Jeremiah’s Story
Jeremiah woke in the pitch black of night to hands crushing his throat. He clawed, doing anything he could to budge his assailant — but he was still a lanky 14 year old boy, his nascent strength eclipsed by the fully grown man above him.
White spots exploding in his vision, his flailing accomplished nothing. Jeremiah shoved his hand under his pillow — there! He grasped the handle of the small dagger his father had given him and plunged it into his attacker’s chest. Jeremiah’s would-be-murderer jolted off him and soon the room filled with agonized sounds — one man dying, the other gasping for air through a throat afire.
After a minute, Jeremiah realized he could hear screams from the village — screams of terror and others that sounded feral, insane. It appeared the violent nightmares people had experienced the past few weeks just got much, much worse.
Jeremiah stumbled out of his bed and into his parent’s room. “Ma? Da?” he rasped, voice crackling in pain.
He shook his Ma over and over again, calling her name, before realizing she, too, was dead.
Fear gripped Jeremiah’s chest — his mother dead, but where was his father? A sudden, horrifying possibility washed over him, and he ran to check the body of his attacker.
Oh.
Jeremiah rushed to the front door of his home. The screams had quieted, apparently because everyone was dead or dying. He stood on his porch, aghast at the scene before him — doors and windows smashed, bodies of the villagers, people he had grown up with, littered the streets. The inn, newly built, engulfed in flames. James Cooper gave a battle roar as he charged into the burning building, his old military saber slicing at imagined foes. His screams lasted longest of all, until the only sound left was that of flames licking timber.
Why? First people blacking out, waking to describe horrific, violent nightmares. Then three people disappeared within days of each other, and now this — an entire village gone mad. Except Jeremiah. Why not him?
Because you’ve always been able to see Beyond, Son. Words of Jeremiah’s Da. His father, dead by Jeremiah’s own hand. He collapsed on the porch, breath coming in ragged gasps, panic threatening to overwhelm him.
Breathe, Son.
Jeremiah forced himself to sit cross-legged, back straight. He drew shaking breaths deep and slow into his belly, as his father taught him whenever another panic attack hit. He continued doing so, forcing his thoughts to focus only on his breathing. It took far longer than normal, as his mind continually threatened to spin into a hurricane and leave Jeremiah in a puddle of self-pity and fear.
Breathe-in-3-4, breathe-out-3-4.
Breathe-in-3-4, breathe-out-3-4.
Eventually Jeremiah managed to descend into the stillness at the center of the hurricane. It still raged at the edge of his consciousness, but his soul calmed, his mind spread out to observe, but not react to the scene around him.
What was that? A tugging, a wrongness, emanated from the north of the village. Jeremiah cocked his head, intrigued. Weeks ago, when their troubles first started, he’d sensed a wrongness near the cemetery, like something was missing. Jeremiah had tried to find the source, but soon the wrongness had clung to every person in the village, a mist none of them could shake. Did that tugging mean someone was yet alive?
He grabbed a lantern and his dagger, following the sensation until he arrived at old Bert’s hovel. Bert himself was dead, his face a rictus of fear and agony, his ragged clothing torn to shreds — by his own hands, it appeared. The wrongness emanated from beneath his woodpile.
Tossing the wood aside, Jeremiah dug at the loose-packed soil beneath until he found a rough-hewn box. It was filled with trinkets — rings and necklaces with grime and even decaying flesh still clinging to them.
“Oh Bert, what have you done?” Jeremiah whispered. None of the baubles were particularly valuable, but if sold in the Imperium a few miles south, they could fetch enough to stave off starvation for a few more weeks. Jeremiah hadn’t realized how desperate Bert’s situation had become.
One trinket stood out. A skull-shaped talisman made of pewter, with red stone eyes that appeared to glow in the faint light. Bert had probably assumed they were rubies or some other valuable stone. Jeremiah wasn’t sure about that, but he was sure this was the source of the wrongness.
He picked up the talisman and Bert’s shovel, hurrying toward the cemetery, letting instinct guide him. Jeremiah took a few steps into the grounds before calming himself once again, stretching his senses out. He walked slowly, following the gentle tug of yearning until he reached a grave with a broken headstone, its earth recently disturbed. Jeremiah pulled out his shovel and dug until he hit the broken casket. He brushed away the dirt from the hole Bert had hacked into the rotting casket lid and placed the talisman back into the broken finger bones of the skeleton below. Instantly, Jeremiah felt a release, like a sigh of relief in the atmosphere.
Jeremiah sat at the edge of the grave, stilling his soul and questing his senses to confirm that the wrongness he’d felt throughout the village for weeks was indeed gone. He re-covered the grave, removing the headstone so that over time no one would ever know there was even a grave to disturb.
As Jeremiah tamped down the loose earth with his feet, he grunted in dissatisfaction. The “wrongness.” “Seeing Beyond.” The words were correct, but insufficient. If he’d known the right words, the right actions, he could have fixed things before his entire village, his parents, had been eradicated.
Jeremiah didn’t know the right words, but he knew who did — the Slayers. Guardians of the mystic arts, and guardians from mystic threats.
– – – –
“Brother Jeremiah.”
The voice pulled Jeremiah from his memory as if through a layer of cool, crisp water. He blinked and returned his roving soul to the present: a simple, wood-paneled room where he sat seated on a woven mat. It had been years since he’d revisited the events that had brought him here. His lips quirked a sad smile at the memory of himself as a child, a child now 30 years dead.
Brother Theodore stood in the doorway. “I apologize for interrupting your meditations, Brother Jeremiah, but Guildmaster Rayne has an urgent request, one that I think will take a more experienced Slayer.”
“I understand. Come, explain the job to me on the way to my quarters,” Jeremiah replied as he rose to his feet.
The Slayers and the Guilds had no love for one another — but the ripping of the Undershade at the Scarlet Fields unleashed mystic forces that no group could handle on their own. So the Slayers and Guilds worked together to eliminate mystic threats. For now.
