In the morning, Nettle muttered in various dead languages insults they all ignored as he got in the peeling red Ripple. For unknown reasons, Kriti’s eyes had huge obvious black bags, btu nobody felt fit to mention it. The horses too reacted slowly. Laural quizzed them all, but they ignored her or muttering about sugar snacks she’d given them three days ago. They’d gotten back on the road slowly in the morning. Spoon chose to be in the back and Bodi out in the front.

  Laural chose to ride by day, despite being stuck on Jack today. He’d already bucked a few times over nothing and his internal dialogue consisted of such grimness that Laural took drastic measures to drown him out.

  She called up to Day. “We’re going to Mooning Castle. I think the map said. Will it be hard to find?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  “At least they took the time to improve this stretch of highway.”

  Wooden guardrails protected the woods and worn travels from getting tired. They had trees and rocks and honestly the most generic fantasy woods setting she’d ever seen before. It comforted her to think maybe a portion of their world hadn’t been completely swallowed up by cultivators or kingdom builders. The animals told her all sorts of ways the world had been undone and redone and she honestly hoped they lied or got confused. Often too their perceptions didn’t quite make sense in translation. For this reason, she had to be very focused if she used an official scout for anything. The energy could usually be used elsewhere while traveling, to stave off larger creatures or help them speed up or slow down to do their own avoidance. So, she kept focused on her own ideas when traveling to the new place. It took them half the morning before signs of a few farms scattered outside suggested proximity. As the maple trees dropped away, she began to see rolling fields. A few workers here and there out working them.

  Far in the distance, the castle on the hill boasted all the things one expected of a castle. Gray stone walls, four turrets on each corner, built with formidable rock, and a great view of all the way across the hilltops and farms. The battlements and crenelations cutting their square teeth into the sky. A proper portcullis lifted up, but no need for a bridge. No moat, but who could afford a moat these days? One had to downscale if you were a millennial castle owner. A pretty river passed by on right. Enough water for everyone. The land around had small red and purple market tents scattered at the bottom of the walls willing to offer up their food and plenty of abused serfs for corporate, er the castle, to continue its rise even over hiring freezes. Their road got forced to take them around the back to avoid a small flood plane full of farming and enter the side gates. The problem as they realized going further to the side, is that at some point the back of the castle had taken considerable damage.

  The back wall of the four quarters stood open. It was a bit like seeing a king without any underpants. The mooning castle’s nickname became apparent as two collapsed wooden spires met in the middle of the opening. These had collapsed in a specific way right in the middle of the breached way, with a distinctive curving shape. The destructions looked exactly like a framed buttock fully mooning the entire pathway and farmlands. If the wood color had not been quite so tan, and the gray stone less committed, it might have at least helped.

  Mooning castle, evidentially in the middle of the open plane without enough brick to work with nearby, had no signs of its backend being repaired. They’d not bothered to create a path, but old scars cut into the back showed where the massive battle had once been. Sitting proudly standing in the dirt was a battering ram, off to the right. The beautiful face of a golden fox with the nose for strike point and the ears for handles clearly had been polished recently.

  A few more enterprising sellers sat on the ground with their fruits, raspberries and blackberries, displayed. Also jewelry with foxes and maybe prayer cards for pilgrimages. A fine set up of drinks as well, with three lemonade stands declaring, “See the Moon. Have a drink of world famous Fox Moon lemonade!”

  Bodi inspected the huge hole in the wall. “Tell us the best jokes your tired of, and I’ll buy our drinks from you.”

  “How many got rammed in there?”

  “I bet you’re the butte of every joke.”

  “You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

  “Everything’s all ass end up here?”

  “You guys really took up it up there?”

  Bodi fetched a drink from each seller and handed it off to others. None for Nettle. The last lemonade seller at their staring at the fox ram offered, “It’s a reproduction. The original siege ram was burned to symbolically indicate the declaiming, as in de-claim not talking, of the city. Now that fox ram is watching over the breach in the walls. A totem to protect us all.”

  “Tell us the story,” Bodi said eagerly. “We’re all too curious to walk past this whole thing.”

  The man with a cart full of squashes who could be a farm or a merchant or really anyone with squash on the ground because who knew about these sketchy establishments. Maybe it was money laundering. He had a single rummy eye, and another clear blue one along with an off sent nose that appeared to have been birthed that way, and a few ugly markings along his face. Clearly a gnoll mixed troll with Ao Oni. His hyena blue face merged into the trollish traits with each tooth pointed ninety degrees out. But he had a friendly smile all the same, and perhaps he shared a kindred spirit with the ugly castle before him. Happy to let others see his ugliness and proud of what it represented because it was himself and being ugly is no sin nor shame. But being a fool always has been. Trolls in general were a great species when modified to act without ignorance and only in good fun.

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  He beckoned them over. Before his story, each of them got given a squash, and Day went into the cart, shook down whiny Nettle for cash, before returning to pay. As she did, the seller told them his story. “I’m old enough. Then I was but a child. You must know that the siege lasted over forty-eight days. They keep hoping we’d starve out and we’d gotten plenty of supplies in and besides that have a few air systems for getting food in. We’re a terrible place to besiege. You know out in the middle of nowhere, Houska Castle style. And the crops can’t be supported much without water which we have and magical ways to stop. The other way is across the mores, marshes, and muches, which is a weighty way to carry the food through nearly a full day of travel on open heath that cannot be defeated by magic. Most smugglers won’t even attempt it. Be that time Castle Healthbar-“

  Day interrupted rudely, “You mean heath?”

  “Nope. Healthbar, but heath is a common mispronunciation. Castle Healthbar had fended off the barbarians of barbary, the running wings, a few wildling storms, and any number of random human armies raised up by chosen types. We swapped whenever an entire kingdom changed, but Healthbar Castle sticks to its location never turning and always being forced to deal with if you want full completion war campaigns. We’re a bonus level for a lot of kingdom builders that’s typically won by intelligent negotiation, without breaking the wall. The last three attempted sieges wound up with multiple armies being forced to flee as they starved to death long before us! And getting the water out is no easy trick either. Anyway, we got the best defenses and were using to being called Titanic Castle.

  “Then came along Kudzu. Kudzu, maybe a single person, a species, an off worlder encampment who knows, were known to be able to climb anything. Break into anything. Survive on nothing and choke out the local population of trees castles and farmland alike. Kudzu is the type of thing nobody expects, until it swallows you whole. Their army too had a few flying units. Mostly winged monkeys and a few other species of Frankenstein creatures with wings slapped on. So the Kudzu swept in with their foreign languages and new way of swallowing us up and they’d been comping at the base to get us you see. Because we were the unbreakable castle and they were the siege killers. It was meant to be kismet of armies.

  “So, they surrounded us and choked the air supplies. Then, brought forth their battering rams. They’d done a few before but none of them were like the Great Ram. The grating ram they’d made of golden fleece taken from Argonauts in trade for two silkworms. Both the silkworms died as they’d been sickly, so they got the fleece for basically nothing and the Argonauts went home crying about investing in foreign markets being a sham, the next crypto.

  “Anyway, the golden fleece. They wove into the side of the oldest tree upon the great volcano mountain in the see of Sea of Trees that swallows souls that the locals call Aokigahara. So, they took the Acer distylum, Betula grossa, Sorbus americana, and Chamaecyparis obtuse all these branches they glued into one. (I don’t make up these names talk to a scientist about their weirdness). They took their tree and they bleed into four unwilling souls be them human, ram’s head mushrooms, ram sheep, or foxes, the stories are unsure. Then they used the molten rock from the mountaintop volcano and bonded it with the golden fleece. And it created the most impressive siege ram to ever be made.

  “The Rams had never been broken. The Kudzu army could not be defeated. No wall could stand against them. No enemy too large. And I tell you seeing the very ram itself was something to behold. This is how I got my eye injury you know. Anyone of us from the castle and surrounding areas who looked upon it went blind instantly. We still don’t know how the ram got to move or used by the Kudzu without them going blind.

  “But anyway, the others who attacked us convinced them to bring forth this ram. And it battered away at the walls for four nights, and when it broke through in the great beyond the Kudzu gave up a great cheer. And they took away the battering ram sending it to a new castle because they believed all you needed was to break out are walls to break our spirits. But they never should have. They should have destroyed all four turrets, these brick have been placed by hard toil, but also the anger of generations of troll anarchists who wish of no kings and gave themselves one quiet one what knows his place.

  “We broke open the remaining bricks and we welcomed in the Kudzu with a celebration cut scene. We did not resist but offered them wine and drink and called them the killer of Healthbar Castle. And those who wanted to fight left. Those who wished to subdue, got anxious. For thirteen days and nights, we called them the great conquers. We offered them the best we had. And once they felt calm and once the fighting men had left, we poisoned them at roots. The food we gave them came from the lands of sorrow. We broke the bread of our defeat. We baked and smote it into everything they touched, and as one our resistance grew. And on the fourteenth night, nobody who had broken the wall and remained here were alive. If they had off worlders, they permanently lost the game. No more lives.

  “But Kudzu came back for their dead when nobody offered an explanation. The Kudzu returned to the walls, but still without their golden fleece, and we showed them the dead, we did not resist again.

  “And we told them there had been a great curse placed upon the castle high up on the hill. That whomever had touched brick of wall that should not would die within sixty-five years. And the Kudzu knowing of their rams and knowing that they’d never seen anything like us, brokered a peace per the usual rules of our bonus episode. They would have nothing to do with us and us nothing to do with them.

  “And it has been for two hundred years. We broker nothing with each other and that makes us both even. We put up the fox to indicate our wisdoms and how it defeated even the greater might and we’re no longer the undefeated castle.

  “Two hundred years? But you said you saw the ram? Are you simply young looking?” Bodi had been invested and now appeared skeptical.

  “Trolls age less when they appear infrequently to socialize. Why do you expect they get so upset by true connection and have to live alone? Each day with sentients is less time to live. This is not the worst though. It was how Kudzu renamed us.

  “The Kudzu started calling us the Mooning Castle, in their defeat they insulted and sullied our names. And honestly, it’s funnier than the truth. Their story gets spread around and only that lone fox battering ram recalls how we won the day at the end, and the walls cannot be rebuilt for the knowledge is lost and nobody has the right stone. The picture is left, all the same. Mooning Castle instead of Healthbar Castle. We have lost by reputation, if not in actuality.”

  Laural sighed. “This was a downer. Do you holistic healers or doctors? Anyone who can fix blunt injuries?”

  The gnoll mix squash seller shrugged his shoulders. “You can’t trust those doctor’s types. None of them fixed my eye. They’re cross species skill is horribly lacking.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind. It’s time to go.”

  Bodi tucked in one arm to make a small chicken wing and muttered, “Let’s go touch the butt.”