“Friends, Caldonians, rapists, murderers, and criminals of all colors, lend me your ears!” Croutonius cried brilliantly before the clambering crowd of the choakie’s mess hall.

In a disturbing flurry of clammy plods, a torrent of bloody, severed ears pelted his makeshift cardboard podium.

“Erm,” Croutonius shivered, “Thank you all for that.”

Dr. Krumbunculus nodded at Croutonius with a smile. After all, the exchange rate on severed ears to chickensfeed was generally quite favorable at the moment.

“Now. Let us begin our talk for this luncheon period. I want to start us all out with a story. A story as ancient as—”

Dr. Krumbunculus shot Croutonius a bitter look.

“Erm, I mean to say, a story as fresh and new as a bright sprig of juniper—”

Dr. Krumbunculus slapped himself in the forehead as the audience began to murmur angrily about this being a talk for ‘strawberries and their ilk.’

“Erm, I mean doubly to say that I am going to tell a story, and that story will speak for itself.”

Dr. Krumbunculus shrugged. That one wasn’t too bad.

However, as time marched on, and two seconds became thirty, Krumbunculus realized that Croutonius intended in some way for the story to literally tell itself. That is to say, he expected to stand there in silence and somehow through that accomplish something.

“Keep talking!” Krumbunculus whispered frantically.

“That is to say—erm—that, seeing as the story is unable to literally speak for itself, I will speak to you the story. That is to say, I’ll tell you lot the story, and through me, the story shall be told, and it is through this mechanism that the story will indeed speak for itself. Are we clear?”

The crowd grumbled, clearly not comprehending much of anything Croutonius had just said.

“Now, then. There was once a society, long, long before the nation of Caldonia ever existed, that was made out of two distinct classes of people. One class were referred to as the watchers, and the other class were the watched. And, generally, they hated eachother.

“Why, one asks, did they hate eachother? Well, I shall tell you. The hatred was, itself, a societal function. Like a turning gear in the wheel of existence, their mutual hatred kept the watchers watching and the watched watched, and indeed natural order and balance was upkept.

“I see in your eyes you are failing to grasp the implications therein. Not to worry. I will now go into detail and explain what exactly it was that the watchers and the watched were doing. You see, the watchers were watching the watched, though I’m sure that much was clear already.

“What was probably unclear was how exactly the watchers were watching the watched. It was not like this today, where you see me in my totality standing before you at this podium, asking for severed ears as tribute, no, it was not like this at all.”

A couple prisoners threw some extra severed ears at Croutonius for hood measure. He grimaced.

“Erm. Thank you for that. You’re very kind. Now. The watchers were not watching the watch in the way you watch me today, instead, they were watching the watched through a thicc sheet of ice! Yes, ice so thicc and foggy that the form and figure of the watched was indeed so distorted that they looked like awful monsters, when in reality they were just people, like you and me.”

“What a nuanced take,” a gargantuan, putrid elf nodded with a grumbling garble.

“Also, the watchers were all chained up to rocks, they couldn’t move at all, but it was nothing sexual, I assure you, even though there were a hood deal of large things permanently shoved up their butts.”

Someone coughed.

“So we’ve got the watchers watching the watched, thinking, wow, who are these crazy creeps? And of course, it was a one way sheet of ice, so the watched could not see the watchers on the other side of their stage, oh, no no no. But they could hear them. They could hear their jeers, and their shrieks and cries of terror! So the watched wondered who these terrible disembodied voices were, commenting on their every movement.

“It could have gone on and on endlessley, and indeed some posit that it did. But, in truth, it did not. No, there is an end, and a point, to this tale. And that pointed end is thus: one day, there was a wretched Gurthquake! Suddenly, rocks and sediment gave way. The sheet of ice was shattered, as were the chains and anal torture devices, and both the watchers and the watched were set free. In shock, they hurried through a long tunnel, whereupon they suddenly emerged outside, realizing they had been in a cave the whole cockhamned time.

“Of course, they were all cave shrimp, so, emerging outside of the cave suddenly was painful and horrible and they all quickly died, being eaten by predators or stepped on by absentminded passersby. And thus, the allegory of the story is laid bare for all to see—the society that oppresses the person, is the society that protects the person. In fighting our fears and forging out to new land, we welcome certain doom! Do not change your perception, do not consider that what you believe may be wrong, for even if it is wrong, it may still be the only thing keeping you alive.”

The crowd was silent. Everyone’s eyes were wide.

Dr. Krumbunculus started slowly and uncomfortably clapping. The more he did it, the more others started joining in, and within half a moment they had suddenly begun to give Croutonius a standing ovation. As he took slow bows the crowd cried in adulation, including a couple of women screaming out that they wanted to have his babies. With a slow, proud nod, Croutonius vacated the podium, wandering off to his table to slowly eat his disgusting prison stew in peace.

This routine carried on in similar fashion for fourteen days straight, each one with the crowd more ferociously dogmatic than the next, and indeed each one raking in that many more severed ears. Dr. Krumbunculus had amassed well over twenty crates full of them by the time the fourteen days were over, and had a buyer lined up on the other side. A forger, in fact.

Krumbunculus could only meet with the forger through a series of knocks on a particularly loose stone in the choakie wall, and still then only at a specific hour of the night. However, on the night that he was to coordinate with his forger the buying and selling of crates of severed ears, Croutonius was feeling quite philosophically fiesty, and began questioning the arrangement.

“Krumbunculus, would you please to explain to me why exactly you need to transfer these crates of severed ears to the forger, again?”

Krumbunculus groaned, nearly letting loose the rope he’d been tugging which was attached to an intense pulley system that ran through the windows of five adjacent prison cells and to the prison swewers, where the crates of ears were stored. They were to be hoisted by rope through the labrynthian choakie sewers to outside world, right beside the open, waiting caravan of Krumbunculus’ beloved master forger contact.

“Because, Croutonius, if we give these to the forger, then the forger will forge documents for us that will dissolve our arrest records, forcing the Royal Gourd to set us free!”

“As long as we are a part of this society, Krumbunculus, surely you understand we will never be free. And, indeed, we must not strive to be, or we might just die. Just like those cave shrimp in my story earlier today.”

“Croutonius, have you been paying attention to anything we’ve been doing the past fourteen days? It was all a calculated effort to amass you a lucrative following that will not only stick with you outside of prison, but indeed to get us out of here in the first place by way of the almighty severed ear, that most valuable of incarcerated currency! What is it about this plan that you find so detestable, and why is it now, right before I am to begin my scheduled stone tapping session with which to communicate to our forger?”

“I could only bring it up now, Krumbunculus, because I was far too focused preparing my lectures. Indeed, the lectures took up so muhc of my own mindpower that, when I was not lecturing, I entered into a semi-unresponsive fugue state with which to formulate my thought processes for the next lecture.”

Krumbunculus nodded. This was an astutely accurate description of Croutonius’ state post lecture, and he was really starting to miss it.

“There is no longer a lecture droning on in my mind, and thus, the wheels of my cognition have turned against the very means we’ve devised to escape, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to let this point go, as I am horribly hung up on one thing, and one thing only.”

“What, for the love of cock, what are you hung up on?!” Krumbunculus screamed, releasing the rope fully and cringing as

KRSKHKHKKSHKHHHH

KSKGKHKHKHHHH

KKSHKKHKKHKHKHHHHH

Three lifted crates of severed ears crashed down on one another in the distance.

“One word, Krumbunculus. One word to fool them all, one word to keep them, one word to swindle them all and in confidence betray them.”

“Sorry, what are you saying again, Croutonius?”

“Forger. I will never trust a forger.”

“Oh my cock, Croutonius, you can’t be serious.”

“Can’t I? What is seriousness at all, if it is not what I am?!”

“Why don’t you trust forgers?”

“Their business is lies and deceit, Krumbunculus. How could one ever trust a forger? Excepting, of course, those few forgers that are members of a Forgers’ Guild.”

“Oh, come on, the Forgers’ Guild is full of hacks, and you know it! Standards for illegal forgery? I mean, cluck’s sake, Croutonius, that’s absurd!”

“Is it absurd? Is it truly? Or, indeed, is the position that so many denziens of Caldonia hold, wherein that forgery itself is an art form done by way of the great forgers’ muse moreso than a mechanical function that, when standardised, is effortless and needs little to no sentimentality attached to it, patently absurd?”

“Who gives a clucking shit? I just want to get out of the choakie, Croutonius, and you ought to, too! Hen, they’re still planning on executing you in here, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yes, indeed they are…but, if we live in a world wherein the state cannot reliably dictate who it will and who it will not deem worthy of execution, than is this world worth living in at all?”

“Yes! What the cluck, Croutonius? You can’t seriously mean you’d rather be executed?!”

“I’d rather the great nation of Caldonia’s Royal Gourd have the integrity it so often feigns. If it gaining some dignity requires me to die, then so be it! Live by statehood, die by statehood, is my philosophy!”

“Oh my clucking cock,” Krumbunculus sighed.

“And concerning forgers, once again, the entire establishment ought be burnt to the ground! It’s ridiculous enough our state allows such cretins to openly exist in the form of the Forgers’ Guild, although oftentimes people posit that said Guild is no more than a front to subvert the integrity of forgers everywhere. Any forgery at all is a sign of weakness! Soceity must be strong, not weak, indeed, it sohuld disallow the weak in favor of the strong! Society must not protect, it must defend—defend itself against its citizens, whom are nothing but foolish cave shrimps, fighting for their own headless doom!”

“This is nuts. Look, Croutonius, I can hear the forgery tapping on the stone now. Let me just start hoisitng these crates of severed ears again with my rope…my rope…” Krumbunculus shuddered, “Cluck’s sake…what’s happened to my rope?”

Of course, as soon as he asked this, he watched Croutonius finish sawing off the end of the rope with a sharp knife.

“May anarchy lie dead forever!” Croutonius growled, brandishing the dagger as the rope slipped up, up, and away, infinitely out of Krumbunculus’ grasp.

“Croutonius! Why in the clucking hen would you do that?”

“I have finally found what I’ve always wanted in this choakie—a captive audience! And I will never, ever let you take me away from it!”