…the poetry of their wicked kind, fallen and dethroned whistled down the mountain from Hinterpass down to the Old Baily, lost like a speck behind them. For Prentice Dolphin had a fair view of their progress from the safety of the rear of the column.
Forest, dark, ice-crowned in wintergreen, spread out to the south. Behind them, to the east, was the Old Baily. To the north loomed the craggy faces of wind scoured mountains. To the west, winding around these mountains, marched the titan skeletons in icy rows. The rode was a slick, rocky bed, snow hundreds of feet deep to the west, rocks grinning to the east above the moaning steel of the titans. Legend had it that these steely sentinels, their metallic frames shivering with the rushing wind-song, like naked trees of steel, once pulsed with devilish life in service to the sinister fiends who had ruled the followers of Christ like an army of Pontius Pilots in service to their Mammon Caesar.
All life was sorrowful for the Christian soul in those long nights of profane darkness, in an age of towering Babels, when sin was good and goodness was sin. He stopped to count upon his rosary, looked up at the moaning steel monstrosity made in vaguely human form, as it dirged mournfully, and as he leaned on his crook, the dolphin bearing The Blessed Mother whirling upon is wheel, he spoke in the tones of exorcism:
“Lo, in the Twenty-nine-hundredth-sixty-first Year of Our Lord and Savior, I confirm your banishment and the plague upon your master’s kind—not to rise in wicked service ever again. Amen.”
The men had stopped and listened, silent in their ranks. As they moved off again at a nod from the Elder Pikeman, the young crossbowman inquired, “Father, why name this year and not the year of God’s Plague?”
He thought little and spoke from his rote soliloquys, “God willed his cleansing of the wicked through alchemical works of Prenticeship. Though it were the founders of the Order, to which I belong as a servant of Christ under the Blessings of His Virgin Mother, the fathers of Our order have never agreed on a precise dating of the alchemical scourge unleashed in the name of Almighty God, Lord of Hosts. Some hold that it was in Twenty-seven-sixteen. These are the Seveners, who maintain the reliquaries at Vester Cathedral. There are three dissenting alchemical schools of thought. Hence, it has been judged by a council of papal legates, advised by the cardinals and bishops, headed by the Pontiff himself, that confirmation of the baptism of evil by the founders of our order, is to be addressed to the earthly remains of heathen relics and other such monstrous manifestations of evil as these moaning shades of steel. Likewise, reconfirmation is to be showered upon the graves—if any—the likenesses—if any— and, God forbid any of the Rendel kin who survived the initial plague to stalk as fiends in the waste places. It was this monstrous manifestation that brought into being your military branch of the order in Twenty-seven-twenty-one, to the glory of God.
The young soldier nodded, dumbly and they continued their trudge, Prentice Dolphin wondering after Justice Claret and his knights, seeing no sign of the passage of horses.
…
Just after High Noon a barking was heard up ahead where a figure of some stature, womanly in form, was surrounded at the mouth of a large cave by a pack of what seemed wolves. As they neared it was plain, that the barren mountainside, covered in snow, was a sheep pasture, and that said flock resided under snowy skies in a large cave complex, bleating and feeding upon stacked hay. The shepherdess was a large woman with light red wool upon her head, her skin browned from the sunrays of these waste places, who stood haughty before the cave. He noted that a hut was built in the eve of this cave and that the many large, wolf-like hounds obeyed this woman like she were their very deity.
‘A witch I wonder?’
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