I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent this night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went! And more must, in yet longer light’s delay. With witness I speak this. But where I say Hours I mean years, mean life. Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Religious verse, Terran, M2
The Magos, Dan Abnett
ANALYSIS
The fragment is preserved among the Terran verses of the second millennium, attributed to one Hopkins, a cleric of the old Jesuit confession who served in the city of Dublin upon the isle of Eire. He died in the year 1889 of the old Terran reckoning, having taken holy orders in his youth and laboured in the teaching of letters in his last years. The greater part of his work was lost to the Long Night and is known to us only through the scholia of later archivists.
These lines belong to a sequence the Terran scholars name the terrible sonnets — verses set down in a season of spiritual desolation, when, by his own testimony, the cleric was forsaken by the consolations of his faith. The Adeptus Ministorum has at times forbidden their copying, deeming them a grief unbecoming the servants of the Throne. The Schola Theologica of Bakka holds the contrary view, and copies them still.
The matter of the verse is the long night of the soul. The speaker rises and finds no day. The hours he names are not hours but years, and the years are his whole life. Even the body, the bones built within him, the flesh that fills him, the blood that brims his veins, are reckoned a curse. It is a testimony recorded in the second millennium of Old Terra, and it speaks plainly to the present age.
The verse comes down to us by an unlikely hand. The Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn, of the Ordo Xenos, set these lines at the head of the fourth chapter of his late account, the work the savants name The Magos. By the time of its writing he had been declared excommunicate traditoris by his own Holy Order, and walked alone, in the company of the daemonhost he had bound to his service. That a man so placed should choose this fragment, of all the verse preserved out of M2, to mark his testimony, is a matter upon which the chroniclers have not seen fit to comment further.