IV.
A Summoning to War (Dea Bellorum Invicta)
[Excerpt taken from the journal of Count Wilhelm]:
For how many months have I heard the the tumultuous cacophony of carnage in my dreams? Each night, my eyes close and it begins again - the fanfare of horns, the call to arms, the commanding clarion demanding a price paid in blood and flesh. My heart races, my blood quickens; each fibre of my being yearns to throw itself with reckless abandon into the carnage, and yet each morning I rise with tired limbs, uncomprehending of why I am assailed by such dreams of slaughter and why I greet such nightmarish visions not with horror and repulsion but a glee and bloodlust I have never before tasted on any of the numerous battlefields of my past.
Yet now the timbre of the dreams shifts: The battle-horns still call out to me; their peels seemingly echoing across unfathomable chasms; still I hear the clash of iron and steel and hear the cries of victory and defeat as slayer and slain are dealt their hands by capricious fortune; though now I hear too the voice of a woman, though the words are indistinct, I seem to hear each syllable as clearly as I do the shrill clarion over the battle's din. She appears to me a vision in silk and steel and diaphanous cotton; both hard as iron yet delicate as gossamer strands. . .
Upon seas of time she rides the waves of fate.
Come to me, daughter of the hunt,
You who hath seen the birth of man and borne witness to the end of aeons.
Attend them!
The war-horns sound,
Within my soul abound!
Hark! I hear the call,
Across the seas of time.
A compulsion so sublime –
A summoning to war!
Blessed goddess
Betwixt the planes
Upon stygian wing
Thy wrath unchained.
I have answered your call,
You who have bridged the gap ‘twixt the realms perennial and ephemeral.
Come, let our blades satisfy the demands of baleful ire:
To glory in carnage
And be satiated in slaughter!
Across the seas of time,
Compulsion so sublime
What chaos hast thou wrought
To summon . . . summon me to court?
Black mistress far beyond the temporal sea,
Black goddess, thou belongst to me!
Together we’ll blot out the sun
And grant them, these realms, no absolution.
Blessed goddess
Betwixt the planes
Upon stygian wing
Thy wrath unchained.
Blessed goddess
Betwixt the planes
Upon stygian wing
Thy wrath unchained.
What is this need – insanity?
But what deeds and deities await
My blade? Now offer fealty to me!
Die!
Satiated in slaughter! To glory in carnage!
Our blades shall descend to this erstwhile king
And then together we shall rise,
Our spirits carnally entwined,
Our passion to blot out the sun,
To glory, my benighted one,
We shall conquer Creation’s throne.
Recondite knowledge of the nature of the coexisting planes thus revealed, for the demands of war commanded it so. Mortal steel by mortal hand summoned by those that seem so ephemeral but are deathless, insofar as men’s minds would reckon, to bring a mortal finality to that otherwise eternal. For even gods may grow corrupt and even the divine can lust for carnality . . .
