Such a weapon was brought out from the creek and found to be soaked in the blood of the villagers. They tested the blood for magic, of course, life's blood, uncontaminated by living things feeding on the dead, maggots and such.

It was indeed the blood of druids on N'mirilium and she had thrown it into the creek to preserve the proof. It saved her life, the Order intervened and had her locked up instead of killed again. She was bewildered, saying they had taken her to some other realm and it was so good to be home, even if she had to now spend some time in an asylum.

So an expedition was to be made, except there was one more source of reinforcements.

One of the newer members of the Order, a young man of another village. This one they did allow to pray for my return as he delivered his own blood to anoint my white bones. Then he died amid the bloodied bones. I am sure it was awful to behold the change from death to life, taking all of what was once a man, now a martyr, to make me whole again.

There I stood. They wanted me to tell them what it was, what they were up against. And one more thing, they wanted me to lead them, for they had no leader anymore. My rebirth had taken much from me, going from the state of a spirit to the living body again. I was very confused, physical reality is quite sensational and it took me days to return to a coherent state.

Then I led them to their doom, but insisted that I would not open the way into the darkness below. Not the place men should not tread. There is nothing safe to tread upon, for those that live in the airless frozen darkness Outside, they simply go from place to place and let their bridges down there in the night fall from brick to brick.

But they tied me to this old gray tree and made me speak by uttering magic at me. I eventually failed to resist them and I spoke the incantation that they wanted me to speak.

Then the gray clouds came and found me and rained on me and I realized I had stared for a long time into the darkness that they had gone down into. It reminded me of something that had happened before I died and I remembered from my life before, many different things and I gradually became myself again.

It was raining upon me and my hair grew very long and gray and the rain made my skin all wrinkled. I simply remained tied to the tree, unmoving. I had only my memories to accompany me. I was entirely powerless to escape or to die again, doing what I was there at that tree. I was there and I grew very old and gray and strangely mutated in my growths against the tree, of hair and brow, and of my skin and bones and my nails and my insides, all changed and shriveled and writhed until I was certainly some kind of very ugly creature. It had all certainly hurt a great amount.

Then I realized that this was the torment of being unable to go into that darkness below and pursue the meaning of my memories of my past life, and of the strange thing it reminded me of, then thing before I died.

In the memory it was night and I had gone to my home after I had studied at the place of confessions. All the voices echo there forever and teach what nobody wishes to say, all the important facts of life. As one who has learned the difference between a student of life and a teacher of life, I had too much knowledge of death. That was before I died for the first time, when life seemed temporary and precious. I had not learned our place in the cosmos, not yet.

Suddenly there was something attacking my neighbor's chickens and it was snarling with a catching rancor voice as it killed chickens. I was going towards the shadowy darkness and realized that what had gone in there was injured. Bleeding already. It was somewhat large also, much larger than a fox. How it had squeezed into the coop I wasn't sure yet. I opened the door, not realizing that it was already opened before. Then something of monstrous proportions greeted me. My neighbor had already responded, also not noticing the opened door.

The beast was an old forest creature, some fur covered, primal animal with claws and teeth. It was shot with an arrow and had come galloping out of the woods and bounded to our village. It killed me next.

Presumably it killed more before it was stopped. But I was dead for a long time after that. The village became a town, the Order grew. My bones became white relics and I prayed over those that kept them.

I wanted to be the hero, but instead I just got killed as soon as I opened the door. Some farmer's wife with a huge heavy oven board bludgeoned it to death later on. But not before the creature rampaged and killed several more villagers.

I wondered if I had become entirely mad.

Then I realized that but a night had gone by and morning brought a fresh torment. The buzzing I had not noticed before, it was gone. They had come.

"Oh what fresh morning Hell?" I screamed at the mishaped drones. These foul concoctions bore the wings and eyes of insects, the parts of mythical things protruded, they had on them stingers and pincers and also like legs of grasshoppers or the parts of a bombardier beetle, shooting boiling venom at its victims. It was not the chimera of insect parts, on these new gods from below, it was the parts of men that were there, plain in the daylight.

I found the sight of them so repulsive that I thought my head might burst from the pressure of containing such an awesome sight as this. These horrid monstrosities, insect abominations, diabolical stuff of nightmares, they saw me and discussed my fate.

"We must now leave this one to die." Thremex said.

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"I want to eat it, let me eat this human." Spexem spoke.

"We shall not do either of those. We shall make it follow us, it is quite mad." Phexet decided. They claimed to be gods and who was I to argue? I doubted my faith then, in sight of such horrors.

So the gods led the way after they freed me. I needed to find some part of my humanity and I followed the buzzing that gave it to me. The buzzing of bees. The hum of the gods as I walked along behind them, their prisoner.

I dreaded to know the definition of their chittering. It was their laughter. These gods were lesser gods. So they were lesser gods, or Lesser Gods of Aphshai, for a queen bee, a top god, this bug called Aphshai. They said the name of this demon with strange amount of treachery, for their voices are like voices a person could make. It is the main way they communicate, forsaking their pheromones and other insect ways of communication. They grow human limbs and speak human language.

It is more than that: they have strange agendas. They had the treachery of one Mirkin go rewarded with a release, and a treasure of gemstones.

They showed me his image with the uniformed and perfectly cut stones of many colors all in a heap before him. The image could move and I watched in horror. It showed all in a way that seemed to skip time, only telling the fate of the gemstones and what they really were.

It seemed that this was the joke that the monsters had played on the man.

The gemstones could whisper evil things, making men covet them. They called to be fed, called to become something more. First it was blood for the taste to whatever a man might desire, the hum would start. The gemstone became a gelatinous jewel, something taking shape, somehow becoming whatever it is that the man wants, promising, swearing to grant the wish to become the object of desire. I watched in horror.

Mirkin sold one of the gemstones and it then did happen. The money changer did not have enough blood he could give. He knew he must feed it more but he knew not what. Animals, pets, neighbors. It grew and grew, but it hummed louder too.

So then the man gave it the wrong thing, but the right thing it swore to him.

His wife came home and found all of the wrongness. She found the huge digesting mass of cocooned and translucent vileness in her home. Her little baby girl was gone. She looked and saw what he had done.

"What have you done?" She screamed at him. She raked at him with her fingers and she clawed at him until she had his eyes out. There was plenty of blood everywhere and then it burst open, hatching quite quickly, this one.

It was smaller and less developed than the Lesser Gods I was with. I watched the image that they showed me of this newborn god, its name Vermilex. It was some gigantic wasp-like creature hovering, its flesh red and its stripes white. Black ichor already seeped from it, but not in the quantities that the Lesser Gods polluted their path with.

There were more but I cannot recall any after that, not with enough clarity to give such details again and again twenty or more times. I do assure you that the violence and cruelty and perversions only increased. Mirkin delivered the tokens of death, the gemstones that were really just the gods themselves.

The demons wrought destruction and horror throughout. It was not enough to torture and eat and slay many people. The demon insects also called themselves Aphshai's Children and forced the worship of their demon god throughout the lands.

Mirkin was a human that was given a change inside, to become the speaking part of Aphshai. Right now, Aphshai is in many parts. I can understand that.

These Children of Aphshai grew in their numbers until their spread from one village to another found the armored knights of the Church coming to destroy them. Battles were fought, but in the end the monsters were never defeated, only driven away.

And Mirkin goes on to become Millken. Bishop Millken. He is Mirkin.

This is why Bishop Millken has halted the knights of the Church from attacking villages. Not to put an end to bloodshed because of a religious difference. The Children of Aphshai are an evil religion. They worship a false, demonic creature that calls itself a god. And Millken, this man rose to power not too long ago, from the position of a monk.

But all the while he preaches that non-violence is the answer and that the time for the raids to stop, has come. So the raids stop and the insects return, an infestation even more prominent. The traitor is the leader that we have come to depend upon. We are led, as sheep, to the slaughter.

So then the gods took me down into the darkness after showing me all of these things. I wondered at time, the strange convoluted meaning of time becoming a strange perception, while with these beings. It was indeed cold, but not airless. The air was very damp and smelled of rot and the frozen horrors of the bottom.

And all around us the sacks melted flesh inside and glowed. Amid them there was a foxfire of the gasses. The waxy ichor dripped down among that place all around.

I saw then that so much of the stuff had congealed that at the top of many black spirals stood such splendid glowing colors of witch-light. And there, amid all of its rainbow auras, a maker of the gems, the hive-thing, the very god Aphshai.

So I saw at last the demon enemy. It saw me too. And Mirkin was there, having brought more dead for them to feast upon, their young ever growing in that place, unable to take form without desire.

I had much desire, to be dead, to be rid of the nightmare, to find my humanity, in general. I knew then why they had kept me. Death, disguise and the very core of their lusts: humanity itself.

Aphshai welcomed me and fed me the honey. The stuff changed me. I became as their mad little puppet, always as they asked. I chopped the dead brought by Mirkin and not even that treacherous fiend stayed to watch such butchery. Then as the keeper in the cold dark nest I went and began to feed the little monsters, one at a time.

But I got the death I wanted, or at least part of it. As Mirkin had a part of Aphshai inside, I too obtained a part of Aphshai. In my madness I ate one of the gemstones, unable to bear the agony of my tasks any longer.

It did no go down easy. The gemstone was large and cut into my throat as I rammed it past my windpipe. Finally it was inside me. Maybe now I could die.

Instead I did somehow digest the gemstone, coughing blood, however. I was again changed. I could see how the great wax lights were made, how the gemstones were made, how the humming, the honey, the horror, how it was all made.

It was laid bare for me and I could see it all. Aphshai among the great wax cathedrals. Each hexagon a candle tower of all the skeletons in honey. The choir of insects sang like angels as the light shone upon the candles of Aphshai.

Then I threw it back up, along with a lot of blood. I was still changed and I started to escape. I fell down and laid there with blood coming out of my mouth. Then I got up on my hands and knees and started crawling that way.

It took long through the darkness on my hands and knees, blood from my mouth as I went. I then saw daylight and emerged on a beach somewhere, a different place then where I went in.

It was not long before Bishop Millken's knights found me, but in such an unexpectedly distant place that they instead took me as the one from the asylum. There I was to remain, listening to the stories of those who loyally served the Order and slowly forgetting my own.