by Neal Jones
At last she came to a spot close to the castle, behind the great cathedral, where a large stone low in the wall was loose. She had to dig up some earth to completely remove the large rock, and she rolled up the manuscript so that it would fit in the small space. She put the rock back into its place, and then filled in the dirt around its base, packing it tightly. She hurried back home, anxious to tell N'Toth of what had happened. But when Grev entered her son's room, N'Toth was already there, weeping over Rynn's bed. He told Grev that their son was dead, and she screamed in fury to the Varashok, refusing to believe her husband's words. Only after she had embraced Rynn's lifeless form, after laying her head against his chest and hearing no heartbeat, did she finally accept the truth. Grev wept sorely over her loss, laying in bed next to Rynn and holding him close, while N'Toth left to summon Aldus and Tasnin. Much later, after Rynn's body had been wrapped and carried away by the Sisters of Dra'Shai, and after Tasnin had left the house, Shil'Ra Aldus spoke quietly with N'Toth and Grev. He demanded to know what had become of the pages of Rynn's fevered writing. Grev told him that she had burned them in the fire. The shil'ra nodded gravely, his relief palpable as he expressed his condolences her and her husband. He turned to leave but Grev spoke again, giving him pause.
"What did you read, shil'ra, two days past? What was it that gave you such great fear?"
Aldus did not immediately turn and answer. When he did finally face them, his brow was damp and his face pale. "It is not for me to speak of, nor should it be a matter for you any further. You have done what is right and just by burning those pages, for whatever cerusk'om had seized hold of your son has now taken him into the darkness. But be not afraid, for his soul has passed on to the Varashok. Their battle with the cerusk'om for Rynn's soul was victorious. He is at peace now."
At these words, Grev wept fresh tears and was comforted by N'Toth as Aldus left their home. For the next two weeks, the villagers paid their respects to the sorrowful couple, and Grev told no one of the manuscript. She didn't even dare to go dig it up again, for the shil'ra's words had deeply frightened her. For all the years until her death, Grev kept Rynn's writings a secret, and she bore no more children. After her death from bleyt, N'Toth closed his shop and left Velosa Keep to wander the plains and the wild lands. He was never heard from again.
( 2 )
Rynn's manuscript was unearthed two hundred and ninety-six years after his death by an historian named Fisama Pernash. The marking of the Second Age had just passed, and it was a time of new discovery and enlightenment for all Chrisarii. (This time period would be akin to the Renaissance Period of ancient Earth.) At the time of Rynn's birth, all of the world was in upheaval. Kings warred with kings over lands and power, and the Church of the Varashok was spreading its gospel to all the unexplored and unsettled lands beyond Kabold, which was now the capitol province of the Mother Church and seat of the Chrisarii Empire. Some of the foreign kings felt threatened by the power of the church, and they burned the chapels and drove out the shil'ras from their lands. This reaction stemmed from the belief that no one was more powerful than a king, not even a tal'shil'ra, and, thus, the missionaries were not always welcomed on the continents and nation-states beyond the seas that bordered the Chrisarii Empire.
Forty years before the dawn of the Second Age, King Augray of Tasik Keep succeeded in conquering all of Attana. The people of Velosa Keep were made slaves, their king and his family slaughtered, and the village ransacked and burned. The walls surrounding the keep as well as the walls of the castle itself were torn down and the stones carted away to build an even greater palace for King Augray. As soon as he had control of Attana, he set his sights upon the Chrisarii Empire, and he ordered his army to build a mighty fleet that could withstand the ocean storms as well as the vast distance that needed to be crossed to land on Kabold's shores. King Markanus of Engge, the ruling emperor of the Chrisarii, had the same idea, and he managed to get his fleet built just a few years before Augray succeeded in launching his. After many years of long and bloody warfare, Markanus conquered Attana and renamed it Queytas'Eumi, which, roughly translated, means "gift of the gods". (The name was shortened to just Queytas by a mapmaker midway through the Second Age.) Markanus believed that because he fought in the name of the Varashok that they had blessed him with great power and vast lands of new wealth and resources.
The Second Age was a time of new invention, new ideas, and new discoveries. At the time that Pernash was uncovering the writings of Shil'Ra Aldus in a dusty corner of the catacombs beneath the Cathedral of Tyacc, a man named Fuxul was inventing a contraption that would eventually become the printing press. While the shil'ras were still responsible for teaching the fundamentals of reading and writing, those subjects were no longer taught only to the boys. Many Chrisarii women were standing up and speaking out for equality in learning, and so some of the more progressive cities and communities began allowing their daughters to accompany their sons to the church for daily lessons.
It was a time of new thinking and reinvention in the fields of philosophy, literature, art, and music. King Markanus had achieved the remarkable feat of bringing all of the civilized world under his dominion – and under the dominion of the Church of the Varashok – that all people now called themselves Chrisarii. His death was considered the dawn of the Second Age, and it was ninety-six years later that Pernash stumbled upon the writings of a shil'ra who had served in Velosa Keep nearly three centuries before.
Fisama Pernash was an historian, not a shil'ra as some scholars have claimed. He was serving as a record keeper for the Cathedral of Tyacc, which was located on the southern coast of Attana. Tyacc had been built by Augray early in his reign, and he succeeded in holding on to it throughout his campaign to conquer all of Attana. Augray had built the cathedral as a monument to the God of the Sea. The ancient tribal clan from which Augray's lineage descended had worshiped the Sea God as their creator and the giver of all life. When Markanus conquered Attana, he converted the cathedral into a church for the Varashok. Because the city of Tyacc was right on the coast, it was a stop for sea traders and merchants, a port of call for soldiers and explorers, and thus it became a center of learning and discovery for the new age. Tyacc's grand cathedral rivaled that of the cathedral in D'Kor Province in splendor and design, and because of its prestige it became a repository for old records, manuscripts, and scrolls of history that had been passed down from shil'ra to shil'ra through the ages.
It was deep in the musty catacombs beneath the cathedral, beneath piles of parchments and scrolls on dusty stone shelves, that Pernash uncovered the scrolls of Shil'Ra Aldus of Velosa Keep. Among Aldus' writings was an entry regarding a boy named Rynn Seraudu, who became possessed by a cerusk'om during his fifteenth year, and a book of heresy that he had written as a result of the demon's control. Aldus recorded that the book contained blasphemy against the Holy Church, and that it had been burned by Rynn's mother shortly after her son's mysterious death. Pernash was intrigued by this entry, and he made a note of it for further reference. Less than six months later, as he ventured further into the catacombs, he stumbled upon something bound in tava leaf. The package was quite thick, and he carefully unwrapped the dried leaves, thinking that he discovered a lineage record for one of the Attanite kings. What he found instead was a religious declaration, a telling of the god Onng Le'Roh, the true god of the Chrisarii.
Fisama instantly recalled the journal entry of Shil'Ra Aldus, and he took the manuscript back up into the cathedral library where he could better study it. After reading the first few pages, Pernash became certain that he had found the very book of which Aldus had written, and the historian was further astonished to discover that both sides of the parchment had been written upon. The narrative didn't make sense until Pernash realized he had to read all three hundred and thirty pages on one side and then flip the entire manuscript over and read all the pages on the other side. This was something revolutionary for that time because of the way the ink and parchment were
made. It took several hours for the ink to dry properly, and the parchment commonly used in Rynn's time wasn't particularly thick. By the time of Pernash, however, the shil'ras had discovered that if the parchment was made thicker, it was easier to write on both sides as long as one waited the proper amount of time for the ink to dry. On the last page Rynn had signed his name and inscribed the date beneath it. Pernash was able to calculate that the book had been written two hundred and ninety-six years earlier, during the reign of King S'Bast, which also matched the dated entry in Aldus' scrolls.
The elegant – yet hastily – scrawled paragraphs of Rynn's book spoke of a cerusk that visited Rynn during his dreams as the fever wracked his frail body. The angel told the boy that he was to write the testimony of Onng Le'Roh, the true Creator and God of the Chrisarii. For the six days and nights that Rynn lay in his bed, the cerusk spoke of the creation of the world, of the history of the time before the tribal clans, and, lastly, of things to come. When Rynn's fever finally broke, he had demanded the parchment so that he might record everything that had been told to him in his dream.
Pernash became obsessed with studying the writings of Rynn. The boy had predicted the rise of King Markanus and the conquering of the continent of Attana two hundred and fifty years before those events took place. The prophecy was not written with specific names, places, and dates, of course, but the meaning was clear. Not only that, Rynn referred to the people of the world as Chrisarii, long before that name was ever widely used by the nation-states of all continents.
As he delved deeper into the book, Pernash also realized that the cerusk who had delivered those words to Rynn was also predicting the rise of the church's power and dominion over all the world. At the time that Pernash was studying this, the church had begun to insert its influence into the new discoveries of science, medicine, art, and philosophy that were rapidly reshaping the known world. For instance, the church asserted that the world of the Chrisarii was the only world in existence, and that the sun revolved around it; that all things – including people – were made of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water; that it was wrong to cut into the body in order to heal; all healing was done with natural herbs and other remedies. As more and more Chrisarii began to think and explore for themselves, their new ideas about the physical world started to clash with established doctrine and power of the church.
Thus, when Pernash discovered The Gospel of Onng Le'Roh, he found a voice for many of the questions he'd been afraid to ask for fear of being punished and/or excommunicated by the church. The same ideological, religious and scientific struggle that had taken place on Earth during the fourteen- and fifteen-hundreds was taking place on the Chrisarii homeworld a century into the Second Age. In his own writing later in his life, Pernash revealed that he had become an historian in order to appease his aristocratic father who had wanted him to become a shil'ra. Even as a young boy, Pernash had questioned many of the teachings and rituals of the church, and the last thing he wanted was to be a priest. So he studied literature and history instead and eventually became a record-keeper for the Cathedral of Tyacc.
Now, at forty-six years old, Pernash, a simple man who had lived an adult life of loneliness and exile among dusty scrolls and ancient records, was stunned by the realization of what he had uncovered in the catacombs. Shil'Ra Aldus had been correct. Rynn's manuscript was heresy, and the church council would burn it if it ever came to light. Anyone who dared to read it or try to copy it for others to read would also be tortured and burned at the stake.
However, that didn't stop Fisama from smuggling the manuscript out of the cathedral. In the same manner that Grev had hidden her son's writing in a hole in the wall of the keep, so did Pernash tuck the forbidden pages beneath a loose board in the corner of his bedchamber. In the next few days and weeks he began to formulate a plot to copy the manuscript and properly bind it. His first task was to secure several hundred pages of fresh parchment. Even for a cleric and an historian, this was no easy feat. The only people who could afford parchment were the scholars, noblemen, and other such wealthy folk. The church, of course, kept its own supply on hand for record keeping, but that was given as part of the tithe and offering from the farmers. In those days, parchment was made from dried animal skin, or from the leaves of certain plants, depending on what part of the world one lived in. Thus, it was the farmers who sold the hides of their butchered herds to the tanners who would turn the hides into parchment and the animal's blood into ink. Over the next five years, Pernash stole two or three pages a week, copying Rynn's book by candlelight, and by the time his fifty-second name-day arrived he had produced a properly bound copy of Rynn's manuscript.
At this point in the Gospel's history, no one is quite sure what happened next. Most religious historians have posited that Pernash passed the newly bound manuscript to his apprentice. Yet there is no official entry in the cathedral's record of him having an apprentice at that time. Pernash died four years later at age fifty-six, from unden fever, and since he had never married and had no heirs, his entire estate was given to the church. The next record keeper to take his place was a young man of only nineteen years named Shyvias Myr, and this is why some historians believe that Rynn's book was passed on to Myr. Shyvias' personal diary is currently on display in the Museum of Q'thot in D'Kor Province, and there is an entry dated two years before Pernash's death. The short paragraph says that he shared midday meal with Fisama and Shil'Ra Dathris. Unfortunately, there's no other indication that Myr was actually Pernash's apprentice.
Whatever the case, Rynn's manuscript remained hidden for nearly two centuries. There is very little information from this time to tell exactly what happened, but two hundred years after Pernash's death, the book surfaced once more. And this time, it became public. The printing press had been around for approximately a hundred and fifty years, and thus it was much easier to make several copies of Rynn's gospel to spread to the masses. There is some debate among church scholars as to who specifically was responsible for unearthing Ryyn's manuscript a second time, but it has been generally accepted for most of the present age that a cleric named Lersa was the one to print several dozen copies of the book and begin spreading The Gospel Of Onng Le'Roh publicly. And, of course, the Church of the Varashok was outraged. Many inquisitions were held throughout the empire, and many "heretics" were burned at the stake. However, the persecution only seemed to bring more to the new faith, and, in the last decade of the fourth century, Second Age, a deadly plague swept across the continent of Kabold. D'Kor Province was the hardest hit, and, by the time the disease ran its course, over ten thousand had died.
The followers of Onng Le'Roh, referring to themselves as Seraudites, were more fervent than ever in their new belief in the aftermath of the Grey Death, which is what the plague eventually came to be called by those who survived. In the fourth chapter of his gospel, Rynn wrote of "...a masked cerusk'om who would ride among the faithful, cutting them down by the thousands, and marking them with grey faces." Since the plague struck the continent of Kabold, capital of the Chrisarii Empire and the Church of the Varashok, the Seraudites believed more firmly than ever before that their faith was the true faith, and that the Varashok were the false gods.
Midway through the fifth century, Second Age, the Seraudites were too great a number for the church to successfully quell and silence. In the fourteen hundred years since, these two religions have clashed with one another, both sides believing that their god(s) is/are the true god(s) of the Chrisarii.
( 3 )
The Gospel of Onng Le'Roh is a very different book than The Holy Covenant. The latter is more a compiled historical record than a testimony of a single man. THC is over a thousand pages thick, and only its final chapter contains prophecies, and even then there is only six total. TGOOL, on the other hand, contains exactly three hundred and forty prophecies, and all but a dozen have come to pass in the two millennia since it was first written. Some prophecies have predicted the rise and fall of kings and em
pires, while others have spoke of nothing more important than poor harvests or unusually extreme weather. This book has baffled many scholars and historians for that very reason. More than half the prophecies in The Gospel were not deciphered or explained until the events that they spoke of came to pass. Only then did the Holy Fathers and their congregations understand what those prophecies were about.
In the final chapter of TGOOL, Rynn predicts the rise a false prophet, one who will bring about "...a time of great darkness. There will be wars, and famine, and disease, and many will cry unto the heavens for release, but none shall be given them." It goes on to talk of a "...terrible destruction in the sky, and the stars shall fall to the earth, and their fire will consume the world. This, then, shall be the last war, the battle that shall call the faithful, and their souls will be gathered unto the New World, and they shall be given New Life, and this will last for all of time. Ok'Thra. "
Many followers of both religions believe that this prophecy and Tor'Ahl's 5th prophecy are predicting the same events. Unlike Tor'Ahl's prophecies, Rynn's prophecies are not numbered, but are scattered amongst the text like nuggets of gold in veins of ore. Therefore, it's not always easy to differentiate not only the order in which the prophecies will be fulfilled, but also the subject of one prophecy from another. However, it is clear in The Gospel that an End of Time and Days is coming, just as predicted in The Holy Covenant, and millions of scholars, historians, and believers throughout the ages have been eagerly awaiting this period of time.
