Radulf: The Unlucky [Act 1]

Radulf: The Unlucky (Introduction)

~Introduction ~

Helloa!

Thank you for your attention.

This quaint volume is the third—or fifth—re-edit of the journey it contains. I would apologize, but I have been instructed that this sort of thing is de rigueurfor go-nowhere, vagabond narratives, such as this.

My name, of course, is Radulf; If you don't know this, you've been under en sten, min ven. My friends call me Ralph; you get to call me 'Sir'. The chronicling of my travels was started years and years ago, most people from the time are dead or senile.

As I was saying, I did begin chronicling my travels years and years ago. In particular, the year in which this volume commences; the year we learned the Moon is falling…

I'm sure you are familiar, by now, with some of my earlier works. However! Availability doesn't mean en skid in this case, as I'm here to present to you the very first adventure. Well, not the first, the first I chronicled at the time so has some small amount of credibility. The true first is lost to a few fragmentary memories of losing my bride, my offspring, youth and—and my innocence.

As this is a much poured over collection of facts, events and characters placed inside a narrative context, I've attempted, as much as possible, to divide it into consumable chunks…

I should explain, here, the point of this … this scrawl. Assuming the reader is interested and agrees such an acquittal is necessary…

No doubt you are aware of Athanasia's much lauded, though highly fictionalized, novel; this, supposedly dictated to her by the mind-reading genie, Truth, upon the peaks of the range we call The Wolf. She is a scion of a creature of my acquaintance, Iakovos, from whom she indeed extracted said djinn. That mind-numbing and unreadable tome is, thankfully, long gone and the supposed reprints and copies are of questionable provenance, let me assure you!

Theophilia, I mean Athanasia—den lille Tatiana—called the completed work, Osiris: The Story of an Athanasios Geisterbeschwörer(but is more properly entitled Iapyx: The Man and His Stick), which, as recorded above, is unobtainable at this point. …and good riddance!, for the fictions and mistakes documented within it were not, in the least, entertaining.

Not to worry, friend!, it is by no means my intent to—accurately or otherwise—retread that old meandering road. The presently recorded events do, tho, contain the story of the extraction, the ignoble birth, if you will, of that ill-conceived bastard. …But I'll try not to dwell on the details.

No, I suppose the reason I'm writing this is because the tale, so bold and full of action, demands to be repeated. And if I fail to keep your attention, if I fail to give a full account, if I fail you, dear reader, the failing is mine and mine alone: because the way these events made their way into my head, so that I could relay them to you, does not excuse a retelling that lacks polish and fails to keep the interest of the audience – or indeed, annoys the audience and turns it against the storyteller himself and forces a new kind of embellishment: The lie that I do not know the story at all.

~ Preface~

A note about the text—and feel free to jump ahead, this is boring stuff Radulf insisted on leaving in even though I removed and hid the pages several times—you have before you.

Because most of the historical documentation which could validate—or not—these writings is—somewhat coincidentally—lost, my employer—du ved hvem—does not want it assumed that these events actually happened or that these people actually lived or anything of the kind. Bluntly speaking, I'm not sure I understand the purpose of publishing a tome only to disavow it.

Radulf adds, “please excuse the punctuation and bizarre tense changes, this text was edited by små primater¹covered in their own excrement on the afternoon before a huge øl party and were, most probably, distracted by the smells of their own genitalia!” He has a colorful way of talking, to be sure.

The narrative is broken into acts and chapters because he seems to have a low opinion of the attention span of the reader, that would be you, yes, you.

1. I think he means monkeys.