In the River Veil Kingdom of Thorn Wild, where the wolves ran in bloodlines older than the throne, and a creature’s worth was read off its pedigree the way merchants read a coin, there was a thing the high folk said, half in justest and half in iron.
The blood shows, it always shows.
It meant that breeding was destiny, that a wolf of the royal line was royal in its bones, and a cur of no line was occur to its marrow, and that no amount of kindness or care could lift a low thing above the rank its blood had fixed.
The great hounds and dire wolves of Thornwald’s court were bred in ranked and proud, and the lowest of them outranked the highest commoner, because the lowest of them had line, and line was everything.
Mees had no line at all.
a wolfless foundling raised in the kennel’s filth.
She was the lowest of the low, a girl who mucked the runs of beasts that outranked her, whose own blood was a blank no one had ever bothered to read.
She had made her peace with it the way the bottom always must, by going unnoticed, and by loving the only things in Thorn Wild that loved her back without checking her pedigree first, the animals, the broken ones, especially the runts and the rejects and the small discarded things the kennel masters called for having the wrong blood.
She did not know that on a cold morning at the river’s edge she would find a half-drowned stray puppy that every expert eye in the kingdom would call worthless, or that she would keep it anyway against all sense, or that the king himself would one day mock the mongrel at her heel, until in the great hall before the whole court, every royal wolf in Thornwild lowered itself to the ground and bowed to the worthless stray.
Chapter 1.
She found it in the river shallows on a gray morning, more dead than alive, and by every rule of Thornwild, she should have left it there.
Meis had gone down to the river at dawn to haul water for the kennel runs, as she did every morning, and she had heard it before she saw it.
A thin broken sound caught under the noise of the current, the particular cry of a small thing that is stopped expecting to be answered.
She followed it to where the reeds choked the shallows, and there, tangled in the weeds, half submerged and shaking, was a puppy.
It was a wretched-l looking thing.
She could see that even soaked and shivering.
Its coat was a muddy, nothing color, neither the silver of the royal line, nor the black of the war strain, nor any of the proud colors the court bred for.
Its legs were too long, and its ears sat wrong, and one of them was torn.
It was, in the cold language of the kennel masters, a call, the kind of mongrel pup that the breeders drowned at birth for having the wrong blood, tipped into the river in a sack so the line would stay clean.
Someone had done exactly that.
She realized someone had called a litter and thrown the wrong-blooded one in the river to die, and the sack had snagged in the reeds, and the pup had clawed its way half out and been clinging to the world by its torn ear all night.
She knew what she was supposed to do.
She was supposed to leave it or finish it the way the kennel masters would.
A cull was a cull.
The blood showed and this blood showed nothing.
No line, no worth.
A mongrel even the breeders had judged unfit to live.
Mis waited into the cold river and gathered the shaking wretched thing against her chest.
There now, she murmured as it pressed its cold muzzle into her neck and shook.
There, somebody threw you away because your blood came out wrong.
I know about that.
My blood came out wrong, too.
Came out nothing far as anyone’s ever bothered to read.
She held it close, warming it.
So, we’re a matched pair of coals, you and me.
And I’ve never yet seen the sense in drowning a thing just because of what its blood says it’s worth.
Come on, you’ll not die in a sack today.
Not while I have a warm corner to put you in.
She carried it back up to the kennels, hidden in her shawl, and told no one.
A foundling keeping a coal was breaking a rule older than the kennels.
But Mees had spent her whole life being judged worthless by her blood, and she would be damned before she judge another thing the same way.
Chapter 2.
She raised it in secret in the cold corner of the kennel loft where she slept, and it grew.
It grew strangely.
She’d expected it to stay small and sickly, a call, after all, the runt of a called litter.
But it ate what scraps she could steal, and it slept warm against her, and it grew week on week into something she could not quite make sense of.
Not handsome by the quartz lights.
Its coat stayed that muddy nothing color.
Its frame stayed lanky and odd.
But it grew large, larger than a puppet’s age had any right to, and there was something in the way it carried itself, even as a half-grown gangling thing, that she had no word for, a stillness, a watchfulness.
The other kennel beasts, the proud royal wolves in their runs, went oddly quiet when she walked the mongrel past, not hostile the way they were with strangers, but attentive, their great heads turning to follow the muddy stray, their ears coming forward.
She did not understand it.
She put it down to her own fondness, the way you think your own ugly child is secretly beautiful.
She named it ash for its nothing color, and because it had come up out of a place that should have killed it.
You’re a strange one, Ash,” she told it in the cold loft, scratching its torn ear.
The royal beasts go quiet for you.
I don’t know why.
You are a cull and a mongrel, and the breeders threw you in a river, and you walk past the proudest wolves and thorn wild like you own the place, and they let you.
She laughed softly.
Maybe you’ve got delusions of grandeur.
Maybe that’s the only thing your blood gave you, a cull’s nerve.
Well, good.
The world told us both were worth nothing.
We might as well not believe it.
Ash looked at her with its odd mismatched eyes and leaned its growing weight against her, and she thought no more about why the royal wolves went quiet.
She should have.
The kennel masters had begun to notice, and the kennel masters did not like a thing they could not explain.
A cull mongrel that the royal beasts deferred to, kept in secret by a foundling who had no right to keep anything.
Word of it climbed the way word does from the kennels toward the keep.
And one cold morning a steward came down with two guards and the news that the king himself had heard there was a foundling hiding a beast in his kennels and the king wished to see this mongrel for himself in the great hall before the court where such irregularities were judged.
Chapter 3.
The great hall of Thornwild was the proudest room in the kingdom, hung with the pedigrees of 40 generations, and the whole court turned to watch the foundling come in with the call at her heel.
Mees had never been in such a place and never wanted to be.
She kept her eyes low and her hand near Ash’s head, and she felt the contempt of the room land on her like cold rain.
A kennel drudge, bloodblank, dragging a muddy mongrel into the hall of bloodlines.
The high folk drew back their fine robes as she passed.
The courtwolves, the great proud beasts that lay at their master’s feet, lifted their heads, and on the high seat sat the king.
She had only ever seen him as a distant shape on feast days.
King Veyron the thornwolf, three years on his throne, young and hard and coldeyed.
A man bred from the oldest line in the kingdom, and proud of it the way the whole court was proud.
A man for whom the blood shows was not a saying, but a creed.
His gaze moved over her, dismissing her in an instant as the nothing her blood declared her, and then dropped to the creature at her heel.
And the king of Thornwild laughed.
It was not a kind laugh.
It rolled around the proud hall, and the court took it up, because the court always laughed when the king did, and the sound of it broke over me in the muddy stray like a wave.
This, Veyron said when the laughter had died enough for him to be heard, is what my kennel masters lost sleep over.
A foundling with no blood hiding a cull with less.
He leaned forward, cold amusement in his hard face.
Look at it.
The wrong color, the wrong frame, a torn ear, a mongrel the breeders judged unfit and drowned, and you fished it out of a rivergirl, and you’ve been feeding it on stolen scraps in my loft.
The court tittered.
I’ll grant you a soft heart, but a soft heart is a luxury for those with blood to spare, and you’ve none.
That thing is worth nothing, less than nothing.
It’s the proof of a breeding mistake.
The blood shows, girl, and that blood shows occur.
He sat back.
Take it to the river and finish what the breeders started, and get yourself back to the runs where your own blood put you.
Mis stood in the proud hall with the whole court laughing and the king’s contempt on her, and the brave, reckless thing that had lived under her quiet face her whole life rose up and would not be held down.
“No,” she said.
Chapter 4.
The hall went silent.
One did not say no to the king of Thornwild, and certainly not a bloodblank foundling with a call at her heel.
Veyron’s cold amusement sharpened into something more dangerous.
No, he repeated as though tasting a foreign word.
No, my lord.
Her heart slammed, but her voice held, and she made herself lift her low eyes to the high seat.
I’ll not take him to the river.
You can call him a cull and a mongrel and worth nothing, and you’d be saying exactly what every expert eye in your kingdom would say.
I know that the blood shows nothing in him.
I’ll not argue it.
She rested her hand on Ash’s head, and the muddy stray stood calm and still beside her in the laughing hall.
But you’re wrong.
That worth is only what the blood shows, my lord.
And I’ll tell you why even standing here is the lowest thing in your hall.
My blood shows nothing.
I’m a call too.
Blood blank kennel raised.
Judged worth less than the beasts I muck for.
And I have spent my whole life watching this court drown things for their breeding and crown things for their breeding and never once look at what a creature actually is.
The brave thing carried her.
Past sense, past safety.
You say his blood shows occur.
I say I’ve raised him from a half-drowned scrap and the proudest wolves in your kennels go quiet when he passes, and I don’t know why, and neither do you, because you’ve never once looked at a thing without reading its pedigree first.
So, no, I won’t drown him to prove your creed.
If you want him dead for the crime of bad blood, my lord, you’ll have to do it yourself in front of your whole court and see if your fine wolves think it’s as funny as you do.
The court did not titter.
Now the hall had gone very still, the way a room goes still when someone has said a true and dangerous thing.
The king rose from his high seat, cold and slow, and Mis braced, certain she had just talked her way into the river beside her stray.
Veyron came down from the deis, his own great wolf at his side, the proudest beast in the kingdom, silvercoated and royal to its marrow.
15 generations of the purest line in thorn wild.
Let us settle it then, the king said, soft and dangerous.
By the only language that matters, my wolf is the highest blood in this kingdom.
Yours is the lowest mud, the river spat back.
Well see which the blood bows to.
He gestured his silver wolf forward toward the muddy coal.
When my beast puts your curr on its back in the dust, girl, you’ll take what’s left to the river, and you’ll have your answer about what worth the blood shows.
The royal silver wolf paced forward, vast and proud, toward the lanky, muddy stray, and then it stopped, and it looked at Ash, and the proudest wolf in Thornwild lowered its great silver head and bent its fourlegs and bowed.
Chapter 5.
The silence in the hall was absolute.
The king’s own wolf, 15 generations of the purest blood in the kingdom, the highest beast in Thorn Wild, lay down in the dust before the muddy cull and pressed its silver muzzle to the ground.
The way a wolf abases itself before nothing in the world but its rightful pack lead.
And then around the hall, one by one, and then all at once the court wolves followed.
The great proud beasts at every lord’s feet rose and turned toward the foundling stray and lowered themselves to the ground until the entire hall of thorn wild.
Every royal wolf of every ancient line lay bowed in the dust before a half-drowned mongrel the breeders had thrown in a river.
Ash stood among them calm and still the muddy nothing color cull and accepted the homage of the whole kingdom’s blood as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
King Veyron stared at his own bowed wolf and at the bowed court and at the creature they bowed to and the color drained from his hard proud face.
That’s not possible, he said.
Lo, the blood, my wolf does not bow.
It is the highest line in the kingdom.
It bows to nothing.
It bows to me.
His eyes came up to Meis wild now, the creed of his whole life cracking.
What is that thing? What did you pull out of the river? I don’t know, my lord, Mis said as stunned as he was, her hand trembling on Ash’s head.
I swear it.
I found a half- drowned cull in the reeds, and I couldn’t leave it to die because no one should be drowned for their blood.
That’s all I know.
I named him Ash, and I fed him scraps, and I loved him because he was thrown away like me.
She looked at the impossible sight of the whole court’s wolves bowed in the dust.
But your wolves know something we don’t, my lord.
They’ve been telling me for months, and I didn’t listen.
They go quiet when he passes.
They turn to follow him.
I thought it was my fondness.
It wasn’t.
The blood you trust so much is bowing to him.
Maybe you should ask it what he is since it seems to know better than either of us.
The thornwolf looked at his bode silver wolf, the beast whose blood he had trusted above all things his whole life.
And for the first time in his proud reign, he did the thing he had never done.
He knelt and put his hand on his own wolf’s silver head and asked it in the old wordless way between an alpha and his beast, “What do you see?” And the wolf, without rising from its bow, turned its eyes to the muddy coal, and Veyron, reading it the way an alpha reads his pack, went white to the lips.
Chapter 6.
He did not finish the judgment that day.
He could not.
a king whose own blood creed had just lain down in the dust before a foundling stray could not pronounce on worth as though nothing had happened.
He kept them in the keep messes and the cole both in rooms far above the kennels to the scandalized whispers of a court that had watched its wolves bow to mud.
And he came to them in the evenings because the impossible thing the wolves had done struck at the root of everything he believed.
And because she slowly saw it had cracked open something in him that the proud creed had kept shut his whole life.
She thought at first he meant to study the mystery and discard the foundling once he’d solved it.
She braced.
It did not come.
Instead, the king talked to her.
The way she understood he had never talked to a soul beneath his blood because a man raised to Reedworth off pedigrees is a man who has never once spoken plainly to a thing he thought was worthless.
She learned him sideways, that he was beneath the cold, proud creed, a man who had never been certain of anything but his blood.
And now even that had bowed to a call, and he was unmed, that he had ruled three years by the certainty that breeding was destiny, that the high were high by right, and the low were low by right, and that the certainty had made him cold because it left no room to see anyone, only to read their blood and file them where it put them.
That the wolves bow had not only confused him, it had frightened him all the way down.
Because if the blood could be wrong about a call, the blood could be wrong about everything.
About the lords he trusted, about the foundlings he dismissed, about the worth of every soul in his kingdom he’d never once truly looked at.
“You’re frightened,” Meis said one night, watching his face.
Not of ash, of what he means.
If your wolves bow to a thing the blood says is worthless, then the blood’s been lying to you about him and maybe about everyone you ever read off a pedigree and put in their place.
She held his gaze about me.
It’s a thing I have no name for because my kind stopped believing in it generations ago when we started breeding for blood instead of watching for it.
He looked at the muddy stray dozing now unremarkable by the fire.
There is an old line in Thorn Wild.
Older than the throne, older than the proud bloodlines, mostly forgotten.
The trueborn, the old keepers called them.
Wolves born not to the highest blood but to none at all.
calls mongrels the river throne in which the oldest deepest wolf nature runs pure undiluted by the breeding we’ve spent 40 generations doing to make beasts handsome instead of true the court bred for silver coats and proud frames and forgot what it was breeding out and every so often the old line says the true thing surfaces in a creature we’ve judged worthless and every wolf alive knows it on sight and bows because they remember what we made them forget his hands were fists I drowned Found them.
Meis, my breeders for generations.
Every coal thrown in the river to keep the blood clean.
How many of them were true born? How many times has my kingdom drowned the realest thing it had? For the crime of not looking handsome enough to a creed I never once questioned.
Chapter 7.
The almost came on a night near the turning of the season after the king had begun clumsily learning it like a foreign tongue to look at things without reading their blood first.
He came down to the kennels with her and learned to watch the beasts the way she watched them, for what they were and not what they were bred from.
He looked at the foundlings and the kennel drudges as though seeing them for the first time, which he was.
He was unlearning a creed 40 generations deep, and it was slow and humbling work, and she watched him do it, and could not help what it did to her.
He stood with her by the fire, ash dozing between them, and he said, “Stay, my lord.
I’m a kennel drudge with a cull.
There’s nowhere for me to go but the runs, the crown, the cold, the proud creed.
Gone from his face.
I’d make you my queen.
Mees, not because your stray is some sacred trueborn and I’d keep it close.
God, not that.
Never that.
For the foundling who stood in my hall with the whole court laughing and told the king his creed was blind.
Who fished a drowning call out of a river because no one should die for their blood? and was right, more right than 40 generations of my line, and shamed us all with a thing we’d thrown away.
” His hand rose to her jaw.
“You looked at a worthless thing and saw worth when my whole kingdom is built on doing the opposite.
Teach me to see that way.
Marry me.
I have read worth off pedigrees my whole life and been wrong.
Be the one who teaches me to look.
” The yes rose in her like the wolves rising to bow.
And behind it the old arithmetic bloodlank, a foundling, a king bred from the oldest line in a kingdom that worships blood.
The moment your queen, the whole court, 40 generations of pedigree proud lords will see a bloodblank drudge on the throne.
The living insult to everything they believe.
They’ll never accept you.
They’ll name you the proof their king’s gone mad, bewitched by a cull and a kennel girl.
And they’ll tear it all down to be rid of you.
You shamed his creed.
That doesn’t make you safe.
It makes you the thing his whole proud kingdom most needs gone.
I can’t.
She whispered, “My lord, don’t you see what I’d be? A bloodblank foundling on the throne of a kingdom that worships blood.
Every lord you have built his whole life on the blood shows.
And you’d put a girl with no blood at all beside you and ask them to bow.
They won’t.
They’ll say the Cole bewitched you and the kennel girl finished the job.
And they’ll use me to prove their kings abandoned the creed that made Thorn wild.
And they’ll break your reign to break me.
She stepped back.
Keep me a kennel keeper, my lord.
Let me tend the runs and raise the coals you stop drowning.
That’s worth more than a throne I’d only crack your kingdom on.
It’s safer for both of us.
For 3 days, chapter 8.
On the third day, the lords came and they brought the old creed with them like a blade.
Lord Keredok, the proudest of them, whose line ran nearly as old as the king’s own, had watched Veyron grow strange this winter, sparing the culls, raising a bloodblank drudge to the keep, speaking of worth in ways no thornwolf had spoken in 40 generations.
And Keradok, who had built his whole standing on the creed of blood, had gathered the proud lords behind him and come to put a stop to it.
He came into the great hall where it had begun with a dozen lords at his back and their proud wolves at their feet and he found me there with ash for the king had summoned her though she did not yet know to what “Your majesty,” Keradok said loud, “for the court and for the creed, we come in love of Thornwild, which your father and his fathers built on the one truth that has never failed us.
The blood shows, the high are high by blood, the low are low by blood.
It is the order of the world and the foundation of this throne.
His gaze radis with contempt, and you would set a blood blank upon it.
A kennel drudge with no line, who bewitched the court with a cull’s trick in this very hall, will not have it.
A king who abandons the creed of blood is a king who unmakes Thornwild itself.
Set the drudge aside, drown the cull, as the law demands, and return to the truth that made us, or we will find a king who honors his blood.
His proud wolf bared its teeth at the muddy stray.
The blood shows, majesty, it always shows, and hers shows nothing.
The proud lord’s wolves growled low at the coal, and the king rose from his high seat, and the cold that came off the thornwolf was a thing Karadok had never seen behind the comfortable creed of 40 generations.
“You’re right, Kadok,” Veyron said, soft and terrible.
“The blood shows.
It always shows.
So let us let it show.
” one more time in front of the whole court as it did three days ago.
He came down from the deis.
Bring your wolves forward.
The proudest blood your lines can muster.
And we’ll see by the only language that doesn’t lie exactly what the blood bows to.
But it was not the king in the end who finished it.
It was Mees who stepped up beside him, not behind, in front of Kerodok and the proud lords in the whole watching court and spoke with no armor left at all.
You want the blood to show, my lords.
Her voice shook and climbed and held.
So do I.
Let it, but understand what you’re asking for first.
She rested her hand on Ash’s head, and the muddy cull stood calm and still in the proud hall.
You’ve built your whole world on the blood shows, and you think it means the high blood is the worthy blood.
But your own wolves told you different three days ago, and they’ll tell you again, and you won’t be able to laugh it off this time.
Because the thing you bred your lines for, the silver coats, the proud frames, the long pedigrees, isn’t the thing the blood actually carries.
You bred for handsome.
And 40 generations of breeding for handsome.
You bred out the true old wolf nature, the realest thing your beasts ever had.
And it surfaced pure in the one place you’d never look.
in a call in the riverthrone mud.
You’ve been drowning for generations to keep your lines clean.
She held Keradok’s proud gaze.
You’ve been drowning the realest blood and thorn wild for 40 generations, my lord.
Because it didn’t come dressed in silver.
That’s what the blood shows.
It shows that your creed has been killing the best of you the whole time.
She gestured to the proud lord’s wolves.
Don’t believe me? Believe them.
Bring your proudest blood forward and watch it bow.
And Keradok, sneering certain, gestured his great proud wolf toward the coal to put the upstart mongrel down.
And his wolf stopped and looked at Ash and lowered its proud head to the dust.
And around the hall, one by one, and then all at once, every wolf of every proud line bowed itself to the ground before the muddy river thrown stray, exactly as they had three days before.
The whole blood of Thorn Wild, 40 generations of pedigree, lying in the dust before the thing the creed called worthless.
Kerodok stared at his own bowed wolf, and the creed of his whole life broke in his proud face.
The king turned to him in the ringing silence.
“There’s your blood showing, Keradok,” Veyron said.
“It’s been trying to tell you for 40 generations, and you wouldn’t listen.
The realest thing in this kingdom isn’t on any of your pedigrees.
It’s the thing you’ve been throwing in the river.
” He looked at the bode court, at the muddy coal, at the bloodblank foundling beside him.
The creed changes today.
We stop reading worthoff bloodlines because the blood has just told the whole court twice that we’ve been reading it wrong.
We stop drowning coals.
We start looking at what a thing actually is.
And the next lord who tells me the low are low by blood can explain to his own bowed wolf why it’s lying in the dust before a stray.
He took Meis’s hand, her bloodlank hand there in the hall of 40 generations with the whole proud blood of the kingdom bowed around them.
I don’t want a queen the pedigrees approve of, the thornwolf said raw, no king in it.
I want the foundling who stood in this hall while my whole court laughed and told me my creed was blind and proved it with a thing I’d have drowned.
Marry me.
Teach my kingdom to see the way you see.
The blood shows me mis.
and it’s been showing me all winter that the most worthwhile thing in Thornwild is the one I called worthless.
Kerodok in time knelt.
The ones who would not knelt anyway eventually because a lord whose own wolf bows to mud cannot long argue that mud is worthless.
Epilogue one year later the kennels of Thornwild were a different place now.
The Culling River ran clean.
No breeder had thrown a wrong-blooded pup into it in a year because the creed that had drowned them was dead.
The runs were full of the river thrown in the mongrel and the wrong colored raised now by a queen who had been a call herself and who looked at every one of them for what it was and not what its blood declared it.
That had scandalized the court most a bloodblank foundling raised to queen who still went down to the kennels each morning to tend the culls with her own hands who had made the looking at a creature’s true worth the foundation of a kingdom that had worshiped blood for 40 generations.
They had stopped calling her the drudge.
They had not settled on what came after.
The queen the wolves bowed too, the children said, though it had been Ash they bowed to, and Meis thought the children had it right anyway.
The bowing in the foundling had become, in the kingdom’s telling.
One thing, the old line of the trueborn was no longer drowned, but sought.
The king’s own breeders, humbled, had begun to learn from the riverthrown mongrels the wolf nature their 40 generations had bred away.
Ash, the muddy, nothing color coal the king had once told her to drown, lay at the foot of the throne now, where the proudest royal wolf had lain for a thousand years, and the proudest royal wolf lay beside it, content, because the blood had sorted itself out at last along truer lines than coat color.
Veyron came down to the kennels on a clear evening, to the kennels, where it had begun, because some things are worth keeping the shape of.
He found her in the runs among the culls.
A new litter of riverthrown mongrels tumbling at her feet.
Ash watching over them with its odd mismatched eyes.
In his hand he carried something small.
A scrap of weathered sacking kept and cleaned.
The very sack the breeders had thrown Ash into that she’d pulled from the reeds a year and a lifetime ago.
He’d had it found and kept.
I had this kept, he said, pressing the worn sacking into her hands.
After I learned what they’d thrown him away in, a cole’s sack waited for the river.
Because everyone in Thornwild believed the most valuable thing in this kingdom was its blood.
40 generations of pedigree, the silver and the proud frames, the lines we’d kill to keep clean.
He folded her fingers around the rough cloth.
We were all of us wrong.
The most valuable thing was the one we kept throwing in the river.
The true thing, the real thing that didn’t come dressed handsome enough for the creed, so we drowned it.
generation on generation to keep our blood clean and never once knew we were drowning the best of ourselves.
His mouth found her hair.
I told you to take him to the river and finish what the breeders started and you stood in my hall and said no and shamed 40 generations of blood with a half- drowned cull.
The realest thing in my kingdom mis was the thing it had judged worthless twice over the stray and the girl who wouldn’t let it drown.
Mis laughed, the easy hole sound that came so freely now, and set the weathered sack on the kennel wall, kept like everything true she’d ever pulled out of the water against the judgment of its blood.
Around her, the riverthrown coals of Thorn Wild tumbled and grew, raised now for what they were, and not drowned for what their blood declared them.
watched over by the muddy stray that the whole proud kingdom had bowed to.
And the bloodblank foundling who’ fished a worthless cull out of a river, and seen the entire court’s wolves lower themselves before it, knelt in the runs among the discarded and the wrong-blooded, her king beside her, raising up the things the creed had thrown away.
It was the only worth she had ever been able to read.
The worth that doesn’t show in the blood, in the thing the world has judged and thrown out, in the call clinging to life by its torn ear in the cold reads.
And it had in the end bowed a kingdom and been worth a crown.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
