the Dice Parlour

On the morning after the undead had been vanquished from the marketplace village, Cedric the Emerald Knight awoke in the quiet dawn. He alone heard a strange lure song from the woods. Without a word, he followed it, leaving behind time, reason, and his companions. Meanwhile, Veylan the Moss Knight joined the others, seeking the same purpose, as Cedric ventured deeper.

After the matter of the Black Swan, the villager fled from the shore and back among the houses, there to bar his door and gather his own close about him. All the village was troubled and afraid, for night had come suddenly upon them with the song of the black swan, and no hearth in that place was left at ease.

The company rested beside the market village, near the place where they had cast down the shambling dead. Yet the folk they had saved were not so grateful as a tale might prefer. Fear had not made them noble, only sour, and they seemed scarcely to understand how nearly death had taken them all. Thus the knights found little honour in that place, though they had purchased the villagers’ lives with steel and peril.

Till was set to first watch after the searchers departed, and the knights laid themselves down upon the heath. Yet Nikolaos, the Dove Knight, woke before dawn to the sound of heavy snoring. Till had fallen asleep at his post.

I grew up in the nineties—a round-faced kid staring wide-eyed at the vibrant sci-fi and fantasy miniatures in the early editions of Warhammer. The colors were loud. The worlds were strange. The promise felt infinite. The far-future battlefields of Warhammer 40,000 and the claustrophobic underhive skirmishes of Necromunda were particularly formative to me.

Three knights, each newly bound to fate by their respective seers, were called to a distant land across the sea—a place where glory, myth, and peril were promised in equal measure. Each had been told only this: travel to the appointed shore, wait, and cross into the Meadowlands.