Eric Guindon Writes

This is a draft scene for Velkin. A late addition that actually precedes the others I’d written for him. Enjoy!

Velkin was obsessed. He had heard the words and they had clearly been from the mad god Morvru. The breaker of chains had been busy that day, speaking to a dozen mortals as he gave them each one of the stolen relics he had acquired. Each one was presented in private, each ceremony a secret, and it was Velkin’s gift to hear secrets, ironically given him by Morvru in what had seemed a curse at the time. Since then, for more than a week, he had been trying his best to prepare to head out of his current confinement, but things had not so far gone as he wished.
The first artifact he would seek would be the one given to the young girl in Fount. He knew it had to be Fount. He had gone over the conversation in his head over and over, and he could not be mistaken.
“I will drink Sunden Upsal’s blood and piss poison for his sister to drink.” The girl had said. “I will kill them all and dance on their graves until my legs cannot stand anymore; then, I will dance on my hands.”
The name was familiar to Velkin. He had lived in Fount before, and the Upsals were an Agaran crime family there and likely still were.
This business with Morvru stealing the divine artifacts of all the gods and distributing them had to mean big things were afoot and Velkin intended to be a part of it. Surely, he was meant to be involved. Why else would the god have cursed him those years ago with exactly the means to become involved now.
Surely there had to be meaning there. Surely.
If there was then a decade of confusion and madness would not have been for nothing.
The priesthood of the god, who had taken in him when he had lost his mind were loath to release him. He had met with the abbess in charge and it had not gone as he had hoped.
“You know me to be fully recovered,” he had told the crone.
She looked like a scarecrow dressed up to play the part of abbess, but her clear green eyes told that she was very much still vital and clear-headed despite her years and the state of her body. “You think so, eh?” she asked, tapping him with her cane as though to sound him out.
“Does not the fact that I can ask to leave very much prove it?” He asked.
“Seems to me you think your babbling incoherence was all that was keeping you here. We take care of the mad of all stripes here, Velkin.”
“You think me mad still? Of another illness?”
“Aren’t you? What is it you think you’ll do out there? You have room and board here, free of charge; no one expects you to do any work, and you’re practically venerated, but you want to leave? Is that not madness? What awaits you out there, boy?” To the old woman, all men were boys since she was senior to all but the most aged.
She was not altogether wrong that he had a good life here at the mad god’s abbey, but it was not the life he thought he wanted. Before he could answer she spoke again, “Not to be mentioning your other perks you have been acquiring, playing blackmailer and getting lessons in the thaum with those fools Brothers Welkir and Bressenth. You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing? You have it good here, Velkin, why ruin such a thing?”
At the time he had no good answer and had let Abbess Moondark bully him into staying and letting the matter drop but now, more than a week later he confronted her again.
“I need to leave, your Holiness,” he reaffirmed when he managed to get an audience with her.
“This again, boy?” She asked. “What has changed from last time?”
“Nothing has changed but I know why I must leave,” he told her. “I know the reason now.”
“Well, out with it, then.”
“I am destined for more than this,” he said.
She laughed, a cackle that had little of delight to it and a lot of contempt. When she finished, she laughed again, wiped her tears and managed to sober herself again at last. “No. Velkin, you claim to be free of madness and ready to return to the world? What’s this, then, if not delusion? And is that not madness?”
She dismissed him, and he spent another week making preparations, expecting to have to run away. During this time he gathered supplies for a journey to Fount, which thankfully was not so far away from the abbey, lying no more than a week’s journey north. He continued to extort coin from those fools Bressenth and Welkir and stockpiling some thaum for taking away from him. Welkir was his teacher in its use, and although Velkin had surpassed the man in the art of its use, he still continued his lessons because they came with a steady supply of the drug, which was rather valuable. During these recent lessons, Velkin had begun using only a small portion of what he was given for use in the teaching and pocketed the rest for his eventual journey.
All the while, events in the world unfolded, and he could not even leave the gilded cage that had been his home for a decade—not easily anyway.
The abbey was constructed like an old castle with a wall surrounding and, given its often dangerous patients, its inhabitants were guarded like prisoners, though venerated ones, for they had been touched by their god.
It was during mass one morning near the end of this third week since the god had sown chaos into the world that Velkin finally understood how he would manage to leave. The priest giving the sermon that day, Spooner, had told them the story of Elgers, a poor farmer unable to pay his taxes to his lord. Elgers, who had always denied the lord’s sovereignty over his land, had refused to beg forgiveness and refused to pay even what meagre wheat he managed to harvest. He was imprisoned three times and three times managed to escape the lord’s jail. When he was next captured and asked how he performed the escapes, he said simply that his god was not just the god of madness, which so many thought of him as exclusively, but also the god of freedom and chaos and that his god looked after him. The lord, not one to take such things lightly, made failure to pay taxes a capital offence and had the man executed, but the point of the passage stayed with Velkin, and again, he demanded an audience with Moondark.
The next day, she agreed to see him in her garden, where she grew a variety of plants known for their psychoactive properties. When he was brought in, she looked up from her pruning and asked him what he wanted with some impatience. “I have little time for fools that are not entertaining.”
“I wish to leave,” he told her for the third time.
“And I have yet to hear why you should be allowed to leave,” she countered.
This time Velkin had the perfect answer prepared. “I will leave because I wish it and our god is the god of freedom.”
The old abbess smiled her toothless smile. “Is that so?”
“I insist that I be let to leave,” he demanded.
Moondark nodded. “Very well. You are free to go, then Velkin, but I still think it madness.”
“I would not expect any different from you, your Holiness,” he said then turned to leave but paused at the door out of the greenhouse. “Is Moondark the name you were given at birth?” He asked having long wondered.
“Don’t be stupid,” was the only answer she gave.