Deadlaws - Nicodemus Proctor

Player: GeorgeSquares 

He should have listened to the bees.

Nicodemus Proctor, descended from military men back east and expected by all rights to follow in their bootsteps, found a new life for himself out west on the frontier after discovering a rapt fascination with the transcendentalist philosophies of Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, et al.

Now, he weren't the first fella to start a new chapter in his story from the reading of a book, and he wouldn't be the last, neither. But this new way of thinking spoke to him as a way of finding purpose and fulfillment outside of the sheer monotony and dishonesty of city living; where men had become the tools of their tools. Rather than love, or fame, or money, what he sought was truth. And he believed he could find that truth in not in country nor organized religion, but in the tickle of the valley wind, or the sprinkling of light on a stream at just the right angle in a mid morning journey. Heaven beneath our feet as well as up above.

For the past decade and change, he's settled himself down in the dusty old town of Southpaw, one of the few new transplants to grace that den of squalor in ages. Folks 'round town always wondered why anybody would willingly commit themselves to this pit of destitution they so desperately yearned for the means to flee. He must have an angle - some dirty deeds or despicable past he's runnin' from. The rumors were relentless, but as with all things, their edges eventually sanded away with time.

Now that he's become something of a fixture in town, tending bar and listening to peoples' troubles a few days a week, folks have gotten more familiar with the wolf what came west. But not too familiar, mind you. He always maintains some distance, for reasons he keeps to himself. Far on the outskirts of town, where he can hear the song of nature more vividly than the hustle and bustle of other people, he lives a simple life most days, alone with his hobbies. Woodworking, distillery, even the keeping of bees; ways of connecting with the natural world that let him live each season as it passes. He breathes in the air, drinks of its bounty, tastes of its fruit, and resigns himself to the influence of the earth.

It wasn't too long ago that this blissful existence began to bestow upon him a few peeks behind the curtain, as it were.  Just a few tidbits at first - whispers on the wind, strange patterns in the fall of the leaves, and buzzing in the hives out back that seemed to suggest some form of portend just beyond the reach of his comprehension.

When the town fell to the Otherside, he was surprised not to find his connection to nature severed, but instead cast in a new light. The strange ways of this shadowed land were still nature of a kind, only viewed through a different, darker lens. This place seemed more pliable than the world he'd known until now; more permissive to the influence of ideas. And is he ever a man of ideas. Even as the rabble around town brands this the end of days and clamors for the salvation of their God, he keeps his treasured copy of Thoreau's Walden at his side, confident in its wisdom to guide him through even these most troubled of times. Still, he can't help but wonder if those hints from before weren't tryin' to warn him away before he got wrapped up in all this.