Free The Twins of Noremway Parish by Eric R. Johnston Page B

the work of the Darkness, Story Teller.”
    “ I do not believe that for a second,” I say.
    “ Then we have a mystery on our hands. Aye, but let us not concern ourselves with things we cannot change or control. We’ll succeed at nothing but useless worry. Let us see how this plays out.”
    “ You can’t possibly believe that I would accept that you have no complicity in this.” Were they taunting me? The Darkness, the banished Darkness: this hideous child was surely the result of black magic.
    “ Let us not dwell on what we can or cannot do; nor shall we dwell on how we choose to go deal with this unexpected circumstance. The scheme has gone as planned with the exception of this one minor aberration. You see, notice how the good friar and doctor gave this house only a passing concern. If they had stepped foot in this house they never would have found the child—the original, single child—alive, and would have left it to burn in the field. We couldn’t let that happen, could we? No, that would not do. That would have been condemning our child to an untimely death.”
    “ Our child?”
    “ Yes, ‘twas the child of the Darkness. Do you honestly think that we would care so much about the child of Tomias Waterman if it were not in fact our own? Tomias housed us here—or so he would say if he had been honest enough to admit to his fellow parishioners that the Darkness was right here in Noremway Parish.”
    “ You’ve been banished from Noremway Parish! You do not belong here! The great leader and warrior Ragas Moliere defeated you 2,000 years ago!”
    “ Silence! Banishment means nothing to creatures of the shadows. We reveal ourselves when and where we will. No one can hold us out unless we want to be held out—a lesson that Tomias was surely thinking about as he was viciously killed by those wolves. He must have known that we set the wolves on him.”
    “ Ragas banished you.”
    “ Ragas was not the hero he was made out to be, you know? What is a story teller but a liar in disguise? You interweave a story to spin a tale. A story is no different than propaganda when you think about it. Of course, you say you seek to uncover the truth, and in many cases that may be true. I wouldn’t know, but a story teller often creates his own truth built upon the perspective he has. You and Brother Oleander wanted Ragas to survive into posterity as the sung hero who vanquished the Darkness, yet it was the Darkness that consumed him; consumed him from within.”
    “ You lie! I was there! I saw Ragas die a hero! The great wall surrounding the parish—”
    “ Is nothing more than a wall; do not tell me you still believe such fallacies even after you’ve seen us here? Such is the shame of a story teller. Two thousand years can be such a drag on the memory. Think! What really happened? You may be a story teller, but every story needs an editor. A story teller is a curious creature. Even now the story you had planned for Noremway Parish is changing, and with it the memories of what was supposed to happen. The difference this time is we have altered the narrative before the story was even told.”
    What is happening to my memories? There were no sages…and there was never any protection from the Darkness? It was a…lie? And Ragas? I clearly see the tall, beautiful man with flowing red hair, holding the Angled Cross over his head as the sun gleamed off his breastplate, a creature of the Darkness defeated at his feet.
    “ The image currently in your mind is nothing short of fallacy, and I think you know it.”
    “ What are you doing? How are you doing this? Why? This cannot be true. This just cannot be true. IT CANNOT BE!”
    “ But it is. Our child has been born, yet there is another that we did not foresee. This other…we cannot see what the future holds, and it scares us.”
    ***
    “ Ghora, get up,” Franz Phoenix ordered as they entered the Waterman House. Urey had fallen to his knees in some sort of prayer; at