The Fertile Grave

It was the render of a myriad spell books that I discovered an arcane truth.

That the dead become the children of the living.

Through countless studies of endless tomes in the candle-lit tower atop the Abbey of Sighs I saw with clarity the ancient sunless alchemy of life from death, the fertile traffic from grave to cradle.

Set on a course to find God's mission for my brothers by the first deacon, now long gone, years of lonely research strayed from this industry and led instead to a dark and dangerous realisation, that a geometry existed that defied the benevolent norm and explained in one the hidden purpose of death, to sow the unborn spirit with the captive energy of the dead.

The magnitude of this equation weighed heavily on my mind and for a time I stumbled into lethargy and intoxication, as the  unwelcome sum of this revelation was a reckoning too far for a mere mortal.

I considered seeking the council of the learned Abbot but my fear of sacrilege drew me further into solitude and isolation and in time, save for my novice who brought me food and water, I was largely forgotten by the brothers of the order and left in the cobwebbed tower.

The longer I delved into the library's folios, already hoary with age when I was born in Sorrow,  the deeper my comprehension of the dark algebra determining our embryos in the spirited womb.

I experimented with lesser souls: spiders, mice, rats and birds, but the transfer brought nothing. No new fertility. No new progeny. It seemed that the morbid exchange was reserved for Mankind. Was this the divine gift? The sacred freight? The precipitated soul?

Nightmares haunted me and sleep became uncommon. I was growing old in my minaret and time was evaporating. Yet I still didn't know for certain. The books may have been written by fools or fakers, a dreadful folly to distract the curious scholar.

It was a raging sable night when I saw from my tower the funeral cortege ascending the Abbey's high edifice of graves. From the numbered company and mitred pomp I realized that it was the ancient Abbot himself who had sadly passed this mortal plane and therein lay the final testing of my lifelong calculus.

I must acquire the Abbot's corpse forthwith, a nun of willing nature and within the hour to conjure the requiem birth and my deserved vindication.

My novice, now full-grown and strong but dull of mind, assisted me in my nocturnal labours, the Abbot's noble body and the heated Sister both delivered to my tower before the hour was up.

It was an excellent beginning and the stars were surely aligned to procure the exchange in this strangest of nuptials.

I prepared my simples. Earthnut, Myrrh, Aphrodisia, Fly Garic, False Unicorn and Nightshade. 

Impatience for success, however, lead me to discard the Abbot's livid cadaver, from which the phantom had already flown. 

I instructed my novice and the Sister to hastily partake of carnal pleasures, whilst I took the poison I had readied. 

This was it.

The zenith of my study, the hallowed offspring of a fertile death. 

I sensed my life inching away and my soul flowing towards the fruiting nun, a mellifluous flame to fire her conception. 

Poisoned and perished, my ether entered the divine chalice of the Mother, where I rejoiced in the knowledge that it was true and that my life's work was correct.

Gestation only gilded my spiritual growth within the sacristy of the fattening foetus, my zest to mature and one day record my revelation. 

The eighth month came, grave mechanics and alchemy sought to ready the widening loin and I was elated. Soon I would guide the nun's hatchling to veneration.

But I had been short-sighted in my scholarship. I had not foreseen the wrath fermenting for the fecund Sister within our pious order and my ecstasy slowly turned to horror.

On the holiest of days that frigid December my most wretched host, my immaculate mother, was ripped from our tower by my hate-raged brothers, who brutally roped her to an oaken stake atop a pyre of brash high on the Abbey's storm-lashed edifice.

"Witch!" They howled on that terrible cliff and lit the loathsome bushels.

As the starving flames digested my mother's piteous form, her screams and the searing heat became the last sensations my unhatched ghost ever held.

Our nested lips were sealed in that cruel fire, the misfortune I had not wagered, where an innocent nun, her unborn son and my helpless ether were all martyred on that scoured precipice, the eternal secret of the fertile dead remaining inviolate and intact.