Dantino, The King Quaterer

“Don’t you care about the fact, that your sister is dead?” said Nadine to Tanner.

“Only as much as one a general to a private, besides her memories – her important ones, anyway – are backed up, I have all the meta-data I need. So how does it feel to die knowing you opened a bridge to another universe?” Tanner said, then asked his question rhetorically.

“Your not going to get away with this.” Nadine said, feeling her neck being rapped by the portable lunette of the guillotine gun. Her second sentence was interrupted, by a blade slicing through her small neck.

Nadine woke up in bed, she was crying.

“Rassie!” said Nadine.

“Wow, you’ve changed Nadine.” said Malcolm.

“And you haven’t.” said Nadine.

“‘Oh I miss her to, but I know you.”

“You remember when we lost Blanci?” said Malcolm.

“Yes, I still feel that.”

“Then think of the children you could have had, think of what children she could have had. She could have been a great mother.”

“I’m not disagreeing.”

It was the next month, that Nadine, Millie, Elena, and Malcolm met Ellen again. Ellen, who was working as a nerve splicer and tattoo artist, for moment felt jealousy coming on. But Nadine hugged her tightly, they kissing under the glow of the flickering L.E.D. light. Ellen slightly felt sympathy for Millie. They went home, to a darkness not quite darkness.

And had a threesome.

Malcolm dated Elena, missing the long lost Blanci.

Almost as if she was another Blanci. She and Elena went to go visit Blanci’s grave. Peculiarly, it was Malcolm that needed the most comfort.

Elena provided a warming hand on his cheek, and he placed a flower he had picked from Voreth’s Promise. The only one left in that world, and placed it on Blanci’s grave. She will live on in his memories till nevermore.

When Nadine herself went to see Blanci, it was with Ellen and Millie. Nadine somehow remained un-hardened despite all the seemingly long years of abuse within the nature of the game, the very realistic game of death. Ever sense, she became white as death. As a ghost. Like a platinum Katana, in it’s sheath. Whenever she hears Blanci’s and Rena’s name, she says:

“Nevermore.”

She published a song, To Nevermore:

On a

bed, sleeper’s

sleeping …

In their

head, dreamer’s

dreaming.

Of a

meadow light,

heaven.

It was the second date with Ellen, that her life became more bearable. Ellen held Nadine’s shoulders in a warm embrace, under the glow of the sunset on a distant shore. “Come with me Nadine,” she said, tenderly. Then just before the kiss. “where the meadow is always real on the other side.”

To the Meadow they went.

Nadine, Ellen, Millie, and Malcolm went to go visit the grave of their friend Blanci. Though Nadine in a way had experienced the feeling of loss like Malcolm, for her everything was entirely undone. It was almost as if trying to bring someone back from the dead, made the gaming gods, those eyes in the sky, hate her so. Malcolm is crying and kneeling at the little makeshift grave in a lesser known neck of the woods of the world underneath the sky of rows of city-streets. Where the meadow of gold is always shining, and gives a false sense of hope.

Nadine wished she did not try bringing back Millie.

As she remembered her only from the moment, she started game again.

Her mind was erased, and loved Nadine. Nadine pictures in her mind, running through the forest, where the fairies children are jumping rope. Where the everything was good and true, and everything was somehow better again.

Her new youth song.

There were few punishments that intimidated Dantino, least of all having one’s head chopped off by a sword in battle. When you raise an army of over twenty thousand strong, lining them up in Neo-Roman formation, it was difficult to be intimidated by much of anything. When he had captured princess Millie, he saw nothing but his future under the crown. Carefully, methodically, he plotted on the best way to make sure to completely and utterly break the royal family.

Generally, beheading was mostly reserved for noble, although the old king was generous to expand the swift demise to those who were of the merchant class, and eventually peasants were able to place their necks on he block rather than inside of a noose. But they were still forced to wear uncomfortable wooden shoes, stuffing them with driest of straw to keep themselves from getting splinters during the cold Winter season. Dantino remembered when he had first started for those goal. It was one of those campaigns anyone of good conscience would dread, for to be a soldier only those with the strongest of stomaches were allowed to take the challenge. A small group of thieves were ransacking the ancient temples, that had long been here before the invasion of the infected regions. Every day there was the thought that none of us would go home.

On the mount, they apprehended their leader, thrusting her neck on a chopping block after extracting a confession through exploiting man’s evolutionary fluke designed to protect their body. The ax tore through the flesh and bone of her neck, but it two four swings. You would think with all the executions he carried out on behalf of the king, the executioner would have enough experience. But there was something about this one that seemed almost deliberate. And there was something in the eyes of this rogue leader, that almost made him reconsider all the desires he had to kill the king. But he knew that, unlike the thieves, were who out gunned, eventually the royal family would come for him; they hounded him in his sleep.

Dantino tried requesting Millie’s hand in marriage, but to no avail. He supposed he couldn’t blame her, as he had chosen to behead her mother, and hang, draw, and quarter her father. But there was desire or even a mild pleasure in drawing all of the royal bloodline, until recently. Dantino knew that, was someone who had a sister myself who was unjustly accused by Millie’s father, it was no fun to grow up without someone to replace your parents. For Millie, Ellen, and Aldiel his instinct was complete mercy and benevolence. He demoted their status to the level of peasants sending them on their way, stripping of their rights of having bodyguards. As far as he knew at the time they made it to the town across the mountains near the north east sea just fine, and thriving.

Yet now, Millie had stolen something from him, that made him reconsider what amount of remorse he had for letting her go. She stole a picture of his little sister, who was beheaded by the king. Smirking, she accidentally knocked a crack in it, then tossed it into the wall to make a point. All those memories he had, that single image of his sister, broken into millions of pieces.

He wanted to kill Millie’s brother.

At the village over the mountains on the north east sea, his gathered up a force of 100,000 strong. He employed the best of the naval special forces officers, gathered the most bomber gliders employed by any army before. But there was one woman, a woman who seemed much more like a goddess than a human being, able to employ magic with her fingertips to manifest things in the air he could not dream of. Slowly it drove him mad trying to figure out how it was she was doing. Then he saw the tattoo on her body, that signified the worst of the worst. She had come from the human world, that split off from our own universe. Dantino had been taught about the humans from early age, though he wasn’t sure if it was just a myth. He didn’t recognize the other symbols, however she carried around a pair of head prods that allowed her to foresee my methods hours in advance.

It was almost as if she played this game before.

Almost as if she had no fear at all, as it was simply playing another level. She was just trying to make it through, because to fight me was merely tedious, and I was merely nothing to her. And that was the most maddening things of all, while Dantino rested in my bed with my replacement arm being a slightly rusted gauntlet and band of metal sheets. She treated fighting his men like it was a game, rather than something that was completely real.

Dantino was simply nothing to her.

He wanted that power, and after quartering the king, murdering Aldiel in the same fashion. He had nothing else to lose but whatever regrets he still had in keeping them alive. There was another lady, that stayed behind when they left in that flying machine built by the humans, carrying multiple godlike fire archers into the seen like a flying house. Dantino knew what intelligence gathering was, because he had employed the same practice against the royal family, and it was how he was able to gather the support for killing them. With a musket in hand, he tried shooting her from behind. But the gamer Nadine sliced open his cheek. He was blinded from the festering of that wound, leaving his good eye the only thing he could use to see.

But this woman, this other woman he tried to kill, Dantino managed to apprehend. He wanted to make a point to her. Rassie’s severed head now rests outside, although at this point the peasants have likely given it a soldiers burial with the highest honors that one may give to the fallen.

Dantino, they didn’t want him to go that quickly. But it was worth the price.

Eventually Dantino would die for the length of two years, and he was on his first month. He wished there was a way to get to the human world before this process takes its course. Generally your limbs would be gradually replaced by suit of armor replacements for those parts. For him it was his right arm, that had always been his bad one. But he knew that soon the peasants would come after him again, an army employed by the new Queen Millie. Even if Millie was more merciful, the crowd was not. So he needed a way to cross the barrier between this universe, Voreth’s Promise, and the real world the Nadine referred to as mother Earth.

He found this opportunity.

But he needed to hurry.