Luitpold's First Meditation: The Hammer Has Fallen (Patreon)

Welcome to the first of an irregular series of meditations from Father Luitpold as he reflects upon the events he has witnessed and what it all means. 

This meditation contains spoilers for content up to Episode 28.

Above deck, the sun burned. A fitful wind struggled to move the sails, and the still, hot air was intolerable. Sitting in the slightly cooler dark of his cabin, Luitpold could sense the others around him: Alamennowyth sprawled on the yard-arm, thirty feet above his head; Gerhardt, Lukas and Magritte flicking through books in the hold; Birdie, Elrick and Yume above deck, searching in vain for a cool breeze. And others, too: their crew was growing by the day, or so it seemed. Greta faintly fussing over her baby. Dumpling clattering around in the galley. And Sigfedr, lounging on deck, doing his best to get underfoot; Gerhardt’s newest tutor – master hardly seemed fitting – had been with them two days, now, and thus far had shown himself to be useful for only three things: getting in the way, swearing inventively, and pleasuring Dumpling.

Luitpold thanked Sigmar nightly for the blessing of earplugs.

And their latest recruit, of course. Nils. His novitiate, currently assisting Bluthilda in some menial tasks. Luitpold’s responsibility had been weighing on his spirits for some time; it was long past the point where, traditionally, he should have taken on a novitiate, brought them back to the City of the White Wolf. To the temple. To the flame. But circumstances had conspired to thwart that, dragging them from calamity to calamity… until it dragged them to Nils.

The boy’s pain and anger was palpable. It shone from him. Tall, if lanky, his clumsy gait belied a skill at arms that surpassed his sixteen summers. The denfather at the Place of the Shining Rock had recommended him to Luitpold on the day they left the holy site. He shared the horrific story of Nils's home village, put to flame by witch hunters for the sin of fighting off an attack by beastmen.

Sharp bile rose in Luitpold's throat at the thought of all the burnings. How many men, women and children were dying, needlessly? How had his cult – supposedly the very heart of the Empire, driven to unify – become the canker blossom eating out the heart of Sigmar’s realm? They were supposed to save the Empire, not destroy it, and yet daily they drove things closer to the precipice.

The Hammer has fallen.

Yorri. A Feathered Lord. The thing beneath the Temple of the Gilded Boar. It was all too much…

He took a deep breath, centring himself, remembering Elrick’s words on meditation. 

Don’t try and fight the thoughts, that’ll only bring more. Think the thoughts, but let them flow through you, past you… 

He was an enigma, that one. One moment picking fights with belligerent royal knights, getting himself marked for death, the next espousing calm and measured wisdom, so at odds with his fiery demeanour.

And in his vision… Luitpold saw once again the horned, spear-wielding form of Elrick, striding through the scintillating, coruscating colour, bringing… what? Certainty? Calm, for a heartbeat, then violence. Death. Chaos… That vision's meaning lay beyond his ken, for now at least. 

Unlike his vision of Nils.

As soon as he’d clapped eyes on the uncertain boy, sensing, rather than seeing his rake-thin figure and sunken, sullen eyes, he had realised he had seen him before, in his dreams, his visions, his foretellings. For weeks he’d been having the same vision: seeing himself – older, wizened, pressed against a tree – and standing over him, defending him, a towering presence, wielding a double-headed hammer, fending off enemies. The nature of their foe was unclear; he presumed beastmen, but then he had been raised on stories of Sigmar, who when he wasn’t slaying greenskins, was slaying beastmen, and so he knew this for the supposition it was.

But there was no doubt about Nils: he was the one defending Luitpold as a grown adult. 

And so Luitpold left the Place of the Shining Rock with a novitiate. A novitiate who, though skittish and diffident, was attentive and driven. For the first time in a long time, Luitpold felt himself stretched, as a teacher. For the last five days he’d sparred with the boy, seeking to teach him how to wield a weapon, and Nils had taken to it as if born with a blade in hand. The simple forms he used with villagers – and Gerhardt, to little effect – did not suffice. It was time for Luitpold to construct a new curriculum of combat, drawn perhaps from his own experiences. From this hellish year of 2512. Hard to believe it was only six months since this had all begun. And yet the world seemed changed, profoundly.

Yes, well, best not dwell on Change.

But doubt gnawed at him as it had for weeks, now.

He was torn. A man of faith, his faith had been tested, time and again, and had endured, but not as it once was. Like the Denfather and – he admitted to himself, reluctantly – like Gerhardt, he could see the need for knowledge, for intelligence. Dogmatic belligerence and ‘burn first, ask questions never’ was the approach taken by many on the Cult of Sigmar, and that was clearly wrong.

Remembering his training, the endless lectures on rhetoric and the finer points of theology, and also drunken conversations with Gerhardt in which his friend had clearly laid out plausible arguments for things he couldn’t possibly know, Luitpold took another deep breath and marshalled his thoughts.

As his Sister Habercorn, his old tutor back in Ubersreik, repeatedly drilled into him: first principles.

He knew that Sigmar was real. To him, that was an inviolate fact. But then, he had come to realise that both ‘Sigmar’ and ‘real’ were not certain, absolute terms.

He knew that he felt Sigmar’s presence, and had done since he was a boy. He knew that he – and a select few others – possessed the power to invoke Sigmar’s power, that when he said certain prayers – the same prayers uttered daily by every member of Sigmar’s clergy – miracles resulted. He had heard warrior priests declare themselves beacons of virtue, to inspire others in battle… but he when uttered that prayer, he glowed with a holy light.

That was not nothing.

Of course, and he could hear the dry, mocking rasp of Iulius’* voice: all that proved was that something or someone was empowering those blessings: not that it was Sigmar, the First Emperor, deified and ruling in the heavens.

Not for the first time, he wondered how many Sigmarites had broken bread with not one, but two vampires. Though Genevieve** was as different from Iulius as day from night.

To those espousing the Sigmarian Heresy, Sigmar was but a mortal man and blessed servants of Sigmar no more than misguided wizards. This was, to Luitpold, patently absurd. His prayers invoking Sigmar were in Reikspiel, not the complex, eerie language used by Alamennowyth and Elrick to conjure fireballs and the like. They could use those words to counter spells uttered by enemies, but they couldn’t stop his invocations.

So, he was not a wizard. Or, at least, not a conventional wizard.

Iulius claimed that the Cult of Sigmar, that every blessed servant of Sigmar, was a child of the First, an ancient daemon-prince. Once again, Luitpold shuddered at the memory of a vision, of a mighty beastman roaring, of the sure and certain knowledge that this creature was his father.

But that hadn’t been his vision, had it? That had been his Shadow’s vision***. Or the spirit controlling his Shadow. So was it his own parentage he perceived, then? Or its?

And, of course, that raised more questions; the Shadow was every bit as capable of invoking Sigmar as Lutipold was. Of course it was, it was him – but also not him. And that fateful morning, when he returned, and was reunited with his Shadow…

The memory struck him cold. Birdie. When they struck out to rescue Lady Wittgenstein from another blessed servant of Sigmar… the Shadow's invocations had affected Birdie, casting her as an enemy of Sigmar – though whether from the vampire blood coursing through her veins or her intent to rescue the alleged witch, he couldn’t know. But Luitpold's invocations had treated her, as always, as an ally. Surely, if she had been an enemy of Sigmar, his holy light would have scorched her eyes, driving her back?

So… what did that prove? That one can be both an enemy of Sigmar and not at the same time? 

The skull-faced warrior they’d confronted at Castle Wittgenstein would seem to support that theory.**** Or that the invoker, the blessed cleric of Sigmar calling on their God, somehow shaped or influenced the manifestation of divine will? That by perceiving someone as an enemy, this somehow also persuaded Sigmar that they were an enemy? That, too, seemed plausible. But so, too, did the Sigmarian Heresy: that they were wizards of a sort, drawing on power – perhaps Sigmar’s power; perhaps something else, something darker – but without divine will, or intelligence behind said power. Nothing like the college wizards, but something else.

And there was something else… Luitpold knew that, at that moment, he could not call on Sigmar’s power. His prayers would go unanswered. This had happened before, always accompanied by a deep sense of shame, and a nagging, gnawing fear that it would never return. This time felt different, though whether in truth it felt different, or he felt differently about it, was unclear.

Certainly, he had not felt an overburdening shame or anger when, face-to-face with the Grand Theogonist, in the cavern of the Shining Rock, he had sought to call on Sigmar and felt nothing answer.

And that meant… what, exactly? That Sigmar wasn’t displeased? That Luitpold was merely distracted by the divine presence of the Theogonist and his own overwhelming visions, and so failed to note Sigmar’s displeasure? That this time that power was not coming back?

Or something else?

He recalled, without bidding, the absolute certainty he had felt at the conclave in Altdorf, all those months ago. The certainty that seers who were not blind could not see true. That the visions, and prophecies of those with material sight were distracted by the material, that the truth of their visions were altered, distorted, obscured. And the certainty, the absolute certainty that – as the fires of the Silver Flame burned out his eyes – his own visions were true. His own visions came from Sigmar.

And though his prayers now went unanswered, the visions still came. The auguries still spoke of the future’s path. The divinations still showed him glimpses of what was to come. Oracular prophecies still spilled from his lips.

So, what did that mean?

Were they different? 

Did they come from a different source? 

His visions certainly came from Sigmar, but perhaps it was not Sigmar who answered his prayers…

* Iulius von Carstein, whom Luitpold met in Episode 19.

** Genevieve Dieudonné, whom Luitpold met before the streamed episodes. 

*** For more on Luitpold's Shadow, check Episode 13.1 and Episode 22.

**** Episode 18.