Reflection

11th Day of Autumn

767 Karloman’s Peace

Ekkehard's eyes welled with unshed tears as memories of his trials flooded through him. He had lost so much in that single moment. A normal day, like any other, had turned into the worst of his life. The harrowing image of his baby boy’s charred remains haunted him. He had thought it the greatest pain he would ever face.

Yet his journey would cost him even more.

In his youth, Ekkehard immersed himself in scripture. If the Merchant’s Rebellion had not seen him conscripted, he would have donned a priest's robes. That alternative life might have saved his family, but he would never have met his wife Auriana, and his son Cheldric would never have been born.

Perhaps that would have been better.

The horrors he witnessed at war, the mistakes he made, and the cruelty he inflicted on others rendered a life of religious service untenable to him. Ekkehard could not take up the mantle of Teacher, having utterly failed to abide by the will and tenants of the heavens that he would be expected to impart on others. Before the war, he pledged himself to religion and the preservation of all mortal life. He broke that oath several times over and was branded an apostate.

Later, a heretic.

Ekkehard often wondered if the gods' abandonment of his family on that fateful day was punishment for his forsaken debts. While he knew it was the cruel whims of greedy men that had brought his family low, who had sent those men? Were they simply machinations of envy, or was the hand of Spring, the King of Heaven, somehow involved? Did the Pantheon call for the deaths of his family, or was it merely earthly avarice?

The question of how Spring was able the countenance the slaughter of Ekkehard’s family had plagued him since. It was a contradiction of everything he had been taught about the gods.

The holy texts declared that Spring valued life as his most generous gift and considered the lives of the innocent sacred above all. Ekkehard’s family had been innocent. His son had been innocent. Auriana was innocent. Yet the gods seemingly punished them all for Ekkehard’s betrayal. Why they chose to harm them in his place, he could never understand.

Whether the punishment was decreed by the gods or a result of their apathy mattered little. Perhaps the gods were simply absentee, he thought.

Innocents were slaughtered daily across the empire, and Spring had never intervened. Nor had Summer, Autumn, Harvest, or the death god Winter. Not a single god had ever acted to save a mortal life, and Ekkehard suspected they never would. He wondered how he had spent so much of his life believing in them despite their inaction.

It wasn’t like he had never considered this argument before. Doubters of the faith often pointed to the abundance of suffering in the world as a means of questioning the accuracy of doctrine. During his studies, Ekkehard had learnt well how to counter such an argument. The texts were clear: Spring, through Karloman, did not free humanity just to enslave it anew. It is our own misuse of our freedom that brings about the pain in the world.

Yet, when that pain was finally his own, he doubted.

He wondered if anything he had ever witnessed provided even the smallest sliver of evidence of the gods' existence. He could not think of a single occasion. He had never been one to find miracles in the mundane, believing those who did were desperate and narcissistic, trying to raise themselves to the ranks of the eminent through imagined prominence. No, he had always believed the gods to act on a more macro level, steering humanity on a grander scale. Now he wondered if that had simply been his way of excusing their absence, of blinding himself to the truth.

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As he trudged through the tangled foliage of the forest, he concluded that whether the gods were real or not, they certainly hadn’t made any effort to save the Reubkes, and that was reason enough to hate them.

Despite Ekkehard turning his back on the faith, the Reubkes had always been devout. They made pilgrimages to offer thanks at every harvest. They honoured the gods at every meal in winter and answered the call to war to defend the faith when the Karlomans summoned them. What had they gained for their devotion? Where were their promised protections?

If the gods existed, they must be cruel and indifferent creatures. They were not worthy of his prayers. They were not worthy of anyone’s.

He fought his way through Hastfala Forest’s dense brush, using Audomar’s hrapan war spear as a walking stick, all the while contemplating the questionable existence of higher powers, a welcome distraction from his grief.

Pushing through the thick wood along the slopes of the Udine Mountains was no easy task. He had been trekking uphill for most of his journey, and his breath grew laboured. The weather had calmed, the stormy gales subsiding to a breezy drizzle, but Ekkehard's dark grey tunic was still soaked through. His hair and beard were heavy with water. Shivering, he pushed past branches and slogged through thick mud, his nose snivelling as he squinted through the surrounding darkness, trying to make out anything ahead of him.

Ekkehard was unsure of the time, but he suspected it was nearing midnight. Tired, he considered returning to camp, knowing his brothers had likely fallen asleep. Yet that would only postpone the inevitable struggle, one he had already endured enough. Doubting he could find his way back in the dark anyway, Ekkehard carried on, aimlessly wandering until he pushed through a thicket and entered a small clearing in the woodlands.

For a moment, the clouds parted, and moonlight illuminated the area.

In the centre of the clearing was a small pond, edged with a variety of reeds and vegetation. On one side, a large, pointed boulder jutted a few meters over the pond's surface. In the moonlight, the falling raindrops shimmered, and Ekkehard saw stars descending upon a picturesque oasis.

“Beautiful," he said to himself. "As good a place as any."

Ekkehard took a deep breath, stabbed the butt of his brother’s spear into the earth to hold it fast, and walked toward the pond. He climbed the pointed boulder and crawled to kneel at its edge, gazing into the shimmering pool below. It reminded him of the garden's reflecting waters in that little palimpsest house, so often admired by his wife.

He remembered those he had lost: brothers, sisters, family, his son. He pictured their faces and their smiles. He tried to remember what joy looked like in their eyes.

He failed.

Instead, the bloodshot eyes of the mutilated dead forced their way forward, accompanied not by laughter or sweet voices, but by heart-wrenching screams of agony. Her eyes wailed at him most of all. That look of disappointment. The judgment for breaking his promise. They would haunt him for the rest of his days, if he let any more come to be. Shame was all he could feel in the sinking pit of his stomach and the frozen depths of his core. Drawing his dagger, he was ready for the atonement her gaze demanded.

He cupped the dagger in his hands, gazing at the metal shimmering in the moonlight. The blade promised freedom from the pain, grief, and the earthly debts that had hounded him for over a year. To Ekkehard, the dagger was a weapon of mercy. The blade sparkled, beckoning him to the afterlife, if such a place existed.

He gripped the dagger's handle, pointed the blade toward his heart, and stretched out his arms, preparing for the thrust. The tip glinted at him, and he took his final breath.

Then the clouds returned, covering the moon. The clearing fell dark, and the blade's glint faded with the moon's eclipse, Ekkehard's resolve evaporating alongside it.

If the gods he had abandoned, and who had abandoned him in turn, did not exist, then what waited for him? The idea of an oblivion more all-consuming than the surrounding night chilled Ekkehard’s very essence.

The prospect of ceasing to exist terrified him. Would the love he had felt for those who had been taken be snuffed out as well? With his death would their memory be lost? Would the last vestiges of their beings die alongside him. Would he be killing them a second, more permanent time?

Even worse, what if there was an afterlife? What if he had to face those he had so utterly failed? What if she would not forgive him? What if he would not recognize them? The darkness was frightening, but the light terrified him in ways words could never define. He collapsed to his knees, the dagger clattering against stone before being lost in the water below.

Sobbing uncontrollably, Ekkehard longed for neither life nor death. His will departed and the memories of hollow, horrific endeavours returned to mock him.