Abbot Andrew's Agony

The Black Franciscan Monks faced the sickening forces of evil every Godforsaken day in a darkening world of merciless penury and canker.

Beyond the Abbey's cloistered hallowed cells raged rising tides of bloody blasphemy, the common folk sinking ever deeper into a sucking ditch of wrenched damnation.

In stinking fields crows guarded their carrion jealously, where farmhands had fallen, agonised, in the barren tracts and greased the soil with oozing flesh and sinew. Buzzards tugged at taut nerves like seamstresses. Wolves gulped whole shit-smeared buttocks. Worms bathed in craniums.

Amidst such malaise, the deadly sins were the currency of dread. The Beast, that heathen demon,  was abroad, its pitiless lapdogs, Hunger and Death, snapping round it's cloven paws.

In the monastery, the larders depleted, the old vows were faltering as the bony knuckles of starvation rapped on the creaking doors. 

Let me in!

Frugality had saved them thus far, the Friars, but veering from their strictures would surely invite desolation to take up residence and torture their very souls. It whispered to them.

Let me in! 

No, Abbot Andrew would not countenance the erosion of his brotherhood. They had toiled far too long to now allow avarice a place at the monks' meagre table. Only the extra mouth of God himself would be tolerated at their sacred repasts.

And so it was that a storm blew in from the North, a terrible tortuous tumult lacerating the valley of prayers like a mad surgeon. The beck ran red, the forests fell, the deer herds pelted and the Wolfpack howled like widows.

It arrived at the Abbey's ingress a screaming ram pounding the wood with wrath and rage. In it's dreadful gyres helpless rooks were slammed against the doors, their guts piling up like parcels and worse still, as cadavers flew in the shrieking winds of Hell and hit the windows.

For Gods sake let us in!

The priory was overrun with the witchery of the Pit. The cassocked friars were stripped down to pale fat lumps plump for the taking by lust-bent harpies. Thus assaulted, spit and spent, famine burst forth, their naked porcine bellies withering to sticks from which ribs and bones unclipped. Death crept up and smiled at them, it's toothy grin a fatal maggot heaven full of flies.

You've let me in you imbeciles.

Abbot Andrew was the last, the residue of Christ in that blood-full crucible, where rent, he stood against the titans of the bane and the desolate one, his arms outstretched, where together they fell into the holy cellars and the sacred well never to be seen again.

Until ten centuries later, whence the sun shone down upon the labourers breaking into that ancient ground and finding the Abbot, fossilised, asleep, who then woke up and gasped, from whence a smoking crimson figure rose, the demon wings in fires unfurling, set free from Andrew's dead embrace, the Fallen Devil screaming

You've let me out!