feldsbadman

Living memory encompasses a very small allotment of time but undead memory stretches so much further through the mists, in fact defining where the mists are and where they are not. Mortals did not remember the Way of White very well, and the Way's militant arm, the Warriors of Sunlight, had undergone too many reformations and pogroms to be continually considered associates with the Way.

Feldman remembered. He remembered well the time of the Allfather's commandment that those befallen by the curse were to be hunted down and persecuted, imprisoned, tortured, stripped of identity, until they were hollow and capable of final death. He had been an ardent advocate of those policies, defending them whenever the bleeding hearts in Thorolund had stepped up allegating that the undead were still men and women.

In retrospect, he hated himself for it. It was so easy for a man of the White to look down upon the dead. If he awoke branded by the Darksign, he would go to the land of the gods and perform the Right of Kindling, alighting bonfires in his wake and bringing selfless comfort to the hollowing wretches that walked the roads of the move-on land. Accompanied by a band of merry Brothers of Sunlight, they would cut through the catacombs and challenge the will of the Gravelord himself and his ilk in order to seek forgiveness in the eyes of Gwyn and the Allfather. That had been a comforting delusion, but it was dispelled like a morning fog when the Patriarch of House Thorolund's youngest daughter had been cursed.

Questions arose. Should the girl be locked in the great Northern Asylum and guarded by a demon? Or rather quietly hollowed by the inquisition and executed as an act of twisted mercy? In the end she had gone to the land of gods and never returned, and Thorolund had never forgotten the loss and what it meant. Royal blood was no ward from the curse.

After her came the others. Half of the Way had gotten it before the decade was out, and half the Warriors of Sunlight too. To preserve itself the church had changed, and Feldman had too, once he had contracted the curse.

Thorolund wept. Hollows were interned and peasants made into hollows the only way the church knew how, with murder. The Rite of Kindling was sought by masses of desperate worshipers and Nito claimed them all. William Feldman was not among them. He was by then a monsignor and frequently lobbied for better treatment of the lower undead in Thorolund, reviling and eating his words from before Reah's sentencing. He argued that if mad men like him had decided Reah's hearing, the Patriarch's daughter herself would have been consigned to die as a madwoman in the dungeons.

Thorolund was a different, darker place so many years later when the sound of bells woke Feldman from his bed.

Rumors spread throughout the country and indeed from countries no one had heard from in a hundred or a thousand years; countries forgotten, countries never heard of before, countries believed to have fallen to the horde. That was when the Patriarch began hosting delegates from the royal family of Catarina and the Yama Empress in the East. The court of Thorolund began talk of perhaps a final, grand expedition to investigate the bells, and the prophecies of cinder began to fill the halls of the Way's monasteries.

Feldman was one of a hundred or so brothers of White and Sunlight Soldiers to volunteer for the newly christened Day's Fleet project; a fleet of four ships, all the participating kingdoms could or chose to muster, that would sail for Lothric, where the sound of the bells originated from, and kindle the dying fire.

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Feldman's introduction to Lothric, the remains of the land and the legend he had so romanticized as a younger, crueler man, was a slog through a beach slick with the blood of a hydra, with only four surviving brothers and none with combat experience in accompaniment. Every Warrior had been slain or drowned by the hydra which had *eaten* its way through their ship the Beauteous Maria. Every other brother of the Way had likewise succumbed to the throes of the see. The brothers arrived shivering cold and shellshocked to a bonfire that did not need their attendance, carrying with them a faith that persecuted undeath, to fight in a campaign they realized they did not belong in and never had. But there was no going back and there never would be, and Feldman, who would forever seek repentance for the sins of another life, had no disagreements with that.

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