By Alex Langer
From Goblins & Galaxies #0 Summer 2025
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
We piss-poor trash. We rotten villein shits.
There is a fog at the base of the castle’s hill, thick as unhewn wood. It reeks of battle—shit and blood, sweat and mud. Rain has rinsed the soil, but the stench encroaches, as do the creatures below. Gangrenous eyes that shine through, glowing like stars, like undiscovered metals wrenching apart the bonds of creation. The land is theirs, far more than kings or lords or priests who scrabble for its surface.
Four score huddle round the glow of our campfires. French and English done killing for their lords. We yeomen keep our bowstrings dry and stake the earth, trenches deep and arrows bright. We brought these men of fair Paris low only days ago, but now they hold firm next to us. Their wounds patched, crossbows drawn, and spears sharpened.
To our left and right, there are Frenchmen and Englishmen, Flemings and Germans. They come from other times, other wars. They hold bronze swords or fire lances, jabber in strange or familiar accents, wear woad paint or three-cornered hats, or masks of glass and leather not so different from our helmets.
A war makes for strange bedfellows. Brothers bound in the shadow of the motte—to each other, by each other’s blood and the greater evil below.
Were that but the truth our world abided by! Brothers and sisters in the redness of our blood and the tender whispers of our hearts, of a baby’s cry and a lover’s shout and a worker’s groan and a mourner’s sob. But the swords of our betters cleave us apart, Kings of Misrule who reign for centuries and gorge themselves like the sun will never rise again.
Our kings brought us to this place, Harfleur smoldering in the distance. Not far from the River Somme or the fields of Flanders, where poppies grow. Earth that knows the wars of old and new—Caesar and Charlemagne, William the Bastard and Wilhelm the Hun.
This shall be a place of honor, said Charles, their king.
This shall be a place of glory, said Henry, our king.
Yet once the battle was met and blood was spilt, there was neither to be found. There is no honor in how iron punctures flesh or mustard eats the lungs alive, no glory in the half-gutted father or limbless brother or son who quaffs whisky like water to keep the monsters at bay. And when morning came, those who were no longer of use were left for this place.
A place that throbs. That knows. That hungers.
Below we hear them, the crunch of bone and rip of flesh. We smell them, the stench of donkeys leading lions into the gaping mouth of Moloch. We taste them, the putrid rot of lords who slaughter all and let God recognize His own. We feel them, the velvet whisper of the flag and the sandpaper of the bandage that once was white.
Whose glory, we ask now, abandoned to the ravenous horde. Whose honor?
We band of brothers? If we are their brothers, are our kings not our keepers?
No. They have murdered us too.
The monsters creep forward now. We see them, wearing the faces of the dead. Iron masks and grimy beards, loved ones and hated ones. Their lips drip with gore, and their clawed feet are wrapped in loops of barbed wire.
Saint Crispin’s Day is past, and none will celebrate it again. The lily flowers have wilted. None will ever sprout again here, where nations rot and trenches to hell will be dug.
All that remains is we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
As our doom comes, in the shadow of the ruined keep, we raise two fingers to the sky.
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Alex Langer is a Canadian Jewish writer and lawyer usually based in Brooklyn. He lives near the park with his wife and daughter. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Heartlines Spec, and On Spec Magazine, among other venues. You can find him at @alexlanger1993.bsky.social on BlueSky.
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Illustration: Tom Mead is the creative director at Spiral Circus games and loves to draw and paint the weird and wonderful. “I grew up in a dark forest in the middle of nowhere in Cornwall, UK and it’s shaped the way that I draw and think.
“Surrealism and horror is what makes me tick and I always love messing about with drawing projects large and small. My biggest project to date is an underwater horror game called ‘Silt’.”
Tom’s work can be found on walls in Bristol, galleries in London and dotted around the internet.
www.mrmead.co.uk | www.spiralcircusgames.com
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