History Unfolding

Chapter one

When we rise..

              It’s a crystalline day in mid-December’s Central Park.  The snow and ice cover the trees and many of them look like upside down chandeliers because of the ice storm from the previous night. Now, they glisten in the midday sun. Entire families are scattered throughout the park, enjoying performances by the local street performers. Many are down at the ice rink skating and laughing.

              A man stands on a hill looking down toward the nearby ice rink. He has somewhat bushy eyebrows, bags beneath his eyes, dirty blonde hair, and his nose seems a bit large, yet proportionate to his appearance. He thinks to himself and wonders why all these people are here.  Hadn’t they seen the news?  Surely the police should be here telling people to leave. He supposes there isn’t much they can do though, it’s not like he’s going to leave if they told him.

              Earlier that day, the News broadcasted reports of people dead; their bodies found frozen across the city at random. They also mentioned the dangerous conditions of a bad freeze today, while telling everyone to stay inside and turn up the heat.  There is supposed to be another ice storm tonight.

              He assumes it was probably dead homeless people they found lying around the city because of the ice storm.  But, what if they find a body in Central Park and one of these kids sees it? He shrugs off the notion; he has other things he needs to worry about. Today is the only day that he can buy an artifact he has been searching for, for many years. The nature of the artifact is shrouded in mystery, but the legends surrounding it set it in first century, AD.  He had heard of its current location from the art dealer he had met at the museum. Asking about it wasn’t an easy task.  Many people had never even heard of the relic and the people who had were often institutionalized or just considered mad by their peers. Finally, a dealer had not only heard about it, but he had a possible location.

He was given the number of a man who was said to have been in possession of the Cowl most recently. The man seemed like a legitimate source; mostly because he looked ancient and would have no reason to lie about it. The reason for the meeting in Central Park was due to the secret nature of the sale and, according to the old man.  The powers the Cowl possesses must be kept safe. Not one for superstition, he had decided not to heed the warnings of the old man, but to buy the Cowl for his private collection, considering the years he had spent looking for it.

              “Where is that old man anyway” he grumbled to himself while he sat there. It had already been an hour and a half and suddenly, it felt like it was getting colder. Seemingly, out of nowhere, the old man appeared. He was very small and looked as though he was going to fall over dead at any moment, but at the same time he looked full of life. “It’s about time you showed up. I have been waiting for what seems like days. Do you have the Cowl?” the man asked anxiously.

              “You shouldn’t be so anxious to receive this doomed relic. It is the downfall of man you seek. You must understand the stories that have been told of the Cowl” the old man squawked caution at the man.

              “I have been searching for this particular artifact for many years, and you won’t dissuade me from it with your babbling. They are just religious superstitions, nothing more. Do you have it or not” he asked in an irritable tone.

              “If you take the Cowl then you must take its sister relic, to stem the power of the Cowl. These artifacts must never be separated; for if they ever become separated the ancient powers will rise and fall, and those powers will ravage this world for a thousand...”

              “Yeah, yeah. Keep the relics together or the world will burn.” It’s mindless rambling of an insane man, simply that.  It’s a story for children. They are mere superstitions and that’s it.  “So do you have the Cowl or not?”

              “If you do wish for the Cowl, I beg you to take care.”

The old man brought forth a parcel wrapped in what looked like parchment covered in ancient runes. Atop the parcel lay a blade wrapped in a similar style, with the same type of runes running the length of the blade. Neither visible beneath their parchment covers, the man could feel that his long search had finally come to an end.

              He took the two parcels carefully and began to examine them. He pulled back the corner of the parchment and examined the contents of the larger package. He had seen the rune markings lining the seams of the Cowl and decided this was what he had been searching for all this time. He looked up to tell the man he was satisfied and to offer payment. He suddenly realized that the man had disappeared without a trace. Why hadn’t he taken payment for the artifacts? What was the purpose for him just to give them away? Who was that guy?

No matter now, he has what he came for. He had better get the objects to a safe place. It had gotten much colder and with the freeze warnings it wasn’t safe to be wandering around. The man strides toward a nearby subway station with anticipation. He is excited to get back and examine the artifacts he procured.

              A train pulls toward the station and the man stands waiting, the large parcel tucked snuggly under one arm and the smaller parcel sticking out the pocket of his briefcase. He quickly searches for an empty carriage, and steps into one a few cars away. A homeless man in a tattered green coat lays on one of the benches at the opposite end of the car. It is only a few stops to his destination, so he decides against looking at the objects while on the subway. The man at the end of the car seems to have woken up to the call of the train’s conductor over the PA system announcing the next stop. The homeless man glances around the car and goes back to sleep.

The train makes it to the man’s stop. He steps off the train and makes for the exit of the subway station. He sets a quick pace up the stairs toward his hotel, glancing over his shoulder to see if he is being followed. He he saw the man in the tattered green coat, but when he looked again, he wasn’t there. Why was he being so paranoid anyway? He hadn’t even given the man money for the artifacts, surely nobody could even have known that he had acquired them.

He walked through the spinning doors of the Hotel Pennsylvania. The inside was filled with businessmen and tourists trying to get out of the cold and find rooms. He walks toward the elevator past a nearby group of tourists and waits for a short period till the lift arrives. He goes to the fourth floor and walks with vigor to his room, entering quickly and closing the door behind him, while not forgetting to latch it. He sets the parcels on the bed at the far side of the room. A large grin spreads across his face.  A search that had lasted years has finally come to an end. He was proud of himself, he finally found the Lich’s Cowl. There isn’t much known about the object itself except that it was supposedly worn by a necromancer who summoned forth a great evil into the world and with it seven evils to consume mankind.

Although he’s never heard anything about the sister relic of which the man spoke. It was only by chance that he had stumbled across the text that had even mentioned the Cowl.

He goes to his briefcase and begins examining the small parcel.  The runes on the parchment were old, very old. He decides he better document them.  As he begins to copy the symbols to his note pad, they change into English, or maybe he had understood them and was writing them in English. He isn’t sure, but what he reads, as he finishes writing, startles him.

Yea and the fire came up from perdition, the heavens split, consumed was the light of Ascension.

The darkness spread throughout the land and the powers of darkness were released, and by this blade were they quelled.

Yea, and when the virtues came down to battle the sins of man, a protector was named and given power.

The necromancer was destroyed by the protector and the relics were forged of these two forces.

The prison must stay closed lest the world be cursed by destruction once more.

        He thought again about what the old man had said about the Cowl and blade, shrugged and continued his examination, pulling back the parchment that had covered the hilt of the blade. It was an impressive hilt. It was a very pale smoky ash colored marble, mixed with white overtones. On the end of the blade looked to be a silver claw extending about two inches off the handle. In the center of the handle there was a jewel that glistened with a captured light, even though there wasn’t a light nearby. As he pulled the parchment from the blade itself, the blade was dull and discolored, with no shine to it at all. It was almost as if it was swallowing up all the darkness in the room.

The blade is intriguing and its features seem to shout at a person, yet surprisingly it’s modest and underwhelming. It doesn’t grab the man’s attention.  No, what matters to him, and what draws him closer and closer, is the mysterious Cowl that once eluded him. He doesn’t care so much about the writing on the parchment it was wrapped in as much as the object itself.

He tears back the parchment, breaking the rune seal that had encompassed the parchment covering. He pulls the Cowl from its packaging. It’s magnificent to him. Its seams, lined with ebony runes accented with material similar to the blade in nature, absorb the darkness in the room. What’s strange is the fact that all the stories about the Cowl say that it is as dark as a moonless night, but for some reason this Cowl is an ashy white color. He feels an unbelievable draw toward the Cowl, it inspires awe within him, yet at the same time his heart wells with fear of the object. It felt bizarre, indeed.

He decides to put everything away, when, he looks at the clock and realizes he had been rolling the objects in his hands for about six hours. Has it really been that long/ Not even tired, he thought about going out to get something to eat. He moves to his window and, looking out, remembers the freeze warning that had been on the news.  He sees a man in a green tattered coat down on the street. The homeless man looks up to his window making him jump back to get out of sight of the window. He creeps back to the window and looks for the man in the coat, but sees nobody on the street. “Am I going crazy?” he thinks to himself, “Maybe some food would help.”

He goes down to the lobby to see if the café is still serving food. Luckily for him, with the extreme weather, they decided to open it for the people staying at the hotel. He grabs what they called a chocolate cigar and a fruit and yogurt parfait. That should at least settle the hunger he had acquired sitting in his room the last six hours. His flight to Los Angeles would be at six in the morning, out of La Guardia airport, with a layover in Chicago. He heads back up to his room and finishes his food. Falling asleep was no problem for him as his energy, for the most part, had already been drained.

He woke up early at around four in the morning and called for a taxi. He packed up all of his things and headed down to check out of the hotel, got in the cab and headed for the airport. Sitting in the car he realized something. He wasn’t going to be able to bring the knife past security at the airport. He thought about it until they had arrived at the airport. The man went to the check luggage counter and inquired, “Do you have express shipping for items you aren’t allowed to fly with? I don’t have an extra bag and I need a way to ship an antique knife.”

“We do have shipping available, is it just the one item?” the woman asked.

         “Yes it will just be the knife” he said without a second thought handing the woman at the counter the knife and an address to send it to.

         “Okay.  I will just need your ticket and if you would, please put your carry-on item on the scale.”

He does as the woman asks and gives her his ticket.

“Very well, we will package this for you, and here is a tag for your carry-on bag.”

              “Thank you very much. Do you have a confirmation number for the shipping?”

         “Yes, I took the liberty of printing it directly to the sticker for your carry-on.”

“Thank you so much.  Have a great day.”

The man walks off and heads to catch his flight. As he walks down the causeway toward the plane, he considers the writing on the knife and on the parchment that contained the Cowl. After he boards the plane, he takes his seat and after searching for a moment, pulls out the parchment to look at the runes.

It’s strange.  There looks to be only two symbols that repeat over and over across it. He pulls a piece of the parchment that had surrounded the knife and sees the runes are much different from what was on the Cowls’ wrapping. He decides to do what he’d done with the runes before.  He asks the flight attendant for a pen and some paper. The flight had just departed from the gate and had taken off. The flight attendant brings back the pen and paper after the plane gets into the air. He thanks her and begins to draw the two symbols,  Then, he sees the second  symbol change.  He writes both sets and what it means confuses him.

peccatum in carcerem

peccatum liberatus

              He pulls out his phone and searches for the words.. The attendant sees him on the phone and starts toward him. He hasn’t found the word yet when she comes down the aisle.

“Sir, I’m going to need to ask you to turn off your phone. It can interfere with the airplanes flight controls” she states.

              “I will put it away, in just a moment, but first I need to figure out what this says real quickly.” he said getting a paranoid feeling up his spine,  Although written in Latin, he understands some of it: “liberatus” means “freed” and “in carcerem” means “imprisoned,” but “peccatum” isn’t a word he’s ever seen before.

“It means Sin Imprisoned, Sin Liberated.” The words come from the deep voice of the man sitting behind him.  As he turns around, he sees a man wearing a tattered green coat.  His eyes were as black as night and a wicked smile streaked across his face.

Meanwhile back in the city, with the two nights of freezing weather, people weren’t really out on the street as usual. People had begun getting up for work, the weather had not improved as of yet, and night hadn’t quite surrendered its icy grasp over New York City. As the people went about their morning routines, the calm silence of night had begun to die away and the morning hustle and bustle of the New York life slowly began to take hold. Many had already called into work and others decided to stay in their hotels rather than see the sights the Big Apple had to offer, but for the people off to work there was something different about today. An eerie sort of thickness to the air, it made the monotony of life seem unbearable. There is perhaps one who did not share in this feeling.

The denizen I speak of, is not an outstanding person. To say, he doesn’t stand out would be a better phrasing. He wanders unnoticed through the world and casually observes the lives of others. Rarely, if ever, involving himself in their lives. One may say he is an historian to the masses or perhaps a chronicler of time itself. Ever shifting in infamy from one life to another, documenting moments that make the true history of this world. Not to be mistaken for a prophet, this man can’t predict the future and in no way is this man omnipotent, but he is able to observe the shifts in time and consciousness that make this world the place it is, and may see through to the other side of a window, or portal in reality.    

This has been my calling, and I am obliged to the nature of events. I speak of myself, although these portals only show themselves to me upon necessity, with no ability to predict their presence. All I know is the object I carry will create the portals. The windows as of late appear more often and I document what is shown. Studying these portals I believe it is possible to travel through them like a wormhole, only in theory though. What I do know is the purpose they serve, which I have previously described. I am to chronicle the events that matter in this world, and help you to understand them. Simply a narrator, here merely to bring understanding. Of this I am certain, and so allow me to apologize for the aside, but this will make my writings simpler to understand forth with, and now I proceed, as one such window has appeared and the history must be told.

It has been a couple of weeks since the plane crash now, it had been on the news every day since it had happened. They haven’t been able to explain exactly what had happened that morning. The black box had been retrieved, but reports say it had been too badly damaged to recover anything from it. There was however a leak, supposedly of the tape that had popped up on the internet a few days ago, although it was an unreliable source. What could be made out sounded bizarre. The pilots screamed about everything going dark in the cabin. Another voice could be heard, but the language they were speaking was a very strange dialect of gibberish.

Many people speculate to the nature of the reports, and others shrug it off as “conspiracy mumbo jumbo”. Either way, people have moved on, or things have begun to return to normal. The weather became far more bearable since the icy grip of death had released the hold it’d maintained over New York City. Although storm clouds begin to gather. The droves of tourists are now back in full swing, due mainly to it being New Year’s Eve. A man stands in Central Park in the late evening hours building up to the New Year. He despises the crowds that gather in Time Square, but enjoys the solemn peace that comes over the city when the tourists are busy watching the ball drop. Of course there are a few groups of people here and there, but not nearly enough to bother him.

BOOM!! A clap of thunder bellows forth. “Great, it’s pobablry gunna rain, let’s get orta here,” slurs a man to the woman he is with. The woman looks at him confused for a moment, but takes the man’s arm and they quickly walk away.

Laughing about what he had seen, the man decides that he should probably get going as well. Who knows, but maybe the drunken man was more informed about the weather than he had been. He began heading toward a nearby subway entrance. Glancing at his watch, he notices that it is only minutes from midnight, and he decides to wait a moment. The roar from Time Square could be heard all the way to Central Park and that is the only reason he chose this location. As the minutes pass the man looks toward the sky. The clouds, which were glowing from the light of the city, have changed to a crimson red color.  It was almost as though they had been drenched in blood. The thunder continued to sound, mixing with a pink and green colored lightning, the sight being both, mystifying and at the same time terrifying. Deciding that the spectacle, to be worth his gaze, the man stayed to behold more. He hears the roar of the crowd as the ball finally drops and in that moment, seven seemingly identical streaks of light fall from the sky. The clouds begin to disburse, but the thunder bellows forth, once more and the sky is consumed by the darkness that is only seen on a moonless night.

Not knowing what to make of any of this, he resumes his walk to the subway station and down the stairs to wait for the next A, C, or E line train to take him home. He is alone on the platform and the train arrives fairly quickly. He gets on the C train toward his destination. When he finally arrives at his stop, he heads to exit the train, there is a strange man wearing a bizarre hood and an odd green coat standing in his path. Suddenly becoming agitated the man growls, “Get out of my way or I will make you.” Without hesitation the stranger put his index and middle fingers up to the man’s forehead and spoke one word. “Wrath”