The Black Priest of Annwn
Ritualist. Prophet. Would-be vessel of the Wild Hunt.
Recorded history
The figure now known as the Black Priest of Annwn is described as tall, severe and funereal: a pale gothic face beneath a black top hat, shadowed eyes, black vestments marked with an inverted cross and an ornate cane carried more like a sceptre than a walking stick.
Those who have heard him speak say his voice carries the weight of ancient stone. He does not sound hurried. He does not sound uncertain. He speaks as though modern history is a brief interruption in a much older conversation.
Before the Fall, he lived alone on the wild edges of Anglesey. He was drawn again and again to the ancient stones of Bryn Celli Ddu, the Mound in the Dark Grove, and to the older paths that crossed the island long before roads, borders or settlements made their claims.
Locals called him strange. He appears to have considered that a sign of progress.
He spent years walking those paths, reading tarot among the ruins and listening to whatever he believed the dark grove whispered after sunset. Whether those whispers were spirits, radiation, loneliness, prophecy or madness is still debated. The Black Priest himself makes no distinction worth recording.
The Annwn doctrine
When the world cracked, the Black Priest did not treat it as the end of civilisation.
He treated it as confirmation.
According to his doctrine, the old gods had never left. They had only withdrawn, waiting beneath the skin of the world for the rites to be completed and the old bargains renewed. He claims that Rome, Christianity, industry and the pre-Fall state all tried in different ways to bury the same truth: that Annwn, the Otherworld beneath and beside the known world, still presses against the gates.
The Black Priest seeks to open those gates.
His stated purpose is to awaken Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of Annwn and master of the Wild Hunt, and to become the vessel through which the Hunt returns to the Wasteland. Whether he means this literally, symbolically or with the particular dangerous certainty of a man who has stopped recognising the difference is unknown.
In the Wasteland
Travellers report him at boundary places: ruined churches, barrows, standing stones, crossroads, dead woodland and the edges of old settlements. He is rarely seen in the centre of anything. He prefers thresholds.
He has been known to offer readings, warnings and blessings whose usefulness varies wildly depending on the listener's tolerance for omens. Some dismiss him as a theatrical relic of the old world. Others avoid him entirely, reasoning that anyone who talks to the dark for long enough may eventually receive an answer.
His rituals are not yet known to have opened anything.
That is not the same as saying they are harmless.
Archive notes
- Carries an ornate cane; function unknown.
- Frequently associated with tarot, black vestments and inverted cross imagery.
- Displays specific interest in Bryn Celli Ddu and Anglesey's older ritual landscape.
- Claims the Fall exposed rather than created the truth of the world.
- Do not attend solitary rites conducted after sunset.