>>6161771This is the great question.
>>6161825>>6162000>>6162059You decided to look upwards, after all God was in the sky and if he was here you had to look up to see if he is here. And, as if to answer your faith, a powerful ray of light hit through these blurry scenes of death, and you received, perhaps illumination. This blinding light rendered you unable to see anything for a moment, your mind only in prayer, hoping for the Lord to protect you and the Holy Virgin to take pity upon you. It was when you remarked that you were hot, terribly hot, and it was as if sand hit your head... Wait... Sand ? In winter... No, no, no, no, you remembered this hotness, this place. You never were here physically, but the strange.. Experience that you had in the tomb of the brother of Leman, the desert, the saracens... You tried to advance under this blinding light when you saw a sea of tents... An host, a mighty host, but not a host of infidels, no, there were crosses on the banner and you saw several men in mail with christian helmets but sometimes with turbans and parts of clothes around them as to protect against the heath. But... It was absurd ? The crusades were no more, Acre has fallen 8 years ago to the great sadness of Christendom.
You did the sign of the cross, how was it possible ? Perhaps it was a raid from Cyprus, yes, probably, it was still in the hands of honest christians. You advanced and, as in your last experience a sentinel posted right before you ignored you, as if you were invisible. You continued and what shocked you was the vision of the main tent, in the middle of this army of perhaps four or five thousand men. It bore the emblem of the realm of Jerusalem, an entity today inexistant. Had a new crusade been declared in your absence ? Has God sent you this sign so that you assemble an army of Indians to march against the infidels from the East ?
You moved towards the tent, and entered it, and what you saw shocked you to the core. The banners, the emblems on the tabards... Ibelin, Granier, Courtenay, Châtillon... And the man, the very young, practically a boy, but very tired king who had to be transported in a chair and seemed to point towards the men, he had the coat of arms of the kingdom of Jerusalem on his tabard. And the bandages, he was a leper... By Saint Denis, it was Baudouin IV of Jerusalem, the leper king... And the men... Dead, they were all dead a century ago ! The brothers Baudouin and Balian d'Ibelin, Renaud de Sidon, Josselin de Courtenay, and Renaud de Châtillon... The last one, a champenois compatriot of yours, did not look like his descendant, he was taller, with a face that was once probably beautiful but now hard and marked by deprivation and torture, still he looked like to like battle. He seemed to be bored. You looked then around and saw two serious men who discussed, the Grand Masters of the Templar and Hospitalier orders, Eudes de Saint Amand and... If you remembered it well Roger de Moulins.
