VII. Barbarians, Bards, and the Great Medieval Soup Spill
Empires fell apart the way cheap furniture falls apart: all at once after creaking for years.
Castles popped up across the landscape like stone middle fingers aimed at neighboring lords.
Knights put on enough metal to become human cookware and then rode horses into disputes about honor, land, and whose cousin insulted whose goose.
Every feast looked like a health code violation wearing velvet and .
Bread was heavy, soup was mysterious, and every banquet had at least one uncle who sang too loudly after the mead.
Bards wandered from hall to hall carrying news, gossip, and that made everybody feel like their village was secretly the center of the universe.
Monks copied books by candlelight and developed the thousand-yard stare of men who had rewritten the same holy paragraph eighty-six times.
Peasants plowed, nobles schemed, and everyone smelled like weather.
Yet in the middle of all that mud and manure, stained glass caught sunlight and turned churches into accidental portals.
Humanity, somehow, kept becoming more beautiful and more ridiculous at the exact same time.