NARRATOR: Your emotion will not save you. Nor your will, or luck. The only thing you can offer the Dandelion King is your need to be a servant, everything else isn’t allowed. Despite being a ruler for hundreds of years only a few managed to be his servant. The challenge is only one, one action to be his servant. Just climb the Dandelion hills and come back without taking a single Dandelion back.
NARRATOR: Geir entered the hills.
TORE: What do you want, boy? Surely it’s something the Dandelion king can’t provide?
NARRATOR: Geir stayed silent. Tore hugged his back like a loving mother. She rested her flowery chin on his shoulder.
TORE: They don’t love you, you know this don’t you? They deny your desire for power and purpose. I can give you such things. A lord of war, with his hammer of conquest. There’s many things to take and own. Wouldn’t you like that? To own?
GEIR: He said you’d say such things
TORE: They do not own do they? Nor do they conquer. But they claim it’s evil, yes? But why? Aren’t you smart enough to rule, is it not insulting that they were asking as if you’re someone who knows not the truth?
GEIR: Power corrupts. Even I can’t control its grasp.
TORE: Would your mother think that? Her baby boy is nothing more than a tyrant without the crown.
NARRATOR: Geir flinched at the mention of his mother.
TORE: You lost her didn’t you?
NARRATOR: At this point Geir was laying his head in her lap. Tore stroked his hair with her flowery fingers. Her natural warmth made it hard for him to resist the comfort.
TORE: The pain is unbearable isn’t it?
NARRATOR: Geir began to silently weep.
TORE: You know she’s here. Her love became one of my own pieces. Every death affects me, takes me to a new being.
GEIR: How did she affect your being?
TORE: In small, beautiful ways. Like how she used to stroke your hair.
NARRATOR: Tore began to fall asleep at her lap. His mother’s presence allows him to feel the warmth and the love a child feels. Giving him an unknowable peace, in that moment he could stay forever. He felt a dandelion wrap around his hand.
TORE: All you have to do to join her is give her this flower. Don’t you want to give her a flower when you meet her?
NARRATOR: Geir felt guilt as he pulled away from her. The coldness of his life setting in, sobering him to the demon.
TORE: Oh! Why did you leave? Don’t you want to meet her?
GEIR: She’s not here anymore. Just her illusion, an illusion you want to trap me in.
TORE: Opposed to what? A world where your mom is nothing but dust? A world where you’ll soon be dust? How is that any better?
GEIR: It’s not better but I know it well.
TORE: Well I hope that world serves you well. For you served it well.
NARRATOR: The wind scattered Tore. And Geir was now free to be a servant of the Dandelion king.