1086: Story 1086: The Revenant Bishop 1086: Story 1086: The Revenant Bishop The chapel bells of Saint Halgrim’s Abbey had not rung in over a hundred years.
They chimed once more at dusk.
The surviving townsfolk of Velmire gathered at their windows in silence.
They knew the legend.
Every century, when the veil between the living and the dead thinned, the Bishop would rise again.
Not in holiness or grace—but cloaked in rot, with eyes of sanctified fire and a hunger for souls.
They called him The Revenant Bishop, and he remembered every sinner by name.
Once, Halgrim was a man of immense faith.
When the first plague swept through Velmire, he offered prayers while the sick cried for medicine.
When the second came, he offered fire, burning the infected in great pyres and declaring it divine will.
When the third came, there were no prayers—only silence and screams.
On the eve of his death, the townspeople stormed the abbey and crucified him against his own altar.
But he did not curse them.
He only smiled and whispered, “We will all return, children.
In fire.
In judgment.”
Now he had returned.
The abbey was no longer stone and stained glass, but a living cathedral of bone, its spires grown crooked into the sky.
Choirs of eyeless monks wailed hymns in tongues no longer human.
Candles burned with blood instead of wax.
The Bishop stood at the altar, his robes matted with centuries of ash, his mitre split and fused to his skull.
At his feet were chained the souls of the guilty—and the innocent alike.
A small band of survivors, led by Mae Dorell, a lapsed cleric with blood on her hands, climbed toward the cursed abbey, desperate to retrieve a relic rumored to stop him: the Severed Cross, an icon broken during the Bishop’s first death, buried beneath his tomb.
But the Bishop was waiting.
He greeted Mae by name, his voice a blend of velvet and bone.
“You who abandoned your flock for fear.
You who ran as the dead walked.
Tell me, would you kneel now?”
Mae raised her blade, carved from church silver, but the Bishop did not flinch.
His robes rose around him like wings.
Shadows surged, forming the silhouettes of every soul he had condemned.
They whispered in unison, “Repent, or join us.”
Mae drove the blade into his chest—but it passed through smoke.
Laughing, the Bishop seized her throat.
“There is no absolution.
Only fire.”
But Mae had brought more than a blade.
She had brought remorse.
She spoke the forbidden benediction—an ancient rite that demanded true guilt, not ritual—and it burned brighter than any flame.
The Bishop screamed.
The altar cracked.
The abbey imploded, consumed by a golden light not seen in Velmire since its fall.
When the smoke cleared, Mae stood alone, blind but alive.
The Revenant Bishop was gone… for now.
But deep beneath the abbey’s ruin, the bells still hung.
Waiting.