《Silvana: Queen of the Witches》Prologue - Allhallows

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In 1646, during the bleakest days of the English Civil War, as the kingdom was torn asunder in the bitter conflict of the Royalists and the Roundheads, and the countryside reeled from the deprivations of the conflict, one place remained, for a time, curiously pristine. It was a little village called Allhallows in the rural thickets of Cambridgeshire. You needn't trouble yourself to try to find it on a map, as it is no longer there.

While the surrounding towns languished and faltered, all sorts of folks, upended by the war, or by poverty, or just nagged by the elusive mystery of their life's purpose, found their way to the new settlement. People said it was a little paradise where every man was a brother, every woman a sister, and upon the earth on which it stood no lord could claim dominion save one.

The village founder was a man by the name of Benjamin Croke. Croke had been a cunning man, in particular a wandering dowser by trade. During his searchings he claimed to have had a vision from God, whom he said appeared in the grove just outside of the village and called upon him to establish a place on earth that should be alike heaven, where no one would be deprived their earthly desires, but would find fellowship and harmony among one another.

At the same time, conducting his great deeds of cruelty not two counties over, was Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, whose fervent zeal for putting sorcerers, or would-be sorcerers, to the stake was the stuff of legend. Word of Allhallows spread to his ears and Hopkins prepared an expedition that would investigate the nature of such a strange place on suspicion of witchcraft, or at the very least, surely a criminal deviation from the protocols of the church.

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Before Hopkins had even set on his way for Allhallows he received a letter from Ben Croke, who invited him as a guest to meet in the town, and to see for himself "the greatness of God's gifts formed of amity with nature and brotherhood among men."

We know from Hopkins' records that such a meeting did indeed take place between the two men. Though we do not know what happened, or what they spoke of, we do know what happened afterwords.

Hopkins ordered all residents of the town to be arrested and burned at the stake for 'high diablerie, the practice of necromancy, and for being in league and communion with Satan himself.'

At Ben Croke's brief and severe trial at the hands of the witchfinder's prosecution, two pieces of evidence were leveled against him, a book of spells called 'The True Grimoire', and a parchment on which he had drafted a contract to corrupt the innocent and perform blood sacrifice in exchange for earthly favor. The book and Croke himself were burned swiftly after the trial's guilty verdict, but the parchment of the pact was retained in the court's records- still bearing the infernal signature of the devils who had ruled over Allhallows.

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