Black Knight - Chapter 12 (Patreon)

~[A Dark Place]~

A ‘grim’, otherwise known as a ‘church grim’, is a spiritual protector of holy places. In the language of the other nation, it is called a ‘kirchenhund’. They are divine entities that take the shape of black dogs and wander around sacred grounds such as churches and graveyards in the dead of night to keep them safe from evil spirits.

However, the Holy-Church has co-opted the term to use for their own purposes, regarding a very specific experimental group of elite soldiers, taken from their families and raised from childhood by the church itself to become weapons, because of their unique circumstances.

Once upon a time, in a faraway, distant land, lived a little girl.

She lived inside a very beautiful castle with giant, white towers of strong stone and colorful glass windows. There were fantastic gardens with exotic flowers that always smelled like warm springtime and libraries that were filled with books that never ended. The kitchens never closed, and they baked the most delicious cakes and treats in an endless supply by smiling bakers who loved their work.

But the castle had a secret.

Inside of it, hidden in a place where the bakers, the guards, and the librarians couldn’t ever see it, lived a monster.

Kaisersgrab looks around himself, throwing the sheet of paper he had caught away. The walls have all changed shape and form. Rain pours down the windows outside of the place he’s in now. A dark, regal castle surrounds him. He’s no longer in the cathedral. He’s in the house of regal nobility.

The glass and the floor shake, as thunder roars outside — a scream borne of the heavy storm, like the roar of an encroaching dragon. On the other side of the water streaked panes of glass is absolutely nothing. There is only total darkness outside of the structure, an absolute void, as if the night itself had swallowed the world.

His fingers twitch, resting on the hilt of his rapier as he walks.

“You will not fool me with your illusion,” says the man, moving forward down the long corridor, walking past many sturdy oak doors that are closed. His boots press down against the fabric. “Kreatur.”

He looks around himself, watching the area as he moves.

Something crunches beneath his boot. He looks down at the ripped out page from a book, recognizing it. He doesn’t even have to read it; he knows the words, having read them so often as a child.

The monster was a very scary thing. It ate good children and bad children. It ate their mothers, and it ate their fathers. It was so hungry that it ate everything it could ever hope to find. It ate dogs, and it ate cats. It ate books, and it ate boots. It ate houses, and it ate the mice inside of them.

One day, the girl who lives in the castle finds the monster, and it desires to eat her!

However, she is a clever girl and offers to bring as many sweets from the bakery as it wants, and as many books from the library, and as many flowers from the garden as she can carry in her arms to it in secret.

The monster agreed, but only so it could eat even more. After she brought her everything, it decided it would then eat her too.

He twists his boots, kicking the sheet of paper away to the side behind himself as he looks around the dark castle, pulling out his sword and holding it toward the darkness. “Fight me!” he yells, his voice resounding down the corridor. He looks behind himself. But there is nothing there.

— Thunder cracks outside the castle.

His voice vanishes down the long hallway, being swallowed by the blackness at the end of it that marks the end of his line of sight.

Looking to the side, Kaisersgrab grabs a door and opens it. Inside the room is a space that he recognizes. It doesn’t belong to this castle. It belongs to where he grew up. Quite frankly, it’s impossible for it to be here in the context of this illusion.

The man steps through the door in the castle corridor into what looks like a grassy patch on the edge of a forest. The rain howls, whistling in his sensitive ears, and his matted hair sticks against his nape as he observes the familiar clearing, with a familiar tree and a familiar smell in the air. It’s the smell of filth and fear.

Stuck to the largest tree at the edge of the clearing is a chain wrapped around it, and beneath its heavy links is stuck another sheet of paper, ripped from a storybook. The bark of the tree is rubbed away, something having pulled on the chain for a long time with noticeable strength.

And so the girl brought the monster cookies, and when it asked for cakes, she brought them too. She brought the monster flowers from the garden, and when it asked her to bring the gardener’s rabbit, she brought it too. She brought it books by the armfuls, and when it asked her to read one to her, she did this as well.

And the monster learned that it could consume something else. Eating a book is well and good. But if it had the book read to it before it ate the book itself, it would have even more to fill its emptiness — words, knowledge, and stories.

And so, even after the girl had brought her all of these things, the monster decided that it would not eat her yet because she would read to it books of stories and lovely poems that it could swallow.

It was not intended. The girl and the monster became friends.

However, one day, a brave knight came to the castle.

The chain rattles as something grabs him. Kaisersgrab hisses, looking down at a small boy who is wearing an iron collar around his neck and dragging the very heavy chain behind him. The man looks down at the illusion, at the copy of his own memory of himself as a boy who looks up to him in terror.

All around them is darkness.

The forest clearing offers no solstice from the darkness and cold of night. The tree, while strong, does not protect it from the wind that comes from many sides. The rain pelts. The starlight shines down in this place with an almost mocking weakness, as if the lights from the heavens above were very intent on keeping this creature here out of their glow. It’s dark.

It’s always dark. It’s always cold. It’s always hungry.

“Don’t let him eat me,” says the boy, looking up his way. His arm is covered in bite marks from a small mouth of his own.

— There is a loud slamming.

Kaisersgrab spins around, looking at the door he had come through. It is now closed. “Der Ritter!” yells the boy’s voice from behind him in fear as the man unsheathes his rapier. There’s a clinking of metal as the child runs back off to hide in the nook at the base of the tree.

Pinned to the back of the door is another page.

Everyone loved the brave knight. The bakers spoke to him and pleaded with him to find the thief who stole their hard work. The gardener begged the kind knight to find his missing rabbits. The librarians asked him to find their stolen books.

The brave knight was welcomed into the castle by everyone.

This, however, made the monster very angry and the girl very sad.

Because as long as the kind knight was there, the monster’s new friend could not bring it treats and stories. She could not visit it, even in the dead of night.

The girl lived in the castle, but she was not the princess or the queen. So this was very dangerous for her.

One night, when she was going to visit her monster friend, the kind knight caught her.

He knew that she would be very harshly punished since she was just a servant girl. However, the good knight, being an honorable man, had no choice but to fulfill his duty.

The girl was punished.

This made the monster very angry.

So it ate the knight, and then it began eating everything else.

— Screams erupt all around him, the black forest crying with wails and shrieks, as if packs of animals were crying and yelping in fear. From the base of the tree howls the boy, crying like a wolf. His back presses against the door, his hand fumbling with the bronzed handle, the sweaty fingers of his other hand holding the rapier very tightly.

The black boughs of the hundreds of trees seem closer now, their limbs appearing as if they had been bent inward around the clearing, interweaving and locking into one another like the bars of the roof of a cage over his head. He curses, the door knob rattling as he can’t quite get it to do what he wants.

— Thunder cracks.

Kaisersgrab lets out a terrified scream, spinning around and grabbing the handle with both hands, tearing the door open again, only to look at the blank wall on the other side, on which is pinned the next chapter.

It ate the bakers and their ovens. It ate the gardener and his trees. It ate the librarians and their shelves. It ate the colorful glass of the castle, and it ate its bright, polished stone. It ate the king, and it ate the queen. It ate the princess, and it ate the prince. It ate all of the little boys, and then all of the little girls, and then it ate their mothers, and then it ate their fathers.

The angry monster ate and ate and ate, and it never felt full.

Because it still has not gotten what it wants most.

So now, with the castle gone, the monster roams the world, eating more and more until it has everything.

And that includes…

- You.

He’s drenched in sweat and rain, his wide, paranoid eyes staring at the wall. His body freezes, the hairs on his neck standing on end, as his sensitive hearing picks up the sound of rattling metal in the distance. It sounds at first only like the rustling of the leaves in the storm. However, it grows louder and louder, grinding, gnashing — like teeth. The grinding of his own teeth sends a signal of pain to his throbbing head.

Kaisersgrab spins, lunging toward the encroaching thing with his rapier, the blade cresting onward like the point of a spear as he drives it straight into…

— Nothing.

The man’s outstretched arm maintains composure; however, the shaking tip of the long blade that is pressed out into the imaginary heart of an enemy who is not there betrays his fear.

This was his fault. He got too impatient with the mission. He saw an opportunity and took it; however, he should have listened to the high-priest’s plan to lure the girl out of the city and stuck to it instead of coming inside himself.

“THIS ISN’T REAL!” screams Kaisersgrab at the darkness, his voice swallowed by the storm.

“I am,” says a voice from behind him.

Kaisersgrab screams, his eyes flashing yellow, the darkness falling over him. A piece of paper floats through the air, drenched by rainwater.

________________________________

~[Acacia]~

“We have to run!” yells the familiar priestess over her shoulder, dragging Acacia behind her as they go down the street, the pouring rain hammering down all around them.

“Why are you helping me?” asks Acacia as they go. She looks back over her shoulder toward the cathedral, it’s totally dark inside. However, some silhouettes have made it out and are in distant pursuit of them. “This way!” says Acacia, dragging the woman who was already dragging her sharply in another direction.

“We mustn’t stop!” insists the priestess as Acacia hammers on a door. “We are in grave danger!” she argues, looking back behind them. “We can’t hide here!” explains the priestess. “That man from the east, he’s -!”

“- I know,” says Acacia, interrupting her. “A lycanthrope.” The door rattles on the other side. “He’s a grim. A hound of the church.”

“You must know, then,” says the priestess. “Sir Knight is strong, but…”

The Holy-Church has a dark secret whispered about in the romantic stories of noble courts. That is, they capture and take young children who were infected with lycanthropy — the werewolf disease — below a certain age and train them to be indoctrinated zealots in a radical and extremely cruel program.

Soft light greets them as a tired boy stands on the other side of the door, looking their way in confusion and rubbing his eyes. It’s the vildt boy, Mietze. They’re at the Tatze Teahouse.

“This is an emergency,” says Acacia, looking at him. “I must speak with the owner immediately.”

— Off in the nearby distance, something howls in a tone so deep that the glass windows of the shop and the houses all around the street rattle and shake before the coming crack of thunder.