Session IV: The Fallen Seer

After the matter of the Black Swan, the villager fled from the shore and back among the houses, there to bar his door and gather his own close about him. All the village was troubled and afraid, for night had come suddenly upon them with the song of the black swan, and no hearth in that place was left at ease.

Nicolaus, Garth, Tyll, and the Moss Knight withdrew for the night and took what rest they could, meaning to depart at first light. Cedric, the Emerald Knight, who two days before had walked into the great forest and had not been seen again, did not return. Thus the company was made to go on without him.

In the morning they rowed out upon the lake while the villagers watched them from the shore and shook their heads. After the passing of near an hour, they saw the island before them, and upon it a wood grown thick and wild. Yet even as they marked it, they knew themselves pursued. A boat had come out from the village behind them, and three pairs of oars drove it hard across the water. In its prow stood a man unknown to them, waving.

The knights trusted nothing upon that lake, and had no wish to meet danger while afloat. They rowed swiftly for the island shore, landed there, and drew their boat after them.

The other vessel halted a hundred fathoms from the strand. The unknown man in the prow called out something that could scarce be heard, save for one word: “Knights!” Yet those who rowed him would not bring the boat nearer.

Behind the company, the island gave forth an ill feeling. Nicolaus felt a cold shudder pass through him and looked upon a certain ash tree that seemed strange to his sight. Between the seaweed-clad stones, in a strip of earth, there grew wild thyme with purple flowers.

Tyll was sent back out in the boat to speak with the unknown herald upon the water. Meanwhile Nicolaus leapt into the crown of the ash, and before he sprang, his armour sang like a thousand mechanical feathers. From the height of that tree he beheld a small stone keep: a nobleman’s hold in three storeys, a stone villa standing forsaken, some parts gone to ruin, though the greater part yet remained whole.

Tyll returned from the parley with grave tidings. The Drowned Seer and the Reed Seer had sent an urgent word across all the realm: the Fallen Seer was to be slain on sight.

This troubled the knights, yet there was no time to lose. They entered the close-grown forest. It was an elder wood, with no paths under its boughs, and all was overrun. The Moss Knight in particular was cut across his bare breast by twigs and branches as the company forced its way through. Their going was slow, and after more than an hour they came to a part of the wood where no trees grew, but only bushes.

There Garth glimpsed two figures. One sat against a tree, and the other crouched above him. Garth began to creep towards them as best he could. Yet the shadowed figure marked him and fled.

Garth came instead upon a thin man in a hood, with a simple necklace and a bone medallion. His body was covered in scars shaped as symbols, and his eyes had been put out and covered with scars also. He was a seer. When they examined him, they found many bones broken, and saw that he had been strangled. His body was still warm.

Unwilling to leave a seer abandoned in such a place, they bore him with them and made their way to the keep.

After some failed attempts to find a way within, the Moss Knight found an open window on the uppermost floor, and Nicolaus leapt and climbed inside. The chamber was a bedchamber, its door barred from within, and it seemed that no soul had entered there for many years.

They opened the door and searched further. Upon the highest floor they found a prayer room and two other closed rooms. On the middle floor lay the great hall, hung with old, moth-eaten, filthy tapestries, and furnished with carved wooden pieces bearing heraldry: a hand clutching a sprig of heather.

In the floor was a hatch, and beneath it a stair led down into the cellar. The first room below had once been an armoury, but the weapons had long since rusted into ruin. The second held the remnants of a food store. In the third they found a prison cell and corpses: one body outside the barred wall, and among its belongings keys and a short sword, all eaten through with rust.

The Moss Knight took up his club and smashed the weathered padlock. Within the cell they found the dead of one grown person and two children, seated close together as if they had embraced one another at the end. The Moss Knight prodded some of the bones to examine them, and they fell apart. A skull rolled away across the earthen floor.

Amid the heap of bones and scarcely visible garments, he found a rose a hand’s breadth long, seeming to be made of crystal. Its stem was green and its flower red, and its thorns were sharp enough to cut him. He wrapped it in cloth.

Then they carried the dead seer, also wrapped in cloth, into the prayer room, and laid him beside an altar and a fair chalice, that he might rest there.

They slept poorly, and woke in worse condition than they had been the evening before. In the night they had dreamed: a white swan swam to them through the reeds and cried out for their help. On the next night, it said, the wraith would come.

They went swiftly to the boat, and Nicolaus pleaded desperately with the burned girl who had dubbed him knight, asking her to show the way. She appeared in the light of the rising sun, and they followed her command.

So began a chase across the land, among hills and groves of trees. They found a row of great stones that did not seem to have been placed there by nature, and the Moss Knight meditated upon their origin. The stones told him that they had been moved by human hands to mark a border. And indeed the knights saw that they ran north to south in a line, likely as a boundary against the realm in the east.

But the day fled from them, and still they had not found the Reed Seer. Desperation came upon them. They cast themselves into the boat and rowed along the coast. The day was failing when they heard singing.

Liars all, blind fools all,
Worthless then and now;
Twisters, marring truth and vow,
Come and see me bow.

Pure my dance and dark my friend,
Shadow keeps my tune;
When night returns, your roads shall end,
Beneath the watching moon.

Liars all and sightless all,
Aimless, lost, and low;
Blind fools stumbling toward the fall,
Where only shadows go.

The knights came ashore and saw the figure dancing as he sang. In pirouettes and skipping steps he moved through the twilight, a staff in one hand and a strong lantern in the other, robed in his hooded cloak.

“Liars! Blind fools!”

Garth had seen enough. This could be none other than the one of whom they had been warned. He took up his neck-catcher and went loping toward the seer, who mocked him as he came.

“Corpse-whisperer! Crow-feeder! Do you not understand that nothing may be seen clearly any longer? Not forward, not back!”

Garth would not be cowed. He struck with his weapon and caught the seer fast in the neck-catcher.

“I woke it, but it obeys me no longer!” the seer laughed desperately. He let fall his staff and drew forth a long-edged weapon. “The Reed Seer is the Fallen Seer!”

Garth cursed and swung again, binding the seer’s blade with his own weapon. The other knights ran toward the fight as they understood what was happening, though only the Moss Knight was swift enough to reach it in time.

The Fallen Seer spun in a pirouette and danced away from Garth, drawing his weapon with him.

“Tom from the village shall die the death tomorrow night. None can control it any longer, least of all I, who asked it to come here.”

The Moss Knight and the Gallows Knight threw themselves upon the seer. The Moss Knight swung his club in a mighty blow and struck him, driving him backward, while Garth once more bound up his weapon.

Again the seer danced away with a pirouette and laughed. But his laughter ended when he was pierced from behind by a shadow’s sword.

Behind him towered a vast shadow-wraith. It drew its blade from the seer and seemed to wipe it clean, before it leapt and melted into the coming night.

The seer collapsed, and the knights were left staring at one another. Nicolaus, the Dove Knight, took hold of the dying seer and asked him for his name.

The seer looked him in the eyes and spoke his last words:

“Your friend Cedric, the Emerald Knight, is the wraith.”

And so ended the fourth passage of the company: with Cedric lost no longer merely to green silence, but named in dread by the dying; with the Fallen Seer slain by that which he had woken; and with the next night already promised to Tom of the village, whose death had been sung upon the shore.