Page 111 - Hunter - The Vigil

The hou e burned, an orange mon ter with many mouth ca t bright again t the dark night.
moke whorled, wallowed the moon. But wor t were the wi p of paper ember at fir t, then
growing dark, darker than the midnight ky catching the uplift of hot air and then lowly drifting
back to the earth. Like gray bat or black butterflie .
All that knowledge, all tho e book and book page , con umed by fire.
Elia Erhard knelt on the ground, watching hi life work burn. He had failed the Loyali t . He wa
no cholar. He wa no hunter. Ju t a weak and tupid man who ne er thought the mon ter could find
him here. He ne er put him elf out there, o how had they known? How had they come to realize how
many of their ecret he kept?
He pulled great clump of hi white wi py hair into hi tightening fi t and wept.
Ju t then, a hadow next to him. And then, a hand on hi houlder.

Ah, young Jo eph. Hi prot g in the compact. A reedy boy, gawky, all wri t and ankle. The boy
parent weren t killed by the mon ter , but they might a well ha e been. No, they were en la ed, made
to ta te the blood of the demon , and thu did they come to er e the demon . Jo eph, Elia figured,
would ne er be much of a hunter, not really he wa n t that fa t and didn t eem that harp. And he
wa woefully pre umptuou .
I m orry I didn t get more, Jo eph aid.
Me too, Elia an wered. Wait. What? Get more of what? pit it out, boy!
The book . canned. He pulled one of the old man hand from the white hair and peeled the
finger back the way one might pull kin from an orange. He pre ed a mall pla tic widget, no bigger
than a po tage tamp, into the man deeply etched palm.
What? What i thi ?

Jo eph hrugged. I canned about a third of the book in your library. I PDFed them and copied
them to thi ecure digital card. I wi h I d gotten more.
But Elia leapt to hi feet with a pryne he hadn t felt in 10 year or more. Hi bony arm drew
the boy into a wift embrace.

You might turn out all right yet, my boy, Elia aid, weeping anew. We mu t make ha te. Other can
u e thi . We e been keeping thi information to our el e for too long. It time to hare. It time to make
our allie tronger! It time to make the mon ter weaker and pay our debt .

Secrets make us who we are. Secrets build us all. The de- vors sailed across the sea in ships with painted sails to the be-
sires, the hopes we hold inside us change the world. Everything nighted lands of Europe and Asia. They became, so the theories
runs on secrets, things occulted from the rest of the world. go, the gods and lawgivers of the peoples. They gave the world
And some occult things are more occult than others. art and architecture, and the ability to work bronze. They also
Some legends have it that once upon a time, a land now gave man the terrible mystical secrets that, over thousands of
lost — Atlantis, Mu, Thule, Pan or whatever its name was — years, were forgotten by the masses, but hidden by those who
gave the world civilization. A cataclysm took it, but its survi- knew (and can yet be found if you know where to look).
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