Knights of Ferlonia

VIRYL OF ZELFIRIA'S CHRONICLES I - YEAR 921

The increasingly long days were starting to get warmer, and the golden crops swayed on the hills surrounding the citadel of Zelfiria. On a pleasant late Tetrestes afternoon, Viryl was lounging on the couch in his small room, reading a racy adventure book full of obscene illustrations. The way he had procured such a forbidden object was in itself a feat worthy of celebration.

Certainly the old hag at the newsstand in Crocifissione square would never have sold it to him, and he would never have asked her in the first place. The son of Yustass of Zelfiria had a reputation to uphold.

That was the booty obtained in his honorable battle in defense of the weak and the oppressed. Weak and oppressed was his cousin Tolomer, the son of the doctor of Zelfiria. Now, how the son of one of the city's most prominent figures could be considered weak and defenseless is easy to understand. Let's just say that the rowdy country boys don't care who you are, if you dress like a dandy prince and behave in society like a disturbing bookworm, with those glasses as thick as the bottom of a demijohn and a book bigger than you under your arm, unless you use it as a weapon to hit them on the head, which is the only thing some people deserve.

Tolomer had taken the bold decision, as dusk fell, to sneak into an abandoned ruin under the walls and perform a bizarre ritual on a dead frog. An obscure naturalist philosopher of the Classical era believed that by drawing a convoluted pentagram with a horrendous mixture of cat feces and a paste of Vitulla Nuts and heliotrope flowers, while reciting a prayer to the goddess Fenia, daughter of Ilixanthia, one could reanimate the body of a small animal that had died less than twelve hours ago for a mere ten seconds.

Certain blasphemous things are best done away from prying eyes, because it's not that the Inquisition will put you to the stake, but let's just say that the priest, if he catches you, might give you an hour and a half sermon and if he feels inspired he might even slap you a couple of times, with your father giving you the rest as you get home.

The ruin, we were saying, had seemed to Tolomer an elegant solution for conducting his vile experiments. What Tolomer didn't know is that in the aforementioned ruin, the kids from the vocational schools used to go smoke cigarettes and play dice. Imagine what their reaction must have been when they saw a cautious little nerd enter their lair, carrying a jar of strange stuff and a dead frog. They had knocked him to the ground, kicked him, and after sniffing the pestilential jar, they had smeared his face with its contents, drawing squiggles on it with a stick. Somehow his glasses had miraculously escaped unscathed, but the rest of Tolomer had come out of it rather worse for wear.

Viryl crossed paths with Tolomer as he was returning home from his fencing lessons. That afternoon Viryl's hands were itching quite a bit. That fetid wretch Radios, as usual, had put him back in his place. In school, Radios was no match for Viryl; Viryl was superior to him in every subject. Even their private tutor in etiquette and chivalric code was firmly convinced that Viryl was undoubtedly sharper and more brilliant than Radios. But then they would go to fencing lessons, and Radios would pour out all the frustration he had accumulated in the previous days on Viryl. All the relentless athletic training that Yustass forced his son to do was for naught. Radios' reflexes were lightning fast, and his eyes seemed to be constantly fixed on everything that was happening on the battlefield, as if there was a hawk watching over him from above and communicating telepathically from where every single thrust would come from, from every blind corner.

«Who was it this time?» Viryl asked, seeing his cousin so horribly battered.

«The big ones...» Tolomer replied, tears welling up behind his thick glasses.

«And what did the big ones want from you?»

«You know the abandoned villa beyond your house?»

«Yes, well?»