Terra Nova Research Base, Antarctica.
RAIN-994: “Spear of Destiny”
Written in 1923 [no updates required]
Sometimes, the artefacts are nowhere even close to where there supposed to be. The blame there is with the human condition, the crusades, international commerce and, most recently, the perpetual ghost of globalization brought by the titanic British Empire. In the last, let’s say, two centuries, mostly the British and French moved local artefacts towards the centre of their empires. When this began, those who were at the early stages of Sophia were suffering some serious headache because of it; this was before my time, and when Daedalus himself was on charge of the place.
Problems multiplied as we go further back in history. When we speak of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, most of them are safe inside of the tomb, well, at least they were until the mummy craze on England. However, other civilizations weren’t so lucky. Greeks, Phoenicians, Catageneses, Iberians, and others got their artefacts hidden as heritage or stolen by the Roman Empire. Then, the Romans suffered the same treatment from the Goths and the Germanic invasions, with a key difference: Religion. As you may know, and if you don’t, let me tell you, Christianity had its beginnings in the rise of the Empire, becoming the official religion of it during the reign of Constantine the Alright.
The death of Jesus Christ in the Galilean Province of the Roman Empire created three artefacts at the same time: The Holy Cross, the Holy Nails, the Shroud of Turin, and the Spear of Destiny. I will not discourse the Holy Grail, due to its true origins (one can check RAIN-3981 once it’s available), while the former three have record of their own (RAIN-33, RAIN-41, and RAIN-34, respectively).
The history of the Spear of Destiny, also called the “spear of Longinus”, is not as convoluted as one could expect, though it’s certainly a strange one. This was used to pierce the side of Jesus during the crucifixion, to ensure his death; even if now sounds incredibly gruesome, we need to remember that this was a common practice during this particular execution method. I don’t know exactly if the act itself was what turned the spear into an artefact, or the blame is in the whole debacle of Christianity that came afterwards. In any case, the spear was buried with Jesus Christ, along with the remains of the cross and the grail.
There it remained undisturbed until the 4th Century AD, when Emperor Constantine ordered for the Christian relics to be brought to the recently renamed Constantinople (modern Istanbul) into a secret vault he’d designed inside the palace. From there, it was moved two times in the following centuries; one in the 6th Century to a chamber under Hagia Sophia, and a second where it was relocated to Jerusalem in the following century in below Temple Mount. There it remained until the Crusades.
As one of the “holy sites”, the place was in a permanent dispute between the Catholic Hoards and the Muslim inhabitants. During negotiations with Saladin, one of the people under Richard I, king of England, took the pointed head, as it was the only piece left after centuries of rot, and took it back to his family home in the Isles.
From there went to the eldest child, becoming part of the Family State. As the Anglican Church began to take form, in the form of a war and burning Catholics (though then the tables turned and Catholic Queen Bloody Mary began burning them by the dozen), the remains of the spear where melted into a knife without any markings. It kept being passed on, from generation to generation. Though when the eldest child was a girl, the propriety of the knife changed families and the tradition kept going on. By the early 19th century, the knife was in possession of the Faraday Family.
The Faradays, a family known for being descendants of the Fae Court in the Old World, has stablished themselves in Cottingley after the fall of the kingdom in the 9th century. As one can assume, the stablished themselves in the place that was going to be known as Cottingley in the following centuries, not in a random place called that in a time when it didn’t exist yet.
It went unassuming until the last person in the line, Blaire Faraday, left the new family home of Rosemère and enrolled at Antioch University in London. When the fire of the main building ended, the inventory of the personal belongings of the students revealed the existence of the knife and immediately alerted the people in Sophia. This is when Daedalus, as a member of the University’s governing body, stoop in to give Blaire a request regarding the artefact, after which it was sent to the recently formed Terra Nova Research Base.
Ariel Bonheur, Chief Archivist.
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