It was a harsh landscape with the bony spine of the world breaking through the dirt. I stumbled falling to my knees, sharp rock sliced easily through material and skin. I was alone in the fog and silence, clumsily making my way down into the canyons.
In a world full of ugliness, cruelty and war I had seen the magic that exists on the opposite side of now. I have seen the glory of angels. My most precious possession the feather I picked up from the battlefield. I felt it was an invitation, a calling card of sorts, entry to another world.
They had all fallen around me laying in the blood churned mud, my brothers with whom I shared the warrior’s code. A code we held too that gave a semblance of honour to our brutality, to the savagery with which we hacked at other living souls at the whims of our masters. As arrows and axes took their lives, our circle was broken. Honour becomes nothing when your brothers are hacked like pigs at a slaughterhouse.
Amidst the horror I found a glory. A coruscating light that flowed over the slaughtered remains, leaving behind a sense of peace and emptiness and a single shimmering feather. I was never a religious man I was too grounded in the ordinary sins of the world, the everyday lusts and laxity. In that moment my life changed. I dropped my sword and walked away from the battlefield.
I walked endlessly out of the darkness following the ichors’ of wounded souls, those gathered up and taken home. I needed to find my home. The place I could stop, take a stand and turn my world around. I stumbled down the mountain to the canyons below. My mind drifted, losing itself in the memories of horrors. Shimmering light before me stopped me in my tracks. Around me an illimitable voice challenged my pursuit dragging from me my innermost response, the reason I had walked away from my life
I am the Speaker for the Dead.
