Brother Shawl

The man remembered as Brother Shawl was a simple initiate who served in Nuln’s Gardens of Morr some three hundred years ago. He led a rather unremarkable life, and perhaps would have been overlooked had it not been for his unusual talent for fashioning gravestones. He could take ordinary pieces of marble and sculpt them into the most fascinating shapes. In his early years, he spent most of his time chiselling lifelike ravens from chunks of obsidian. When he finished, he would place them on the headstones of particularly worthy guests, and it wasn’t long before the Gardens were full of these exquisite pieces.

As he aged, he spoke less and less, and whenever a new guest was brought to the vaults for preparation, he would spend hours on a stool watching his fellow priests work. When the sun set, he would retreat to his shop, where the sounds of his labour would echo until dawn. When the priests awoke, they found a sculpture of the recently deceased, fashioned in such a way as to reveal the how person appeared at the moment of death. Disturbing, but also believed to be created by divine inspiration, the Morrians allowed Brother Shawl to continue his work, and soon a number of macabre pieces joined the black ravens. Brother Shawl’s life came to an abrupt and startling end when he happened to sculpt a young woman who was fished out of the river. 1a

No-one knows what the piece was to look like, because when the priests came to see the latest work, they found the statue shattered and Brother Shawl crumpled on the floor, his head crushed by one of his treasured ravens. The cultists filed out, arguing amongst themselves about the implications of the murder, when one looked out onto the Gardens. There, all of the obsidian ravens came to life and took wing, cawing a name over and over. The name turned out to be Rudolf, a fellow priest. It turned out that Rudolf made nightly ventures into the streets to murder young women of the Shantytown. With such damning evidence, Rudolf confessed to everything, claiming that Brother Shawl had carved his name in the statue’s head for all to see.

Given this miracle, Brother Shawl was elevated to the status of a Venerated Soul and a small icon of him stands in the centre of the Gardens. Each month, an unkindness of ravens alights on his head and arms, shrilly calling the name of Rudolf to remind all of the dastardly deed committed on holy ground.

Old Worlders who inter a wrongly slain loved one in the Gardens of Morr sometimes stop at the icon of Brother Shawl to pray for him to reveal the identity of the deceased’s killer. In most cases, the statue offers no clues, but every decade or so, a raven appears and whispers the name once, before falling to the cobbled ground and shattering into pieces of obsidian. 1b

Source

 * Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2nd ED -- Tome of Salvation pg. 95 96