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Friday, 8 February 2019

The Humble Monk



Outside blood dripped everywhere, it shot and spurt in orbic globs, stickily clinging to the spectres that caught their sprays, patterning the outside walls with ghoulish graffiti, where lines dripped into pictures, in monochrome records of how the dead had fallen.

Once these were nearly all young and robust men. They had been sons of villagers, children of Barons, shouldered together, in fighting lines of mindless formation. Censored, disengaged, now angry men, whose ghost wives and children now stood beside them.

Frantic and accusing they stared out from sightless eyes, with mouths slung open, drooling witless words, stumbling steps from an atrophied and necrotic flesh.

"Oh the Priest is like the cleaner” he said knowingly - I imagine he will take the dark forces, bag them all up and commit them to some out-of-the-way place - he is that powerful."

***

They had expected an Archbishop but this fellow was but a monk.

They had anticipated royal purple robes, with embroidery and fancy work, and a golden cross upon the breast, but this humble Monk wore none.

He stoutly stood; pale faced and solemn - looking so deeply concerned, whilst everyone who was counting on him fell to dismay.


He greeted the group warmly and then said "Kneel brothers".

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series

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