This silly story, believe it or not, was inspired by a game of Polytopia. I played as the monsters; the story is from the perspective of one of my victims. I discovered a tiny island on the corner of the map, the last holdout of this civilization, and for some reason it inspired a story in me.

There was smoke on the horizon.

Tublek turned away from the shoreline and began trudging toward home. He’d only built it the year before—and, if he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t really fully built. He and his wife had a room to themselves, but the children all slept in the same room, the same room where his wife labored over meals to feed them all. But that simple house had become a home.

Somehow, now, he could think of it as home.

Tublek slowly made his way up the long coral-lined path, to the top of the hill where he saw his wife, Saank, holding little Torgr in her arms while Tuksen and Grimdulbr held her legs. They, too, smelled the smoke, saw the plumes coming from the mainland. Perhaps the children didn’t understand, but Tublek and his wife did: the legacy of their warfaring people had returned to haunt them.

Still, Tublek put on a brave smile. “Tuksen, could you take your brother and sister inside while I talk to mother?”

Mutely, the child obeyed. When Tublek didn’t hear the sound of play inside, he knew they were standing beside the doorframe, listening in. He could have told them off—no. Now wasn’t the time to risk hard feelingss.

Tublek whispered to his wife: “There’s nowhere left to go. We’re at the edge of the Square.”

After so much hardship, Saank was beyond tears, but her eyes were still red as they scanned the horizon. “The sky is clear and beautiful today,” she whispered. “The ocean blue and pure.”

Tublek nodded. A blessing from the gods.

A good day to die.

Soon, the skies would be filled with dragons, the waters with battleships. The Elyrion armies, who had swept the Aquarion tridentions before them as the ocean waves sweep foam and spray before them, would not be merciful. They had rejected every peace treaty sent to them. Their armies of beautiful, terrible monsters would not be sated until they only had each other to turn on.

After all, there could only be one conqueror of the Square.

A pink dot on the horizon. Slowly growing larger. A dragon?

Tublek turned to his wife and embraced her. “Come. We should be with the children.”

Now Saank cried, but only a few tears—not the great, heart-wrenching sobs of turns before when they had fled on little rafts into the ocean and discovered this tiny island beside the mysterious Lighthouse.

Tublek’s children did their best to pretend they hadn’t spied on their parents, but there wasn’t enough mess, wasn’t enough distraction, when Tublek entered their shared room. He smiled nonetheless. He put little Torgr in his arms and held up a toy figurine of a Rider, a simple wood carving of a man riding a turtle. Then Tublek froze.

The toys he had given his children were Riders. Men of war.

Suddenly, Tublek found himself shaking. This toy—he’d grown up with many like it. This was all his fault, his fault and his father’s fault, and his mother’s, and their fathers and mothers, all the way back as far as Tublek could remember. There was a rot in their family, in all Aquarion families—maybe in all families on the Square—that had been passed down from generation to generation, somehow regarded as a gift. It had never even been questioned.

Saank held her children and cried in fear as their home shook with gusts of wind, like miniature hurricanes. Tublek could only stare blankly, almost not even registering the gout of fire that blistered his skin and melted his flesh.

His last thought: “This could have all been prevented.”

_{Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow}