The End - Episode 1: The Beginning

Chapter 4: Ruminations and Corvus the Mage

After the funeral he stayed in the room for three days. They brought him food and drink, but he only took water. He would even leave the water to sit for hours after they brought it, only drinking it when it was lukewarm and dissatisfying. He prayed some, but every time he did felt as if a dark cloud was hanging over him. It was as if God was blocked from him, or he from God, he couldn't be sure which. So he stared out the window. He saw the scenes of horror, the comings and goings. What horrified him before had become instantly banal after that event. He began to see them not as images of some great horror emerging from his nightmares, but instead in the same light as those who massacred the elders.

They were clowns. Each and every one of them. He could see how stupid they were being. He could see their sin, yes, but beyond what he had been told to avoid in the pews he saw how these people were reaching inside themselves and pulling things out just to feel the satisfaction and with no regard for what was to happen next. He thought to himself that if Hell itself were this comical in its darkness and horror, then it should somehow be worse. And, he supposed, it would be every bit this perversely comical and still yet worse. For it was Hell. When he had been told about Hell growing up, he had always pictured it as if there were some order and dignity in it. For everywhere he looked there had been order and dignity. Not to say that people always lived in accordance with it, but they did indeed live in its shadow. But this scene before him? It was a pantomime.

He could see what was wrong with them so clearly, and felt as if he could go up to them and shout them into fixing themselves. He wanted to show them how stupid they were being, that if only they would do this differently or look at that differently it would all be better. He could see the mother who never wanted to be a mother. He could see the baker who should have been a soldier. He could see the child who should have been playing. The children especially he wanted to simply hit upside the head, as he had been hit, and to give only a vague reminder, for so often that was all that children needed to find their own answers. Because children did not need to be told in the same way as adults.

He was a man now, he mused. His father was dead, the elders were dead, even the blacksmith who, for all his vulgarity at least repeated things to him that were true. The expression on his face, fixed there upon his moment of departure, was that of shock and dismay. It were as if he had seen something beyond the death itself, and it was a horrid thing indeed. Eckfar thought the man must have glimpsed the fires of Hell in the moment before he went to burn in them. But Irma, proud Irma, strong Irma, had the look of serenity and acceptance. He could see in it the shadow of self-reproach, as if what she had seen made her abandon the ridiculous things that she had clung to on the earth before she was transported Heaven's way. He remembered her firm stand, standing perhaps not for Christ Himself as the martyrs did, but still remaining steadfast in defense of the good. How the blacksmith would have shrunk had he been in her place as leader. But not this woman, this formidable woman.

The bodies had needed to be tended rapidly. The priest had informed Eckfar that it was impossible to transport the bodies home because nobody knew how properly to prepare them for travel. Therefore, the funeral would need to be held in that horrid town and quickly. He had been the only one to attend the funeral mass, though there had been a donation by the judge's secretary for the coffins, which had been hastily constructed. The priest was a dour man who seemed even less than those in Daphnir to care for the mysteries of the faith. Eckfar couldn't even be sure that the words he intoned in Latin were the correct ones, and he had no confidence that they were. He could have no confidence in anybody around him, for all had abandoned him to this tragedy, for reasons he neither knew nor cared.

He had met two men on this trip who he felt he could truly look up to, and yet both were as distant from him as the sun and moon. How was he to know them? To follow them? To learn from them? He had nobody to learn from, and yet still there was so much to learn. He felt this gap in his knowledge and awareness palpably, as if it were a death wound. He feared he would drown in it. He knew he could do it: drown in his own blood.