Day 324 - Monastery Story

Monastery Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The monastery only had twenty monks at any given time. It was a small order. There was a prayer hall and another building for meetings with a library and study in it. They lived in a simple barracks, all together, with relativity no privacy. They were an extremely close and tight-knit group.

Their numbers were small. They were private and secretive. They farmed their land and occasionally sold their surpluses to the local villages, but they hardly went out of their way to do this. They had a small network of interaction with other monasteries and the occasional traveler from one would arrive. But other than that, they didn’t have many guests or visitors. That wasn’t their way.

The twenty were all middle-aged or elderly. They had no novices. They didn’t train their replacements. When someone died, a message was sent to an outside master and soon their member was replaced. That was the only interaction with the Novice Master. It wasn’t exactly clear if the Novice Master knew what he was training the novices for or why. It wasn’t exactly clear to the brotherhood if they had all come from the same master or not. It wasn’t something they talked about.

Once a year they were allowed a sabbatical. They could travel and vacation in the nearby villages and interact with other men and women as they saw fit. They were not concerned with sin or virtues in the traditional religious sense. They had no Holy Scripture or divine guidance. They were charged with a different purpose altogether.

There were twenty monks. They were charged with keeping one book. One book they did not read. If the book aged or began to fall apart, one monk would leave to become a Hermit. It was his job to transcribe the book and when he was finished he would bring both books back. The other nineteen would each review a section to ensure that the transcription had been carried out accurately. But they weren’t allowed to read any more than one section. And they were encouraged to not read carefully or absorb and think about what they read. When they were satisfied, they killed the Hermit and sent for his replacement. There could be no one alive who had read the entire book or knew all of its secrets.

The other monasteries behaved in much the same way.

They had seen the future and the future was not well. The future was written down and forgotten. It had to be prevented. The world we be the better for it.

The knowledge had been outlawed. It had been deemed too dangerous and the written records had been divided years ago. The monks had all taken the solemn vow to protect the world. Even though time and the world had moved on, their order still did exactly that. They had the fates of the world, of man, of possibly the universe, but they abstained from knowledge. The world was kept in darkness, but as a result it was protected. For over three thousand years it had been kept safe.

Until the last Hermit disappeared. He took the book and vowed to perform his duty. But he never returned. The monastery had never faced this sort of problem before. They didn’t know if they should leave to search for him. They didn’t know if they should warn the other monasteries. The book was gone, the fate of the world hung in the balance, and they didn’t know what to do. Perhaps he had died before completing his task. Or perhaps he had read something that scared him more than his brothers could ever know. Perhaps though, he read it and learned the entire thing was one long lie.