Let Us Consider An Ugly Soul

BOYFRIEND rides at a trot through the gloom, sheathing his fiery brand, Hartgalven, and dousing thus the sunbeam by which he rode. In more ancient days, its steel was by cunning smiths imbued with Rare Temper (+20 Fire Damage, +100 Visibility, Undead ≤ Level 20 flee). The far feebler torches of the Northengalven Stables bob ahead of him in the sudden dark. Stablehands run forward, hailing their Earl and taking the reins from him as he dismounts his faithful steed, Plato. His Vizier comes panting, torchlight dancing on the gold plate in his alchemist’s cap, tangling in his whorled beard. The Vizier opens a dialogue.

Vizier Wigerin: Earl Harnoen! Earl Harnoen! Kluneimon smiles on you. Oh hurry! You must come!

Boyfriend: What is it?

Vizier Wigerin: Your wife! You must come! Oh hurry!

The dialogue option terminates, and the Vizier scuttles off into the shadows, toward the guards posted on either side of the steel-battened door. Boyfriend follows. Both guards are triggered by his proximity and blurt over each other:

Guard: Kluneimon smiles on you.

Guard: Strange doings on a full moon, my Earl.

Boyfriend follows the Vizier through the barbican into the inner bailey that rings the North Castle like a great donut, glazed with snow. The market square is a thin disc of crushed ice, its wooden kiosks and stalls empty of all but the cruel wind. The city’s trade, and the harsh rents Boyfriend levies on his tenants, generate a perpetual stream of gold into his coffers. But, as it is now the small hours, Boyfriend’s beloved NPCs–usually bumping around the stalls and spewing the same half dozen scripted phrases from a grab-bag of archaisms–are all asleep. The Vizier doesn’t dally, though, so Boyfriend runs after him, past the apothecary’s, the blacksmith’s and the publichouse. The North Castle mounts its hill behind the low stone buildings, rendering detail as Boyfriend approaches. Through the portcullis and past another pair of sentries, across the haystrewn inner bailey, peopled with targets and wooden dummies, to the base of the donjon towering over the keep like a tombstone. Yet another pair of guards open the doors at their approach.

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The Vizier materializes in a large hall, candlelight flickering on Northengal banners. Tankards, slathered plates and crusts of bread lie scattered on the long, beerhall table. A small huddle of Boyfriend’s advisors, burghers and clingers-on render suddenly, the assemblage deposited mid-posture as if by God, or Rodin. The Vizier leads him down the great hall, and Boyfriend narrowly dodges the many condolences and renewals of fealty from his courtiers and proceeds down a long stone corridor hung with moth-eaten tapestries depicting the deeds of his forebears. At the end, the Vizier turns and bows beside the entry. Boyfriend throws open the heavy, oaken door to his chambers.

The fourposter sits in the middle of the room, the heavy curtains hanging thereon rent to shreds. Boyfriend approaches and tosses aside the torn coverlet. A rude stone icon lies where his wife ought to, the size, and very near the shape, of a heart. The black stone is speckled with white mineral deposits, and carved in likeness of an ancient, savage goddess: Amorifai, Patroness of the Wodfolk, crosslegged, her seven eyes closed serenely, fangs protruding from her lips, a bow in one hand and a snake in the other. Her bare breasts hang low over her ribs, and the icon’s head, half again its total size, is adorned with a crown of brambles, and numerous piercings.

(Press A)

Boyfriend presses A and adds the statuette to his inventory.

“So that’s your wife?” Girlfriend asks, coming over to sit on the couch with him.

“Yeah, Sith,” Boyfriend says, “The elf lady in the south turned her into a statue.”

“Aw. I liked her.”

“Haha. I’m sure I get to turn her back.” Boyfriend approaches the Vizier and opens a dialogue.

Vizier Wigerin: My Earl… Words cannot express…

Boyfriend: What have you got for sale? [Selected]

How was it done? [Optional]

Vizier Wigerin: Potions, spells—and Dust, of course…

Boyfriend spends a few minutes perusing the Vizier’s inventory, comparing the items’ stats with his own. He buys the spelltome Spitfire (+50 fire damage per second), Potion of Plentiful Healing (x5), Potion of Plentiful Manna (x5), and 6 packets of Dust for 122 Gold.

Vizier Wigerin: You would do well, my Earl, to curtail the use of Dust.

Boyfriend: I can stop whenever I want…! [Optional]

How was it done? [Selected]

What have you got for sale? [Optional]

Vizier Wigerin: They infiltrated your keep, plainly. Whoever transfigured your wife has a skillful hand in the magick arts of Alteration and Illusion. They may have secreted themselves here in the form of a bird, for instance…

Boyfriend: Have you questioned the guards?

Vizier Wigerin: Of course, my Earl. Nobody saw anything out of the ordinary, until that blind old crone of Sith’s came to bring her her breakfast.

Boyfriend: Hunar?

Vizier Wigerin: Well, you see, my Earl; when first she made report of Sith’s condition, ‘twas thought that Hunar herself had cast the loathsome spell. Many of the men believed the crone, already advanced in age when they were yet young, a witch; and… well…

Boyfriend: What happened to Hunar? [Selected]

Blasphemy! Who spreads such lies? [Optional]

My wife would nary consort with a witch–Wizard. [Optional]

Vizier Wigerin: She was placed in pillory, my Earl; ‘twas supposed she would confess in time. By the time we returned for her, I fear…

Boyfriend: Well?

Vizier Wigerin: She’d died of exposure.

Boyfriend: You should bend a knee and beg my forgiveness. [Optional]

Do you have any leads? [Selected]

Vizier Wigerin: Just this my Earl. The totem is imbued with strange magick—Wodfolk magick. Wulfoen believes this to be the work of Lonairula, Lady of the Wodfolk—and I heartily concur.

Boyfriend: Leave me. I must think. [Selected]

What have you got for sale? [Optional]

Vizier Wigerin: Posthaste, my Earl. But, pray pardon, a final word of warning. I know not what effect the totem will have on you; what ill luck, slow poison, or sudden leach of your powers or health is in store. The spell upon it does not yield to… traditional methods. I am sure it is no boon to you, my Earl.

And with that, the Vizier bows and leaves. Boyfriend opens his inventory and takes a packet of Dust. His vision goes violet; ghostly blue footprints, as if drops of alcohol fire, lead from the rent curtains of his fourposter to the narrow window carved in the thick wall. Too narrow for a man, even a Wodman, to fit through. He equips the Amorifai totem and stands turning it over in his hands. The white minerals in the stone are leaking the blue light.

“Why’s everything purple?” Girlfriend asks, looking up from the blanket she’s knitting for her baby cousin.

“It’s this stuff called Dust. It’s like a drug, but it puts the user closer to the Magick realm, so you can like see where spells were cast, that kind of thing.”

“Ah. Like the ‘spice’ in Dune.”

“Exactly! Trouble is, I’m addicted, and it affects my stamina and strength. When I go a long time without it, it gives me special dialogue options. Like I get to flip out on people when I’m having withdrawals, haha.”

“You’re basically a Mournfall meth-head.”

“Hahaha, yeah basically,” Boyfriend says, drawing on his vape pen again. He pulls the right trigger by accident and hucks the statue across the room where it cracks in half against the stone wall like a geode.

“Oh shit! I broke my wife!”

“What?”

“I accidentally threw her!”

“Haha. So… you’re single now?”

“Pshh.”

Boyfriend walks over to the statue, halved on the ground. The broken halves shine with magick, bright as torches. He adds them to his inventory and starts prowling around his chambers, looking for blue light through the violet gloom. He throws open the wardrobe but finds only his own formal dress, his wife’s numerous gowns. Boyfriend retreats to the table and looks over the rolled parchments, quills and inkstand: nothing but Sith’s letters. The violet light intensifies, turning red with his increasing heartbeat; the Dust is timing out. Boyfriend turns again to the bed, blue light pulsing beneath it. He crouches and toggles to first person POV.

There is a Wodfolk arrow beneath the bed, a scroll tied round its shaft. The haze hardens to a dull, opaque purple, thins to lilac and finally disperses. The room spins. Boyfriend grabs the arrow and unties the message:

Beware the Fox

When he adds the message to his inventory, the arrow sticks itself in his breast, drawing half his health in an instant.

“The fuck?” Boyfriend says. “Hm...”

He goes to his bed and sleeps for an hour, restoring his health and curing three diseases he didn’t realize he had. Then Boyfriend leaves his chambers and heads down the hall again, takes the stairs down another flight and enters his armory. A smith works the forge in the corner. Boyfriend goes to the workbench and spends a 132 Gold repairing his weapons and armor. Girlfriend yawns.

“You getting sleepy, babe?”

“Uhh, yeah,” Boyfriend says, drawing deeply on his pen again. Then coughs violently, squinting through the tears and vapor to save his game.

HOW to describe this man, this ‘Boyfriend’? Where to begin? He’s a gamer, though not a good one. ‘Verbose’ is an understatement. And his blondness is rather striking. All his life long the comments have rolled in on this theme, this unsought attention which he now feels even more heightened in the gradual but unmistakable thinning of that eye-catchingly golden fleece. The blueness of his eyes and fairness of his skin, in this connection, have never failed to raise the question of his ancestry, in both polite and vulgar company—which he doesn’t actually know, his ancestry, to be honest, but the word ‘Aryan’, and the Sieg Heil, got thrown around a lot by his classmates in school. Girlfriend calls him ‘thicc’, and grabs his ass with relish; not that he minds.

He climbs well, as in rocks, and runs 9 to however-many-he-can-muster miles each week. He paints with oils, and reads to fill the void of his religion. There is no cuisine his stomach has not appropriated to the nourishment of his body. His temper and his patience grapple endlessly behind his furrowed glare, of which RBF he is, alas, quite unconscious. He checks those indulgences which he cannot justify, and revels in those he can.

All his life long, he’s been subject to an exaggerated, abiding terror, which in turn has yielded exasperating displays of his bravery. Performative emotional fireworks oft ensue. Boyfriend’s power of reason, such as it is, is decidedly more associative than logical; he delights in characterizing his life according to a fluid ecology of impressions, emoting for the sake of it, recklessly cresting the waves of giddiness and fury, gluttony and exertion, that trouble his not-so placid seas, trading masks of asceticism and bohemianism at different hours of the day like observing matins, vespers, compline. He plays chess but is not good at it; he reads the Rationalists, but does not understand them; and he codes, another yeoman of his era, not by the clear and distinct light of reason but by trial and error, StackOverflow, and Youtube tutorial.

All of which is roughly to say that this man, this Boyfriend, is as thoroughgoing an empirical hedonist as you could ask for, an Epicurean, making his slipshod way through a not so treacherous life, introducing a little treachery now and then for ostensibly aesthetic purposes or more honestly for the thrill of it, cataloguing his experience all the while, self-assured that this searching entomology of experience, a truly Millennial methodology (in his opinion), is his first and favorite birthright. He wends through the tall grass of Life with his specimen jars, safari hat on his head and zinc on his nose, hunting down sensations to pin to his examination board, to sketch their anatomies and speculate at their properties—even, perhaps, their uses.

It is through this long application of his head against that wall, Experience, that he has come to his surprising, if sometimes impressionistic, Self-Knowledge. But perhaps it’s best to start with his times, isolated from which context this ‘Boyfriend’ of ours cannot, properly speaking, be known.

To wit—

IT’S 2020, 2021. Who can remember? Covid Times. Everyone is fat and sad. “Two weeks to flatten the curve,” eh, Guvnah? Half the population—the Masked—won’t leave home if they can avoid it, and certainly not without hiding their face, their hands raw with sanitizer. Unless they’re “peacefully demonstrating.” Boyfriend is sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed everywhere, but remains obstinate in his skepticism about the social utility of, say, arson, and the many tacit assertions by the more vociferous SJWs haunting the message boards that Social Justice and Sars-CoV-2 share no jurisdiction. Why need protestors not worry themselves with social distancing, Boyfriend asks, annoyingly? Does injustice inoculate you to viruses, or just common sense? Are the demonstrators truly there for justice, he insists on wondering, or has demonstration become a pretense to escape quarantine restrictions, with a political prerogative conveniently immune to question or criticism?

Of course, besides the 32 flavors of Marxists, Antifa posers and Antiracists on the news and in the streets, fear herds the remaining lefties into their homes like dogs into their pens. Ah, the oft-scorned Libtard, cowering in his home, with his veneer of dignity! That meekly compliant, tax-paying, voting asshole! Boyfriend (a registered democrat) is keen to reclaim this pejorative, this ‘Libtard’, not unlike certain other Words of Power he is not entitled to use, though he has been known to, under the influence of certain chemical compounds. It is a gift, says he; a gift to the foes of Dolor… Why not use this slur against The Enemy?

Speaking of, that other great American contingency, the MAGA nuts, Q-Anon freaks, 2nd Amendment fanatics, ProLifers, Antivaxxers and Antimaskers, the Libertarians (sorry, Chomsky), the Nazis and Conspiracy Theorists, or, in a word, the REPUBLICANS–Frau Blücher!–have thoughtfully refused the shutters of quarantine life, and proudly go about barefaced, arm in openly armed arm, in search of ‘normalcy.’ They’ve done their research, by God, and die by thousands, martyrs all to own the heathen Lib! Churches and gun ranges operate at full capacity.

A young couple, 20-somethings (well, late 20-somethings), scarcely a year into their unwittingly grown-up relationship, move from the hills of Tennessee to Boston, Massachusetts, to escape the dueling charades of normalcy and justice (and rising infections) in Nashville, and watch from afar as their friends contract, one by one, the infernal Plague. They bring their cat…

The cat sits habitually hunched over her folded limbs, her scarcely drawn breath evidenced by the gentle rise and spill of fat beneath her medium-length, calico coat: sienna splotches striped with dark salt’n’pepper grain over white ventral lining, pink detailing in the nose, finger-beanz, nipples. She has green eyes, all her claws, no ovaries. Sweet when she wants to be, Elvira, aka ‘Evie,’ aka ‘Evil,’ was found in the parking lot of a gas station and traded for clout over Facebook Market Place, with great displays of performative virtue on all sides, no follow-through of course from any party except that of Evil’s passive inheritor, Girlfriend, on the occasion of her lease (and roommate) running out. This was early on, during the Toilet-Paper Scare, when the Republicans, skirmishing for January 6 perhaps, stormed Walmart Supercenters far and wide like starving refugees pawing at relief workers, looking for every last roll they could hoard from the other hoarders, or possibly sell at a good ol’ fashioned American markup.

Evil then made her torturous journey from Nashville to Boston, yowling a pitiless, brain-piercing invective for 18 straight hours, paralyzed but by no stretch sedated by the vet’s prescription, screaming right into her little 450 ft2 prison on Saint Mary’s Street, park adjacent. That was 10 months ago. She’s taken, lately, to punitive measures when feeling under-stimulated; namely, pissing between the couch cushions.

Enter Boyfriend.

He rises from bed at a groggy 6:32 am, eyes sticky and dehydrated, after snoozing severally his several alarms. Need we specify that the alarms are on his iPhone? Nay. Boyfriend walks out of the room, stretching and yawning, pleased with himself. He has an hour or so before logging into work in which he may read, play chess on his phone, or possibly—write?

Need we specify that work is remote?

Boyfriend walks out of the bedroom, goes to the electric kettle on the table, still half-full from the day before, and flips the switch. He turns and takes the Twelve StepsTM to the other side of his apartment and fetches down a chipped mug that reads ‘Grampa’ in brown Cooper Black font, poorly kerned. Possibly a relic from a predigital age, origins unknown. Boyfriend takes the mug to the kitchen table and sets it down, smiling at Evil, curled up watchfully on the duffel bag he keeps his paraphernalia in when not actively smoking. Or, in other words, a duffel as empty as the gesture of moderation it represents. Need we specify weed?

Boyfriend tears open a tea packet (Twinings of London, 100% Pure Black Tea, Irish Breakfast) and sets the bag in the Grampa mug, opens the chess app and moves a pawn incorrectly, says ‘ah’ quietly to himself as the app informs him of his (?) Mistake. After a minute’s meditation he carefully (??) Blunders : Nd4, Bxd4. He frowns, castling. Boyfriend looks at the boiling glass kettle and lifts it from its base, pours steaming water in his mug and walks—fatally—to the couch. He’s just starting to wonder if he’d rather play Mournfall before work when Boyfriend sits down in a damp patch of cold catpiss, invisible on the black cushion cover.

Action: Reaction—