Joy was unpleasantly surprised when the entire castle blew up. He had been merrily running around with his new stick, smashing the inky faces of all the shadowy monsters he could find. He just loved the stick; it was the perfect stick. It was the sort of stick that reminded him of playing wizards as a child, and always trying to find the best-looking stick to cast his spells with.
Nothing stood a chance between him and Sticky’s personal might. He didn’t even need to play any games with them to beat them, his personal prowess with the staff destroyed anything that stood in his path.
But all good things come to an end eventually, and just as Joy had got in a particularly satisfying strike against a monster’s face the world around him turned red.
He was thrown around like a doll that had just been given to an overexuberant child. Debris flew around him and the world shook from the mighty boom that echoed out.
After what felt like an eternity of being pelted with tiny rocks Joy’s world came to a crashing halt. The ground sucker punched him in a fight he didn’t even know he would be having against the earth.
He laid on the ground for a while, feeling it shake from the occasional large piece of debris that landed nearby, but he was far too out of it to try and deal with it.
Joy’s body was in pain. He hadn’t felt like this in a long time, the last he could remember was when that Hair gifted person had nearly killed him with his own beautiful locks.
His hands were still tightly clenched against the stick he had found up in the throne room, but even his awesome stick wasn’t enough to make him feel totally better.
Groggily, he opened his eyes and saw the beautiful sky. Despite the unending snow, there was a stark beauty to it. There was nothing like it in the whole wide world, so Joy made sure to drink in the beautiful sight.
Someone sidled up to Joy’s feeble body and gave him a soft kick.
“How’s it going buddy? Beautiful fireworks in this continent, aren’t there?” The prince, looking as dashing as ever with his blue eyes and blonde hair. Joy wondered why he hadn’t used his gift to change the color of his hair during this expedition at all. Normally the prince took a sick pleasure in finding the most garish of hairstyles to galivant around the capital, but he seemed to be all business here in the frozen continent.
Joy grunted at the prince, trying to think up a way to describe how annoyed he was at the prince.
They had all gotten so worked up about saving the prince and keeping him safe, but here he was. Absolutely unbothered by the events happening around him. The entire building had blown up, and the prince’s stupid hair looked even more dashing than normal.
“I hate you.” Joy summed up his thoughts concisely before trying to take a nap on the hard ground.
“Don’t say that to your employer Joy. Imagine what would happen if I got dissatisfied and stopped paying you.”
Before the prince had even finished those words Joy was back on his feet. He stood tall, wearily using the stick as an impromptu cane.
“No sir, sorry sir.” Joy wasn’t really a penny pincher, but even he knew that being part of the prince’s personal retinue was a killer paycheck and he should not squander it.
“Well, did any of you find the throne room while I was incapacitated?” The prince changed subjects.
“Would that be a big room, with a gaudy skeleton with tons of gold and jewelry on it holding a scary looking scepter, gazing out of what used to be a beautiful stained-glass window overlooking the entire frozen city?”
“Why is that such a specific description Joy?”
“That’s the place I found my stick.” Joy replied innocently,
“You saw artifacts of untold power, and decided you would rather take a stick?” The rage seemed to boil off the prince as he spoke.
“Yes, that accurately sums it up.”
The prince let out a scream of pure and utter frustration into the air. But he slowly calmed down, he knew that he had not provided an adequate description of the Kingmaker to his goons. He had never assumed that he would be separated from them, thus he had never thought to inform them of what the artifacts of untold power looked like.
“At least try and help me find the rubble of that room.” The defeated prince commanded Joy.
“Um, we may have bigger issues than that.”
Joy pointed at a procession of inky monsters approaching the pair of them. The prince sighed and threw his hands up in the air; it was definitely not his day.
The largest of the monsters looked like a giant bull-frog, as in a bull with the head of a frog. Atop that monster sat a boy, Joy recognized him as the boy he had seen in the side room where he had gotten his perfect sledding door.
The boy rode atop his massive beast, shirtless, showing his pale skin off to the frigid air. He was thin, as if he had been starving for years, but had finally started to eat healthily sometime recently. Thick chains were tattooed on his arms and legs, scars covered many of the places where barbs had been inked onto his skin.
But his most striking feature was his back. Along it was the words, “you are not forgiven, but you will be forgotten.” Ethereal blood seemed to seep out of the scars constantly and gave the boy a terrifying look.
The boy sighed and turned his back to the two of them, as if presenting his pain and misery to them. The prince and Joy looked at the boy and his freaky tattoo and shivered a little bit. It was all like the plot of a bad horror novel.
The boy turned around and shouted. “Two of you? Is illiteracy a fucking problem on your continent dickweeds?”
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His voice was shrill and carried quite well over the snowy landscape, but the vulgarity of it all made both Joy and the prince take a short step back.
“We can both read, young man. Those are some rude words you are sharing.” The prince replied in a measured manner.
The boy ignored the prince’s complaints about his vulgarity and continued, “then why aren’t your sins showing up? My gift makes your sins real; don’t tell me you haven’t sinned?” A sad look seemed to cross the boy’s face, before it was covered in a flash of rage and determination, “everyone has sinned.”
The prince started laughing at the boy, it was an awkward moment. The boy had a real gift for the melodramatic, but the prince refused to give him any ground on the matter; it was just far too childish and silly to him.
“And what is a sin, boy?” The prince’s teeth bared as he began his tirade. “Do you think of yourself as the arbiter of all that is right and just in the world? Maybe you feel the Sin is allowed to speak for all of humanity, or that Good can speak with finality on the subject of goodness and sins.”
“Maybe the entire existence of humanity comes together psychically once every month to decide what is right and wrong? But none of that is true, young man.”
“We all say that murder is wrong, but would we stop a mother from defending her family with lethal force against attackers? Would we say she was wrong?”
“No, I tell you that she would be lauded as a hero, and paraded around whatever backwater town she came from and shown as a shining example of goodness and pride.”
“A sin is a mark on the soul, it is a deformity of pain and misery. It is a defining moment that you wish never happened. And the only person who can decide whether you have sinned is you.”
“I have never done something I have regretted. At every turn and every hard choice, I stood tall and proud, unflinching in the face of the consequences because I accepted them in full. I carry the weight of the future, and every step I take on the path towards it is necessary. No matter how painful.”
The prince’s face had flushed a bit, one part anger and one part embarrassment. He obviously cared about what he was saying, but he had fallen into the teenage boy’s trap. He had fallen into the melodramatic monologue.
Silence reigned over the snowy expanse that surrounded them. The boy looked thoughtful, while Joy and the prince were inching away.
“Well, I was hoping to avoid it. But it seems that I must end you both here. I hoped that removing your sins would make you mindless fools like the previous chief and then you would stop fucking around with us. But you cannot have everything in life.”
The boy pointed at the two men and all the inky figures started charging at them.
“Stop!” The prince demanded, and for some reason the boy did. Not even he truly knew why.
“My gift creates massive bombs in the ground and allows me to detonate them at will. I placed a bomb underneath your feet while I was monologuing, if any of your monsters takes another step towards me, I will make it explode.”
Joy looked at the prince in incredulity. Had he really been lying about his gift this whole time? Maybe the reason why he never actually changed his hair color during this expedition was that he just couldn’t.
The boy on top of his monster truly stopped for a moment, contemplating the situation. Then a few of the larger monsters moved towards the boy and shielded his body with their own as the rest of the line started to advance.
Joy looked on at the wall of monsters approaching the two of them and sighed, “maybe now would be a good time to blow them up?”
Joy looked back to where the prince had been standing moments before. But he was gone and hightailing it away from the mass of monsters.
“Dickhead!” Joy called out as he started running too, now realizing that the whole bomb thing had been a desperate ploy by the prince to give them a head start.
Joy was somehow faster than the prince, but didn’t overtake him, instead he merely matched speeds with him once he had caught up and started a friendly conversation.
“Well, he seems like a nice kid. Maybe a little crazy but think of how wonderful his gift is. He can remove the emotional burden of someone’s sins with his gift. And he tried to make his tribesman live better lives by removing that which burdened them. Isn’t that wonderful.” Joy kept talking with an annoyingly chipper voice.
“He’s the enemy, Joy. That is the enemy chief who has been rabble rousing in the capital. I will admit that he is younger than I had imagined, but that is our enemy. We must defeat him.” Between gasps for air the prince replied bitingly to Joy.
Joy started batting the occasional monster that started getting too close with his stick. Despite their speed, the flying monsters and the particularly lightweight ones were fast approaching. Thankfully the stick Joy had found was absolutely perfect for bashing monsters’ heads in.
“Well, I like him.” Joy said matter of factly.
The prince rolled his eyes at his subordinate. If he wasn’t so genuinely talented at making money and scamming people, he would not have dealt with the man-child that was Joy. But usefulness trumped all in the prince’s mind.
“We’re screwed. Neither of us have the tools to really fight this onslaught.” The prince said to Joy as they kept staving off the inevitable. The prince threw small knives with deadly precision towards the monsters, every knife felling a monster as it hit.
“If you could buy me a minute of time I could do it.” Joy grinned as he kept throwing his stick around.
“If I still had my supplies I could try. But I am running out of knives here. Soon, all I will be left with is my fists.” The prince looked slightly surprised that Joy was so confident, but he wasn’t one to judge his subordinates… much.
“You can have the stick then and help fend them off better.” Joy tossed over his precious stick. He was loath to let it go, but he knew that the prince would probably be more effective as an ally with a real weapon.
The prince did a few test swings then said, “this really is a fantastic stick. Where did you find it?”
“In the big chamber with the skeleton and the throne.”
Their idle chatter tapered off as the two of them had to start putting some real effort into defending themselves from the onslaught of enemies rushing towards them. The number of sins that this boy had under his control was just staggering.
It was a gradual process, but the more the pair fought off the monsters the more monsters would catch up. Thus, forcing them to spend more time fighting off the monsters. It was a cyclic recurrence that would only end with them dying.
Just as Joy was considering starting a game against the horde of enemies in the hope that some useful game to them would start, a blade cut its way through the throngs of monsters. In a moment, dozens of monsters were bisected by what seemed to be an effortless swing.
Ian stood in the rubble with three figures behind him. Joy’s two favorite friends and Benny were there also in awe at the sheer power that Ian could wield. It never got old watching the master at work.
The two groups started making a beeline for each other through the throngs of monsters. Ian cut waves of them in half, while Theo and Lillian erected walls of ice that protected everyone from the errant monster that avoided Ian’s fury.
Joy and the prince sighed in relief as the two groups converged. They finally took a small break from bonking the monsters as Ian took up the slack of protecting everyone.
“You!” A shrill voice called out from across the raging battle. The boy still stood there on top of his massive bull frog, and stared down at the group imposingly, before turning around so that his back was facing them.
Everyone took a brief glance at the odd boy’s actions, but only the prince and Joy understood the implications. Neither one could warn anyone else in time and everyone’s eyes went blank.
Benny stood there and his fedora fluttered to the ground next to him. Lillian stood glassy eyes as tears welled up. Theo felt so much pain that he doubled over. And Ian stood impassively, but still transfixed on the boy.
“I knew it! You all couldn’t be illiterate.” A victorious cry erupted from the boy’s lips.
The prince and Joy looked at each other and said simultaneously, “shit.”
Massive black clouds of smoke tore out of the four frozen figure’s mouths before starting to coalesce into figures. Joy and the prince had no time to worry about that, since they had to defend everyone from the rest of the monsters they were fighting.
It was not looking good for the prince and his goons.