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The great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Charlemagne was Odo, the Insane. Officially, Odo’s mental state forced the council of barons to take away his position as Count of Vermandois and Valois in 1085. Unofficially, they had grown fearful of his strange powers and labeled him a madman in order to discredit him.
Of his unusual gifts, two in particular were problematic for the barons: First, Odo was able to recall with great clarity events that took place long before he was born. Once, after standing on his head for eight hours and two minutes exactly, Odo leapt to his feet and began speaking in Greek, a language he had never learned. Luckily, one of the nearby abbots, a learned man, was hastily brought in to translate. Odo was dictating a letter, one apparently from Irene of Athens, Empress of Byzantium, to Charlemagne himself, with an offer to unite their empires through marriage. The dictation was verified as completely accurate after some research in the royal archives, corresponding to a letter written almost 200 years prior. Second, Odo had the gift of foresight. Although they often made no sense, the staggering accuracy of Odo’s aft-sight gave his visions of the future an inescapable resonance which unnerved the barons. Further, the manner in which the premonitions manifested, by comparison to the paltry absurdity common with his aft-sight, was horrific by all accounts. During the ceremonial banquet following the arranged marriage of Odo to Hedwig, daughter of the green knight Viromandensis, one of the more gruesome revelations occurred. A halting silence passed through the once jovial guests at the table, as if siphoned from one side of the room towards Odo, who sat at the head of the table, his visage suddenly an iconoclasm against reality itself. Where his eyes had been, now were sockets, gouged deep and black. He seemed to mass onto the space around him, as if all else had become flat and two-dimensional in comparison. Candles burned to nothing. The feast ate itself. And Odo spoke. |