*

-From the personal correspondences of Left Hand King Rawaahjun Who Kills The Eternal (3821 - 3719 B.P.):

"Strength be upon you, Young Jazeer, Son of Reekashuur, who to me is a third cousin.

As most likely has reached your ears, from the lamentations spreading through the limbs of our domain, King Juthaatu Who is The Fourth Claw, Mine Venerable Master, and so on, has retreated to The Cycle.

As he once chose me on the eve of his own teacher’s passage, I have now elected you, who, upon the reception of this letter, is to become my princely apprentice and, should you survive me, which you likely won't, a king.

I offer no congratulations, this being neither a sentence, as you mistake in the present, nor a reward, as you’ll mistake later, but a certainty.

Instead, what I offer to ponder through your sombre prelude is a dream.

Once, during my own training, I happened to let slip to my teacher one of these strange visions that play upon the abyss of heavy eyelids. Juthaatu, during the discipline that followed, warned me to never share again, on pain of death. In the exchange of dreams, he insisted, a man entwines his destiny with another’s. As in these nocturnal fantasies ideas conjoin so readily, so conjoins the fate of two souls that dare to bear them witness. My destiny he did not wish to share, weak and wretched as I was.

But now Juthaathu is dead, while I, who live, spit upon his advice and his memory.

Soon, Jazeer, you will be conducting the pilgrimage north, to our Holy Mount Asuuhla. That is the so-called birthplace of our race, and where we two shall soon meet for the first rites of your initiation. It was there, to the mountain, that my dreaming flew me last night…"

*

The Left Hand Kings had risen amongst a people attempting their own balance of order and the transgression of order that maintained it.

The Tasheezi Empire had ruled the present Heimland region from 4574 BP in Saana’s chronology to 3539. Throughout their reign, they’d employed a rare six-way separation of powers, splitting their strength across six co-kings of sibling dynasties, each controlling an anatomically-named branch of the government.

Domestic politics were governed by a ‘Head King’, and infrastructure by a Skeletal-Venous-System King (while clunky in English, this was a unified concept and one word in Tasheezic). An Organ King managed agriculture and the internal economy. A Phallus King handled foreign diplomacy and trade, the male sex organs associated with growth through externality.

The Right Hand, a Peopleworker by Class, covered what could be described as pro-personnel duties. In peace, he was like a propagandistic social worker supreme, monitoring the general mood of the nation, resolving disputes between royal families, funding festivals, and so on. In war, he was the generalissimo of half of the Tasheezi military, guiding his troops to victory from the backlines.

Finally came The Left Hand King, the most peculiar of the roles. His function encompassed several disparate, 'anti'-personnel activities, knitted together beneath a broader concept of ‘loathed but accepted opposition’. Behind this lurked a Tasheezi superstation against left-handedness. Those with the aberrant chirality carried stigmas of minority, mutancy, difference, wrong, antagonism, forbidden, evil, transgression, but, also, function. The Left Hands themselves were selected and reared from nobles born with the condition.

In peace—not so relevant to Henry’s duelling research—a Left Hand was assigned the dirty work of governance. In discussions amongst the co-rulers, he played a devil’s advocate. If a prominent public figure were to be executed, it was by his scimitar, and he similarly purged rebel groups, defecting nobles, criminal organisations, and peasant revolts. Whenever imperial control called for a massacre, he'd oblige, clearing out mansions and cities and hunting escapees. He also delivered announcements about harvest failures.

Basically, everything that might tarnish the state's golden image fell to him, making him a human conduit for the populace’s resentment, an imperial black sheep. This building of so much disdain for one individual would normally have invoked insurrection and retaliatory assassinations. However, any negative repercussions were curbed by The Left Hand King's wartime function.

In warfare, he was a second, semi-independent military. Not 'controlled' – was. His whole branch consisted of himself alone. He'd be jacked up to ungodly levels of power after swallowing a full sixth of the state resources through training and equipment.

The Left Hand King was a literal one-man army. And his single purpose, continuing the anti-personnel motif, was to annihilate as many of the enemy as possible, to convert his generous endowment of resources into a proportionate magnitude of casualties.

*

"…I dreamed that all our nation lived upon that mountain, 182 million souls, camped part-way up Holy Asuuhla’s frost-caked slopes.

From birth to death, the whole of the human tableau unfolded on its narrow track. The sole mission of our people—accepted and unquestioned—was to climb to its summit.

The task began at once. As babies, we emerged from our mothers, who we soon forgot as we were ushered forward in a crawling procession with our brother newborns, thrusted cruelly towards our life’s pursuit. Up and up, we children of the Tasheezi struggled in our naked mass, ageing as we progressed. Our thirst, we quenched on fistfuls of the bitter snow. For sustenance, we cannibalistically gnawed upon those of us who died, who, by the mountain’s magic frost, were preserved like the vile carcasses of animals. These conditions, we did not question..."

*

Like a tornado on an unpredictable path of destruction, The Left King battled. Wherever he stormed the front to join The Right Hand King's military, stalemates were smashed, opposing leaders swept away, enemy advances ruined. Sometimes, he blustered independently, one man shredding an army over the course of days and weeks. Into enemy population centres, his tempest also wandered, indiscriminately recking farms, smashing churches, just murdering and murdering and murdering and murdering until his opposition, regretting their defiance, bowed their head to his descending scimitar. Just epic quantities of slaughter.

The Tasheezi Empire had long since collapsed and disappeared, as had these ghoulish sovereigns. Nevertheless, Henry’d managed, using his Scholar’s , to generate footage of them from eyewitness historical accounts of soldiers and survivors of their massacres.

To watch one sifting through the blood-soaked tide was a grotesque but riveting marvel.

Bred and conditioned since birth to the role of out-sizing others, they harnessed the disparity at its utmost. At their level of power, the main consideration was not whether you could eliminate this or that enemy but how many of them and how quickly. The Left Hand, seeking the maximum, shifted from kill to kill with a tireless efficiency. Each turn of the palm obliterated half a dozen troops. Each step transported them in range of another cluster. Each flick of the gaze added to the end of an endless string of projected devastation.

Throughout, he exercised muscular hyper-efficiency, with no movement extraneous. Blinding bursts of speed to chase down a group were followed by recuperative sequences that looked deceptively lazy. At times, it was as if they were stumbling sleepy-eyed from the bed to the kitchen, reaching for a tea cup and accidentally smiting seven fleeing, half-charred children through the gesture.

The English author Thomas De Quincey, in his essay On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts, wrote about the underappreciated aesthetic potentialities of killing. The Left Hand Kings, spitting upon that toddler nonsense, partook of the greater art beyond this one, mass-killing, which they could be said to have pushed to its creative zenith. Through repeated practise and prolific output, they obtained unimagined heights in the elegance with which they manipulated the craft’s instruments, in their refinement towards its Platonic ideal, and in their masterful invocation of its most profound sentiments of pathos. Any honest spectator—as long as they weren't attached to the usual taboos around the topic—would have to concede, after observing enough of their oeuvre, that, undoubtedly, this could also be an art. Mass killing, approached with enough care and dedication, became sublime.

Sarcasm? Satire? Henry spat a little upon the suggestion. Their sprees were, genuinely, captivating.

Anyway, he tossed himself enthusiastically into The Left Hand training gauntlet.

One man against the horde, he pushed himself and The Overdream’s simulations to their max. He buffed up with his Tier-8 Spelltomes, and he equipped all his broken Legendaries, including last session’s fresh Reliquarian trinkets. Spit upon all restraint, he said and blew it to the absolute limit.

Many were the armies he’d once annihilated while lurking in the rear. All these soldiers, spitting upon their ghosts, he cloned and killed again from the front, with his own fingers. His loyalist armies also didn't escape the spit, Henry wiping them out, too, along with mixtures of the armies and multiples of them.

Across the diverse terrain of his globe-smothering campaigns, he hunted them and their people as rats, through fortified fields, through miles of underground caverns, through the smoking streets of capitals, through the hulls of deserting armadas. Millions and millions, he re-eradicated, their bodies re-scythed, re-speared, re-evaporated in the furnace heat of his spellfire.

For Henry, who’d struggled to find new challenges after becoming a two-century-old battle cyborg, these lop-sided exercises were fantastic fun. They were infinitely more engaging than duelling.

*

On massacres at such a scale, even if you're not squeamish, the number itself becomes a difficulty in its own right. The number exhausts. It drags. It soaks. It encumbers. It confuses. It sticks to the shoes like mud. It blinds like little specks of dust in the eyeballs. If you lose track, suddenly the number smothers, one’s limbs incarcerated in a prison of sweaty, bleeding flesh, some of which is your own as the edges and points of a dozen knives churn towards your dismantlement, knives in the groin, knives in the mouth, knives in the earholes, knives in the nostrils.

Thankfully, The Left Hand techniques taught the noble’s stable mindset and methods for processing the immensity of the number.

The combatant composed himself as the king he was. He wielded his heaven-selected gifts to birth hierarchy and order from a chaos of untamed human scum.

With his further-glimpsing eye and sharper mind, he clumped his opposition, he sorted them, he ranked them. The borders they’d arranged between themselves, he discarded, remapping them according to his superior vision and purpose.

With his larger will and stronger hand, he impressed his schemes upon them. As a king carves new roads through overgrown forests to link the nation’s hubs, The Left Hand chopped his own path through the horde and connected its leaders with its vital holdings. Where the mass resisted him, uniting against him in faulty clumps of opposition, he spat upon their puny conglomeration and scattered them, lopping off their heads and smashing out their knees.

Above all, he, answerable to no one, obtained a tyrannical speed and efficiency. He did not waste his energy like his co-rulers, being tugged between counsel with advisors or appeals from serfs. In his domain of war, he was king and counsel and appeal. His martial efforts went wherever he saw fit. To what mattered most, to them, he directed himself. To the rest, who impeded his advance, he spared only his spit and a fatal slap to quell their distracting noise.

Such had been the manner and philosophy of The Left Hand Kings.

At least at the beginning...

*

"...The path we followed had been worked by those who’d preceded. For some obstacles, the way was cleared by fixing ropes of twine to walls and traversing gaps with bridges of timber. Others were constructed of bodies, our dead ancestors freezing themselves into human bridges, and these, as we crossed, we crawling children thanked for their sacrifices.

After reaching the age to speak, I asked my neighbour, “What explains these two types of bridges? Why is the road forged here by timber and there by our hibernating kin? From where was the material of these first bridges sourced?”

This, Jazeer, my neighbour could not answer, nor any questioned afterwards. None had seen any forests upon the mountain. Everywhere we looked, the slopes were crusted with ice. Some ancient ancestor, a few brethren guessed, may have known the magic of the wooden bridges but it’d since been lost. The older children denounced them all together, declaring the constructions of the Tasheezi’s own bodies to be sturdier and more magnificent.

My inquiries continued, until my comrades, some primordial darkness in them stirred by the badgering, beat me and ordered me to silence, and so I kept my silence..."