<i>“Back then we used to set the chosen ones on fire/ You really think God only sent a single messiah?” -Ill Bill featuring Immortal Technique, “War is my Destiny”<br/>
<br/>
“I rise before thee, Queen/ to feed our lusts on the blood of the weak/ To rule heaven and worlds crawling beneath/ Satanic Tyranny…” -Cradle of Filth, “Queen of Winter, Throned”<br/>
<br/>
“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” -Samuel Johnson</i><br/><br/><br/>The Grand Justiciar was unprepared for what she saw on the old woman’s face.<br/><br/>The High Inquisitor had sat in command of the Blackshields for almost a century. Already a crone by the time she had donned the sable and ermine robes of her office, her vitality had not waned in the years since she assumed the Inquisitorial cathedra. Indeed, it seemed to Grand Justiciar Maliora Witchfoe, who had gone from a sixteen year old novitiate to entering her fifth decade under the reign of the old woman, that the High Inquistor had only grown stronger, more vital, as well as wiser, as she edged toward two centuries of life.<br/><br/>But tonight, Maliora saw, for the first time in her life, the years truly settle on High Inquisitor Arkimandras. The old woman looked tired, broken down, and worst of all, afraid.<br/><br/>The day had not seemed out of the ordinary to Maliora until she had been called into the old woman’s solarium. The usual administrative pedantry, the signing of death warrants, the hearing of the accused, the dispatchings of units of cataphracti to investigate tales of illegal sorcery in little mud-hut villages all over the empire. It could have been any day.<br/><br/>Until the summons.<br/><br/>Maliora had answered it immediately- one did not keep the High Inquisitor waiting- and was let into the crone’s chambers by the silent guardsmen who stood flanking the heavy oaken door. Maliora knew both of the young men since their entry into the order of the Blackshields, and she had felt both pride and a touch of sadness when they gave up their tongues in the bloody oath all guards of the High Inquisitor must take. Alone among the men and women of the order, the guards of the High Inquistor are privy to the old woman’s innermost thoughts and moments. While all of the sub-orders and cabals of the Blackshields had their own mottos, the guards of the High Inquistor were the only ones with words so easily twisted into contorted shapes, and yet so difficult to pin down the actual intended meaning.<br/><br/>“No name is a secret. No secret is a name.”<br/><br/>Or was it “No-name is a secret. No-secret is a name”?<br/><br/>There were mysteries even the Grand Justiciar was denied.<br/><br/>Stepping into the dimly lit room, Maliora heard the heavy door click closed behind her. She saw High Inquisitor Arkimandras sitting at her high, lectern-like desk, her long brown hands flipping through some ancient tome, her worn, dried-apple face screwed up in uneasy concentration.<br/><br/>Maliora did not speak. The High Inquisitor would address her in due course.<br/><br/>There was another minute or two of frenzied page turning before Arkimandras turned on her stool and fixed her deep brown eyes on Maliora. That was when the Grand Justiciar first saw the fear. The weariness.<br/><br/>“Maliora.” Arkimandras said. “Thank you for coming.”<br/><br/>“I am always at your command, my lady.”<br/><br/>Arkimandras smiled weakly. It made the fear in her eyes worse. “We… I… no. No. Let me try again. Maliora, something has happened. We are in danger.”<br/><br/>Maliora’s hand went for the hilt of the tulwar on her belt. Pure warrior instinct. “Danger? Where? What do you mean?”<br/><br/>“Relax your sword arm, cataphract. I am not sure this can be so easily slain. Come here.” The old woman waved Maliora over, and the Grand Justiciar dutifully crossed the room, the clanking of her sabatons muffled by the thick rug.<br/><br/>Looking back to her book, which to Maliora seemed a gobbledygook of indecipherable symbols, Arkimandras drew in a breath, and then spoke slowly.<br/><br/>“Did you see the prisoners brought in three days past, from the Aberfal raids?”<br/><br/>Maliora nodded. “I did not process them myself, my lady, but I watched them enter.”<br/><br/>“Tell me… did any stand out to you?”<br/><br/>Maliora was about to say no, to shake her head, but then realized that it would have been untrue.<br/><br/>“Yes, actually. A-“<br/><br/>“A youth. I’d wager he was not yet twenty? Big lad. Broad shoulders. I’d guess nine spans tall? Probably weighs more than twenty stone.”<br/><br/>Maliora felt her bowels turn to ice water, but nodded slowly. “Black hair, shaved high around his head except for a long lock at the top, worn back in a braid. Barbarian looking lad.” She said.<br/><br/>“A steppe nomad, as far as I can tell. Fair skinned. He’s missing a chunk of his ear, probably a mark of criminality among his people. Fresh scar from his mouth to just  beneath the corner of his eye.” Arkimandras said.”The other prisoners have started calling him ‘the Grin’ because of it.”<br/><br/>“How do you know that?” Maliora asked. Her hand was again slipping around the hilt of her weapon.<br/><br/>Arikamndras smiled bitterly. “I dreamed of him. Then I went and looked at him. There’s no mistake.”<br/><br/>“If he was brought in on the raids, he’s at the very least a lesser Talent, if not necessarily a trained Adeptus. He looks savage, true, but perhaps he could be quite a skilled sorcerer. He could be trying to influence us.”<br/><br/>Arkimandras shrugged her bony shoulders. “Maybe.”<br/><br/>“You are not convinced.”<br/><br/>“I cannot afford to be. Do you know what the most frustrating part of prophecy is, Maliora?”<br/><br/>The Grand Justiciar shook her head.<br/><br/>“Prophecy attempts to show us the future, but it is by its nature flawed. The beings of the aether- gods and daemons, spirits and less recognizable things-  they don’t speak in poetry, Maliora. They speak in images and impressions. We who can hear them write the poetry, formulate the religions  around these images and feelings. The gods don’t speak simply because they cannot. They don’t speak because it is beneath them. Words are for lesser beings.”<br/><br/>The cold feeling in Maliora’s stomach was not warming as the crone continued to talk.<br/><br/>“So when I say that this boy, this steppe barbarian with some minor natural Talent may be one spoken of in prophecy, I need you to understand that we mortals make the prophecy. We take the pure and untainted energy of the aether and break it into the crudeness of language.”<br/><br/>Maliora set her jaw. “What prophecy?”<br/><br/>Arkimandras laughed bitterly and gestured not just to the book in front of her but to all the grimoires in the many bookshelves.<br/><br/>“Pick one.” She said. “As I said, we make the prophecy. We take the gods music and add the lyrics, child. This young man….”<br/><br/>Arkimandras rubbed her temples with long, bony fingers. “... he is a hub. He is a point on which the world will rotate and what happens to him in the next few hours will determine just what that means. For all of us. He has joined the great cosmic mummer’s farce, Maliora, and I believe it will be our actions that determine which costume he dons and which role he plays when he steps onto the stage.”<br/><br/>“This… frightens you, my lady.” It was not a question.<br/><br/>Arikamndras nodded. “Maliora, I have always been possessed of fortune’s gifts. I have always been One Who Sees. I would not be High<br/>Inquisitor otherwise. I have seen thousands of things that might have been, save for a slight altering of course. But I tell you, old friend, today I looked into that barbarian’s blue eyes and all I saw was a block of marble, and every artist who approached it promised only to carve out atrocity. I am not frightened of god, daemon, or warlock, but Maliora, that boy down in the gaol does not simply frighten me.”<br/><br/>The old woman drew in a ragged breath.<br/><br/>“He appalls me. In a way I have no words for.”<br/><br/>“Then he must die.” Maliora said, her own fear at least slightly abated by the surety of the duties of her post asserting themselves.<br/><br/>“He must.” Arkimandras agreed. “But I ask you, little sister, which path does his death put him- and us- upon? He has been Chosen, but he has not yet been called…”<br/><br/><br/><br/>———————————————————-<br/><br/>Even underground, the young man they called Grin- a name he hated and would not tolerate to hear- felt the tugging.<br/><br/>He had always felt it, to some degree. There was always an awareness, a lingering shadow in the corner of his eye, that told him there was something more. His grandmother, a wise knuckle-woman of his tribe, had a touch of it as well, and she would often say that it all originated at a point at the very back of your head. That was where the spirits slipped in and out of the world, and you could never turn and see it, no matter how fast you moved, for what man can see the back of his own head anymore than he can bite his own teeth? To accomplish it would break you, mind or body, or both.<br/><br/>But he felt it. Always had.<br/><br/>They’d sold him, he knew. He had not been among his own people for two years, but still he had thought the people he had gathered around himself to be safe. Thought them friends.<br/><br/>He had been wrong. They had sold him to the Blackshields as a warlock, and Ferrox- Grin- knew it was because of the tugging.<br/><br/>Because of that little point of unseeable light at the back of his head.<br/><br/>Handed over to the witch-hunters, and he never having so much as cast a spell.<br/><br/>The gaol reeked, of piss and shit and blood and bile. He sat in the dirty rushes of his cell, aware without being told that the bars were not simple smith-forged things but ensorcelled cold iron meant to weaken and dispel other magics.<br/><br/>Not that Ferrox Thrune could conjure up a blast of melting fire or turn to mist and slip through the bars anyway. He had committed crimes, to be sure, but they were the honest crimes of a steppe horseman, of a reaver and raider, of a thief and murderer, not of a witch-man.<br/><br/>That he would die in this gaol, or perhaps on the stake or at the end of a rope seemed very likely to the big young man with the scarred face and the notched ear.<br/><br/>That troubled him.<br/><br/>He had been raised to not fear death, but like all men of his people, there were only two good deaths amid all the deaths a man might earn. To die proud and strong in battle atop a mound of enemy corpses, or to die rich and fat in your bed surrounded by wives half your age.<br/><br/>To be hanged by outlanders at eighteen, before any deeds were accomplished, and then simply for being capable of a crime was ignoble. He would not enter the halls of his fathers like this. The steel-shod woman with the icy blonde hair and the eyes of a fanatic, who had overseen the sad procession of prisoners into this fortress, she would make certain of that.<br/><br/>It was that thought that made him reach for the tugging. The fear, not of dying, but of being denied a good death.<br/><br/>That wasn’t the only reason he did not want to die of course.<br/><br/>The fear was there, but it was a brittle shadow compared to the rage.<br/><br/>So he reached. Reached out with his mind, with his soul, trying to form either into a grasping claw that could tear open whatever it was that held back the great tugging.<br/><br/>It did not matter to Ferrox Thrune what may dwell beyond. What might have been responsible for the tugging.<br/><br/>Simply reaching them was all that mattered now.<br/><br/>There were no candles anointed with sacred oil. No shining daggers or gaily painted wands. No symbols or signs drawn in the air in fluttering green witch-fire. There were no intoned chants or barbarous invocations.<br/><br/>There was fear, and rage, and will, forming their own silent sorcerer’s triangle amid the shit, piss, and blood of the gaol. The enchantments on the cell bars burned, but in his mind, Ferrox threw his whole great mass against it anyway.<br/><br/>They would be coming soon, he somehow knew. The blonde woman in the armor and another, far older, far more mighty in magic. He had to escape.<br/><br/>He had only his three weapons.<br/><br/>Fear, rage, and will.<br/><br/>Ferrox Thrune let out silent bellow of hatred to whatever lurked on the other side of a veil so implacable and unyielding, and yet so very thin.