Artisan

MAP: http://nnwoodbury.webs.com/photos/Mundus%202008%20and%202010.bmp



This is the story of a student of mine, a student of the universe. I am the Abbot Zircles and it is only through death that I came to understand the significance of my apprentice's journey. Here it is, told by my mouth through his eyes.


The small city's streets were damp with crimson creeks that filled the concrete canyons between the cobblestones. A bleak overcast the color of the black sheep's wool threw a shadow over the city--gray and sad. Its walls first, and then its tenements and workshops and temples, turned to rubble by the devil's hand. The gatehouse crumbled, creating a view straight down the merchants' avenue, into the infinite dull-blue prairie and then into a lonely oblivion.

Among cadavers piled atop each other like bad meat left behind the slaughterhouse to rot, a sole man stood and looked down the empty avenue. He did not see the present but a looping vision of a time just-past. A princess snatched from her gilded cage to be taken to another. Nothing seemed real except for that one moment in all the universe.

Countless repetitions--the vision replayed itself in his memory over and over again, until everything became blank and black and the man collapsed into the crowd of corpses. He was the lowly artisan...He is our servile savior.