Hi all! This week we have the start of a medieval horror adventure monthly by guest writer, podcaster, historian, man, Jimmy. Jimmy pitched this to me a while back and I shit myself (due to excellence) so been looking forward to getting it in my hands…read on dearest rats!
Content warning for : Blood, dead animals, and general spooky shit.
An extract from Oculus historia, attributed to Willemus de Brosce, Brother of the Adairnite monastery situated at Kel, c. 11xx. Fragment translated from High Ultraad c. 17xx.
“…during these times, there came a great comet in the sky. Red of colour at times or blended with white the shade of moonlight, it had a crimson tail whose arcs could be seen at night. It could be beheld crossing that part of the sky where the great star Lyrian holds heavenly court in spring. The comet brought with it many great disturbances and disorders to the land. I report what the others have seen, fellow brothers of my house who travelled far under the comet’s shadow. Two brothers were charged by our Abbott Father Rikaard to travel south to the Primacy and the mother house of our order, they left us and passed striving for many weeks into the lands we monks rarely see. They returned from the south after much time had passed and exhibited many changes. For what they have told me, in the years since that time, may the One save us from what lies beyond our walls! For the evil labour of the Other never ceases...”
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Amalric had been unable to sleep a full night in two weeks. Every night since he and Keolbert had left Kel, he could only doze for an hour or so and then would wake thrashing and groaning, drenched in cold sweat. Amalric couldn’t remember any of his dreams and Keolbert was growing concerned. His companion prescribed Amalric a mixture of henbane and mandrake to take before sunset but to no effect. Tonight went the same as every other night, so now he watched the fire turn to embers as his shoulders sagged with exhaustion.That night they sheltered in a broch perched atop the tallest peak of the moors, rooted into the hillside like a dead tree that had forgotten to fall. Rain thrummed against the drystack walls, the stones huddled together without mortar. Narrow stairs were cut into the foundation leading up to the hearth from the door level and continued up the walls to eventually spiral away into the dark above. Neither of them dared to explore what lay up there. They reasoned there was a good possibility that the stairs wouldn’t be able to take their weight, considering the age of the place, so they camped at the base of the tower. The floor was cold compacted earth, but no green shoots had been able to emerge furtively out of the dirt. Miraculously, the roof remained intact and watertight, but they could hear the coming and going of petrels who nested in burrows in the upper stonework. A gap had been left in the wall that faced southward and it was covered by a hinged, wooden flap. From it, they could watch out for anyone who emerged onto the moorland from the valley below.
Amalric absent-mindedly drew patterns and shapes into the dirt while he kept watch. In his sleeplessness, his mind turned back to his home at Kel while he looked around the broch’s walls. He couldn’t think of a building he had seen that could be older, except perhaps St Adairn’s chapel at the monastery at Kel. The two places felt so similar in that moment, the weathered stones held together in the archaic style, the groans they made in the rain, the mysterious quirks of their construction telling of ancient secrets which had passed away into obscurity centuries ago. But they, he and the other Adairnites, had not forgotten the chapel. It lay at the centre of their world, housing the relics of holy St Adairn himself. Who remembers this tower? He thought. Did anyone know it well enough to be able to forget it? The stones were silent, only the rain made them speak, the taps chained together into whispers. None of the wood in the roof or the windows has rotted away. Someone maintained this place, maybe decades ago, but still someone.Despite what Amalric knew when he looked at the woodworking inside, it was hard to imagine anyone using it except as they were, in passing. To imagine its reason to be here, perched on this particular moor, was harder still. Bandits were common enough in this region of Ultram, particularly during these times of strife, but Amalric felt like this tower was never made for watching for them. The immediate area was too remote, too poor to be in any danger. Two days ago, just to the north, Amalric and Keolbert had passed through hamlets where the land seemed a lot more…healthy. They were abandoned too, like so many other places in this country, but at one time people could have made a decent living there. Not like the broch. Amalric frowned into the woodsmoke and suddenly felt uneasy here, sitting in the belly of this tower. He turned over the same questions again and again as the broch sighed under the rain. Which lord had decided on this keep? How long ago did the simple folk once look at this tower, the same stones that I am looking at now, and feel the yoke of suzerainty upon their shoulders? The One Above reduces the work of all secular men to such ruins. He touched his lips and then his forehead in silent benediction while he thought of the One Above.
The fire spat and pulled him out of his thoughts. It wouldn’t be long now until it died and Keolbert would wake. His uneasiness grew. Amalric rose and crept to one of the window slats, quietly so his companion could sleep soundly, and pushed it open gently. He had to see the outside, remind himself that the world was more than this forgotten place. The hinge wheezed a weary creak. He could make out the path to the south, not yet entirely overgrown, that sloped lazily into the valley below. Nothing else was visible through the rain. Thunder clapped and echoed into the distance. Amalric counted one beat before the lightning smote a tree nearby to the south. It erupted in crimson flame before being smothered by the deluge. In that brief, revelatory illumination, when the sky flashed a brilliant white, the rain looked red. Deep red. Amalric blinked and focused on the rain drops. He hadn’t seen the rain in daylight. It had only started to rain once they had lit a fire in the hearth and were eating a motley dinner of foraged currants and roots with the last scraps of bread brought from Kel. He pushed the window open further and reached a hand out, palm facing upwards. It came back stained. The thunder had caused Keolbert to stir from his sleep and he watched as Amalric held his hand closer to the firelight. Red. The colour smeared when he touched it with his other hand. “Oh One Above”, Amalric groaned. Keolbert was now sitting bolt upright and he stared at the wood door on the north side of the broch. The rain threw itself harder and harder against that door. The taps which were once whispers turned into a babbling speech. They watched as the outside seeped in. It smelled of iron and ozone. “Blood…it’s raining blood”, Keolbert uttered awestruck. “It’s coming in through the gaps in the door.” He stood. “Quickly, upstairs.”
Amalric was frozen in place while Keolbert gathered their things.
“Amalric, now! We need to save the parchment.” Keolbert snapped and looked up at Amalric, his brow blazing with impatience.
Amalric broke into action, wiping his stained hand on his habit. He collected their books and papers together with their small bag of provisions stacked on top. The blood was seeping under the door and formed a sickly pool at the base of the stairs. The smell was now overpowering. It had shifted from the intense stench of iron to a melange of decay. Keolbert held the last smoking branch of the fire they had built and tried to relight it with tinder.
“Come on, you cur. Light, light, light.” He cursed. Amalric began to murmur a prayer for intercession to St Adairn, his head spinning from wall to wall to check for more breaches while he spoke the holy words. The rain was focused on the north side, hammering at the weakest points, but he watched the floor beneath the window grow dark and damp. Blood rose up out of the earth and began to leak out as if from a wound. It spread towards the fire, reaching out with stumpy hands as it advanced through patches of uneven earth. Keolbert wrapped the end of the smouldering branch with a strip torn from his habit and filled it with tinder. The branch caught alight and Keolbert charged upstairs clutching his own bundle. Amalric followed, stealing a glance over his shoulder to see the downstairs flood with that abyssal red. The stairs remained clear all the way to the roof and held their weight with some complaints. Below, not far below, they could hear the blood slosh like waves in a rock pool and above it hammered into the roof like a thousand tiny fists. Keolbert stopped on the floor just below the roof level, and laid down his bundle. “There’s nowhere left to run,” he said sullenly. Amalric set his things down next to Keolbert. His hand, the hand which had touched the blood, began to sting. From fingertip to wrist it had all turned to a shade of angry red that had penetrated beneath the skin. He clenched it into a fist.
“You can’t let it touch you. Look,” he said gesturing with his afflicted hand. “It’s under my skin now. It hurts, Keolbert.” The sting had turned into a burn. Amalric clutched his wrist and looked at his companion. He wanted to weep.
Keolbert knelt next to him and gently caressed his hair. He held Amalric’s other hand and kissed him gently on the forehead. “It’s going to be okay. Pray with me.”
Amalric nodded and they faced northward, back towards Kel and the church of St Adairn. In unison they touched their lips, then the middle of their foreheads and began to recite the words in High Ultraad. It was a prayer of deliverance from evil, a plea for the One Above to intercede and abjure harm towards the faithful. They held hands as they prayed and the rain thundered above. The roof groaned and splinters rained upon their heads as the rising blood began to pool at the top of the stairs. A half-skeletal mouse corpse, left fallen from the roof by a profligate owl, poked out, half-submerged in the red tide. It was moving, writhing and clacking its putrid jaws and looking at them with its one remaining eye. They stopped praying and watched the vermin drag itself towards them with its split and stumped limbs. It squeaked a breathless squeak, sounding more like the scraping of steel on stone. Then the roof gave way. Amalric, as he knelt in prayer, was showered first in the detritus of broken wood and bird nests and then a deluge of suffocatingly deep red.
Everything was red.
Red.
Red.
! Woah! Thanks again to Jimmy for sharing this with us. You can read the next part of this story next month, so stay tuned.
I’ll be back next week with something else once again…but as you can see, some regular submissions are starting to appear…I have ideas for this and how they will be delivered so if you like something in particular, SHOUT ABOUT IT! Letting me know you’re enjoying an aspect of Rat Depot helps me plan future stuff. I want this project to be about you and the creators the depot connects you to so: