After The Fall

originally posted March 26, 2006

For an ahn, the words I penned to paper held the world enrapt.

It was for this that I trekked across the Vosk and further north to the base of the Sardar Mountains. With the influence of wealthy Merchant Vesutto of the resort city of Venna, famed actor Locutius, flamed-haired beast of the Gorean Stage, and widely respected, seasoned performer Nikos of Tyros were secured to play the parts of Julian the Assassin and Agamedes the Warrior in the En'Kara production of 'The Fall of Agamedes' one more time. The pair had played to Vennan dinner theater patrons for three successive runs, but this was a world stage, an open venue. The acoustics to carry the actors' voices, the musicians' strains, would be provided by the wall of the black Sardar itself. Energy bulbs and the din of polite diners would be replaced by the drama of flaming torches and row after row, tier after tier of every facet of Gorean society. Low caste met High. Those of the wagons and the plains huddled beside the elite of the most metropolitan of cities.

I watched from the side of the stage. Sandal knelt before me, my hands upon her shoulders. Months before, she was there as I wrote the play, stirred from sleep at times when I would wake in the middle of the night to pen a line, jot down a turn of phrase that could not wait until morning. She knew the lines. She knew, in fact, every portion of the play save the final scene. She was my 'Julian' far before there was a Locutius or Nikos of Tyros, before there was a Vesutto of Venna. I traded lines with her as the work came together, finding her commentary and opinion insightful and worth consideration. She is a slave, yes, but a fascinatingly intelligent one. She was just as engrossed in the lines as the other women I own who were not afforded the privilege of knowing the work from it's earliest drafts to the final, triumphant production. She gasped as they did, as the final moments revealed themselves, deftly delivered by the highly underrated Nikos of Tyros. I left the applause for Nikos and, too, for the undeniably talented Locutius. Their's were the accolades of thousands from every corner of the planet. I was well satisfied to escort my women, arm about an auburn-maned girl's waist, out into the anonymity of the Fair's crowds. I had what I wanted.

Szol, Poet of Ar, had become, at the base of the Sardar during the En'Kara Fair of 10,156 CA, a Playwright of Gor.