Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: East of West, Issue #41 – “The Last Two Brothers in the World”! In the previous installment, The Psalms fail to kill Death before he turns the tables. Xiaolian Mao is going to keep marching through to the Confederacy even if she has to plow through the Union/Endless Nation (against Wolf’s wishes). Famine and Conquest are taking Babylon to do some Great Beast training. War and Death have a stand-off, but if Death wants to wrest Babylon from the Horsemen then he’s going to have to try!

And that’s where we’re at right now. Things are coming to a head, as they say.

East of West, Issue #41 [February, 2019]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“The Last Two Brothers in the World”

It’s Endless Nation time, gentlemen and ladies and other members of the rockin’ teenage combo. Wolf is a little kid, and Cheveyo is most certainly not a little kid but he doesn’t look old either! A ship starts decsending toward them from the sky. It’s going to be a brother for Wolf! Sent from Santa Claus himself! Oh boy!

An old man walks down the stairs from the jet with a boyish John Freeman VIII in tow. The King’s Vizier. His King sends his regards, but barely. In that he doesn’t! But he does tell Cheveyo than Freemy No. 8 is the King’s favorite, so he gets the pick of the litter! “The Kingdom of New Orleans has always sent its princes to be raised in other nations. How better to know your allies than to be raised at their knee. Even better if they are not allies at all, no?”

Cheveyo promises Johnny 8 a wonderful upbringing, chock full of ice cream, Blockbuster Video, and neon trapper keepers.

“Perhaps it’s time for the boys to meet?”

“Yes. This is Prince John Freeman. Say hello, John.”

“Hey.”

“And this is my son, Wolf. Greet the boy, son.”

*starts WOLFING down all the ice cream*

Wolf hides behind Cheveyo and, suddenly, Johnny sees a tail poke out. “Huh? What the…” Poor Johnny looks thoroughly freaked out! Enough to kill? We’ll see in a minute.

Wolf sticks his wolfy head back out from behind his father and asks John if he’d like to play catch. This makes John cry with laughter. And the boys start having the fun.

Oh, the merriment and mirth! Oh, the joy! Oh oh oh!

“I don’t believe in this anymore…”

“…but I do believe in you.”

Sharra tells John Freeman VIII not to move an inch lest she fills his face with a gun fulla bullets.

We see more to this part of the story. One of the other Johns, the legless John, is tied to a vertical beam. He’s screaming his lungs out, asking what the hell is going on. Begging VIII to untie him and get him out. He’ll do anything! He’ll say really nice things about his dick! He’ll forgive everything he ever did! He’ll do really nice things to his dick. Anything!!! Guh! Guh! Buh!

Thomas the Hunter didn’t actually snipe VIII. He sniped legless John. We see this now.

VIII tends to his dead brother as much as one can tend to a dead brother (not much at all), and asks Sharra what the meaning of all this is! This all seems like some real bush league nonsense, ma’am. Some real D+ stuff going on.

Just a couple of bros sadboi-ing about death, is all.

“We have to go!” she yells. “I have a ship waiting for us, we can go wherever we want. But we have to leave now.”

“You still haven’t said why. My brother is–”

“A replacement. That’s what he is.”

Guh! Guh! Buh!

Remember your dad? Kingy? He wanted the assassin to kill you, but we aren’t gonna have that, now are we? And it’s all because you are Chosen, you dumbass dipshit. Should’ve thought of that. So let’s book it before your religious butthole gets pounded further. Sharra will explain more on the way (about Freeman’s religious butthole).

So Sharra and John try to escape on on of their sky ships, but King and his Merry Men approach obesely. John has already been squirreled away and out of sight. “I have to say I’m surprised to see you out here with all that’s occurred,” the King says to Sharra. “Needed a little walk to clear you head? To forget about the blood on your hands?”

She answers in the semi-affirmative. King tells her that a team has secured the body and confirmed that it was John, which leaves Sharra quite speechless indeed!

“Still… I will miss the boy. He would have, one day, made a formidable king. And while I don’t believe in miracles, if by one he was to appear someday, healthy and whole…” the King gives Sharra a grave, knowing stare, “I do believe in spite of the hard words he had for me the last time we spoke, I would embrace him and welcome him home to reclaim his rightful seat.”

IS THIS A TRICK?! “If only, my King…” she says, hanging her head. She is reminded the Viziers clean up messes; they do not make them. She understands and then shoves off in the sky ship.

I can give a trillion examples. Donald Trump. Elon Musk. Darkwing Duck. Phil.

Later, they appear to have landed in the desert. Everyone always ends up in the fuckin’ desert.

The sonofabitch knew. He knew! He knew! And he let it happen! And w–

Yeah yeah, just shut up and keep walking.

…

Sharra looks up at John and declares that she’s not coming with him. He is floored by this statement, because, and if he’s not at all mistaken, she risked her damn life to get to this point. He doesn’t understand. And I think it’s very simple: her place is there and his place is here. Duh. Deal with it.

“All I can do is free you… And so now you are free.”

They kiss, and she leaves.

“And who knows, maybe your father’s right, and one day a miracle might bring you back.”

Skip to the person I’ve been waiting to see again! Archibald sits at his comatose niece’s bedside… praying. Actually praying. Like, honest-to-God hands-clasped-together talking-out-loud praying.

“Dear God, you know I’m not a praying man. I’m much too vain for that, and honestly, I find the competition a bit off-putting.” Hey, that’s a decent start, right? Archibald knows there are things out of his control, as insufferable as that sounds, but not knowing whether Constance will live or die is a real trial, man. It’s the anticipation that’s the worst, you know?

Why you conniving little snake in the grass! Come here and give me a kiss!

BUT, he is also in the middle of a war in which he doesn’t know the outcome either. And the stakes there are much greater, so… ha ha, do I have to spell it out for you, God, you rapscallion?

Archibald lights up another cigar and walks away.

Constance peaks out through one eye. “Shit,” she mutters. Then falls back into a “coma”.

In the Endless Nation of Endless Boredom, Wolf sits perched atop a rock. Meditating or doing yoga or on drugs or something. A wild John Freeman VIII approaches! They exchange happy words and genuine pleasantries. It’s good to see you. Good to see you, too. Yada fucking yada.

“I thought I’d seen the last of you when we were being overrun by the pilgrim horde…” John says. “But then word started to trickle out about a new prophet… And the White Tower fell to the Endless Nation… It sounded like you.”

Now that we’re all caught up, you can tell your good ol’ brother how you ended up getting away. What happened? Spill.

“Oh, you know, out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Wolf answers cryptically. He’s happy to see John and all that, sure, but he needs to know if he’s here for Kingdom business or Message business. And ha, well, it’s sorta Kingdom business. As in, his Fat Pops King ran him out of town. “I’m here Wolf… And I’m here to see this through to the very end.”

John follows Wolf to one of those crazy precipices that Wile E. Coyote is known to fall off of hilariously. It overlooks the Machine City, where Mao is plowing through with her army. “There’s going to be a great battle soon, likely very near to here,” Wolf tells John. “I cannot stop it… And I’m not sure what to do.”

“Well…” John hazards a solution. “We could watch.”

Grab the popcorn, chucklefucks! Some idiots are going to battle other idiots!

Archibald rides with a tied-up Bel Solomon in a FUTURE BENTLEY. Or something that drives itself? Archibald “feels something he hasn’t felt in years”, and it can’t be orgasm-related because I know that my boy fucks. No, this is something much better than an orgasm or two, and Bel Solomon gets to be there to bear witness to something extraordinary!

And the bitch has the nerve to feel ungrateful??

He was promised Pizza Hut and Blockbuster, so what do you think?

Bel Solomon is just tired and wants it to all end. The scream-faced visage of Cheveyo pops into Bel’s view and tells him he can sleep when he’s fucking dead. “This Chosen has chosen himself. And he should know the cost of it.”

Cheveyo goads Bel into telling an impatient Archibald something. Archibald is impatient because Bel is gibbering like a loon. “Don’t… don’t you see what you’re about to do?” Bel asks him, face wrinkled into a mask of CONSTERNATION and CONSTIPATION. “Don’t you care?” he continues. “All those people you’re about to grind to dust… Don’t you care that you’ve waited until everyone — everyone — is at their weakest before you will fight them?”

Bel finishes his point. “You only fight when people are at their weakest. And that makes you a coward.”

Ha ha ha! Of course Archibald knows that this is what you think, Taco Bel. That may be true, but it doesn’t shame Archibald. He knows what follows victory, and it’s like three orgasms!

“First, I will erase my enemies from existence, then there will be parades and speeches and all those wonderful things. After that, the real work begins, and that’s what makes the shame tolerable. You see, the shame only lasts for a day… but victory is eternal.”

Ohhhh-kay, and when no one remembers your name in 14 years did the victory really matter? That’s what I thought!

Oh wait, he thinks that people will remember him. But not as a coward. As a titan! “For history is written by the winners.”

Final Thoughts

Archibald fucks. That’s what all this is amounting to and you know it.