I. The Sound in the Hall

    “That Names hold power is the most primitive truism of sorcery, known in its most puerile germatom to any child smart enough to balk when a parent utters their primordial appellative. It is the same infantile misapprehension that provides a second livelihood of many a hedge witch or bone reader -- traders in philtres to stir love and poisons to prevent its consequences -- who provide amulets invoking powers no greater than of Murgatroyd or their own name writ ass-to-cock to protect the foolish in exchange for a meager tax upon their fatuousness. Such servile stupidity, self-inflicted, is naught but the basest cowardice of the mind: a crude and cringing superstition that causes man to hide the true precepts of the arcane behind barbarous names without meaning or power.

Yet you who would read on heed me thus: craven as such babbling impotence must prove, worse by far is that ignorance which presumes the power of the Name inviolable. More than one practitioner has discovered only in cruel and crimson death the remorseless Truth of that censure: “do not call up any that you cannot put down.” A greater being may be called by many Names, but so too may what had one Name be diffused in many forms. 

Why should such be so hard for the men of Rimm to grasp? Have not we ourselves been bred, blood-against-blood, into the manifold races of the kyne? Did not the callous hands of the eldrakythe rip and splice threads from out the Hundred-fold Weft of Flesh until they had the slaves they so desired? And this divergent flourishing of the flesh was wrought by the power of the gods themselves! They, the Gods of the Outer Spheres in benign charade, whom we know from our most fundamental myth appear in human permutation only by the constraint of the Sigil of Sigils! Who but a fool looks upon the serene visage of Gloon and thinks His beneficence unfeigned!? Who but an idiot is seduced to mad raptures by the white, callipygian globes of the Magna Mater, when all know that what lurks in their gleaming crevasse is naught but the Mother of--”

-Geannt of the Blood of Graey,Unfinished

    The weary, slithering creak of a floorboard, far after midnight.

    My hand stopped, quill snapping short with an abruptness that made the candle-flame falter.

...Silence.

A long minute passed, but I remained still, knuckle and feather arched over the page like a serpent coiled. It might have been innocent. After all, there are many innocent things within the universe, some of them even claiming to be sentient. But few of those walk stealthily upon the boards of a monastery in the dark-most hours of the morning, and fewer still come to silent, foreboding rest before a chamber not their own… 

No light under the door. Either they knew the monastery well, or had seen the flicker of my candle through the gap and quenched their own. And more, no whispers: good if there was one. If there were more than one, such meant training or practice, with neither boding well.

The quill slipped into the inkwell with a liquid silence, and for the breadth of an instant my emptied hand hovered over the glint of the quill-knife before shifting to pluck the pounce from its casement. Grinding the small satchel of powder and muslin in my calloused palm, I pried loose the twine with a single, crude rip of the thumb. White sand trickled loose from the packet and I inhaled deeply, tasting the dull tang of raw earth as the incantation hissed through my teeth.

“Pahaalyumedron abryca arcbya trydylabrineth gyomed auratyo kynoscuryloscuryloscurylos acroagro aqyura…”

I felt the presence of Pahaalyumedron -- “Cynosure of the Many-Ways” -- center itself upon the eye-between-my-eyes, opening the great and dormant sense-organ that flared to life upon my brow. Before this supernal vision, thin faultlines cleft the universe like scratches in glass, filling the air around me with a hundred-thousand lines of invisible potentiality. This was the Labyrinth of Pahaalyumedron, the Labyrinth of Possibility, and at that particular moment it exposed before me all the paths my projectile might take: tiny beads of unseen non-light flickered along each fault, hitting an object only to be refracted in ricochet. One by one the beads flickered outward, and as each failed the faults disappeared one by one back into the seemingly seamless universe, until only three remained. One turned me the wrong way, cornering myself. No. Another bounced off the doorframe, losing power. No. The last...

The board creaked again; a rising whine as someone gathered their weight upon it.

I rose. Spun--

--too fast. I felt the smooth sense of pressure as my arm fell into the arc Pahaalyumedron had prescribed -- and the bone-jarring twinge as my momentum carried me out again.  The pounce whipped through the air, but shuddered against the edge of the door as it crashed open in turn. I’d missed my mark, and instead of stinging my assailant between the eyes in a cloud of blinding powder, the pouch thudded dully into the chest of the man behind him.

Bloody Horn and Gash!

The first man rushed me, and I moved to counter. Dropping to a sunken crouch, I ripped the chair from the ground and thrust it toward him, one leg catching him just below the ribcage. The blow was meant to wind him, but I snarled as I felt the numb impact of wood on metal.

Who the devil sent armed men into a monastery in the middle of the thrice-forsaken night!?

I hadn’t broken the bastard’s will, but I still had reach and size; the man was a torquyne, and at a mere six feet came up only to my mid-chest. Still, I was lucky I’d dropped low enough to counter his balance with leverage, and even luckier he’d taken the brunt with his left shoulder. As he wrestled to get his right arm and short sword into range of my guts, I gave slightly -- just enough to bundle the power in my core -- and then rebounded against him, chair-legs splintering against his breastplate as he crumpled backward to crash into the man behind him.

The first assailant collapsed, creating a natural break between me and the second. Gripping the shattered remnant of the chair in both hands, I stepped wide, coiling the makeshift club over my shoulder, and--

“Stop, Gaennt of Graey.”

That. Voice.

A growl tore from my throat, but I stopped -- which is to say, stayed the momentum of the chair, though it remained poised overhead with a dark and deliberate menace. The speaker strode carelessly into the room.

Wardsman Balstor was the Head Guardsman and questionably sentient sycophant of Rorric, Greatlord Ducal of Direwatch Keep: a glowering, pugnacious bulk whose most salient professional virtues were a ruthless doggedness, a venomous and superstitious suspicion of anything he could not understand -- like the fundamentals of arithmetic -- and a refusal to let the anything so paltry as the truth get in the way of executing his directives.

Still, it would be falsehood to deny that in the past two years Balstor had grown to at least look his part. From his auburn hair and brown eyes I suspected Low-Vorse rather than Llunic ancestry, but that aside he was the epitome of the torquyne male: a brawny and broad-shouldered build, with five fingers on each hand and a palm-wide swath of hair that grew over the crest of his head and down to his mid-back. His face had entered that awkward middle stage that men among the torquyne get when their tusks have started to grow in but have yet to be visible, giving him a strong-jawed but distinctly jowlsome look. With the addition of a great, fur-trimmed red cloak and the blue-and-scarlet Blemmyae of Direwatch Keep embossed upon his breastplate, he looked imposing, self-assured, and almost capable of rudimentary conversation.

Balstor ignored the chair, only scowling at his subordinates as one guardsman hastily proffered a hand to help the other up. When he spoke, he did so without turning to face me: a tactic I’d learned to recognise as one way many a torquyne kept from having to look upward at the imposing stature of my own race, the vvarlkyne.

“Put down the chair, Gaennt. The Greatlord Rorric wants you.”

“The Greatlord Rorric wants for many things.” I responded dully, “Given his proclivities, I suggest a tincture of quicksilver.” 

Balstor frowned, his face in silhouette, and in the half-shadow his narrowed eyes and heavy cheek-line in no way alleviated the pronouncedly porcine cast of his features. A creature of crude habit, Balstor seldom understood how words spoken in flat affect could scathe by their simplicity; but if the implication of my comment had registered -- which I doubted -- the wardsman simply… ignored it.

Now, that was an evil omen.

Past experience had taught me Balstor could only reign in his inklings of disgruntled consternation -- the deep-rooted suspicion that someone was making a fool of him -- if he was deadly certain that retribution bode nigh for the instigator. Either Balstor had learned patience in the past few years, or  he was convinced in the untutored and unimaginative fundament of his soul that my head would soon embellish a bloody spike upon the walls of Direwatch Keep. And such said, a general lack of those grim portents legended to herald the Ends of the World made it plainly not the former.

I lowered the chair, loosing the tight spools of tension from my back and shoulders, before casting the wooden shards dispassionately onto the rug and shoving my naked wrists towards the guardsmen. Balstor made a sound somewhere between snort, grunt, and chuckle.

“And here I thought you might finally try resisting. Shame.”

“The worship of Umer instills due obedience to the rule of law.” I said with diplomatic reserve, “And besides, I have always presumed you to receive enough resistance in your pigsty back home.”

He understood that one. Without a word the wardsman closed the distance between us and leveled a heavy blow across my jaw. The impact shuddered through me, my head wrenched harshly to the right, but if he’d hoped for anything more he was doomed to disappointment. Clenching and unclenching his knuckles, Balstor spared me a last dark glance before turning his displeasure on his subordinates.

“Shackle the bastard. Rip this place apart. You know what we’re looking for.”

    The guardsmen approached warily. One grabbed my wrist -- trying impotently to pinch my bones in his grasp-- and with eyes unflinching fumbled to unhinge the manacles from his belt.

“Not in front, you idiots. Behind his damned back! Milk of the Rutting Mother, the bastard was a templar of Umer!” Balstor swore. The man who had my wrist froze, uncertain how to proceed, and after an awkward moment I shuffled to face the wall, both arms twisted behind my back.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I felt the bite of cold metal cut against each wrist; it is an unfortunate reality that, as my kyne -- the vvarlkyne -- comprise most of the high nobility, accoutrements of imprisonment have largely been fashioned for those of smaller stature. Not, let it be said, that we of more prominent birth are less disposed to iniquity than those below; rather, it is that our lesser transgressions are ignored, and our greater require legions rather than law-courts in repudiating.

Which begged the question of what merited such a treatment of myself...

Asking Balstor was one obvious solution, but I was loathe to give him the satisfaction of warming his pride by the campfires of others’ aberrant and unfathomable confidence in his abilities. Instead, I -- like the wardsman himself -- turned to scrutinize the actions of his guardsmen as they prowled my chambers.

I tried not to show my confusion as they did not immediately go for my books, the carefully-reconstructed tomes -- survivors of two damnable trials-- lying derelict and dumb upon the shelf.

...But I would speak falsehood  before Umer if I were to deny that an acid pang of doubt began to crawl through the recesses of my mind, fear seeping as it passed...

My first trial, for Grand Heresy and Idolatry, I will freely admit was both necessary and justly carried out -- with the sole caveat that it sowed the seeds of my later tribulations. That the lordly masters of my order -- the Knights of the Sevenfold Temple -- had practiced rites obscene and blasphemous before Umer I will never deny. For in the end, not only did I bear half-mad witness to their hideous acts, but it was my own Great Work they desecrated in their dread and demented hubris. That I was not immediately put to the sword I can only attribute to two things alone: the lingering penumbra cast by a patronym I despise, and the enlightened and truth-seeking Justice of the God.

However, my second trial -- for Promulgation of Heresy and the Practice of Necromancy -- was a prattling farce thrust upon me by the aforementioned Rorric, the Greatlord of Direwatch Keep. As a member of the Mourningcrown nobility advising the Ecclesiastic Court over the course of my first trial, Greatlord Rorric had been among the most fervent seekers of my execution. Upon my exoneration by the court, Rorric had come to the apparent belief that -- as a young nobleman, profligate whoremonger, and gambler who generally won more than he lost -- he was equal to any religious authority and thus impelled to further my prosecution on matters of a theological nature.

Fortunately for my head’s continued tenancy of my shoulders, the case proved to be a spurious and egregious travesty against procedure, politics, and Divine Providence; even the rarity of a greatlord bringing the charges could not forestall their collapse under the weight of its own pretense. When Balstor came within a hair’s-breadth of committing gross and ignorant heresy before the court itself, I might have laughed if the magnitude of the situation had not been so very grave, and the grave so very mine…

The grotesque ignoramus simply had no understanding of religion.

...Case in point...

Monastic chambers do not lend themselves to prolonged searches. After all, they are quite tellingly called “cells.” Even in the room afforded to me as a guest and devotee of Umer, the furnishings were naught but a set of low shelves; a writing desk, chair, chest, and straw mattress; and a small altar for personal devotions. Still, Balstor glared around the room, nostrils flared as if trying to root out the faintest scent of inexistent iniquity.

Or, possibly... truffles.

    The first guardsman disemboweled the mattress with two crude jabs of his sword, chaff and straw spilling over the timbers in a sagging wave. The other guard broached the chest, throwing wide the lid with a force that caused it to crack against the stones of the wall. Soon all the chamber was in stark disarray, the innards of the bed comingled with the disheveled contents of my chest: garments and cloak and other sundries specked with husks and bits of grass. I frowned at the chaos with a dry distaste -- an expression unwittingly mirrored by Balstor as the guardsman at the chest reached the bottom of the container and proceeded to pry at the base and sides in a vain inspection for false panels.

    “Nothing? You’re sure?”

    “Not a stain.”

    “What about you?” the wardsman barked, this at the man probing the straws with the toe of one boot. The guard just grimaced and shook his head in a flat negative. Balstor’s mouth warped into a sour line that twisted around his words. “Well, keep looking. Bastard must have overlooked something.”

The two men hurriedly reinvigorate their search of the room, almost fevered fingers prying at every crack and crevice the candlelight could reveal. As for Balstor, he surveyed at the coarsely-strewn remnants of my chamber with a mere condescending gracelessness before idly fishing the unfinished manuscript from my desk. He sneered down at it, creasing the parchment as he pinched it between blunt fingertips.

“What’s this shit, then?”

I looked darkly over his shoulder, weighing my words for a moment.

“...Polysyllables.” I said, uttering the word with exaggerated care.

    Against the context of his bland ignorance, this appeared to pass for an answer... until Balstor wrapped the parchment in his fist, crushing the page into a rough and ungainly mass that then tumbled blindly to the floor.

The bastard.

    “Sir!”

    Both Balstor and I started at the exclamation, wheeling just as one of the guardsman recoiled from the small altar that squatted in the corner of the room. The guard’s face was white, his finger pointing like judgement at a small alcove in the pedestal that had been hidden from view but a moment before.

    The altar was of the typical make for monastic use -- only about a foot and a half across -- but was carefully crafted to the arcane mathematical standards requisite for mere matter to serve as a Dwelling of the God. The top was perfectly triskaidecagonal, its nether edge facing outwards, with Umer’s thirteen-pointed star inlaid within the wood. An intricately graven image of the God stood within the star’s center, His figure shrouded in robes save for where His hands rapaciously clutched at the mutilated head of mankind’s last god. 

    Upon my altar in particular, the idol to Umer stood flanked by other -- and to my mind lesser -- deities: Hastur and Shub-Niggurath foremost, with smaller statuettes devoted to Tullu, Dagon, Yig and a half-dozen more. But in addition to these were two others, waxen effigies carved into the figures of the two Bznaic deities I propitiated with words of worship; the first was Pahaalyumedron -- the “Cynosure of the Many-Ways” -- and the latter was Oxylyyngahaalys the “Whispering Wound.” 

    Below the altar-top, cunningly concealed within the pedestal, was that small recess within the wood that had so unbalanced the guardsman. It had been revealed by a small catch -- almost completely hidden by one of the beveled panels -- and even amidst the dim shadows cast by the candlelight you could make out a wicked metallic gleam from what lurked within…

    I opened my mouth to object, lips curling in a sneer of vehemence -- after all, all that the irreligious idiots had found was a sactristal compartment for the storage of ritual implements -- but not an eye stirred from the scene that they credulously presumed to be unfolding.

    Hand trembling, the guardsman reached into the shadows and drew forth a knife, its edge a bright line of cruel and merciless death chiseled against the darkness. Other items followed in turn: a few bare sticks of incense, two holders in the shapes of fluted pipes, a flask of scented oil, a small chalice, and... 

...Balstor looked at the last item with a zealous enthusiasm, a greedy gleam sparking in his small, piggy eyes...

    It was little more thin swath of linen, crimped with lace at the outermost edges. Once white, the expanse was now mottled with ragged splotches of an uneven yet cruelly suggestive pink. But even more insidious than those stains was that blackened and  befouling residue of a week-old rite encrusted upon its surface. 

    A rag. That’s all it was. A knife and a bloody rag. But... what had the man said about a stain…?

    My eyes flickered to the guardsman, but his face was hidden by the heavy shadows cast by his helm as he knelt gravely by the plundered implements. Still, when he spoke, part of my eas relieved to hear his voice held the suspicious shadow of perplexity.

    “It... looks a bit old, though, doesn’t it? Especially if the--”

    “It’s enough.”

    “But the--”

    “It’s enough. Strip the damn altar and bring it with us. All of it. And don’t look at me like that! Blood and milk! Whatever this bastard is up too, heresy is the least of his sins; probably doing the gods a favor tearing this forsaken thing apart.” Balstor paused, before he chuckled grimly, “And if there’s justice in the world, we’ll finally get to see the great Gaennt of Graey torn apart as well. Just like the poor bastard he rutting gutted.”

    Murder. This time their game was murder.

    Fear, trickling below the surface of my mind, coiled itself and rebounded in a rage I could scarce contain. Even as I stilled my tongue a shuddering indignation wracked my frame, and before permitting myself even the barest shred of thought I surged abruptly to my full height. The chains shrieked in the dark, metal scathing my skin as they snapped to their limits.

    For a second my mouth churned dumbly, driven by the flushed and trembling anger that quivered in my bones, before I found the thread of my thoughts.

    “Murder. Murder? For what -- the crime of owning the most basic of ritual implements? Idle and swollen accusations of heresy and blasphemy and necromancy, fine! I will not deny the vicious and hideous sins perpetrated by other fellows of my order, or that those bereft of intellect by nature and numena could fail to distinguish them -- but this? You invade the monastery of Umer’s own, accost me in my chambers in the dead of night, and now -- grasping upon the most puerile misapprehension of reality -- you would have me executed upon feebleminded and baseless accusations of murder?”

    Once again Balstor whirled upon me,  and for the first time since his entrance his eyes met mine. What I saw therein could not have shocked me more: a writhing mix of genuine self-righteousness and undiluted horror. Whatever Balstor had seen -- whatever had prompted this imposition upon myself -- it had shaken even his base and vestigial spirituality to its core.

    He drew near to me with two even strides, and wrapping his knuckles in the front of my tunic wrenched my face awkwardly down to his level. His next words with delivered with the weight of a  commandment, but one that strained against a rasping, desperate undercurrent of fear.

“You shut your mouth, you pompous bastard!”

“You accuse me of mur--.” I hissed in reply, but before I could counter his accusation with my own, Balstor had drawn his weight backwards and -- left hand still enmeshed in my tunic to guide his fist -- lain a punch like a thunderbolt across my jaw. Already half-imbalanced by the awkward bend of my waist, the blow stumbled me and I fell sideways, the desk’s legs groaning against the floor as it was forced sideways by my collapsing form.

Balstor stood over me, and as I watched he breathed heavily, mustering his dubious self-command against the face of his own palpable terror. After a moment, he spoke, looking down at me with his affect of self-righteous disdain.

    “You are not accused of murder.” He said, his lips moving almost mechanically, numb with a stoic cold.

    “Then wh--?”

    “You stand accused,” he announced, “of human sacrifice. Upon the Feast of Azathoth.”