument’s twin blades were sent to cleave through the ones responsible for her death by the scores.

It is the annual coming of her passing where masses gather throughout the kingdom to sojourn in parades of celebration from the first light of dawn to the last star of the night sky. Sounds of children cheering as they revel in the lack of schoolwork commonplace any other day fill the streets whilst the uninnocuous rhetoric of their elders in spite of rivaling nations, once lived and still living, continuously find their way into earshot.

There is no mention made of Queen Amieta, whither in name or title.

To all this the young princess sits in static contemplation, knowing enough to bear witness to her own ignorance yet still unable to actualize her unknownings. Her predecessor’s phantom, the very idea of her once existance, only being perceived as no more than that, neither her subjects nor her own daughter capable of conveying any small semblance of personal patois with the woman that was, save only for the mention that the mechanism accompanied her before the young princess’ own birth.

To this puzzlement that walking edifice of steel and ceramic remains silent, fulfilling its duty of stolid protection and no more, only deviating from its statuesque form at the occasional sound of beck and call. Compelled in a state of desperation for epiphany, the young lady finds herself facing the contraption in the dead of night.

It doesn’t waver in her presence.

Of course, the Knight would gain no sudden voice for conversation, no exchange of thoughts to be had nor ideas to be shared, the princess knows this. Her fingertips crawl throughout the Knight’s architecture, grazing every seam for even the smallest crevice to be pry wide. Though presuming the Knight’s form to communicate a message yet made known, she only finds herself impressed by the quality of craftsmanship.

Her search moves overhead and the need for better vantage is realised. The young lady thrusts herself upwards onto the machine, careful not to let the fabric of her clothes become caught on the plates of armor nor to stain the Knight’s own veil. For a moment, she is convinced her momentum would overcome the Knight’s steady.

It doesn’t.

Her ignorance again dawns on her with closer inspection of the Knight’s form giving way to more subtle, minute aspects of constructions seemingly left in plain sight yet not too apparently as to catch the attention of the eye. Shadowed by the distractive nature of the horns and hidden beneath the sprawling web of auriferous filligree were gaps in the ceramics’ width where the eyes of one’s head would lie, forming an effaced visor of some sort. Thinking to peer through the pitch black of the night into the hollow of the contraption’s head, the princess leans closer towards the Knight’s head, squinting her eyes to match the slit.

In that moment of distraction, the princess’ posture wavers and her footing now misplaced, but not before she catches glimpse of a pair of hoary beads behind the slit. She is about to fall onto herself, she knows this. Her instincts brace her for the crash of fall, but her mind lingers on the contents behind the the visor, the sight of eyes not so mechanical, so lifeless, so utterly lack of soul as the contraption that she had thought possessed it.

Then she waits for the cold of stone, one that doesn’t arrive.

Her lungs hold their breath for the brunt of pain, only to realize the Knight’s arms curled around her. For a moment, she unclenches herself, convinced of her safety. The contraption’s figure now loomed over her as if a mother over a baby’s crib, but she feels no comfort of affection, and a fear whelms her. A fear of the Knight, that its actions erratic and intents illegible to read that screamed at her not to commit the same sin of briskness as those wolfdogs before her.

With a grace unnatural of a machine, the princess’ feet is met with the ground.

And without so much as a second to compress the minutes of events to memory, the princess espies a faint lamplight pouring out from the architrave of the nearby hallways. In the spur of manic, by a means of motion beyond her notice, the Knight had already

returned itself to posture and the princess is left alone in her precarity. Knowing that her absence from her chambers would raise suspicion to her endeavours, the young lady storms back under her bedsheets, careful not to sound the slightest hint of her presence. When that figure in the hall stepped into her chambers, the princess would seemingly be sound asleep, unphased by the light of lantern.

“Are you awake, dear?”

Softly, the figure says, in the voice of the princess’ mother. For a moment, she pauses in her mind to think.

She keeps to her slumbering appearance, and the door become shuts.

Now with the glimpse of those pearls of washed out greys in her mind she becomes more adamant to peel away at the Knight’s enigma, a desire stagnant in inaction so long as the gibbous moon sojourned in the night sky. Her head sinks, and her mind drifts, both into reluctant sleep, yet again too naive to actualize her unknowings even as they are made known to her.

The morning light pours through the gaps of curtain, but only barely, and the princess is already awake, and to find the Knight absent. She surmises only one suspect.

Little do the two of mother and daughter exchange in a manner of genuine affection of one another for their lives so rarely intertwined amidst the choatic order of all things in the royal family. Even in their rare conversation, thoughts are taciturn, and words obeisant. Her ask was simple, without glib or falsehoods, but some prescient sense of her mind already knew the answer.

“We’ve had to move her, dear. I’m afraid we can’t spare Amelia any longer from the war efforts. I hope you can understand, can’t you?”

It is clear to the princess her mother’s tone is not one of request, and she nods to her in remonstrance, and takes her leave, just as her mother leaves her with a final remark. One that the princess would quickly make into practice through abstinence of distraction in her routine, never again to be found pondering of untied threads and wandering out of appropriate hours.

In that young nation of New Geuphia, warring for glistering gold and pristine marble of lands far off lied a young princess, one of youth becoming grown. She spoke as she wrote and wrote as she read and she read only that othes before her had written. The young lady was only herself, yet she takes after her mother, and will become like her grandmother, for this is the young nation of New Geuphia.

Look, nobody just wants to sign up to be a guinea pig, alright? Especially not to get toyed around for some hoity-toity eggheads working for the government. When the rest of us had our boots on the ground in Normandy, these college types kept their cuffs clean playing “nukular physics”. But when they started handing out blank checks to everyone, I told them what I told my C.O.— “Sir, yes, sir.”

The job was easy— “Shut up, listen, and respond when asked”, just like back in the corps.

“We’d like to start off by seeing how well you’ll do with this New World thing.” This real scrawny little one tells me.

“For the next couple weeks, just... do. Do whatever comes to mind, anything you want— just don’t break any laws.” Some other, older geezer goes on. “Just remember to jot it all down here.” Then he passes me this this brick with the word “JOURNAL” sprawled out on the front. I think this is what the kids call “being meta”.

They didn’t gimme much else when they booted me out the nest— clothes on my back, 4000 dollars cash for the month, and an address. A place to sleep I think, and it’s just across town. I thought I’d hop a taxicab and be there in a minute flat but I don’t see jack, so I say “screw it” and just walk.

I don’t make it 10 feet down the road before my gut starts biting bullets, no surprise though, haven’t had a bite since ’52, HA. I try to chuckle but the cheek meat’s still stiff, nothing Paddy’s brew won’t fix. Man’s diner is top of the line— “Food for the soul, coffee for the go, AND CASH ONLY!!!” He said to me the same morning I got shelved.

Think I’ll stop by, grab a bite and say hi.

Just when I turn the corner, I see this... huge, and I mean HUGE drive-in movie thing all the way up off the ground... ’cept there’s no projector, and it’s got these fancy colours— red, blue, yellow, green, purple, pink, orange, brown, and on and on and on and on and on and on and I just... stood there.

When I saw them, all of them, dozens, hundred even, everything else just fades like gunshots on the battlefield. The only thing you remember is the flash, the lights, the colours. All of them bouncing around here and there then over there— it’s like the whole damn city was breathing, moving, LIVING... like I was finally li—

“Ah, shit, so—”

“Aight, man. We good.”

He chuckles off and hits the corner before I even finish. We knock shoulders for a second, a breath maybe, but it’s like I knew him my whole life. His tan was like hot chocolate, smooth, dark, just enough to make you want a second taste. His clothes, like nothing I’ve ever seen before on another man, no shirt pocket, no button ups, no army green, no dirt or mud or grime or blood...

...there’s a reason for the uniform, for the training, for the marching. They want— NEED us to be... uniform, predictable, EASY TO CONTROL. Down to how we dressed, how we ate, how we walked, how we talked. It was how we lived, how we survived on the front, because it was all of us or none at all, because if just one of us walked, we all would.

But not him, no, not this greaser. There was no uniform, no marching boots, no Jody shouts, no rifles, no C.O., no gunshots, no bullet to the knee, just... him, like nothing else in the world mattered.

Before I know it, I’m at the end of the line and all outta road. Just a day ago, it was big neon signs and shiny chrome streaks and stools by the bar and a jukebox that ate quarters. Today, its metal benches and outdoor tables and something called “Spotify” blasting away.

I swing the door open, waiting for the bell hanging off the wall to ring, to hit me like those waves did when the Higgin’s door dropped... and nothing happens.

“You folks still do the Paddy Special?”

The dame smirks at me and chuckles. “Not since my grandpa died.”

“Aw shit I’m—”

“But I’ll put it in, special order, on the house.”

“Yeah, thanks doll.” I smirk back at her.

I get myself a seat, right in the middle of it all, and I really BREEEEEEEEath, and I tell myself—

“—I'm gonna be alright, it's all gonna be perfect.”

“COME GATHER 'ROUND, PEOPLE WHEREVER YOU ROAM AND ADMIT THAT THE WATERS AROUND YOU HAVE GROWN...”