*

"…On occasion, we saw the deserters' folly in conglomeration. We passed mysterious sections where, instead of lone corpses, enormous piles of their wayward bodies collected. Shattered at the feet of cliffs, they gathered, broken from the heights from which they’d fallen; elsewhere, they sprinkled the ridges going nowhere. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

In my teens, I asked my neighbours, “What’s with these nests of lumpen enemies? What evil allured so many disgusting, loathsome devils?”

To this question, my friends collected around me and kicked me until I agreed to keep my silence, and so I kept my silence..."

*

The Tasheezi Empire and its six-way kingship would last a whole millennium. Over this lengthy course, The Left Hand tradition deepened and evolved as their rival armies adapted to their imbalanced militaries.

In their first battles, the enemy lines wherever a king appeared swarmed to stop them. Later, discovering the futility in that, they simply routed. Later still, conscious tactics were developed to avoid and delay.

The Left Hand Kings, in turn, created an extensive skillset for destroying obstacles, for leaping over pitfalls, for cycling through dozens of mounts targeted by opposing archers. The Left Hands were initially Crusaders by Class, juggernauts of metal sustaining themselves through self-healing. Four centuries in, the reigning Left Hand switched his apprentice to an Earthfriend, for the stealth and mobility of the Fauna forms, and this persisted until the art's conclusion.

Eventually, opposition commanders settled on a relatively stable solution. Exploiting the physical limits of The Left Hands being only one person, they drilled their units in rapid alternations between retreat and advance. Wherever the king was active, the line conceded, while sections a safe distance away moved forward. Co-ordinating thus, the army, although losing every conflict, could roll onward, over the main battlefield objectives.

The Left Hands, in response to this, developed a morbid type of massacre juggling. They wandered from point to point, eradicating just enough at each to scare the soldiers off. To increase the speed with which they broke morale, Left Hands near the empire’s twilight adopted terror tactics, using larger, more monstrous Earthfriend forms and prolonging select kills into horrifying displays, singling out the enemy’s most cherished members and devouring them limb by limb to spread the grossest shock.

*

"...Finally, adulthood brought me to the end of the Tasheezi’s crawl up our holy mountain, along with the remnants of my thinned-out comrades, none the same from when we’d started.

There we came to the prophesied ravine. Twenty-metres wide, it stretched, before the slope resumed on the other side. The distance, we saw, had not yet been covered by the hoped-for bridge, and our bodies, thus, would have to join the frozen bricks of our ancestors.

With a sunken heart, I filed into the queue of volunteers. My eye studied those in front. Each, after a brief hesitation at the edge, kissed their friends farewell and leapt hand-in-hand towards their courageous duty. Several of my brothers, ahead of me, went so, and the moisture of their lips froze upon my cheek.

As my own turn neared, I, ready to die as they had, approached the precipice and beheld, as the other jumpers had, our sacred bridge still in construction..."

*

In terms of raw practise mass-killing, from the outset, the number of bodies Henry’d accumulated had already exceeded any historical Left Hand, his original imperial legacy spitting on their count from far above. If one added the Overdream clones of his research since—spit upon the distinction, all meaningless bodies in a videogame—then the centuries of duelling had stretched the gap further.

This period would widen it again, as he massacred one army after another, multiple armies per day.

A veteran weight-lifter designs a regime to isolate muscles lagging behind the rest. Likewise, Henry began to formulate complex army mixtures targeting the many sub-skills of massacring, altering his armies in number, strength, spacing, environment, and composition. Massacre-speed, massacre-length, massacre-density, massacre-shape, massacre-diversity – for every one of these variables and a dozen finer gradations, he built an army and extinguished it. Again and again, he massacred, one army, one rep.

Although he wasn’t aiming for high scores, within the 33-month span of this training period, he would rack up roughly 144 million clone solo-kills.

*

"...Into the ravine, I peered, and down, far, far below, squinting, I found our promised bridge, the rewards of our six thousand years of struggle, their millions filling barely a twentieth of its height.

Where my friends had moments before leapt, I, horrified, flinched away, my feet conveying me backwards, my vision tearing from the path I’d loyally pursued. The rest of the abominable mountain rose before me, and all that’d preceded. I beheld the bridges of bodies we’d crossed. I beheld the bridges of bodies waiting in the hollow ravines ahead.

How long, I asked, had our people been crawling up this mountain and throwing ourselves into its chasms? How many infinities must we remain naked in its frost?

My comrades tried to argue with me, but I refused to join them. Theirs was not my path, I knew. It was not my destiny to throw myself into some mountain hollow.

Cursing me for cowardice and betrayal, my friends gave up on me and rejoined those leaping, and I, forgetting them, retraced my journey down the trail, passing those marching to their own pointless doom, cursing me, spitting at me, beating me..."

*

As often is the tragedy of those who transgress what's sacred, over the centuries, The Left Hand lineage became increasingly insular and deranged.

The founding member, King Walmeen Who Is Of The Firsts, had been your typical high-born. He’d viewed his role as dark but necessary, and that was all.

The fourth, King Markaz Who Slew The Reindeer Prince, marked the first with a superiority complex. To him, The Left was the uncontested chief of the six Tasheezi kings. What distinguished them was not simply their objective physical superiority but their possession of an even greater spiritual superiority, one privileging them to actions that would destroy their lessers.

In maintaining the health and peace of the kingdom by inflicting death, as Markaz reckoned, they embodied the most fundamental principle of nobility. The king was he to whom no limit applies, who transcends all false contradiction. He, alone, can wield the dangerous and forbidden for its necessary purposes. He enfolds the directions beyond right and left. He is brighter than light and dark. He is better than good and evil. He is holier than the sacred and the blasphemous. A child cannot be trusted with a flame, but what of their parent? That identical flame, the parent uses to extract more nutrients from the meat, to harden minerals into weapons at the forge, to clear the forests that become the nation-feeding fields. Such, to a king, father of the realm, is the nature of all prohibition. All, in his larger hand, becomes an instrument that serves the good of his children. Etc etc, such was the rhetoric.

This credo, although megalomaniacal, at least justified the insidious aspects of their role under the original proto-utilitarian framework.

That was discarded by the sixth, King Mashaara Who Is Most Beneficent. He made the tradition into a secret death cult, in which they were the lone followers and gods, murderous transgression their core ethical virtue.

Thenceforth, as part of their practice, as their self-worship, they actively subjected themselves to the unconventional and taboo. They traded their royal clothes for rags, they refused to bathe, they made slaves and foreign women and men their brides, and they covered their faces in hideous tattoos. Public rumours circulated of the domestic enemies they were in charge of executing being put through the worst of it, before death and after. Torture, rape, cannibalism, necrophilia - The Left Hands were suspected of every crime buried in the graveyard.

Henry—studying the art from manuals circulated amongst them—could confirm they weren’t necrophiles. Everything else, though, was pretty much on the table. Apprentices near the end stages went through a multi-year initiation that involved, as one strange rite, learning to sleep in a room packed with mutilated criminals. The final step required the assassination of another Tasheezi King’s successor, whose corpse they’d taxidermy and add to a collection killed by their predecessors.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

After a thousand years of each king inheriting quirks, inventing their own, and transmitting the complex of quirks to their apprentices, the tradition completed the dark metamorphosis that'd been in process from its foundation. The first Left Hands had been regal in bearing, brutal but precise, calculating, efficient. The last ones, only vaguely reminiscent of their ancestors, were mad, holy fanatics of murder, walking avatars to the negation of all that was human.

Their character eccentricities would feed back into their war habits.

For one example, with the original Left Hand mapping technique for sorting the masses of soldiers, the routes the last kings carved became intricate and patterned as an arabesque and, at times, vaguely runic, as if, through their trails of dead, they were attempting to communicate with some higher power. What they'd meant by these, nobody could explain, including themselves as mystified in their personal writings.

Another was their breathwork. Many of Saana’s styles specified sophisticated approaches to this, breathing regulated in pace and depth in sync with the tempo of combat. The Left Hands of the seventh century onwards timed their breaths to an algebra of casualties. Three privates per inhalation, eight per exhalation; an inhalation for a sergeant, eight full breaths for a company, and so on. During peaks of battle, this ghoulish breathwork had the effect of inducing the king into trance-like, hallucinatory frenzies. The Left Hand—in a sort of morbid antithesis to a yogi permeating themselves with life’s oxygenating essence—sucked death into his lungs, absorbed death into his blood, circulated death throughout his body, welcomed death to soak and animate his every cell. Achieving what could be described as 'tantric murder', he sustained himself for days through an undulating and interruptionless ecstasy of mass-killing, united to death in being, in thought, in purpose, and in action.

*

...Along the way down the mountain, Jazeer, I, who in this dream endured our people's hatred, re-examined those corpses off the course, and I understood what’d driven them to their solitary graves.

Then entered my view the last of the massive collections we’d passed, hundreds of thousands crushed and wasted at the bottom of a dangerous cliff. And there I beheld the secret of their madness. From the higher vantage point of my treacherous descent, I, who, like the rest, had forfeited looking back so long ago, perceived it now in all its obvious clarity.

Above that cliff whose heights these traitors’d failed to climb stood a small plateau, and from out of the snow that lined this flat jutted a grove of ice-bound trees. There it’d been, the missing timber for our bridge..."

*

In Henry’s past career and throughout the prior duelling research, he’d already conducted many of the Left Hand Kings’ transgressive rituals. And, once again, in the spirit of maximal experimentation, he would repeat a set of them – at least, to the extent such atrocities were replicable in the Overdream, a simulation within a simulation.

If anything were different this time, it would merely be his mindset.

But a change in mindset was not necessarily trivial.

After sampling enough of world history, one discovers that most taboos are morally ambivalent, everything you abhor being worshipped by some random tribe. The same ambivalence is attested, within a culture, by its sexual perverts, relishing lust in the grotesque of bodily waste, violence, or—most horrid and spit-worthy of all—feet. Properly examined, all the forbidden act itself objectively inspires is a visceral, adrenal spike. This sensation, once channelled through a cultural mindset, then morphs into disgust or pleasure, horror or ecstasy. Context, ritual, meaning, control, and social approval coordinate into a psychological parachute, which transforms the nauseous dread of falling into an addictive thrill.

In terms of Henry's own mindset, he'd been heavily immunised from the blowback of his own mass-murdering by a relative psychological detachment due to this being a videogame. Even when he lost sense of that, he had further buffers. The unsavoury elements of his duelling research were filtered through the aims of analysis; he'd been like a neurologist dispassionately opening the brains of hundreds of rodents. Similarly, in his preceding career, he was mostly protected by his tyrannical calculus and his physical separation from the battlefield. (Mostly. One had to factor for the sheer number of casualties and him spending thousands of hours eyeballing soldiers getting graphically dismembered before his eighteenth birthday. All considered, his mental health as a teen had been, arguably, excellent.)

Scrutinising, through this perspective of mindset-ambivalence, The Left Hand’s intentionally-transgressive rituals, one could explain their purpose as to enable the practitioner to go beyond Henry's own immunity and desensitisation. The kings, although not themselves conscious of this, had through their self-religion of death and corpse-play inculcated a positive mindset. Effectively brainwashing themselves, they reinterpreted as pleasant and gratifying the typically off-putting elements of their massacre-dealing duties. In this regard, you could say they achieved that laudable therapeutic goal of loving yourself, even when you’re a mass murderer.

So, in this round of Henry’s experiments, through the minor change of his own mindset, he would go to the Left Hand extreme, in act and heart. Through repetitious ritual, through drugs, through psycho mantras, he would recondition himself into a devout worshipper of mass death.

"Wait! Wait just a minute," returns the cretin of his conscience, observing him prepare his first corpse puppet and thirsting for more spit. "Are you batshit insane? Not even getting to the billions of ethical issues involved in these experiments, you haven't even provided one coherent rationale for undergoing this."

Oh right. Henry, unaccustomed to dealing with novices anymore, thought the motive would be obvious. A bunch of humanistic drivel could be drummed up, but spit upon it. He just wanted to obtain the maximum of his performance. As all climbers know, the peak is reached only when, in this field of mass-murder as any other, you’ve gone to the lengths of these demented kings, after you’ve transformed every doubt to assurance, every weighing guilt to uplifting pleasure, after you’ve ascended to the full psychosis of duty. In his case, the death of the old friend this corpse puppet's replicating needs to become part of Henry's divine ecstasy before he can kill most quickly and beautifully and guarantee the end of that endless cunt.

"Endless cunt? Hah? Well, firstly, the romanticism of the irrational you're using to justify this is just demonstrably not true. The highest performers in any area are cold and calculating. In circumstances that throw off others, their breaths are calm, their minds unflappable and precise in their judge—"

Stay unflappable with this spit in your eyes! Haha. Henry spat upon this whole ideal of yours. Become a stoic, you say. While your house burns around you, you should sit there tranquilly, absorbing none of the heat, collecting your palms tidily in your lap, analysing the consequences of every decision before you dare to leave the flaming armchair. Upon you backseat critics and your passion-deprived genius, Henry spat and encouraged you all to continue sitting. Upon the post-Enlightenment ideology from which has sprung such elevation of the rational beyond a few millimetres of brain tissue to the infinite, he spat. Upon all of you, all thought and no action, he spat.

"You even spit upon—"

Don't joke. Let's stop the jokes. Of course, he spat on that.

Make no mistake, the greatest often are composed when most are not. However, this is simply because they’ve already risen beyond what seems to others a challenge but to themselves has become routine and dull. But push a man to his peak, and what you'll reveal in him is a totally different animal. While at his full prime, he’s an insane, fanatical, foaming-mouthed idiot. He devotes himself so absolutely to his duty that he destroys his capacity to comprehend anything else. All extraneous knowledge collapses bizarrely around his ambition like debris entering a black hole, warping into mere metaphor repeating his one obsession. Conversation with the prime man even upon his own craft is utterly futile, the sharing of expertise also being extraneous. If he can stand back and describe himself in the fastidious detail of a scientist, if he can sling these self-aware jokes of yours, then some part of his finite brain is not entangled with the struggle. Man's highest active state is an immersion into deranged, shouting silence. It’s only afterwards, when he's finished, that he can glance back over his shoulder and examine the gorgeous monstrosity of himself in his fullest.

Now move aside, the mountain beckons. As she returns, so must he return.

"She? Your talk is descending into pure, mad gibberish."

A sign of him becoming the higher man, discarding his final inhibitions and entering his highest state. Alas, you, who are incapable of following, will never comprehend. Never have you encountered the altitudes that demand the sacrifice of all that's holy. Never would you walk where he dares to, extending your fingers into the pinnacles of your untapped greatness.

"And while you abandon this last caution, you go to your doom. In this choice, you adopt the very practices of those you most disdain. You make of yourself a second and worse Hog, who followed these identical rituals into the alleyways where he strangles and devours the young."

WRONG, YOU CLINGING SHIT! I AM NOT THIS LOWER SCUM WHOSE BLOOD BUT BRINGS THE HIGHER SCUM! I, WHO PLACE MY EYES UPON THE SKY ALONE AND MY DAGGER TO ITS THROAT, AM ALREADY BEYOND HIM AND WHAT IS BEYOND HIM! I AM ALL NEGATION AND BEYOND ALL NEGATION! I AM THE FATHER AND BEYOND THE FATHER! I AM THE SON AND BEYOND THE SON! I AM THE UNHOLY AND BEYOND THE UNHOLY! I AM THE TRESPASS AND BEYOND THE TRESPASS! I AM THE NOTHING AND BEYOND THE NOTHING! I AM THE ONE AND BEYOND THE ONE! I AM THE SAND AND BEYOND THE SAND! I AM THE SOIL AND BEYOND THE SOIL! I AM THE SHACK AND BEYOND THE SHACK! I AM THE UNCLEAN AND BEYOND THE UNCLEAN! I AM THE SOUL-EXPANDING CHAOS AND BEYOND THE SOUL-EXPANDING CHAOS! I AM THE HERO-ETERNAL AND BEYOND—

Just joking. Henry, before this episode, had done a ton of preparation to keep his mentality stable. Such had been one of the purposes of the weird Forest Farming detachment exercises, plus some hush-hush substance addiction experiments during the Sheathed Dagger years.

But, without further ado, Henry—nobler than all danger, nobler than all hypocrisy, nobler than all evil—dove soul-deep into The Left Hand Kings' dark rituals - at least to the degree possible with The Cap of A Thousand Dreams, which, was honestly, a childish joke, but this lack of authenticity could be easily remedied once he'd woken up.

Sufficing for now with pure simulation, he fashioned beds out of preserved corpses and slept wonderfully upon them. He gave up bathing and stewed in the accumulations of his morbid filth.

During the slow days, the kings meditated nostalgically upon their massacres. One recalled their killed victims and envisioned a better way to kill them again. Henry did this, too. Remembering the casualties of his campaign, he lifted them up from his grief for them, up from his acceptance of them, up from his indifference to them, and up to the highest summits of his delight.

Cannibalism – of course. He ate his assassinated friends. He ate that little orphan tailor girl. He sculpted a fleshy puppet of his dead mother, emaciated and bulbous-eyed in the last stages of her cancer, and he ate her, too.

*

"...There it’d been, Jazeer, the whole time, that grove of our salvation, the clear way for the Tasheezi forward, waiting only for one who with the strength to seize it, waiting for me.

And so, leaving the worthless crowd, leaving the procession’s warmth, I, too, journeyed through the traitorous frost towards that cliff with the crushed piled at its base.

The screaming masses tugged me back. “Evil fiend! Do you not see, that yours is the wrong direction?! Do you not see that you join the heaps who've fallen?!”

“No,” I replied, throwing off their weak grip and spitting in their faces. “This was the right path, just not the right people. Where they have fallen, where you would fall, I, whose grip is stronger than all of yours, will succeed in my ascent.”

And so I went towards the cliff, thanking the frozen dead trod beneath my feet for showing me my path..."