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Edgar Golham
Topic Started: Feb 18 2014, 06:06 PM (163 Views)
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Thornbury’s older citizens had fond memories of Earl Godric’s time. It had been a golden age, a perfect era to turn a good ruler into a myth. His law had been just, his advice at the King’s council wise, and his battles heroic. But it was for his kindness that the man nicknamed “Goodwill” had been remembered.

No one had been aware of the tragedy that had been unfolding behind the door of his peaceful-looking Thornbury manor house, which had been later integrated to the Episcopal palace.

*

As he and his wife Hilda, who was of Viking descent, were seeing their old age drawing nearer and nearer, they became worried about remaining childless and thus, without an heir; all the while, Hilda had been aware of her husband’s secret desire for one of her maids, a Saracen girl he had “rescued”, so he had said, years ago, while traveling in Constantinople with his friend the merchant Belami. Once back home he had given her to his wife and she always wondered if it had been a means to ease his conscience. Whether or not it had been the case, one day came when Hilda finally led the maid Kader into Godric’s arms. “You desire her”, Hilda told him, “Go ahead and take her. Give us a son”.

Edgar was born one bleak night of November. The heavens went blood-red with a terrifying show of rare Northern lights.

The boy was healthy but “looked too much like a monkey”, Hilda said. His primary needs were seen to properly, if not anything else. In spite of a relatively frail stature and lack of speech, he took his first steps at the surprising young age of eight months. His father didn’t see much of him in his first year, because of his duties; then again, it wasn’t that unusual, as fathers rarely interfered in their sons’ education until hey reached their seventh year, what was called “the age of reason”.

When Edgar was four, Hilda gave birth to her own sickly but legitimate son Casey. During the next three years or so, the existence of the heir didn’t affect Edgar’s life much: he was mostly left to his own devices and he preferred it that way. The boy was unpredictable and lacked social skills; every attempt to reach out to him that was promising was unmercifully destroyed by him. He wasn’t very likeable. His seldom seen father was the only one who somewhat succeeded in his interaction with him, and Edgar didn’t break the drum he had given him in his third year; on the contrary, the child proved himself surprisingly skilled at playing it.

In his seventh year, Edgar “played” a little too roughly with his half-brother and hurt him. Hilda used the opportunity without delay: she forced her husband, with the help of persuasive political scheming from her family, to ban the maid Kader long with her bastard son who had become a potentially dangerous burden. Secret arrangements were taken by her with the son of the French merchant to make sure that they would ever be seen again: both were taken back to Constantinople and sold as slaves. Edgar was branded in the middle of the forehead by the merchant’s son Leo, as the boy had hit him there with a stone from his sling.

Kader didn’t even live to be sold: because she had given herself to an infidel barbarian, she was torn away from Edgar’s chains and stoned to death before his very eyes.

It was therefore a traumatized eight-year old that the traveling scholar Zamil took interest in, and for very special reasons of his own. “Among the Jewish beliefs is the most ancient myth of the golem”, the man recalled, as he found the boy in an extreme state of prostration, sullied with earth. “In their tradition, it refers to an inanimate object, most often a human figure made of clay, that could be brought to life through the means of a specific ritual involving the engraving of three Hebraic letters on its forehead. This boy looks like one. Or he can become one”, he reflected. The idea was most interesting: he was certain that his young pupil, Hassan, would approve of it. “A golem is a slave without any of a human slave’s normal impulses or desires to quell; it has no conscience of its own; it doesn’t fear death; it doesn’t ever question its master’s authority; all of which makes it a powerful tool at the absolute service of its creator; it is the perfect slave.”

And so, Edgar was sharply pulled out of the strange state of non-existence he had sought refuge in, only to be further deprived of his identity s a human being: Zamil worked him like a clay figure, he painfully shaped him anew, and pushed him into a blazing oven; he intensified the deconstruction process through a Spartan tutelage of his own device, which included a subtle art of combat very different from the chivalric codes we're familiar with, that was made from a wide variety of gleanings he had collected over his years of travel, and teachings that the modern world would probably refer to as mental conditioning. And so Edgar reached adulthood. Zamil’s ultimate goal had been to offer his masterpiece to the widowed mother of his pupil, whom not only he cherished above all, but whose potential husband would thus gain tremendous political influence.

Such an ambition had made the scholar oblivious of the danger therein… Creation could only be of divine origin; the imperfect cannot create the perfect. In all golem legends, the creature would eventually become so powerful that its master would lose control over it.

The scholar should have seen it coming: not only his lady was pleased with his gift, she also took the golem as her lover. Zamil and his creature became rivals. The golem didn’t foresee anything wrong either, as all he did was obeying orders.

Zamil called his trusting slave to him made him dig a grave. He then knocked him out with the shovel and modified the mark that had identified him as the golem: he erased one of the three letters and explained: 'from emet, the truth, you hereby are met, dead. You no longer exist to me.' Pushing him down into the pit, he buried him alive and left.

The truth.

It was because of the truth, or more exactly, because of its absence, that the golem has existed at all: through his conditioning, Zamil had deprived him of his true name, Edgar, as well as of his true past. But as he struggled his way more and more weakly out of the grave, truth and past came back to him with his breath.

All those years he had been a fake. It all had been a lie. Zamil didn’t really care about him. No one ever had. Whatever people called truth only meant pain to him. He might be bad, but no one was better than he was. If he was discarded like a filthy rag, everyone else either deserved the same fate or would remain alive to serve him. It was only fair. Time had come for the others to deal with his truth.

With a shaking hand, he carved the “aleph” letter back on his forehead, not minding the blood that trickled down his nose and cheek.

After having stealthily murdered his master with the very techniques that had been taught to him, the half noble-born now known as Golham became a fugitive slave who took some years to travel back to his homeland, only to learn that his father was deceased.
Edited by Edgar_Golham, Feb 11 2015, 09:02 PM.
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