I clearly remember the night I spoke to Abbot Pellanor about the cave. It would be the last discussion we would ever have as living beings. The traitors—the secret members of the Order of the Shrike—had just been escorted away by the guards, and it was just the abbot and I in his study. I paced agitatedly from his desk to the burning fireplace and back again. I stopped and stood facing Abbot Pellanor, whose tired eyes sagged with several layers of loose, ash-colored skin. “The World of the Damned . . . it’s . . . it’s a real world?” I asked, my ears barely recognizing my voice. I had thought I would never ask such a question.
“I’ve heard of the Saboteurs . . . they lure one’s soul into empty darkness.” I shook my head. “They’re like ticks, mites creeping under the skin, implanting doubt, draining everything.” I was babbling—mainly to calm my nerves, but also in hopes that the abbot would join in on my ramblings.
“Saboteurs,” I continued. “Their nastiness, I know . . . and I know how they drain the spirit—but the World of the Damned?” I paused with my mouth open and shook my head once again. “Sir, the World of the Damned? How can that be real?”
His words came out haltingly compared with my rapid-fire spew. He drew out a long sigh. “Apprentice, I am sure that all your reading and writing on the Shadow of Fear has made you an expert on the World of the Damned.”
“Yes, I’ve spent many hours reading about it and meditating on the subject, but I always believed it was a metaphor, perhaps a symbol of where the souls who surrendered to the Shadow of Fear were kept. I didn’t believe the World of the Damned was an actual space in time.”
“There are the living, the dead, and the living dead,” Abbot Pellanor explained. “The living are souls encased in bodies. The dead are souls who have been released from bodies. And, as you said, the living dead are souls held hostage by the Shadow of Fear. They can’t reside on Earth with the living, but they can’t rest eternally with the dead. They stay in a parallel world called the World of the Damned. There are two ways to go to the World of the Damned—succumb to the Shadow of Fear or be ferried across the Stauros Sea. The Stauros Sea separates the World of the Damned from our own. It’s the reason for the unusual tides. Low tide, the World of the Damned is inaccessible. High tide, the World of the Damned opens before us.”
“Has this cave always been there?” I asked. I now stood still, stunned by what the abbot had revealed.
“Always.”
“Why didn’t I know about it until tonight? And how did those treacherous murderers know about it? Had we taken precautions earlier, we wouldn’t have lost so many of our brothers!”
The abbot looked away.
“When the first members of the Order of the Crane arrived on the island, they discovered that the cave was a passageway to the World of the Damned. Realizing the potential danger, they built the abbey over the cavern and tried to keep the cave’s existence as secret as possible.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but the abbot already had the answer to my question.
“They could not get rid of the cave, for Stauros is a crossing of the living and the dead and everything in between. That is the nature of the island. We could only keep it a secret, and only the oldest monks were told. They passed the secret down from generation to generation. How those members of the Order of the Shrike discovered the cave and conjured the Saboteurs is a question I don’t have the answer to.”
“Can we rescue those who were lured there? Twenty of our members are gone. Including tonight, we have twenty-one members lost in that . . . that hell. They didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t even give themselves over to the Shadow of Fear! We should gather a party and save them.”
“No.” The abbot’s voice was stern. “No one has ever returned from the World of the Damned. To do so, one would have to defeat the Shadow of Fear, and you, more than anyone, know that only one being is capable of that.”
“The Slayer,” I muttered, nodding. Since the day I had arrived at the abbey, I had been assigned to record an official version of the tale of the Slayer of the Shadow of Fear. For the six years I’d been at the abbey, I’d researched and pieced together what I believed to be the original myth of a brave young man who would conquer the Shadow of Fear and free people entirely from this menace. But the information was scarce and hard to come by. Although I had written most of the myth in my book, I had not yet finished it.
The abbot was quiet for a moment and then spoke. “Apprentice, you didn’t fall under the Saboteurs’ curse and get into the boat in the cave. Although you saw them, they could not lure you.”
“No,” I said, suddenly realizing that I could’ve been the twenty-second member to have gone missing. “I . . . I don’t know why. I was in the library, the same as he was . . . probably the same as all of them were.”
The Abbot nodded slowly as he scratched his chin for several seconds. Finally, he told me, “I put you in charge of boarding up the cave and sealing the passageway so that no one disappears again.”
He walked abruptly out of his study before I had a chance to react.
The next morning, I followed my orders and the mouth of the cave was filled with large boulders. An extra layer of marble was laid on top of the library floor to cover the opening to the cave. I gave my testimony to seal the fate of the secret members of the Order of the Shrike. They were ordered to leave the island.
I had believed that they—the few bad apples, soon to be gone—were our only problem. But I was mistaken. There was an entire secret network of members of the Order of the Shrike throughout the world—all of them people of great wealth and power who aspired to have even greater wealth and power.
The day the condemned monks were to leave, a planned massive assassination of all the members of the Order of the Crane took place. Every member of the Order of the Crane died that day, including me. This attack would later be remembered as the Massacre of 1615.