Chapter One Greetings traveller. You may approach. The night is cold, but my fire is warm and it holds the darkness at bay. Come, you may see that I am an old man who means harm to no one. I will be glad of your company. Settle yourself, eat and drink if you will; find companionship and respite from your journey. My own journey? It is nearly over - in every sense. As I sit here I contemplate the darkness as it stretches before me.

I see how the night lives, stirred into motion by the leaping flames until the shadows appear to creep and circle about us like spirits that prowl at the gateway to another world. It brings to my mind images from long ago - a time when I wandered deep into the Otherworld on an expedition whose memory seems to me now like a mad and terrible revelatory dream. You wish to know my story? But you will have guessed by now that it is not a comforting tale. Yet it may serve to instruct you, or at least divert you until the morning comes. Very well. Let us look together deep into the shadows which enclose us, and hope that chaos may come to take on the semblance of order. It was in the year six hundred and sixty-six of our Christian Age that I, Athwold, a monk, was given leave by my abbot to depart the monastery in the kingdom of East Anglia which had been my home for eleven years, to become at the age of twenty-five a hermit in the great marshland of the Fens. If you have never journeyed in the Fenlands - and I doubt that many ever find cause to do so - it is difficult for me to convey adequately in words just what a forbidding territory that dismal place is.

A grim and desolate wasteland of dense high grasses and rushes, a perilous labyrinth with creeping fogs that will rise in a moment to close upon the unwary traveller, leaving him to stumble blind and lost through twisting treacherous pathways amongst black quagmires and sucking-pits that will pull him in an instant to his death. There are foul stagnant pools, streams and rivulets which abound with leeches, stinging flies and all manner of vile parasites; and worst of all are the foul-smelling miasmas which float above the tainted waters, creating a poisonous atmosphere of unremitting gloom in a land of misty and near-perpetual twilight. The very gateway to Hell. In short, the ideal place for a religious retreat. The Fenland is vast, practically a murky kingdom in itself, and its depths stand uncharted and ungoverned, beyond every law of man; the natural refuge of outcasts.