Vitalis Hartsfeld

A MAN STANDS with his back to a kneeling god half his size enshrined and shrouded by broken thatch and splintered wood. His hands are red and a supplicant of this god in a mask of utter shock lies slain at his feet. Behind them water drips from above onto carven stone and the image of the pyre flame contorts on this god’s grey fingers and over a grey knee it turns and rights itself with the droplet’s passing. In the pale light of pre-dawn all else including the man inside the church is shadow. He watches the damp priests in their damp cloth drag a woman through the salt soak of the upturned soil where the harvest of this year and last and those of near a decade before were but old dreams muttered by cynical men. In this barren place her white cloth is rendered darkly and she calls to the veil of the copse that swaddles this shattered hamlet as if the dead gods of that dying place and their thousand young could hear her still. Her hands are broken at the wrists and the sickle she held to ward these wolven men of the cloth lay drowned in the marsh. Against her bonds she kicks and shrieks in hiccups like the throes of a dreaming dog as she is led by hair and fist to the crackle of the stake. The man before the image of the god turns and wraps a noose around the nape of Mitra. He wraps the cord around white knuckles and ruddy palms and he pulls. The stone whines in protest, then falls. The topple sounds the memory of the knell that had once dominated the hamlet. Stricken, the damp priests release their slaughter and turn their backs from the woman and the wood and in their fright the image of their forefathers emerge revenant from behind them, cudgels and nooses of their own in hand.

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BODIES HANG HIGH on the edge of the water in woods that were old and deep. No breeze runs through these stilted lands yet the limp legs sway as the forest heaves another sigh. At one time in the world there were wildernesses that no one owned and these were like them. Beneath, a marsh-dwellers vedette languishes at a crooked pier and watches a vast and narrow column of men as they come covered in ash and ghostly in the distance like a vaporous horde brought forth from some strange and unknowable continent. They are covered in the chattels of the lands they raid - in crocodile hide or boiled leather, in shawls and the stink of foreign viscera and a primordial lust for more of it. Together in their painted faces they embark the waiting boats. Among them sits the man supine with his back to the vessel’s bow. His knuckles are stained red. He looks across at the white sister whose purple hands are bound in splints stained by teary eyes. In her pain he sees the seed of fury familiar a thousand times over. It was no great prescience or vision; all the world knew a Hyborian enraged - theirs is the brood that has seen gods slain. And it had been a lesson the bones of the earth remember. His watch breaks with a blink when the vessel beneath them jostles to life and the low karve leaves the bank with a hiss of it’s hull against the water. Beside him the last of the damp priests thrashes against his bindings like a nemedian maniac bound for the maesters. He wants to tell them with glee that no monument or graveyard will mark their passing when the fires that struck the hamlet reach theirs.

GAUNTLY SHE GOES to a fey song rising. To her flock she calls in a long trill as gentle and unbroken as the pale gold that weaves tresses down her back. The faint clatter of cowbells and hoofs across the sunken meadow greet the tune in turn, echoing the rattle of the girl's beaded shawl and talismans of faith that decorate her pale robes. Gently does her trill rise. It goes above the stark pre-dawn air, up and across the craggy rise. Behind parapets of stone and timber and rust-toned wattle and daub the men and women work; felling, bending, shaping the wood with their artisan means. Together they toil to forget the shame of a livelihood at an end and they toil yet more to find small lasting pride in their living. In the distance the hammer of nails into flesh and bark is drowned by the rustle of the drying weald. A man lays prostrate before an altar, his red hands clasp above his head, the brow of his mask pressed against a kris that rests flat on the stone at its base. There are others crowding quietly among the walls, garbed in linens coloured outlandish and strange. They are singing a hymn. The man is praying. He is giving lifeblood to a tradition as old as his family – or older. In the habit of his primitive ancestors, his mask is a skull carved from a great breed of bipedal capra that no longer walks the world. On the face of the leafless wyrd tree that stretches and winds its branches into the featureless sky is pinned a creature branded in exile, hissing and kicking. He is naked, clad in nothing but his fear. The man at the altar rises and fetches the kris and holds it aloft in the air and he is like an icon of war to some old world forgotten by man. The hymning becomes chanting - becomes howling. Promises to the ancient ancestors are spoken among the fevered pitch that they will not bow to the hordes that follow in the wake of this dark minded priest. They promise to never let their children go. One woman’s cry undulates and the rest are silent and the man and the kris are one and he brings it to bear above the gut of the sacrificial lamb. No one hears his scream above the chanting.

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SEE THE MOUNTAIN and the hill following after hill as wave on wave the woods and orchards go. The fields of ripe corn and the meadows reach to the reed-beds by the river. It is seen all by the descendants of Bori. They stand there beside one another and their warlord and each hears the voice of the other in that old fey way. It is told that all these things - from the star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground at their feet - are but dreams and shadows. The shadows that hide the real world. It lies beyond the glamour and the pomp and beyond them all as if beyond a distant veil. They sing still as farmhand tools are turned to reap the lives of men who come to take their ways. They stand there before the Mitran horde and await the destruction of their ken. As their city burns and cries it is but a mote and ember of vision and sound from the vantage of cliffshades beyond. Beyond that the cliffshade is but a distant shadow to the rolling wave, and beyond that those dark tides roll on into the night and starless sky. It may all be nonsense-strange to a human who has seen no further than the crest of that first wave, but for he who has seen beyond it is different. He stood before such a wave and felt it crash upon his home. He was shipped like chattel to a far-off place where he could stand and defy the glory of a Kneeling God away from eyes that saw it as a sin. From his vessel that bore him hence he could say as he saw the shores of these exiled lands and that here lay the veil and he had to but lift it to see the great powers that sent the first ripple to the island of his birth. He told himself that he might one day return - but they are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there: their names are myth, legend, dust.