[Event] A Dark Prophesized

[Callistus 963]

 

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“There, within the sky’s bassinet, by the heavens strewn amongst countless stars, there resteth the sun; greater thing, a golden pendant, hurling beads of light. Afore it sat the hideous moon, an ugly conjury of hell and witchcraft, deceiving the bent light of faith. The men of Earth had thus, in fright, screamed their woes unto the ears of the deaf, their eyes grown naught and blind, and their breed born accursed; children burnt at the hest of the canonist stake, to be cleansed and berid of sin. It was thence a wretched thing men had feared; for light was sacred, but was also the accomplice of dark; spun hither together and consorting amongst one another; in a fiery hell, light and dark was bound in forbidden duality; light was the absence of dark, and the dark of light thereof.

 

Beckoned forth was the hand of God, wept upon several times; and thus in the same manner, twice and thrice over, that the moon may be dislodged; and in its stain may shine through the dead spirit of Adrammelech, and the lost light of God.

 

But if the aid of God were not conjured, although greatly pled, and limp were his right Hand to the pleas sung without response, may the sun thereby be devoured; and in its wane; dark shall reign.”

 

– An old folktale, origins unknown

 

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“I fear no omen. But that night... that cursed night.”

 

The sun had risen far ahead of time, its fiery rays storming the vast variegations of warring cities in the North and South. Cast beneath its core unto Earth was an undulating darkness, the likes of which you would read within the lines of Canonical Chapters; overarching shadows born only in the dearth of light, and if the legends were true, in the prevalence of sin and iniquity. In the tongue of the Velianese, the flexion dialect, folk thought it the omen of darkening prospect; ékleipsis. And in the speech of common folk, the darkening of a heavenly body; thus similarly the eclipse. The mainlanders of men had taken to terribly fear this omen, ascribing to it a great deal of gullible phenoms and many an irrational superstition. To some, it signified the Ire of God, the imminence of a time of trial and suffering.

 

Of Mankind, and of many churches, there rung choirs of prayers that echoed strongly within the sacred halls and passes, vain cries rent out into the barren streets beneath that unpropitious daylight; a hymn sung only to ghosts, to bleak air.

For God, as it seemed, was not pleased, and therefore would not hearken or lend ear to their imperious speech.

 

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The war-torn wheatfields rustled weakly beneath the wind, great oaken trees stirred to their root; whether by hellish miracle or god-sent curse, cold came to reign at the sheer height of day.
 

Such and so would steel unfurl from fallen scabbards, and in the midst of fog would rise an unseen terror, shrieking in emptiness, begging to be heard. Begotten by sorceries of old, shaken by some black speech, the buried stood in their graveyards and trailed the foolish Man without heart; blood and misery bound to unwind.

 

Such monstrosities dabbled in the quiet, feasting on the flesh of martyrs and the injured within fields of blood.

 

The sun turned and she wept, and in her absence malady ensued; For men had forgotten her, and the last of her vows, once forsworn, are now broken.

 

”Oh, thou who had angered the Sun, by what blasphemy do you plead your misdeed?’

 

[Axelu 3691]

The aged dowager princess, known now as Joanna Amalie, sets her eyes on the fable with interest. With an amused chortle upon reading it, the woman continues on her stroll.