But if you'd rather not know... you can absolutely skip this one if the metaphysics of the worldbuilding aren't for you.
Main plot point here is that
SpoilerRutt finishes making his magic axe.
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The Shamans and the Enchanters made war on each other. When the war ended they were on the same side. Perhaps they won.
There's a Serpent that Nests in the Queen of Forfeiture's Womb.
The Minotaur will return on Sunday.
It is Sunday. It is Monday. It is Tuesday. It is Wednesday. It is Thursday. It is Friday. It is Saturday. It is Sunday.
The Minotaur has returned. He has killed Irene Ivermectin. The Unpopular Priest will not speak again until the Burgrave's final wedding.
Irene is alive and the Unpopular Priest is delivering a new sermon. The Minotaur has not returned. He will do so on Sunday.
'You' are outside linear time. Events are occurring simultaneously.
I have been trying to warn 'you.'
The Minotaur's Milkmaid is Acquiring that title right now in her own Kitchen. The baby awakes. The Old Trans Piemaker is Happily Appreciating her Long, Beautiful Life. The Heterosexual Vampiress is Having a Boring Evening. The Priest's Traumatised Wife is keeping the Door on the Chain. The Careworn Farmer is Discussing Breeding over Breakfast. Everyone is shouting about Spiced Schnapps. The Heterosexual Vampiress is looking for something to Read. The Unstoppable March of History is resulting in an Incredibly Awkward Bathtime. The cattle are lowing. Three Conventionally Attractive People are having Dub-Con Sex. Two Conventionally Attractive People Are Having Consensual Sex. The Priest’s Traumatised Wife is Going to Bed Early. Statice and Karamack Are Introducing Themselves. Events are occurring simultaneously.
'You' are meeting your Milkmaid.
'You' are outside linear time. I have been trying to warn you.
The Minotaur is inside linear time.
He has not yet killed Irene. He will return on Sunday.
He is on the Eastern road. He is inside linear time.
He was on the Eastern road. It was a long walk back to where the caravan had been attacked. Longer for walking it without the sensation of being hunted. Shorter for being able to walk the road itself, rather than the fields and forests of Forfeiture and the gullies and ravines on the Ligature side of the border.
Rutt was walking back to the site of his greatest defeat. There was something there he needed. Something he had left behind that was worth this walk of shame.
He could have been back in Spetlamu, ejaculating copiously over his beautiful new girlie. He was falling for the Milkmaid hard. Her joie de vivre and positivity were so infectious, they brought out feelings inside him he hadn't experienced since things turned sour with Vanessa. Yeah, the Milkmaid was a hell of a cunt and he couldn't wait to use and abuse the little slut more.
Plus, the shaft of Peartree he now carried allowed him to summon the dryad's humanoid form whenever he wanted. There was nothing to stop Rutt, whenever the fancy took him, from just summoning up the chubby green nymph, raping her to death, and then summoning her right back up again. The Peartree Shaft granted him an infinitely recyclable supply of nymph pussy. Fuck, his old man was a dumb cunt for never figuring that one out.
Yeah, right now, Rutt thought, he could be spending the whole day getting wanked off by his new Milkmaid and raping his daddy's wife. But instead he walked the lonely, dusty Eastern road towards the last place in the Lands he wanted to be. To a place where he'd failed. A place where he'd been made to feel small and weak.
Men had paid him to protect them and their cumdumps. The men and the cumdumps were dead. All dead. Slaughtered by screeching metal horrors from Galaxy-(7). Abominations no Minotaur could stand against.
He had been helpless. He had fled. And now he returned.
This Minotaur has twice existed outside of linear time.
Like all Man-Bulls he gestated outside of the World, brewed and baked inside the roiling wombs of the Tauriarch itself. Like all Man-Bulls he had to fight, search, rip and tear to win the privilege of entering Linear Time, the Material World and the Lands of Lust and Pain. His birth was an adventure. His first, debatably conscious, act was a quest. Like all Man-Bulls successfully born into the World he made the grisly pilgrimage through the First Labyrinth, his mother's grotesque innards, until he found her portal-pussy and spewed himself out into entropy's dominion.
That was the first time this Minotaur existed outside of linear time. But there was another.
This Minotaur enlisted.
Rutt fought in the Idea Wars.
The camp was abuzz with corpseflesh and the tiny lives it nourished.
It was as Rutt had expected. Whether they had got what they wanted or not, the British Robots had not left a clean massacre behind them.
The bodies of men. The bodies of whores. The bodies of slaves.
By Rutt's reckoning, those were the three kinds of people. Men, whores, and slaves. Those were the three flavours that humans came in.
But there was one body here that was not human. Maybe it was not even a 'body' but it was for sure a corpse. It was a husk of life departed.
The shell of one of the Exterminators. The creatures that had routed him.
Rutt had seen it die. At the hands of an oppai loli bitch with a surgically-stitched cunt. At the hands of a slave.
There are things you cannot think.
Ideas you cannot have.
Your mind can't hold them, can't contain them. They pass through it like water through a sieve.
Let us us very clear; We are not talking here about ideas your imagination cannot generate, logics your intellect cannot deduce, phenomena your senses cannot perceive, or notions your reason or fancy could not originate.
We are not talking about the limits of what can come from you.
We are talking about the limits of what your mind can hold.
There are ideas that simply cannot exist in your mind.
I am going to tell you five of them right now. Right...NOW.
Did you catch them? No, of course you didn't. But I typed them and posted them in between the last two paragraphs of this update, right here on Scribblehub dot com. Count the words you can read in this chapter. Now check the word count. They don't match up, do they? There are hundreds missing. Hundreds. Whole invisible paragraphs. They express ideas your mind can't hold so they pass through it. Water through a sieve.
Don't be embarrassed. It happens to everyone.
But who decides? Who chooses what ideas will be possible for minds? The godfolk? Hardly!
In the Lands this story tells of, wars were staged to decide. The Idea Wars.
The Shamans and the Enchanters took arms to fight over what it was possible to think. Two sides, each battling for the continued conceivability of a set of ideas.
The Shamans thought one thing.
The Enchanters thought another.
Two sides.
At the end of the war there was one side, the Shamans and the Enchanters, because whoever had lost could no longer think the thoughts they had been fighting for. Both sides believed they had always thought the thoughts of the winning side. Both sides believed they had won so, in a way, perhaps both did.
The exotic alien metal of the creature's casing could not, even in death, be breached.
But Rutt had not expected otherwise. He had not come looking for metals that tools or hands of these Lands could work. He had come looking for metals fit to forge a blade for an axe that had a dryad as a shaft.
The Minotaur would take the robot's corpse to one who could work it. One who could fashion it into the weapon he needed. A dear friend from the Idea Wars who owed him more than one favour.
Strapping the dead machine to his back, Rutt performed an unspeakable ritual and, for the third time in his life, found himself outside of Linear Time. Outside of the Material World. Outside of the Lands of Lust and Pain.
Rutt the Minotaur entered the Multi-Verse. He will return on Sunday.
Who really won, do you suppose?
What does the shape of this world's thoughtspace suggest?
There's a Serpent.
A Serpent that Nests in the Queen of Forfeiture's Womb.
Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape. Rape.
Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt. Cunt.
Girlies. Girlies. Girlies. Girlies. Girlies.
Slutbags.
Besthole.
Slutbags.
Spiced Schnapps!
What does the Serpent want? Is this what it wants? Is the Serpent the shape of the world? Is this what it likes? This relentless, wearying, juvenile misogyny and borderline racist subtext? Is this what it fucking likes?
The Serpent that Nests in the Queen of Forfeiture's Womb.
The Shamans and the Enchanters made war on each other. When the war ended they were on the same side. Perhaps that means they both won.
Or perhaps there was a serpent.
It's okay though! The serpent is mighty friendly.
Every morning when the Beautiful Princesses of Forfeiture, Misericord (32E) and Eulalia (34G), take breakfast with their mama then the serpent will pop its head out of her snatch to say hello! What a funny snake!
Did the Idea Wars decide what is 'true?'
They decided what it is possible to think in this world, but did they also determine what is true in this world?
Is conceivability a guide to possibility?
We do not know and we are not concerned. Such things are questions for philosophers and the Idea Wars were never about philosophy. They were war.
Had they been philosophy, what use would they have had for Rutt?
NEXT TIME: Dark comedy and sexual violence.
