Gamliel

Now I want you to know that I came to no harm, no physical harm that is. My body bears no scars of that day; the same cannot be said of Robert Habsworth. Robert you see was a nobleman, a knight. And as knights tend to, he had a squire. Someone to carry his weapons and help him get into his armour, that someone was me. 

For Robert trouble began long before the day on which I found him in that sorry state, sitting in his rocking chair overlooking the Soothing Sea. When he was young, his father backed the wrong side in a civil war and so the great Habsworth house lost most of their wealth and renown. At that time Robert was old enough to remember; and old enough to feel grief for what he had lost. The family never lost their home, they still reside within the once glowingly glorious and noble walls of their ancestral seat, which afterwards served only as a dire reminder of the things they had lost, a bleak prison whose great symbolic eccentricities had eroded to become ghastly relics of a bygone age. Throughout all of his adolescence and young adult life, Robert wandered the deserted halls and with every turn of a corner, every opening of a door he was disappointed to be confronted with the emptiness that lay on the other side. He wished so to return to what once was, to reach into the black abyss of the past and retrieve the lost glory of his house.

Robert would eventually marry, perhaps as an attempt to rebuild his family name, for marriage was the way of forming alliances and building dynasties. And he knew that marriage was his duty, if he refused to marry he would plunge his house into even further depths of irrelevance. His betrothed was a lady of a far more wealthy house and so for the entirety of his marriage to her, he would live under the shadow of her family and at the behest of her father.

Soon after their marriage, I entered service as Robert’s squire, also at the orders and benefit of his father-in-law. Shortly after that, the new lady Habsworth would give birth to a baby girl and not much later a baby boy. Now Robert had a family, one that he would not do anything to protect, he would not repeat the mistakes his father made. He now felt even more of the burning desire to return to his lost glory, to become an idol to his children and to finally break free from the influence of his father-in-law.

Being that I spend all my time at the castle, I grew quite close with the family, especially the children, I would come to love them as if they were my little siblings and the lady Habsworth likewise accepted me like I was a member of the family. My relationship to Robert was far more professional. Though there were little personal emotions between us, we were still held together by a bond of honour and duty, as a knight and his squire often are. For a squire, loyalty and honour are everything, I was like an extension of Roberts own will.

A few years went by, seasons waxed and waned and the children grew older. The girl was 14 and the boy 12. Though the life of Robert’s family coming along well, he was evermore haunted by his undying ambition to restore the family name.

It was spring when an opportunity finally revealed itself to Robert. News spread throughout the kingdom that a terrible beast had been spotted in the Black Mountains nearby. For centuries, myth and folklore surrounded those strange peaks, they were some of the highest in the land and had always had an eerie and mysterious presence. From afar they looked like the maw of an enormous beast bursting from the ground. Few people had ever been up there and most that had never returned. They say beyond the jagged rocks that so resemble great teeth scraping against the sky, one can descend into the bowels of the mountain to a place the light never touches. During the full moon the lunar sphere rests above the peak in such a way that the rocks appear like stone claws gripping the glowing orb in the sky. The vegetation on the ancient slopes is said to be strange and unlike anything elsewhere.

People claim to have seen odd and foreboding lights flashing from the mountain at night and some even claim to have seen the silhouette of an unidentifiable creature soaring around the ominous peaks.

Rumour spread of strange and inexplicable occurrences chalked up to the beasts influence. A new illness that, word of mouth claims, leads to the afflicted vomiting a strange blue gooey substance speckled with glimmers of yellow blue and purple. The substance has been described as looking like a window into the starry night sky. Farmers had complained that their crops began to grow to an unfamiliar and alien morphology, some even claimed to have heard the mutated flora whisper in the night.

With stories such as these spreading throughout the populous, it was not surprising that anyone with any sense to them started to avoid being anywhere near the mountain or any of the plants, animals or people affected by the terrifying strangeness.

In a revival of old folklore and myth, people referred to the unknown beast as a dragon. Dragons have long been part of folklore and old-wives-tales. And in a reflection of those same stories, the king placed a bounty on the dragon. He decreed that the hero who banishes the dragon shall be granted whatever they desire as long as it is within the king’s power. 

And I’m sure dear reader that you can already foresee that this was a chance that Robert of house Habsworth would not let slip. 

I gathered his armaments, I helped him into his armour, I readied his horse. I was preparing my horse as well as I planned to join him. At the last moment though, he stopped me, he took me to the great hall and there, without much forewarning knighted me. Lord Habsworth thanked me for my service as loyal squire and commanded me to return to my own family. When I think back, I wonder why it was that he sent me off at that moment. I believe he saw me as a part and symbol of his time as a downtrodden man posing as a lord, I believe he wanted to finish that part of his life and the only way he could was by sending me away. He believed that his embarking on that journey would be the beginning of his new life as a celebrated hero.

The things that transpired on Roberts journey I know only by what he has told me afterwards, when I went to visit him years later at the Habsworth estate. I wanted to go and see him and his wife, most of all the children who had done a good job of staying in my heart. I had become a lord myself by then, ruling over a respectable chunk of land with a beautiful wife and three children. I returned to the home of my former mentor as an old friend seeking a nostalgic reunion with the home of my youth, I had heard years earlier the great dragonslayer Robert Habsworth had returned to be showered in wealth and fame.

When I returned to the estate however I was not greeted with the lively home of a once more prosperous and merry family, but with old and abandoned halls and a forsaken, almost ruinous castle. I let myself in, for the door was ajar and there were no servants or guards to speak of. The great hall too was empty and dreary and there was a smell of decay in the air. But I could tell the place was not abandoned for there were a few burning candles on the large table in the middle of the hall.

The first soul I happened upon, was busy in the kitchen. A lonely servant was cutting flowers on a cutting board as if to add them to a stew. He noticed me, but remained calm, he raised his head and asked who I was and I told him I was an old friend of the family. He demanded to know more specifically who I was and I told him my name; upon doing so I could see an expression on his face that suggestion he seemed to recognise my name. “Oh yes!” He said in his calm but raspy voice, “the children have told me about you. They always wondered if you would ever return.” His voice was very soft and could have been comforting, but here in this grey abandonment, it only added to the unsettling feeling I already had, to me, his calm, undisturbed mannerism did not fit into the creepy setting. “I suppose you are here to see the Lord Habsworth.” I nodded and told him I would also like to see the children and Lady Habsworth. He looked at me bearing a melancholy expression: “I’m afraid they’re not around anymore.”.

The servant led me up multiple different flights of stairs and along the way I thought I could recognise some of the old rooms, but they were all clearly abandoned for quite some time and left with no caretakers. Without speaking a word I followed the servant and we arrived at the terrace of the estate, and sure enough there was a rocking chair facing out towards the Soothing Sea; a vast body of water with an eerie stillness to it and beyond the lake: the Black Mountains. The servant waited at the doorway to the terrace as I approached the rocking chair. Sure enough I could see the rough outline of a person sitting in the wooden seat, they were wrapped in a cloak so I could not see their face or anything else to confirm the obscured mound of cloth to be a person, other than the fact that it rocked the chair. Alas I knew this to be the late Robert Habsworth. I did not circle around the chair to it’s front but instead stayed behind it “Lord Habsworth?” I asked. The cloth wrapped figure returned a quiet sound of surprise, I could tell he recognised me; perhaps by my voice. “What happened here? What happened to you? And your children and your wife? What happened since the day you slew that dragon?”.

It was then that Robert Habsworth told me everything that had happened since the day I left and since he embarked on the quest to hunt a dragon. He told me in the voice of a tired, broken old man of his ascend of the slopes of the Black Mountains, he had faced a hard and long journey but it’s details do not need repeating for they were nothing more than obstacles. Obstacles he overcame. He was joined by his closest friends and companions, two friends he had known since childhood, one of whom had already died during the ascent, as well as his younger brother, who also gave his life to allow the remains of the company to venture onwards. As they arrived at the precipice of the great maw at the centre of the mountain group, they bore witness to a monolithic ravine, tearing down through the mountains and into the flesh of the earth. From below, strange blue and violet lights beckoned, those depths were surely a gateway into the most hideous and deepest depths of hell itself. As they descended, towards the hypnotising lights, they navigated through dark cavern systems filled with fungus-like growths on the walls and ceilings. The growths glowed in that same hypnotising hue, and they did seem to be alive, for Robert always had the haunting feeling of being watched by a thousand eyes. Even further yet they encountered giant trees breaking out from the rock. Their trunks looked like they were comprised of multiple smaller tendrils twisting into a single symbiotic organism. The leaves bore the most fascinating colours and shone in the light like the scales of a fish. Beyond the trees the adventurers emerged onto a meadow of the most vibrant and lush green they had ever beheld. And on the meadow there was teeming life of the most unfamiliar and dream-like quality. There were organic looking multicoloured wisps floating through the air like swarms of fish, there were creatures akin to bears with antler made of blue fire. And on a raise in the middle of the landscape was the creature they had before referred to as a dragon. It was not much larger than a human, it sat hunched on the edge of it’s rocky plateau with it’s wings wrapped around it’s frail body. The thing looked almost skeletal, yet it was not the colour of bone. The pigment it bore, Robert could not describe, he only said it was a sight at which one would think one had fallen into a state of blissful delirium. The creature looked calm and unlike the dreadful dragons from the tales, that eat little girls. 

And soon after entering that cornucopia of strangeness, Robert realised the truth of what he was witnessing; the dragon, wherever it had came from, had brought with it teeming and bountiful life. It was not a destroyer, but a creator, and it delivered existence unto the world unlike anything that had come before it. Robert was struck with a feeling of guilt and a disgust of himself. No human had the right to kill such a creature, to steal from mother nature a true gift and child of god. To do so would be arrogance, blindness and blasphemy of the highest order and a crime worthy of the most unspeakable penance. In that moment Robert refused, he could not, and had no desire to, commit this atrocity. Alas his remaining compatriot yet displayed the nature of man. He urged; forced Robert to do what he had set out to do. He spoke of Robert’s fallen brother, of his family, of his responsibility. He took all that which had been holy to Robert throughout his life and turned into a weapon, a tool of torture which he used to force Robert to plunge his sword into the divine creature’s heart. And now Robert had desecrated his own soul and the most wondrous thing any man would ever lay eyes upon.

As the men returned to the king, Robert received what he had so desperately craved in his many years before; wealth and renown. But all he desired now was atonement, whether in the form of pain or confession. Robert knew no church of this world could be his salvation And so now he spends his days and nights sitting by the lake, whispering the confession of his sins to the great blue abyss and praying for penance. He claims that in the depths of the mountain he heard the soft and harmonic splashing of water in his mind. He now believes the sea to be his captor and an auger of the divine. He believes the creature came from the sea as a gift from beyond.

Throughout the years of mourning his life crumbled, his wife and children left him to his agony and the tides of time ate away at his world.

I slowly made my way to the other side of the rocking chair to be able to glimpse the face of this broken man. At first he refused to show his face but as I insisted further, he dropped onto his knees in a praying position and mumbled something to the Sea as if begging for final salvation. I slowly lifted his hood with a trembling hand. I could feel in my bones that I was about to be witness to horror. Underneath the ragged robe, no human face stared back at me, but the form of a hideous, sickly worm, writhing where the man’s head should have been. I noticed his hands and feet were wrapped in frayed, blood-stained bandages and sprouted wiry, dark hair and the fingernails were more akin to the talons of a beast. It became clear to me why this creature’s body had seemed so deformed and unshapely to me before. 

The destitute Robert Habsworth had received what he had so sorely desired.