Chapters (15)
‘Something is beginning.’ The elf twisted his ravaged face into something that according to all evidence was a smile. ‘I am… Wolf Isengrim.’
They shook hands, quickly, firmly, downright violently. For a moment it looked more like the preliminaries to a fight than a gesture of reconciliation. But only for a moment.
The log in the campfire shot out sparks, celebrating the event with a joyful firework.
‘God strike me down—’ Boreas Mun smiled broadly ‘—if this isn’t the start of a beautiful friendship.’
…along with the other Martyr Sisters, St Philipa was also calumniated for betraying the kingdom, for fomenting tumults and sedition, for inciting the people and plotting an insurrection. Wilmerius, a heretic and cultist, and self-appointed high priest, ordered the Saint to be seized, thrown into a dark and foul prison beset with cold and stench, calling on her to confess her sins and declare those that she had committed. And Wilmerius showed St Philipa divers instruments of torture and menaced her greatly, but the Saint merely spat in his countenance and accused him of sodomy.
The heretic ordered her stripped of her raiment and thrashed mercilessly with leather straps and for splinters to be driven under her fingernails. And then he asked and called on her to disavow her faith and the Goddess. But the Saint merely laughed and advised him to distance himself.
Then he ordered her dragged to the torture chamber and her whole body to be harrowed with iron gaffs and hooks and her sides scorched with candles. And although thus tormented, the Saint in her mortal corps showed immortal forbearance. Until the torturers were enfeebled and withdrew in great horror, but Wilmerius fiercely admonished them and ordered them further to torture her and soundly belabour her. They then began to scorch St Philipa with red hot irons, dislocate her members from the joints and rend the woman’s breast with pincers. And in this suffering she, having confessed nothing, expired.
And the godless, shameless Wilmerius, about whom you may read in the works of the Holy Fathers, met such a punishment that lice and wyrms spread over him and overcame him until he was decayed all over and expired. And he reeked like a cur such that he needs must be cast into a river without burial.
For which praise and a martyr’s crown are due to St Philipa, and glory forever to the Great Mother Goddess, and to us a lesson and a warning, Amen.
The Life of St Philipa the Martyr of Mons Calvus, copied from the martyr scribes, in the Tretorian Breviary summarised, drawn from many Holy Fathers who praise her in their writings.