Dear Peter,

I regret to inform you of my intentions this way. It’s cold and callous and impersonal. It does not befit me as a man of faith. But, before the faith I am a man of flesh and blood and I must face certain realities.

The abbey is doomed. There is no longer any hope for it. The protection from our founder is clearly lost if a monster like this troll can rampage on our doorstep. This was supposed to be a sanctuary but now it is nothing more than a feudal estate of the princeps. Our tax money matters more than any contribution to learning and the preservation of history. I hardly have any role in that on a good day and I believe our good days are behind us. The Prince has seen to that.

No amount of toil or tithe will be enough to rebuild the abbey’s wealth. You will be forced to beg the other churches for support, which they will have little to give, or to make concessions to the Princeps. Perhaps you will be forced to beg favor of the very people bankrupting you.

This presupposes that any of us will even survive. I do not know why, but we have earned the ire of a monster. Oh how I wish he would be willing to content himself with the blood of the Vassish, those rabblerousing wastrels, those pond scum in human forms. The world would be better off with them buried and I know that’s not a proper thing for a man of the cloth to say. I say it because from this day forward I will no longer be a man of the cloth.

I wonder Peter, do you know how meager our larders are now? Now empty the cellars? Have you looked over the harvests and yields? I can’t imagine you have, your current responsibility was only just thrust upon you so I imagine you don’t know how nearly the abbey will come to starving before we can even begin to harvest from our fields. As the former swineherd, you must think this time of year plentiful, but we have almost no pigs left at all and they were supposed to carry us through to the spring harvest. The abbey is ruined. If all it meant was eating gruel for a year, I would gladly stick through it.

But it is not merely poverty. It is the troll. The monster. The GRENDEL. It has the scent of something in the abbey. Maybe first it came because of the noise but no monster would continue attacking like this if there weren’t something it craved. Either someone here or the relic itself.

I shudder to think what will happen if a troll were to get the relic and I advise that you take it and flee if you can.

As for myself, by the time you read this message I hope I will be on a ship sailing far away.

Your former brother,

Anthony

755 CC Apr 4th

Brother Anthony died last night. No, I shouldn’t say it like that. He was killed last night, and his corpse thrown at the doorsteps of the abbey. Part of me says I should be thankful that there wasn’t another massacre. The grendel did not waylay us this past night, nor did I see the raven. There was no mass grave to dig, no heap of broken bodies. There was just the one.

The men who found it didn’t even raise an alarm, not one that woke me. They told the prince and sallied forth with horses begging for rest. Ten good men, or so I’m told, rode down the trail in the night lanterns at their saddles and bows in their hands. I do not know if it worked well, and I don’t think the prince knows either. They chased it down and loosed arrows into its thick hide as they darted between the trees as best as their steeds would allow. The troll got the better of them eventually, killing two of their horses but not getting the men.

I imagine it must be good eating for a troll to get so much horse meat. The prince was satisfied to let him have it. He told me that it was time for a change of tactics. Since their swords could do little to hack through the tough hide, he took inspiration from the siege of Blue Scale Temple. A one hundred to one siege that failed to crack the mountainous hold. The Dragon Khan threw his army against them and the defenders held fast. They loosed arrows dipped in feces, eventually spreading tetanus and other diseases through the filth. The Dragon Khan’s army was brought to its knees by it, and the prince saw it as his duty to repeat the trick.

Disgusting and dishonorable, but a man-killing troll deserves no honor I suppose. Perhaps infection will weaken the beast in the coming days. That is his hope and mine too.

Regardless, the fighting is his problem to deal with. Tending to the dead is mine. Brother Anthony tried to steal away in the night. He must have thought the troll would be busy attacking the Vassish, that he could sip out without being seen. He took nothing more than some bread and a lump of cheese the size of my thumb. It cost him his life and now I wonder if there will be any escape at all. I have received no word back from either the princeps nor the bishop. No courier birds at all have arrived and I find myself afraid that my messages out have not reached them either.

How could a troll fell birds from the sky? There must be some explanation but I do not know.

At least, I know one letter reached its recipients. Brother Anthony penned one for me. I have it beside me now. He had such hope mingled with despair. I don’t even blame him for gambling upon his own feet and wit but his gamble came up short. Snake eyes. Twos and sevens. Perhaps a gambler never really knows when his next bet will be his last. It happens to us all eventually. No, I suppose there are some gambles where you might expect death, but I think Brother Anthony expected only hardship and shame.

All the brothers of the abbey attended the service, of whom still remained. Upon counting heads, it looked like half a dozen acolytes were missing and could not be found. The northman was gone too, but he told Brother Mikael he was off to get a spear. I wonder if he has been biding his time like a merchant hiding stock. He wants his price to be as high as possible before saving the prince.

I can only muse so much about it. Brother Anthony was right. I busied myself through the hours of the day inventorying all that we had left. We are going to be boiling leather just for something to chew soon. The Vassish aren’t even plundering us further, but that I hesitate to call a silver lining. I must figure something out. It is our duty to protect the relic as well as our own lives.

If only the crest could be used by a human.

I think tomorrow we will have peace at least. I can sense a storm coming in. Normally such a downpour would be an omen of a miserable day sitting beneath a shack and covered in mud. There are so few pigs now that they can be kept in one of the old barns. If the grendel does attack it would be a fool. The mud tracks it would leave would guide us right to its lair in the light of the sun.

Legends of the North by Sean Cainwicks

Excerpt from page 70

Grendel made his lair in ruins fitting his purpose. Monuments of erected basalt among the ice. Gargoyles from the previous age leered down upon King Haelfbear and his men. Satyrs and nymph made from frozen stone, their joy eroded to scowls and spite. ‘Twas a city larger than any fief or hold in all of Skaldheim, but only long ago. What life they found was nothing more than lichen, snow mice, and raptors. Death was more than a forgotten thing in those ruins, for Grendel had spitted heads upon the ancient walls, the blood clotted and hoary with ice.

Orthodoxy forbade them to enter the ruins. The emissaries of the wolf mother forbade it as heresy. King Haelfbear held the sin of heresy in one hand, and the lives of his bannermen in the other. He did not fault any of his men for stopping at the gates, but he welcomed those who would march with him. At this, many of his men wailed and cried, for they did not want him to go. Even if he defeated the troll, the price may well be his own life.

That, he said, would be a death of honor.

Wishing to do all that they could, the men of faith girded their king in armor and piled upon him as many weapons as he wished to carry. After a toast of wine, he entered the forgotten city with ten good men at his back, each carrying spear and bow. They swept through the icy ruins, following the beaten down tracks of snow made by the beast. Ancient walls and foundations stuck up from the permafrost at odd angles and spans, shimmering between ice reflections as a storm rolled in from the west. The light of the sun did not diminish, but their sight shrank nonetheless. It had the effect of making the exposed stones shift and squirm when out of sight, like the tombstones of old were following around them and closing them in but they were only ushers showing them the way to the profaned temple of old.

‘Twas there that Grendel met them. As tall as three men and with hide as black as the night sky. His antlers had grown in thin and sharp, like a web of claws crowning his head. In his hand was a might weapon, a blade of stone sized for his giant frame like no human could ever heft. He had ripped a weapon from the grasp of a statue within the temple and given it true purpose. And so, he faced King Haelfbear with a marble edge.

King Haelfbear was undaunted and ordered his men to fan out. They encircled the troll with bows after stabbing the tips of their spears into the ice. This was not for them, but for the king. To slay a troll the size of Grendel would take a great many weapons, not merely strength and bravery.

Before the battle began, Grendel turned his head to the gray sky and trumped, deep and woeful. He screamed to the heavens about his wrath for having lost his herd, but the gods only heard the corruption nurtured inside him, fed by anger and hatred. The gods heard, and they judged.