Guardwalking (Shifts In Otherworldly Places)

Guard House
(first shift)

I had never went there before, the far off wall mostly blocked the strange structure beyond it as just a shadow of an undefined silhouette. I was always perplexed by its presence and the varying tales I'd heard. I wasn't welcome with open arms in the village for I could see inside them. The name given to this matter wasn't for witchcraft, but a form of fortunetelling, although I was just a sentry in the night. I kept to myself. I have no recollection of uttering any portends of any event or saying a prediction of any person.

But the silhouette of the dark abode seemed to know, the empty castle stood off in the cold distance. I could brave that way, I could walk there, for I have seen the shapes of the dwellers of the dark. They always moved in scurried pace.

The local folks had begun to bring in their wares for the night, wares that could not be left outside. The axes, the gardening tools, the water vessels. I thought that odd. The moon was hidden behind the clouds. Alone I sat in the guard house, not too far from the well.

The far off castle echoed with the wind. There was something. As my hearing upon night's darkness increased, and those could have been mistaken for footsteps rapidly pounding upon the cold, stone floors inside that empty ruin.

I turned to look at the time. It was 2:34.

The midnight had passed and with it, the sense of ordinary night. The hour was something else now, a timid shutter, as if something in limbo had struggled to escape. A sense of suspension hung in the air. Yet, what is suspended? What nature has subdued itself unto the unknown? The distant castle now seemed more awake, alive, and stirred. The guard house door of oak wood made no indication of the moonlight that spilled all around the outside. I felt its presence, nonetheless.

With even more concentration, I could feel the presence from within the abandoned castle. There was something dull and forlorn about the echoes between the walls of stone and the trees out in the fields.

I walked outside and went to gate of the wall, and took the key to open it, to venture towards the abandoned castle that had stood so long as a mere shadow that cast itself against the nightfall of the village. Two different darknesses between one and the other. Something that seemed to recoil. It seemed the empty place felt as if more afraid than anyone looking in from the outside.

I went in through an open window, where once a stained glass window had been. The broken pieces still on the ground outside of it as well as on the inside. I lit my torch and walked in further.

Night Watches
(second shift)

The floors were solid stone but little else seemed solid. The walls were more twine and broken pieces of the structure than what it appeared to be on the outside. Empty. Dull, and muted. No sounds came from anywhere here. I sensed a time from before its ruination. The faces that were shown to me were those of the villagers. But in much younger days. I was from the deep forests and my work as a guard, a maiden watcher, was not yet a part of my life. But this place seemed to be the dying memories of the villagers. Their past deeds. I began to understand why they wanted to keep it hidden. There was darkness passing through. The ghosts wandered but their tales were kept guarded. I felt that my task was more about whatever I was guarding back in the village, wasn't for the village against this place outside its walls, but more likely guarding the abandoned place from being forgotten by the village. And this was something that some really wanted forgotten.

I went back to the guard house. I rekindled the small fire, and wrapped up in a simple wool blanket. The faded stone of the gates were silent, and the movement of wind had died. Nothing but the anticipation of first light. Twelves hours was exhausting and began to weigh heavy on my eyes. There was stirring out in some grove or forest nook but I paid it no mind. Too far off to concern anyone in the immediate time. I'd drift to a blissful oblivion. The night would come again, soon enough. On my way to the guardhouse, I'd bring with me this time, a small, golden shield. It had been years since I used it last.

During the parallel age between the village and the forests, there was a time of Graveyard Dreams. A few hundred years before, in a time when life had been mirrored by some other world that folk could come, and go in between. Like an alternate dimension into what seemed like a timeless realm. A passage into what could be some near future but more colorful from the bleak reality of the age we knew. It began to absorb in a way, woven intricately into life, and trapped a traveler or two. The only way they could speak to the villagers was through dreams, where they'd see images of them standing or walking in a graveyard that was situated into a back way of a forgotten part of the village. The rock walls that surrounded it always seemed to keep a soft shadow over it.

I laid the shield against the wall beside my sword next to the fire in the guardhouse. Now something else had emerged from the foreboding castle beyond the walls of the village. A visitor came to the iron gates. A cloaked figure with a long staff. I greeted this persona, and he spoke as if far beneath the deepest castle but the feeling was as if he spoke from a place more lofty than the unseen mountains of legend.

"What do you seek, in the night, in this village?" I asked. His eyes narrowed and focused on me tightly. He spoke with an ancient voice, an elder of some far off age who seemed to have gotten lost. "Soon you will have to find your way. Past the villagers. They do not move forward, and they cannot move backward for the limbo they inhabit. But you shall find your way out." As he spoke this, I felt a sense of dread, but ultimately it sounded as if the guarding would cease and the shadows would depart this little gray village.

With the golden shield I could hear things more distinctly in the night. I could see clearer. And in the dawning of the day to come, I again, saw inside the villagers' hearts once more, and I saw death and their wrath to bring death. At first saying nothing, they went about their daily affairs. But as I rose again, I was greeted with queries of why I hadn't used my sword and shield against the night visitor. "He disappeared past the gate, I never opened it." I explained. "The visitor works in Necromantic Ways!" They exclaimed.

This village was becoming more and more clear to me as a place that was built away from the living lands. But what lands I could not name. I was not in this village so much as I was walking along inside a place and time where it is. Or was.

Dreaming Back Awake
(third shift)

The abandoned place outside the village was no longer a point of fear. It was something now in the background. The gold shield had been taken with the sword back to the forests and enshrined by the night visitor. That's what they had told me. I was no longer needed as a guard at the wall and gate of the village, and that when the night came again it would be my last watch, although I wasn't fully aware of this. And the place that had given the villagers so much worry, was to be burned to the ground. They made a spectacle of it.

I watched as the flames engulfed it and I wondered about the graveyard behind the village in the opposite direction. Something instinctively lured me toward it. That a gate was opening somewhere. That it was time to go back to the forests. But the villagers came and wrapped me in a blanket as they lead me to another guardhouse on the darker side of the village between the center castle entrance and the path back into the forests. Here I would meet other guards from the village who once stood watch a long time ago. They wanted reassured that no truth of the past would be visiting anywhere inside the village and wanted to lure that strange night visitor in. So my last night of guardwalking would be deeper inside the village and not in the usual lookout.

Later that night, a few priests came and spoke to me. They seemed agitated and annoyed. They were sarcastic in tone. Sinister in appearance. "What or who is your god?" The mocking priests asked. "Truth." I answered. It wasn't as if I were suggesting any one truth to another, just the idea of it. What it was to me. I kept wondering if I was dreaming all of this. The village seemed overcast with an even heavier cloud. This one was layered and still. There was no movement. The night drew on. This night seemed to have no end.

There was a question of my faith. Secretly I denounced the false prophets, the wicked priests and their gods...whom did not exist but for the evil that could be done in their names. Names that had to be imagined before they could have solidity in the minds of the weak. "You can burn!" They screamed. I wasn't phased. It was as if I was walking through some other place and time.
"I burn with a fire, already." I said. "It's truth! I'll speak of true things and the darkness wails in my utterance. I burn with delight that I know who walked here, and seen the face of the creator! I know his face. His face was once seen here. I remember."

They faded from view as they wandered in confusion, as if walking in circles in unfamiliar lands. I wasn't the only one who had seen beyond the earthly planes. There were others and I couldn't reach back into ancient lore without leaving the walls and I had to stay awake on the nightwatch, and I wasn't able to stay there for more than nine hours at a time. I had to shift back to the sun and live in the light for a time. That was what I had and believed of how time would go here from now on. That I would simply return to the guard house, and my night watch, and walking as a guard when night fell. But that was just my routine that I felt they would bind me to. That the threat of the following night to be my last watch was something of a foggy retreat behind the castles of the lands. Out of some angry backlash about a visitor they didn't know.

But this was not to be. I paused and remembered all the things I'd seen before, and how they'd come to pass.
"There are those who see, those who know how tragedy unfolds in the darkness." I said amid the now muddled voices inside the guard house. "And they weep."
After an hour passed, I was being lead to where others had been before. It was now that I had no sword and shield to defend myself. Now that they were taken away, I was at the mercy of these same angry villagers. They were going to the entrance of a dungeon.

In A Darkened Abode
(final shift)

This place was underground and massive, the floors and chambers were grand in size and the stones laid out were different between one chamber and the next. Some of the chambers had earthen floors, simply smoothed rocks of the cavern they were hollowed out of. Past one area there were huge blades that circled in the middle of the giant room. Like a mechanism that ensured no one would either come into the deeper chambers without harm or to keep anyone from escaping. That's what I'd concluded as they lead me past the blades, from a safe enough distance, as they blocked any way back through by locking chamber doors behind them. If I tried to run, I would have been forced to step into the circling blades. So I had no way that I could see.

Finally we were halted at the place where I would be chained to the stone wall. But that was to be later. They snapped whips at my arms and back when I turned my face away and fell down. I wanted to escape if only to another corner of the chamber. I felt the trickling of blood on my wounded flesh. The walls of the dungeonous chamber where I stood now shackled and gazing at the angry faces of my oppressors, were ominous and from the dim edges of what I could see, shone candlelight from the four corners thereof. I had been chained to the wall for some hours but I could not recall how long I'd been that way. I felt the bruises but didn't recall when they were inflicted. I took blows to my middle, and arms, and head. I felt a chill that embraced me. But a heat of the wounds at the same time.

While the villager lords grabbed at my long hair and gazed at my closed eyes, as if to get one last tear to escape from under my eyelids, I felt no pain. I knew if death were near that it'd be all over and I'd be back home. The cloth I wore as the last remnant of my guard regalia, was a thin white under layer of woven silk, but the back was ripped off when the lashes were struck out at me. I felt tears on my face, but could not remember crying. I felt the strong sword hand of my captor let go of my hair and back away. I looked at them standing in the center of the chamber now, while my wrists were numb and bruised by the iron cuffs that I wore from the cold, stone wall.

"She has to be tried for witchcraft! She has left all behind on this quest for freedom! She must die!" I heard one of the lords declare. But there was a few that wasn't so bloodthirsty, but their courage was lacking. Only words were used as some last miserable defense. No bravery was among any of them, just an attempt to save a life but the most regarded of things was not life itself, but the appeasing of those who held power here. That was what was most sought after. To never offend those that abused power, and if someone's life was to be spared, it surely would have to suit in proper form.

"But surely she has done great good for our people. Can't it be that we may try to understand the reason why she spoke with an unknown at the gates? And saw us as enemies?" Another lord spoke on my behalf but it was too late. I could sense their voices getting louder and louder. I could feel the air around me grow warmer as the fires from the deep parts of the dread dungeon of shadow churned below several chambers of granite and brimstone. As they glared over at me, I looked past them, I saw in a copper bowl's reflection that a hazy, soft expression filled my blue and watery eyes and pierced through the dim lit chamber, and for one moment they stood silent and motionless.

I felt no pain, I felt no sorrow, I felt no remorse for that which I knew I had done in purity, love and honor. The visitor wasn't a stranger to me deep down inside. I somehow knew him. This wasn't his land, but it was obviously not mine, either. I leaned further back until the blistered flesh of my back almost melted with the cool stone wall. I felt a brief moment of relief and I looked up and I heard a soft tune. Vague at first, but unmistakably the same melody that I would hum to myself in dark places when'ere I'd go on high adventure with my now scattered comrades, who had either been sold as slaves or killed.

I began to look past the enclosed gloom of the chamber walls and ceiling. I began to hum my song and it echoed through the vast emptiness like a soft breeze of Spring and I saw that no matter what had happened....what had passed...that those few notes and the feeling of them were more solid and everlasting than anything of this dark turn of events...or of the world. I forgot about the urgency of guarding anything. That was passed.

Finally I closed my eyes again and the voices of the enraged lords were fading as if into nothingness. Then silence.

I had found my way.


~~~

Originally written in October 2002
 
The first parts of this story were written a year or so after the last part and included in its file in August 2005. It was meant to be a short series or 'shifts' of medieval events subtitled: Various Scenes, Acts, And Deeds.