The Black Sheriff's Threats

"You cannot kill the Monks!" a voice shrilled bitingly.

"No, but I can castrate the bastards! I assure you it would be doing the Holy Church a service increasing their virtue..." the Black Sheriff sneered, and then spat, pacing around the twelve that were lying face down on the ground in front of his men.

The figures were motionless, helpless in submission, with their hoods over their heads and long brown robes, and just ankles and sandals bared.

"This Order harms no one Sir" the knight persisted bravely in his dangerous protest.

"Perhaps. Yet they contrive against me all the same - with their insolence. They endeavor to heal the foe we strike down - what madness compels them to nurture our enemy? It is contrary to law, and they needs be punished for their fickle humors."

Sweat drinkled down his neck, as the heat of the day had set upon them. Their tunics were weighing heavy, as none had slept and plainly his men had become weary.

"I will give them but one day to produce the traitor Robin or I will cut them all" he then added to pepper his threat: "Their hymns will be sung all the sweeter."

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series

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

A Ghostly Ferment

“We must call in the Priest – he will know what to do.”

“What of Kybosh?”

“No, it is never any good to add calamity upon calamity - we need an expert in quelling this turmoil. I will find him and bring him here.”

Earlier that day Puck had met with the realtor and secured a winning price for Stanhope - its invisible householders were pleased. They had gathered together to celebrate the residence when the moors had started to froth over with a ghostly ferment.

Very soon its mists had grown faces and a stronghold of four hundred ghouls were howling at their windows.

Zombies are physical bodies who manifest without souls, and ghosts are astral remnants that live on without inhabiting souls - shells of former men recanting their past woes.

These fellows had been aroused from their rest and their carryon was overbearing. They even brought with them an odour most foul.

Tonight's party had fallen short.

"How about I'll go and get the Priest and you look after what is happening here?" offered Nervina who was chilled by their presence; for there were sides to humanity he could not stomach well.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series

Stanhope Manor

Thrice the bell sounded to an empty corridor. The figure at the door had departed, flicking the latch, the gate snappily clacked shut, and the house wheezed an ethereal sigh, much relieved.

For a decade Stanhope Manor had sat empty with only the Lady Marthorn and her borders in residence; who preferred the mansion to be vacant - for the commotion of mortals gave them all a terrible brain fag: which was a fatigue from the constant interruption to their creative sensitivities....

Puck made his commute from the forest to the town house that he and Marley shared, keeping a watchful eye, all the while on Stanhope, protecting its ghosts and the wealth of mineral that lay tucked beneath it.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series

Diving Down out of a Cosmic Sky

There are faerie lights in Faerie - not the tiny paper lanterns that you might see strung up high upon a tree, and not the fat neon fireflies that sprinkle the forests at night - no, these lights are actually the beings themselves, visible as just a pin-point of light, like stars on the sky, the etheric beings grace our world with fleeting sparks of brilliant radiance.

They say for every problem there is a solution, and that grey wolves have white beards; marshmallows taste better toasted; and, once a queen, you are always a queen until death. Sifting through such wisdoms is a pastime of the disenchanted, for they have lost their own secret knowledge and seek to find it by the light of another's insights.

The air was cool and its mists were fresh.

While the lost souls locked in the interior of Hell sat picking at their scabs, the newborns were jettisoned fast into the world, diving down out of a cosmic sky, where centuries of future men awaited their time for a soft landing.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series

WAR was becoming a chore

Folk were beginning to tire of games and all around the earth members were falling away from spending their days and nights with Phoenix WAR 3.

In no time at all, the online log-ins had dropped to just a five percent attendance.

Some players had leapt into the more boutique and elite games, with political and socially happening forums, whilst the overall consciousness had just shifted and drifted away. The viral temperature was deathly cold.

Reality had become so strong, they had said, that WAR was becoming a chore.

Some thought that the glamour had dissolved because people only wanted something which is new - and after a seven year success it had simply tired and retired out of fashion.

There were, added to these considerations, the subliminal add-ons the Master Kybosh had inserted: attaching olfactory and tactile sublimates to the usual hypnotic flashes, which deceptively ran throughout the high points of engagement. Players were now smelling sulphurous eggs, and spray of cat, with a whiff of salami. He also produced pins and needles in their feet and fingers; jammed consoles and wiped their scores.

Pretty soon the youth migrated leaving only the infirm to continue playing against themselves.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series

Puck was not purely of Fey Heritage

Although Elvish folk have come from the old world, there is always a particle of the future that they carry illumined brightly within their quick minds that is gifted with foresight, inspiring them with an acute sense of a world just about to happen.

Technically they are not capable of, or ever meant to actually, interfere with the destinies of Men - cross paths they might, but the two streams of evolution are very distinct and separate.

But it so happened that Puck was not purely of Fey heritage, for his lineage's blood was also human, and this gave him an inherited longing for involvement in their kind as well as for those of the vale.

Apart from that fact, he also had the inclination towards a good story and the epic that is Mankind surpassed the seeming frivolity of the etheric world.

And, as a tsunamic tide, the conduct of men washes over the Faerie realm in stormy repercussion - how then could he merely await its advance, to ride yet one more deathless death?

The stories of his famed debauchery had been fabricated over time - all kinds of mischief and gossip made it difficult as historical record to put right.

Puck had loved, and he had overlooked the laws of the day when it was necessary, but he was always true to Humanity with an equal heart, through and through.

-Gabriel Brunsdon, Puck in Hell, Azlander Series