The Genesis of Avarice (A.D. 1248)
1314 Words
The year was 1248, and the world was burning, though not with fire. It was burning with a cold, slow hunger.
The name of the man who became the Consegrue was Cairn. He was not born Silas Pelf, nor was he the gaunt enforcer known to the cosmos. He was simply Brother Cairn, a humble quartermaster within the cloistered walls of the Saint Jude Abbey in the province of Aquitaine.
Cairn was defined by his position. He was the keeper of the Abbey’s stores: the barrels of pickled herring, the sacks of flour, the casks of wine, and, most importantly, the coffer of gold florins tucked behind a loose stone in the Abbey cellar. Cairn’s hands, thin and perpetually chapped, were not made for prayer or labor, but for counting.
The Black Death had yet to fully savage the region, but the creeping famine—a slow-motion disaster that predated the plague—had already arrived. The Abbey, once a beacon of charity, had sealed its gates.
“We must preserve the future, Brother Superior,” Cairn would argue, his voice a dry whisper that felt more like financial advice than spiritual counsel.
Cairn believed the greatest virtue was not generosity, but sufficiency. He believed life itself was a finite resource, measured in ounces of grain and slivers of silver, and that to give away what you might need tomorrow was the most profound form of spiritual recklessness.
His daily life was a relentless exercise in accounting. He spent hours in the cellar, not eating, but simply observing the stock. He would run his hand over the fat sacks of hard, preserved beans, not with appreciation, but with cold, calculating terror. Every rattle of a hungry stomach outside the Abbey walls was a direct threat to his stores.
“One hundred days of barley remaining,” he would write on his slate. “Seventy-three brothers. Twelve servants. Thirty-seven weeks until the next harvest, God willing.” God’s will, in Cairn’s mind, was merely a variable in a terrifying equation.
One brutal winter morning, the sound of weeping came from the gate. It was the farmer, Elias, and his three children, their faces pale and pinched with hunger.
“Brother Cairn,” Elias pleaded through the iron grate, his voice raw. “We gave the Abbey our last harvest grain in tithe. My son is failing. Just five pounds of flour, please. I will repay you double in spring.”
Brother Cairn—Cairn, who could hear the exact, rhythmic pulse of the gold florins under his feet—did not hesitate.
“The Abbey is consecrated to God’s work, Elias. Not to the preservation of poor husbandry,” Cairn said, his voice void of malice, only logic. “If I give you five pounds, then tomorrow, twenty more will come. And then we starve. The Law of Sufficiency demands that our needs be met first. Go and pray for better fortune.”
Elias knelt in the mud and cursed the walls. The next morning, a brother found Elias’s youngest child dead near the gate.
The Abbey had preserved its stock. Cairn had been correct in his terrifying mathematics. But the logic had cost a life, and the shadow it cast over his soul was thick and cold.
The Abbey’s refusal to share drew the eyes of the desperate. On a moonless night, a band of starved, ragged men breached the outer walls, driven not by malice, but by the animal necessity of survival. They sought the cellar, the mythic hoard that Cairn so obsessively protected.
The brothers fought with panicked fury, but Cairn did not join them. He fled directly to the cellar, his heart not pounding with fear for his life, but with a terror for his assets.
He scrambled to the hidden stone, pulling it away. The small wooden coffer inside, lined with tarnished brass, was heavy with the Abbey’s collected wealth: the florins, a few silver chalices, and a small, jeweled cross.
As the frantic shouts and the brutal clash of iron reached the cellar stairs, Cairn clutched the coffer to his chest. He was surrounded by wealth, yet his hunger was the most profound of all. He knew, with piercing certainty, that if he lost this, he lost everything—his security, his purpose, his very existence.
In that moment of ultimate terror and possessiveness, he did not pray for salvation; he prayed for permanence.
"No!" he choked, tears of pure, desperate avarice streaming down his thin cheeks. "I will not lose this! Let them take the Abbey, let them take the lives, but this hoard must endure! It must be mine! I will become the very force that protects it!"
And in the silence that followed his cry, something answered. Not God, not the Devil, but an ancient, vast, and chillingly logical consciousness that existed only in the ledger of cosmic debt.
The consciousness saw the monk who valued a few coins over human life. It saw the perfect, clinical terror of loss. It saw the potential for a supreme agent of balance.
A whisper, drier than the oldest parchment, entered Cairn’s mind, echoing in the vast, cold space he had made for himself:
“You desire to hold the line? To enforce the cost of insufficiency? You will become the keeper of the ledger. You will never want, but you will never spend. You will be the judge of all who take more than is due. The price of this service is your humanity. You will be the Consegrue. You will be Avarice.”
The consciousness descended upon Brother Cairn like a sheet of pure, glacial cold. It did not possess him; it reforged him.
The terrified monk became the vessel for the ancient vice. His flesh, already starved and thin, became the gaunt, enduring shell of the Consegrue. The terror of loss solidified into the cold, penetrating logic of the enforcer. His heart ceased to beat with blood, replaced by the relentless ticking of cosmic time.
When the ragged men burst into the cellar, seeking the gold, they found Cairn standing there, still clutching the coffer.
He said nothing. His eyes, the startling silver that would centuries later assess the students of Room 309, simply focused on the leader. And the leader of the starving bandits did not feel fear, but an overwhelming, sudden realization of worthlessness.
The bandit dropped his iron cudgel. The sight of the gold in Cairn’s hands no longer promised salvation; it promised an unbearable burden. The coins suddenly felt heavy, dead, and utterly without meaning. They looked like chunks of cold, worthless metal stolen from the dirt.
"It is nothing," the bandit whispered, weeping. "It is all dust."
The men, stripped bare of their motivation by the sheer presence of Avarice, fled the Abbey, leaving the gold untouched. They didn't flee the Abbey's defenders; they fled the crushing, existential revelation that all acquisition was meaningless, that all wealth was a burden, and that they had sacrificed their souls for nothing.
Brother Cairn—the last, pathetic flicker of the fearful monk—was gone. In his place stood the Consegrue, the ancient, handsome enforcer, cold, perfect, and utterly, eternally alone.
His mission was set: to stalk the centuries, from the plague-ridden fields of Aquitaine to the shining towers of the modern world, making certain that when human greed broke the Law of Sufficiency, the debt was paid in kind.
His work, started with a few florins in a medieval cellar, had now led him to a titan named Arthur Valen, whose ledger of imbalance was the largest the Consegrue had encountered in over five hundred years.
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