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Sunless sea soulless9/18/2023 ![]() ![]() Living things, and things worked by living things, leave footprints in the deadworld. You may recognize something of the monuments of the living world in them-here, Carcassone, there, Osaka, beyond, Tulum… visions and memories shape us and them alike. They partake of the fortresses of the other peoples, for they are part of our number, as I have said. They are not altogether European, it is true. The Five Castle-Cities are, as you see now-distance means nothing here, we move as a thought!-each a great and strange castle, built in the fashion of centuries that are alien to you. Even in this strange endless dark we inhabit, there should be many more of us, should there not? But it is only in the Five Castle-Cities of the Pale that there are crowds of the dead. When gathered in the citadels of the Pale, we seem many, but consider: The dead far outnumber the living. ![]() Some famous or infamous, most like myself, simple and ordinary… death takes all, and this world harbors a legion. I died in what you would call the “ninth century of our Lord.” When we look upon the dark civilization of the dead, I see the incredible grandeur of the fifteenth century!Īll the family of man-even your folk, sir-are among us. ![]() If it be any consolation, know this: The shadowscape you behold is, to me, as a wonderland of the far future might be to you. Each man and maiden thinks well of his own generation, no matter his disputes with them, and imagines them the pinnacle of history. I will grant, good my lord, that it is not as you had hoped or expected, and I will not gainsay you your dismay. When I returned to myself, in this otherness of death, I was pleased to find that so much seemed familiar. I have no grave but the bellies of the ravens who fed on us that afternoon. The battle had no name and is forgotten but for crumbling pages in an old monastery’s records. My face was half buried in sheep droppings when the mass of men roved over the place where I lay, and I was trampled to death. My world narrowed to pain and fear as I fell. His mouth opened in a scream I could not hear, for all around me was noise and disarray.Ī younger boy than myself, who looked very frightened, stabbed under my leather shirt and into my groin. I saw my spear drive under a man’s collar and felt the shock of the spear-point punching through his flesh. The knights commanded us to fight the neighboring peasants, in their pot helmets and leather shirts, and thus did two forests of sharp wood meet. It was a cool morning in late spring the grass was wet and my feet hurt. The Baron wished to settle a dispute with another noble, and so we met that other worthy’s forces in a green meadow dotted with sheep dung. I was given a hammered pot for a helmet, a leather shirt, a long wooden spear and a cooking knife, and I marched with the others to the neighboring village’s lands. Our liege’s liege, the Baron, called him to give service when the war season came, and he in turn demanded that we take up arms. My family and I were farmers we grew mostly barley, with a little plot of aubergines and leeks and a few geese and chickens. When I died, I was a levy in the service of a landed peer a knight baronet, you would call him. Fear not, for in time you will come to see your new roads become old tracks. A few stones overgrown by the forest remain, not far away from one of your motorways. You would not have found my home on your maps… you are of a later time, my lord, and in the thousand years that separate our deaths, my kith and kin were destroyed utterly by plague and famine. I never beheld the Duke himself, nor any of his sons or brothers. I am Gaucelmus of the village of Saint Therese, which was once proudly part of the Duchy of Burgundy. ![]()
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