'Belligerent Knights' Series - All Liturgies

What makes a knight?

A shining blade or bloody battered steel?

Let us name the Orders Four and the truth within reveal.

THE GEAS KNIGHT unknown by name, the seeker proud and true,

His endless quest hath rent the stars yet known is he by few,

THE PEREGRINE, whose bell always rings the crack of breaking day,

It’s nameless peal will drive the ceaseless evil from the ways,

THE BLOODY KNIGHT, belligerent, her edge tastes skulls and lives,

The viscera of common men and royalty besides,

THE MENDICANT, the beggar knight, roughly clad and shod,

He lives as though he were a beast, but fights he as a God.

– Children’s Rhyme.

“Let us cut God to see if he bleeds!”

-Slogan of the Belligerent Knights

“I have long suspected the Belligerent Knight’s single minded devotion to Jagganoth as a natural outgrowth of the core tenets of their order. When a core part of your knightly creed includes the phrase ‘If it has a pulse – remove its skull!’, what can you do about a thirty foot immortal monstrosity impervious to physical harm and with complete mastery over space-time?

Worship it, of course.”

Preem Payapop Pritrum – On the New Gods

“Ever sang with a Devil before? You’ll be completely clobbered drunk or stone cold dead before the fifth verse. Which … I’m never sure.”

– Mars Pallatrix, Belligerent Knight

“It’s said a man should put prudence before power. Well them that says that don’t have power do they? And them that has power don’t have the time to think about prudence. They pull their bloody swords out and hack away!”

-Mars Pallatrix, Belligerent Knight

“Mastery: the power to fill a man with death before his next exhalation.”

– Book of War, Knights Belligerent

“If it has a pulse,

Take its skull!

If it builds a house,

Smash it flat!

Strength is my God,

The God of Shapes,

If my God should fail me,

I will kill him too.”

– Sword Law Mantra of the Knights Belligerent

“The Knights Belligerent have a single rule to their Sword Law and it is this – killing is the first instinct of man, before breathe, or even thought. Therefore everything a man does, every single detail of his day, from sleeping to eating, should be an argument with himself on the restraint of said instinct. Naturally, they don’t tend to get along with each other very well.”

– Ampater, merchant prince

“The Belligerents have a name for Preem Jagganoth: God’s Monster. You see, to them, he is a divine messenger, blessed by YISUN’s angels to cut away weak and useless things from the world and forge it into a more pure form. To them, he draws all evils into himself, like a great poison, in order to expunge the world of corruption.

Most people, I believe, take their worship as further proof of their insanity.”

-Peroxes the younger, S.C. 1440

“They say power makes for the best intoxicant.

If skesh wasn’t cheaper, I’d have to agree with them.”

– Pallatrix, Belligerent Knight

“Seeing his three wives draw ever closer and that his first plot to foil them had failed miserably, Prince Kassardis doubled his pace. Knowing he would never outrun the cruel Vastoki on open ground, he hurled himself into a sea of dead grass, and used up all his water trying to escape her grasp. A night and a day later, he emerged on the shores of the river Dal, and spent the last of his money hiring a fisherman to take him downriver.

The fisherman’s boat overturned in the town of Kol Varas, and there Kassardis did a very shameful thing. He sold to the first rich man he could find his fine silk headwrap, and his father’s silver dagger, and his waistcoat lined with sparrow feathers, which were marks of his lineage. With his sack of foreign coin he hired six strong men, belligerent knights from the wars of conquest, and hid himself in a wheelbarrow, hoping against hope that his ploy would be enough.

Vastoki arrived in the dusty town not hours later, and she was almost immediately set upon by the mercenaries that Kassardis had hired. From his hiding place, the young prince watched as Vastoki was caught in their ambush and fought desperately against stave and sword.

Vastoki was very fast, but also very slight, and no match against the six knights in close combat. Though beaten, she merely retreated to lick her wounds and set camp outside of town. One of the knights nearly lost his head to her long rifle when he ventured out to confront her, and that was that for a while.

As night fell, the knights returned to Kassardis. “Where wandereth thee, young one?” they said in their foreign dialects.

“To the land of Samura, where I may find peace and an escape from violence,” said the exhausted Kassardis, from his hiding place.

“Violence is inescapable,” guffawed the mercenaries, and robbed Kassardis of everything remaining that he owned, for they had seen he was a fool from the start. They threw him naked and beaten into the street, and spent their winnings on drink.

Kassardis, his swollen eyes full of tears and knowing his time was short, stole a woman’s garb from a washing line and a small hunk of bread and fled into the desert, the final words of the Very Wise Frog echoing in his ears.

The belligerent knights, for their part, died not hours later when they were squashed into a pulp by Littari’s iron cauldron. ”

– Tales of the Silver Prince

“Fear the heart that is covered by the cloth.”

– Saying of the Belligerent Knights

“DEMON FLIPS THE CART

A strong internal/external style that grants a practitioner unbelievable muscular strength.  While not as reviled as infamous styles such as Leisure Kicks, Ecstasy Dart, or Hundred Wind Ghost Blade, it is nevertheless seen as a rude, renegade, and unrefined style, and as such has no official schools and must typically be learned by seeking out a wandering master. It is a popular style of many famous belligerent or mendicant knights, including (famously) the warrior monk Ippo Kemon who once defended a bridge by clogging it with a wave of dead men and horses.

It can only be learned by men and devils, who have the abundance of black Atum needed. A student of this style kindles their Atum and internal forces with unbelievable heat, by eating certain herbs and ingesting certain roots over a few weeks of time, during which the practitioner must train intensely. The result of this process produces a voracious and incredibly strong hot black Atum that suffuses far more of the body than normal, spilling over from its meridians and saturating the flesh itself, an effect which is normally quite painful and can in some cases cause a person to quite literally burn to death.

The masters of this style sweat profusely when they let this energy suffuse them totally, and their body becomes red and flushed with blood, and even seemed to steam. They are capable of absolutely absurd feats of strength, such as lifting an ox cart overhead with one finger, lifting a house sized boulder, or (as I once witnessed in a duel) hurling an opponent several hundred meters into the distance. An old master once boasted to me that he had hurled a royal sailing ship at an opponent once while drunk in his youth, which I calculated later was about 2000 short tons (2500 imperial tons).

The well known drawback to this style is a practitioner must eat and drink around three or four times as much as a normal person of their weight in order to stoke their internal fire. Without such regular fuel, their own body is consumed and they quite literally combust. The masters I talked to were rather unconcerned about this particular quirk and took it as a matter of religious importance, one of them going as far as to say that most old masters that know their time is getting near stop eating, so that when they next enter battle their body will consume many of their opponents in its violent self immolation.”

– Manual of Hands and Feet

“Many fools admire the Gods, thinking them admirable and wise, praising their virtues, and asking for their boons.

I’ll tell you one thing friend, there ain’t nary a pious farmer who comes up short when it’s time for burnt offerings. He’s always got a lamb ready. He may not know it, but he remembers why the Gods are Gods in the first place.

You can ask for harvests all you like, but never forget they sup on fire and blood.”

– Mars Pallatrix, Belligerent Knight

“The old bugger always tried to dissuade his own worship. Hated the whole idea of divinity, matter of fact. But it didn’t matter. The common people worshiped him. The city guard worshiped him, and so did the priest class. Bleeding hells, the demiurges, princes of the world, held him as their king. I’m sure a few o’ them had a little beardy shrine set up somewhere.

I mean, just look at what the bastard could do.”

– Mars Pallatrix, Belligerent knight

“The moment the first prince of the world tore apart an angel, we must have known we were proper fucked.”

– Mars Pallatrix, Belligerent Knight

“Never assume because a bloke’s bigger than an ox’s arse that he ain’t gonna sneak up on you and make your head do a lovely little dance off his knuckles.”

-Mars Pallatrix, Belligerent Knight

“Once, a long time ago, in my youth, I served as a caravan guard crossing the deserts of Qeen, a trip of around a half turn all in all, crossing through the kings road. I made the crossing about four or five times – the men in that caravan were hardened and bolstered by both youth and good, boisterous courage, fed by the frequent clashes with bandits, desert beasts, and other hazards that the crossing was known for.

One night we stayed in an errant ruin to shelter from a sandstorm. There was something about the place that set the hackles ablaze with ill feeling. Thorough examination of the area presented nothing, but into many of the stones of that place we found a curious marking – a single indentation, coiled and sinuous, as though something had been sealed in there, inside the stone itself, perhaps for millennia. Though we could not explain how, each man of that expedition, and there were fifty something of them, reacting almost instinctively with almost violent repulsion. Without any reason to think so, we somehow knew what had been encased in that stone was older than time itself.

We lost three men in the sandstorm trying to escape that place, but given no other quarter, we had no choice but to bivouac there. It was one of the most harrowing and uneventful nights of my career. The company parted soon after. We lost the stomach for the work.”

– Graves, belligerent knight

“Oh aye, you’ve fought many a doughty warrior. Monks vested in shimmering atum, warriors wielding caraptine plate and dragonbone swords. Do you think you’d last one second against a real i mmortal?”

– Graves, Belligerent Knight