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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

Does the Codex Gigas exist in the Hopeverse?
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IamLEAM1983
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"It certainly does, but although the Black Goat has always relished in taking credit for its creation, the honor goes to Solomon's Court - to my compatriots, and especially to Vassago. Allow me to set the scene...

We are early in the thirteenth century, in what now is the Czech Republic - more specifically in the monastery of Podlazice. The town not being altogether isolated, the monks living in relative seclusion had some difficulty cutting off any and all ties to the outside world. Most of their needs were met by the villages surrounding their locale, which meant that some monks were required to serve as a reception party of sorts; to break their vows of silence long enough to receive all offered or purchased goods, or at least deal with the occasional wayward traveler. One such monk is now only known as Herman to us contemporary folk, and he was an erudite, if rather insecure man who never did fully make peace with his baser needs, while on his pursuit of Heavenly graces..."

He pauses and clicks his tongue.

"Oh, come now - Radcliffe? The Monk? The ages-old trope of the chaste man of God falling head-over-heels in love for an equally virtuous peasant girl, to the point where mere chaste admiration gives way to baser and more personal forms of pleasure-seeking? Surely this is familiar to you, by now, as should be the consequences to expect. A few soiled robes later, the abbot scolded Herman for this oh so grievous of offenses, and having one good foot in Pandemonium already, reacted like any two-bit monastic despot would and opted to have the door to Herman's cell bricked over - with him still inside...

I've always agreed with Samigina that Herman could have used some Amontillado to pass the time, but the joke wouldn't've made any sense to any Medieval monk, let alone any flummoxed archeologist carbon-dating seventeenth-century Venetian wine found moldy and dry in an alcove dating back to the Late Middle Ages. In any case, we were far more productive than this, thankfully. You see, Herman had not always been a monk - he'd had a brief stint as a dabbling Infernalist, in his youth, and had been lucky enough to find our Names and rituals interesting enough to commit them to some dusty corner of his mind.

And here we are, with a monk gambling his last breaths of fresh air on an impossible task to placate the abbot. If he could summarize the entirety of Man's knowledge in a single book, illuminated by hand, in a single night, then his sentence would be commuted to mere excommunication. Remember, however - this takes place in the thirteenth century, whererin great oceans of uncertainty and palpable ignorance still shrouded the world, and in which a single mortal man could still conceivably approach something resembling polymathy. Herman was well-read, he had a good basis, to be sure. What he lacked, however, was time.

So, the abbot and he both agreed on a procedure. Most of the door would be bricked up as per the standard punishment, but a few bricks would be left out for air to circulate, until the very first inkling of sunrise. If he failed in his task and could not leaf through a fully-illuminated tome of massive proportions by the night's end, he would be entombed. If his challenge proved to be a success, however, the swarthier of the monks would tear this new wall down, release their now-former  brother and throw him to the roads outside the monastery, to fend for himself. Herman, however, asked for a single day to prepare - and prepare he did.

By the cover of darkness and in candle-light, with no circle than that which his mind projected on the bare stone floor of his cell, and with no offering other than his desperation, Herman the Recluse called to the Court of Solomon. I certainly found his request unusual, but his palpable humility was touching, and so was the genuine love he harbored for the girl whose beauty and apparent kindness had caused him to violate his vows. He showed maturity in understanding freedom gave him no guarantee of her accepting his advances, and that she would be promptly disturbed by the sight of a disheveled monk clambering down a countryside road with a beaming smile and grandiose tales of conjugal harmony.

We then brain-stormed for a few hours at the favor of Angel Time, finalized the design as one, and then set Agares and Vassago loose, under Herman's directing leadership. The moon sat still at the five-minute mark past midnight, whilst we spent months in that single instant, hosting Herman and offering him a tad more than mere authorship over a book of titanic proportions. We turned his skills with quills and ink into career skills in draftsmanship and made sure that he would be well-equipped to survive as a civil servant or architect, elsewhere in Europe. We crammed the Old and New Testament in these pages, along with treasties on botany, herbology, astrology, mathematics, philosophy, alchemy and a then-complete primer on the arcane arts in those pages. We illuminated them with all the care Agares' time-bending skills in Graphic Design could produce - with Amduscias choosing to leave a tongue-in-cheek mark that would get those poor would-be Godly codgers chattering for the next several hundred years. The exact middle folio's double-page spread was reserved for a grinning Devil the likes of which the Dark Ages had a particular yen for - with enough ambiguity in its design to make retracing us a difficult proposition. We barely kicked up a fuss when the Goat claimed ownership of the Codex - he was more than welcome to it! There was no power to it, no exact significance that could not be garnered across a dozen other books; and that was entirely intentional.

As expected, the sun rose on a complete Codex Gigas, a seemingly hale and hearty Herman, and fingers we intentionally had him soil with as much ink as we could. Add a tiny hex to aid in convincing the abbot, and our now-freed friar was left lightly shivering like a man possessed - or at least like a man who'd earned a slight case of fever in his damp prison. He was thrown out, the monastery bricked up the Codex's alcove until 1648, where the Swedes invaded the Czech Republic during the Thirty Years' War and relocated the volume to Stockholm as part of their war booty. 1697 sees a fire returning it to Prague, where it has sat ever since.

As for Herman? We lost his trace for several decades, only for a young girl to summon me at her dying grandfather's behest. I remember shedding a few tears at the sight of this now-dignified old man holding the withered hand of the love of his life - who'd eventually said yes to his advances. She'd died a few hours prior, and it wouldn't be long until he would join her. I reassured his granddaughter and called upon the Court, so that they would receive his final vows of gratitude. I lingered in Prague for a few months afterwards, helping the family with their funeral expenses and all matters of succession, and promised young Katia that one of her descendants would one day turn the pages of what the locals now already called the Devil's Bible.

If only the poor fools had known... Now, only a young girl and a handful of misfit demons knew that if anything, the Codex was a work of love. Love with a pinch of impish glee thrown in for good measure, yes - but sincere love nevertheless."
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