Lame of Thrones

by The Harvard Lampoon

  “Catch this,” she said, as the Nighty Night King caught it, grabbing her hand before she could stab him once again. Here goes nothing, thought Malarya as she dropped the knife yet again, the blade now so low that she had to catch it with her foot. Malarya pretended to stab him with her foot to fake him out, dropped the dagger again, caught it with her other foot, dropped it again, let it land on the ground, picked it up with her other foot, and then kicked the blade into the Nighty Night King’s shin. “I guess the knife is on the other shoe,” she quipped, “or wait, no. Looks like the shoe is gone and now the knife is on the other foot—no, no, wait. I got this. Here we go: Knife to meet you!”

  That was it. The Nighty Night King shattered into dust immediately. Every single zombo and White Wiener dropped dead in an instant.

  “I’m gonna kill you, Mr. The Nighty Night King!” shouted Jon, arriving at the weirdwood tree in a sprint, his sword raised above his head. “Where’s the—uh, where’s the Nighty Night King?”

  “Malarya just killed him, Jon,” said Bland. Jon entered a state of shock.

  “No, but the Nighty Night King!” Jon reiterated. “He’s alive, right? I fought my way through thousands of zombos, and now I’ve come to kill him and end the battle!”

  “Jon,” said Malarya, “I just killed him. I’m so sorry. I know you really wanted to do it yourself.”

  Jon’s face dropped, and his eyes filled with tears. He let his sword fall to the ground. He was too weak to hold it anymore after hearing the news.

  “Oh,” he said, his voice cracking, snot coming out of his nose, “that’s so awesome Malarya. I’m so proud and happy you did that.” That was all Jon could eke out before he began bawling.

  From the weirdwood tree, they could hear the ecstatic cheers of the survivors at Wintersmells. The battle was over, and the celebration was about to begin. Malarya and Bland stayed behind to comfort Jon as he fell and curled into a ball. Jon wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth until he’d cried himself to sleep, his siblings right beside him.

  “Jon, what do you say you lead us in another round of cheers for Malarya Snark, the hero of Wintersmells?”

  “The hero of Wintersmells!” repeated everyone in unison.

  “Oh,” said Jon from the head of the Great Hall. “Yeah. Proud of you, sis,” said Jon wiping his eyes. “Everyone give it up for Malarya.”

  In response, the crowd in the Great Hall hooped and hollered for thirty straight minutes.

  “That was great,” said Jon, suddenly snapping out of a thousand-yard stare. “Here’s to a great night to celebrate our victory—”

  “The hero of Wintersmells!” shouted someone in the crowd.

  “Yeah, that’s her. Just remember that this was a group effort and that we’re having a mass funeral pyre tomorrow to honor all the dead—”

  “Malarya J. Snark! The hero of Wintersmells!”

  Jon downed several consecutive ales and then pulled Pantsa and Malarya aside as the celebration got going.

  “Malarya, it’s cool that you killed the Nighty Night King and all, but I guess, well, is it not kind of cooler that I’m the rightful heir to the Pointy Chair?” he said, trying very hard to look casual about it.

  “What?” said Pantsa.

  “Jon, is this true?” asked Malarya.

  “Oh,” said Jon, fake laughing, “and I guess I fucked my aunt too? No big deal, haha.”

  Malarya looked at Jon incredulously. Could he have actually fucked his aunt? If so, that would have been awesome, but he was wasted right now. The odds it was true were slim.

  “Here’s the thing guys. Keep this on the down low, but dad isn’t my dad. His sister is.”

  “Dad’s sister is your dad?”

  “Was my dad,” corrected Jon. “She’s dead.”

  “What?”

  Thirty minutes later, Pantsa and Malarya had gotten enough coherent details to understand Jon’s lineage.

  “That means Dennys is my aunt, and so I fucked my aunt,” he said, raising both of his arms for a double high five. “But no, Malarya, it’s actually really cute that you killed the Nighty Night King. That’s like a good start at doing awesome things,” he said, putting his arms down after not getting either high five. “Bottom line is this: Dennys will pretty much do whatever I say. I’m sure I could tell her that I’m gonna be king, and it’ll be fine. But keep this between us.”

  “But Jon, people need to know,” said Pantsa. “We have to tell—”

  “Ah buh-buh-buh!” said Jon. “We’ll talk later. Right now, my people are counting on me to go be the life of this party!” he shouted, before returning to the corner to drink alone.

  “Whoremund,” said Jon from the floor, much later, as he sobered up in the late hours of the night. “Whoremund.”

  Whoremund grunted back, lying face down next to Jon.

  “You gotta take the Mildlings back north. You gotta take Toast too. Don’t try to talk me out of it. You belong up there. This isn’t your fight.”

  Whoremund grunted again.

  “Okay, cool,” said Jon. “I’m glad you’re on board.”

  “Jon,” said Lord Varysectomy, approaching politely. “May I speak to you in private?”

  “Anything you have to say in front of me you can say in front of Whoremund. Isn’t that right Whoremund?”

  Finally Whoremund mustered the strength to roll to face Jon. “Can you please shut up?”

  “Very well, somewhere private it is,” said Jon, leading Varysectomy out to the Carol N. Snark Memorial Coup d’État Planning Courtyard. The stars were brighter than they had ever appeared since Jon’s childhood. Perhaps the eradication of the army of the undead had brought some light back to the world. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up for Westopolis.

  “Westopolis is on the down-and-down, Jon,” Varysectomy said frantically once he was sure they were alone. “I know you have the rightful claim to the Pointy Chair. You must take it.”

  “Who told you? Malarya? Pantsa?” Jon’s eyes darted around nervously.

  “Pantsa told Beerion.”

  “Damn. And that little snot told you?”

  “No, he told a couple of the whores at the brothel.”

  “Ah, and you went for a visit, to get them to… touch your… stump? And they told you?”

  “No they told Linda Miller, who’s a total blabbermouth.”

  “Aha. Linda. The blabbermouth. A staple of the Wintersmells community indeed. And she blabbed to you.”

  “No, she kept her mouth shut. But Juan Arenas, do you know him? Good guy. Anyway, he overheard the whores Beerion told while he was getting a suckjob at the brothel from a different whore.”

  “Those damn whores! Cannot keep their mouths shut!”

  “Yes, well, Jon, I suppose that’s part of the job description,” chirped Varysectomy cheekily.

  “Now, that. That is a clever double entendre. You can’t just shoot a double entendre off like that from the hip,” Jon laughed.

  “Yes, well, I have little children who write quips for me. I call them birds.”

  “So this Juan fellow told you?”

  “No. Heard it from Lisacious Stoverick. No idea where he heard it from.”

  “DOES EVERYONE IN THIS GODDAMNED TOWN KNOW ABOUT MY SECRET CLAIM TO THE POINTY CHAIR?!” shouted Jon.

  A villager stuck his head out from his frosty window. “Congrats on the claim to the Pointy Chair, Jon!”

  Another villager peeped out. “Yeah and huge stuff with the fucking your aunt and everything. That’s mad cool!”

  “I don’t have a claim!” shouted Jon. He stormed off, steaming. “And it is NOT cool to fuck your aunt. Or no, it is cool! But I didn’t fuck her! Or wait, no. I DID fuck her, but she is NOT my aunt!”

  Lord Varysectomy shook his head. He scuffled along to catch up with Jon. “Listen, I worry about Dennys ruling Westopolis. For all intents and purposes she is an outsider. A refugee from across the ocean for the Gods’ sakes. There is o
nly one true, rightful heir to the chair. And it is you, Jon Dough.”

  “I will never betray my queen.”

  “Such integrity. Such virtue. But you must realize, Jon… this will mean that the whole world will never know that you made love to your aunt…” Varysectomy said coyly.

  “I fucked my aunt, dammit! Agh! Damn you, eunuch! You will not sow seeds of doubt into my mind!” Jon stormed off again, steaming once more.

  “What did I miss?” groaned Squirt Bevlidge, a Snark soldier who’d gotten so blackout drunk during the prebattle festivities that he was only just now waking up on the ground. “Are we going to fight the zombos now?”

  “We won,” replied Jon as he passed him on the walk to his bedroom. “You can go back to sleep.”

  “Awww, man!” said Squirt, kicking a helmet on the ground and hurting his toe, but only a little bit.

  Lemme

  Lemme barged into Brian of Fart’s room. He was half in the bag. The other half of him was so drunk that it had long since abandoned the bag and instead proudly displayed his drunkenness. He was fully naked.

  “What do you think you’re—”

  “Shummy shushy shhh shh,” said Lemme, slamming into the ground face first without catching himself. “You think I’m sexy, I think I’m sexy, why haven’t we fucked yet?”

  “Lord Lemme, you’re drunk. You don’t mean it,” Brian said indignantly.

  “Well, excuuuuuse me for caring about the environment. Our environment, might I remind you! We all have to live in it we might as well take—excuse me,” he burped, “take care of it!”

  “What in the seven hells are you talking about? You’re truly piss drunk!”

  Face firmly planted into the cold hard ground and raising his butt to the sky, Lemme began to pee. “The only thing piss about me is… hold on I had something clever for this,” Lemme said, confused.

  Brian shook her head. Once Lemme had finished relieving himself, he slowly rose to his feet. “Now then,” he burped, “let’s begin.”

  “Listen, Lemme,” Brian said beginning to warm up ever so slightly. “I cannot lie. I have thought about you once or twice. A day. Every single day. Since I met you. Thought about how much I want to make love to you, that is.” Brian began to blush. “But I… I have never been with a man. I am not sure I am ready.”

  “Perhaps just one kiss, then,” Lemme slurred as he wiped some of the dirt from his mouth.

  “Well…”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Well, I suppose just one…”

  Lemme gave Brian a peck on the cheek.

  “There. I have cum,” Lemme said, flopping onto his back and immediately beginning to snore. His pants were soaked with gallons of semen.

  At first Brian was shocked. But as she lay down and watched the candlelight flicker on the ceiling, she began to smile. “I am a virgin no longer,” she said. Her heart pounding contentedly, she drifted off to blissful sleep.

  Dennys

  Searching for Jon, who had slipped away from the banquet hall amid the revelry, Dennys poked her head into every bedroom door, trash heap, and laundry chute she could find in the hallways of the fortress. She needed to speak with him earnestly once again about their impending siege of King’s Landing Strip and quiet her fears regarding his claim to the Pointy Chair. After an hour, she had walked in on a dozen couples in their bedrooms, her clothes were coated with garbage from the trash piles, and her hair was covered in urine and shit from the laundry chutes.

  Eventually, Dennys found a heavy wooden door that opened into a candlelit bedroom where she spotted movement. The hunched figure reeked of whiskey, which reminded Dennys of Jon’s cologne, which was a spray bottle full of what Dennys now suspected consisted only of whiskey.

  “Are you drunk?” she asked softly.

  “Nop,” Jon replied. He was drunk. He sat on one side of a chess board, and his hand rested on an intricately carved black mahogany king piece. “I guess nows that Imma king, I can move my pieces in any direction,” he slurred thoughtfully, taking burps throughout for dramatic effect. He picked up a pawn and moved it ten spaces sideways. “Chessmate.”

  Then he shuffled over to the opposite side of the board. “Okay, okay, you win,” he said to the empty space where he had just been sitting.

  “Are you sure you’re not drunk?” asked Dennys, who noticed that Jon had at some point removed both queen pieces from the board and discarded them in a heap in the fireplace.

  “I’m not sdjrunk.”

  Dennys wasn’t convinced that he was not sdjrunk. She had been finding it difficult to trust Jon lately, after he had realized he had a legitimate claim to the chair, and also because he had told her that forest fairies didn’t exist when Dennys had literally seen one with her own eyes a few years ago. Dennys scratched a straight line into the floorboards with her heel. “If you’re sober, can you prove it by walking on this line, one foot after the next, while telling me I’m as sexy as a big white horse with big white horse hooves?”

  “You’re as sexy as a big white horse.”

  “With big white horse hooves?”

  “Sexier.”

  Dennys smiled for a moment but quickly returned to her stern demeanor. She held up a finger. “Can you follow this finger with your eyes, while standing on one leg, and swearing to never tell anybody about your claim to the throne?”

  “What? No.”

  “Oh my Gods. You’re drunk.”

  Jon saw fear behind Dennys’s gleaming violet eyes as she reached out for Jon’s cheek and stroked it. He followed her finger with his eyes, and they rolled up into the back of his head.

  “Jon, this truth will destroy us. You cannot tell your sisters who you are. They’ll hate me.”

  “That is impossible, Dennys. How can my sisters hate you when, biologically speaking, they don’t exist?” He lifted Dennys’s face to his. “I’ll always be loyal to you. If I were a dog, you’d be a different dog whom I was extremely loyal to. But I cannot keep this a secret.”

  Dennys’s eyes were pleading. “Why not?”

  Jon’s eyes were still stuck at the top of his head. “Exactly how many kings, do you think, have fucked their aunts?”

  Dennys was quiet. “I don’t know, Jon. Not many.”

  “Right. So exactly how fucking cool is it, then, that I fucked my aunt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fucked my aunt, who probably fucked my uncle, so I basically fucked my uncle too?”

  “Jon, don’t say that.”

  “I can’t just keep this to myself bwaaaeerrp,” said Jon, burping. “I would become such a slegend with the boys in black if they knew. They need to know how we did it doggy style. They need to know how we did it on a boat. They need to be given a recounting, in too much graphic detail, of our sex in full high definition every, say, Sunday night. Not to mention, if everyone knows the Snarks aren’t really my sisters, I can finally bang Pantsa!”

  Dennys’s eyes watered. “Jon, that is disgusting! I am begging you. Do not tell anyone about this.”

  But Jon’s mind was already racing. “Let’s hook up again, Dennys. But this time, let’s role-play that my parents died and you become my legal guardian, because you’re my closest living relative. Oh, wait, I forgot, my parents are dead! We don’t even have to pretend!” He had never been more turned on in his life.

  The terrifying possibility of Jon’s betrayal sat uncomfortably in the back of Dennys’s mind as their combined forces prepared to set sail for King’s Landing Strip to retake the Pointy Chair. Occasionally, Dennys stopped worrying about Jon and instead thought about how pointy the Pointy Chair really was. If it was so pointy, pointy enough to have earned that name, how could anybody sit on it? Was her raid on the Strip worth the puncture wounds? Did Cervix have an especially voluptuous bottom? Probably.

  Soon after the ships had pulled away from the bay, the sudden appearance of a fleet bearing Cervix’s flags on the horizon brought her mind back to present threats. It w
as the Ironic Fleet. Dennys, perched on her dragon’s back, felt her heart sink as more and more rows of ships approached. Dennys counted them carefully. “One, two, three, four, five, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, eleven, fourteen, fifteen, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven…”

  “Two hundred ships,” shouted a sailor down below.

  Two hundred. Whoa. Dennys counted on her fingers carefully to check how many dragons she had left. “One, two.”

  Two was probably a lot of dragons, she supposed. But the confident faces of the approaching captains filled her with unease. Arrows began to fly, and Dennys’s ships were clearly outnumbered. Dennys hopped on Jragon, knowing she’d need to pull out all the stops for this one.

  “Gasolina times two!” she shouted.

  Jragon and Dragun each breathed out beams of fire, then combined their beams together into one mega-beam, except that each of their fire beams was a double fire beam as per Dennys’s command, making the combined mega-beam a quadruple fire beam. The enemy ships could probably withstand a double beam and maybe even a triple beam. But a quadruple beam? The ships were toast.

  One after the other, enemy ships went up in smoke, meaning one after the other, hundreds of children lost their fathers—fathers who nobly put food on the table each night by serving as naval soldiers. Dennys was in the middle of ravishing these fathers and their boats when suddenly Yourmoms Playboy, leading the Ironic Fleet, began calling.

  “Hey, dragons! Come to papa! Papa being me, that is,” shouted Yourmoms, who stood at the front of his ship with more than sixty men, all gripping the massive sword designed specifically to kill Dennys’s dragons. After the last huge sword had failed to kill them, Sideburn rebuilt it, this time out of metal rather than wood, and this time much larger than the original—nearly 1.2 times as big.

  Pssh, thought Dennys. How in the seven hells does he expect to get my dragons to fly near that thing? We’re totally safe.

  Yourmoms ripped off a tarp and revealed a mechanism that dangled a horse corpse in front of the giant sword. Except it wasn’t just a horse: it was a pony. And not just a pony: it was the pony version of a miniature horse.