Heracles has heard my prayers and sent me a sign. Finally.
My father has more pull with my order than I would like. It seems he spoke sternly to whoever ordered me held, so that I could leave this fortress and go see my city again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but my father insisted on it. He said that he hoped that Heracles might show me a sign in this city, as he had before. It seemed as likely as anything else.
So I wandered. I had nothing to wear but the skin they had provided me, that wretched thing festooned with jewels. But the order had provided it, so I wore it.
It did not stand out as much as I might have feared. It seems that many of the knights have taken to wearing such skins, not won in battle but made by slave girls. I made it deep into the city before I was recognized.
I had wandered near to one of the inns, where I used to spend far too long at dice and drinking. One of the whores there recognized me. She knew me from before, but she had heard stories, now. Of my dealings with the Tarrasque and that pack of lies, but also of my inappropriately enthusiastic behavior regarding some of her fellows who had been at the party. I wished to hide my face in shame, but I only walked away. Not before some others of my old crowd had recognized me, and believed that I had returned to my former state of sin.
It would be false to say that I did not flee. I may have run. There was no enemy I could fight, there.
I found a marketplace, far enough away that those present spoke only in vague rumors of debauchery at the fortress. I watched a bard, who said he had a story for me.
He told the story of a noble knight, who was falsely praised for deeds he did not commit, and then brought low by the fornicators who played at being his masters. He spoke of a knighthood that had lost it’s way, become corrupt, and how that noble knight made use of the reputation his masters had made for him to overcome their dastardly grip upon the land.
He was an unsubtle fellow. I asked him if he also asked the cleric for potions that would cure the genital ailments of his “friend.” He laughed and took that to be a sign that I was not as stupid as I had been made out to be.
He told me that he might be able to help make the story true, and gave me the location of a cleric who might help make it so.
I found that cleric. We spoke long of the Heracletians, of where they had gone astray, of what I might do to help correct it. He helped me see Heracles’s true path for me.
I am no longer of the order, for the order is rotten and has forgotten the face of the gods. I am released of my oath to obey them, for they have forgotten their oaths to obey Heracles himself.
The order is fouled, and it must be destroyed.
And I will become the order.
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