Gregory Blair - Neuschwanstein Castle -1886 - The heartbroken man tasked with locking up the unfinished castle upon the death of King Ludwig II, makes his final walkthrough of the massive creation, including the empty throne room that never got its throne.
The Aurora Archives - Day 3
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 1886-DEC-24 LOCATION: Hohenschwangau, Bavaria SIGNAL RESONANCE: High / Kinetic OPERATIVE: Unknown
TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED CORRESPONDENCE:
To my brother in Munich,
I write this with hands still black from soot, and a heart lighter than it has been since the King drowned. Yesterday, I was a pariah. When I went down to the Alpenrose Inn for a warm drink to fend off the winter cold, Lukas, the lead stonemason, now out of work, spat at my feet. He called me the ‘Mad King’s Watchdog,’ guarding a palace of gold while the village children froze for lack of fuel. He was not alone either, the animosity in the room was clear. I left, not entirely under my own steam, an outcast. I left in shame.
But as I trudged back up the steep path to the gatehouse, I heard a shatter. High up. The wind carried the sound of glass breaking in one of the castle windows.
Terrified of looters, of what they might do to the late kings hard work, I ran. Unlocking the heavy oak doors I raced through the dark corridors, not bothering to even get a lamp. In the early evening light of the unfinished Throne Room, I saw a shadow flicker past one of the collumns. Not a man, too small. It moved with an impossible speed and I didn’t quite catch its true form, just a small flash of white and red. I shouted, chasing the elusive person down the spiral service stairs, all the way into the mountain’s belly. To the coal bunkers below the castle.
The sloped room was dark, and there was soot that had been kicked up into the air from something or someone having passed through recently. I walked in nervously, trying to feel with my feet where the floor turned from stone to coal. There was a shadowy presence deep in the room, over to the side of the wall. I called to it, asking who was there. I wondered if it might be one of the village children, driven to take some of the coal to fend off the cold. I would have given it to them too, if they had asked. Suddenly, with a clang of metal, the iron release lever of the main chute was dislodged. Light poured into the room through the now open sluice and I was blinded, all I saw was that same flash of red, before the entire rooms worth of coal started to slide down and out into the evening sunset.
It was thunderous to hear it, brother. Forty tons of the King’s seasoned coal roared down and out, cascading over the mountainside like a black avalanche, right onto the village path below.
I stood there, coughing in the dust, barely able to breathe, when a hand patted me on the back. It was Lukas, the same man who had spat at my feet, standing beside me in soot filled room. He had followed me up, intending to fight, or to steal. Instead he saw ‘me’ open the chute when I was standing by the lever. He didn’t see the shadow or the flash of red and just assumed.
He looked at the coal. He looked at me. He nodded, once. “Happy Christmas, Heinrich,” he said.
Tonight, at the holy evening feast, Lukas pulled out a chair for me by the fire. The villagers, the workers, the children, they all think I stole the King’s coal for them. Perhaps I did, perhaps the strange shadow was just my minds way of protecting me from my crimes. But I am heartily glad of the outcome. I feel at home with these people once again.
Heinrich
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:
The operative utilized extreme secrecy in the execution of this task. The ‘Unspoken Agreement’ between the humans is a common side-effect of these interventions; the Rabbit provides the miracle, the Human applies the events into their own mythos to justify it, and the community is healed.
Oh my, this is magical.
Oh, this is wondrously imaginative, delightful and mysterious! Bravo!