Lame of Thrones

by The Harvard Lampoon

“Darnnnn tootin’! She’s just over that ridge right behind us, going on about some army.”

  Lemme stared at Piffley. A bead of golden sweat dripped down Lemme’s face.

  “Her army, that is,” Piffley continued, “of dragons and Clothkhaki blood riders. Oh boy! Look at that there flower! It’s gray! Like a horse!”

  “That’s a rock, my boy,” Lemme said, his mind racing at the thought of what lay over the ridge. “Carry on.” Lemme turned about and quickly trotted back toward his army.

  “Who’s the lad?” asked LeBronn.

  “Never mind that. Men! Spears and shields! Take arms immediately! Fall in line!” Lemme commanded.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” asked the First Guard. “He is just one boy. Surely you are overre—”

  Suddenly a thousand thundering hooves crested the ridge directly ahead of the Bangsister army. The Clothkhaki horde stormed toward the unprepared Bangsister men.

  “—acting… Men! Spears and shields! Now!”

  Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip Yip. The Clothkhaki war cry was almost as intimidating as it was incredibly irritating.

  “Good Gods. They yip at us,” Lemme wheezed.

  The Bangsister army quickly fell into a tight rank of spearmen and shield bearers. The wall of warriors provided some level of optimism for Lemme. Perhaps they would stand a chance against the vicious yippers coming their way.

  “Men! Only a few times have the armies I’ve led been defeated,” cried Lemme. “And I don’t intend for today to be the first day that continues to happen! What do we fight for?!”

  “Money!” cried the thousand Bangsisters as they braced for the riders’ impact.

  Just then, from the clouds above came a deafening roar. Piercing through the sky was Dennys on the back of her dragon Draggin.

  “LeBronn… The weapon. Now,” said Lemme, watching the sky with awe.

  LeBronn rushed away toward the covered wagon carrying their secret weapon—the only thing potentially separating them from certain defeat. Dennys homed in on the left flank of Bangsisters and with a single command, “Gasolina!”, set one hundred men ablaze.

  Plop. A single tear fell from the face of a Bangsister soldier and landed in a cute puddle as three thousand horses with Clothkhaki riders swinging scythes from their backs violently trampled over the Bangsister front line.

  “Bro, fuck this,” a soldier said disappointedly as Dennys circled back and lit him and his brothers in arms on fire.

  In the fray, one soldier was valiant enough to lightly scrape the shin of a Clothkhaki before being impaled by seven other riders and then burned to ash by Draggin. It was a massacre.

  “LeBronn! Get the damn weapon ready!” Lemme cried in desperation. As he spoke, a mean-looking Clothkhaki rider hopped from his horse and landed right next to him.

  “Yip, yip, yippie, yip, aghhh.”

  Lemme drove his sword straight through the throat of the rider. “Not today, death,” Lemme said, confusing his catchphrase with a different character’s.

  “My lord, we are fucked,” said the First Guard.

  “We are not fucked until my sister and I are fucking each other, which we do not do,” said Lemme Bangsister. “Now pick up your sword and fight, you coward,” he said, driving his sword through another Clothkhaki.

  They were in fact fucked. Draggin had made quick work of nearly all the Bangsister forces. The handful that remained alive were either deserting to the mountains or running to LeBronn’s call for help with the weapon.

  “Right, then, give me a hand with this, won’t you?” LeBronn said, struggling to remove the weapon from the wagon it rested in. “Three, two, one, pull!”

  From a sheath inside the wagon, they drew the longest, most magnificent sword the Seven Kingdoms had ever seen. Fifty feet long and four feet wide, the sword made even the most average-sized sword look smaller than, but otherwise identical to, it.

  Lemme smirked. “Let’s see how you handle this one, Dragon Queen.”

  LeBronn and the soldiers helping him tiptoed toward Dennys, who was having Draggin unleash a monstrous jet of fire on an unarmed Bangsister medic. LeBronn looked into the eyes of all his fellow soldiers and gestured to attack. They heaved the point of the giant sword at Draggin and managed to stick him just below the shoulder blade.

  Lemme thrust his fist into the air triumphantly. For a moment it appeared that Draggin was mortally wounded. However, Draggin was stronger than he looked. And he looked like the strongest thing in the entire universe. He shook the sword and leapt into the air. All of the soldiers dropped the weapon and scattered as Draggin hurled flames at it, incinerating it in an instant.

  “Those fools. Why did they insist on making the sword out of wood?” Lemme shook his head.

  Then Draggin turned his attention toward Lemme and, with a few powerful wing strokes, rocketed toward him.

  “If I’m about to die, at least I die with you,” Lemme said retrieving corn-husk Cervix from his sock. Ser Pennybottom swiveled around to see that Lemme was straight in Draggin’s path. He sprinted toward Lemme and hurled himself forward, tackling Lemme toward the safety of the lake. Seeing Lemme and the First Guard tumbling toward the water shot a shiver down LeBronn’s spine. His mind flashed to the infamous unofficial Bangsister House words: “A Bangsister does not like being wet.” He instantly sprang into action and intercepted the two of them right before they hit the water’s edge, tackling them both back toward land. Certain that Lemme would forgive him, given the circumstances, another soldier rushed to the conglomerate of three men and tackled them all back toward the lake, away from Draggin.

  This pattern of back-and-forth tackling continued for the next thirty seconds until Draggin descended directly on top of them. A soldier feebly tried to push the dog pile of men to the safety of the water, but his feet just slid in the mud. He was the first to burn. It would be a dramatic understatement to say that the fire unfurling from Draggin’s mouth onto the men was not even hot at all. After a full minute of flame throwing, Dennys called Draggin off, and they shot back into the sky toward Drunknstoned. The Clothkhaki followed their queen back toward their castle, yipping proudly at their unconditional victory.

  Moments later, from under the pile of charred corpses, Lemme and LeBronn emerged. They stared at the faint outline of Draggin’s wings cutting through the clouds.

  “Aye then,” LeBronn said, brushing himself off. “Back to King’s Landing Strip?”

  “Yes,” Lemme stammered. “Yes, let’s go.”

  A few hundred feet away, Piffley stood up. Despite being trampled by nearly five thousand horses, he emerged completely unscathed. He dusted off his hands and looked at his feet. There lay the bundle of flowers he had been collecting, now trampled and destroyed by horse hooves. He shrugged his shoulders, began to whistle a tune, and once again began skipping around, plucking flowers.

  All was peaceful for dear Piffley.

  Jon

  Jon was shitting out of his window when Ham burst into his room. “Jon—I know how to defeat the White Wieners!” panted Ham between bites of the turkeys he had in each hand.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take three.” Jon said what he assumed Ham wanted to hear, but his mind was just totally elsewhere.

  “I stumbled upon a bunch of old maps at Citadel State when I was looking for porn, and I found this!” Ham finished his two turkeys and ate one more before holding up an old, greasy piece of parchment. Jon squinted at the parchment: it was extremely faded and stained with a white substance, but he could make out what appeared to be two islands shaped like breasts. He and Ham laughed and high-fived. Ham continued, “And later on I found an old map of Drunknstoned, which showed what seemed to be a huge deposit of gunnes hidden under the main castle.”

  Jon gave Ham an inquisitive look. “What in the seven hells are ‘gunnes’?”

  “You know, ‘gunnes’? Like what I used to kill a White Wiener that one time? Remember? I killed one, and then everyone started calling me ‘Trickshot,
’ and I had all those women throwing themselves at me but I couldn’t do anything about it because I couldn’t break my vows, and then they just kinda had sex with each other in front of me, and I tried to close my eyes but they held them open and made me watch? And then I held my breath so I’d pass out but every time I passed out they used smelling salts to get me to wake right back up and I had to watch them have sex? I told you it was the defining moment of my life and that I’d never be the same again? ‘Gunnes’?”

  Jon didn’t remember the incident in question, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit this to his friend. Especially not with that boyish grin on his face. “Nope, don’t think that happened,” he said after finally building up the courage.

  Ham took out a piece of paper and started scribbling on it. “A ‘gunne’ is a weapon designed by the Thirsty Men—it shoots little pieces of metal that can pierce the White Wieners’ icy hearts and destroy them.” Ham scribbled for a few more seconds and then showed the drawing to Jon:

  “See? They look really cool. And they’re the only way we can hope to stand a chance against the White Wieners and their army.”

  Jon was intrigued. He pinched his stream of shit and got up from the window ledge, then wiped himself and grabbed his clothes. “Ham, if what you say is true,” Jon held up a piece of paper, “then I shouldn’t have just wiped myself with this invitation from Dennys Grandslam to come to Drunknstoned.”

  Ham had returned his full attention to nibbling on his turkeys. “Yes, yes. Sounds like a good idea.”

  “I have to accept her invitation and investigate this cache of gunnes. It may very well be a trap—but it’s the only chance that my people have.”

  “Very well, enjoy your trip.”

  “No Ham—I have to do this alone.” Without another word, Jon burst into a lengthy musical number and strutted down to the harbor.

  The spires of Drunknstoned rose up through the mist. “OH THANK THE GODS—LAND!” wheezed Jon. He stopped trying to drown himself and clutched tighter to the piece of driftwood he was floating on. He had refused the offers of the North’s best sailors to accompany him on his voyage, as he didn’t want to risk their lives if it turned out to be a suicide mission. Unable to steer, navigate, and operate the sails at the same time, he sank the North’s most expensive boat a few seconds into the trip.

  Jon needed to make himself presentable for Dennys and her court. He tore off his scraggly beard in chunks and wiped down his raggedy clothing with the bones of the few seagulls he’d managed to eat by luring them in with his testicles. He relaxed his eyelids to a normal level, as they had been fully open and dried out for weeks. He then sat up, adjusted his hair for a while, and passed out. His dreams were of the North.

  When Jon woke up, he was at the end of a long table, facing a beautiful woman with silver hair. “Ah, you’re finally awake,” said the woman. “I am Dennys Grandslam, Queen of the Sandals and the Thirsty Men, Rightful Heir to the Pointy Chair. And what is your name?”

  “AAAHHHHHHHH WAAHAHWOHAHAH WHO?! WHOOOOOOOOOO?!” screamed Jon, his hair still impeccable.

  Dennys’s interest was piqued by this stranger. “Well, if the stories are true, then there could only be one man in Westopolis with hair as nice as yours. You must be Jon Dough, bastard of Iron Neck Snark.”

  Jon threw himself at the nearest chamber pot and ate its contents greedily. His mouth sufficiently moistened, he returned to his seat and said, “Indeed I am, Miss Grandslam, sir. The length of my hair is matched only by the length of my honor.” He’d read that in a book once. Unsure of what to do next, he ran to the other side of the table and kissed Dennys’s hand.

  Dennys blushed, clumsily wiping off the excrement that Jon’s lips left on her hand. “Ooh, I see you’ve read Grandmaester Pigfucker too? A scholar and a guy with long hair?” For a moment they locked eyes, each one caught in the other’s gaze, the weight of their sexual tension matched only by the weight of their hands on their genitals as they were actively masturbating without blinking. Dennys suddenly remembered that she’d summoned Jon here for a reason other than pleasure. “Jon Dough, I invited you here today in order for you to swear fealty to me. As the last living Grandslam, I am the rightful heir to the throne, and—oggghhhhhhh”—Dennys took a second to orgasm as she hadn’t stopped masturbating—“and I cannot allow for you to rule the North as its own separate kingdom. Unless you want your people to face the fury of my dragons, I advise you to bend the knee.”

  Jon didn’t know what to say. If his father were here, he’d probably do something cool with that iron neck of his, but Jon’s neck was nowhere near as uncuttable. The North is counting on me to lead them, he thought. There’s no way in the seven hells they would accept another leader, much less one as foreign and young and female as this one. Think, Jon, think… Jon looked around the room, unsure of what to do. He spotted a large bell hanging above Dennys’s head. Oh! That’s it! I’ll throw my dagger at the chain suspending that bell, and then it’ll fall on Dennys and trap her, and then I’ll bang on it a few times from the outside and shout something cheeky like “Really dinged ya on that one, huh, Dennys?” and then while she’s busy figuring out what in the seven hells that means and recovering from the bell falling on her head, I’ll run down to the caves beneath the castle, grab all the gunnes, and be on my way!

  Jon grinned, pleased with his plan. He looked back at Dennys and saw that he was surrounded by several armed guards, while several more were detaching the bell from the ceiling and carefully lowering it. Drat. Looks like I was saying my thoughts out loud. Again.

  “You just said that out loud as well, Jon,” pointed out Dennys.

  Drat. Looks like I was saying my thoughts out loud. Again.

  Dennys looked at Jon while he stood there silently. “Well, Jon, if you won’t pledge your fealty, then I will have to keep you here as a prisoner. But first—oghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”—Dennys orgasmed again, harder this time—“but first, what in the world are ‘gunnes’?”

  Jon finished explaining gunnes, zombos, and White Wieners to Dennys. Even though Dennys didn’t fully understand or believe what Jon was saying, she had to admit that Jon looked really cool in the drawing that Ham made of him.

  “So, you see, Dennys, it’s imperative that I get these gunnes back to the North if we are to defend the realm. If we don’t stop the White Wieners, I’m afraid all of Westopolis will be…” Jon forgot what word he was going to say, but Dennys knew it was a bad one and got spooked anyway. “There’s no point in you, me, or Cervix fighting each other right now. We’re just wasting resources on a war that’s small potatoes compared to Great Zomborian War I: The Reckoning.” Jon had come up with that term himself. “I have a plan to establish a temporary peace. I’m going to lead a team beyond the Trench so that we can capture a zombo and present it to Cervix. Once she sees that the undead threat is real, she’ll have to at least momentarily stop the foolish war over this continent—a continent that will soon be…” Damn, what was that word! “Anyway, that’s why I came here to Drunknstoned. Under this castle is a huge cache of gunnes that we need in order to fight the White Wieners.”

  “Jon, I must admit that I think you made all of that up on the spot so that I wouldn’t imprison you. But if all it’s going to take for Cervix to make peace long enough for me to build up my army and invade her city is for you to take the gunnes from here, then go ahead. They’re taking up all the space for my man cave anyway.”

  As Dennys was turning to lead Jon down to the caves, Yora Mormon burst into the chamber. “Queen Dennys, my sweet!” he yelled. “Take a look at this—I just got it done today!” Yora ripped open his shirt, causing his colostomy bag to explode all over the Queensguard. On his chest was an enormous tattoo of an ugly doglike creature with the word “dennis” scribbled above it. “It’s you! See? And look, I can make it talk!” Yora pushed together the fat on either side of his abdomen and made the dog contort in a weird way while he said, “Oh, hello, Yora, aren’t you a handsome you
ng man, hmmmm?” in a raspy, high-pitched voice.

  Dennys had an idea. “Yora! Your tattoo, it’s, uh, it’s uhhh—I hate dogs! I love it! Wow, it’s just great. Meet my friend Jon Dough—he’s here alllllll the way from the North, and now he’s gonna go back and bring back an undead soldier so that Cervix Bangsister will leave us alone for a while. How’d you like to go on a special mission for me and join Jon on his quest?”

  Yora got so excited, his teeth went flying across the room. “Queen Dennyth, you can be thertain that I exitht to therve!” Yora popped his dentures back in and continued, “So, Jon Dough, you fancy yourself a young adventurer, eh? Well, I’m quite the strapping swordsman myself! Hyah!” Yora struggled for a few seconds to unsheathe his sword and then pulled it halfway out and sliced his catheter. While his fluids leaked on the floor, he produced a huge mug of beer and proclaimed, “Or perhaps you think you can outdrink me? Why, I put all the squires to shame down by the stables! They don’t call me ‘Yora the Underage Drinker’ just because of my nubile physique!” Yora put the mug to his lips, but his gout made his fingers scrunch up and spill the beer all over himself. He bent over to lap it off the floor and try to save face, but his back gave out on him with a loud crack, and as he collapsed he looked up to see that Dennys and Jon had already descended down into the caves.

  Dennys led Jon by the hand down the stairs and through several small chambers. “I like to come down here when I’m drunk,” said Dennys. “I blow out my torch and pretend that I’m a drunk blind person.” Dennys took Jon deeper into the caves than she’d ever gone before; they found themselves in an enormous chamber. Before them was a tall pile of strange metallic objects. They shone brilliantly in the light of Dennys’s torch and made the firelight dance around the cave walls. Right next to these metal things was a huge pile of gunnes.

  “Wow, just like how Ham drew them!” exclaimed Jon. He ran up to the pile and picked up several gunnes, striking the same pose from Ham’s drawing. As Jon posed, something on the cave wall caught his eye. He grabbed the torch from Dennys and held it up to the wall—revealing what seemed to be an old cave painting. It showed a man—the most ripped man Jon had ever seen—holding a bunch of gunnes in each hand and using them to shoot at a crowd of pale, humanoid figures. “This must have been drawn by the Thirsty Men,” said Jon, awed by the vasculature and sheer girth of the biceps on the man in the drawing. He turned to Dennys so they could share the moment, but she was busy taking whiskey shots and shuffling around with her eyes closed, waving a white cane.