Strange architecture is involved in building a kingdom.<br/><br/>I hold the yard stick perpendicular to the shaft jutting out of the bog dweller’s neck.  The reed shaft extends 58 centimeters out of a snotty black ring of a wound at a 21 degree angle.  Reed is useful because it is common here.  The wound has vomited black curds in a sash over the supine bog dweller’s chest; it smells more like cirrhotic turd than blood.  The bog dweller’s body lays in shock, looking like a gigantic baby made out of mushrooms.  I double check the angle of the shaft.<br/><br/>I make a note of it, internally.  I am building a kingdom with these notes.<br/><br/>There are five major components to the mechanics of killing someone with a bow.  There are ten to the mechanics of killing with your hands.  The Abruzzi have over two thousand different sword forms.<br/><br/>I make careful note that the arrow had been falling at a slight angle when it struck the bog dweller.<br/><br/>Somewhere near, a woman is baying like a hound, “Why?  Why?”<br/><br/>I think I recognize the voice.  Ruddy woman.  Yellow flower apron.  Pimple over left eye.  She had a young daughter with her when I and my men came to her town, and she tried to sell me bread while her daughter ate snot from her own nose.<br/><br/>Judging by her voice, her daughter is probably taken.  It might improve her marketing.<br/><br/>I bend forward over the body, and my chain mail yanks my neck, pinches my breasts through the sheepskin, bunches at my belly and butts rudely.  I hardly notice.  I use the yardstick to lift the bog dweller’s neck slightly, confirming what I suspected: No exit wound.<br/><br/>The angle of impact suggests the arrow would have sheared between the chunky sternomastoid muscle and the trachea, puncturing the internal jugular vein and stabbing out the other side.  The lack of exit wound and the swollen lower lip of the wound show the arrow was also falling flatly when it hit.  This probably caused the arrowhead to dislodge, impact bone, shatter.  Cut open the bog dweller’s lumpen neck and you would find a ball of iron tinsel smashed against its spine where its spinal accessory nerve used to be.<br/><br/>I make a note of this.  It means the nerve is nearly two inches from where a human’s would be.  It was a textbook lucky shot.  But copy that angle, aim for where that arrow exploded this monstrosity’s murderous consciousness in an instant of iron and shorting electricity, and it is no longer luck.  It is just textbook.  It is geometry.  It is architecture.<br/><br/>The baying woman is still going on.  The next bog dweller I check is pin cushioned with six arrows through its lean gut. Footsteps suggest he ran sixty yards from the first impact before going down.  I make notes.<br/><br/>Lean gut.  Many arrows.  Sixty yards.  Equals elusive abdominal organs.  Equals don’t shoot for the belly.<br/><br/>A bawling man, weeping like seeping piss, joins the sound of the crying woman in honor of his dead son.  The next bog dweller has one arrow, 13 centimeters from the rotator cuff.  Lots of blood.<br/><br/>13 centimeters from rotator cuff.  One arrow.  Lots of blood.  Equals shoot for the shoulder.<br/><br/>The next bog dweller has three arrows in him.  The next, two.  I pass by where they’re dragging Ymir away by his rosy-red braids, a bog dweller cleaver the size of a frying pan still lodged in his leaking stomach.<br/><br/>I try not to look at him, and succeed.  But not looking reminds me of the other ways he was present on the month long trail here.  How he smelled like lilies after he shaved.  His horsey laugh.  The way he’d always repeat things he wanted to sound meaningful three times.<br/><br/>I’ll say some words for him and the other fallen later.  Everything in its place.  I begin measuring the angle of the next dead bog dweller’s wound.  It’s a sword wound to the shoulder like a rift valley, the trapezius sheared entirely away from the deltoid.  The strike that made this is called, in swordsmanship, Zornhau.  The Strike of Wrath.  The strike’s angle and aim opened a path of weak resistance straight to the bog dweller’s otherwise well-protected heart.  There is more black blood here than could fill an ale cask.  Everything smells like feces.<br/><br/>I make notes.  A weak point between the arms and the trunk.  A vulnerable heart.<br/><br/>Zornhau was Ymir’s favorite stroke.<br/><br/>The baying woman and the crying man and the family who is bawling over their burning house are polluting the town with their grief.  Everything is resounding with cries, and it makes the smoke of the air especially bitter to me.  I pity these people.  I pity them for what they have lost.  I pity them most of all because this kind of life is strange to them.<br/><br/>They build families.  Houses for their families.  Farms to feed the houses.  Towns to support the farms.  Their architecture is simple.<br/><br/>Six major components to a bed.  Four walls to a room.  Three basic stitches when stitching a sheet.  Penis goes into vagina.  Out comes one baby.  Repeat.<br/><br/>Repeat.  Repeat.  As Ymir would say.<br/><br/>I sigh.  I pity them because they do not understand the life that barged in and showed them that they were not living so substantial, so natural, so real an existence after all.  I pity them because I do understand.<br/><br/>There are six major components to a coffin.  There are thirty seven ways I know to kill a man with one action of my hand.<br/><br/>I trade the yard stick in my hand for a sword and begin circling back to the area that caught the bog dweller’s flank assault.<br/><br/>Anyone can learn to build a chair.  Babies happen by accident all the time.  Most people can even learn how to craft something truly beautiful – a Gothan cathedral arch like an angel wing; a minaret; a very pretty chair – given enough time.  You discover the steps and follow them.<br/><br/>It takes a different architecture to motivate people to devote their entire lives to following these steps for the purpose of glorifying you.  To get a thousand people crafting a hundred minarets on your castle.  To worship under that arch and have wet-eyed, gasping, grateful dreams of dying for that glorious angel.  To bow before that very pretty chair and call it a throne.<br/><br/>To build a kingdom, you need to learn to break down, not build up.<br/><br/>Strange architecture needs different tools. Swords.  Respect.  Fire.  Panic.  Gold.  Torture.  Lust.  Legends. And people, to use them and be used by them.<br/><br/>I look over the madding group near the rim of the forest, not close enough to hear the conversation, but close enough to feel the panic.  Close enough to taste it.  Bog dweller bodies are everywhere, along with those of the raiders, and so everything, everywhere, smells like their turd blood.<br/><br/>It’s the high amount of skatole in their blood.  But my blood is racing again.  Because I can smell panic, I taste it.  And panic is the water on the clay of humanity.<br/><br/>Panic I can use.<br/><br/>My people have seventeen names for fear.  Vortighast.  Ghollic.  Krüe.  We have five Master Strokes of the sword – killing strokes: Crooked stroke.  Crossing stroke.  Top stroke.  Squinting stroke.  The Strike of Wrath.  We had one king.<br/><br/>We had one king, but now my father is dead one summer past.  Ymir is from my people, and he followed me for a month, gathering four others to my search for the Diadem.  Now they, and Ymir, are dead.<br/><br/>I need new people now.  New tools to build the kingdom.<br/><br/>I stride up to the newcomers as they talk with the elder – I am tall and fair, red haired and gold mailed, and I carry a sword.  That, and my posture, is enough to explain what I am about.  The travelers seem experienced.  One seems familiar.<br/><br/>I raise my empty hand in peace.  I move with the ceremonious ballet of a hierophant holding services.  Both new people glow for a moment in my eyes.  She is very familiar indeed.<br/><br/>From what I hear the elder, Arden, saying, a girl was taken – Anissa, the younger version of this woman who just arrived.  Wotan’s mirror has broken, it seems.  No matter; she is a very pretty shard.  And there is panic to be exploited.  I can concern myself with portents and philosophy later.<br/><br/>“I am Thoris.”<br/><br/>I turn to Arden, all poise, stare, subtlety.  I appear for the all the world like some holy icon from the Eastern Empire.  This is deliberate.  I speak very deliberately, the way monks lay gold leaf.<br/><br/>“Arden, we need a guide who knows the all the surrounding terrain about here very well, and we need a map.”<br/><br/>I am looking at this older, very pretty Anissa now.  There’s a little panic in her too, freshly buried, enough to taste.  My blood is racing.<br/><br/>“We must make haste to rescue you.” I tell her.<br/><br/><br/>