To Chris, my brother-in-arms.

ACT

of

WILL

BY

WILLIAM HAWTHORNE

Translated from the Thrusian by

A. J. HARTLEY

Until a few years ago, the collection of manuscripts now known as the Hawthorne Saga had been sitting in a climate-controlled case in an obscure English library for over a century, baffling all attempts to decipher the strange language in which they were written. We knew from library records that they were once part of the Fossington collection and that they were almost lost when the east wing of Fossington House was badly damaged by fire in 1784. Parts of the second manuscript showed some light scorching, and there was moderately severe water damage to much of the first book, but how they were originally acquired and from where remains a mystery. The eighteenth-century records refer to the crate of Fossington manuscripts only as “handwritten, very old, bound in calf, in indecipherable cursive: language unknown.”

Being completely unreadable, the manuscripts would have remained no more than linguistic and historical curiosities were it not for the recent discovery of certain papers located in the attic of an Elizabethan manor house in Oxfordshire, the precise location of which I am not at liberty to reveal. I was first shown these papers eight years ago. Various experts concurred that the author was none other than the famous translator Sir Thomas Henby (1542–1609). The papers were all in Elizabethan secretary hand and difficult to read, which is the only explanation I can offer for not immediately recognizing that while some of them were in plain English, others were actually transcripts of the strange language featured in the Fossington House papers.