When Wille finally came to, she was sure that she was dead. The entire left side of her body throbbed in a way that told her it was broken. One of her lower ribs grated against its neighbour whenever she took a breath, a rhythmic and unwanted sound that confirmed her worst suspicions. Her legs wouldn’t move, and the side of her head felt heavy.

It had been a terrible idea. Not simply below average, or even bad. This idea had been unsalvageably stupid. She thought this, and other self-deprecating thoughts, as the world around her came into focus, revealing itself to her senses one at a time.

Her left eye was swollen shut, and she could barely keep her right eye open for more than a few seconds, the light was so bright. She was sure that it was actually dim, a few candles guttering in their holders perhaps, but she was so unused to the light that her eye stung with the effort. The reason for the heavy feeling on her cheek became known to her. Gravity, just as it took her tears sideways away from her sore eyes, so too did it hold her face down upon some surface. She tried to move one of her arms, and a sharp pain tore up through her side. It told her what she needed to know however; she was sitting, head down upon some sort of table, and her ribs were much worse than she thought. The movement had disturbed something bound against her torso and a thin trickle of bitter, herbal smelling liquid seeped out from beneath, disappearing into the folds of her dress.

“Sister Wille? Ah good, you’re awake.”

She couldn’t see the speaker, but she recognised the voice. She tried to respond but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate, her tongue tripping over her teeth and only making a grunt.

“Hush hush, there there. Drink up and you will feel better, yes.”

A hand tipped her face upwards slightly, and a thin trickle of warm tea, sweetened with honey, entered her mouth. She swallowed. The only other alternative was to drown.

She became more aware of other sounds in the room, and the unmistakable smell of hot, roasted meats and vegetables. Lips smacking, the chink of cutlery on plates, and the background crackle of a log fireplace filled the room. She opened her eye a little more - one still refused to open - but her tablemate was sitting to her left and she could only see the remaining, empty, seats that lay to her right. She tried to lift her head, but it was still too much effort.

“Careful now, you don’t want to exert yourself, eheheh. It will come back, in time. The tea will help.”

“I remember falling.” Wille said, her lips moving almost on their own accord. Her words were small, but audible.

“Yes, yes. You fell very far.”

“Did my rope help break my fall?” How she knew that Sister Caprimulgus could answer this, she did not know. Perhaps it was just the tea talking.

“Not at all. It would have killed you, either way. Had I not been watching.”

“Thank you.” She didn’t know how simply watching was able to save her life. “You brought me here?”

“I did. Here, let me.” The old Nocturne reached out from behind her and helped her into a more comfortable sitting position. Her head swam, and when the room finally came into focus she saw Caprimulgus setting the table. It was a long old mahogany work of art, fit to seat twelve or more guests and Wille’s chair was directly in the centre. The chairs tucked around it were of various shapes, sizes and designs but each and every one seemed fit for a prince. A great dish of burnished bronze was placed before her, with knives and forks to match in ascending order of size and use. She had no idea which one she should use first, or even if she could eat in this state. Wille tried to wave the old nun away, when she attempted to fix a large burgundy napkin around her neck.

“Leave the girl alone, Mina. Can’t you see she’s shook?”

The deeper voice came from the other side of the table, the side she had not seen yet. Wille turned her head slowly, painfully, to the left.

“Some food will do her good, my lord.”

“Undoubtedly, but she will eat in good time. Quit your fussing, and call the others.”

The man who spoke was no man at all. He had been addressed as lord, and although Wille had never met a lord she was sure they did not look like this.

Where his jowls met his whiskers there perched a set of hairy, arachnidian pedipalps that brushed his emaciated face with tremorous strokes. His eyes were hard to make out, but the two magnified nodules that covered most of the top half of his face reflected the light in such a haphazard way she was convinced they were convex and multi-faceted, more like a fly’s than a spider’s. An oversized dark coat covered the rest of his body, except for one bony arm, which held aloft a big brass spoon that looked similar to the ones set before her. This he rapped impatiently against his plate, calling “Hurry, hurry!” as Sister Caprimulgus made her way around the table. Overall he gave such an impression of ill-temper and aristocratic bad manners that Wille hardly questioned his appearance. Even so, her instinctual response was one of revulsion, and she tried in vain to push herself back from the table she shared with this creature. Her legs clinked as she shuffled them, and she realised that she was not paralysed after all - numerous loops of thin bronze chain twisted up and down her legs, tying her firmly to an iron ring bolted to the floor.

“It’s for your own good, dearie. You’ll see.” Caprimulgus said as she raised her arm to ring a small, delicate dinner bell. The chimes were high pitched and resonant, cascading out beyond the confines of the stone-walled dining room and into the network of corridors that branched out from their location.

Before the reverberation had time to dissipate there came the sound of footsteps in the hallway. At least four doors adjoined this room, and two of them now opened. Several Gol of varying shapes and sizes made their way over to the table, attracted by the ring of the bell. One had to stoop so low to enter that its two heads - skulls, in all but name - scraped against the floor. The two long skulls made up the majority of its body mass, stretched humanoid shapes with a smattering of muscle to keep it upright. The reason for the varying chairs became clear as it settled itself into a humongous throne to her right, its leftmost head inhaling her scent with gaping nostrils, curious about this human girl, and sending her hair flying when it exhaled.

Wille tried and failed to struggle free once more as more and more Gol came to the table. One of the figures that sat down was the red-veiled Sister Mischa, looking distinctly human next to a tangled bundle of silken cloth, beneath which peeked a pair of glittering pale eyes. To her right sat another nun she had seen before but wasn’t overly familiar with, all dressed in turquoise and carrying a small, well-worn journal.

Caprimulgus rang her bell again, and the last two doors opened. Plates appeared beneath shining silver cloches, borne by more figures dressed in rags which obscured their features. Gol, she assumed, by the variety of comportments and the hinted intricacies of anatomy. One of them placed a silver dome before her, removing it with as much flourish as was possible with whatever misshapen hand resided beneath those folds.

“I had them dress for the occasion, so as not to frighten our guest more than necessary.” Wille heard Caprimulgus say to the two heads on her right before settling herself at her left. The plate before her held a mouth watering assortment of cooked meats, vegetables and gravy garnished with fresh blackberries and tiny sprigs of holly. Wille stared at her plate so long she caught the attention of the spider-man.

“Eat first, then we talk. Eat, girl! You’ll find nothing unsavory here.” Wille watched as a thin trickle of gravy slopped down his prodigious chin and was painfully aware that she had not eaten in many days. She was not sure how long she had spent in the icehouse but her stomach in no way let her even consider skipping this meal, even if she dined with the devil himself. She made an attempt to lunge at the big brass spoon, fumbled it in her weakened state, and sent it falling to the floor with a clatter.

“Eheheh, oh dear oh dear. Here, let me dearie.” Caprimulgus took up the spoon, wiped it carefully on her habit (which Wille was not convinced was any less dirty than the floor), and began to feed her mouthfuls of the most succulent tastes Wille had eaten in a very long time. The spider was right, the food was excellent. Wille looked around at her fellow diners and found them all enjoying similar fine dishes, varying in ingredients but all of them sumptuously presented. The mode of ingestion, too, varied from Gol to Gol but she did not want to look too long at any of these methods lest her stomach lose what nourishment it had only so recently gained.

“The larder has been feeding much more than the population of the convent for many years. Or I suppose you could say, it has been feeding the convent quite adequately, eheheh.” Caprimulgus confided, filling the spoon with a mouthful of tender braised pork before continuing in a hushed whisper. “We don’t use any of that Sophie’s provender, so you need not worry.”

“What?”

“Nothing, eat now.”

Before long, she regained enough strength to pick up her own spoon, and by the time another servant Gol came bearing a glazed fruit tart she was tucking in with her own strength. When the plates were cleared and goblets refilled, some of the Gol left their seats, though to her disappointment the two-headed creature stayed, its oversized, glassy stare boring into her body from only a few inches away while it’s other head slurped at a pitcher of wine.

“So. Mina tells me that the inquisition has been let out of their tower.” It wasn’t a question, yet the spider watched her intently as his pedipalps unconsciously groomed his whiskers. “I suppose you know who I am.”

“Aloysius Mallory.” Wille said, her voice quiet.

“The very same. Yes, good. You’re not as stupid as you look.”

The Gol to her right whinnied and shook one of its heads.

“You’ll shut that mouth of yours, Montague. I said what I said.” Lord Mallory brandished a chicken bone towards it with a macilent hand. “Now listen tight and listen fast, all of you, for no good can come of dawdling. I am getting old, and my voice isn’t what it once was. I bet you’re wondering, child, at all this. What a sorry state of affairs we have found ourselves in, hmm?”

Wille nodded, before finding her voice.

“We can help you. If you came with me, we have a doctor, she has helped others who have been touched...”

Mallory’s cackling laughter interrupted her, along with a few titters and snorts from assembled guests.

“Help us?” He rasped. “Ha! Did you hear that Mina? I take it back, you are an imbecile. Child, whoever your good doctor has helped is long gone, as are we. As are all of us. This is not a place of honour, there is nothing here worth returning to the light, but it is a place of love. Yes, love can be salvaged here. An affection long past that lingers, poisoning, tainting all it touches. You too, if you’re lucky - though your beloved Church will see to it that you never see the light of day.”

Caprimulgus - or Mina, to Lord Mallory - gently turned Wille’s face away from him with her fingertips, giving him a reprimanding stare as she did so. She seemed younger, somewhat, and less decrepit than her usual appearance.

“Sister Wille, pay an old man no mind.”

“What does he mean, a place of love?” She asked, and the entire table seemed to lean closer as Caprimulgus began to talk.

“In the beginning, there was a lake.” She began. “And in that lake there fell a star, wandering. Lost, never to be found. It found us, however, and turned the lake to blood. It was dying, you see, its journey had been long and fruitless as it searched for others of its kind. It did not choose to come here any more than we did, but exhaustion had compelled it, and so with the last remnants of its strength it set up a beacon, in the hopes that it would be found. It did not expect for earthly creatures to follow the shooting star, nor did it expect them to drain the entire lake just to meet it. We humans are a curious species, curious but ultimately compassionate. We forgive quickly, and forget much too soon. For stars are not for us to process, and though this creature cared for us in turn - perhaps, even grew to love us - it could not sustain in safety prolonged contact with our species. Our world and its world were too incompatible, separated by dimensions and geometry and other unknowable forces. The ground around began to change as its essence seeped into the earth. Our bodies, too, became infected the longer we stayed in proximity to it. In despair the creature reached out to us in the only way it knew how; through our thoughts.”

Wille thought of the Alucinari tenets, of the importance of dream interpretation to the worship of the dreaming God.

“So, it became the Dreamer?”

“The very same. The Alucinari were not the first to worship it, but they were the first to rediscover the location of the body after many centuries of the Mallory family hiding it away from humanity, at our own request.”

“Pah!” Mallory interjected. “Some God, some God indeed that cannot do anything but harm that which it touches. We were nothing but ants beneath its gaze. Ants it wanted to love and coddle, yes, but when does that ever work out for the lesser creature, hmm? It only ended up crushing us with its overpowered affections. We were the best - the best I tell you! - at cryptography, me and my boy. And look what it did to me.” He spread four of his arms wide in example.

“Cryptography? You mean, like the study of code-breaking?” Wille asked.

“Code-breaking? Ha! Good heavens, no. Cryptography, the study of crypts, and how to make them. The Mallory family have been creating your crypts, your mausoleums, and your booby-trapped dungeons for generations. This here is some of my finest work.” He gestured to the room, and by extension to the undercroft and all its underground towers and bridges and labyrinthine passageways. His chest, though long since turned to thorax, seemed to puff up with pride.

“Once you go in, you will never find your way out again. Not without a guide.”

“So what are you saying, that the Gol are us - humans, once, who were touched by God?”

“Some are.” Caprimulgus replied. “Some are not. Some were once trees, or rocks, or buildings of stone and mortar. Some are phantasms, conjured by our own imagination - our own desires made manifest. They may look frightening, but they cannot hurt you without your permission. You see the more the Dreamer tried to help us, the more it misinterpreted. If we wished for a good harvest, the crops would warp under the weight of thick ears of corn, ears which wept and cried like babes beneath the scythe. When we asked for prophecy we woke up aged, only to turn to dust upon the morning sun. If we prayed for mercy, it gave us death. Aloysius here was so intent on casting his webs, thinking maybe that he would be the one clever enough to subdue the beast, yet it still caught him in his own grasp, the single-minded buffoon.”

Lord Mallory ignored the insult. Wille had the feeling it was one he had heard many times before.

“Now you see why we had you bound. I apologise, my dear, but we had no idea how you would react to us. Here.”

She fiddled with something on the floor before reaching over and marking Wille’s collar with two daubs of fresh pearl iron residue. The red cross stood out spectacularly against the dusty white. Caprimulgus smiled, and Wille was certain now that it was no mere trick of the light. She was de-aging, returning to a more youthful countenance of a woman somewhere around her early thirties.

“You’re a Nocturne now.”

Wille regarded her clothes for the first time. Tattered and worn, they hadn’t been changed since before the funeral. The layer of dust and pearl iron had left their usually black exterior faded and pinkish, unrecognizable as a uniform of the order of Orisons.

“But this plan, with the labyrinths, it hasn’t worked, has it? We need to warn everyone, we need to move the convent far away from here!”

Caprimulgus and Mallory shared a glance, before the older nun responded.

“Sister, the Alucinari were not invited here to begin with. We turned them away, time and time again but they would not have it. Eventually they sent a young disciple, a troubled girl who did not take no for an answer, to vouch for them in blood. She killed the Lord, his servants too, and set the operation up anew under the direct auspices of the church. Such a rotten apple I have never met before or since, than Sister Francesca.” Her face scrunched up into a scowl, and with that anger also came age, and before her final words were said she had returned to the same cackling old lady Wille had met beneath the abbey. “I took vows, and tended to the denizens of this place, the castle under. The Dreamer would not let them die, of course, not them nor you nor any other, eheheh.”

Wille glanced around the table at the remaining Gol. The one with the two oversized faces was wearing two pairs of tweed trousers, intertwined where the previous owner’s bodies had fused. Another was peeking shyly out from one of the doors, a maid’s bonnet fastened clearly to it’s twisted hoglike head.

“But that makes no sense. How then did Harriet die? Why was she not saved?”

“Did you find her body, child?”

“No, I… No, it was already gone.”

“Then unless it is desecrated, I’m sure she will be alright.” Caprimulgus placed a comforting hand on her shoulder, which despite its intent still made her jump. Mallory had left the conversation by way of sleep, his head bobbing with the rise and fall of his chest, eyes lidded in a transparent film.

“Stay. With us, down here. You won't regret it, you know. Others are already on their way, you will be reunited soon.”

Wille shook her head, but couldn’t stifle the yawn that crept up on her.

“I have to get back. I have to. I can’t just abandon everyone, they need to know they have a choice.”

“Very well.” Caprimulgus looked sad, but didn’t comment more.

Even after being unchained, she barely had the ability to stand by her own power. It was a long way back to the surface, and every step of the two headed Gol almost jolted her out of her reverie. She was draped across its back, arms around its twin necks as it bore her carefully through the maze to the outside world. In her half-asleep state she thought she saw a creature, red and beating at the heart of Palus Somni. The heavy-lidded eyes that covered its body regarded her with an intense and ardent tenderness, a desire unlike any she had encountered before resonated inside her bosom. She hugged it tightly between the shaking footsteps of the gol called Montague, covering it with kisses.

When they reached the surface the sun was low on the horizon and the air hit the bare parts of her skin with a deep and icy chill that told her winter was close at hand. Her feet began to drag along the frosted grass and, looking down, she saw her own legs visible through the now-translucent Gol. It was weakening, legs buckling with the effort as it struggled against the sunlight. Dismounting, and thanking both of the heads, she turned to see the walls of Palus Somni in the distance. It would be a day, perhaps longer, before she made it back with her body - full of warm food but aching with exertion - in its current condition. She wondered if the labyrinth was designed intentionally to lead people away from the estate.

When she looked back the creature had faded, only to dissipate completely in the rays of the morning sun, the two faces half turned towards each other.