The origins

The nightmare of the bald guardian

The entity, frightened as it was, stood a while more hidden and, when it came out of is hiding spot, its its terrifying appearance was not the more worrying of its features.

It clung to the wall as if it wanted to merge with it so that it could perceive everything that was happening much more clearly, and it noticed that the cat, after finishing its feast, was sleeping peacefully. At least, there was someone for whom his encounter with the serpent had not changed his life. "At least for now," he heard within himself. And he had to nod.

He continued to move carefully through the tunnels, needing no light through the endless darkness, and felt that the monstrous serpent was now close to the main nave. He would soon find out what had happened... And he would know that he had been right when he thought that there was someone else and that this someone was not just a cat.

So he tried to move a little faster, but he still wasn't at all sure what was going on, and that was what worried him most of all. He also didn't think the bald man was going to solve anything, even though being big, strong, and muscular as he was (although he called him fat sometimes to laugh at him, he wasn't really like that and he wasn't even someone to be laughed at, but he just wanted to). That bald man had performed deeds that were in the public domain, which was why everyone was shocked to know that he had applied to watch over that temple and win the position! Yes, it is true, the monks who inhabited it were important in that territory, but there he would have little opportunity to fight against really despicable people... Or so it was widely believed.

But those facts didn't mean that the bald man knew this could happen, but anything was possible.

Precisely, the good thing about the fact that everything had happened at night was undoubtedly that no worshippers were praying in the temple and that the monks were all in their cells, located in a different building, separated by more than a mile and a half from the temple. On that ground, the monks maintained an orchard and a garden full of flowers that allowed them to experiment with potions for healing.

The entity stopped: when they found out what had happened, the ascetic monks were not going to be happy. He stood and saw that there were only a few stairs left to reach the door that led to the corridor where the guard's small apartment was located. It was then that he sensed a strange stillness: he was right, the dream he perceived was certainly not natural and only then could he locate two small beings that were next to the bed, although he was not yet sure what they were doing.

It stuck firmly to the wall again (you had to be careful) and then it felt the guard's heavy breathing and that worried him even more. Those short, stocky creatures (they were no taller than the watchman's bedside table) were giving him something to drink again. He found a small hole in the wall and passed through it and entered the room. Those two deformed beings (now he had no difficulty in distinguishing them) sensed his presence and took out small daggers from their belts, strange daggers with a flaming blade and a strange ornament on the hilt, and prepared themselves to stab anyone who entered the door.

Bad luck: it was not in the habit of using doors, so it rose through the room and made his way to the round lamp with arms that hung from the ceiling in which two candles were still burning, and made the temperature rise around the rope that held it. The lamp fell, producing a metallic noise and then a screeching sound as it crawled on the ground for a while, catching those two beings in their fall, like flies in honey.

Now came the hard part: being incorporeal, it couldn't wake up the bald man, so it had to come up with another solution. And then he heard the low barking of the dogs in the next room. The guard's two giant mastiffs were locked up there, and they could help transport the keeper to the infirmary, or at least to the cell of the eccentric monk in the tower who was always doing weird experiments.

It was standing there when, suddenly, the door opened and a tall, wiry man with abundant and completely white hair and beard, wearing only a poor but neat habit, rushed into the room. It was the eccentric monk who, at a single glance at the room, understood what was happening: he took a rope that hung from a nail in the wall and tied up the two beings who had given their mixture of potingues to drink to the guardian and hung them after the balcony. "You're not going to run away from there," he heard him say, visibly angry.

Then he looked at the bed and said: "Lasanides, we have to take you to the infirmary, wake up", Meanwhile, the monk gave him soft hits in the face to make him come back. "We need you, something's going on, and I'm afraid it's what I've been dreading for a long time."

Of course, now he remembered: the bald man's name was Lasanides. As he looked at the scene, he could only sense the monk's uneasiness. Then he thought, "I don't remember his name either. I'm getting older".

Originally posted at https://histolatos.blogspot.com/2024/04/la-pesadilla-del-guardian-calvo.html