It was a cold night, but she didn’t mind. The chill kept her sharp, kept her senses keen. She was not a person anymore, she was a knife. Cutting through the vegetation like butter, swift and senseless, a silent blade in the darkest moments before dawn. She severed any ties to her humanity and let them flutter, loose in the breeze like filaments of fate left hanging from the gallows.

You can’t see me. She thought, and it was true.

The monstrous Gol did not even turn as she passed, unnoticed and invisible, through the bracken like mist in the morning.

They sought out humans. No-one really understood why. Inka thought she understood, and she used that understanding to outwit them. She was a knife, not a human, and so they were not looking for her. Not many folks knew this trick. Those who fell into melancholy discovered it by accident, more’s the pity, but in others it took years of careful study. You could disown your humanity if you believed hard enough, though finding it again could be tricky. Inka was sure she was still human, mostly, even if the Sisters were increasingly worried about her cold aloofness.

Not right now, though. Right now she was a knife.

The Gol was a small one, barely any larger than a deer. Where it should have had a head sprouted a pair of long, humanoid arms. Grossly elongated carpal bones made its hands into an extended parody of flesh, the fingertips blackening at the ends. Across its exposed, ridged spine grew great lengths of hair, straight to the floor where it brushed gently against the undergrowth. As it walked it sighed like a lonely lover, betraying a voice box that could mimic human pain. To anyone passing it would seem pitiful, perhaps even elicit a sense that the beast was somehow hurt.

But knives felt nothing. And this knife knew that those hands would squeeze the life out of anyone foolish enough to feel sympathy.

She kept walking.

“I didn’t mean to I’m sorry.”

She stopped.

“No wait please… don’t please.”

Her knife mask was slipping. The Gol turned its arms towards her position. Shit.

“Inka, I’m sorry.”

She ran faster, slipping through the trees and vaulting logs. She slid down a muddy bank and waited at the bottom, heart pounding.

But it had not followed her, and she didn’t get to hear it mimic her dead sisters voice again. A part of her was sad about that. She supposed this meant that her humanity was restored.

It was dawn. So, that’s why it didn’t come after her. The Gol detested the light, for reasons unknown. She was sure the theologians up in their ebony tower had some ideas about it, but that was none of her concern. All that mattered to her was that they disappeared long enough to allow her to hunt.

She had meagre pickings to bring back to the Abbey this time. A couple of rabbits, one hare. No venison, no pheasant. She had caught a baby deer but had left it behind. It had eyes growing from its stomach, and none on its face. Gol-touched. It was getting harder and harder to find good meat.

As she crested the hill at the edge of the forest she could see the monastery down in the valley below, an obsidian fortress of leaning towers nestled amongst the purple heather. Her home, technically, though she spent more time outside it than in.

As she walked down the slope to the tinkling sound of buckles she thought about the past. She prided herself on maintaining her calm under pressure, and yet that Gol had hit her weak spot. She was still bothered by the mistakes she made, a long time ago. Her hair was grey now, but back then it was still black and so long it grazed the back of her knees. The two of them would braid it together and dare the local boys to tell them apart for a kiss. It didn’t matter what they guessed, they would swap names so that the lads got it wrong and they would smirk and stick their tongues out at them. If you got to know them then of course you could tell them apart, though it wasn’t often that boys cared enough to get to know them, and so the ruse worked well into their late teens.

Until that time when Elsa began to wander. Their mother had rolled her eyes and said something about ‘soppy girls in love’, but Inka knew her sister as well as she knew herself, and it was no suitor who drew her to the moors each night.

She had followed her, and by God how she regretted it every day since. She could still remember pulling on her boots in anger, and that anger was a regret that dwelled with her to this day. How dare she? How dare her sister do something without her? They did everything together. Everything! Tears had formed in the corners of her eyes, but she had brushed them away and set off after her sister.

When she found her she was naked, her hair swirling around her like a cape of dark, concentric circles. She was unravelling before her eyes, entwining with something hidden in the darkness.

“Elsa…”

Her sister turned, shock all over what remained of her face. Her eyeballs on exposed stalks as her skull peeled off her like an orange.

“You… did this without me?”

“Inka!”

Back then, the Gol had been less widespread. There were still villages, even towns. Wolf attacks were about as common as Gol attacks, which is to say not very. People had hope for a future without fear. It was a simpler time, then. Now, there were no wolves left. Even so, people know what the warning signs were when a Gol attacked. Wolf bites festered, but they did not make you grow extra bones or sprout distorted, fleshy wings.

Her sister had taken a lover after all, and given it something more intimate than she had ever shared with her.

“Now we are different, now we are not the same. We are different, Elsa, how could you!?”

“I didn’t mean to I’m sorry.” Elsa flung her shredded arms around her sister, and Inka felt her body reciprocating the embrace, reaching out… and placing her hands around her neck.

The Gol had fled into the night, abandoning its prey to the new hunter. Inka wondered, now, if her sister felt betrayed by that, in her final moments.

She had plunged Elsa down into the bog, peaty water hiding her tears as she struggled to hold down the thrashing, flailing mockery of a human being as it writhed and sobbed and gasped for air.

It was what was waiting for her back home. The Gol-touched were burned, destroyed without mercy. She was only doing her duty. And who else was more suitable to carry out this task, than her twin?

These were the lies she told herself over the years, but the truth was much darker. It was only a crime of passion, driven by an intense feeling of betrayal. The tears of her mother as she hugged her tight, the silent admiration of the village as she returned bloody and cold, her sister’s mangled body in tow… it hurt. It hurt like a knife wound even all these years later, even knowing there was no other way, no happy ending for her and her sister. Part of her wished that Elsa had confided in her, shared her injury with her, that they could have gone together into whatever new rebirth awaited them beyond humanity.

But Elsa was even further away from her now, somewhere she could never reach.

She only stayed another season before leaving to join the nunnery, unable to face the sadness in her mother’s eyes.

The gates of Palus Somni loomed before her.

“Hail Inka, welcome back!” the voice of Isidore the gatekeeper filtered down from a window above, and mechanically a small door opened to grant her entry.

“You look like you’ve been through a rough time.”

Her rusty-brown robes were stained with mud and tattered along the bottom. Only her dark woollen hood remained mostly unharmed. Over her shoulders lay a blanket, tied to her torso with thick rope. When making camp, it was large enough to create a shelter and thick enough to stop the rain. Most of the other nuns assumed it was part of her habit, but her many layers of variegated cloth were utilitarian in nature, not fashionable. She pulled her hood closer around her face to stave off the morning chill and stepped over the threshold. The walls were thick, and no grasping hands or voices from the past could assault her here.

She dropped off her rabbits and the hare at the kitchens, where a nun she did not recognise was crying. She learnt from the cook that there had been an attack while she was gone, and one of the Etudes lay dead in the infirmary. She did not recognise the name. Many of the nuns did not know her face, and she was happy that way. She did not sleep in the dorter with the others, but instead made her way to the barn along the western wall. A short ladder led to her abode; a musty hayloft with a sweeping view over the monastery grounds.

She sank her aching body into the rocking chair by the loading door, and watched the sisters begin to wake up and go about their everyday chores. She knew such things about this world that would put a fear into these girls, more than anything they have ever experienced inside the safety of these walls. Maybe one day she will tell them what they should really be afraid of.

But for now, this was home.

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