Who was Saint Eridmus?

In the present day, not many people know who Saint Eridmus was and what he did to become revered, let alone why the Church of St Eridmus bears his name.

During the time in which the second book of the Nighthunter is set, there are no such things as wizards. They were all wiped out years ago when Emperor Carachuill came into power.

Of course, there are still mages — people born with the ability to use magic in their blood — but this is becoming a rarer congenital condition with each generation. On top of that, using magic, teaching children about magic, or even writing stories with magic in them is against the law. It’s been outlawed ever since the rise of the Dal-Rhiatan Empire, and the punishment is abduction followed by death in the Emperor’s gladiator battles.

This means that any child born with magic in their blood has to either hide it to integrate with society or go into exile, travelling to the Hiraeth mountains where groups of wandering magi take them in, care for them, and teach them how to control their powers (or “fera”.)

The Last Wizard to exist left a gift to humankind: a form of glass impregnated with a tincture that repels “the Grim” (or Ghosts and Witches) and dissolves them on contact. It took the wizard his entire adult lifetime to find, grow, borrow, and sometimes even steal the ingredients needed to make it, and to work out how and in what order to combine them, but his life was snuffed out before he could share the recipe with the world.

During the first years of Carachuill’s tyranny, his golden-armoured soldiers swept the continents of Dal-Rhiatah and Ossyan “purging” households and establishments of known magical practitioners. Some of the wizards, prophets, and healers banded together and formed a rebel army to protect and hide the Last Wizard whilst he worked on his method of protecting humans from the Grim.

After a lengthy fight where the rebels were beseiged in a narrow mountain pass by the Emperor’s forces, they were taken prisoner and brought to the Emperor’s palace in Dal-Rhiatah. The soldiers forced their way into the cave where the Last Wizard was currently concealed, and took him prisoner too, destroying his reams of notes and books.

While the rebels were languishing in their cell, the Last Wizard suffered a violent fit — very unusual for someone of his temperament — claimed he’d had a vision, and demanded to see Carachuill face to face. One of the guards showed compassion at last and brought him before the Emperor.

In his audience with the paranoid ruler, the Last Wizard said he could see a terrible disease growing inside the Emperor’s body — it was widely known by the magical community that the Emperor held a great fear of aging, illness, and mortality — and his performance was so convincing that the Emperor said if he could cure him of the ailment, he and his friends would be free to go.

The wizard refused to perform the healing rite until his friends were safely on a ship heading back to Ossyan, along with the final piece of Grim-repellent glass he would ever make. However, once he “cured” the Emperor, the tyrant went back on his word and had the Last Wizard eviscerated by nymrafus-cats in the palace arena.

Eridmus was the Last Wizard’s name. The last piece of the wizard’s glass was built into a room containing the gateway to Hell — one of the main places the Grim were leaking into the living world from — and some fragments of it were taken into the Barren Plains by people who still attempted to cross that Ghost-infested area, thinking that it would bring them luck. However, the fragments were either too small to be effective or the travellers didn’t know how to use them, and they met their ultimate ends.

The public were incensed at the Emperor’s censorship and killing of the one person who could have saved them from the curse of the Grim, so after consulting with his advisors the Emperor agreed to make Eridmus a saint and allow a church to be erected in his honour.

The second book of The Nighthunter is currently in its final draft, and you can find out more about Book One here: