Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Day and Night (07/10/14)
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TITLE: Fiend no longer | Previous Challenge Entry
By Gregory Kane
07/17/14 -
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My knees buckled under the weight of my adversary, yet I succeeded in rolling to one side, freely myself from his lethal grasp. Grabbing up my torch from where it had fallen, I thrust the full force of its brilliance in the face of my foe. Accustomed to darkness, I saw him flinch and fall back a single step. "I adjure you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost!" This time the retreat was more pronounced. The fiend glanced behind as if anticipating flight. But then, just as quickly, he regained his courage.
“Welcome the embrace of death,” he whispered. “No more sorrow, monk. No more heartache, no more loss.” His words were a mockery of the holiest tenets of my faith. I should have struck without hesitation, but instead the vanity of my own intellect mulled over a fitting retort. My eyes locked with his and at once I was lost. Resolve drained away, my tongue dried up, I could not move. With a smile devoid of any humanity, the fiend stepped forward, fangs gleaming in the faint moonlight, hunger demanding to be sated.
From out of the darkness, the chapel bell tolled and the spell wavered. I did not pause to consider why the bell should peal so at this ungodly hour. Instead I scurried backwards, hunting desperately for anything I might use as a weapon. There, half hidden by the dust and cobwebs was a long wooden pole, perhaps once used to pull down tomes from the highest shelf. Lifting it up and feeling its weight, I hefted it through the air and watched as it struck the vampyre in its chest. A shout of terror filled the air and spilled out to echo down the marble stairs. I continued to watch as slowly the fiend's flesh melted away and its bones crumbled to dust. Cinis in cinerem, pulvis in pulverem.
It took me some time to find the chapel. Fallen masonry had blocked the main route and I had had to proceed by the servants' quarters. I entered to find the chamber lit by the soft glow of an oil lamp. A figure sat hunched by the altar, his sobs barely perceptible. As I approached, I laid a hand on his shoulder, hoping to offer the fellow some word of consolation in his obvious distress. God may have appointed me a hunter of the undead, but he had first and foremost called me to serve him as a priest.
Yet moments later, I felt the blood drain from my face as yellow eyes gazed up at me in supplication. Acting on pure instinct, I pulled my crucifix from round my neck and held it two inches from the fanged face of this fresh fiend. Only then, to my great surprise, did I notice he too wore a cross dangling by his breast.
"Have you come to slay me or save me, brother?"
My mind reeled at the implications of this question. Was this ungodly creature purporting to be a Christian? How could a servant of Satan wear the Saviour's seal around his neck? It was unthinkable.
"You confess Jesus?" I asked. "How is that even possible?"
"I believed ere I was turned. And I believe still. Though my soul fears that it is damned. Can the undead drink of eternal life?"
I admitted that I had no answer to his pressing need. In the minutes before dawn, I knelt by him, my own neck bowed in prayer, vulnerable to the vampyre's bite yet confident of a higher outcome. Then we parted with an embrace, he into the hidden shadows, I into the beckoning morn. Fiend no longer but friend.
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Well done.
God bless~