History According to Aegon Nightshade

Aegon Nightshade

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"Dreams of Darkness are but reflections of reality." -- Aegon

Prelude: Berlin -- December 21st, 2042

I had barely spoken the words and reality was rent asunder by a darkness older than creation. I felt humbled to be granted a momentary sight of the unknowable and limitless Abyss. It reaffirmed my dark faith and inflamed my need to fully understand the dark truth that served as the underpins of creation itself. Please understand, I am not a monster, I just understand that the Abyss existed before creation as we know it. It exists now and without question, it will exist when creation finally burns. These are incontrovertible truths that I would be happy to discuss with you, save that they are also holy secrets, and thereafter I would either have to Embrace you or kill you. Its simply a matter of orthodoxy, after all the Abyss is my calling, my quest and my god.

Momentarily, my eyes stung from the brightness of the German night. With a few blinks, my sight adjusted and I found myself in a winter wonderland. Berlin. The very name conjures so many images and memories for me. Obviously, like everyone born in the twentieth century it makes one think of World War II and the Third Reich. But there is so much more to this amazing city than that and to make so much of so short a period in history is a disservice to Germany in general and more specifically, Berlin.

Yaldabaoth

I could paint a fanciful scene and relay to you the might of a Titan's strike and what that might feel like, but then I didn't feel a thing.

It all happened so fast, I was lucky to catch a glimpse of something larger than a man as it closed with me. I would swear that the giant appeared, literally, from nowhere. And even as he closed with me, I knew it was too late. Then...nothing, the absence of sensation. As a mortal youth, I had a similar experience with a skittish gelding and had awakened seconds later and a good fifty feet away. This was far more terrifying.

They say in that moment before you die that your life flashes before your eyes, but that isn't true because all I saw was darkness...for the longest time. Then, at first at the edges of my peripheral vision, and slowly sliding into my primary line of sight came the images of other people's lives lived in reverse. Ghost-like flickerings of 21st century Berlin, then other locations appeared with people all rushing backwards, undoing... everything. As the days and nights sped backward into months and then years, I understood that I was watching history unwind itself. Not something one expects to see when one has died.

It is indescribable and awe inspiring to watch all of history played backwards, as if I stood like one of the angels upon the edge of creation as God worked his will, a master artisan at the easel and I alone his sole audience. From the darkness beyond the ghost-light came the voice of a woman, at first the voice was unplaceable and yet hauntingly familiar, like something half remembered from a dream. Her words only subliminally audible as if felt rather than heard. More disturbing than the vibration of whispers was its unseen source which teased that primal human instinct to see what could only be heard.

Feverish with the need to know the unknowable, I called upon that most basic ability of Abyss Mysticism and inverted my sight. And it was if a veil had pulled from my eyes, the darkness gave way to sublime illumination. As I gazed about myself I perceived that I hung suspended at the heart of a storm beyond measure, like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, the storm could likely have consumed Berlin in an instant and shortly thereafter all of Germany. In truth it was a tempest, a funnel cloud of infinite rainbow hues cycling counterclockwise at unfathomable speeds wherein piceous lightening arched between cloud layers of cerise pink, cadmium blue and dark tangerine.

As I glanced about myself, I saw that a swarm of ignis fatuus clung to me and upheld me above the towering top of the tempest. A look down produced intense vertigo, fear and gratitude. The churning vertigo made me want to vomit, but all I experienced was dry heaves for I was already empty. The fear was visceral, but there was no escape, only an infinite down into the heart of the storm. Raising my eyes to regain my balance, I felt only gratitude to the minute will-o'-the-wisps who upheld me from a fatal fall into the storm of history.

As I raised my eyes, it was as if I looked into the heart of the sun. Its brilliance so intense it left a palinopsia of afterimages that would remain forever. Unable to bear the pain of what I had seen, I returned my sight to the mortal spectrum and was granted the respite of darkness. The woman's laughter came to me not from the storm, but from utter darkness that exited above it. And while it was clear to me that the source was that Stygian dark which spoke to me, it did so through the shadow-motes which buoyed me.

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Alexandria (February 1096)

Paris (April 1096)

I woke in my tent. Even before I opened my eyes I knew I wasn't alone. It was an undefinable feeling, something primal, instinct coded at the genetic level informing humanity that a predator is close. Without opening my eyes, I spoke to my visitor, the one who watched me in utter silence.

"My Lord? Forgive me if I do not rise. I do not believe I am capable. Have I been sick long? I have vague memories of something going wrong in Alexandria and then indistinct recollections of illness and nightmare."

{Theodoric} "Salivius, you were poisoned outside the Memory City, or so I am told, by a giant albino scorpion. Were it not for my Vitae, you would have died. Still, you have been abed for more than fourteen days. But, do not worry, my other servant has been looking after your duties while you have rested."

"Thank you my lord for your generosity, I am unworthy and will seek in vain to repay your kindness."

In the darkness of the tent's interior, I could not precisely see Theodoric, but I could see his shadow. His dark form came closer until it stood directly over me and then I saw the flash of a blade. In that second, so many possibilities passed through my mind, my liege could well have decided I was no longer worth his effort and waited until I was conscious just to kill me. But then there was the sound of flesh being sliced and cold, viscus blood spattered my face and I instinctively opened my mouth to receive this gift.

The feeding session seemed to go on forever and its took all my willpower to gag the vile black blood down and to swallow it. Then Theodoric was simply gone. I lay there patiently counting out sixty seconds against the beating of my heart and then leaned over the edge of the cot and barely found the chamber pot as all of Theodoric's black blood, bile and whatever they had most recently fed me came up in a rush. It was a noisy and unpleasant business, in my original mortal life, I had always hated vomiting more than any other symptom of sickness. This time however, it was much easier and afterwards, I felt a distinct sense of relief. I rummaged around near my cot until I found a wine-skin and washed the taste from my mouth. With effort, I nudged the chamber pot under the camp table and lay back to think.

If Theodoric ever realized that my body was rejecting his vampiric blood, he would almost certainly kill me. I would need to dispose of the chamber pot's contents personally as I could not afford one of the camp followers being a spy and reporting this back to the vampire.

It had not always been so. In the nights immediately after joining the pageant, I had been able to ingest the elder's vitae without difficulty. But over the weeks following, the black blood seemed to slowly sicken me and finally my body began to expel it. In all my years as a vampire, I had never seen or heard of such a thing and it produced such sheer unreasoning terror in me that when the blood would leave me, thereafter I would collapse in shivering terror.

To stem the fear, in my mind, I tried to reorder the events leading up to the attack on the temple of Ereshkigal. Despite my efforts, those memories seemed hazy as if I were remembering the events from more than one perspective. It made me uneasy with the thought that such a long convalescence could have been due to a brain damaging fever. I quickly dismissed the possibility, for if I did have brain damage, I probably wouldn't have had the wits to notice anything out of the ordinary.

My sickbed stank of old sweat, nightmares and vomit. And I could tolerate it no more. Sitting up made my head spin and I broke out in a sweat. Getting to my feet took a great deal more effort as my muscles felt like gelatin. But I managed with a bit of difficulty. Thereafter, I retrieved a cleaner set of clothing from the chest at the foot of my cot, a bar of soap I had bought in Alexandria and a towel and headed outside.

As I emerged from the tent, I turned to see the eastern horizon fully aflame. It burned with bands of gold, ruby, and opalescent orange. It would be dawn within just a few minutes. Somewhere within the encampment, the vampires of the pageant were hiding away in dark places to wait out the day. Like cockroaches they scurried for the shadows and for reasons I couldn't name, that made me smile.

But I immediately noticed something was not completely as I recollected. The humid, almost tropical breezes of Alexandria and the city itself were just...gone. We were somewhere else. Looking up at the fading night sky, I spotted several constellations and calculated that we had traveled several degrees of latitude northward and many degrees of longitude westward. We were somewhere in western Europe. And it was cold.

Returning to my tent, I retrieved a cloak and sought out someone within the camp who could answer my questions. As I worked my way through the slowly awakening pageant, the first individual I ran across was Frater Eadweard. The good brother had just come through the double wall of canvas even as I sought egress. Coming face to face, we exchanged the morning greeting and I asked after the pageant's current whereabouts. He replied that we were in the Frankish lands, just outside the walls of Paris. I thanked him for his information and lightly brushed past him in my haste to dispose of my pot of night-soil and spoiling vampiric vitae.

To be honest, I had never really paid much attention to the fat monk with his greasy pitch of religious righteousness sold like a snake-oil-salesman. But when he grabbed me by the arm, he spun me around like little girl. Startled, I dropped my burdens and by reflex my sword blade slid free of the scabbard. As we confronted each other in the dark gray twilight, I realized the monk was far stronger than he looked. Fat and tonsured, the good brother looked soft, but clearly that was far from the truth and like an accountant, I noted it down in my invisible record book. As we stared at each other, he must have sensed something was different about me, because he suddenly released my arm and mentioned that there was a killer loose outside of Paris and that I should be careful. I nodded my understanding, but I did not thank him this time, we both knew he was not warning me so much as trying to scare me. When I offered nothing further and did not sheath my sword, he backed away and resumed his walk towards the House of the Profligate.

Gathering my fallen items from the snow covered ground, I kept my sword in my hand and passed through the first lay of yellowing canvas. The space between the two canvas layers was only about four or five feet wide, but it created a strange corridor in the twilight that seemed to stretch away into darkness to both the right and left. I did not tarry and even as I was pushing my way through the outer canvas, I heard the whisper of a woman's voice calling my name. As I turned to look in that direction, I beheld a beautiful woman with hair like living flame and iridescent green eyes that seem to gather the light like those of a cat. She was no more than five feet tall and could not have weighed more than ninety pounds soaking wet and yet she radiated age and power like an elder vampire might.

"Lady Astarte, I take it?" She offered a polite curtsy in reply and I set aside my bundles to bow in return. As I straightened, I noticed for the first time the elegantly pointed ears that were only partially hidden by her glorious mane of hair. As if she had read my mind, she smiled and nodded in answer to my unspoken question. "My lady, please forgive my appearance, I have been ill for a fortnight or more and I was making my way to the Seine to bathe." Despite myself, I found it difficult not to stare at this fae woman. Her feminine attributes where not lost on me as my body began to involuntarily respond to her proximity, but there was so much more to it than mere mortal lust. The air around her seemed to crackle with unseen electricity and I could feel it crawling across the backs of my hands and down my spine. I was in the presence of something far greater, older and eldritch, a fey princess.

I knelt there before her and recalled the three things my old mentor had to say about the fay: creatures of faerie are not to be trifled with, pure iron can kill them, but one must never ever make a deal with them. For the fay are more clever than mankind, subtle and worst of all, fickle.

Niflheim -- Seventh of the Nine Worlds -- (middle April 1096)

All along the wagon-train, men and draft animals shivered in the cold dim twilight following dawn. The snowstorm had only partially abated as the sun rose in in the east tinting the gray horizon there with rose and amber. Flakes of icy crystals still fell thick on the left bank of the Seine where the pageant prepared to depart Paris on its eastward trek. Beautiful as the dawn might have been, my eyes were turned to the south where the last vestiges of Bolverk's Army vanished over a low series of hills. As I turned back to look at Paris, I could see that despite the sudden and heavy spring snowstorm, some buildings still smoldered after the fires and riots of the most recent chaos. As the line of wagons and riders began moving towards the dawn, my mind drifted over the events of the preceding nights and the part we had played in them. There was a sense of destiny in all that had transpired and as the only living man to witness such momentous events, the responsibility fell to me to record what I knew of this new history.

Less than a Roman mile from the walls of Paris, the pageant encountered thickening snow and fog. Visibility became so labored that riders like myself were obliged to tie our horses to the rear of the closest wagon and walk afoot through the knee deep snow. Most lit torches and called back and forth to one another so that individuals might avoid getting lost in the foggy blizzard. I tied a length of rope to the nearest wagon, then about myself and had each of my men do so at three foot intervals. In such conditions, it would be all too easy to lose one's footing or get turned around and separation from the pageant would almost certainly mean a long freezing death. Before the blizzard caught us unawares the pageant had been moving along the Roman track the Franks now called the Eastern road. Fairly early on, I lost track of time and a sense of plodding continuity took its place. It seemed forever that we wandered through that freezing white storm, not that I questioned this, rather it seemed only natural. But somewhere along the way, the pageant had left behind the fallow snow covered fields of the Left Bank with its numerous peasant hovels and occasional aristocratic manses for a single snowy track through a twilit forest.

I shook my head as if to clear it of too much drink or too little sleep, an indiscriminate fugue that in future days I would come to anticipate each time the pageant moved in that peculiar way wherein it traveled impossible distances in only hours or days. Later, I would with difficulty remember something of the terrors the pageant had passed through on its journey from Paris to wherever we were now. As if in a half-remembered dream, I recalled the pageant's passage through a blasted arctic landscape. Snow still fell in thickening gusts and eerily the fog clung to the wagon-train in spite of the freezing wind. So cold was the air that my breath smoked like Argont's forge and I felt the first tinges of numbness that would eventually become hypothermia. But as I looked up, I beheld a cold blue sun many times the size of the golden Sol and its azure radiance gave the icy landscape an alien ambience. The white plain seemed to stretch as far as I could see, but it was anything but flat and periodically whorled pillars of ice would rise from the surface, carved by the wind into fractal shapes that shattered the cerulean light into a kaleidoscope of rainbow hues like a prism. Further interspersed, sometimes by miles, were barren hills and ridges of black volcanic rock rising from the icy surface. Although it did not touch the pageant, the wind shrieked like a banshee and beneath its icy keen I heard something else - a low rumble that was omnipresent and felt deep in the bones. The sound was that of massive ice sheets grinding together for the surface of this world was composed of endless glaciers.

In disorienting flashes these memories surface and only with meditation and occasionally magic. Reconstructing what happened while the pageant journeys as it does is most like assembling a child's puzzle cut from the center of an old tree. The whole is lacquered and polished to reveal the very specific pattern of the wood's rings, then its cut into countless pieces and dumped willy-nilly into a box to be sorted by bored children trying to rearrange the original whole. With time, patience and a bit of sorcery the memories can be reconstructed, but its clear that the powers-that-be never intended that the pageanteers should be aware of the eldritch nature of their constant sojourn and of the myriad of worlds used as way-stations betwixt here and there.

Our journey across the arctic landscape eventually brought us to a ice-floored valley squeezed between two high escarpments of black volcanic stone down which layers of hoarfrost glittered like blue diamonds dying in the fading light. The days on this world were long, even compared to arctic summers, and with a sky empty of clouds the nights would be too cold for humans caught outside. Despite the cold, instinctively, I welcomed the false night between the canon walls as only a creature of darkness or a former creature of darkness might.

The valley's width narrowed until we moved through a crevasse like defile. Eventually the crevasse emptied onto the frozen surface of a lake that lay in a crater many miles across. The pageant's pace across the great ice lake slowed to a crawl as men and beasts lost their footing with alarming regularity. I was among those and as I began to rise, I had occasion to look down into the glass like ice to see what lay below. At first uncertain of what I thought I saw, I knelt down on already numb legs to brush away the wind drifted snow.

The frozen lake was as crystal clear as tropical seas and there, only a few feet below me I saw them, countless men, women and children caught forever in the moments of their deaths. They were spaced out every few feet in all the cardinal directions, if the entire lake floor where so meticulously filled with human corpses, then an entire race of man lay forgotten below the ice. I scrabbled to my feet and resumed my zombie's walk towards the unknown, like all those around me, only partially aware of the graveyard across which we walked. Beneath my feet the open staring eyes of countless people looked upward at the dying light, perhaps in envy of our still warm flesh and the freedom of motion of which we were still capable.

As twilight betook the land, the arctic zephyr ceased to rage and in the stillness I heard a woman's voice raised in song. Incomprehensible were the words which were foreign to mortal ears and I felt my heart quicken with a surge of the arcane. Like whale song her mellifluous coloratura carried far across the glistening ice and was answered by a chorus of baritones as bleak as a funeral dirge. This alien opera progressed even as the wagon-train approached the center of the vast and frozen lake. There at the heart of the crater was a monolith of ice, carved by the wind, into a towering crystalline structure the equal of any twentieth century skyscraper. As the sapphire sun began to sink below the horizon, its last rays seemed to ignite the arctic monolith throwing shards of fractured light to the farthest extremity of the cold crater lake.

Somewhere up ahead, a brazen and sonorous note sounded, that of a rams-horn. This ancient symbol brought the caravan to sudden halt. In that place, the light died with surpassing speed and violet shadows pooled within the crater-lake like dark water rising up from below and leaving only half of each animal, wagon and man visible to the mortal eye. As horses and oxen stamped their feet reflexively for warmth, men and woman shivered without the heat of exertion generated by our sleepwalker's march and the breath of all the living smoked in the half-light adding to the aberrant mist that still clung to the caravan's periphery.

From my position towards the middle of the pageant's convoy, the tower or towers of ice, for they were two and intertwined dominated the landscape before me and it was impossible for me not to see that windows, doors and stairs of all sizes had been carved from the monolith's exterior. Looking out and down upon our twilight parade from countless windows were faces, indistinguishable in the dying light, but both familiar and alien. Down the frozen exterior of the monolith trailed flights of stairs and down these stairs came men who were not men, their skin was painted as blue as Pictish woad and their hair although dark shown with many metallic hues. None were dressed for the arctic cold and some were not dressed at all. As they grew closer it became apparent that these alien men were proportionally larger than mortal men twice over and not all who descended were masculine in character for many beautiful if fierce looking amazons traversed the cold crystal stairs to the surface of the frozen lake.

At the base of the monolith they gathered, several hundred and more looked on from above. They stood in an archway a hundred feet high that served as the entrance to a tunnel that made its way through the base of the ice towers and out the other side, an otherworldly Eiffel Tower formed entirely of ice. From the throng before the great arch, a small contingent of a dozen or so made their way across the frozen lake to stand before the head of our motley column. I could not see them well from my vantage point and my attention drifted from time to time. When next I was aware, the group was once more in motion along the caravan's port side giving me a good view of them. In the lead was a naked woman who stood twelve feet tall, her voluptuous blue body swayed with predatory grace like a Balinese dancer or a Bengal tiger and her black hair tinted in shades of violet hung down to her ankles in a thick braid. I knew before me was a queen for upon her head was a delicate diadem of arctic ice like a crown of pale blue Tiffany glass.

Beside her, and so much smaller was Astarte, but not as I had known her. Her hair was like molten copper as it flowed out behind her in an otherworldly breeze and her dress of amethyst and verdigris bore a corona of eldritch emerald fire that gave off sparks of gold. Never in all my countless lives had I seen anything to compare with such alien beauty, both terrible and majestic, a unearthly vision made manifest and given life eternal. Such sights mortal man was not meant to see and I came to understand that the fugue that held us all prisoners in our own flesh and robbed us of our reminiscence was meant in part to insulate us from the madness such sights could instill and alternatively to protect these alien, but beautiful beings from humanity.

Behind this otherworldly duo came a cadre of blue giants, bodies sheathed in armor of iridescent reptilian leather trimmed in long fur the color of a Russian grey cat. I could not imagine what animals gave up their lives to cloth these blue warrior men, but as they approached, I could see that like Astarte, their ears were distinctly pointed and each marked with ritualistic black scars that I had originally taken for tattoos. Like their armor, they bore no ordinary weapons, but creations of ice, glittering deadly spears, swords and axes that seemed glow of their own accord. And yet, despite each of these unearthly features, it was their eyes that captivated me, red the color of blood and with a vertical pupil reminiscent of felines more than those of a serpent. Despite their initially humanoid appearance, I understood on an animal level, that these creatures were in no way related to mankind and as they looked upon us and spoke among themselves in a harsh guttural tongue that they bore us an ancestral enmity that must one day be slaked in a genocidal holocaust. What is more, somewhere in my own mortal heritage, every fiber of my being, bones to blood called out to me to attack without mercy or else flee for my life. I could not imagine under what fey truce we the children of humanity stood in this place alive without being butchered to the last.

With the death of the sun, the sky's amethyst turned atramentous and from the unfamiliar void burned alien constellations whose meanings I could not fathom. These things my down cast eyes perceived in the mirror of the darkening lake. No more the staring eyes of countless corpses were seen, but rather the Oculus of Niflheim.

This mirror darkly, reflected many things, all the more so as an eldritch aurora spread across the foreign firmament casting all those present as aspects of incandescent. It was neither Astarte's reflection bound up as it was with the entwining image of a great black serpent, nor the gathered host of azure giants whose reflected raiment consisted of the bones of human children that surprised me, but the reflections of the nearby pageanteers.

Of course, I could only see the reflections of my men and those closest to us. Several of the pageanteers bore distorted visages, some looked starved like concentration camp victims, while others were obviously sick as their reflections bore terrible lesions or oozing pustules. Like the host of the damned revealed to Scrooge by Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol, all of the pageanteers were weighted down with chains of varying lengths. Some were bound to additional weights like coin chests or beautiful weapons or even stranger things.

What I saw of myself and my men in the oddly illuminated ice brought on a moral terror and revulsion that would later manifest itself as twisted déjà vu and the occasional nightmare as the memories sought to break free of the pageant induced amnesia.

In the ice, my form possessed a distinctly draconian aspect, like a man sized dragon standing on two feet with a tail like an alligator and wings like a gargoyle, clearly my reflection was both strong and hungry, but not the least bit human.

My reflected self was covered in black gem-like scales that became horn-like ridges over both the eye sockets and where the ears should have been. My scaled hands ended in obsidian claws three inches long, and the leathery midnight wings upon my back possessed ebony spines for both defensive and offensive purposes. It was my face that stayed with me the longest, my face was like that of a crocodile with a broad short snout and rows of savage teeth visible even with my mouth closed. The worst part were the eyes, reptilian and golden, they seemed imbued with both calculated cunning and predatory intelligence.

Around my neck was a thick slave's neck-chain and hanging from it was the amulet versus demons made for me by Mordblund. A single thick chain hung around my waist like a belt and from it hung three books, the arcane tomes I had stolen from the library of the French king's palace in Paris. But that was not all, in each hand, I held a thick iron ring and bound to those rings were chains that bound my men to me. Strangest of all, at my feet sat a black house cat with not a care in the world.

The group behind my cadre were camp followers, a mixture of men, woman and children. In the coldly reflective ice, each and every one of them looked like a corpse. In the back of my mind, I knew what was going to happen to them, but I was powerless to even twitch an eyelid let alone change the outcome of a foregone conclusion.

As the delegation of blue giants passed my men and I, for the first time I understood their conversation. Astarte and the blue giant queen were haggling over the price of passage for the pageant through this realm, the cost would be paid in human lives from among our camp-followers. The powers-that-be within the Pageant were obviously possessive of their chosen and indentured servants, those the giants could not have. But those poor fools who had sought to find safety and an easier journey following the pageant to Trier would pay a far higher price than they ever might have imagined.

Astarte matched the blue queen's stride with several smaller steps and she personally helped the giantess select the sacrifices. As each victim was chosen, a blue warrior would step forward and take the unresistant mortal by the arm and lead them several feet out onto the ice. There beyond the confines of the mist that surround the Pageant, the individual would start into wakefulness. Like drugged animals they were slow to realize their plight and when it finally dawned upon them that they were being systematically cut off from escape and the safety of the Pageant, they began to panic and begged for their lives.

The blue giants treated this behavior the same way a farmer or butcher might the bleating of a sheep or goat. But rather than gentle kindness or casual indifference, the blue warriors obviously relished the terror of their human victims and sought to enhance it with savage intimidation and physical cruelty. How many times had this sort of scene played itself out as the pageant moved from the mundane world to another realm and back again? How many human lives had been lost paying the toll between worlds? Only Astarte would know for sure.

When a full two dozen men, women and children had been selected, the queen of giants trailed her warriors and their charges a bit further from the pageant and there she had them herded at weapon point into a rough knot inside a circle of blue warriors. Those within the circle, save for the children, knew that their time was up and as the cold began to afflict them, the chatter of their collective teeth carried over the ice to where I stood. Like animals to the slaughter they bleated and cried, screamed and tried to push through the warriors. One of the men called for calm, and brought order to the chaotic, weeping group.

Then unlike animals to the slaughter, they all knelt down and began to pray. Their chattering prayers served as feeble counterpoint to the the rich notes hummed by the queen of giants as she walked the perimeter of the circle and chanted in the harsh tongue of her people. As she completed her first rotation fine traceries of blue-white light delineated a perfect circle below the surface of the ice. I did not need to see what was happening, although I could peripherally glimpse the action – rather I could feel the gathering of power, of air and water as they interacted to momentarily imbue a significant quantity of fire and then just as quickly drain it away.

I expected screams and the sounds of splashing, but that never happened. One moment they were kneeling on the ice praying and the next, they were just – gone.

From some long forgotten store of human emotions passed down to me in my first life or perhaps from my most recent reincarnation, I felt rising within me a primordial rage that for just a few brief seconds allowed me to brush off the fugue. Astarte had not even bothered to watch what became of her human sacrifices, she was striding back towards the head of the caravan when she must have sensed something of what I was doing. She stopped before me and as our eyes met, I saw that her eyes, from iris to sclera had turned infinitely black – the Abyssinian stare. The emptiness of the Abyss drained away my rage and my spell collapsed before fully forming. Once again the fugue held me, distancing my mind from thought and emotion, insulating memory and injecting absolute bliss – once more I was as serene as the Buddha.

The queen of giants had a much longer stride and caught up to Astarte only a moment or two after my spell fizzled. She inquired what Astarte was looking at, the Autumn Queen's reply was nominal, just enough in the language of the giants to dispel the giantess' suspicions. In that second as she still faced me she must have looked down and seen my reflection, what she gleaned there, I cannot know ever were I to remember the event. But as she lifted her head high and the eldritch nimbus of cold fire blossomed anew around her, she turned to face the queen of giants. Although coldly polite, she now dictated terms, the Pageant would pass through the portal within the frozen monolith and we would leave this world for the realm called Midgard.

The blue giant queen, frostily agreed as she eyed all the other potential sacrifices with something resembling regret. But then, Laufey, queen of the frost giants and mother of Loki – the lord of lies, remained painfully aware of her pledge of hospitality and the golden oaths that bound her to deal fairly with this wispy princess of the Autumn Court. And perhaps to reassure Astarte that her obligations and responsibilities were not forgotten, she recited the compact between the courts of Autumn and Winter. She never looked back at the dirty fire haired human, the surge of power could never have come from a mortal member of the Pageant, and her assumption of Astarte's fickle anger were correct save for their source. But while Laufey was many things including sublimely powerful among the fae, one thing she was not, was overly imaginative.

From somewhere at the head of the column, the long lonely call of the rams horn reverberated across the ice and the caravan that was the Pageant began to move forwards on legs long since gone numb into a gateway of glittering blue-white light that swallow the humans, horses and wagons like a dragon of ice swallowing a giant serpent of flesh.

Trier - Duchy of Upper Lorraine - Germany near Luxembourg (middle April 1096)

I came to myself leaning against a frost covered wagon for support. I was bone tired, weary in the way soldiers are after a forced march and my body was completely numb from my feet to the scalp of my head. Everywhere I looked, pageanteers and camp-followers and even the horses began to collapse in their tracks. We all drew in deep gasping breadths of moist seemingly warm air and every object bore a rhyme of frost. I had trouble remembering how long we had been traveling and where precisely we were. The details of our journey seemed fragmented and fuzzy, and the harder I tried to make sense of them, the more swiftly they flew away from me like the black birds of Paris.

I was literally jerked into the moment as the man closest to me and tied to me by a frost covered rope, lost his footing and began dragging me down. Without any feeling in my feet, keeping my balance was difficult. I could not feel my hands as I grabbed the hilt of my dagger and once again I nearly lost my footing as I wrenched it from the scabbard with too much force. It had been necessary however, as the blade itself was thickly covered in ice crystals. With a single strike, I severed the length of rope binding us and he along with rest of my men hit the ground hard. My second strike severed my bindings to the wagon allowing me to totter a bit before kneeling next to the first fallen. For a few moments, I struggled even to think of the fallen man's name. Then it came to me, Agilulf, born in the northernmost reaches of Italy he was a Lombard and all of my personal guard called him Little Wolf. As I inspected Agilulf on my knees, I could see that his normally tan face was far too pale and as cold as we all were, he should have been shivering. But the boy was not shivering and by the lack of visible breath he clearly was not breathing either. I know, its ironic that I call him boy because physically there could not be more than a year or two between us and he could easily have been my older brother, but then appearances can be deceiving and I had lived many lives before this one.

As I bent over him, with the knife in hand it occurred to me that this life might very well be my last.

From that point forward, I thought of nothing other than what might be necessary to save his life. A lifetime of combat training has other uses than just the acts of war. In my hands the dagger made a series of precise cuts to remove his leather armor, a woolen vest and a stinking linen shirt that had not been washed in months. Then sheathing the dagger, I leaned yet closer and began to breath life back into the boy's mouth. Those around me starting to become aware and stared at me in a dumbstruck fashion which was a shame, because resuscitation is a two person effort. I made do as best I could, but without the right rhythm, I was likely doomed to fail. Then a shadow fell upon me and I glanced up to see Blagoy the barber-surgeon, it must have been his wagon we had been tied to during the journey, and a turn of good luck for the dying Agilulf.

In the Bulgarian dialect of the southern Slavic tongue, I said:

"Master Blagoy, the boy is dying, the cold has stopped his heart and breath. We must quicken the him and I need your help to do so."

His reply was typical of the man.

"If the boy isn't breathing, he is already dead. In this, he is not alone and there are others more likely to survive if I attend to them this night."

As he turned to walk away, I grabbed his wrist and pulled him to his knees. So detached was he that this assault merely drew a questioning glance and a raised eyebrow.

Blagoy was a man that I admired for his deep calm and utterly rational behavior, he would never make a decision based on emotion, nor allow emotion to sway him. With him the only appeal that would move him would be one of enlightened self interest.

"He is not yet dead and if you do exactly as I tell you, we can save his life. What price would you pay to know how to restart a man's heart and make him breath again?"

My grandfather was the fisherman of our household, but I knew the best morsels with which to bait a hook.

His voice did not change, nor did he seem to breath any harder, but the widening of his pupils told me what I needed to know even before he voiced his reply:

"Show me."

I placed Blagoy on one side of the Little Wolf and showed him the palpitations needed to compel the heart to beat again. I emphasized the need to synchronize our tandem routine, of my breathing for Agilulf while he palpitating the young man's heart. Blagoy as my partner needed only to see me do this thing once and he had mastered it. In those moments, it seemed as if time contracted and stretched out infinitely. This then was the opposite of battle, the struggle to save a life became a labor alike and yet different than childbirth and both of us were straining and sweating even in the evening chill. I am not sure how long this went on, but eventually we were rewarded by the convulsing of Agilulf's body as he returned to the land of the living.

Blagoy and I looked at each other over the young man as he struggled to get enough air and then we were both laughing. It was the first time I had heard the serious surgeon laugh at anything and it was an explosive thing. After propping up Little Wolf's head, I got to my feet and looked around while Blagoy remained at the boy's side.

My other men lay where they had fallen, as had at least half the pageanteers. The forest around us was showing signs of spring, the budding of trees, new shoots and even a few flowers were visible from where I stood. About a hundred feet from the road on which the caravan had settled, the true forest began, it was a wild tangle of trees and undergrowth and also a means for our survival. Turning back to my men, I stopped and knelt down to speak a few words of encouragement to each, but they just shivered where they lay.

In this life and those that preceded it, I had known many taskmasters, some had favored positive reinforcement, but most had understood that men are just animals that walk upright and must not be coddled. I walked to my horse and from the saddle I pulled a whip and to each of those still lying down I gave a taste of the lash and repeated my command.

"Get up! Move!"

A couple screamed and a couple cursed me, but all came to their feet panting. As an analogy, men are most like dogs and I mean this in all ways. One must establish dominance and then show them affection, too much of one spoils the animal or turns it savage. I walked up to each and offered a long pull from my wine-skin filled with Frankish brandy. While the alcohol provided only a false warmth, it did galvanize each of them and remind them that their master could give them punishment or reward depending on their actions, but he would never accept failure. Once I had them moving, I took them into the nearest edge of the forest to collect deadwood. Despite the feeling that it should be true night, we could all see the sun had barely set and the dimming light would last for some while longer.

I did not waste the opportunity this situation presented, rather I sought to instill each of my guard with the understanding that each of them was important to the whole and that as a group we could survive anything. As a team building exercise it was perhaps imperfect, but it got their blood flowing and allowed us to collect considerable wood with which to create campfires. As we returned from the forest, I could see Vulo Vodach riding slowly along the line of wagons giving directions from atop his dark warhorse. Momentarily our eyes met and he nodded ever so briefly and then continued on his way. His directions told me that a clearing had been found ahead and that the Brotherhood of the Blade were pushing the exhausted pageanteers forward to a defensible location. I led the men to the head of the column and down the road where a pair of scouts waited. One already had a fire going and we added our fuel to the blaze and created other fires around which the half frozen travelers could warm themselves.

While it took longer than it should have, the wagon train followed those on foot until everyone was gathered together in the clearing. Tonight the wagons were arranged in a circle to protect the exhausted pageanteers. Only one of the large tents was erected, the Tent of Dionysus, which was used to shelter the sick and the tired while food was cooked outside in black iron pots over each of the campfires. Slowly, other small tents were erected around the mess-tent and while fat Rodolph and his helpers made a quick stew for everyone, I commandeered one of the small fires to brew up some coffee for myself and my men. When I gave each of them a tin cup of the bitter brew, each looked dubious and some spit it out immediately while the more pragmatic made faces but drank it down. I needed them both alert and warm, food would only make them sleepy and none one including myself would sleep until we had scouted the area and determined potential risks to the Pageant.

As they warmed themselves by the fire and drank their coffee, I watched each of them. Of the three remaining Mochán was the eldest at around his middle forties, home for him was Dublin Town, a Viking stronghold on the east coast of Eerie (Ireland). The men called him Early Bird for the fact that he seemed to need less sleep and was always the first to awaken. After killing a Norman knight who had mistaken one of his daughters for a whore, he had been obliged to leave his old life behind if only for the sake of his family, for the Normans did not take the killing of one of their own lying down. The Hiberno-Norse look after their own and he found passage on a long-ship to the port city of Bordeaux in the Duchy of Gascony. There he took up with a mercenary company in the endless border wars between the duchies of Gascony and Toulouse. His mercenary company was eventually destroyed by the Army of the Red General as it made its way from Nimes to Clermont. He was a man who could tell a story and keep the men fascinated and he had a decent singing voice as well, but his finest asset was a solid head on his shoulders and the capacity to keep it there. Being the eldest of my guard, the other men looked up to him as an older brother and I found over time that I could entrust him with instructions that would not be questioned, at least not before the other men. For myself, I liked the Irish man, although he would offer to fight me if I called him that for his sire had been a full blooded Norseman with a taste for adventure and war.

Next to Mochán sat Gebahard, a proud Saxon from Büren in Westphalia. Dark haired and stout, the German was hardheaded but pragmatic, until you got him drunk. The men called him Hardy and that sobriquet described him well. Born the third son of landed but destitute knight, on his sixteenth birthday his father placed him on his second best horse, given him a sword and a small pouch of silver and told him to make his own way in the world for he was a man. Gebahard rarely spoke of the years immediately following, but I got the impression he joined a gang of bandits and did a number of things for which he was not proud. On only a few occasions had he reminisced about what his life had been like before he joined the Army of the Red General, and I did not press him, for men will tell you their tale when they are ready and every man has secrets. I did not pry and in return I found Gebahard to be an amicable man of deep humor who was always playing harmless pranks in the dull day to day of the pageant.

The last man was also the most complicated, Waramunt was the youngest son of Veremund, 11th Baron of House Hasek of Augsburg in Bavaria. In the summer of 1094 Bavaria had been under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV since its old duke had taken up arms in rebellion against his lord twenty years before. Henry had appointed a imperial seneschal, Lord Carolus to oversee the Duchy of Bavaria until such time as a new duke or duchess could be found. But the emperor must have failed to mention that he planned to select a new ruler for the duchy himself, for when a prospective heir - a young woman named Eadburga of Nordheim had appeared the noble houses of Bavaria decided to take matters into their own hands and ignited a civil war. In all likelihood, the emperor's absence from the Kingdom of Germany and the war being wagged between himself and his eldest son in Italy had much to do with the Bavarian noble houses belief that they could choose from among themselves a new duke or duchess. At the time of the advent of the Bavarian civil war, Waramunt has been the wastrel and black-sheep of House Hasek, and as such had been given in pledge by his father to Leudoberct - Baron of House Adler to shape into a reputable nobleman. Waramunt for all his lack of experience, had fought bravely for the Southern Alliance, but had been captured by the Western Alliance of Bavarian houses early on in the civil war. The boy must have learned something from the Old Eagle of Adler or found some nobility in his own blood, for only a month into captivity he organized a group of low ranking nobles and led them to escape into the Duchy of Lower Lorraine. This disparate group of young nobles quickly left the civil war behind to seek fame and adventure for themselves as they traveled ever westward. In Orléans a squabble over a woman led the group to fragment and Waramunt chose to join the Army of the Red General rather than return to a homeland shattered by war. The White Rabbit as the men like to call Waramunt, a vague reference to his heritage and his luck with games of chance, is a handsome lad with a ready smile for the ladies and a surprisingly keen wit in general and specifically in the arena of politics. Although I like the White Rabbit, I show him not a hair more favor than the Little Wolf who was born of simple peasant stock. His station outside of my cadre and the pageant does make him useful in dealing with the Christian nobility of Europe and he serves as my agent in matters political.

Taking Mochán aside, I outlined my intent to scout the area and that I was going to speak to Vulo Vodach. His stoic nod was all I received in reply, but we had worked long enough together for me know he would prepare the men and all would be in readiness. On my way to speak with the leader of the brotherhood of the Blade, I only stopped once to retrieve my shield from one of the pack animals.

The clearing chosen as the campsite lay upon a flat-topped hill, about one hundred feet wide and a little over three hundred feet long, perfect for the pageant, one could almost say - too perfect. Already the pageanteers were erecting the Wyrdling Wall creating an eye-shaped space oriented north to south with a gate located in the east wall at the head of what looked like an old road that zigzagged down the heavily forested slope to cultivated fields half a mile east of our position. The location offered an excellent view of the local farmland between us and a wide slow moving river, and just on the other side, a city with well fortified walls.

All this and more I noticed on my way to Vulo's tent which lay in the pupil of the eye-shaped encampment. The tent itself was shaped like a bee-hive and formed from numerous skins sewn together. Smoke poured from a small hole at the top and fire light threw orange and gold illumination onto the moist dark earth before the tent, it also partially illuminated two of Vulo's guards as they stood at attention on either side of the entrance. Both men were Slavs and of dour disposition, as a point of interest I found it odd that the leader of the Brotherhood of the Blade would surround himself with such a homogeneous group when the rest of the pageant seemed to be made up of an almost random grouping of peoples from across Eurasia, the Middle-East and Africa.

Both men focused on me as I approached. Rather than risk a confrontation I kept my hands away from my weapons and offered a greeting to them. One of them stepped forward and placed a well muscled hand on my chest and queried me on my business with the Vodach (leader). Succinctly I told him that I needed to speak to Vulo on the matter of a scouting mission. Behind him, his fellow guard chuckled while the man before me smirked. Obviously I had violated some social taboo or stepped above my station in their eyes. Despite this, the second guard entered the tent to inform Vulo while the first guard locked gazes with me in a contest of dominance, he was the first to look away.

A moment later, the second guard emerged and gestured for me to come forward and enter his master's tent. As I entered, I could feel the first guard's gaze boring into my back, but I focused on the fire-lit interior. The smell of dung-fires and an almost drowsy heat enveloped me as I entered, off to one side were two men seated upon the rug covered ground facing each other, Vulo and his second in command Arnviðr. Both looked up as I entered and they exchanged comments in the Slavic tongue. Strangely, I had to work to understand them and only caught the gist of what they said. The Varagarian thought I should be taught a lesson for over stepping my place among the pageanteers, but Vulo seemed genuinely curious what might have brought me to his tent. I had only spoken to the war-leader a few times and he had largely ignored me since.

In the vulgar Latin that was so popular with the common people, I offered the evening greeting and waited for Vulo's response. Even while seated, Vulo seemed to radiate authority and I noticed his shadow was much larger upon the wall of skins that it should normally have been. I spent a few moments interpreting this sign and determined that like myself, Vulo had some power over the shadows and that there was far more to this man than met the eye. In turn both men watched me, with measured interest on Vulo's part and obvious scorn on the part of the Varagarian.

Vulo's deep bass voice was like the low roll of thunder when he spoke. "What brings you to my tent Aegon?"

"Vodach, I came to offer the services of my men and myself in scouting the local territory."

This response drew an immediate snicker from both men who drank from their cups and exchanged jokes at my expense in the Slavic tongue. In response, I smiled sheepishly as if I too found this funny, but did not quite get the joke. Sometimes it is best to humor those above you, it stokes their egos and sometimes they show you a bit more of themselves than they realize. My continued presence and patience in waiting for a real response eventually killed the mood and then Vulo spoke again.

"Aegon, neither your assistance , nor that of your men will be required. Arnviðr is in charge of all scouting missions and his men have already determined the lay of the land. You may go about your business as Arnviðr and I have business of our own. Goodnight."

The dismissal was obvious as both men returned to their conversation and joking at my expense. It did not really surprise me, but then this was simply an exploratory foray into new political territory. I had learned a fair amount, but I wanted to leave them with a bit of an impression to make future advances more profitable.

"Of course, Vodach, I look forward to visiting Augusta Treverorum again. The city seems to have prospered since my last visit and I long to once again soak in the Imperial Baths and visit the Temple of Mars. Shall I offer a sacrifice in honor of the Brotherhood of the Blade?"

Arnviðr had just told his lord a ribald little joke wherein a eunuch accidentally finds himself in the most renowned brothel in Constantinople and when presented with the options he is dumbfounded. Both men were so amused that Arnviðr had fallen over and Vulo nearly choked on a mouth full of expensive red wine. The Varagarian's implication that I was somehow like the eunuch was meant to insult me. In that moment it occurred to me that were I so inclined I could kill both these men before the guards interfered, but what would be the gain and did I really care what Arnviðr or Vulo thought of me? The answer was hard, but then the truth usually is, yes I cared both emotionally and intellectually. I needed the good will of both men if I was to rise within the pageant and that was my goal. I could not afford to alienate or kill either of them and killing out of wounded pride would be stupid. Taking life is a necessary evil, in the defense of oneself or a loved one, to prevent a greater loss of life or to achieve a greater end. None of these things would be served by needless butchery, so I turned off my emotions and offered them my best retort.

"Asphodelus Albus."

Both men stopped laughing and looked questioningly at me

Emain Ablach -- The Summer Isle (late April 1096)

City of Worms -- Southern Germany - Along the River Rhine (middle June 1096)

Myrkviðr -- Forests of Shadow and Mist (late June 1096)

Bökenförde -- Village of Black Gates -- North Rhineland, Province of Westphalia, Kingdom of Germany (late June 1096)

The Strange Little Town of Wifilisburg -- North Rhineland, Province of Westphalia, Kingdom of Germany (late June 1096)

Erdach Kodesh -- Place of Dead Roads (early July 1096)

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