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 speaker rises and finds no day. The hours he names are not hours but years, and the years are his whole life. The body itself, bones and flesh and blood, is reckoned a curse. 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.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see The lost are like this, and their scourge to be As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley · M2 Terran Archive · Recovered Verse · Continuation
These five lines are absent from the Ophelia VII copy, which is the version the Inquisitor would have read, and survive only in the strand preserved at Bakka by the archivist Vesk Oranthen in the thirty-third millennium. The cleric does not name an outward enemy. He names himself the cause: gall, heartburn, the body’s own bitterness turned inward, dough soured by its own yeast. He measures his condition against the condition of the damned, and finds the difference only one of degree. The verse ends on worse and stops there.
Eisenhorn’s quotation stops short of these lines. Whether by ignorance or by choice is unrecorded. The fragment he set down ends at blood brimmed the curse, the body as vessel of the curse, built and brimmed, unable to be otherwise. The chapter it stands above is his own account of acts he could not undo, set down because he would not leave them unsaid. The Schola Theologica of Bakka teaches that the terrible sonnets are not records of failure but records of honesty. Whether that constitutes a virtue is a matter the Throne has not adjudicated.