* Author : Woody Dismukes
* Narrator : Roberto Suarez
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 698: Solace of the Keeper is a PodCastle original.
Content warning: Arachnids
Rated PG-13
Solace of the Keeper
by Woody Dismukes
If you watch the wind for long enough, you may find yourself a wisp. And though we call ourselves the Keepers, not even we can keep what is not there.
We tell the living that we keep the dead, but only because that is what they want to tell themselves. Some of us believe it too, perhaps even many. Yet the most disciplined of us know this is not the case. It is the living that are kept from the dead.
I first arrived at the monastery under these same delusions, and in no hurry to upturn my faiths. I came to find solace, though not from what you think, for there are far worse punishments than exile among the dead. I took solace from my peers — I never liked them much — and solace from my future. I was destined to be damned, either as an urchin of the streets or an urchin of the graves. And so, by my life of petty crime, it was chosen for me that I should perish as the latter.
I was not angry when my sentence was imposed, at least not at the sentence. I was angry at life itself: that which had conjured us into being without leave or explanation. We are told that life is a gift, but I never saw it as such. I saw life as a curse, and I wanted it to burn.
There was little to do about the desert plateaus. If one could not find some joy in hunting or the menial games played around the dinner table after supper, there were few other options than to read. That or drinking oneself into a state where you could forget the place you were.
My favorite place to read was among the graves. The cliffside catacombs were more intriguing and offered shelter from the wind and sand, but they offered little torchlight during the night. When the moon was large and bold enough I could read by moonlight alone, and even when it wasn’t, I could still set a lantern atop the stones and sit peacefully outside the fervor of the drunken home.
It began there, in silence, on a night when the air had grown thin with nowhere for the warmth to hide save the towering Kákkaro cactuses and the shrubs of brackenbush blossom. I didn’t mind the cold so much, as I had wrapped myself in a blanket of thick hide and preferred the chill of night over the searing sun of day.
I had already been sitting with my back against an unassuming stone, on which the name and dates had been whisked away by the desert sand to the point where the engravings were nearly indistinguishable. Had the Matron or any of the Elder Keepers been around this would have been taken as a considerable grievance but, seeing as many Keepers before me had let the stone be carved away by the wind for years, I assumed that if I should be found out my disciplining wouldn’t be very severe.
The hours of the night had already lifted the moon almost to its precipice and my lantern was beginning to dull. Although I had nearly finished my reading of Mariana de Valéctro’s A Case Study in the Behaviors of the Southern Sand Wolf, I could see that I didn’t quite have enough fuel left in my lantern to both finish the book and make my way back to the monastery dorms. Still, I was not ready to return yet, so at the end of the penultimate chapter I marked my page and du...
