755 CC Apr 9th

I feel like a hermit or prophet of old. My desert is the fallow fields and pasture hills where no sheep, pig, or cattle roams. All around me are trees barren save for unpopped buds. Even the apple orchard is like bare kindling raised to the sky, branches like a troll’s antlers staked to the ground one after another. The rain has left the ground muddy and spotted with seeping pools.

Requests for help have flown in every direction but no one has answered the call save some children daring each other to steal a look at the darkened chapel hall. They did not even speak with me, scurrying from my sight like scolded school children.

I am alone in the abbey save for perhaps a dozen pigs. Even they seem ready to bolt and flee the comfort of their home. Perhaps they will turn feral, will grow in size and hair and tusk and hoof. Perhaps they will gorge on roots then turn their minds to carcasses and farmer fields. It would be the way of a grendel and just such a cursed fate as the abbey is doomed under.

The engineer doesn’t even have pity for me. He has watched these past few days with a sly grin. He treats it like he’s watching a circus and that at some point all the corpses will stand up and take a bow. That their blood will be revealed as nothing more than stripes of red silk strewn about the stage. Never a word from his lips would break this fake illusion. He plays his part but he grins while he does so.

He promised to bring Leomund back. The northman has gone missing, I think when he heard that the prince stole money for the bounty. I pray that he returns and fells the beast but what right do I have to impose on a foreigner like that? He is not even of my faith. He never claimed to be a pilgrim or a student of letters. He always took his food after laboring for his keep and not a word of complaint. Money has drawn him away and I cannot find it in myself to blame him. Even King Haelfbear did not fight the troll of legends by himself.

At least now, in the privacy of my journal, I can say that I am glad that engineer has gone. How did a man with skin nearly the color of dirt become a royal engineer of Vassermark? It is preposterous. He belongs in Giordana. And given his age, he practically belongs to the reign of the yellow king. A disgusting butchery of innocents! Even his eyes are black. It is hard to see, as he never brings his face close. Even when he smiles it is a sneer that draws his lids close together but I have seen it. He has the eyes of a demon.

…

What a fleeting hatred that was. It flared within my chest and died as quickly. My heart is but cinders and ash, cold and forgotten. He is old, but the yellow king was very long ago. He is smart too, enough to trounce me in every variation of trireme both of us knew. Of course nothing could make him flourish in Giordana. A city like Hearths Bay would be necessary for him to nurture his gifts.

He is gone from the abbey now and I shan't see him again. The least I can do is meditate on myself. Soon I will meet the final shepherd and she will take me into her fleeting embrace. I will have to answer to myself and I don’t have much time before then. I will want a proper answer from myself so I should see to getting it.

Maybe some hero will arrive and free the abbey from the troll, but such a miracle may be beyond hope. I will stand vigil this night and the next, alone with myself and awaiting the birth of a demon.

Should I die and this journal be found, I suppose I should write what I know of the relic. Father Marcuese called it the Crown of Ather and said it contained the potential of protection. It clashes with the mind of any who wishes harm upon the wearer and can force back fatal blows. It has warded the abbey for centuries and grown weak in power but not in shape. That is the purpose of the sacrifices, to restore its magic. Should a man wear it upon his brow, it would be nearly impossible to slay him in combat, but one would have to break it off the corpse of an angel and such blasphemy would never be permitted. I am afraid a troll would have no such hesitation, but I think a troll will struggle to wear the crown. That is where the only weakness might lay.

How Ather perished with it upon his head I do not know.

***

My hand trembles as I write this further. Perhaps I have waded through the veil of the world and into the dream lands where idea manifests and the soul burns. This paper is real. These words are truth. If nothing else in the world can be held certain, I must focus on what I know.

Cogito, ergo sum.

The words exist. They are thought given body and they persist upon the page in my hand, not shifting and squirming but along rigid lines. They continue to match my memory with neither changing. There is no disease, madness, or demon twisting them unless it is so dextrous that I have no hope of ever finding the light again.

Tonight, amid my vigil, I drank with an angel.

Delirious with sorrow and yet standing upon my feet in the mud so that I could not sleep, the black bird of death perched upon the flagstone fence across from me. More than a shadow upon the walls of the world, I felt the wind of his wings. I heard the scrape of stone beneath claw. When his head twitched and twisted, I heard the sliding of his silken feathers.

He asked of me why I stayed.

Why did I stay outside an empty set of buildings? When everyone else had died or fled and given up hope. No, I shouldn’t say they all gave up hope. Perhaps some have gone to find help and plan to return. In the presence of the divine beast, I held my tongue until I knew I could speak the truth, and I told him, “Because it is my duty.”

The angel complimented me on my faith, but asked why I gave it to a dead god.

I had to remember that he was born of Shepherd, of the goddess of death and he an usher, a winged psychopomp from living to new life. Perhaps my choice to serve in the name of Helios was merely one of circumstance. It was the simple solution. It was his teachings that gave shape to the many central kingdoms, the people therein, the place I was born to and call home. It is my preference. But there is also a truth to the teachings and his death to give salvation to mankind is manifest proof of the truth.

These teachings I swore myself to are not good because Helios spoke them, Helios spoke them because they are good. All that the abbey does, to give structure to life, to preserve knowledge and pass on gifts to the future is itself an act of worship. I among many others have chosen to sacrifice our labor to that which is good and it would be a miserly thing indeed to shrink back at the last moment. I gave myself to the faith and the faith gave me responsibility, purpose, and duty. These are gifts passed on, not given back.

Only, I have no one to pass them on to, and soon there will be an abbey no more.

The angel looked me over and commanded that I pass them over to him.

I refused the angel, for they are the duties of man.

So he said to pass on the teachings, and that I could do.

For a moment, I gave the vigil over to the great bird and I moved my numb feet through the mud. I shuffled back to the dormitory and to the library where the only remaining candles stood. I lit one and took it, along with my personal copy of the good book and a bottle of holy wine.

Never would I have imagined performing the ritual of transmogrification for an angel, but this night I did just that. The prayers, the cup pouring, the invocations, all of it. Normally, the ritual takes only a sip of wine, but what I splashed into a bowl fit for the bird’s beak was much more than a sip. I found my voice hoarse afterward and my will weak. Sitting upon the opposite fence, I drank not for the ritual but for myself. The holy wine seemed stronger than any distillation. It burned through my blood and opened my mind.

The angel made a chuckling remark about irgot before we began a back and forth questioning. He pushed me on my faith, on my duties and actions and he told me of the past. Centuries of life at the head of a temple far to the south, now destroyed, but he did not despair. He spoke of the temple, the sculptures, mosaics, murals, and feasts. Through his words the memory blossomed within me as though I could dream another’s dream, could walk where he had walked. I heard the bardic tunes of deathly remorse and I tasted the fiery meals given to children as they became adults–a burst of pain to delight the tongue with all the fierceness life had to offer.

When the bottle of wine ran dry, the southern dream came to an end. Dawn warmed the sky to the east and yet my body did not yet need rest. The battle of fatigue I had expected did not occur and I was able to look around at the empty abbey and see that no knights were marching to my rescue nor had the troll left the chapel.

I must have made some certain remark about it, for the angel asked how I knew.

“The blood. I can sense the blood still in there. Last night there were too many puddles. It confused my senses, but time has whisked the water away. The mud is drying. It is as thought someone had stabbed the earth the abbey sat upon and it was bleeding out around me. In time, it was all to clear to my stigmata the hand that dealt the blow.”

My ability intrigued the angel. “A unique power indeed,” he said, but he did not go so far as to think it divine providence. I was, afterall, a priest of a dead god. Happenstance brought me here, not the hand of fate.

There was something very strange that I could not quite put into words, not before the angel took flight and vanished through the twilight. I wonder what he would have said but he is gone now. I can only put the thought to paper and hold it dear. It is a sense that births a question. I might ask the heavens but I am the one who will have to divine the answer.

Why does the grendel, a beast thrice as tall as myself, have no more blood than a man?