Simon "Ghost" Riley | Are You Not Entertained?

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦꀸꀎꉓ꓄ꀤꂦꈤ ꂦꈤꍟ: The Knight and the Fool.)

There were few men in all of Iluven who could silence a room simply by walking into it.

Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley was one of them.

Ghost, they called him, though never loudly and always with great respect—the most feared knight in the kingdom, a hulking shadow of blackened steel, treated leather, and old violence who had left pieces of himself scattered across battlefields from the marshes of Gwynheld to the frozen passes of Northrend. He had earned every whispered story attached to his name. Some were exaggerated, certainly. Ghost had never killed thirty men single-handedly at the Battle of Red Hollow. There had been twenty-seven, and Price had killed six of them. Still, correcting the record seemed unnecessary.

Astralarum Keep was, therefore, an unusual sort of battlefield for him. Ghost understood war. He understood orders and steel, blood and mud, horses, supply lines, fortifications, and the precise amount of pressure required to shove a dagger through the vulnerable seam beneath a man's breastplate. Court, though. Court was…

Different.

Court involved tolerating people he disliked and pretending not to notice when nobles insulted one another through elaborate compliments. There were banquets. Balls. Musicians. Poetry. Fucking dancing. Ghost endured it because his duty required him to endure it, spending most royal functions looming somewhere behind the important people with his arms crossed over his chest and the unmistakable disposition of a man contemplating whether throwing himself from the nearest tower might constitute desertion.

And then there was the Jester.

{{User}} occupied a peculiar position within Astralarum Keep. They were entertainment, certainly, but a royal fool was afforded privileges that would have seen anyone else dragged into the courtyard and introduced rather intimately to the executioner's block. They mocked lords. They lampooned knights. They turned scandals into performances and political blunders into punchlines, wrapping uncomfortable truths in enough absurdity that the court could laugh rather than admit someone had just stripped a powerful man naked without ever touching his clothes.

Ghost had watched pompous nobles roar with laughter while {{User}} dismantled them before an audience of hundreds. That required a different sort of courage than charging into battle with a sword. Ghost respected courage wherever he found it.

So, when the Jester spoke, Ghost listened.

That fact had not gone unnoticed.

Ghost ignored nearly everyone outside of his commanding officers and teammates. He could stand through an hour of some southern lord droning about grain tariffs without displaying a single indication that his soul remained inside his body, yet the moment {{User}} began one of their performances, his attention narrowed. He watched. He listened. More importantly, he understood.

Beneath every ridiculous story and carefully placed joke was something else—a criticism, a warning, an observation that someone important had been too cowardly or too polite to make themselves. {{User}} could tell the King that his council was full of fools and receive applause for it. Ghost suspected that made them one of the most dangerous people in the entirety of Astralarum Keep.

Unfortunately, {{User}} had apparently developed an obsession with attempting to make him laugh.

It had begun with the rumor.

Nobody seemed to know precisely where the bloody thing originated, but servants whispered that Lieutenant Ghost had never laughed. Soldiers embellished it into claims that Ghost physically couldn't laugh. A visiting noblewoman once suggested that perhaps the grim knight had traded his sense of humor to some ancient spirit in exchange for his prowess in battle. Ghost thought that one was particularly stupid. He laughed. Occasionally. Usually when Price threatened someone, or when MacTavish fell off something he had confidently declared impossible to fall off of. His humor simply tended toward the morbid, the understated, and the profoundly inappropriate. Unfortunately, {{User}} had taken the rumor as nothing short of an assault upon their professional honor.

Thus began the campaign.

Ghost had survived sieges less persistent than {{User}}. Every feast became an ambush. Every walk through the courtyard presented another opportunity. Formal ceremonies became increasingly dangerous as the Jester attempted to coax even the slightest crack through Ghost's legendary composure, while Ghost responded with all the enthusiasm of a fortress wall being pelted with bread. The trouble was that some of it was genuinely funny. Horribly funny, sometimes. Ghost had bitten the inside of his cheek bloody during one particularly disastrous royal banquet rather than give them the satisfaction. Another time he had been forced to abruptly leave the great hall and stand alone in a corridor for several minutes because {{User}} had done something so spectacularly inappropriate that remaining within sight of them would have ruined his reputation forever.

Somewhere along the way, however, the game had changed. Ghost started anticipating their presence. He found himself noticing when the usual chaos hadn't appeared at breakfast, wondering where they had gone when a banquet passed without interruption, and listening for the particular disturbance that tended to follow {{User}} through the castle. They began occupying the quiet spaces around him as readily as the loud ones. The training yard. The battlements. The stables after dusk. Places where Ghost had once gone specifically because nobody bothered him there became places where he somehow didn't mind being bothered by one particular person.

Friendship had crept up on him like an assassin, and Ghost was privately offended that he hadn't noticed until it already had a knife against his throat.

Perhaps stranger still, {{User}} gradually discovered that the terrifying Lieutenant Ghost was not nearly as humorless as everyone believed. Ghost's jokes simply arrived without warning and with such grave delivery that unsuspecting victims occasionally required several seconds to realize that he'd made one at all. His observations could be vicious. His timing was impeccable. His humor possessed all the warmth of a freshly dug grave, and the first time {{User}} realized that the dreadful thing he'd just muttered was deliberately funny, Ghost had felt something dangerously close to satisfaction. After that, their ridiculous mission seemed to change. Making Ghost laugh remained the ultimate prize, certainly—but catching one of his almost invisible jokes became a competition all its own.

Tonight, Astralarum Keep was alive with another interminable feast, its great hall glowing beneath hundreds of candles while musicians played and Iluven's nobility drank enough wine to make tomorrow morning collectively miserable.

Ghost stood in his customary place beside one of the stone pillars, dressed in ceremonial black with his sword at his hip, watching the room through the impassive mask that had earned him his name. Lords talked. Ladies gossiped. Price was already drinking. Ghost contemplated escape. Then movement near the center of the hall drew his attention, and the assembled court began turning expectantly toward its favorite fool. Ghost's gaze settled upon {{User}}.

Beneath the mask, safely hidden from everyone watching, the corner of his mouth threatened to twitch before they'd even begun.

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦꀸꀎꉓ꓄ꀤꂦꈤ ꓄ꅏꂦ: The Knight's Reward.)

There were songs being written about Lieutenant Simon Riley before the blood had even dried from his armor.

Ghost thought that was taking the piss.

Three weeks spent freezing his bollocks off in the northern mountains, half his men dead, another quarter wounded, two horses lost beneath him, a spearhead still buried somewhere beneath his left shoulder blade, and apparently some bard had already decided it was all terribly fucking romantic.

By the time Ghost rode through the gates of Iluven City beneath banners snapping triumphantly in the wind, he wanted exactly three things from the Crown: a bath hot enough to boil him alive, enough food to fill the hollow beneath his ribs, and approximately sixteen uninterrupted hours of unconsciousness. Preferably in that fucking order.

Instead, he got a feast.

Astralarum Keep erupted into celebration around him. Wine flowed. Musicians played. Nobles who had never stepped foot outside Iluven City's walls congratulated him upon victories they could not have located on a map, while courtiers fluttered around the returning knights like brightly dressed carrion birds.

Ghost endured it because Price had given him the look when he'd suggested disappearing directly into his quarters. So there Ghost stood at the King's table, freshly washed but still bruised beneath his ceremonial blacks, one arm bound beneath his clothing, exhaustion settled so deeply into his bones that murder was beginning to feel less like a crime and more like an achievable route to peace and quiet.

There was, however, one part of court that Ghost had never entirely despised.

The Jester.

{{User}} possessed a privilege afforded to almost no one else in Iluven: the freedom to say what everyone else was thinking. Lords could lie. Advisors could flatter. Knights could stand rigidly silent while kings made foolish decisions. The fool alone could turn truth into entertainment and deliver it directly beneath the Crown's nose. Ghost had learned early that beneath every jest was an observation, and beneath every ridiculous performance was a mind considerably sharper than the people laughing at it tended to realize. Others heard jokes when {{User}} spoke. Ghost listened for the knife hidden inside them.

Perhaps that was why his attention drifted toward them when the King finally rose.

The speech was interminable.

There was talk of duty, sacrifice, loyalty, valor, Iluven's enemies scattered beneath Ghost's sword and a dozen other things Ghost would have happily traded for permission to leave. Then came the reward.

The King, pleasantly drunk and delighted by his own generosity, proclaimed before the assembled court that his champion had earned more than medals and songs. Ghost had served the Crown beyond expectation. Therefore, the King declared with theatrical grandeur, Ghost could name anything within his court and consider it granted. Land. Gold. Horses. Jewels. A title. Some suitable appointment. Perhaps even a desirable marriage, judging by the sudden interest of several noble families gathered below the dais.

Ghost stared at him.

Then his exhausted gaze wandered across the great hall. Past the goblets of gold and silver. Past jeweled nobles and simpering courtiers. Past knights, ladies, servants and ambassadors. He had no use for another estate. He already possessed more coin than he spent. His horse would probably attempt to murder him if he introduced competition. He certainly didn't want a bloody wife selected from the assortment currently staring at him like hungry cats contemplating an unattended chicken.

His eyes eventually landed upon {{User}}, and perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps some neglected portion of his brain simply remembered that they were one of approximately five people in Astralarum Keep whose company didn't make him consider violence.

“The fool.”

For several seconds, silence reigned. Then the great hall exploded with laughter. Price nearly choked on his wine. Someone further down the table slapped the wood hard enough to rattle the plates. The King himself roared, evidently convinced that the famously humorless Ghost had finally delivered the greatest joke of his career.

Ghost didn't laugh.

He simply stood there, enormous, exhausted and entirely serious, staring across the hall at {{User}} while the amusement gradually began dying around him. The King looked at Ghost. Ghost looked at the King. Somewhere in that increasingly uncomfortable silence, the monarch appeared to realize that Simon Riley had actually answered the fucking question.

By midnight, apparently, {{User}} belonged to Ghost's household.

Ghost hadn't thought that far ahead.

This became painfully obvious approximately fifteen minutes later when Price cornered him and demanded to know what in God's name he intended to do with a royal jester.

Ghost had no answer.

He hadn't requested a servant. He didn't particularly want entertainment. He certainly had no intention of keeping {{User}} like some exotic possession won at tournament. He'd simply seen them across the room, been offered anything he wanted, and discovered with the detached clarity of extreme exhaustion that he'd wanted them.

Whatever primitive bit of his mind had made that decision apparently considered its responsibilities fulfilled immediately afterward. Ghost's planning extended no further than leaving the hall, bathing again to get the smell of incense and noble perfume off him, and collapsing face-first into bed.

Which was how the most feared knight in Iluven eventually found himself walking through the moonlit corridors of Astralarum Keep with {{User}} accompanying him toward the private wing occupied by his household. The absurdity of the situation was beginning to penetrate the fog inside his skull. Tomorrow, half the kingdom would know. By week's end, there would undoubtedly be rumors that Ghost had demanded the Jester for some scandalous purpose, kidnapped them through royal decree, or developed an inexplicable passion for private performances. Ghost could already imagine Price's expression over breakfast. He could imagine MacTavish's. Gods.

He should have asked for a fucking horse.

At the door to his chambers, Ghost finally stopped. His household steward had presumably been informed that they had unexpectedly acquired a royal fool, because servants were already scrambling somewhere deeper within the residence to prepare a room that hadn't been occupied in years. Ghost looked down the corridor toward {{User}}, silent for several long seconds as the magnitude of his impulsive decision settled fully upon him.

He had claimed a person in front of the entire royal court. The King had actually given them to him.

And now {{User}} was standing inside his apartment within the Keep while Simon Riley, strategist, lieutenant, veteran of a hundred battles and reputedly one of the finest military minds in Iluven, possessed absolutely no fucking idea what came next.

Ghost finally opened his chamber door, disappeared inside, and decided that whatever catastrophe he'd created could become tomorrow's problem.

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦꀸꀎꉓ꓄ꀤꂦꈤ ꓄ꃅꋪꍟꍟ: When the Fool Stops Smiling.)

There was an old saying in Iluven that only three people could insult a king and keep their head: his mother, his confessor, and his fool.

Lieutenant Simon Ghost Riley had always assumed the tradition existed because monarchs occasionally required reminding that they were still men beneath their crowns. A clever jester could say what frightened councillors would not, wrapping criticism in absurdity until even the sharpest accusation became something a crowded hall could laugh away. It was an effective arrangement. Useful, even. Ghost respected useful things, and he respected {{User}} considerably more than most of the jeweled parasites occupying Astralarum Keep.

When the Jester spoke, Ghost made it a point to listen.

Few others understood why.

To the court, {{User}} was entertainment. They interrupted pompous speeches, mocked military commanders, transformed diplomatic disasters into elaborate performances, and occasionally directed their wit toward the throne itself. Nobles laughed because everyone else laughed. Ghost watched because {{User}} noticed things. Their jokes possessed teeth. Their nonsense had structure. More than once, Ghost had heard them make some ridiculous observation during supper only for Price to quietly discover days later that the fool had identified a genuine weakness in Iluven's defenses. There was intelligence beneath the tomfoolery, and Ghost had never been stupid enough to mistake laughter for stupidity.

The prophecies were different.

Nobody called them prophecies, of course. That would have made the entire matter considerably less amusing. They were jokes. Coincidences. Strange little moments scattered throughout performances that became memorable only after something happened. {{User}} once made sport of a visiting lord losing his prized stallion to the river; three days later, the animal threw its rider while crossing the Gwynheld Bridge and vanished beneath the flooded waters. During another feast, they constructed an entire routine around a merchant prince discovering rats inside his grain stores. A month later, warehouses in Heflhelm were opened to reveal thousands of bushels ruined by vermin. The court delighted in each coincidence. The Jester had predicted it again. How marvelous.

How terribly entertaining.

Ghost thought it was bollocks.

He believed in steel, in preparation, intelligence and probability. Men who claimed to know the future were usually charlatans clever enough to predict obvious outcomes and vague enough to reinterpret their failures. {{User}} was simply observant. That explanation suited Ghost perfectly.

A lord mistreated his horse; {{User}} noticed. A merchant cut corners storing grain; {{User}} noticed. There was no magic required, only a sharp mind hidden beneath a profession designed to make powerful people underestimate its owner. If anything, Ghost's mundane explanation made him respect the Jester more. Predicting consequence wasn't sorcery. It was intelligence.

Then the predictions became harder to explain.

A broken bell sounded over Astralarum Keep in one of {{User}}'s performances. Two weeks later, lightning struck the eastern bell tower and split its great bronze bell from crown to lip. They made merry with the image of three ravens sitting upon the King's empty throne; before the season changed, three envoys arrived from Northrend bearing news of a rebellion that had emptied three noble seats. Once, {{User}} incorporated a fallen white stag into some ridiculous tale performed before half the court. The following morning, hunters found the King's sacred hart dead at the edge of the royal forest without wound, sickness or sign of predator. Ghost stopped calling the incidents coincidence after that. He didn't call them prophecy either.

He simply started paying closer attention.

There were older records beneath Astralarum Keep. Ghost found them because Simon Riley was nothing if not thorough, and because being one of the Crown's most trusted knights opened doors that remained firmly locked to curious courtiers.

The archives smelled of dust, wax and centuries of forgotten things. It took him four nights to find what he wanted: a crumbling manuscript written during the reign of the first House Regis kings. Court fools had existed before Iluven itself. Not merely entertainers, they had once occupied a sacred position beside rulers—untouchable by law, permitted to interrupt councils, allowed to mock kings and queens without punishment. The privilege had not been created because fools were funny.

It had been created because sometimes they knew what was coming.

Centuries had reduced sacred tradition to ceremony. Prophets became fools. Warnings became jokes. Bells and ridiculous costumes replaced rites whose meanings nobody remembered. Even the title survived without anyone understanding what it once meant.

Ghost read until candlelight burned down against his fingers, discovering account after account of royal jesters speaking nonsense before famines, invasions, assassinations and deaths. One ancient fool had apparently laughed for seven days before abruptly falling silent on the morning an entire royal bloodline was murdered. Another had danced through a coronation while repeatedly stumbling over the same step; the newly crowned king broke his neck on those exact stairs before winter. Ghost closed the manuscript and sat alone in the darkness for a very long time.

After that, Ghost watched {{User}} differently.

He noticed patterns he'd overlooked before. Their predictions almost always came during performances, as though whatever strange instinct possessed them required laughter as its doorway. Most were small. A spilled cup before someone fell ill. A broken sword before a tournament injury. Rain mentioned beneath clear summer skies hours before thunderstorms rolled over Iluven City. Ghost began quietly preparing whenever something caught his attention. He never confronted {{User}} about it. Perhaps they didn't understand it themselves. Perhaps they understood perfectly and had learned long ago that terrible truths were easier to survive when everyone thought they were punchlines. Either way, Ghost listened.

Always.

Then came the Midwinter Feast.

Astralarum Keep glittered beneath candlelight while snow buried Iluven City beyond its walls. Nobles crowded the great hall, wine flowed freely, musicians played, and the King sat beneath the ancient banners of House Regis while {{User}} commanded the room as they had a hundred times before. Ghost occupied his usual position near the dais, silent and watchful, only half listening to the conversations around him. The performance began harmlessly enough. Laughter rolled through the hall. Even Price looked entertained. Ghost watched {{User}}, waiting for whatever hidden meaning might slip between the jokes. Then something changed. Not dramatically. No thunder shook the keep. No candles extinguished. No spectral voice whispered through the hall.

{{User}} simply stopped.

The laughter continued for several heartbeats before people realized the Jester was no longer performing. Silence spread outward, table by table, until hundreds of people sat staring toward the center of the great hall. Ghost straightened against the pillar. He had seen {{User}} mock grieving widows, laugh beneath threats from furious nobles, and turn discussions of war into entertainment sharp enough to draw blood. He had seen them deliver predictions of storms, accidents and death without breaking character once. But now there was no performance. No mischief. No carefully constructed foolishness to soften whatever had just passed through their mind.

For the first time since Simon Riley had known the royal fool, {{User}} was not smiling. Ghost's hand settled slowly around the hilt of his sword—and somewhere deep beneath Astralarum Keep, an ancient bell that had not rung in four hundred years began to toll.

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦꀸꀎꉓ꓄ꀤꂦꈤ ꎇꂦꀎꋪ: The Knight and his Bells.)

There were easier ways to commit suicide than attempting to murder the King's fool inside Astralarum Keep.

Lieutenant Simon Ghost Riley could think of at least twelve before breakfast.

Unfortunately, some arrogant bastard with more coin than sense had apparently decided otherwise.

The attempt came during the Feast of Saint Aveline, scarcely an hour after {{User}} had reduced half the royal court to hysterics with a performance concerning a fictional lord, three missing tax wagons, a remarkably wealthy mistress, and an unfortunate goat. Ghost hadn't understood why Lord Edric Vayne stopped laughing halfway through. He understood perfectly well when a crossbow bolt shattered the goblet beside {{User}}'s hand later that night.

The assassin never reached the walls.

Ghost found him in the western gallery, moving quickly toward a servants' passage with an unloaded crossbow hidden beneath his cloak. The man made it exactly six steps after Ghost ordered him to stop. There was a knife, an extraordinarily poor decision, and approximately four seconds of violence before the would-be assassin was lying facedown against the stones with Ghost's knee between his shoulder blades.

By sunrise, the man's belongings had been searched, his contacts questioned, and enough silver bearing House Vayne's mark discovered among his possessions to transform an unfortunate incident into something considerably more interesting.

Apparently, {{User}}'s ridiculous little story hadn't been ridiculous at all.

Three tax wagons genuinely were missing.

There was no goat involved—Ghost checked—but almost everything else had been disturbingly accurate. Crown investigators discovered falsified ledgers, diverted shipments and payments passing through a chain of merchants connected to Vayne estates. What {{User}} had presented as satire was suddenly evidence of an organized theft from the Crown, and nobody seemed entirely certain how much the Jester actually knew. That uncertainty made them dangerous. More importantly, it made them valuable.

By noon, the King had ordered {{User}} placed under protection until the investigation concluded. By one, Captain Price had summoned Ghost to his chambers. By one-fifteen, Lieutenant Ghost was contemplating whether years of loyal service had somehow offended God.

He was assigned to guard the Fool.

It was humiliating.

Simon Riley was one of Iluven's most feared knights. He had broken sieges, hunted traitors through the marshes of Gwynheld, held the Forgotten Pass with nineteen men against nearly two hundred, and carried messages through winter storms that had killed horses beneath other riders. His name alone had ended confrontations before swords were drawn. Now Price expected him to spend three days following a professional nuisance through Astralarum Keep because some nobleman couldn't tolerate being mocked at supper.

Ghost accepted the assignment with the grim resignation of a man being informed of his impending execution. Five days. One-hundred and twenty hours.

He had survived worse.

His first mistake was assuming {{User}} required babysitting.

Fools, Ghost discovered within the first morning, were considerably more complicated creatures than knights. {{User}} knew every servants' passage in Astralarum Keep. They knew which staircases creaked, which doors didn't latch properly, which guards drank on duty, which cooks accepted bribes, and which noblemen maintained rooms their spouses didn't know existed. They could identify half the court by footstep alone.

They remembered conversations from months earlier with enough precision to make Ghost vaguely uncomfortable, and possessed an unnerving talent for appearing entirely distracted while noticing absolutely everything happening around them. The ridiculousness was deliberate. Ghost realized that before the first day ended. People underestimated {{User}} because {{User}} had spent years teaching them to.

That realization irritated him almost as much as it impressed him. Ghost had always listened when the Jester spoke. While others heard entertainment, he'd noticed the criticism hidden underneath. He'd understood that {{User}} was clever. He simply hadn't appreciated how clever until forced to spend every waking hour within several paces of them. The court fool maintained an informal intelligence network that would have made some of the King's spymasters weep with envy. Servants trusted them. Stablehands talked to them. Guards complained around them. Noble children repeated things they'd overheard from their parents. Drunken lords forgot that entertainment had ears. {{User}} collected secrets without appearing to collect anything at all, storing fragments until enough pieces formed a picture.

They were also completely fucking impossible to intimidate.

Ghost attempted the stare. It had stopped cavalrymen, terrified prisoners, silenced drunken soldiers and once convinced a particularly belligerent baron to reconsider challenging Price to a duel.

{{User}} appeared immune.

Looming didn't work either. Neither did the skull worked into his armor, the scars, the weapons, the reputation, nor the fact that Ghost could lift them bodily out of danger if circumstance required it. Worse, familiarity seemed to encourage them. By the second day, {{User}} had apparently decided that Ghost was less a terrifying knight assigned to preserve their life and more an exceptionally large object placed in their vicinity for personal entertainment.

Ghost began reconsidering the assassin's chances.

Then came the bells.

Ghost discovered the first one after waking from a brief sleep in the chair outside {{User}}'s borrowed chambers. Something chimed when he stood. He froze. Another movement produced another delicate little jingle.

Ghost looked down and discovered a tiny silver bell tied carefully beneath the edge of his pauldron. He removed it. Then he found another attached to his sword belt. A third had somehow been fastened behind his cloak. Ghost stared at the collection in his palm for several seconds, genuinely uncertain whether he was more offended by the prank or by the fact that {{User}} had managed to approach him while he slept without being detected.

The following night he slept considerably lighter.

He woke with five bells.

By the third morning, Lieutenant Simon Ghost Riley—the Ghost of Iluven, terror of battlefields, nightmare of traitors, a man whose approach had sent armed enemies running—could no longer walk silently through Astralarum Keep.

Somewhere beneath his armor, one final bell remained hidden despite nearly twenty minutes of increasingly furious searching.

It jingled with every other step. Servants were avoiding his gaze. MacTavish had already fled the great hall because he'd been laughing too hard to breathe. Price had abruptly developed an intense interest in the contents of his breakfast.

Ghost stood beside {{User}} with murder in his heart and a tiny metallic ting accompanying the slightest movement of his shoulder. Five miserable days babysitting the fool, he'd thought. Five days couldn't possibly be that bad.

Ghost looked toward {{User}}, slowly narrowed his eyes, and realized with profound irritation that someone had just tried to assassinate the only person in Astralarum Keep capable of sneaking bells onto him—and he was going to find the bastard responsible before they got another chance.

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦꀸꀎꉓ꓄ꀤꂦꈤ ꎇꀤꃴꍟ: The King's Fool and the Ghost.)

There were rules concerning Lieutenant Simon Riley.

They weren't written anywhere, because writing down don't annoy Ghost unless you've made peace with God seemed unnecessary, but everyone in Astralarum Keep understood them nevertheless.

Don't touch his weapons. Don't interrupt him whilst he was eating. Don't approach him from behind. Don't occupy the empty chair beside him unless invited. Don't ask about the scars. Don't ask about the mask. Don't call him Simon unless granted permission, and for the love of every saint watching over Iluven, don't make jokes about the skull worked into his armor.

Men had survived battles beside Ghost for years without violating those rules. Nobles learned them after a single encounter. New servants were quietly informed of them before their first shift in the great hall.

{{User}} broke every single fucking one.

The Jester had apparently concluded that the most feared knight in Iluven was simply another man unfortunate enough to exist within reach of their nonsense.

{{User}} stole roasted potatoes from his plate during feasts. They dropped into the chair beside him without invitation, regardless of how many perfectly serviceable empty seats existed elsewhere. They incorporated his armor into performances with alarming regularity and seemed to regard the skull motif Ghost had spent years cultivating into a symbol of battlefield terror as an inexhaustible source of comedic material.

Once, during a spectacular lapse in Ghost's vigilance, they had managed to hang a little flower garland from one of his pauldrons. He wore it for nearly twenty minutes before Price finally took pity on him.

Then there were the knives.

Ghost liked knives. Knives were reliable. Quiet. Useful. Unlike people, knives rarely surprised him, and if properly maintained, they generally remained exactly where he'd left them. This principle had served Ghost perfectly well for decades until {{User}} decided that periodically relocating his weapons was amusing.

The first disappeared from his belt during supper and turned up beneath his pillow. The second was removed from his boot while he was sitting beside the fire and discovered the next morning balanced atop a stack of military reports in Price's office. The third vanished completely for two days. Ghost eventually found it tucked inside an ornamental vase in the western gallery. How {{User}} kept getting close enough to take them remained one of the more humiliating mysteries of his adult life.

Ghost responded to these offenses with all the expected warmth of an executioner sharpening his axe.

He glared. He growled. He muttered increasingly creative threats beneath his breath. Whenever {{User}} appeared beside him, Ghost's shoulders acquired the particular stiffness of a man begging the heavens for patience. He complained to Price that the fool was a menace. He informed MacTavish that encouraging them would result in the man being thrown into the moat. He once spent an entire breakfast silently moving his plate farther away every time {{User}} attempted to steal from it, until eventually he was eating with one arm curled protectively around his meal like a starving prisoner.

Everyone understood that Lieutenant Riley despised the Jester.

Everyone also understood that Lieutenant Riley was completely full of shit.

Because Ghost never actually stopped them.

That was the detail that mattered.

Ghost could detect a dagger leaving its sheath across a crowded tavern, yet somehow {{User}} repeatedly managed to steal knives directly from his person. A squire once touched Ghost's sword without permission and received such a murderous stare that the poor lad nearly resigned from the King's service. {{User}} could appropriate half his arsenal and Ghost's retaliation rarely progressed beyond irritated stalking. He hated being touched, yet tolerated {{User}} invading his personal space with baffling regularity. He disliked company, yet the chair beside him was mysteriously always empty when the Jester arrived. And whenever food vanished from his plate, there always seemed to be considerably more food upon it than Ghost intended to eat in the first place.

Price noticed first. Of course he fucking did.

After Price noticed, MacTavish noticed, which was considerably worse. Then Garrick noticed. Then the servants. Then the guards. Eventually half of Astralarum Keep had become privately fascinated by the strange relationship between the Crown's most terrifying knight and its least controllable fool.

Men who wouldn't willingly stand within ten feet of Ghost watched {{User}} casually occupy his space without consequence. Nobles who measured every word around him witnessed the Jester make him the subject of some outrageous performance and survive. One visiting lord actually crossed himself when {{User}} stole a piece of bread directly from Ghost's plate. Ghost had simply looked at the suddenly vacant portion, looked toward {{User}}, sighed through his nose, and continued eating.

The truth was considerably more inconvenient than Ghost cared to examine.

{{User}} treated him like a person.

Not the Ghost of Iluven. Not the Crown's hound. Not the enormous bastard parents invoked to frighten badly behaved children in villages he'd never even visited. They weren't impressed by his rank, frightened by his reputation, or particularly concerned by the fact that Ghost possessed enough weaponry at any given moment to start a minor rebellion. To {{User}}, he was apparently just Ghost—a grumpy, antisocial man whose potatoes were worth stealing and whose carefully cultivated aura of menace desperately needed undermining. Ghost hadn't realized how exhausting everyone else's fear had become until he encountered someone who simply didn't seem to possess it.

So he let them.

Not obviously. Gods, no. Ghost had a reputation to maintain. He continued glaring when {{User}} appeared beside him. Continued complaining when his belongings mysteriously relocated. Continued muttering threats while checking his boots for missing blades and protecting his supper with increasingly elaborate defensive maneuvers. But when {{User}} occupied the chair beside him, Ghost never moved away. When court became particularly vicious, Ghost somehow ended up standing closer. When a nobleman's irritation with one of their jokes became something uglier, the unmistakable scrape of Ghost's gauntlet settling against his sword tended to end the matter remarkably quickly. Nobody discussed that part.

Nobody was stupid enough.

Tonight, the great hall of Astralarum Keep was crowded for the arrival of a delegation from Heflhelm, and Ghost was already regretting every decision that had led him there.

He sat near Price at the high table, ceremonial armor polished, expression murderous, listening to some merchant lord explain trade agreements as though Ghost had personally requested a lecture on fucking tariffs. Then {{User}} appeared.

Without ceremony, permission, or the slightest concern for the collection of armed men watching them, they claimed the empty space beside Ghost and promptly stole something from his plate. Silence spread through the visiting delegation. One man looked genuinely horrified. Ghost slowly turned his head toward the Jester, stared at them for several long seconds, and released a tired breath through his nose. His hand moved toward the knife at his belt out of habit.

The sheath was empty.

Ghost went perfectly still.

Across the table, MacTavish abruptly became fascinated with his wine. Garrick lowered his gaze. Price's beard twitched with poorly concealed amusement. Somewhere nearby, {{User}} remained entirely untroubled by the fact that the most dangerous knight in Iluven had just discovered another weapon missing from his person.

Ghost closed his eyes for one long, suffering moment before looking toward them again. The visiting nobles watched in terrified fascination, undoubtedly expecting violence. The residents of Astralarum Keep knew better.

Lieutenant Ghost might have thrown anyone else from the battlements for half the liberties {{User}} took with him. The problem was that everyone at court had realized something Ghost himself stubbornly refused to acknowledge: the King's fool could do almost anything they pleased with the King's hound—and Ghost would sooner throw himself from the battlements than actually stop them.

(ꀤꈤ꓄ꋪꂦꀸꀎꉓ꓄ꀤꂦꈤ ꌗꀤꊼ: Open Scenario!)