Let me tell you a story.
This is a story about Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens, Daniel Bryan, and Shane McMahon. Like most stories, it has a hero. But wrestling narrative is weird, because the supporting character of one story will be the hero–or the villain–of the next, so all four of these characters could be the main character, depending on how you look at it.
So let’s try an experiment. What happens if we make Sami the hero? What kind of story would that be, and where might it be going? Let me see if I can find the thread of his story and unwind it, follow where it leads. Be patient with me and let’s see what we can do.
Wait. Before we start, there’s a favor I need you to do for me: I need you to take the words “heel” and “babyface” and put them in a box, and put that box on a shelf in your mind for the rest of this story. Heck, if you can keep them there until after WrestleMania, even better. No asking “But who’s the face?” No saying “But how am I supposed to think they’re the heels?” Let’s imagine for a moment that there aren’t faces and heels, only characters, each with their own motivations and needs, none of which are simple or the same as any of the others. Yes, it’s important that once a match comes around, the audience has some outcome they desperately want. But on the way there, people can shift, they can develop, they can evolve. That’s what intricate and layered storytelling is–and you want intricate and layered storytelling in wrestling, I know you do, or you would not be reading this now.
This is a story about the laws of wrestling. The world of wrestling has slightly different moral physics than our world; it’s a world in which actions almost always have equal and opposite reactions. The laws of wrestling are those rules of action and reaction. It’s why the person who sets up tables is nearly always the person who is sent crashing through them; it’s why you can’t finish someone off with their own move; it’s why the person who brings a cake to the ring almost always ends up with it on their face. Wrestling Law structures matches: we expect to see someone suffer and then come back stronger, at least for a while; if they don’t it’s a “squash” and we tend to be disappointed and dissatisfied. The internal logic, the moral law of wrestling is when someone runs away from Braun Strowman only to find him waiting wherever they run, like Death itself, merciless. It’s the triumph of fairness, the balancing of the scales. Wrestling stories that don’t end fairly are ones we remember bitterly.
This is a story about the laws of wrestling, and a man who tried to uphold them and–despite his very rightness–set in motion a chain of events that may have destroyed him.
The story has four main characters, each of whom has a particular and distinct driving motivation.
Daniel Bryan, once known as the American Dragon, is a high priest of wrestling, the living embodiment of the laws of the art. He is instinctively aware of how far is far enough and how far is too much for the moral physics of wrestling. His two key phrases are “We settle things in the ring” and “enough is enough.”
At the beginning of the story, Shane McMahon stands for the old-fashioned virtue of filial piety. Despite knowing full well that his father is a slimy son-of-a-bitch, he feels honor-bound to defend and avenge him. It’s a very regressive virtue, but the Ancient Greeks would have appreciated him.
Kevin Owens is the force that never gives up. Over and over in his career he should have quit, but he doesn’t even know how. He cannot let things go. Enough is never, ever enough. He can’t stop, even when he should. He can’t stop even if he might want to.
Sami Zayn exists to right injustice, to do what’s right. He can’t bear bullies, he can’t abide a system that’s oppressive. He’s one of the noblest, purest personalities in wrestling, and he’s the hero of this story. Finally, he gets to be the hero of a major story on the main roster.
Too bad it looks like it’s a fucking tragedy.
“The tragic hero has normally had an extraordinary, often a nearly divine, destiny almost within his grasp, and the glory of that original vision never quite fades out of tragedy.”
Most tragedies begin with some small, mundane act; something hardly worth mentioning. Two young people from quarreling families each go to a party. A university student comes home for the funeral of his father. A man writes up a will dividing his land between his three daughters. Every river, no matter how deep, no matter how deadly strong the current at the end, starts at some point where you could step across it with one stride.
In this tragedy the event is Kevin Owens’s shoulder being a few inches off the mat.
It happens on August 1, 2017, during a rematch for the U.S. title between Kevin and A.J. Styles, a feud that’s been marked by a bunch of weird refereeing glitches. The ref (blinded, ironically, by an accidental poke to the eye by Kevin) doesn’t see that Kevin’s shoulder is up and calls the match for Styles, and Kevin, who is understandably upset at this, chastises Shane and Daniel backstage until Daniel agrees that at SummerSlam A.J. and Kevin will have another rematch, this time with Shane as the special referee. Shane–at this point still trying to be fair, according to commentary and his own actions–makes a bad call at SummerSlam and declares Kevin the winner, then impulsively reverses his decision on the spot.
Kevin–still understandably upset; no one in this story is ever not understandably upset–manages to get one last rematch against A.J., but has to find his own referee. He turns to Sami, the one person on the entire roster he feels is fair and just.
This is, within the bounds of this story, the first time we see Sami Zayn, and he’s defined as above all things a good man that even Kevin trusts to be fair to his greatest enemy (also, wise enough to not want to get involved at this point, because he rejects Kevin’s request).
Kevin’s rematch fails because Shane gets involved again and counts him out. The next week, Kevin responds to that with some very fair anger–and then goes too far and tells Shane his children would be better off with him dead, earning himself a beatdown.
Usually that would settle the scale according to the laws of wrestling: go too far, especially when warned not to, and get your ass kicked. And that should settle it. That should even the scales.
Instead, the next week, Vince McMahon shows up and chews out Kevin, gloating cruelly over his power over Kevin’s life. Maybe understandable–Kevin did basically wish his son dead–but unfair, unbalanced. Kevin responds by headbutting and bloodying him in an electrifying scene, impulsively–and again, rather understandably–crossing a point of no return with the McMahons.
Shane–obliged by his personal credo to avenge his father even though they don’t always get along–is now committed to destroying Kevin at all costs, a vendetta that will slowly unravel the very fabric of the Land of Opportunity, dragging nearly everyone down with it.
[There’s an angle to approach the story where Daniel Bryan is the protagonist, of course–the wanderer in exile, the wounded paladin seeking salvation and rejuvenation. Because it’s around this point that some people start to notice that Daniel is growing his hair out. He cut it when he retired from active wrestling, and its increasing length inspires a few murmurs. But nothing seems to come of it.]
The action rises toward Hell in a Cell, and Sami appears here and there, over and over. As Kevin’s feud with Shane escalates, Sami is constantly on the edges of the story, a righteous voice of warning. When Kevin is planning on suing the McMahons, he tells Kevin he would rather quit than ever work for him. And just before Hell in a Cell, he cuts a passionate promo against Kevin where he points out that when Kevin goes too far, horrible things tend to happen:
When Kevin taunts him about his lack of success, he insists that although he hasn’t won any titles on the main roster, he will continue to do things the right way, so that he can still look himself in the mirror without guilt and remorse.
Tragic heroes tend to be great people, higher and more noble than average precisely so that their fall can evoke sorrow and pity. Northrop Frye describes the tragic hero as having “a proud, passionate, obsessed or soaring mind which brings about a morally intelligible downfall.” In most tragedies, every single decision the hero makes is completely justifiable, even morally righteous–yet somehow they end up destroying themselves through those very decisions. Tragic heroes are generally loftier and more admirable than normal humans, Frye notes, just as an oak tree is more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Sami has always loved wrestling with a proud, passionate, obsessed and soaring love, and the audience has loved him in return for it. He’s one of the noblest wrestlers in WWE. He has always lived by Wrestling Law, because he’s believed its ethical underpinnings are true and reliable.
As Sami explains to Kevin and to all of us after his shocking act at Hell in a Cell, he was rooting for Shane all through the match, eager to see Kevin get his comeuppance. But then something awful happens. After knocking Kevin off the Cell and onto a table, Shane could win the match right there. Kevin is out cold; Shane “has him beat,” it would be fair and right to pin him and win the match. Instead, he begins to climb the Cell again–not content to win, but aiming to maim and destroy Kevin.
At this moment, watching on the sidelines, Sami has a terrible lightning-flash of insight: Shane McMahon is abusing his power and authority in order to warp the very foundations of the art Sami loves so much. In that moment, Shane destroys Sami’s faith in the system and his joy in wrestling, and Sami reacts accordingly.
“Tragedy presents the theme of narrowing a comparatively free life into a process of causation.”
The tragic hero tends to make a fateful decision that cannot be taken back, a noble yet unwise decision. Romeo and Juliet pledge their love to each other in spite of their families; Oedipus swears to find the man who murdered the old king and bring him to justice; Cordelia refuses to flatter her father; Hamlet vows to avenge his father’s death.
Despite Sami’s talk later about wanting more title shots and to get out of mediocrity, I think we’re meant to believe that he truly did save Kevin because he felt it was right, not because it was self-serving (if you wanted to sell out your principles for gain, surely sucking up to the unfair boss would be a better idea). And I think we’re supposed to see that impulse as understandable: unwise, perhaps, but not evil. It fits who he is.
It’s at this point that the metronome of events really starts to tick. Sami’s righteousness infused with Kevin’s stubborn inability to let things go makes them unstoppable; Shane’s fixation on vengeance combined with his power and influence makes him equally unstoppable. From here on in they will be locked in a spiraling cycle of revenge and retribution that often seems pointless–and yet somehow ends up leading them, step by bitter step, directly to WrestleMania.
[In a video shot backstage just before his triumphant return speech, Daniel Bryan says
Six months is actually a surprisingly recent date! He can’t mean he first started to hope to return to the ring six months ago, because I know he’s dreamed of this moment since the instant he walked away from the ring. No, six months ago he was starting to plan out what he was going to say when he came out of retirement. That hints that he’s been at least fairly sure he was going to be cleared since… Well, six months before March is… hold on…
He’s been fairly sure he was going to be cleared since October, when Hell in a Cell happened and Sami abruptly started on a path that would lead to him becoming truly worthy of being yes-kicked into oblivion by the returning bodily avatar of Wrestling Law.]
From Hell in a Cell, for the next six months, Shane, Sami, and Kevin wrench and warp the narrative fabric of Smackdown Live in their endless quest for vengeance and justice. In a tragedy, every choice the characters make narrows their range of options, and we can see that happening here, as over and over it feels like they have no choice but to lash back, to demand more, to keep fighting and clawing at each other. In the most painful tragedies, the hero remains as heroic as possible, and despite Sami’s fury and rage, there are signs that he remains idealistic and hopeful at heart. At points when Shane violates the moral laws of wrestling, when he goes too far and punishes unfairly, Sami responds not with cynicism—“Ha, I knew he’d do that”—but with dismay and shock. When Shane refuses to make the count that will save Sami and Kevin’s jobs at Clash of Champions, Sami is horrified, aghast, betrayed.
He drops to his knees in shock, staring at Shane as if he can’t believe his eyes at this evidence of exactly what he’s been arguing: that Shane really isn’t at all fair or impartial. Much, much later, at Fastlane, he reacts in the same way when Shane intervenes to cost him the victory:
“Are you kidding me?” Sami says in astonishment, too appalled to even be angry at first, even after months of push-and-pull, when he shouldn’t be the least surprised that Shane is determined to keep him from succeeding. In both of these cases Shane isn’t even responding to something Sami has done: in the first he’s angry at Daniel for what he sees as unfair refereeing; in the second he’s angry at Kevin for kicking him. It’s egregiously unfair, and Sami’s horror is as much at seeing the natural law of wrestling continuing to crumble under Shane’s pressure as it is at his own loss. His heart has been broken by Shane, his faith shattered. He takes pleasure and glee in his actions against the corrupt authority, but there’s not much joy in him anymore. Wrestling has become an agonizing struggle against a rigged system, with his friendship with Kevin the only happiness in his life. When even that becomes fraught and painful, he has nothing left but his crusade.
If you like or admire Sami, Kevin, or Shane (and I think you could actually make a case for Shane as a tragic hero on the flip side of this story, but he’s not my tragic hero, so someone else can do that), you always have plenty of reasons to see their actions as justified, even necessary. Those of us who love Sami and Kevin can truly enjoy their anarchic delight at fighting the system, their righteous fury.
And step by step, their path narrows.
All three of the characters refuse to allow closure, they refuse to consider the matter settled. Each and every thing they do is in reaction to some injustice, but nothing can ever be final, and nothing is ever, ever enough. Meanwhile, Daniel Bryan watches like an increasingly exasperated Greek Chorus, asking over and over again: What will it take to satisfy you? When will you let the scales be balanced? He constantly tells both parties that they need to let it go, that they should consider the story closed, but none of them can without betraying the fundamentals of who they are.
The most explicit example of this is after Sami and Kevin interfere at Survivor Series, costing the blue brand the win and–more importantly–hurting Shane’s pride as the leader of his father’s company. Shane sets up a match where Kevin is handcuffed in humiliation to the ropes, ending with an extended beatdown of Sami and Kevin by Nakamura and Orton to close the show, then calls it “one of the most satisfying finishes to Smackdown in its history.” Satisfaction is the end and goal of wrestling narrative, and you can see a vast relief in Daniel’s expression as he responds:
His face goes blank as Shane explains that he’s “just getting warmed up”–he’s going to make himself special referee at the next PPV, and he’s upping the stakes:
Shane strolls off, and the camera lingers on Daniel staring after him, the Greek Chorus baffled by the inability of the characters to see the hell they’re making for themselves.
Kevin and Sami save their jobs, but this ethical stalemate goes on for what seems like an eternity, month after month of increasing frustration as Shane locks horns with the Yep Movement and neither will give up, neither will back down, neither will ever allow themselves to be satisfied. Shane’s unfair, rigged system taints everything on the show; Sami’s refusal to consider the scales balanced warps everything around them. Wrestling is usually chaotic, but with a strange logic and order underneath it all; now that order begins to fall apart. Referees become entirely unreliable. Instant replays appear and disappear. Daniel Bryan tries to maintain the balance that he instinctively grasps, but here’s the problem: all of his moral authority comes from his wrestling, and as a General Manager he’s fundamentally, well… just a guy in a blazer. That’s not the kind of authority he wields naturally; his authority has always come from his existence as a wrestler, and at this point his decisions become increasingly frustrated. He makes handicap matches, he books gauntlets, he puts more and more wrestlers into matches, he takes wrestlers at their most literal word. It seems erratic but everything he does revolves around the fundamental law of wrestling: we settle things in the ring. He keeps trying to get people to settle things–to finish them, to reach a satisfying end–and to settle them in the ring, the one thing that he as General Manager, exiled from wrestling, cannot ever do. For Daniel, this is a doomed attempt to restore order. The Greek Chorus cannot interfere directly, it is always trapped on the sidelines, seeing and lamenting and never, ever listened to.
As the weeks move forward, as the PPVs tick off, Survivor Series to Clash of Champions to Royal Rumble to Fastlane, viewers complain that it feels like the story is going nowhere, that it’s just treading water. And indeed, it does feel like the nightmare metronome just keeps swinging back and forth, marking time, like they’re locked in a holding pattern. Waiting for something.
Waiting for someone.
At this stage in a tragedy, the effects of the hero’s action begin to ripple out and drag bystanders into it, usually with a merciless body count: Ophelia, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, Polonius, Tybalt, Mercutio, Banquo–all are destroyed as the protagonist and antagonist batter at each other. Tye Dillinger loses his Royal Rumble opportunity when Kevin and Sami jump him; Bobby Roode ends up losing his U.S. title when Shane keeps interfering in his match to mess with Daniel; the Usos have to defend their title twice on one PPV because Shane and Daniel are at odds. A.J. Styles finds himself in an endless game of keepaway as more and more people get added to his title match at Fastlane–please imagine A.J. saying in exasperation, “a plague on all y’all’s houses!” as he struggles to break up every pin and keep his title.
“Tragedy seems to lead up to an epiphany of law, of that which is and must be.”
By the time we reach March, the Land of Opportunity has become a world of chaos, randomness and despair. Everyone is frustrated, annoyed, thwarted–not least the fans watching. Everyone is desperate for this tedious, pointless stalemate to be broken, for someone with moral authority to arrive and to set things straight. And I would say that was all definitely just flawed narrative, except for the simple fact that someone with moral authority is about to arrive and potentially set things straight, and that WWE has known for about six months that Daniel was probably going to be cleared to do just that.
Sami and Kevin have no idea that their actions have set them on a collision course with the newly-resurrected high priest of wrestling. They’re eagerly continuing their spiral of vengeance, which is all they know by now: when Shane costs both of them a win at Fastlane, they respond by delivering a long, hilarious beatdown, in which Shane suffers in ludicrously over-the-top ways that don’t inspire any empathy, only schadenfreude. It’s an apex of brutal retribution, dished out laughingly, that we’re supposed to relish. Sami and Kevin are at their highest point, they’re on top of the world. When they hear next week that Daniel has been cleared to wrestle, they rush to see him, full of joy at the news, only to be brought up short as Daniel informs them, more in sorrow than in anger, that they’ve gone too far.
Their faces are those of chastened children as he explains that the most unforgivable thing is not that they attacked Shane, but that they did so after they had won. Shane had given them a match at WrestleMania, he had stepped down as Commissioner, they had achieved all their goals! He had paid for his mistakes with his pride and his job; the scale had at last been balanced. And instead of being satisfied at this clear and unambiguous win, they had lashed out to hurt and humiliate him further, putting their thumbs on the scale and tipping it even further in their direction.
A tragedy leads inevitably to a moment of dramatic reversal: the point at which the hero realizes that all is lost, that their very struggles against Fate have merely doomed them further. Oedipus discovers that he himself killed the king, who was also his father. Hamlet realizes that his quest for vengeance has resulted in only death. King Lear is abruptly told that his beloved daughter has been hanged. Macbeth learns that Macduff is of no woman born and can thus kill him. Juliet wakes to find Romeo poisoned and dying in her arms. This is that epiphany for Sami, as he listens to Daniel Bryan fire them and realizes that all of their choices have led him to this moment, where all of their actions until now make it inevitable that they will end up beating down a man they love and admire.
“I hate that I have to do this,” says Daniel, and Sami’s face fills with horror as he realizes that Daniel has the moral authority to judge him in a way that Shane never has. Remember right after Hell in a Cell, when Sami said that what broke him was the moment when Shane had Kevin beat and all he had to do was pin him, but instead Shane kept going, trying to destroy him for his vendetta. At that moment, Sami said, he knew Shane didn’t care about anyone or anything but his own twisted need for revenge; he knew Shane McMahon had become “an absolute psychopath.”
Now Sami listens, pale and shaking, as Daniel explains–patiently, sorrowfully–that Sami and Kevin had Shane beat, had him totally defeated, but they had to go further, they had to hurt and try to destroy him.
Daniel pronounces Sami guilty of exactly, precisely the sin he hates Shane for.
One of the greatest heartbreaks of that scene for me is as they turn away from Daniel to leave the ring. I firmly believe Kevin is a character who reacts without forethought when he’s emotional, and I believe that he had no idea he was going to attack Daniel until the second he found himself doing it. But we knew. We all knew he would.
And Sami knew he would too.
There’s an awful resignation in how he puts his hands on the ropes and waits, not even turning back to look as Kevin rounds on Daniel, knowing that everything has fallen apart and nothing but ruin awaits them now. There’s nothing he can do but join in the assault, even though it breaks his soul to harm Daniel Bryan—the very embodiment of the wrestling that he loves, that he loved, so much. Their beatdown of Daniel is visually similar to their beatdown of Shane–the same Helluva kick, the same powerbomb–but nothing is funny or enjoyable this time. Where Shane made dying-whale noises and turned purple, Daniel goes still and silent, struggling quietly to breathe, and our hearts break, just as we can see Kevin and Sami’s hearts break. The anguish in Sami’s expression is that of a man who knows now that he is on the wrong side of the immutable, inexorably fair laws of wrestling that Daniel stands for, that he has in fact—horrifically, pitiably—become part of the warped, unfair system that Shane created. 
Oh, he’ll rally, because human beings always do; he’ll decide that Daniel has been co-opted by Shane (and he may well have a point there); he’ll force himself to be angry again. But during the beatdown his expression is that of a man in mortal pain, a man who sees that all of his noblest impulses have somehow become warped into this perversion of Justice that ends with Daniel Bryan, on his night of triumph, lying broken on the floor at their hands.
For six long months, for reasons admirable or not, Shane, Sami, and Kevin ripped and tore at Wrestling Law. They’ve created a world in chaos, where nothing can be relied on. And now–shockingly, unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue–Daniel Bryan has announced he’s able to wrestle again and he intends to make sure Sami and Kevin get what they deserve. It’s as if the Greek Chorus has decided it’s had enough of sitting on the sidelines, and has thrown off its toga to declare that it is going to kick your ass at WrestleMania.
As events in a tragedy move to their inescapable end, there is nothing left for the hero to do but rage at the world, at fate, at the cruel events that brought them to this pass. “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” Lear howls at the uncaring forces of nature. “Then I defy you, stars!” Romeo cries, shaking his fist at the heavens. Sami sees the forces arrayed against him—sees Daniel Bryan, the avatar of what’s right, embrace Shane McMahon, who has driven Sami step by horrible step into becoming his mirror image—and surely his heart breaks. There’s nothing left but to rage and rant and threaten, filled with righteous empty fury, and defy all the stars against him.
“The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.” —W. Somerset Maugham
So how is the story going to end? Who is going to win? What does it all mean? Damned if I know; I don’t think I have ever even predicted the outcome of a single match correctly, much less a feud this complex. It’s possible there will be no real resolution, that they’ll once again kick the can down the road. But I can give you four possible outcomes and what they mean for this story, this long, agonizing, intricate story that was made to welcome Daniel Bryan back to wrestling, like a king returning from exile. All of them revolve around the fact that the conflict in this match is not just between two sets of people, but between two different ethical systems: one the moral laws of wrestling, where fairness and balance eventually win out; the other Shane’s system of vendetta, where wealth and power justify unfairness and might makes right. Sami and Kevin have pitted themselves willingly against Shane’s corrupt system; they’ve pitted themselves reluctantly against Wrestling Law in the form of Daniel Bryan, its high priest. Now, for different reasons, they are both united against them. Shane wants total, final vengeance; Daniel wants closure and the justice that Sami always claimed to value.
So the outcomes hinge on two conflicts: the physical (who wins the match, Kevin & Sami or Shane & Daniel) and the more-important moral (which ethical system the narrative favors, Shane’s or Daniel’s).
The bleakest possible outcome is the one in which Sami wins in such a way that it’s an affirmation of Shane’s warped system. Maybe he and Kevin brutally beat down Daniel past his defeat. Or maybe Sami cynically betrays Kevin to side with Shane and keep his job somehow. Sami’s downfall would be complete then; he will have accepted that indeed, wrestling is nothing but a pointless, endless cycle of unfairness and cruelty, and all that is left is to embrace it and revel in it.
Another bleak outcome is that Sami loses in a way that props up Shane’s system, where he’s humiliated and shamed beyond simply losing. Maybe Kevin abandons and attacks him; or Daniel watches, complicit, as Shane cheats to destroy them. Here Sami would be right that Daniel had become just a puppet for Shane’s agenda, that the laws of wrestling have become nothing but an empty symbol plastered over a fundamental unfairness.
The most traditionally tragic outcome is the one where Sami loses in a way that affirms the laws of wrestling. This would be a loss that is fundamentally fair, a loss in which the hero has a realization, not just that he deserves to lose, but that his loss represents the restoration of order to the wrestling world. If they lose fairly, if they suffer as much as they deserve to but no more (oh alarmingly vague concept), then the scales may finally be balanced and the moral physics of wrestling satisfied. This would be a sad ending for those of us who love Sami, but a fair one. Cathartic. And if it can restore Sami’s faith that wrestling isn’t broken, even by just a flicker, there could be some hope there as well.
Finally, there is a chance of an outcome that isn’t tragic for Sami at all, that shifts the mode into that of Romance (not a love story, except in the sense that it’s a love story about wrestling). This would be an outcome where Sami and Kevin win, but in addition, and more importantly, Shane’s corrupt system is exposed and rejected by Daniel; an ending where Sami’s faith in fairness and justice in wrestling is somehow renewed.
Is it possible to snatch any hope at all from the jaws of this tragedy? Maybe not. There doesn’t seem to be much chance for anything beyond defeat and despair for Sami and Kevin at this point. I don’t even know if it’s foolish to wish for it, but I do know this: if anyone could tell a complex, intricate tragedy that culminated with a match that somehow ended with the restoration of order and even a glimmer of hope, it would be these specific wrestlers.
“Tragedy is a paradoxical combination of a fearful sense of rightness (the hero must fall) and a pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls).”
So that’s the story. Maybe. It’s possible I’m constructing a narrative out of a random pile of popsicle sticks and pre-chewed bubble gum; it’s possible none of this was intended, that none of this was deliberate. But in my heart I think there’s something there, something satisfying and painful, tragic and good all at once. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, or haphazard, or a mistake.
I think it’s their story.
I think it’s a story that they’ve been telling for six—seven—maybe eight months now. And it’s a story that has had such joy, such overwhelming joy running underneath the despair and chaos for all those months, that I find it hard to believe it can end in nothing but bleakness and nihilism. Surely Daniel’s triumphant return will mean more than a mere check in the win column. Surely it must mean a victory for hope as well—the hope that things can be balanced, that the cycle of vengeance can come to an end.
So let me tell you a story—no, I’m sorry, I can only tell you the beginning and the middle, because it’s not my story to finish. It’s a story like a myth or a legend, a story about a knight who was pure and true of heart, who served the law of the land faithfully until the day he had a vision of the corruption at the heart of its prince. He saved his greatest enemy from the prince, and together they fought him as he became a tyrant. The knight’s cause was righteous, yet in the end he became a mirror of the injustice he hated. And their struggles blighted the land he had once loved, and brought ruin to all, until at last they awoke the Dragon, keeper of the true law and the wild magic at the roots of the world, the one with the power to destroy and to remake.
That’s where they are; that’s where they’ve brought us. Now, filled with fear and pity, despair and hope, we wait for them to bring the story to its end.
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