Years, the knight has wandered. Centuries, perhaps.

The jagged roads contract and

expand like the entrails of a writhing beast. For each time they shift, a terri
ble roar trembles the darkness. Centuries he has wandered yet the farther he wal
ks the less reason he finds in going on. Yet he persists anyways in his dogged p
ilgrimage. Why, he does not know. It doesn't matter. the road is good enough. It
gives him purpose, meaning.
Like all others, he has heard the legend of the Fair Lady. The princess in the t
ower, longing for salvation. Children's stories, he tells himself. He doesn't be
lieve it. And even if he did, why him? Every one of his previous mistresses, he'
s failed. Always, he awakes from the end of a pastoral dream, a sword in hand, s
taring down at the body of a woman he was supposed to protect. A failed lover at
times, a failed guardian, always. Even if the Fair Lady were to exist, what wou
ld it matter? He'd just let her down.
And so he walks. At first he told himself he was looking for something beyond hi
m. God, perhaps. Truth. But whatever noble intentions he had within him have sin
ce crumbled. He walks now just to run himself into the ground.
When he cannot walk any longer, he drinks. He wants to drown himself in an ocean
of drink. He wants to bury his head at the bottom of a smoky wine-bottle sea, a
n ocean without a bottom, where the ten-thousand fishes rise up to sing to the p
ale blue sky and the harvest moon shines without end on endless miles of waverin
g cornstalks.
Too long he's trekked the bottomless halls of the palace of the perpetually-sett
ing sun and roamed the corridors and spiral staircases of the last church in the
universe. He longs for purpose. Another mistress. Some days he dreams of the Fa
ir Lady, in her tower high. He wonders what she dreams of, how her heart beats.
Whether her hair falls like the ones of his former fell, whether he could ever b
e by her side. But alas, he drinks it all away and laughs her off. He writes of
her in the lonely nights yet in the mornings he tears away the pages and folds t
hem into imaginary castles to rival those of the emperors bygone. One day, he sw
ears, he shall hurl the notebook off the face of existence, himself with it afte
r. He's always longed to see the sea. Perhaps he shall set sail in a paper armad
a. Load it up with all his paper memories of paper people in paper masks. And wh
en the ships become waterlogged and sink, he too shall sink with them. For so th
e ship and thus the captain.
Then one night he hears a whisper on the wind. Someone calling. A beautiful voic
e. Why him? He takes another drink. But as the days pass it grows on him. Could
it be -? No, love is a concept foreign and long forgotten to him. But, wait - ho
w beautiful it is! He longs to strive after it. He doesn't know what he wants. H
e wants her, the one behind her voice. He loves her, yet he's never seen her. A
voice on the wind. He doesn't care. He doesn't care.