O Ezra, hear the prayers of this humble sinner.
Lord, I committed a grave sin today: I took Your name in vain. Faced with a spirit rushing at me, I had the choice to either close my mind against it or look it in the eyes and risk whatever horrors lay beyond them. I breathed a prayer and stared the pour soul down, and the shock of it drove to my core. I was entirely unprepared for the viciousness of the imagery I saw, for its brutality. I got a glimpse of the last part of the poor womans’s life, tainted with a flood of emotion, the despair that accompanied her execution. I will attempt to recount what I experienced for, as Father Avram says, retelling a traumatic experience sometimes helps to ease it.
This woman — I did not learn her name from what I saw — was a concubine of the late Duke Gundar. She was treated well enough so long as she was young and beautiful: she was fed enough to keep her plump and she was clothed in silks. She bore the duke a bastard, but when she got too old to appeal to the duke she was put to the sword in the most ignoble way imaginable. This woman’s life, despite plentiful food and pretty clothes, was miserable. She never knew the son she bore: as soon as he was weaned he was taken away to be raised as a noble, and she never even got to hear him call her “mother”.
The high estimation people have for Your servant Avram is well founded, for he is a wiser man than I will ever be. Already I feel the horror and shock draining from my mind, being replaced by sorrow at the sadness this woman lived. And shame at my own sin, which caused me to weaken. When I called out Your name, just before the spirit struck me, I had not given myself entirely into Your protection. There was a part of me that felt that my own strength of will was enough to save me from the madness I saw glimmering in those eyes. Even then I knew I was wrong, that the only thing I can be certain of is Your love.
As penance, I vow to henceforth avoid coming into contact with the dead, whether they be physically tangible or mist-like, as was this one. I shall never again willingly allow my flesh to touch the dead flesh of any creature, man or beast. I hope that this penance will be deemed sufficient in Your eyes.
In the name of Our Guardian in the Mists, protect us as we walk the pathways of this world and guide us to those of the next. Forgive our sins and grant us the wisdom to forgive ourselves.
Amen.