Despite his brave face and reassurances, Colm kept one hand tight on the hilt of his dagger.The furrow never left his heavy brow as they rode on towards the old quarter and the castle beyond.
The Inquisitor
YC 1189
With Alberon now a bastion of virtue, the time has come to advance the cause of mortal flourishing into the furthest west, into Parwys.A kingdom, reports tell, firmly in the grip of ignorance, superstition, and undeath.
I send Anakriarch Torin to you, with his entourage, to determine whether this kingdom might be gently guided into the fold or must be delivered by your sword.
From the Mouth of the Ecclesiarch to Templar Unwith, Commander of the Crusade in Alberon,YC1188
There were many corners of the world yet untouched by light.Kingdoms still bound up in the cobwebs of superstition and heathen belief, covered by the long shadows cast by the First Folk, where mortalkind had yet to shrug off the shackles of ancient power.It had been many years since Torin had last ventured into such darkness.The sickness that it engendered clung long after it had been burned away.Even in the heart of Tarebach, in the Iron Citadel, heterodoxy and heathen foolishness found its foothold.
To dig out a cancer from an otherwise healthy body was a different task than reversing the course of a blazing fever.Just so, the years he had spent keeping vigil in Tarebach, rooting out nascent heresies, preserving the health of the Church, had ill readied him for wading into such a kingdom as Parwys.A land dominated by druids whose borrowed, backward-looking sorcery was founded upon the leavings of the First Folk, where culture and belief found their roots in the early days after the Vanishing.A difference between finding a bit of gristle in a bite of meat and digging one’s teeth deep into a seam of fat and cartilage.
His mount, sensing his misgivings, canted to the side and tossed its head.Its hooves rang against the seamless white brick of the First Folk Road.Behind him, Sir Anwe grumbled about saddle sores.The clink and rattle of her armour as she shifted position stood out sharply against the autumnal stillness of that early morning.Quiet enough that Torin thought—however foolishly—that he could hear the creaking of Sir Orn’s spine as the youth stretched himself to his fullest height, two heads taller than Torin, to peer down the road.
Torin suppressed a shudder of disgust—and then a swell of shame—at the disproportion of Orn’s neck, extended to a length nearly equal to his forearm.The vertebrae became more pronounced as they stretched further apart.His head teetered like an apple skewered on the end of a lance.A sickening crime to twist the mortal body so.A corruption echoing down through time.
Orn’s bizarre morphology was an artifact of First Folk meddling in his distant ancestry.Regressive elements in the Church saw it as a corruption, but theirs was an excess of vigilance.The middle path of justice—the Iron Mean—never called for the punishment of a son for his father’s crimes.Certainly not punishment delivered thousands of years late to one whose ancestors had been the victims, not the perpetrators of the crime.
Still… one had to admit to a visceral, animal disgust.Bodies just weren’t supposed to be that way, as anyone with eyes could see.Not that Torin held it against Orn, of course.The Wars of Orthodoxy had been waged to settle that point centuries ago.
Yet there were still lineages of priesthood that retained vestiges of the heresies the Church had fought to expunge.Particularly among those who ministered to the hamlets and backwaters of Tarebach far from the vaulted halls of the Iron Citadel—such as the township where Torin had been born and lived until the fire of his conviction spurred him to take the holy orders of Beren, Agion of Fidelity.The first step on the long path of self-betterment and service to all mortalkind that had ultimately brought him here, to Parwys, where he strove to save a kingdom from itself.
‘There,’ Orn said, pointing down the road.His height and the power granted by his mastery of the virtue of honesty lent him the ability to peer over the edge of the horizon.Useful skills for a Knight of Stillness—an order who were, however distasteful the description, the spies of the Mortal Church.
‘Wait,’ Orn continued.‘Only a single rider.Wearing the gold and mauve livery of Afondir.’
‘No sign of the count himself?’Torin asked, masking his frustration.
Orn shook his head—a nauseating display.How one was supposed to grow past a natural disgust at the lingering evidence of the First Folk’s corruptions, Torin could not begin to guess.Other than by feeling bad about it, of course.Which didn’t seem to be working.
There was always room for growth, he reminded himself.For deeper understanding and embodiment of the virtues.So wrote Wari the Younger, the great pedagogue of the Church and founder of Torin’s order.
Anwe spat a curse.‘Then what have we been doing, waiting here since dawn?Doesn’t this count think we’re here to place him on the throne?And he can’t be arsed to show up himself?Bloody heathens.Sooner make a fucking chicken the next king than this bastard.’
‘Perhaps the Count of Afondir encountered some trouble on the road,’ Orn offered.
Anwe growled up at him.
‘Whatever the reason for his tardiness, we will have it from this messenger,’ Torin said.
It would be a paltry excuse.Little more than a thin facade over the count’s true intent in leaving them to wait—a power play to establish his own dominance over his templar guests.Torin had yet to meet the Count of Afondir, but had spoken at length with Templar Unwith about the man.Ambitious.Callous.Scheming.A vicious, power-hungry lord who had turned to the Church not from virtue or conviction, but only to wield it as a weapon against his own kingdom in a bid to usurp the throne.
Torin’s gorge rose at having to work with such a man—a disgust grounded in honour, unlike the turning of his stomach at the sight of Orn’s spine.Yet the virtue of industry demanded that he seize any opportunity, however unpleasant, that might lead mortalkind out of darkness.A darkness that had this kingdom deeply in its grip.
He recalled another of Wari the Younger’s aphorisms: ‘No mortal can be expected to attain perfection in an imperfect world.’The path of virtue demanded only striving, only the effort to be better and to make the world better.Even the loathsome had the potential to be good, if they could be guided onto that path.He meditated on this truth, and how it might apply to one such as Afondir—as well as to Orn’s hideous deformity—while he watched the messenger approach.
‘Sir Torin of Tarebach?’the messenger called out, reining in his exhausted stallion a dozen paces beyond Torin.
‘Indeed,’ Torin answered.
‘The Count of Afondir has been delayed,’ the messenger explained, maintaining an impressively haughty tone between deep breaths.‘It may be some hours before he is able to meet you.’
‘Bloody “delayed”?’Anwe snarled.‘Who does the bastard think he is, leaving us to wait on the road?What’s “delayed” him?’
The messenger turned up his nose and, somehow, further straightened in the saddle.‘A matter of utmost urgency to the county and the kingdom.He will meet you when he is able.’
