by Tristan A. Gilmore – This story is unrelated to the Barbarian novel
People tend to watch me when I come near. I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve felt their eyes scraping along my shoulder blades so many times, it feels as though I’ve formed a callus.
At this point, it’s when they aren’t watching that I get nervous.
So as I walked past the pews of the church in the North Country, tracking mud up the aisle, and not a single person filling the chapel looked at me, well…
That’s never good.
“Father Gabrish?” I called out, my voice sharp and cold like the blade on my back. The patriarch standing at the front twitched in my direction, his outstretched hand frozen where it had been since the doors slammed open.
At least his eyes were on me now, even if they were watering.
“You are Father Gabrish, are you not?”
The man made a sound like a pair of dormice wrestling. That, in itself, wasn’t an answer, but as his eyes darted for the doors behind me, I knew. My sigh carried itself outside to stand in the rain.
“If you try anything, you know what I’ll be forced to do.”
A growl sounded from somewhere in the pews to my right. A real growl, like from an animal, not one of the grumbling old men who try for politics now that having grandchildren has made them feel important. Someone beside them attempted to hush it.
“You best walk yourself back out of our service, Conscript,” another voice, lost among the seating, muttered. A few more rattled off their agreement, echoing through the stone halls like spirits. My eyes were locked on Father Gabrish, although the water in his was receding, evaporating in the heat of a fire lighting behind them, fueled by the whispers.
“I cannot do that,” I replied softly.
The gathered mass roiled like a quiet tide, people shifting uncomfortably in their seats, and the father turned his torso slowly, squaring his shoulders against me, finally lowering his hand. I watched as the indecision left him, and I bowed my head in resignation as he spoke.
“You are interrupting us.”
The congregation added their approval with eager shouts.
“Leave. Now,” the father commanded.
“I cannot,” I said.
“You will.”
The words echoed beautifully, and I hated them for how they emboldened the people. Numerous growls reverberated, filling the air with defiance. Deepening. Solidifying.
I closed my eyes.
“I cannot falter,” I said, “for the Lord is my guide.”
Someone in the crowd laughed, but others, more sensibly, shuffled back across the pews.
“He leadeth me to the vile and the heinous, so that I might transcribe His justice upon their face, and bring His beauty to light,” my prayer continued, my eyes opening to see the patriarch at the front, watching me contemplatively. Another cackle joined the growling tide.
“I cannot look away, for the Lady is my sight,” I said, raising a hand, grasping the hilt of my sword tightly. The cackles ceased as the growling intensified. “Though she guards the Amber Pastures of the Garden, she has glimpsed me, and I her…”
The growling swelled, bestial voices joining in an ungodly choir. Intermittent yips and indignant rasps joined the sound of my pulse in my ears. The reek of musk felt smothering as I finished my prayer: “…And for her sake, I am Unforsaken.”
I withdrew my blade, and a keening howl sounded. The windows shook. All around me was the biting and menace of the Beast. Yet they stood at bay, and my eyes, so locked upon the pastor’s, seemed to hold him in a spell. He stared back, hate dimming his expression as his body trembled and all around us the people came to their feet, shaking, shouting, and writhing. Figures contorted in my peripheral vision, pressing up against the aisle in which I stood, as though eager to harm me, but blocked by unseen walls–their shared apprehension manifesting as a barrier.
“You have no right,” the pastor finally said, determined and fearful. “You come to our flock and demand communion, yet we seek nothing from you but our liberty!”
“Your contempt is noted,” I nodded. Our eyes locked, my face set, but my voice dropped low, tenderly petitioning over the bestial madness surrounding us. “Come with me. Do not wish this upon these people.”
“You offer nothing but condemnation,” Father Gabrish hissed, frowning in disgust.
“I offer freedom from further harm.”
A boy stepped from the pews to stand between us. He hardly reached my shoulder, and his clenched fists shook at his sides with barely controlled rage.
“YOU CAME HERE, YOU MONSTER!” he screamed. “WE DON’T HURT PEOPLE LIKE YOU DO!”
The crowds hushed, and I let the words slip away into the sudden stillness, save for the boy’s shivering frame. He couldn’t comprehend what was happening, or the power he then held to quiet the night, but I sipped from the silence, hoping the others would do the same as it overcame the rage of the crowd.
In my heart, I prayed that that stillness would speak sweetly to them. That they would hear it and weep and recognize all the other silences sitting as predators on the horizon. The silences that cannot be undone.
The ones I’d seen too many times.
Perhaps it was my experience that told me they weren’t hearing it. That the silence was not the breaking of a dawn, but the calm before a storm.
The storm I was damned to be.
Silence shattered.
The father cried out. The people howled. Contorting shapes of black hair and blood burst from the crowd, and I turned with the practiced flow of a dancer. All was movement. All was wind and sweat and blood and tears. It was a dance of perfect finality. It was the dance I had performed most days of my life, and despised.
One man grasped at my forearm, attempting to hold me as a wolf the size of a bear leapt for my neck. I pivoted to maintain my grounding, dodging beneath the beast as I felt its claws tangle in my cloak and tear across the leather back of my gambeson. My blade separated the hands of the man holding me, and, stepping again, my swinging blade cut upward, severing the spine of the lunged beast.
Two more surged for my legs, and I took a single step, continuing my spiraling form as I removed a limb and a snout.
Blood and sinew burst as the lycanthropes connected with consecrated silver and steel.
Thought fell away as I killed them. They believed they would be strong, given their numbers, but I was Blessed, and there is nothing a Conscript cannot do under their prayer.
And poor Father Gabrish watched, contempt, pride, and horror taking their turns with him.
The shaking boy charged me, still human. I knew then that he had not yet partaken of their sacrament. He was innocent.
I raised my foot and kicked him square in the chest, his eyes growing wide as the air burst from his lungs and he sailed backward, tumbling into the arms of Father Gabrish.
The massacre continued in a rush, my focus subsumed in form and function. Step. Strike. Step. Strike. Balance. Strike, strike, strike…
“ENOUGH!”
I heard the cry from the pastor, but continued my movements as the monsters continued to surge.
“ENOUGH!” he repeated. “NO MORE!”
The ordered chaos tumbled and fell, revealing the silence once again beneath it. No longer a silence of anticipation, but one marred by disaster. The tattered remains of the soul.
As the fatally wounded groaned and thrashed, the rest dragged themselves back and stepped away, looking between the father and myself. I stood straight, facing him as I recollected my breath. Father Gabrish’s eyes were no longer aflame, and the extinguishing tears slipped freely down his face as he wrestled back the angry boy, whispering pleas to the young man until he stilled.
The father stepped down into the aisle, hands extended to his sides in surrender. “I am sorry. I was wrong. This work of hatred must cease!”
A few voices tried to deny him, to console him, to inflame him, but they were drowned out by the swelling of collective tears as sobs broke out around us. I looked down to my sword and saw the gore streaked across me. Now was not the time to feel, though.
“I, too, am sorry,” I said, wiping my blade and resheathing it. “Truly, I am.”
“You could have come another night!”
It was the boy, standing behind the father. He spat at me. “You could have come for him anywhere else, and none of this would have happened!”
I furrowed my brow as a strange, sad smile twisted the boy’s face. “But I’m glad you came when you did,” he said, “because if our father had been taken in the night, I’d’ve been upset. But now, I will rebel, and I have a reason no one can take from me.” He gestured to a body pooled in blood, malformed somewhere between human and wolf. “Your god has forsaken us. All your talk of unity and purpose, but you’re the vilest ones. The most broken.”
I didn’t respond. It was not my place.
He was right, of course. If I had come for the father at any other function, under any other pretense, there would have been no struggle. No storm from which they would now have to rehabilitate.
Father Gabrish followed me out of the church, and as I closed the doors, I held the eyes of the boy. Eyes that had taken in the storm, to be shared later, and I wanted to shout for him to release it. I wanted to expound upon him the pain of carrying that storm, and the suffering it would cause. I wanted to heal him before he became like…
The doors closed, and my thoughts were swallowed up in the night and the rain.
The father said nothing as I beheaded him, accepting his fate, not as fair, but as right. I left him beside the doors, carefully covered in a white cloth, and I walked alone into the night.
~~~*~~~
I had always considered myself to be a ruthless individual. Not that I didn’t care for people, but that I had no problem with hurting someone if I felt it was the right thing to do. I was never haunted by my actions, as they were right. Fairness was not my consideration.
But something of that night stuck with me. Something of seeing the boy holding the storm and recognizing that I was the imparter. That I was responsible, a tool or not.
As I made the long journey home, the prayers I repeated felt sickly on my tongue. Not sickly weak, but fragile.
Like too-sweet sacrament.
Like immature wine.
Like blasphemy.
I found myself before large, double doors. They had emblazoned across them a set of workers’ tools, and a four pronged symbol of circumscribed crosses. I removed a key from my belt and unlocked them, shoving them open, hard. The heavy wood slammed against the stone walls and echoed vibrantly across the church. This church was empty, save for a dozen men at the front. Where an altar might rest, was a table, with twelve men in white robes sitting about it, partaking of a special sacrament. Their heads swiveled to face me as I strode resolutely down the aisle.
“Conscript, you return,” the most elderly of the men acknowledged, nodding.
“Early, in fact,” another added with some disdain before raising his voice to me. “Conscript, you are to wait outside until communion is complete. What urgency brings you to interrupt?”
I came to stand before the men, and paused. These were the Twelve, those to whom I had so fully committed myself for so long. They waited for my reply, and I held it for a long moment. The pregnant silence swelling, like a storm around an eye.
Finally, as some looked ready to raise their voices against me, I spoke.
“I cannot falter, for the Lord is my guide.” The words were heavy and full on my lips. “He leadeth me to the vile and the heinous, so that I might transcribe His justice upon their face, and bring His beauty to light.
The men shared a confused scowl, shifting to stare at me. “What is the meaning of this?” The eldest asked.
“I cannot look away, for the Lady is my sight,” I replied, emotion gripping my voice, as though for the first time, just as my hand gripped the hilt of my sword. “Though she guards the Amber Pastures of the Garden, she has glimpsed me, and I her…”
The men began to stand. Some hobbled away from their meal, tipping their seats back with a clatter. Some shouted, drowning out the rest of my prayer, and I heard their personal guard charging in from the side halls, having heard their shouts.
But over the din I still heard my own words, as perfect and clear as the dawning sun. A horizon I did not dread, for it was beautiful to me.
“And for her sake I am…
Unforsaken.”