Folk Tales of the Lowlands of Cekon
by Margaret Killjoy
Zine #34 — October 2024
I’ve been reading folklore a lot recently, especially for the podcast Cool Zone Media Bookclub. I’ve become vaguely obsessed with these strange short tales, from all over the world, each one worn smooth by retelling, then set into stone usually sometime in the 18th or 19th century by this or that busybody (busybodies to whom I am grateful, but busybodies nonetheless). It’s impossible to know what these stories looked like before ideas like christianity wherever the stories were from, but it’s easy to imagine they’d be different.
I’ve been reading all this folklore, and I just released a book set in a fantasy world, and I thought… I want to write the folklore from that country. I owe the Kkickstarter backers stories set in the world, after all. So I started writing folklore, set in the lowlands of Cekon, the backwaters of the country. Here are three of these stories. Eventually, we’ll be publishing a much thicker zine of these stories, and maybe these ones will shift or change between now and then. But that’s what folk tales do: they change.
These three stories tell the story of the Good Knight Rockdaw. I hope you enjoy them.
— Margaret Killjoy
How the Good Knight Rockdaw Saved a Mediocre Baron and Earned His Sword
Back long ago, in the age between the Old Kingdom and the Mad King’s reign, there was a knight named Sir Rockdaw who rode for Baron Grestel. If you don’t remember Baron Grestel, it’s because there’s nothing to remember him by but his portrait among so many others in the long halls of Deadman Castle.
Sir Rockdaw, however, we remember.
Sir Rockdaw was an odd fellow, the sort to stand out in any crowd of knights. He was handsome enough, with a mustache to remember and warm chestnut eyes. He was tall and strong and he carried himself well. But he was common-born, and he was not young.
He’d lived an entire life, in fact, before he’d set out to become a squire and then a knight. He was a widower twice over, father of seven daughters and grandfather to twelve granddaughters before he ever so much as lifted a sword. Long had his family worked the forests west of Deadman Castle, hunting and logging. On most maps, this area is called Deadman forest. To the scattered families who live just outside it, venturing in to harvest a meager living from within, it’s just Dark Forest.
They call it that because the mists are so thick, the canopy so thick, the underbrush so thick, that the sun scarcely touches the forest floor.
Before he was the Good Knight Rockdaw, when he was just papa to his daughters, when he was just gramps to his granddaughters, when he was just Rockdaw to his friends at the commonhouse, he rose with the dawn and slept with the sunset, as he’d done for each of his forty-five years. Each night he slept in a one-room stone house built by his gramma and her brothers, as he’d done for each of his forty-five years. Each night he set a bowl of tea under the linden for the Great Mother, as he’d done for each of his forty-five years. Each night, he dreamt of the Dark Forest, as he’d done for each of his forty-five years.
It happened bright and early one day that Rockdaw was attending to the chores in the yard outside that stone house, mending the fence that held back the forest, when he heard a shout from deep in the mist beyond. The sound of man in fright.
As his own mother had told him, as his own gramma had told him, if you hear someone shouting in Dark Forest, in the deep of the woods beyond the paths of men… if you hear someone shouting when the sun first creeps over the horizon and casts its holy gaze upon every corner of Cekon but Dark Forest… if you hear someone shouting from the forest, well, no you didn’t.
So that morning, when Rockdaw heard shouting, he listened to what his mother had told him, and what his gramma had told him, and he didn’t listen to the shouting. There were many things in Dark Forest, and very few of them were people in need of help.
You see, when the sun begins to rise, the creatures of the night begin to despair—at least those who hadn’t any luck the night before with hunting—and so it’s at dawn that they pull out all the stops. It’s at dawn they try all the tricks. It’s at dawn they’ll do anything, try anything, rather than go to bed hungry.
Rockdaw heard the shouting and paid it no heed. He sang to himself a little song, a work song, while he pulled a broken picket from his family’s fence and set a new one in its place. Work songs, like all songs, are better sung in company, but Rockdaw had no company that morning, so he sang alone.
A minute went by, and still the creature in the woods shrieked and screamed. Ten minutes went by, and still the creature in the woods screeched and squalled. Twenty minutes went by, and still the creature in the woods hollered and howled.
But after thirty minutes, the voice was haggard and hoarse.
As Rockdaw drove the final picket into the soft earth, tap tap tap with his mallet, he thought about what he was hearing.
“Maybe,” he said to himself, because people who spend too much time alone at the edge of the woods talk to themselves, “maybe it’s a person, a person in trouble.”
And so, Rockdaw, the proud papa to seven daughters, proud gramps to twelve granddaughters, put his mallet through the iron loop in his belt, opened the gate to the fence in his yard, and strode out into the misty Dark Forest. He whistled a tune his father had taught him, a tune that would not drive back the mists but would keep them from clouding his thoughts with fear.
“Help me!” he heard. While there were many things in the woods that could sound like a human in pain, from foxes on up, there weren’t so many creatures or monsters that could put words together. Rockdaw left the path, the path he walked more days than not, and went straight into the forest after the noise.
“Help!” he heard again, not long after.
Then soon enough, he saw the source of the screaming. It was not a monster of the woods at all, but a Baron. A monster of the castle, one might say. This particular Baron, Baron Grestel, was hanging upside down about ten feet in the air, tied by his feet to the stout limb of a stout oak.
“Why Baron Grestel,” Rockdaw said, for he recognized the man immediately by the fine velvet he wore, “why are you hanging upside down in the Dark Forest?”
“I came hunting,” the Baron replied, though his voice was so hoarse it took Rockdaw a moment to understand him. It was true a fine yew bow lay on the ground beneath him, that fine-fletched arrows were scattered across the forest floor. “I came hunting alone, because my father hunted alone, and now I’ve been strung up by some horrid monster!”
Rockdaw looked closer at the scene and realized what held the Baron aloft was not a rope of hemp, not a rope of straw, nor cotton, nor any other fiber spun from plants. The Baron was held aloft by a rope woven of sinew, in fact.
The Baron, therefore, had been caught by a hallos beetle, a monster the size of a dog that hunted with ropes it made from previous prey. Ironically, the hallos beetle was indeed among the creatures that could scream like a fox, scream like a man, scream like the gates of hell had been opened, though of course it was the Baron that Rockdaw had heard.
“Get me down from here immediately,” Baron Grestel said. “I am your liege and you will do as I say.”
“Well now you’ve put me into a predicament,” Rockdaw said. He took a piece of licorice root out of a pouch on his belt and began to chew it, as he always did when he had a complex question to mull over. “You are not my liege at all, Baron Grestel, because I am not your feudal vassal. I’m commonborn, and I owe you only the respect I might give anyone in these woods.”
“Anything you want, it’s yours, just get me down!”
“I don’t want anything,” Rockdaw said. “Not anything that would not be evil to ask for. I am rich enough as it is, for I have seven daughters and I have twelve granddaughters. I am a widower, though, and the only thing I want for is the company of those who I will not see again until the mists take me, when I will be off to see my lost wives and my own mother and also the Mother of us all.”
Rockdaw thought for a moment.
“I would though, quite like to be a knight. The Good Knight Rockdaw, it has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? I’ll let you down either way, but why don’t you give it a thought?”
“Yes, yes, just get me down!” the Baron shouted. “Hurry, before the beast returns!”
Rockdaw knew that the hallos beetle was likely just out of sight, waiting for the Baron to stop yelling, stop thrashing, stop fighting. The hallos beetle was likely waiting so it could climb the oak and climb the branch and eat the Baron up and make rope from his sinew and a nest from his bones. There wasn’t much time at all. But Rockdaw had promised the Baron he would do for him what he would do for anyone he might find in the woods, and that meant a rescue.
So Rockdaw climbed the stout tree, thinking all the while he was getting too old for the work of clambering up trees. He climbed out the stout branch, wondering why the Baron, and his father the Baron before him, had insisted on hunting in the Dark Woods alone. He reached the rope of sinew, wondering why a man without the sense not to wander the Dark Woods alone, who didn’t even know how a hallos beetle caught its prey, would be in charge of an entire Barony. He pulled out his knife, wondering what would happen to the Baron when the man fell ten feet onto his head on the forest floor.
Then he cut the rope, and the Baron fell, and though he was heavily concussed, he survived. So then, at least one of Rockdaw’s questions was answered.
The hallos beetle had indeed been watching, and it skittered into the clearing, shiny and blue and green and gold all at once. It saw the Baron concussed on the ground, and it screamed, a fox scream, a human scream, a horrid scream.
But Rockdaw, like his mother before him, like his gramma and her brothers, like his daughters, had faced such monsters before. He leapt from the tree, mallet in hand, questioning the life choices that had led him to leap from trees onto monsters, and he landed on the hallos beetle. Tap tap, he rapped on the head of the beast, tap tap tap until its brain was good and scrambled, more scrambled than that of the Baron after his fall, and soon the beetle was dead.
It was a shame to kill the beast, in its way, because hallos beetles rarely leave the forest, and they eat the soga birds who are such a nuisance to those who live in the fields to the east.
Rockdaw helped the Baron out of the Dark Woods, and put him into the lumber cart he used to carry lumber to town after it had been milled and kilned, and rode the Baron back to Deadman Castle.
True to his word, Baron Grestel knighted the Good Knight Rockdaw, who in turn knighted two of his daughters immediately and another one when she finally agreed to come home more often for holidays.
Rockdaw and his daughters and later his granddaughters had many adventures, saving the lives but often not the dignity of both deserving and undeserving souls.
The Good Knight Rockdaw and the Three Captains
One early autumn evening, the Good Knight Rockdaw was taking his rest in a glade just north of Edeton, recovering from a sword wound he’d taken in battle.
These were the days known as the “era of trouble,” when great battles befell the country more often than the sun rose or set, and the Good Knight Rockdaw simply wished, that particular evening, to forget that for a moment and let his body do the slow and painful work of stitching itself back together. He was laying on his cot, next to his horse, next to his mule, next to his sword, and staring at the sky as it changed colors. He sang a song, as he so often did.
As sunset approached, so did three travelers. By their wool and their sashes, they were each sailors. By their gold and their pearls, they were each captains.
“A good evening to you, sir knight, with a voice that sings so pure and pleasant,” the youngest captain said. He was a man with thick black bristles across his cheek and chin, a man who spoke with the level voice of someone accustomed to being listened to. “What brings you to this glade, where we thought to pitch our camp for the night?”
“Well I came to watch the leaves turn,” the Good Knight Rockdaw answered, “and either heal or die from a rather grievous wound. You’re free to join me or not, as pleases you.”
The three captains, at his beckoning, came closer to where he lay on a cot. His horse neighed at their approach, and his mule brayed at their approach, but with a simple gesture Rockdaw calmed his animal friends.
“The flesh doesn’t like to be pierced by blades,” the second captain, a strong gray-haired woman, opined when she saw the wound, which was ragged and unpleasant.
“It does not,” Rockdaw agreed.
“How did you come to be cut?” the first captain asked. “There have been so many great battles, even this last week. Were you among the brave men who fought in the war against the King of the Sea? Did you stand beside our sailors as they fought back the tide of pirates and cutthroats who came so close to overwhelming Port Cek?”
“I was not among the brave sailors,” Rockdaw answered.
The captains each looked disappointed.
“Surely, if I had been,” Rockdaw continued, “captains such as yourselves might have seen me there?”
“I was working behind the scenes,” demurred the first captain. “Logistics and such.”
“I was only watching,” the second captain said, as though this were not a shameful thing to admit. “I saw every battle through a view glass. Someone needs to observe, to write down what happened.”
“I did my fighting long ago,” the third captain said, speaking for the first time. He was old, far nearer to death than birth. He had no hair left on his head to grow white, only a thick white beard. “Others can do the fighting now.”
“If you didn’t take your wound against the King of the Sea, where were you wounded?” the first captain asked. “Were you in the fields to our south, where brave knights and peasants alike stood like a bulwark against the great army of skeletons that came out of the mountains? Did you do battle against fleshless hands that held saber and spear?”
“I was not there,” the Good Knight Rockdaw answered. “Though two of my daughters fought those fiends, standing, as you said, alongside knights and peasants alike. With the Great Mother’s blessing, they’ve lived to tell me the horrors they saw. Yet strangely, none of them can recall the king of the realm among their ranks. But as you say, there’ve been a great many battles of late, and I’m sure he was needed elsewhere.”
“If not fighting pirates or skeletons, where did a good knight such as yourself take your wound?” the first captain asked.
“I engaged in what you might call a spirited argument over ethics with some gentlemen in a public square not far from here,” the Good Knight Rockdaw answered.
“What position did each of you take?” the first captain asked.
“They were convinced of the position that they could, ethically, cut off a young man’s hand for stealing a turnip. I was convinced of the position that I could, ethically, interpose. We engaged in quite a rigorous debate, and here I am, resting up in a glade north of town, despite the fact that my arguments proved more vigorous than their own.”
“Why, you’re nothing more than a simple brigand!” the first captain exclaimed, stepping back, hand going to the hilt of his sword. “To interfere with the law like that!”
“I’m uncertain exactly where the line between the two is, but I’m not a brigand, I’m a knight. If you disagree with my conduct, just as I told the two remaining fellows ten days past, you can take it up with my liege, Baron Grestel.”
“And he condones such behavior?”
“Who’s to say? I hadn’t specifically planned on asking.”
The conversation did not last much longer than that, and soon the captains went on their way, looking for a place to camp a bit further away from this ruffian who called himself a knight.
Peace returned to the clearing, and the Good Knight Rockdaw went back to watching the clouds turn from white, to pink, to blue. He sang a song to himself, and soon enough he was asleep, and soon enough some days later his wound was healed sufficiently to ride, and soon enough he was on his way, off to the next adventure.
The Good Knight Rockdaw and the Greedy Frog
It so happened that one winter, the Good Knight Rockdaw spent some time in a house on an island in a lake in a valley in the lowlands of Cekon. The house on an island in a lake in a valley in the lowlands of Cekon belonged to a friend of his, the great hunter Borbora, who was in those days overseas on a great quest.
The Good Knight Rockdaw, as a general rule, preferred to spend less of his time questing and more of his time fishing, and so he’d agreed to ride out to the valley to the lake to the island to the house in the lowlands of Cekon and watch after it for his friend, the great hunter Borbora.
Five of his seven daughters and seven of his twelve granddaughters had come out to visit him at this house on the island in the lake in a valley in the lowlands of Cekon, but the holiday season had come and gone, with its feasts and stews and songs, and the Good Knight Rockdaw had only his horse and mule for company.
He spent his days ice-fishing and fish cooking, happy as could be, singing a fishing song he’d learned from his own gramma all those years ago.
One day, when he went to the woodshed for wood, a frog hopped out from between the logs.
“Well hello, little frog,’ the Good Knight Rockdaw said, because when your only company is animals, you will talk to animals. “What are you doing out in the cold? Shouldn’t you be at rest for the winter?”
“I could ask the same of you,” the frog replied, which was peculiar, because no frog the Good Knight Rockdaw had previously met knew how to talk.
“I’m a human,” Rockdaw replied, a bit taken aback. “I need to spend my nights by the fire, to be sure, but there’s a fire inside my blood that keeps me warm, just like there is inside deer and bears. A fire that I had presumed did not live in the blood of frogs. Though to be clear, now that we’re talking I no longer consider your relative level of athletic prowess in the cold to be the strangest thing about you.”
“Oh, neither my mastery of speech nor my liveliness in winter is half the strangest thing about me,” sighed the frog. “I am indeed not a frog at all, but a prince, a prince of men. My father is none other than the king.”
“Now, which king is that?” the Good Knight Rockdaw asked. It was, after all, the era of trouble, the era of turmoil and great battles. A great many kings and queens had come and gone from the throne of Cekon, because, of course, kings and queens themselves are a sort of trouble.
“What sort of knight doesn’t know his king?” cried the frog. “Surely I’m not the oddest creature of the pair of us!”
“Well I suppose just as you’re a prince in the body of a frog, I’m a forester in the body of a knight,” the Good Knight Rockdaw replied. “But let’s get us inside, shall we? The fire in my hearth and the fire in my blood are both not long for the world unless I build up the former of the two.”
And so the two fellows, one knight and one frog, made their way back into the house on the island in the lake in the valley of the lowlands of Cekon, and the Good Knight Rockdaw built back up the fire, and the two returned to talking.
The frog told his whole story. He was, he claimed, Prince Meddlemore, son of King Aster. On one morning two summers prior, he’d been in the lowlands on an errand for his father when, out of the blue and with no justification, a witch had turned him into a frog. She’d laid out a series of impossible conditions, conditions so unfathomable that the frog prince hadn’t bothered to remember them, and now and evermore he was cursed to live his life as a frog. He’d hopped across the ice to reach the house on the island in the lake in the valley of the lowlands of Cekon only two nights before, because he’d seen the fire crackling through the window, and thought he might beseech the great hunter Borbora for aid.
“Borbora is, I’m afraid, off on a great quest,” the Rockdaw explained. “But tomorrow, we will ride off and find this witch and see what can be done.”
So the next morning, they set off, the Good Knight Rockdaw upon his horse, with his mule riding beside him. They rode across the ice, they rode through the forest, they rode on the road and then another road and they rode through a frozen bog until they reached the small village wherein Prince Meddlemore had been cursed and stricken.
There wasn’t much to do around the village, least of all in winter, and guests were a rare thing indeed, so most of the villagers were there to greet them as they rode up. Hunters and herders, bakers and brewers, farmers and fishers were all waiting, curious. So too was the village witch. She was easy to pick out, of course, wearing a long wool overdress over a long wool underdress, a black hood pulled over her white hair that hung in two thick braids.
She stepped forward once the Good Knight Rockdaw stopped his horse. “Good sir knight, what brings you our way?” she asked. It’s true, of course, that most knights did not deserve to be called “good” and the people of the village had every right to be suspicious, had every right to hold weapons and look wary at the approach of a man in armor.
“My name is Rockdaw,” the Good Knight Rockdaw said. Then, remembering his station, he added, “Sir Rockdaw, I suppose, if we’re to stick to formalities. And I bring you questions, and I bring you a frog who claims to be a prince.”
“Claims?” the frog prince exclaimed, hopping up onto the head of the horse, who did not look happy but did not shake him off. “Claims? I am Prince Meddlemore, son of your king!”
“I suppose that you are,” the witch said. “Have you done your penance, have you returned so that I might lift the curse upon you?”
“I can’t do impossible things!” cried the frog.
“I thought you didn’t remember what you’d been asked to do?” the Good Knight Rockdaw asked.
“Oh did he tell you that?” the witch asked, then cackled a perfect witch cackle, glee radiating across her wizened face. “Told you it was impossible, told you he’d forgotten… which is it, Prince Meddlemore?”
“My father will have your head!” the frog exclaimed.
The witch ignored the prince and turned to the knight. “Well then, Sir Rockdaw, I will tell you how the prince came to become a frog, shall I?”
“Please do,” the Good Knight Rockdaw replied.
“One morning, two summers ago, Prince Meddlemore rode into town on a fine black steed with a fine black bridle, with three fine black horses, riderless, in tow. We gathered, of course, because it’s not every day anyone of any station comes to see us here in our bog. He told us, from atop his fine black horse, that he’d been sent by his father to find among the people the most beautiful young unmarried women, the most beautiful young unmarried men, and bring them back to court, and not to return until he had the three of such people with him. He told us he’d heard tale of a brother and a sister here whose beauty put the stars to shame, so he’d ridden for days, for weeks, to find us, to find them, and bring them to court so they might marry nobility.”
“I did all of that, sure!” shouted the frog, who by the miracle of being a frog could shout quite loudly indeed.
“We knew, of course, the brother and sister he spoke of, and they were there in the crowd that day. He looked relieved and beckoned them to pack their things and be ready to leave before the sun reached its peak in the sky. They told him they did not want to go. He insisted.”
“Imagine leaving all of this,” shouted the frog prince. “Who could leave a bog for a palace?”
“Anyone who wants to,” said the witch. “But they did not want to. He dismounted, reached for his sword, and what do you know, I turned him into a frog.”
“Slay her!” the frog prince commanded. “Slay her and with her death, the curse will be lifted!”
The Good Sir Rockdaw ignored the frog, but turned to the witch. “Tell me, good witch, what conditions did you set to reverse this spell?”
“Simple things,” the witch said. “I told him he must not be greedy.”
“She told me I must relinquish my claim to the throne!” the frog prince protested.
“He explained he had a right to one day rule over all of Cekon,” the witch explained, “and I explained that that was greedy. I told him once he relinquished his titles and apologized to the brother and sister, that he could return to me and I would set him straight.”
“Impossible tasks!” shouted the frog. “Sir Rockdaw, I command you, strike down this loathsome woman!”
At this, the Good Knight Rockdaw laughed, and his horse shook its head, and the prince fell to the snowy ground with an indignant sigh.
“I serve neither you nor your father,” the knight explained. “I have sworn fealty only to the Baron Grestel. If you have concerns about my actions, or suggestions as to what I must do, I’m afraid you must take it up with him.”
“Baron Grestel never leaves his quarters!” the frog prince protested. “All he does is play card games and read books, he practically leaves his whole barony to its own fate!”
“I’m afraid so,” the Good Knight Rockdaw said. “Well then, Prince Meddlemore, it seems you have a simple choice. You can renounce your title and apologize to those you have offended, or you can stay a frog.”
“Impossible tasks!” screamed the frog.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” the Good Knight Rockdaw said to the witch and the waiting crowd. But no one had been offended by his actions, and he spent a few days in the village, talking woodcraft and hunting with new friends. He met the brother and sister, who were indeed quite beautiful. He had a wonderful few days, then he returned to the house on the island in the lake in the valley in the lowlands of Cekon.
The witch, for her part, grew accustomed to the prince, who stayed in the village, screaming “impossible tasks!” at the top of his frog lungs for a few weeks before he hopped elsewhere, out history and out of our story.
About the Author
Margaret Killjoy (She/They) is a transfeminine author and musician living in the Appalachian mountains with her dog. She is the author of A Country of Ghosts as well as the Danielle Cain series of novellas; she plays piano, synth, and harp in the feminist black metal band Feminazgûl; and she is the host of the community and individual preparedness podcast Live Like the World is Dying and the history podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.