Chapter 1 - A Hamlet

A Hamlet

My illumination shines horrific crawling life upon a garden of flesh. Through me the mad are made sane and the sane, lunatic. To know me is to touch a grave so cold it burns. What am I?  - Circle of the Oath riddle from manuscript fragment VIII.G production dated at circa 65 BR 

"What in the hell had they been doing so far out". The thought resonated in the low grey sky where silken smoke from smoldering log cabins saturated snow-laden clouds. The monochrome panorama before him was an indivisible sum of ice and ash. From somewhere outside his thoughts Manfred could hear a thinning apology echo "What in the hell...what in hell had" against the hard air. Manfred felt like castaway who had survived a maelstrom's immeasurable grasping depths only to find himself washed ashore an estranged land. This was not the warmth of the hearth he had been acclimated to since the two years when he retired from the Khador navy to strike out into the Thornwood with his family and comrades to found a small farming commune. That had all been erased in a frenzy of fire that sunk his village into the earth when raiders came the night before. Nobody that night escaped molestation in one form or another. Now, after the storm of steel had passed, only a deafening silence, bitter winds, strange snow capped hills, and a rising fog on the horizon were left unmolested. Manfred's eyes watched the white world unravel as a man adrift on arctic seas would mourn the shattering of glaciers.

The wreckage and its calm oblivion was comforting but Manfred would not let its siren song sooth him. Beyond the embers of his kin there shifted amongst his world's edge a horrific people. A people who were bound by a primordial covenant: to hunt and hunger. Their howling multitudes were traveling at this moment upon hundreds of feet, devouring the distance between them and their future prey, like a centipede darting underneath the conifers' iron-clasped stillness. Tharn, was their name. He overheard one of the Winterguard soldiers utter it as they carried corpses upon a litter to a nearby wagon. Whispering "I know them now" Manfred laid a timid handful of dust and ashes upon the wind. While the wet sand and soot trickled upon the earth he heard his naked voice echo back to him "Who knew death had and will undo so many” and marveled.

Manfred was a mystery to the soldiers carrying out their labor. The road to the nearest fort was eighty miles through pitted dirt paths. How had he survived the razing of his home, his family, and his people? The words from wandering lips surrounded Manfred, conflating, until they rushed through his mind as an indistinguishable silent clamor before collapsing. For a moment it unfastened his mind felt until he clasped it around clutched fingers. Rocking, like a ship upon weary waves, Manfred steadied his head while hearing “I need a hold, I need a hold” murmur from within. The riddle of Manfred's survival was raveled around a single clue “To know me is to touch a grave so cold it burns “.

The riddle was as old as blood, passed on through generations of his family. Now Manfred would be the last to carry it.

Soldiers moved the litters, stacked the bodies, and acted out their sympathies while a priest performed the rites of passage to Menoth with a pace akin to watching a pendulum swing. Manfred marveled at the spectacle, mesmerized as time trickled forward. Manfred felt as if he was watching the performance of a play and the habit of everything in front of him took on a pasteboard seeming. Even a litter being jostled by a soldier's dutiful swagger appeared rehearsed. Manfred laughed and clapped “Bravo! Bravo!” as one arm slipped out of the edge of the bleached cloth which covered the rest of the remains. Its porcelain smooth texture, like fresh paper, stilled him with anticipation and all movement around the arm seized as the characters waited for the lines of an unseen actor to be spoken.

It reminded Manfred of when Matilda and he would go see the stage plays where they used life-sized marionettes at the Blackfriar in Port Vladovar. With wide wild blue eyes she would lean into the balcony of the theater, biting her lip as the curtains were drawn upward. Often loud and haughty as a drunken cannonball Manfred would be stilled into silence by her company as he watched the smoothness of her blonde silk taffetta bodice heave with each tentative breathe. By the end of the play's first act Matilda would retire, her satisfied head lingering against his heart beat while her blushing nose inhaled the perfume around his neck and breathed the sea salt from the skin underneath. He'd waver during those moments like warm water pushed against a sun stroked shore.

The memory evaporated as Manfred realized the scene had been silent too long. The reality of the where he was began to weigh on him. He was no complacent spectator but played an important role in the performance that was taking place before him. One soldier rolled his eyes (roller ball eyes?) and tapped the toe of his boot (was there a wire attached to it?) impatiently against the ground as if queuing Manfred to recite his lines. However, Manfred had forgotten them and his face purpled with shame. Babbling, Manfred's tongue stumbled for the right words but the wind would not come to his aide. When another soldier approached him to apologize, saying that Manfred did not need to see the body if he didn't wish to and that they would take good care of her, Manfred released a wooden sigh “It is too late, I am a part of this spectacle now”. The arm waxed larger as the landscaped pulled him toward it until the arm, her arm, was his whole world. Manfred traced the arm's purple veins, the small cracks in the porcelain skin he had previously seen as a smooth, upward and stopped. Reaching out toward the white sheet with wet scarlet patches Manfred's fingers posed the wind weighty question “Is this my love?”. In the distance Manfred could hear a man collapsing on his knees and weeping “it was the moon, it was the moon”. The weeping man sounded similar to himself and Manfred marveled at the wind.

When a soldier knelt next to Manfred in freezing mud and threw a heavy wool sheet over him  to comfort him with “It's okay Captain, it's not your fault, you had no control..” Manfred sprung upward steady as an ironwood post. Manfred pivoted his gravity toward the soldier“Pull yourself together comrade I am an old Khardic son of the sea and have no use for spineless sponges. You mar my labor, go comfort that damned man who is weeping like a woman and I will do what must be done. Well were is he, can't you hear his pain soldier or have you gone deaf?” Puzzled the soldier glanced at Manfred and the litter before giving a smart salute. "It is imperative to never forget one's role in things" Manfred marveled while the sight of senseless finger nails dragged across the frozen ground.

As the procession of soldiers and litters continued Manfred played his native Khardic utterance of "Tharn" against the Caspian name Tharn until “Thorn” burbled to the surface. He flickered the constants and vowels until a single syllable emerged “Thoarn”. The word entranced him so he neither felt lengthening shadows nor the cold difference of the air's atmosphere stretch over him. As the horizon began dimming into starless night Manfred crawled into the partially collapsed fruit cellar underneath his home's ashen wreckage and dragged out an iron-clad chest. The fire he started was wet and as the flames grew they shed Manfred and his chest with an orange gloom. Laying upon yellow pine needles, atop the cold red earth, Manfred held the brutal head of his old orange boarding ax against the edge of the darkness repeating “Thoarn”; testing it against the wind.