The FAE Series 3: The Queen

The Secret Diary of Captain John White~

August 18th~, the year of our Lord, 1590.~

I will attempt to write the sequence of events that will define history as we know it. But these things, these unexplainable supernatural occurrences, always tend to be better left in dark places—where mortal eyes are not allowed to taint the reality of what I saw and experienced. One that I lived. One that has extinguished the lives of one hundred and fourteen souls. May God have mercy upon my own for bringing them to their untimely deaths.

As all grim tales begin, when we arrived on the island of Roanoke, it was a cold and dark day. The wind had a force upon it that neither I nor my men had ever seen. It was as if it was trying to keep us from the abomination that we were about to witness. An unholy force from hell, attempting to guard the gates that the Devil himself had built so he was free to complete his work.

We came upon what was once the village these poor men and women had built, expecting to see signs of a robust life, a growth in the community, of hope and happiness. But we observed none of that. A wild land greeted us, one that did not bear the remains of any type of civilization. Through the torrential rain of the fast-moving storm, we continued searching for anything, for a sign, a small token of what we knew should be there. What we expected.

My men are a superstitious lot, and they were afraid. I could not blame them. The wind whispered to us, warning us against moving forward. My men listened and immediately sought refuge, returning to the ship, but I pressed on.

Left alone in the wild, I searched.

I battled the forces and kept advancing until I came upon the iridescent blue light glowing against the night, beckoning me to come closer. I moved slowly, afraid of what I would find. Then I came upon what I can now say was Darkness in human form.

He was a handsome man.

Nay, beautiful.

Striking.

Almost as if he were sculpted into perfection by the Lord himself. It was his beauty that drew me. He was so perfect that I, a mere mortal man, was entranced. I walked closer to him, into the circle of light that he had sketched with a wave of his magikal hand.

The light transformed, and images appeared before me. I saw villagers die in fire, their lives extinguished within a blink of an eye, no hope of escaping the wrath spewing from the monster that stood in front of me. The force of my emotions brought me to my knees as I sobbed before the cause of their demise.

He placed a hand on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “Fear not, Captain John White. I will not kill you. You will live to remember every minute of this great tale. I want you to return to your homeland and share all the details of what you witnessed here today. You might find someone who will believe you, but I suspect that most will just assume you have gone mad.”

I didn’t understand why he spared my soul from certain death. But instead, he smiled sadistically because he knew. It seemed from his behavior that he enjoyed taunting his victims, torturing them. I should have prayed for death, but the fires of purgatory would not be my sentence; nay, my sentence would be to know what had happened and live with that knowledge every second of every day.

To live knowing that my actions, my persistence, had caused their demise.

And to live knowing that I could never utter a word of it.

He rubbed my cheek as a father might and turned toward a great tree.

He wrote three words into the mighty oak. Words that will be etched in my mind until the day I die. Words that will forever haunt me. Words that I know I will never fully understand the meaning of but will wonder about until I leave this earthly life.

Caroline.

Roanoke.

Odin.