“Prince of York”

My father would often sing to us in the carriages, it was my first experience of the core aka of the bard, the ability to create lyrics on-the-fly which I also carried in the lineage

“New York city is a magical place” said Peter. “Full of layers of lives in constant motion.”

Paths of Mid-World

The nature of our mythos is that we don’t know it. Live has to be lived. We must go on the path to understand the path. Such was the case for me with Stephen King’s “The Gunslinger”, a story which would define my idea of the modern knight.

I had come late to the Stephen King series ‘The Gunslinger’ yet it’s significance in my story was vast.  For me it was the tale of the last knight, the last of the House of Eld, finding his way across the blasted remnants of the once-worlds in defense of the Rose.  Of the Dark Tower that sat at the center of the worlds.

Was it Roland’s nobility that inspired me so? Was it his relentless perseverance, his willingness to do whatever it took to reach the Dark Tower? There was a truth within the pages. One that spoke to the Rose and the Tower at the center of the Creation, which the wordslinger King was a sacred conduit.

The Gunslinger, Excalibur, Mage, they were all the same story, each holding a similar vibrational undercurrent beneath a different mask.

I saw it clear. Roland, the last Gunslinger, was a paladin. A knight in iron and leather making his way across the territories.

The Tower was a real thing. It was something I knew, deep within my heart. Like the comics, what King wrote about was just the surface of an energy that resonated far beneath the pages, flush with threads and echoes which spoke to the truth hidden in plain sight beneath the costumes of fiction. There was power there, a reflection of the quest of the knight in service to a larger thing, playing out as Roland’s efforts to save the Tower, to protect the Rose from destruction.