Book of Souls

Believing that the child Octavus required the presence of the Lord, his father took him to Vectis Abbey at a young age. The child would not speak and would not make company with men, and Josephus took mercy on him and accepted him into the care of the abbey. It was then that Josephus made a miraculous discovery. Absent any tutelage, the boy was able to write letters and numbers. And, Lord God, not any letters and numbers but the names of Your mortal children and their days of birth and death into the future. Such foretelling infused Josephus with wonder and fear. Was this a dark power born of evil or a shaft of heavenly light? Josephus in his wisdom convened a council of members of his ministry to consider the child and thus was founded the Order of the Names. These wise ministers did conclude that there was no evil hand at work, for if this were so, why would the child have been delivered into their protective bosom? Surely it was providence at work and a sign embodied by the confluence of the holy number seven that the Lord had chosen this humble creature Octavus to be His true voice of divine revelation. And so the boy was protected and cloistered in the Scriptorium, where he was given quill and ink and parchment and allowed to spend his hours doing his true vocation.

His headache was unabating, so Felix rose from his table to prepare himself a vessel of bark tea. In the great room, he poked at the embers in the fireplace and added a fistful of twigs. Soon, the iron pot of water hanging from an arm began to hiss. He shuffled back to his bedchamber to continue his reading.

As the years passed the boy Octavus grew into a man whose singular purpose did not alter. Night and day he toiled, and there was produced a small but growing library of his books, which did all contain names and foretold of births and deaths. Throughout Octavus had no discourse or commerce with his fellowman, and all his bodily needs were attended by the Order of the Names, which protected his person and his vocation. One fateful day, Octavus was consumed with animal lust and did violate a poor novice girl, and the girl did carry and bear his child. It was a boy with the same strange countenance as its father. The boy was called Primus, and he had green eyes and ginger hair and, like Octavus, was as mute as the stump of a tree and in time he revealed himself to have the same powers as his father. Where there was one were now two sitting side by side, writing out the names of the living and the dead.

The bitter tea was easing his pain, allowing him to read faster and finish the passage he had written the previous night.