Junction Synopsis

Junction Artwork

1666, had been the perfect year for a blasphemy, the Immolate mused striding solemnly through the ravaged tenement.
As he walked his fires penetrated the darkness illuminating not only ways for the few remaining artists to escape but also a landscape of murder sculpted from those not swift enough to do so. Here and there were signs of interrupted operations: stairwells slippery with grease, the smell of burning hair, floors sticky with blood. Those smells brought back bad memories; plague winds through a city exhausted of water by almost a year of drought.

In 1666 the London streets had smelled like this too.

He remembered the rows of houses, their doors bearing stigmatic warnings, shuttered windows blind to the suffering of those that still mouthed prayers from plague tokened lips. Tenements where armed guards had ruthlessly incarcerated the healthy with the sick for fear of spreading infection. He remembered the Parish Churchyard, the cemetery earth swollen with the dead. So plentiful had the burials been that the soil level had risen several feet. All had gone to the grave alone. There were no funerals now. The bodies, bloated by the heat and stacked against the church walls outnumbered the faithful within. He’d thought then, watching the carrion clawing at the freshly tilled earth, that there would not be enough alive in London by summers end to bury the dead.
And as he’d watched the city overwhelmed by plague, deep in his heart he’d known why. There were some secrets that should remain secrets. It was because of him, what he was about to do. It was because of Her. Some things weren’t meant to be seen. It was because of the painting that She’d guided his hand to paint. This was God’s voice that roared in the city. This was judgement.

He remembered the day that he’d sat until night before the stretcher, brush in hand, sensing the pregnancy of that final wet stroke upon the canvas. London had been still, the night humid, oppressive. He’d heard the bell of St. Margaret’s. He did not know what hour his courage came, what hour he’d made the mark, but its consequence had become legendary.

The Immolate had heard much talk of that night as the centuries passed, much hearsay and conjecture. He’d read books in moments of melancholy, historians poring over contradictory evidence, hoping for a conclusive answer to the question ‘What caused the great fire of London’?

He knew.

He looked to the eternal fire that licked at his flesh, robes that God had given him.
It was a brushstroke.

A brushstroke that birthed a holocaust, which obliterated all trace of a medieval city, a mark that erased 600 years of knowledge and began a war.

It was heresy.