Wille was not the only person who was not excited by the prospect of a feast. Claudia had also slipped out early, and with a plate of food in each hand headed out across the grounds towards the barn. The ground was still wet, and her shoes slipped on the damp moss, leaving dark green footprints in her wake.

“Hello?”

Her voice echoed as she stepped inside, avoiding the chickens and setting the plates down on a hay bale.

“Hello, Sister Inka?”

There was a light upstairs in the loft, but no response.

“I brought you some dinner. I didn’t want you to go hungry.”

A creak and a muffled set of footsteps was her only response, until a hatch opened and a ladder appeared. Balancing the plates was tricky, but she made it to the top without spilling a drop. The atmosphere was not unfriendly. Candles flickered as the older woman sat in her rocking chair and gestured to a small table.

“Set them down girl, and let’s talk. What is it you want?”

“Of course, I- what?” Claudia paused, the cutlery she had begun laying out still in her fingers. Inka gestured for her to continue.

“It’s okay, I don’t mind. But people don’t come here unless they want something. It’s okay to want things, but let’s not bandy words. How can I help you?”

“Ah, well…”

“And eat your food.”

“Yes, Sister.”

The two sat in silence for a while as they munched on honey tarts and poached pears.

“I just… wanted to ask about the Gol. Is that okay?”

Inka nodded.

“Can they… become very small?”

“Hmm, how small? Drink.” She passed Claudia a small pitcher of malted milk.

“As small as a bug?”

Inka yawned and stretched, her spine curving as her arms reached out to the ceiling. She was fit, as was befitting a woman who lived most of her life walking the moors, though her silhouette was hidden under the folds of her habit. It was too large for her, and was starting to show signs of wear and tear but she did not care to change it.

“Never seen one.”

“Oh. Good! I’m so glad!” Claudia’s eyes began to brighten.

“But it seems like you have.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, said with such gravity that Claudia felt a shiver from head to toe.

“Oh yes, my dear. You know what spiders look like. You’ve seen the centipedes gathered under the chapel eves and the swarming beehives in the spring. You know the worms that squirm pitifully through their parahuman lives, underside the earth. You know an insect when you see it skittering, and this is no insect… or you wouldn’t be here, asking me, hmm?”

Tears began to form in the corners of the young nun’s eyes.

“So… so you’re saying… they’re inside the walls? How can I protect everyone if they can, if they can…”

Inka didn’t hesitate to reach out and place her hands on the young girl’s shoulders.

“Listen to me. You are not alone, you are never alone. You do not have to face this by yourself. I have one more thing to say, hear me out before you start crying.”

Claudia took a deep breath and took the other nun’s hands in hers. They were coarse and calloused, working hands of the forest and moor. There was years of experience in these fingertips, and that felt comforting.

“Last night, I saw a deer. A shadow thing, not nearly as much deer as I would like it to be. Most of it was Golem.”

She used the old, religious term for Gol. The Golem, the created and the mindless. But experience had betrayed the term, because they knew now that the Gol answered to no creator except the devil, and their minds were sharp and filled with violence.

“The animals are turning. One by one, they become more than they were before, and less than they ought to be. I saw it try to graze with stilted, withered arms grasping at the grass and pulling up clods of dirt. Human arms, no head. It did not know how to eat anymore, it just pulled and pulled at the same spot. It was… harmless. Pitiful.”

She did not mention the voices, or how it chased her across the forest floor.

“These bugs… they are merely trying their best to remain themselves in a changing world. They are no concern, Gol-touched or not. It is harmless. Let it be.”

Claudia was dumbstruck. Never had she considered that the Gol were once living creatures, or that perhaps a Gol was not a thing in itself but a curse, transferred across the ecosystem like a plague from one being to the next. Did this mean trees could be Gol? Could rocks or clouds become Gol? It is true that sometimes birds flew into the grounds to peck at the barley, birds who were somehow... wrong. She remembered last summer when she had seen a crow with two heads. Both were squabbling over something on the ground. When she got closer she saw that it was a cluster of dangling eyeballs, attached to one of the eye sockets. One of the heads was trying to protect its eyes from the other’s hungry pecks. She spent the entire week in her cell after that, not even Wille could tempt her to come outside. She wasn’t sure she could believe that the massive, shambling creatures that came out every night were anything other than demonic, but it was true that there were other changes happening in the world. Whether this was the fault of the Gol or not she wasn’t sure, but Inka seemed calm enough about it and she began to feel foolish for bothering her with such baseless fears.

“Anyway, this is my observation. Believe it, or don’t believe it, it is time for you to go back to the abbey. The sun sets.”

“Thank you, Sister Inka. I… I will try not to worry, as you say.” She smiled meekly, and stood up to leave, brushing the straw off her apron. But as she did so Inka reached out and grabbed her arm, not unkindly but firmly.

“What is it you wish for most in the world?”

“H-huh? What do you mean?”

“I mean. What is your greatest desire, deep down inside? What do you dream of at night?”

“I… I don’t know. I just want to look after everyone. I just want to see people happy. That’s all I ever wanted, even before I took orders. To have a family of my own…”

“So why didn’t you?”

Claudia knitted her eyebrows, nonplussed.

“I have all the family I need here. I have my wish already.”

And with some polite goodbyes, she began walking back to the main building of Palus Somni. Inka watched the long shadow as it crossed the mossy grass, lit up a bright red with the setting sun.

She wondered if she should have lied to the girl like that. Perhaps she should have told her that the walls, this haven, had nothing to do with why the Gol had not attacked. But the other nuns were not ready to hear that yet. If she had already seen one, what more was there to do? What harm was there in letting her believe in her safety one last time, this close to the end. They will know soon enough.

And with that thought she turned down the wick of her lamp, made sure the curtains were securely fastened, and clambered into bed.

---

By the time Claudia got back to her bedroom it was already starting to get dark. Hers was the last door at the far end of the Orison dormitory wing, and the corner room benefitted from not one but two large windows. Not that she used them, however. She had always been too scared to pull up the blackout blinds, even in the daytime. Just in case.

That was how she lived: Just in case.

Take extra care, just in case something happened.

Don’t speak, just in case she was wrong.

Join the Alucinari, just in case Hell is real.

Not that the Alucinari faith had a very clear idea of what Hell actually was. It existed, yes, but where and for what purpose were questions left debated by theologians. For a religion which focused so heavily on the revelatory nature of dreams, many scholars proposed that this meant nightmares were a glimpse into the inferno. Yet others argued that to say such things was blasphemy, that all dreams were sacred no matter the emotional impact. A nightmare was an ordeal, a form of ritual suffering which gave you the gifts you needed for greater spiritual growth.

Claudia flopped down into the bed and sighed.

Why was it all so complicated? Why did everything have to be so mysterious? Hell is real, Hell is a dream. Gol are natural, Gol are supernatural. There was still so much humanity didn’t understand and the lack of any real clarity was maddening. The uncertainty of it all hit her senses like a migraine, reality was both dizzying and painful and nothing seemed to help except closing her eyes and pretending it didn’t exist. The world was becoming smaller, closing in on itself as a rose closes its petals in the night-time. She imagined the landscape falling away to darkness, the moorlands crumbling away and leaving only the Abbey floating silently in the void. Even with such narrow horizons they still understood nothing, and death wouldn’t leave them alone.

She grabbed her pillow and screamed silently into it, hugging it tight around her face and letting her frustration flow freely. She just wanted to know what she needed to be scared of, was that so hard to ask?

“I just wish it all made sense.” She whispered to herself, muffled under the weight of feathers.

There was a thud from the ceiling. Then, another. Stumbling footsteps in the dark. Claudia let her eyes peek over the edge of the pillow and looked up. A small smattering of dust landed on the bed beside her.

It could have been an Etude, but their dormitory attic was not directly above them.

So it was probably a rat, but rats didn’t stomp, they skittered.

Claudia felt a chill run up her spine and in a flash she pulled at her apron strings and threw off her habit. She unpinned her layered coronet with shaking hands, letting the pins prick her fingers on more than one occasion. Bundles of starched cloth fell to the floorboards and blood dripped on her undergown, dotting the muslin with little crimson berries. Her light blonde hair bunched up around her face in tight curls. When she was down to just her white smock and stockings, she went out into the hallway with a thumping heart.

It was a journey she had made many times before, crossing the creaking floorboards to the room next door. The prohibition was in effect, though the full moon had since passed. For some reason, the Gol who rose when the moon was at its brightest were larger, and more intent on reaching the monastery. Claudia was aware of her tresspassess, but also aware of her limits. It would be no good at all if she left herself to have a panic attack alone, creating more noise than just a few simple steps down the hallway.

“Wille...?” She tapped softly on the door. No response. She pushed it open and felt her way to the bedside. There was zero light, but she knew her way around Wille’s room quite well by now. she patted at the bedsheets, but they were empty and cold.

“Wille!?” She whispered, but nothing she touched was Wille, only wood and stone and glass. She crouched down and waved a hand under the bed. Nothing, her boots were gone too.

She felt the tears start to gather on her eyelashes. Where could she be at such a late hour? She shook her head and stepped carefully back into her room, her heart full to bursting with worry. In her head, intrusive thoughts assailed her. Wille was dead, hanging on the tree with Harriet. Wille was dead, dead.

There was no other choice; she had to tell someone.

She made to step back out into the hallway but when her foot hit the floor there was a sharp pain and a wet, brittle squelch. She fell backwards onto the bed as the liquid seeped in between her toes and soaked it’s way up through her stockings. Fumbling, she reached for the matches on her bedside table, no longer caring for the noise she made. It took her several attempts to successfully light a match, but when she finally got one to catch the scene was disappointing.

It was just her room, ordinary and safe. There were no monsters, no footsteps. Her foot looked limp and forlorn, hanging off the edge of the bed. Her blood dripped onto the floor and she raised her head to see what bottle or glass she had stepped on in the dark. Her eyes were blurry with tears, and it took her a while to focus in the gloom.

On the floor was an insect.

It was a small thing. Slithering, like a tongue across the floor. Licking up the dust and tasting the cool boards of bitter wood. It had no visible eyes or face, just the smooth swell of pink-tinged tissue. It’s carapace was damaged, the wound emitting a steady flow of rust-tinged plasma. Before her eyes the skin peeled back from each side, as though the creature beneath was too large for such a tight membrane. Specks of rusty fluid hit the floor, along with a greasy and more viscous ichor that filled the room with an acrid smell that burned her eyes and made her blink.

There was a clicking sound from behind her, just above her head.

She turned and raised her eyes to see another of the insects, this one larger than the one on the floor. It was about the size of her head and hung suspended from a thin trickle of slime.

Inka was wrong, she thought. These are not bugs, oh God, these were not bugs at all.

It stared back at her with a soulless, infant human face. Shattered into several symmetrical parts, linked together with exposed muscle and mucus. Pink flesh pulsated beneath it, pushing through the sockets as though it were a mask, and yet each of the facial segments moved with intention. The cheeks, the jaw, the forehead all moved themselves back in an impossible mechanical contortion, revealing a tongue that would look human if it wasn’t for the thin, pointed tip which had hardened into bone.

Claudia had time only to make half a gasp before it drilled into her, the face plates snapping around her head to hold her in place as the tongue snaked its way down her throat with a velocity that should have split her in half, but didn’t.

Claudia put her hands on either side of the creature, attempting to wrest it from her face, fully enveloped in insect-flesh. Her hands slid off of the oily surface in her feeble attempt to break free, and the grotesque kiss continued. Blind and deaf, she wrenched herself backwards off the bed, only to put her weight on her injured foot and stumble, slipping on a pool of her own blood. She instinctively reached out to grab something and to her surprise her hand found a firm purchase in the spongy body of yet another insect, the flesh of which immediately began to wrap itself around her arm. Had she been able to use her ears, she would have heard the increasingly frantic skittering. Had she been able to use her eyes, she would have seen that the monstrous creatures were now pouring into her room from every opening, from under the door, the mouseholes and the pipes across the ceiling. The bug she had grasped was no bug at all, but the clustered mixture of several insects, coalesced into a single towering entity attached to wall and ceiling.

Tiny maggots writhed across her skin, falling from her hair and crawling under her nightgown. Chitinous worker-drones with large pincers burrowed themselves, one at a time, into her ears. A larger, spiked and limbless leech was boring its way through her bellybutton. Several strings of sticky, putrid excretions had began to build up, both on her body and in the room itself until she was suspended entirely in a cocoon of septic silk. Foamy bubbles dripped from her lips as the tongue-beast lashed inside her chest, cracking her ribs and distending her small frame in ways no living human could possibly endure.

...My insides feel funny…

Her last conscious thoughts flashed out from behind the abject terror that obscured her reasoning.

Wille… I hope...

Outside in the hallways all was a quiet darkness. The rest of the dormitory slept on, undisturbed.