Sleep crept slowly over me, its shadowy fingers digging into my mind and blurring the bloody scenes. In the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, a stray memory floated to the surface.

I was about eight years old. Most of my time was spent in lessons with Kielan or studying, but I used my remaining hours in the library under the pretense of studying to improve my prophecy interpretations. Even then I knew I was making excuses. I just wanted to hide, to hide from Kielan behind the library’s door and from my own anxiety within the pages of the books.

That day, I had been studying the lives of past Saints. I was excited at first, eager to see something in their stories that might help me understand what I was supposed to be. Ever since I had come to the temple I the adults around me had drawn vivid lines between me and others. I had been redefined. Before, I had belonged to a categories of many - children, citizens, family, friends, people. Upon my arrival and canonization I was plucked neatly from that nexus of identities and placed into a new, isolated category, one that I inhabited alone. When my teachers told me I needed to learn about my predecessors, I realized that while I was currently the only Saint, I was not truly alone in that classification. Dozens had come before me, and perhaps learning about them could help me fix… something.

The notion was quickly crushed. Records of the Saints were impersonal, cold, and worst of all they were all written by priests. No Saint had left any of their own words behind, only stories others told of their piety and power. That day, I was particularly overwhelmed by disappointment that I did not know how to articulate, not even to myself. If those records described what a Saint was supposed to be, then why was I so useless? The desperate knowledge of my own inadequacy drove me into the darkest corner between the stacks. 

After an hour or so of hiding in that corner, I decided to search for a book to read, worried someone would come check to make sure I was really studying. As I stood up from where I was sitting, I stumbled slightly, almost crashing into the wall, and  I found a small book wedged between the wall and the massive ebony bookshelf. A thick layer of dust coated the book, obscuring the cover. I distinctly recalled the uncomfortable feeling of the dust on my hands when I brushed it away to reveal the book’s title, On Mosses. Curious, I opened it, only to find it was indeed a book about moss. It was a dreadfully difficult book to read, but the diagrams and illustrations of the different type of moss captivated me. That day, I paged through the entire book, understanding nothing but intent on reading every word.

At the end of the book, after the last page and scribbled onto the yellowed flyleaf, where two short paragraphs. They looked like nonsense; the punctuation, spelling, and capitalization were haphazard, and the lines were broken in strange places. The odd words burned themselves into my mind like heated iron on a bull’s hide.

A faint scent of smoke tickled the back of my throat, and I coughed slightly. I returned the book to the crevice I found it in and left. 

A strange fever boiled in me that night, leaving me weak the next day. I never looked for that book again.

Later, I learned about poems, and I thought those words were some strange poem. Perhaps a bored acolyte had scribbled a bit of poetry they fancied when they were supposed to be studying. Hopeful that was the case, I searched for those words elsewhere, looking through all the literature and poetry I could find for any similar text or reference, but my resources were limited. After a few years, I decided it must have been a work of boredom and put it out of my mind. Occasionally, it returned against my will, vivid, the words as they were written engraved in my memory. With it came a familiar certainty that someone wrote those words out of despair, then left them in that place alone, authorless and strange, for me to find.

Wolves snapped at the heels of my memory as sleep washed over me completely, but despite my exhaustion, my mind refused to let me rest.

Instead, I dreamed again, memories overlapping with my fears.