THIS IS A STORYBOARD FOR A VIDEO
>>> The Narrator is a Western‑Slavic / Baltic‑Nordic chronicler who has lived too long with too many secrets and is now calmly reporting absurd history as if it were weather data. He is not whimsical. He is not dramatic. He is not impressed. He is the last librarian of a civilization that survived by being quiet.
FROM THE OXOHEARTSVOKEN
Groniger Bloodaxe 914-1014
Groniger Bloodaxe Junior 975-1076
Gronyger Bloodaxe 3rd 1011-1105
Gronyagar Bloodeax 4th 1083-1168
Gronyagar Bloodeax 1118-1230?
Gronyar Bloodeau Sr. 1181-1259
Gronyar Bloodeau Jr. 1211-1291
Gronyagar Bloodeau 3rd 1276-1374
Gronyagar Bloodeau 4th 1350-1434?
>>> the narrator says this as Groniger (Gron uh Grr) chisels.
In this scene we see sunrise and sunset for three days as Groniger Bloodaxe dutifully hammers out the runes. His hair is completely encased in ice by the time he's done.
> It was in present-day Lithuania that Groniger met his wife Dagmar of the Wozownicy (vo-zo-VNYEE-tsih), the wagon folk.
>> We see a torchlight coming out of the woods, held by his wife, Dagmar. Several scimitar clad Iberian guards stand nearby.
> “Vhat’s it say?” she asked. He was done. Three days it took and his hair and beard were encrusted with ice. He stood up and they faced each other.
“Ate many Ox today”
“Okay let’s get you home”
>>á¨áá áá¨ážá áᡠthe runes on the stone. Dagmars Druidess companions were waiting and pulled back two very large moss covered evergreen branches to reveal the actual path back to their town while the visible path ended in brambles several hundred feet away.
SCENE 2 đđ❤ 1:15-2:15
>>> Play track
> Sailing in small crude wersions of the longboat in Eastern Europe’s rivers, the Oxhorken clan is reputed to have reached the Baltic Sea 8,000 Years ago when Polena heard the Song of Oooglok.
> Denmark and Finland were an easy sail from where they lived. Jomsborg and Samland were both less than 300 miles away and Gotland Island was less than a two days sail. Yar! There were many easy paths to take through deep forests and along rivers and over frozen bogs to reach the ancient destinations, lost ports and homesites that they used to avoid invaders.
> The Great Mother Goddess in
PLAY THE TRACK
>"Kernave, Samland, and Jomsborg were amongst the hamlets visited by Groniger and his family. Naught but mostly, he and Dagmar didst raise their five younglings: Gronyeth, Gakanrth, Gronierss, Gronstangr, and Gakhorken, within the western fjords and Snuflesnes peninsula of Sweden.
>>> We see antlers and double axes in Dagmars lodge.
> Groniger was stretching Reindeer skin to make a drum. Dagmar discusses foreign trade with several guests from the African-Iberian Alliance. Malian sailors under the Ghanian flag have a 20 ship flotilla sitting offshore with much to sell. The talk was of a New Found Land in the western realms. No ships dared the storms, except one.
>> back to the narrators slate we see these two names Groniger Bloodaxe Junior 975-1076 > 975-1076
> Tis said , Junior was a droll, humorless toiler of the soil ( while others say grim and witless). He amassed a vast expanse of land where his many children slaved during the growing season, and by their hands alone they wrought the province of Axdruva.
>>We see Junior's 11 children working in the field.
>> Gronyger Bloodaxe 3rd 1011-1105
> Gronyger (grow nigh jer)Bloodaxe 3rd (1011-1105) knew his grandfather Groniger the rune carver who had finally retired at his sons farm, dying when young Gronyger
>>> (gronny
gur)
> was three, but not without leaving a distinct impression. Unlike his stay at home siblings in the burgeoning Axdruvan lands, GB3 vas a sailor who often travelled out to the Baltic Sea in his boat, The Groggy Trollop, and this salty gent often came home with tales of sea monsters.
> Many a merry journey was made unto the summer magick fest upon Gotland Island, and one frothy tale harkens the day his friend Gakhorken fought a great sea beast using only the Halyard.
> Finally,
at age 72 , Gronyger the Vanderer unt raconteur und druid , settled down with a
woman of 30 and six and they had only one child, (mark ye slate fer this)
Gronyagar Bloodeax 4th (1083-1168) whom he guided to adulthood
despite his adwanced age.
Unwerified copies of rune manuscript are somevhat
uncertain as to where this family actually lived, but the name change indicated
a move southward.
SCENE 4 đđ❤ 3:15-4:30
>> Allies to the south, Black dudes with black hair and black eyes drop off sacks loaded down with onion and potatoe. Long haired Druidesses reminiscent of the Vril women inspect the goods. Dagmar and Afric-Iberian sailors go off to trod the wood.
>> SCENERY -- frozen marshes , they live in the bogs! Then finally they come upon a clearing. Deer in the far distance and what looks like maybe a Mammoth in the really far distance. Can't really quite tell.
We see rune stones for directions as they amble through dense Pine forests
> The crew of sailors and the bog and wagon folk walked through the forest and came upon a clearing where Reindeer and Red Deer were frolicking along a 20 foot glacial wall of ice about 100 feet away. Folk were panning for gold in the quiet, gentle stream. (pause) They have bartered the rock for hempen sacks of mostly potatoes from Ireland. Dagmar gives the Malian sailor about an ounce of gold flecks they had found that day and Groniger points off into the distance up river.
His brother Grongor was kicking fish onto shore again and playing that weird game with his youngling.
SCENE 5 đđ❤ 4:30-6:00
>>> from the slate Gronyagar Bloodeax 1118-1230?
>> In this scene it's all narrator and the lecture hall
> And thus, Gronigers people gathered unto their hidden faith more cultural customs. Gronyagar(Gron yay gar) was the last of the Bloodaxe; and the clan didst take unto their secret creed more ways, which may yet bide with us this very day. The thirteen sons of Gronyagar, those Bloodaxe heathen knights, didst hide their pagan roots, and their name was made Frankish to Bloodeax. These thirteen brethren became guardians of many a downtrodden and sorely vexed folk. Hiding the falsely and wrongly accused.
> Giving vain words unto the conquering Christians, they did keep far from them and tasted every joy of life instead, vandering betwixt the Eastern Baltic and the lands of the Languedoc. He changed the name to Bloodeax, his children were named Bloodeaus, and later Brousseau when some kin journeyed to Canada in the 1600’s.
>Unwerified
copies of rune manuscript are somevhat uncertain as to where this family
actually lived, but the name change indicated a general move southward.
Gronyagar Bloodeax 1118-1230?
> Now mark this fellow. The longest lived and perhaps the strangest of all. He was the first man to declareth, 'Had I known I should live so long, I w(v)ould have tended mine flesh with greater care.' Strange lore doth suggest the Bloodaxes draw their kin from the last of the Druids who fled north unto the Deep woods.
> The
Bloodaxes loved, not plundering nor war; but to toil upon the earth and to also vander far, and stay hidden from the ravages of the age by hiding and living amongst the bogs and reeds. They went as far
back into the deep forests as they needed to go. Twas good fortune when the
Plague came along in the 1240’s and they found it easy to be isolated.
Verily, 'twas a band of initiated Druidesses who escaped the wrath of those madmen and whose flower did remain with the Oxhorns.
> But it’s believed he went further north to be a hermit in one of the ancestors’ caves and may have lived 18 more years to 130 as the story is told.
SCENE 6 đđ❤ 6:00-7:00
>> in this scene we go outside this is where we see Polena Rangers saddling their horses and setting out for a journey as narrator continues.
>As they waxed old, the sons of the Pagan Knights bore numerous daughters of passing stout will, who allegedly revived the olden rites of the Oxhorkens and named themselves, Polena Rangers, after the famed Empress Polena from their tales of the ancient days. Their sacred host of thirty and three riders endured these three hundred years. Always back to the bogs if trouble breweth.
Three women fashioned each piece. Eleven pieces did exist within the 33. Venus, Diana, and Hecate dwelt in every band. The Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. The triple goddess. A manner of ordering, much like the Mongols who didst bark at their tree.
> These daughters became an esoteric cult of horse-riding women through the 1200’s, a messenger band, keeping the Oxhorns, Bloodeaus, Oxborgans, and Axhorkens in speech with one another. They rode horses from Languedoc unto Kernave, and on secret paths to many lands, following the olden ways of Atlanian villages and the ancient paths unto the Black Sea. Many a mystery doth dwell upon their wanderings. Jomborg seemed abandoned, Sweden and Finland became powerful and violent christian kingdoms and to find rest amidst this folly was to be enlightened.
> The Ax and Ox clans, with
the Romany folk and others, didst fashion a secret fellowship betwixt the
Languedoc of France, heathen Lithuania, and old Atlanian lands. They didst sail
the rivers and tread the deep woods, knowing well the season to cross the bogs
and mires. When the ponds and marshes were frozen fast, they knew the paths to
traverse to make haste. When the depth of ice reached over a foot it could hold a horse.
SCENE 7 đđ❤ 7:00-7:45
>>Featuring the Pagan Knights
> Pagans were building fire altars, kissing images of the Mother Earth and forgiving past wrongs, but the Christian propaganda machine has you visualizing goat horned demons and bizarre rituals. The simple folk religion is harmless, respectful and exemplary and we know whose actually got the bizarre rituals.
> They sought but where the bloodthirsty zealots trod not, desiring only peace. They did fish, farm, hunt, and gather from the bountiful earth that giveth much. First came the Baltic Crusade, then the Mongols and even the Ottoman foe drew passing near. The Mongols were poor fighters in the woods and were struck with great terror by ghostly sounds. Riders emerged silently from forests “they doth were weary, their horses dragging the arrow filled bodies” wrote a chronicler from that era.
> While Pagans extolled in the seeking of knowledge and were dismayed at the destruction of their sacred sites, Christians were busy making sure they named everything in sight,
This is your fascism folks.
> The Teutonic Knights and other violent offenders of human rights made every year more oppressive with their steady incursions into the bogs and the hidden forest enclaves. The 13 sons who created the Pagan Knights in 1170, found it most unusual that there were only a scattering of good sons by the 1190’s, but dozens of the many daughters seemed exceedingly stout hearted and comfortable with weapons and horses. The ageing Knights suggested a sisterhood of riders. The women were already riding back from distant lands, bringing back the modern Arabian horses that were popular.
SCENE 8 đđ❤ 7:45-8:30
>>The backround for this scene is an artistic representation of what was to come in the future. the renaissance.
>The Pope did decree the heretic Cathars should perish in the year of our Lord twelve hundred and twenty two, and nigh was it so, and fortunately, many were hid by the Pagan Knights and Polena Rangers. In the year thirteen hundred and five, they did shelter the last of the Templars who fled the law, and they dwelt with the Gakhorken clan. By thirteen hundred and seven, the rest of the Templars were either slain or cast in irons.
Christianity fully
absorbed France in its Empire, and nearly swallowed all of Europe in its
maniacal maw.
SCENE 9 đđ❤ 8:30-9:30
>> we switch between the narrator and daily life on the bog islands
Gronyar Bloodeau the 4th (1350-1434?)
>>NARRATOR pulls ANCIENT LOOKING BOOK off a shelf
In a more serious, dramatic tone
> Gronyar’s secret faith left but naught but one scroll. The Oxoheartsvoken. Within his lone tome lay a tale of earth-worship from the days of Atlanis, even a ritual from a Druid brotherhood nigh lost to time. Men whisper that their rites endure even now, within a hidden Green Cult. His most famed tract was penned as a final word to all kin in the hamlets. Its dark tidings foretold the death of Pagans in Europe. His Book endeth...
>>> NARRATOR READETH FROM ANCIENT BOOK
> “Tis all o’er, save for the dousing of the holy flames”
> Studies didst showeth that Ragnarok didst come at the turn of the age in 999 A.D., when the Faeroes fell and Eric the Red didst turn. We be the last scraps of truth. The Goddess’s light shall vanish, for a thousand-year reign of these devils shall bring great wars, breeding guilt and much hypocrisy, and a third great war shall rise to hide their sins." A bit of prophecy, there.
"Groniger continueth 'Guard thou the women, the midwives, and the wise-herb women, for we see our sisters burned as witches. They speak 'witch' as an ill thing, of which I cannot comprehend. "
>>The Narrator pauseath.
>The text endeth here, and the middle half of the prophecy is but a mystery. His book endeth with these words: "Tread close to the sacred river-ways, and >>>(pregnant pause) >be as quiet as the elves."
áááąáŚ ááጠááá˘á birth love death đđ❤
Oxoheart(h)voken:
A Quiet COMPENDIUM
SCENE 1 (0:00–1:15)
I have been asked to read from a record that is, by design, difficult to verify and even harder to explain with a straight face. It is called the Oxoheartsvoken. It claims to preserve the lineage of the Bloodaxe clan and written down as if absurdity were merely another form of census data.
The list begins plainly enough: Groniger Bloodaxe, 914 to 1014
Then Groniger Bloodaxe Junior, 975 to 1076.
Then Gronyger Bloodaxe the Third, 1011 to 1105.
Then Gronyagar Bloodeax the Fourth, 1083 to 1168.
Then Gronyagar Bloodeax, 1118 to 1230—question mark included, as the scribes were honest about their uncertainty. After him:
Gronyar Bloodeau Senior, 1181 to 1259; Gronyar Bloodeau Junior, 1211 to 1291;
Gronyagar Bloodeau the Third, 1276 to 1374; and finally Gronyar Bloodeau the Fourth, 1350 to 1434?—also with a question mark, because of the uncertainty of his demise.
This compendium opens with Groniger himself, a founder of the clan in the mid-nine-hundreds, at the eastern edges of the Northmen’s world. The Baltic Sea was his watery realm and the clans wandered to Gotland and other islands, while keeping ties to Lithuania south of the Courish Spit. Between these places, they traded—among other things—with a goldsmith in Jomsborg, and they panned for gold where the streams permitted it. They often found untrammeled plains and fertile valleys. And fish. Always fish.
It was in what is now Lithuania that Groniger met Dagmar of the Wozownicy—the wagon folk.
If one wishes to picture the moment: torchlight in the trees, winter air that stings the lungs, and the quiet presence of Iberian guards hired for travel on the uncertain roads. This is a practical age. Nothingmust not interfere with survival.
For three days, Groniger carved runes, sunrise to sunset, as dutifully as a clerk copying names. By the time he finished, his hair and beard were encased in ice. Dagmar looked at the stone and asked, with admirable economy, what it said.
Groniger, equally economical, replied: “Ate many ox today.”
Dagmar considered this. Then she said: “All right. Let’s get you home.” The stone told friends this was where the sectry gotrdyt trail.and led the others away.
And, as the chronicle insists on noting, Dagmar’s druidic companions drew aside two heavy, moss-covered evergreen branches to reveal the true path back to town—while the obvious path ended in brambles several hundred feet away. This is not presented as magic. It is presented as local knowledge. Which, in practice, is the same thing.
SCENE 2 (1:15–2:15)
Now we widen the lens, because the Oxoheartsvoken is never satisfied with one improbable claim at a time.
It states that the Oxhorken clan sailed in small, crude versions of the longboat along Eastern Europe’s rivers, and that they reached the Baltic Sea eight thousand years ago—when an empress named Polena heard what is described as the Song of Oooglok. The text does not define the song. It simply expects you to accept that it was heard, and that it mattered.
Geography, at least, remains cooperative. Denmark and Finland lay within reach from their coastal lives. Jomsborg and Samland sit less than three hundred miles away. Gotland can be reached in under two days of favorable sailing—less, if one is reckless, and more, if one is wise.
The chronicle also pauses to acknowledge Lithuania’s older earth reverence: Zemyna, the Great Mother Goddess, understood as living earth itself. It notes—correctly—that many people carry such traditions as cultural inheritance, not always as formal religion. Rural economies, after all, teach kinship with the soil in ways sermons do not.
Within this world, Groniger and Dagmar raised five children, named—without apology—Gronyeth, Gakanrth, Gronierss, Gronstangr, and Gakhorken.
The family moved among hamlets such as Kernave, Samland, and Jomsborg, and kept to the western fjords and the Snuflesnes peninsula of Sweden, as the manuscript spells it.
There is also trade. Dagmar hosted discussions with sailors from a West African–Iberian alliance. A Malian crew, sailing under a Ghanaian flag, kept a flotilla offshore—twenty ships with goods to sell, news to exchange, and rumors of a New Found Land in the western realms. Most ships avoided the storms. One did not. That is how stories begin, and how sensible people stay home.
SCENE 3 (2:15–3:15)
We return to the Bloodaxe list, as any responsible chronicler must—especially when the names begin to repeat and the spelling begins to drift.
Groniger Bloodaxe Junior, 975 to 1076, is described as a humorless toiler of the soil. Some sources call him grim and witless. The Oxoheartsvoken does not take sides. It merely records that he amassed a vast expanse of land, and that his many children worked it through the growing season until, by their hands, the province of Axdruva was made to function. The text does not call this inspirational. It calls it effective.
Then comes Gronyger Bloodaxe the Third—1011 to 1105—who, we are told, knew his grandfather Groniger the rune-carver. The old man retired at his son’s farm and died when young Gronyger was three, but not before leaving “a distinct impression,” which is the manuscript’s polite way of saying the family never stopped talking about him.
Unlike his stay-at-home siblings in the burgeoning Axdruvan lands, Gronyger the Third took to the sea. He sailed the Baltic in a boat named The Groggy Trollop, and returned with tales of sea monsters, as sailors are obliged to do by law or habit.
The chronicle lingers on one frothy story from a summer festival on Gotland: his friend Gakhorken, facing a great sea beast, fought it using only the halyard. Whether this is seamanship or metaphor is left unresolved. In this text, these are often the same thing.
In later years, Gronyger the Third became known for jesting—especially at solstice—where he played a mock bishop before crowds so thick no one could find room to stand. Manuscripts of his bardic routine supposedly survived, and his satire was said to be so biting it caused heart attacks and deaths soon after listeners heard it. The chronicler then adds, dryly, that heart attacks and death also occur after people brush their teeth, so correlation is not the same as proof. This is, perhaps, the most scientific moment in the entire manuscript.
Finally, at age seventy-two, this wandering raconteur settled with a woman of thirty-six, and they had one child: Gronyagar Bloodeax the Fourth, 1083 to 1168. The chronicler notes his advanced age, then moves on, unimpressed by biology’s audacity.
It also admits uncertainty: unverified copies of rune manuscripts do not agree on where the family lived, but the name change suggests a gradual move southward. The spellings begin to slide. So do the borders. History, like ink, runs when it gets wet.
SCENE 4 (3:15–4:30)
The chronicle steps away from dates and returns to daily life, where alliances are built less by treaties and more by sacks of food arriving at the right time.
Partners from the south arrive with provisions—onions, potatoes, and goods for barter—and Dagmar’s household inspects what has been brought. The West African–Iberian sailors remain part of the wider network: traders, messengers, and occasional witnesses to the strange quietness of bog-country.
The party travels through frozen marshes and dense pine forests, following rune stones used not for poetry, but for direction. Eventually they come upon a clearing: reindeer and red deer moving along a glacial wall of ice—twenty feet high, a hundred feet off—while a gentle stream runs through it all, quiet enough for gold panning and private thoughts.
Barter follows. Gold flecks are weighed against hempen sacks, the sort filled mostly with potatoes from Ireland, because empires rise and fall but people still need something to eat in winter.
Groniger points upriver, as if the landscape itself were a sentence and he has reached the next clause. In the background, his brother Grongor is occupied with fishing and whatever game one plays with a young child at the edge of a stream—half instruction, half amusement, and entirely familiar to anyone who has ever tried to keep a small human from wandering into cold water.
SCENE 5 (4:30–6:00) plague
We come now to Gronyagar Bloodeax, 1118 to 1230—question mark, again. The manuscript calls him the last of the Bloodaxe, though “last” in such chronicles often means “last before the paperwork changed.”
It describes a people whose older faith persisted as cultural custom, kept quiet and practiced carefully. Under growing Christian pressure, the clan’s public face became more cautious, and their name was reshaped—first to Bloodeax, then to Bloodeau, and later, in distant centuries, to Brousseau when some kin journeyed to Canada in the 1600s. Names travel. So do people. Sometimes they arrive intact. Often they do not.
Gronyagar is credited with fathering thirteen sons by three wives, and those sons are said to have formed a fellowship remembered as the Pagan Knights: guardians who aided persecuted pagans and sheltered the falsely accused, keeping old paths open and well-marked. In the language of the Oxoheartsvoken, secrecy is not romance. It is logistics.
The chronicle notes that the fjords and the Courish Spit fostered independent communities, and that Lithuania—long a stronghold of pagan leadership in Europe—felt, to these families, like a place where old customs could breathe a little longer.
Then the manuscript pauses to offer a portrait: “Now mark this fellow,” it says. Gronyagar is described as the longest-lived and perhaps the strangest. He is quoted as declaring, with late wisdom and no practical use, “Had I known I should live so long, I would have tended my flesh with greater care.” This is the sort of advice best delivered to the young. It is almost always delivered by the old.
Stranger lore follows: the Bloodaxes are said to descend from elder druids who fled north into deep woods in the 400s, seeking refuge with the Axborgan and Oxhorken clans when violence and betrayal were common and the conversion campaigns were ruthless. The chronicle does not list sources. It simply continues, confident that if you have listened this long, you will keep listening.
It insists these families preferred farming and wandering to plunder and war, and that they survived by living among bogs, reeds, and deep forest—going as far back as needed. When plague came in the 1240s, isolation was not merely possible; it was suddenly fashionable, and therefore safer.
The manuscript praises initiated druidesses who kept traditions alive through careful teaching, quiet ritual, and the unglamorous work of endurance. Gronyagar himself is said to have reached one hundred and ten years, still hunting squirrels for a traditional breakfast sandwich—because even in legend, people must eat.
His death is uncertain. The story claims he announced he would leap from a cliff, waved goodbye, and walked off alone. No one followed. Privacy, in this family, is treated as a virtue. It is believed he may have gone further north to live as a hermit in an ancestral cave, perhaps reaching one hundred and thirty—as the story is told.
SCENE 6 (6:00–7:00)
As the Pagan Knights aged, the chronicle says their line produced numerous daughters of strong will—women who revived older Oxhorken rites and formed a rider-messenger band known as the Polena Rangers, named for Empress Polena of the ancient tales. Their host numbered thirty-three riders and endured for three hundred years, retreating to the bogs whenever trouble gathered. Which, in Europe, was often.
The Rangers were organized in a deliberate pattern: three women to a unit, eleven units in all. Venus, Diana, and Hecate are invoked as archetypes—the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone—the triple goddess, used here less as doctrine than as a mnemonic for order in an age that preferred chaos.
Through the 1200s, these riders served as messengers between Oxhorns, Bloodeaus, Oxborgans, and Axhorkens, riding from Languedoc to Kernave and along secret paths toward the Black Sea. The chronicle keeps the details vague, as if specificity would invite pursuit.
It remarks that Jomsborg seemed abandoned, and that Sweden and Finland grew into powerful Christian kingdoms, sometimes violent in their expansion. The riders sought rest not in conquest, but in knowing when to move and when to vanish.
For seven hundred years, the Ax and Ox clans, alongside Romany communities and others, are said to have maintained a quiet fellowship across France’s Languedoc, pagan Lithuania, and older eastern lands remembered here as Atlanian. They knew which rivers to sail, which woods to tread, and—most importantly—when the bogs were frozen fast enough to cross. When the ice reached a foot in thickness, the manuscript notes, it could hold a horse. This is the kind of practical measurement that keeps legends alive.
SCENE 7 (7:00–7:45)
The Oxoheartsvoken now turns from family logistics to the wider pressure of history. It describes pagan communities building fire altars—aukuras—honoring the living earth, making peace where they could, and trying, mostly, to be left alone. It also notes how outsiders often preferred to imagine them as monstrous, because fear is an efficient tool and nuance is slow.
These communities sought places where zealots did not tread, desiring peace: fishing, farming, hunting, and gathering from what the earth gave. But war kept arriving anyway—first the Baltic Crusade, then the passing shadow of Mongol expansion, and later the approach of Ottoman power at the edges of known routes. The chronicle claims the Mongols were ill-suited to forest fighting, unnerved by sounds in the woods, and troubled by riders who emerged silently from tree lines. A chronicler of the era is quoted describing weary figures and horses dragging bodies pierced with arrows. It is not clear whether the quote is literal, embellished, or merely useful to the story. The text is content with all three possibilities.
The Teutonic Knights, it says, made each year more oppressive with steady incursions into bogs and hidden enclaves. By the 1190s, the ageing Knights of the old fellowship noticed a pattern: fewer sons remained to carry the work, but many daughters were capable with weapons and horses. So the sisterhood of riders grew—not as an experiment, but as the simplest answer to a practical problem.
SCENE 8 (7:45–8:30)
The chronicle gestures toward the wider medieval world and calls it, in effect, a machine for issuing decrees.
It states that in 1222, a papal decree demanded the death of the Cathars as heretics, and that many were hidden by the Pagan Knights and the Polena Rangers. Later, in 1305, the fellowship is said to have sheltered the last of the Templars fleeing the law, housing them among the Gakhorken clan. By 1307, the rest of the Templars were, according to the manuscript, either killed or imprisoned. The tone remains steady. The dates move on. The dead stay dead.
Then, in a rare moment of quotation that resembles scholarship, the text describes Lithuanian religion as older than recorded history, without a single founder, evolving from native beliefs. It notes the aukuras—fire altar—at the heart of many Baltic temples, and the singing of dainas, ancient spiritual hymns, as fire is lit and ritual progresses.
It references the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and a vision of ancient culture shaped by art, stable villages, and reverence for natural wonders. Whether one accepts the chronicle’s framing or not, the point is clear: cultural memory can be preserved through craft, song, and the stubborn refusal to forget.
And, the manuscript adds, Christianity absorbed France into its empire and pressed across Europe with near-total reach. The fellowship’s response was not open war. It was quiet survival. This is the chronicler’s central theme. It is not subtle.
SCENE 9 (8:30–9:30)
We end, as the Oxoheartsvoken prefers, with a final name and an unfinished record: Gronyar Bloodeau the Fourth, 1350 to 1434—question mark. After long silence, he appears in the chronicle in 1385 and becomes, briefly, the most famous before vanishing again into forest and rumor.
He is credited with creating a new religion called Druddism—a scattershot blend of Lithuanian cultural practices, inspirations drawn from Christian figures such the Franciscans, older Oxhorn earth ceremonies, and what the manuscript calls hidden Cathar rites and Templar spells. This is presented less as theology and more as the inevitable mixing that occurs when people are displaced, threatened, and forced to carry their sacred things in secret. The chronicle calls it a myth of cultural disappearance and survival. On this point, it is unusually honest.
Gronyar is said to have left only one scroll: the Oxoheartsvoken itself—an earth-worship tale reaching back to the alleged Atlanis empire of Atl and Lani, and a ritual from a druid brotherhood nearly lost to time. It offers a final tract, a warning, and then, naturally, a prophecy. Because history is never allowed to end politely.
The book quotes: “’Tis all o’er, save for the dousing of the holy flames.”
It claims Ragnarok came at the turn of the age in 999 A.D., with signs and portents—the fall of the Faeroes, the turning of Erik the Red—and calls the narrators of this lineage “the last scraps of truth.” It predicts a long reign of cruelty and hypocrisy, great wars, and a third great war rising to conceal sins. The chronicler pauses just long enough for you to consider how often people have predicted disaster, and how frequently disaster has obliged them.
Then comes a final instruction, quieter than the rest: guard the women—midwives, healers, and the wise in herbs—because accusations will burn through societies like dry grass. The manuscript does not argue theology here. It argues for protection.
And then, as if the author finally remembers their own family’s method, the prophecy ends with a sentence that is less poetic than it is practical: “Tread close to the sacred river-ways, and be as quiet as the elves.”
That is the end of the surviving text. The middle portion is missing. Which, in a way, is fitting. The families of this chronicle are experts in leaving gaps.
FROM THE OXOHEARTSVOKEN
Groniger Bloodaxe 914-1014
Groniger Bloodaxe Junior 975-1076
Gronyger Bloodaxe 3rd 1011-1105
Gronyagar Bloodeax 4th 1083-1168
Gronyagar Bloodeax 1118-1230?
Gronyar Bloodeau Sr. 1181-1259
Gronyar Bloodeau Jr. 1211-1291
Gronyagar Bloodeau 3rd 1276-1374
Gronyagar Bloodeau 4th 1350-1434?
