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Authors: Tom Piccirilli
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already shown you the way and the truth."
"We make our own truth. That's why you're so sick." I scrawled fire before Gawain's face and said, "You can come along if you want, Gawain." He looked at me as if I were an even bigger fool than my father. Thummim waved to my second self, black tears dribbling down her coarse face, but that mouth still tilted into a knowing smile.
Jebediah leaned heavily against Danielle's tomb and spun away, dismissing me without even a gesture. "In six weeks, then."
I left the tombs and walked to the northeast of the covenstead, working through the thickets on a downhill grade past the pine and sage as my father stumbled along behind me. I grabbed a handful of snow and tried to wash his face, only to realize that the black-and-white harlequin paint was actually a mystical tattoo. It would take me a long time to get rid of it, if I could at all. We stared at each other and he leered and made nipping motions.
Deep in the woods I finally ran out of steam, dropped to my knees, and bawled like a baby. I kept wishing my father were here to comfort me as the fool clicked his heels and tittered. He'd once tried to save me, and for his failure this was his reward. I wasn't certain if I'd be able to steal what remained of his life, especially now in the midst of so much killing and resurrection.
He broke for the brush laughing and kept going on farther into the forest. I ran after him for a time and eventually allowed him to go on alone. Perhaps he'd be more free this way, untied from both me and Jebediah.
Snow burned with the opening light of dawn as I fought through the heavy brush and broke onto the path leading toward the church.
I wouldn't be back.
I wouldn't.
Self yawned and said, So what are we going to do in the meantime?
Part Two
Mount of the Oath
Chapter Six
C liffs rose sheeted in ice that glared red as the dust of Masada.
At the top of the mount stood a place of massive triumphs and torments, where blood on the rock never faded. Culled from fervor and faith, MountArmon ascends snowcapped and glinting in the coming dusk, hard and undying as the martyr's soul. There are holes in history that can't be filled, eons occasionally still muttering, and gaps into which the restless can be drawn or pushed, straining empty-handed toward ritual and the hope of redemption.
Magee Wails is only made an island by the gorges surrounding the mount and the forked river that converges into JamesLake a quarter mile below the towers of the monastery. Those who dwell there are the damned but perhaps not the doomed. This river has baptized ten thousand, and drowned ten thousand more. Within memory there have been hurricane seasons when hordes of escaping rats rode the swollen corpses downstream, as they did the early Christians in the sewers of Rome.
The first Christian hermits lived on the shores of the Red Sea. They soon joined with the Therapeutae pagan ascetics and consequently moved into upper Egypt to avoid Roman persecution in the third century. Pachomius and Anthony Basilica were the first to be called monks, and their lessons are written in the bronze door friezes and bas-reliefs that surround the monastery's chapel.
Even from the river's far bank the gleaming honey-colored stone and wood of the service buildings can be seen like flashing threads of silver, grouped around a cloister south of the church.
Silhouetted against the moon, the steeples, turrets, and angled spires of the abbey appeared to be basilisks appealing to heaven in the falling snow. Empty branches of ash-gray trees partially obscured the large peaked roofs. Sheep were still kept, but more for the symbolism of lambs and shepherd than for any practical need. Bleats poured down the precipice like hymns gone astray.
The mount is a city unto itself where few have been turned away but even fewer saved. Penitents came from a hundred nations carrying beliefs that sporadically conflicted with one another. Though the shadow of Babel
"We make our own truth. That's why you're so sick." I scrawled fire before Gawain's face and said, "You can come along if you want, Gawain." He looked at me as if I were an even bigger fool than my father. Thummim waved to my second self, black tears dribbling down her coarse face, but that mouth still tilted into a knowing smile.
Jebediah leaned heavily against Danielle's tomb and spun away, dismissing me without even a gesture. "In six weeks, then."
I left the tombs and walked to the northeast of the covenstead, working through the thickets on a downhill grade past the pine and sage as my father stumbled along behind me. I grabbed a handful of snow and tried to wash his face, only to realize that the black-and-white harlequin paint was actually a mystical tattoo. It would take me a long time to get rid of it, if I could at all. We stared at each other and he leered and made nipping motions.
Deep in the woods I finally ran out of steam, dropped to my knees, and bawled like a baby. I kept wishing my father were here to comfort me as the fool clicked his heels and tittered. He'd once tried to save me, and for his failure this was his reward. I wasn't certain if I'd be able to steal what remained of his life, especially now in the midst of so much killing and resurrection.
He broke for the brush laughing and kept going on farther into the forest. I ran after him for a time and eventually allowed him to go on alone. Perhaps he'd be more free this way, untied from both me and Jebediah.
Snow burned with the opening light of dawn as I fought through the heavy brush and broke onto the path leading toward the church.
I wouldn't be back.
I wouldn't.
Self yawned and said, So what are we going to do in the meantime?
Part Two
Mount of the Oath
Chapter Six
C liffs rose sheeted in ice that glared red as the dust of Masada.
At the top of the mount stood a place of massive triumphs and torments, where blood on the rock never faded. Culled from fervor and faith, MountArmon ascends snowcapped and glinting in the coming dusk, hard and undying as the martyr's soul. There are holes in history that can't be filled, eons occasionally still muttering, and gaps into which the restless can be drawn or pushed, straining empty-handed toward ritual and the hope of redemption.
Magee Wails is only made an island by the gorges surrounding the mount and the forked river that converges into JamesLake a quarter mile below the towers of the monastery. Those who dwell there are the damned but perhaps not the doomed. This river has baptized ten thousand, and drowned ten thousand more. Within memory there have been hurricane seasons when hordes of escaping rats rode the swollen corpses downstream, as they did the early Christians in the sewers of Rome.
The first Christian hermits lived on the shores of the Red Sea. They soon joined with the Therapeutae pagan ascetics and consequently moved into upper Egypt to avoid Roman persecution in the third century. Pachomius and Anthony Basilica were the first to be called monks, and their lessons are written in the bronze door friezes and bas-reliefs that surround the monastery's chapel.
Even from the river's far bank the gleaming honey-colored stone and wood of the service buildings can be seen like flashing threads of silver, grouped around a cloister south of the church.
Silhouetted against the moon, the steeples, turrets, and angled spires of the abbey appeared to be basilisks appealing to heaven in the falling snow. Empty branches of ash-gray trees partially obscured the large peaked roofs. Sheep were still kept, but more for the symbolism of lambs and shepherd than for any practical need. Bleats poured down the precipice like hymns gone astray.
The mount is a city unto itself where few have been turned away but even fewer saved. Penitents came from a hundred nations carrying beliefs that sporadically conflicted with one another. Though the shadow of Babel
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