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There's a story without an end or beginning, in a far away land, about a Knight and his Bard.
A land—where, matters not—but what does, are its customs: within, blood-kinds are not. Instead, one's vital essence is a variable in ways unimaginable to its outsiders: some having already mutated into flesh and blood, with warmth and functioning entrails, and a heartbeat to boot—while others remain intact; precious stone, adorned in lead or steel, and a wide array of metals that should not quite lend itselves for living.
We needn't say this existence was a curious one; to have your limbs as malleable as flesh yet have your comrade's skin be as renitent as diamond.
Our Knight in this story happened to be the former; carrying his weight in flesh and blood, carmine pulsing warm, through vein and artery at the same pace: of a runaway that followed paths bearing nativity in the heart.
And the Bard's was, in turn, comprised of a different matter.
Our dear Bard held his portrait in a descendant of kaolinite; first, raw material, pristine and soft until it is shaped by an unrelenting heat that, combined with others in intrusion, renders its features cold, pallid, and sharp-edged until polished—that was indeed how he would often stand before the Knight: frigid, vitrified and unyielding.
Except not quite.
The Bard of our tale had performed many a scene, comedy and tragedy had both coursed throughout without cease, with a peculiar warmth accumulated across time, across his very surface: with every movement, every smile granted to the Knight, and his audience otherwise; but these creases, cracks and crevices hadn't been accumulated across the passage of time. They were not akin the wear and tear of a well loved statuette.
No.
To put it simply: our Bard, it seems, had always been broken.
His shards would land disperdigated after his every step, often shattering into little starlings when the fallen piece was too large for its wholiness to be forgiven; and those around him were forced to perform a cautionary waltz, lest their constitution were unable to withstand such piercing—yet feeble—force. Some exceptions could merely step on the fragments and crush them under their weight without even making a dent in their soles. This privilege was not rare, per se, but it was not one our Knight possessed. What he possessed were veins, arteries, blood, sacroleins—the sarcosanct tenderness of pulsing blood through viscera and entrails that were held underneath a bismuth armor.
And as we erupt into the scene, we find the tattered traces of committed sin:
We find ourselves in the midst of rows and rows, an interminable amount that constituted the uttermost-exterior wall of our kingdom, and guarded its interiors. With columns made from fine but unpolished marble, as if to banish light from its residents; and more importantly, where a meeting place has been agreed upon. Not that there had to be any secrecy, yet why, pray tell, do our courtesans employ such clandestine tactics for a simple meeting? An exchange of gazes and words, nothing more. Nothing too deserving of such considerations. If only…!
Performing a nervous tango it is that we encounter the Knight, thrice at the strike of a clock, time kept in place by careful rotations at his step but, and finally, interrupted by the quite familiar croak of a jester.
"Hi," is the word that greets his, until then, relentless pacing, "hello! Greetings and salutations, my dear invertebrother of another mother."
Even under such moonlight that teeters between and past the leaves, the Knight can be seen making a grimace in response to the dramatism in the Bard's avid gestures.
"You never fucking learn," he says, uncouth words spouted as he shuffled the weight of his helmet from one arm to the other, "do you?"
The grin that receives his words could split the moon open.
And stumbling between the tiles, the Bard's porcelain clinks and clanks around the Knight, bending the moon along in his inquisition.
"Learn what?"
As if too many words had gotten caught at the back of his throat, the Knight does not answer.
The silence isn't as quiet as it should be. Especially not with a Bard around—their vestments jingle and sing with a frenzy that is proper of their kin, an everlasting song, a round and round the clocks and organs tale that never reaches its ouroboric end.
"Why'd you ask to meet here?"
"I had something to say," the Bard replies.
"Again?"
"Yes," the Bard responds.
"You said you had something to report. Did you forget it again?"
"That's for you to find out, best friend," the Bard insists.
How capricious, but a Knight mustn't step to his damned, yet lacking stature. "Whatever. Speak. What is it?"
The Bard goes unnaturally silent. The smile he'd come wearing pauses for a second, flaking at the edges of his mouth.
"Before I spill any of these motherfuckin' secrets, I've got one a riddle," he jests.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," the Knight huffs out the words in a cloud of moonlight.
The Bard's smile is timely to flutter back onto his face.
"Absolutely not, my friend," the praise-maker says, all with his friendly disposition while his limbs clack against his body per movement made, as he pulls an assortment of little cards from somewhere at the back of his coat. His pallid fingers hold them in between himself and the Knight's noses. "Now," he begins.
If the Knight hadn't been acquainted with the Bard's exploits, perhaps he would have assumed that this is the regular amount of time his preparations take, but of course, this fellow is mostly interested in itching his one-man audience, rather than put on a flawless—and that is to say, successful—act. "I'm not the establishment's fool, you are. So hurry up."
His demand is not quite heeded, or at least, it doesn't feel so, with the Bard's cracking smile in full view beneath the moonlight.
With none of the hurry asked of him, the Bard plucks the wrinkles from his vestments by the edges, dragging them around, then fiddling with the cards as if they were a lyre; all is part of the performance, and the Knight watches.
And suddenly, with a bow and a question, it begins:
"What, pray the motherfucking tell, is a Bard's most valuesome asset?"
Such preposterous question finds our Knight off his soles, and he takes a second for his brow to hasten, half in curiosity, half in an imperative frustration. And before the Knight is delivered his due chance at an answer, the first act had already been interrupted.
Improvise as one may, one cannot predict a storm's precise strike, and a performance cannot go on forever.
Our Bard fails to foresee as a gust of wind steals the cards off his fingertips.
Without much thought, the Knight reaches forward to catch them.
His armor sings as the metals rotate against one another in his movement, and screech in vulgar tone once it hits the Bard's own aporcelainated frame—something splatters to the ground.
The Bard doesn't react, as if that sound were so commonplace it did not warrant his attention, but the Knight immediately winces backward, watching as the shell succumbed to the motion and cracked further, even after another piece had already fallen from that same wound.
With the quaint chant of bells, the material litters the ground, disperdigated into glistening stars.
The Knight's heart beats to the rhythm of tachycardia.
A Knight that had never set foot on the battlefield did not know what it was like to hurt.
He was a Knight, all facade and duty; no Warrior at all.
His heartbeat reverberated in its ribcage.
Made its way to the edge of his aching teeth.
Pressed on the bone as he tried to gather any courage to disassemble into words—to no avail, for none would come out. The words would remain rubble buried along his trachea, never to come to fruition.
His duty had been to protect that Kingdom—from what, we do not speak—and his very duty-bearing hands had now committed harm; unjustified.
When his hand had met the composition of the Bard, his shards came to crumble once more.
"Don't mind all that, there's more material junk left from where'd that came from," the Bard says, trying to quell the furrow of his brow and the heave of his breathing, but his words do not faze the Knight.
He had to pick up the pieces.
It is not his duty that brings his hands to the Bard's face once the shards clatter against the floor.
It is not duty that brings the Knight to his knees.
It is not duty that acts as conductor for his hands toward the fragments that litter the ground.
Duty was to protect, and he'd failed.
He does not listen to the Bard's shushing.
He does not hear anything but his heart beating.
It beats, beats, beats; pace-making, blood-pushing,
Armor pieces clank onto one another when the Knight sinks knee to groundstone.
The Bard insists still that everything is alright in a half assed attempt at setting halt to the Knight's intentions, because were he to push any harder, any more stern, and he might fall apart even further. Even fools had reservations with such a commitment such as death. To be a jester and its adjacents was to never commit to what one says, does; to be ready for contradiction and possess a well crafted juggle of hypocrisy in one's sleeves; but the Knight couldn't hear his throes anymore.
His duty is to protect, and his hands have destroyed.
Trembling hands perform the throes of removing the Knight's gauntlets, tugging and pulling with the ineptitude of a maladapted crustacean and its claws.
Unlike a crab's, the Knight's hands are ragged, coarse, scarred; but this does not stop the edges of each sliver that he places between his fingers from slicing thin lines across his fingertips.
His duty was now to fix it.
There were many things to take into account; the valence of blood, the albedo of light.
Precious and fragile things need special handling, even if said things now crumbled in anathema before the Knight's very eyes—as they had always been.
In a way, our Knight was just as broken as the pieces his hands now gathered in frantic might, impassive to their edges.
Bright, crimson embers seep from the wounds in pearls, made bright by the moonlight, going on to take their landing to the pristine porcelain; which becomes quaintly tacit in his hands.
And like the stray stream of a chthonic river, his blood spackles the edges to each shard re-placed, filling each crevice, spilling.
Our Knight is flesh and blood, so he bleeds.
His own carmine fault dripped from his fingertips, from the sides of his fingers—falling and tainting each lily in its path, willing our Knight to advance through the front lines and blame himself for everything.
It is for naught.
And it does not matter.
No one grieves the thieves. No one appreciates the Bards.