Calvary
He knew the cross before it was a weapon. With its stench of blood and terror, the hill outside the city was a beacon. And nowhere else could one hear God so cursed.
He saw them die: the thief, the rebel, the teacher, the poet. Judging their crimes by what the crowd called out, not by their attitudes, which differed nothing at the end.
By the millennium, everyone has invented a similar tale. No one believes that he was truly there. But he still tells the abbots, before they die, that their splintered relics of wood have never seen Jerusalem.