Knights of Old Orders

Part One: Arthur

the 51st tale of agc

written and created by Mark Bousquet

 

Prologue

2201 APRIL

HALA / KE-RETRIBUTION

"What do we do now?" Ben-Vell Parker, the new Cosmic Protector, asked Eon and the Supreme Intelligence?

"We wait," the Supreme Intelligence answered, his voice rumbling in the hollow of the ship.

 

ASGARD / THOR ODINSON HALL OF PEACE

"But we can’t just sit here!" Attumidunn protested to Beta Ray Bill, the new King of Asgard.

"That is exactly what we can – and will – do," Bill replied. "There are times for action, and times for rest, and given the events of the past few weeks, this is a time when our best course to let the waters settle. We need time to heal, time to gather information. If there is a new enemy out there, we need to put a face to it."

"But Bill-"

"That is King Bill, now, my dearest Angel," a rich voice came from behind, and they turned to see Brono the Future King approach. "Although, if our liege will allow it, I mayhap a mission for all the Orphans that remain."

 

MT. OLYMPUS / THE DEAD CORNER OF SPACE

"Aye," Santa Claus/Hercules answered Franklin Richards, the boy god. "A mission is just what I need to clear my head. I will go immediately!"

"No," Franklin answered, "you will not. You will wait until your partner returns."

 

CHRONOPOLIS / THE PALACE OF KANG

"Bah!" Set snorted, pounding his fist against the wall. "I crave action! We have waited too long already!"

"Patience," Doom answered, his voice cold and hollow, echoing throughout the eternity of Limbo. His eyes met those of his Generals – Set, Mephisto, Pluto, Hela, Ikaris, Bruunhilde, and Daimon Hellstorm – and there was no further discussion.

 

Knights of Old Orders

 

EARTH / ONE WEEK AGO

There are parts of the world that reject the state of things.

Wakanda, where the world’s only supplies of vibranium and adamantium are hidden away, where a kingdom thrives, away from the prying claws of the United League of Nations.

Attilan, where the secrets of the Inhumans are locked away inside an abandoned city, and technology still far advanced from the rest of the world lies dormant.

Atlantis, where a few survivors of a decimated race eek out a meager existence at the bottom of the ocean.

To the ULN, these are unfortunate states, but not unacceptable. Treaties with Wakanda guarantee their cooperation should an alien invasion ever come to pass, and guarantee that no Wakandan technology be sold to any nation lest it be sold to all nations. None can penetrate Attilan, so none gain an advantage over whatever technological treasures lie inside. And Atlantis is not worth more than a passing thought once every several months. When Thanos destroyed the ancient city, truth be told, many in power around the world were pleased to see it gone.

But there lies on the Earth one realm whose unwillingness to fall in line causes great concern for the ULN. Not because it is particularly valuable. Not because it is a threat.

No, it is nothing more than annoyance, or a curiosity. A relic of days gone by, when nations fought and conquered each other with armies, navies, and colonizers instead of coming together as a united planet.

England.

There is magic in what ULN members jokingly refer to as "the Old World." Real magic. Magic enough to keep most outsiders out.

If it was a land of peace and power, the ULN might have been driven to action. But it is not. The few that have seen it talk of it as a cursed land where strange beasts roam free, where science has been all but abandoned, where men fight with swords and spells in archaic, bloodthirsty hand-to-hand combat.

In 2194, it is said, the Earth disappeared from existence. Four years later it returned. To the people of Earth, it passed unnoticed. One day the planet entire was frightened by the horrific image of a giant serpent running across the sky, locked in combat with an Avenger. There was a blinding flash of light and when the planet awoke their calendars read 2198.

A girl named Mary remembered waking up and turning on her Net. There was a man in a funny costume calling himself a King who explained to them that what they had witnessed before the flash was the end of Ragnarok. The large snake they all saw? Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, locked in final combat with Thor Odinson. Thor had won, but died himself, and somehow that triggered the Earth – which Balder annoyingly kept calling Midgard – to disappear. But now it was back. It was four years later, but it was back. No one on Earth had aged a day, and yet they were supposed to believe that they had all lost four entire years of their lives.

God did not work that way, Mary remembered thinking. She was sixteen and living in a Christian convent in northern Germany, part of Soviet Europe. Her life was one of worship and study. Her previous summer she had learned to speak Kree just because her brothers had challenged her to do it. The Sisters disapproved, but she kept her translation discs hidden away and studied them at night, under her covers with a flashlight, like some of the more misbehaved boys in the Rectory snuck peaks at dirty webzines.

She was one of six children and she knew, as they all did, that at some point one or more would receive what had been come to be known as "the calling." They did not speak of it. One day, years past, as the ice gathered at the corners of the painted glass windows, one of the Sisters or Fathers came to visit them during prayer time and took them down the long, stone halls to a room they had never entered, where it was explained to them that they were from a special family, that the woman who had raised them was their mother, but the man they knew as father had no biological connection to them. Their real father was dead and buried.

Mary and the others had always assumed – being raised in a convent and rectory – that "the calling" would come from God, and would result in them spending the rest of their lives not just as good Christians, but as a Priest or nun.

As a child, Mary had prayed hard to receive "the calling."

It was on the day Earth returned that she received it.

Turning her head away from the image of the King telling them nonsense, Mary was frightened at the appearance of another in her room. That the young woman standing there was a monster only registered as a secondary response.

"Who are you?" she asked the visitor.

"Who are you?" the visitor’s mouth and voice mirrored her own.

The calling had come to Mary Wagner. She was sixteen. She was a mutant. She was a blue-furred freak in a momentarily intolerable convent.

Chaos ran rampant through the academy, and the nuns quickly came and pulled her into the Bishop’s office. "You have received the calling," the elder man said to her. "You must now leave. Talk to no one, not even your family. May the Lord keep you safe."

Sixteen, not enough money to survive the week, and suddenly all alone in the world, Mary encountered few who would help her survive. While being a mutant had long been accepted in the world, people were frightened of the stories they were being told. The Earth had disappeared for four years? It was the work of aliens. It was the work of the devil.

Covered in short blue fur, three digits on each hand and foot, a slender tail shooting out of her lower back, Mary was not welcome in many places. She walked from town-to-town, covered as best she could in a long navy overcoat she had stolen off a line on her second week alone. She had no place to go, no destination in which to strive to reach. As best she could, she traveled in the woods. God, she still believed, would lead her where she needed to go.

It was while staying with a blind woman in the Tuscany region of France that Mary first heard of the strange occurrences in England. While the rest of the world had returned untouched, England had apparently reverted to the Middle Ages, then disappeared behind an impenetrable wall of thick, grey clouds. The ULN had sent exploratory missions in, but they had either not returned, returned with bedeviled minds, or had not seen anything but the thick smoke that covered the entire region.

The reports of magic and strange creatures came to her then, and Mary decided at that moment that England was her destination.

It was now five years later and Mary was older, harder, her blue fur still short. Luckily, she had come to thank God, the fur had never grown out. They were not years she liked to dwell on. They were of survival, of day-to-day struggle. Of living nightmares and sleeping nightmares. Of cold.

"If this doesn’t work," she grabbed the collar of an old sailor who smelled of stale brew, "I will be back for you."

"If this doesn’t work," the sailor replied, unmoved by the show of bravado, "you’ll be in no condition to do anything but rot in the bottom of the English sea."

Mary let the man’s collar go, and easily jumped from the man’s small fishing boat down into a small, wooden skiff of ancient Viking design.

"By the way, lass," the man called down to her. "Should you not come back, my wife would like to know yer name, so that she may pray for you. She took a likin’ to yeh. So did I, if the God’s truth must be spoken."

Chin raised, the soft misting rain beading on her fur, Mary nodded to the man, and answered, "Crawler," then turned and rowed towards the dark, swirling clouds that appeared to rise right out of the water.

Behind their foreboding wall, lie old legends.

 

SHEPPARDSHIRE, ENGLAND / DAWN

The rain rarely stops and the wind is a near-constant presence rustling through the trees, touching your face. The clothes you wear are always damp. The only thing more constant than the sound of your own breathing is the mud that cakes everything.

It is a place of long shadows and grim vistas, and there are whispers, in the voices of those who live here, of a golden legend rising from the dead to save them all from the hell they find themselves in.

"Arthur …"

It is only a whisper now, but the volume grows.

 

AVALON, ENGLAND / THREE DAYS AGO

The coffee was bitter, hard to swallow, but it was hot and so, to Mary, it was just what she needed.

"S’matter, Crawler, don’t like my joe?"

Mary turned and flashed a smile at Chef. "Just what the doctor ordered. It couldn’t be better if you relieved yourself in it."

The rip brought laughter from the small band that surrounded them – a nebulous grouping of loners that came and went without notice. Chef, Mary had learned in just two days, was the only constant. Hard words were not the language Mary preferred to use, but it was the language she needed to survive at the bottom of life’s barrel.

Chef grumbled as turned away. "Hell, if you don’t like my cooking, you can do it yourself!"

The small band smiled to themselves, pulling their jackets tighter to their bodies. It was cold, growing colder, the slow slide of autumn to winter gathering steam. Mary had never imagined a world like the one she found herself in now. Even at the convent they had some electronics, some signs of modernity, but not here. No, here it was like stepping back into the Middle Ages. There was no electricity, no computers, no Net, no-

"Crawler, check it."

Mary turned, keeping her tin of coffee close to her face, cradling it between her hands. "Check what, Grimm?" she asked the orange-rock skinned man.

"Party coming." Grimm pointed to the edge of the small lake, a quarter of the way around, moving counter-clockwise. Mary’s eyes lingered on Grimm’s body, the rocky surface grinding together with every movement Grimm made underneath his dark green and black tunic. He was the first one she’d met in Chef’s band. Quiet, somber, kind, the body of a tall, athletic man hidden behind a rock-strewn exterior. Blue eyes that hit her deep, not with piercing intensity, but with the gentle warmth of the full-sunned sky … and yet, like her, a freak.

Farmers, fishermen, and freaks - that was England.

American accent, she had noted immediately. He had come to England, too, but she did not know why. England was not a land where you asked questions of the past.

Turning now to the near shore, Mary saw a young man in ragged crimson robes emerging from the woods, moving out onto the hard beach, covered entirely with flat skipping stones the size of a child’s hand. Behind the man, a group of about thirty farmers followed.

"I give you Avalon!" the man screamed over the waters of the small lake, and the followers behind him dropped to their knees. As one, they screamed, "Avalon!"

"Who is he?" Mary asked, coming to stand alongside Grimm, noting the intensity in the almost-human face.

"Dunno," Grimm shook his head. "Some kind of prophet, it looks like. They pop up now and then." This close to him, Mary could hear the grinding of the orange rock, could see the small bits of Grimm that fell away every time rock touched rock. ‘It’s my build,’ he had told her. ‘Not fat enough. If I put on fifty pounds the rocks would be pushed outward, give them some room to breathe. Body’s too tight now, the rocks fold in, grinding against each other.’

‘Does it hurt?’ she had asked, but did not get a reply.

She shook herself clear of the memory of just two days previous. The man in red stood with his arms still extended, his eyes closed, his breathing deep. His hair was brown, with a patch of white, and one of his eyes appeared to lightly glow. "What’s that symbol mean on his chest?" she asked.

"What symbol?" Chef asked, coming to stand near them. "Can’t see a thing with these old eyes…"

"On his chest," Grimm pointed. "Two interlocking Ds."

"DD?" Chef asked. "That’s it?

"That’s it," Grimm nodded.

"Not a proper family crest, that is to be certain." Chef grumbled, moving back to his pots. "Not very excitin’, either, is it?"

"Who wants excitement?" Grimm asked, as the crowd around the young man on the near-shore began to grow.

 

LONDON, ENGLAND / MORNING

Wilhemena Frost looked out from her penthouse apartment, desiring to posses everything she saw.

London was the one city that had survived whatever had happened to England, but it existed as simply the shell of its former self. It was roughly half the size it should be, and while the buildings remained, all other evidence of the way things were no longer existed. There were no cars, which suited Frost fine. A horse drawn carriage was much more regal, much more fitting the White Queen of the Hellfire Club.

A grin spread across her face as she turned away from the view to gaze upon the only sight she preferred to the city she would soon rule.

Her own image, reflected back by an elegant mirror she had taken from Buckingham Palace, during the riots.

"Yes, this will do," she smiled, running her hands over her sharp business suit, her eyes catching the reflection of her former costume on the bed. The black leather and garter outfit signifying her rank was now too common. It was worn, in the days before the Earth’s disappearance, as a symbol of the past, but now the past was present, and the Hellfire Club would change with the times.

She wore a white leather top under a small, elegant white jacket, her midriff exposed. Her skirt was short and her legs were bare down to her black high heels. She thought of her thigh-high leather boots with regret at their absence, but with the grime that everyday covered more and more of the city and people below her, she knew that power was held within the image of two long, clean white legs.

Reaching behind her, she grasped her long blond hair up, tightening it into a bun, exposing a sleek, supple neck. ‘What else?’ she mused. ‘Ah, yes.’ She smiled, reaching for a pair of glasses. ‘A luxury none of the peasants can afford.’

Wilhemana Frost let her eyes and hands take in her new look. She could feel the power that exuded from her body and knew that it was time, too, for the final stages of the rebirth of the Hellfire Club. The last three years were a long process, but the Queen now had much of her court.

And Frost now wanted a King.

Below her in the streets, as a crowd of whores watched helplessly as one of their own lay dying in the street before them, a murmuring went through the crowd.

"Arthur, we need you…"

 

AVALON, ENGLAND / TWO DAYS AGO

"I don’t like it," Grimm shook his head as Chef ladled a chunky broth into a wooden bowl.

"Then leave," Chef shot up at him. "Me, I’m stayin’. That," he pointed to the crowd of nearly three hundred followers on the near shore, "is money to be made."

"Grimm’s right, Chef," Mary nodded, not wanting to know what kind of meat was in the stew. "I got a bad feeling about that prophet." Her eyes quickly darted to the man, still in the same pose as he was the day before – arms outstretched, facing towards the lake.

"Oh, little Miss German convent girl got a bad feelin’ too, eh?" Chef threw up his hands. "You can leave with the big rock, then."

Mary said nothing, and chose not to recognize the look on the face of those around her at Chef’s mention of the convent.

"He’s got the stink of time on him," Grimm said of the prophet, but no one paid any attention.

 

AVALON, ENGLAND / ONE DAY AGO

"Lady of the Lake, we come to serve you!" the young prophet yelled for the hundredth time.

"Arthur!" the crowd yelled in reply.

Chef watched from by his pots, his hands rubbing together. There were now five hundred followers, and they had to eat eventually. Crawler and Grimm never should have left. Didn’t think the female elf would, but then, what the hell did he know about elves?

 

LONDON, ENGLAND / ONE HOUR AGO

"My god," Mary said, her voice seeming to drop away, "it’s not possible. Is it?"

‘Said the blue furry elf to the rock man,’ Grimm thought, but said nothing, his eyes locked to the horrible sight in the sky as the great shadow passed across them yet again.

They stood in a public square inside the city of London. Around them, people alternately screamed, fainted, and stood rooted to the ground, unable to speak or move.

"It is the end, the end, the end!" someone yelled. "The Devil has come to claim our souls!"

Mary watched, horrified and awed, as the large, purple-scaled dragon soared across the sky, circling lower and lower with each pass.

All across the city now, there was one name shouted over and over again.

The name was Arthur, and Mary felt a thrill run down her spine every time she heard it, without knowing why.

 

AVALON, ENGLAND / THIRTY MINUTES AGO

Chef watched the rebirth of a legend.

He had walked down to the edge of the lake to fill his cooking pots with water when it appeared as if a sun was giving birth from inside the lake. From somewhere deep, deeper than the lake itself, it seemed to him, a bright, white light slowly rose up and out of the water.

‘This should hurt my eyes,’ Chef thought, but the light instead warmed him, comforted him, touched him in ways he could not describe. He did not even realize he was crying.

All eyes were now on the white ball of light, and the woman that stood at its center.

The Lady of the Lake.

None later could describe the Lady, except to say she was beautiful. She extended her hands to the people on the shore, and they wept.

"She has come to bring Arthur back to us!" the young prophet yelled. "Lady, give us our King! Lady, show us Excalibur!"

At the words, a sword, handle first, burst from the water, arcing up high and fast, then imbedding in the ground at the prophet’s feet. His eyes drank in the sword, and he reached his hands out to grab the handle.

Contact. Pain. Suffering. The screaming of souls from some dark, horrible place.

The prophet’s followers felt a turning in their stomachs as their leader was forced to his knees in pain. His howling was unholy, the sound of the devil, and its cause was the sword, Excalibur, that the Lady of the Lake had offered forth.

"That is my curse, Nathaniel Grey, not yours," a strong, elder voice said, and the followers saw a knight suddenly standing before their prophet. The knight reached down and gently pried Grey’s hand from the blade.

"Excalibur is cursed!" someone yelled.

"But Arthur wields Excalibur!" another voice cried out. "If the sword is not-"

The now silent knight said nothing, and turned to mount a grey horse that walked out of the Lake. The followers parted as the knight dug his heels hard into the horse, and thundered away.

"That was not Arthur, my friends," the Lady of the Lake said gently as she walked across the water to stand before Grey. "Come, Nathaniel, you are not well." She reached a hand down and placed it on the shivering young man. "You hath traversed the timestream too many times, my lad, and your mind is no longer well."

Tears began to pour down Nathaniel’s face as he looked into the face of beauty. "Sweet lady, who did you bring us? Why did you not bring us Arthur? That sword," he shivered, "there were souls trapped within!"

"Hush, my son," the Lady comforted. "Time will reveal answers to all your questions. But for now," she looked to the followers, "you may go forth and spread the word. That was the Ebony Blade Nathaniel grasped, and it carries with it a terrible, terrible curse." The Lady let her words comfort them all as best she could. "It is a horrific weapon, but the blade you now need, and there is only one we can entrust to hold that dark curse at bay."

"Who Lady?" a child asked. "Who was that knight?"

The Lady’s eyes met the young girl’s, then looked to the distance, where only she could see a dragon circling above the city of London. A single tear ran down her cheek and she dropped her head to once again meet the girl’s gaze.

"It was the Black Knight," she whispered.

"But … why?" Nathaniel asked. "Why not Arthur? In our time of greatest need you are-"

The Lady gave them no reply.

 

ON THE ROAD TO LONDON, ENGLAND / NOW

The Black Knight rode hard, his eyes locked onto the dragon he knew to be called Lockheed.

At his side, he could feel his sword crying out for blood, crying out for the taste of souls. It wanted to kill.

Dane Whitman knew the Ebony Blade would not be disappointed, wondered if it had ever tasted the soul of a dragon.

 

 

Knights of Old Orders to be continued…

Farmers, fishermen, and freaks - that was England.

 

YGGDRASIL

Comments c/o bousquet22@earthlink.net

For a subscription to AGC, send an email to me and I'll add you to the agcverse mailing list at yahoogroups. You will receive every issue of AGC as soon as it is ready for print.

In the place of letters this issue, I want to take some time to introduce a new AGC series.

Starting this past month, I have introduced a new series called TALES OF AGC. This is a unique series in two regards. One, the stories are only 1-2 pages long, and Two, it is only available "hot off the press" on the AGCverse mailing list.

Let me explain. There are often ideas I have for AGC that just don’t fit into the regular series. Or requests from you that I just can’t fulfill. I received many requests and wishes for more stories with Spider, but he just doesn’t fit into my plans for what may be a 20-issue stretch. Believe me, it’s not for a lack of appreciation for the character, or a lack of stories to tell. I’d love to tell more Spider stories, but they just don’t fit right now in this series. They do fit in TALES OF AGC, however.

TALES will not be a regular, ongoing series in the style of AGC, i.e., long story arcs with huge consequences. As I stated above, these stories are just 1-2 pages in length. They’re a scene or two, nothing more. Think of them as back-up stories without a front story to go along with it. The point of this is two-fold – it enables me to tell more AGC stories, to show you more of the AGCverse, and it will keep AGC more active in your minds. My publishing schedule, such as it is, is typically short bursts of great activity followed by long droughts of waiting. This goes to the way I write – I tend to write in long arcs and I tend to not publish the first issue until I’m well into the story-arc.

With TALES, I can get these ideas out to you and show you a larger portion of the Everything. Characters who may not be scheduled to appear here for another 30 issues can be seen in TALES, without my having to rearrange my stories here in AGC. As any of you long-time MV1 readers know, as a group we seem to hit these extended lulls, where it seems there’s never any new content coming out. By publishing these short stories, I can be continually putting out new AGC content without overburdening myself, and you can read more of AGC without having to sit down and read a full ten page story as you try to remember what happened the previous issue.

By keeping these stories short, they won’t interfere with my writing of the main book. When I asked several years ago about starting a second title, many of you wrote it saying that you’d rather I write the main book instead. You didn’t want this main story slowed down. With TALES, this won’t happen. I never sit down to write AGC without the intention of finishing at least half an issue. Which means I don’t sit down to write AGC unless I have at least an hour, hour and a half to devote to the endeavor. If I have a half hour and try to write just a scene inside the story, I find my writing ends up feeling very disjointed. But with TALES, I can sit down and in a half-hour tell a full, albeit short, story.

Now, as to you only being able to read them "only" on the AGC mailing list. I am not going to publish TALES at the website as every issue is released. Frankly, it’s too little content to have you repeatedly coming to the website to get a page or two of content. I was going to actually have them be back-up tales in AGC-proper, but then you’d only be getting them when you got a new issue and they’d interfere with the main story. Just didn’t seem right to tack a back-up story at the end of the first part of a longer arc. The plan has become to release them on the mailing list (allowing me to publish them on their own) and then, after I’ve written 5 to 7 "issues," I’ll collect and publish them on the website as a GIANT-SIZE ALL GOD’S CHILDREN issue. My promise to you website-only readers is that I will NOT be writing earth-shattering stories in TALES, nor will I write anything there that will have any bearing at all on the main title before the GIANT SIZE collection can come out. You will not be missing out on the main story by not reading these short TALES until the GIANT SIZE can come out.

My goal is to publish one TALES OF AGC every week. I think it’s a nice way for me to write more of AGC and a nice bonus for the mailing list readers without hurting the website only readers. The first three TALES OF AGC have been published already. Tale 1 features Spider in a tale called "Junkie Shock" and gives you the background information on this character – who he is, why Venom is bonded with him, and what the relationship between the two of them is like. It was never my intention to make a mystery out of who Spider is, but it also wasn’t important to any of the previous stories to have the information relayed to you. With TALES, I can give you that wider picture, give you a better sense of what’s going on besides this great war.

Tale 2 involves John Francis Saint in a story called "Colonial Heart," and 3 features Daimon Hellstrom in "Soul Cage."

If you’d like to read this first TALE, to see if you like this format without having to sign up for the mailing list, drop me an email and I’ll send it to you. You can determine if this is the kind of story you want in your mailbox every week, or if you don’t mind waiting until the GIANT-SIZE comes out. Or just head to yahoogroups and sign up for the mailing list, or email me and ask me to add you and I will do it for you.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Next month I’ll get into your letters about AGC 50. Until then …

Mark Bousquet

Northern Bear Productions

7 November 2002