The Abbey of One Million Gods
Short Fiction - Dark Fantasy/Folk Horror
Greetings, Talebones Readers!
I first had the stirrings of this story idea about six months ago, but it took quite a long time to find an “in” for the narrative. So this is my attempt to get this story out of my brain and onto the page!
Though it stands fully alone, it takes place in a shared universe with another one of my non-Ferris Island stories. Maybe longtime readers will guess it before the end; if not, the related story is linked at the bottom of this one!
I guess you could say with this story that I was going for a bit of dark Lord Dunsany vibe. Hopefully I got close.
Please enjoy this odd little ditty! 🐝
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It was near the height of the Long Tide, when the lapreyn flowers are slowly buried by the sea, that Fletch first arrived at the Abbey at Orthro.
The rowboat struck shore with a crunch and a scrape, and Fletch grimaced as the old wound in his side—gaping like a mouth, screaming—sent a shock of pain up his ribs and into his neck, throat, scalp, vibrating his very bones.
No one was there to meet him. He climbed carefully out onto the stones which were slick with dried seaweed and a thick layer of dead flower petals, crimson in rot. His boots slipped, but he steadied himself against the bow of the boat.
The sky was clear blue, and the summer air was heavy with the scent of honey. It was overpowering. The heaving of the sea was a constant rumbling hum.
Fletch took up the rope and pulled, groaning as his wound groaned, and managed to drag the boat up and away from the grasping fingers of the sea, just enough. Then he raised his eyes to look upon the Abbey at Orthro.
It was a round and squat stone fortress—an old castle, some said, and others said a tomb—ringed ‘round with a sea wall against the height of the Long Tide and surrounded by meadow, overgrown with wildflowers.
The meadow reminded Fletch of his own, back home. His wound trembled.
Fletch picked his way up the beach. Here the lapreyn flowers were scarce, but he could see them growing further down the ever-narrowing shoreline in patches of brilliant red, bright against the shale. The Long Tide would overtake them within weeks. The smell of the blooms was strange and intoxicating, a malty, heady fragrance.
Fletch could also see the bees. Small and hardy sea-bees, making their journeys from flower to flower and then back to the abbey.
He followed the path up a short flight of stairs to gain ground over the sea wall, and up to the abbey’s front gate.
It was open. It always stood open, in summer. An acolyte stood within the threshold, her bare feet sun-browned on the flagstones under her simple pale linen shift. Fletch startled as he drew close to her, because her skin and bare head appeared pocked and scarred. But what he had taken for scars were designs, painstakingly drawn on her face and head with lines of wax. And what he had taken for scabs were the bodies of bees, curled in death, affixed to her cheeks and brow with the selfsame wax.
The sister watched Fletch with careful eyes as he approached. Then she held out her hand.
Fletch reached into the canvas bag at his side and pulled out a trimmed hank of his own dark hair, tied carefully with twine. He pushed it into the acolyte’s palm.
The sister gave the hair a quick look, seemed to have all the information she needed, and turned, gesturing for Fletch to follow up the walkway and into the abbey itself.
*******
Once he was within the abbey walls, Fletch discovered that the overwhelming hum he had heard was not the sea.
He looked up in the gloom to see vast ramparts of honeycomb, thick on the walls and dripping in palatial layers from the abbey’s stone ceilings like soft gold stalactites. Countless hundreds of thousands of bees crawled over the comb; the humming of their wings filled the air with unearthly song. The smell of honey and warm wax was suffocating.
Fletch did not know much about the Abbey at Orthro, only the things the city-folk whispered among themselves: a band of heretics, they said, who had long ago found bizarre rites hidden in the books and the prayers and had left the city to cultivate their strange ideas in peace. While the city monks rightly celebrated the bee as the nursemaid of the Swan, these acolytes worshipped the bees themselves as gods, and the Swan had been largely forgotten.
Fletch limped after the acolyte deeper and deeper into the round structure, passing spiraling corridors branching into further halls, until they reached the center. More acolytes moved slowly and carefully through the halls, the bees dancing around and through them as they passed, their shaved heads ornate with wax whorls.
The center sanctum of the abbey was an empty stone sanctuary with an open hearth at its heart, a large round hole in the ceiling, and an old woman sitting and tending the fire as if it were the only task she had ever done and would ever do. Bees crawled languidly around the space, lulled by the fragrant smoke. Jars and crocks of honey lined the walls on wooden shelves and tables, tinted red by the lapreyn’s unique nectar.
The acolyte gave the old woman the hank of Fletch’s hair, and then withdrew.
Fletch waited. The old woman threw the hair on the fire. The flame sparked and sizzled, and the old woman studied it as it burned. Then she spoke, and her voice was brittle with lack of use.
“You have questions?”
“I long for remedy,” Fletch replied.
The old woman nodded. “Many do. What is your illness?”
“An injury. It is in my side. In my flesh. It refuses to close.”
“You have seen doctors.”
“All of the doctors. I have taken all of the medicines. Nothing has worked.”
“Show me.”
Fletch paused. But the old woman stared at him, unimpressed with his hesitation.
He pulled off his coat and let it fall to the stone floor. Then he lifted up the hem of his shirt to reveal the wound where it sat on his right side, under his arm. It was as ugly or uglier as the day he received it, a festering thing the size of a child’s palm. It had eaten away at the skin, leaving a hole like a screaming mouth with black lips. It did not bleed, but was wet with odorous ooze.
The old woman asked, “How did you receive it?”
“In battle. I am a soldier.”
Her eyes flicked up at his face for a moment—did she perceive the lie?—before she turned back to the hearth. “A wound that does not close is often a curse. Were you cursed?”
Fletch frowned. “In war, all are cursed.”
“Have it your way.” The old woman thought for a moment, then peered at him. “The gods of this place do indeed work miracles, but they do not suffer fools. Healing is as much about the drawing of poison as it is the sealing of the wound. Have you poison to draw?”
“I do not understand.”
“Poison is the hidden thing that kills slowly,” she said, sternly, raising a thin arthritic finger to let it hover somewhere between the sky and earth. “Hide nothing from the gods. It will be revealed. Do you understand?”
Fletch felt his cheeks flush with frustration. What he wanted was the medicine; let the heretics keep their rites and be damned for it.
He replaced his shirt over the wound, covering it with care. “I will endure anything for healing. This is my last chance for remedy. I have tried everything else.”
The old woman did not reply to this.
“I am a wealthy man, and I will offer you whatever payment you require,” Fletch added. “Only have pity on me.”
“Wealth means little to us. And pity is not mine to give.” The old woman rose to her feet. An errant bee landed on her shoulder and rested for a moment. In response, the woman paused, her lips moving in prayer, her eyes raised to the open ceiling where the smoke drifted out into the blue sky. The insect seemed to listen to her words of devotion, then flew away through the hallway.
The old woman turned her gaze back on Fletch.
“Pity belongs to the gods,” she said. “Let them see you worthy of it.”
*******
The old woman led Fletch back through the corridors, each nightmarish and misshapen with thick comb and heaving waves of bees, until they came to a hall peppered with doors, clearly some kind of dormitory. She pushed open a door and gestured for Fletch to enter.
“This will be your cell while you bide here,” she said.
It was a tiny stone room, sparsely furnished, but this one contained no bees, no comb. It was eerily quiet compared to the rest of the abbey, and there was no smell of honey. Fletch found it a welcome change.
An acolyte entered with a cup. She handed it to Fletch, and he took it. The material was smooth and golden under his fingers.
Beeswax. A small cup molded from cold beeswax.
Within was a small dose of honey. It was thick and languid with the characteristic red tint of lapreyn nectar. That it looked like wine—or blood—was not lost on Fletch, but the smell was divine.
“Drink,” the old woman said, “and then sleep.”
“And I will be cured?”
“You will have your remedy at the gods’ pleasure,” she said. Then she left, and the acolyte left with her.
Fletch held the cup for a moment longer. His fingers were too cold to soften the wax, still numb from his hours-long passage across the channel, rowing against the waves. He tilted the cup, watched the miraculous honey slowly swirl, cling to the waxen sides.
He had heard so many stories of lapreyn honey. Tales of illnesses healed, of wounds sealed, of the dead brought back to life. Tall tales, mostly, but there had to be some truth in them.
He drank it. It took precious minutes for all of the honey to seep out of the cup and onto his tongue, but he waited patiently and used his finger to clean every sweet morsel from the wax. It warmed him on the way down, like mead.
Fletch set the cup beside him on the small wooden stool and then prepared to sleep. He removed his coat again, and his shirt. The wound in his side yawned open at him. He sneered back at it.
“Your rotting lips will be closed yet,” he murmured. “Closed and mute forever.”
He settled onto the hard bed, just an old cot, and closed his eyes. He worried at first that he might not be able to sleep, but the dreams arrived on quiet feet, riding on the red back of the honey, and hovered over his face like spiderwebs.
In sleep, Fletch dreamed of the sea, and then the sea became the new pastureland he had bought with blood, drenched in sun and wildflowers billowing like clouds over the grass. His pasture. His land. His, and all by right.
And there were bees. He could hear the bees. But when he looked for them, the bees were women with daggers in their hands and whorls of wax on their bare heads, carrying bags of red pollen like grain on their backs. And they watched him as he strode through the meadow that was his, and as he walked all of the flowers turned to lapreyn, a sea of red petals dancing on a windless afternoon. The women held out their daggers to him, their mouths yawned open like caves.
“Where is the master of this field?” came a voice, commanding. A woman’s voice, vibrating with power.
Fletch tried to speak, but in his dream he could not, and his lips opened but no sound came out.
“He is dead!” cried the women, the bees, with their daggers and the red pollen like grain. “The master of this field is dead!”
Fletch wanted to say—to scream—that no, he was not dead. I am the master of this field! I am the master of this land!
But he knew it was a lie, and so did the bees. He felt the warm blood on his hands like honey, and he knew the hidden clearing in the woods where the dagger lay in the grass, and he saw the corpse of his captain grinning up at the sky because it was a jest, a joke, to be killed in battle by your own comrade simply for the crime of owning a coveted field. In the chaos, who would see the struggle? In the hum of war, who could tell who murdered whom? All was smoke and fire, all was red and rot.
Who would know?
Fletch limped away from the grinning corpse, stabbed in the side but alive to take the pastureland he had eyed for so long. Stabbed in the side, but it would close.
Yet, it never closed.
“Where is the master of this field?” came the voice again, and Fletch shuddered. In the cot bed his body convulsed. His wound seemed to laugh at him with wet black lips, filling every nerve with pain. He opened his eyes, drenched with sweat.
The stone cell was filled with bees.
They were everywhere. Climbing the walls. Climbing the cot bed. Filling the wax cup on the wooden stool. And their humming was a warning and a worship, and they danced and danced in bizarre spirals, wings whirring.
Fletch was seized with a paralyzing fear, for he knew suddenly and with terrible horror that the Queen was in the room, even though he could not see her in the dizzying crowd of bodies and wings. Each bee called to her. Each god prayed only to her. One million tiny gods, dancing for their shining Queen. Waiting for her word.
“The honey!” Fletch cried out in terror, his grinning wound screaming for vengeance. “The honey, my remedy!”
A voice whispered in his ear. The voice from his dream. Her voice.
“For some, it is the honey,” she said. “For others, the sting.”
And humming and hymning, they descended upon him.
*******
A year passed. The lapreyn seeds spread in the waves and settled in the muck, biding their time for spring, choking the beach with their spent roots and rotting petals. The sea receded, letting the winter sun warm the exposed sea floor. And when spring arrived and the lapreyn sprouted in the beach soil and the Long Tide returned to the Abbey at Orthro, so too did Fletch.
No one knows how he got there. He went unseen for many days, lying at the base of the sea wall, alone. Bleached by the spring sun, and pelted by the rain. The seabirds largely ignored him; there was nothing left of him that they cared about. The acolytes passed him by in their daily care of the sprouted lapreyn flowers, their tending of the sacred beds. To them, he looked like another jumble of pale stones.
It was the gods in their mercy who found him.
They hovered over him, humming. His suffering was over. His flesh was gone and his wound was no more, its vengeance fulfilled.
So they built comb in his empty skull and ribs. They danced their exquisite spiraling dances upon his limbs and shoulders.
They filled him with song and red honey like blood, death to life again, for pity belongs to the gods.
END
Never, ever, ever lie to bee gods. Ever.
Ever ever.
The truth will out, and justice will have her due.