That was the last time I ever saw the house. The walls, the roof, the lamplight, my mother's voice—they all receded, blurred, as though they had been no more than a fever dream. What remained when I woke was colder. The bed beneath me was narrow, stiff, unfamiliar, its linen rough as if woven from nettles. The air smelled of stone and candle smoke. There was no kitchen, no broth simmering on the stove, no sound of my brother's door creaking faintly open and shut. There was only silence, thick and expectant, like a silence that waited for something to be confessed.
The door groaned, and a man entered. His robes were the color of dust, plain but heavy, draped as though the fabric itself carried an authority I was too young to understand. He looked at me with a smile that was neither joy nor pity—something more patient than either.
"You're awake," he said. His voice was soft, as though meant to soothe a sick child. "Do you know where you are?"
I did not. My face must have already answered for me, because his smile deepened, gentle and unshaken.
"You're in a monastery," he told me, as if the word should have meant something to me. "Do you know what that is?"
The syllables clung to my mouth like iron, too foreign to swallow. I thought of my mother. I thought of how suddenly I had been lifted from her world into this one. "Why?" was all I managed.
"Your mother sent you here," he said. "So that you might find your way back to God."
The word God rang in my ears, brittle as glass. I thought of Fyodor's drawings, of the patient unfolding of creatures into man, of the monkeys that resembled us too closely. I wanted to shout that I knew better, that I had seen better. But his kindness pressed against me like a weight, and I could not move beneath it. So I nodded.
"Lyubov, isn't it? I am Brother Mikhail."
He offered his name as though it were a gift, and I accepted it the only way I could: with another nod. His presence was not cruel. He showed me clothes that itched against my skin, a bed that was mine and yet not mine, and books that were all the same book, repeated so endlessly it felt as if the pages themselves were trying to wear me down. Crosses hung everywhere, watching, counting, measuring. Their silence was heavier than the silence of stone. I wondered if they thought me possessed.
I kept my thoughts inside. I swallowed them whole, let them settle deep where no one could see. I told myself I would play along, though I knew what I had seen was truer than any of their words. But even so, even there, life pressed on in its ordinary way. The bread was warm. The air in the fields smelled of animals, of grass. And I met Alina.
She was my age. Her hair fell like unspooled wheat, her face pale in the morning light. We played in the pastures, clumsy with joy, weaving crowns from wildflowers until the petals bruised in our hands. Sometimes we laughed. For a while, it was almost enough.
But nothing lasts.
One afternoon, when the sky was low and gray, our battered ball slipped from our game and rolled away from us, further and further, until it disappeared into the place we had been warned not to go. The slaughterhouse.
I followed it inside.
The air was sharp with the mingling of incense and raw flesh. Chains dangled, hooks glistened. Blood dripped steadily in quiet rhythm, drop after drop, though the stone beneath remained polished, cleaned again and again until it gleamed like glass. Only the scent betrayed it. Only the silence.
When one of the drops fell, breaking the floor's fragile perfection, I reached without thinking, wanting to catch it before it could stain what was meant to remain spotless. But the moment it touched my palm, the world shifted.
A rose bloomed there. Small, fragile, red. Alive.
I stared. I had no words for it. And then I ran.
The sisters' faces changed when they saw. Fear flickered into hunger, into something too fervent for children to name. They whispered, they called for the others. Soon I was surrounded, their eyes all fixed upon me as though I had become something they had been waiting for.
There was a feast that night, bright and strange, with food too rich for children. They dressed me in new robes, laid me in a larger bed, wrapped me in softer quilts. But they took Alina away from me. She was not to play with me again.
I was left with their whispers. A gift from God, they said. The Chosen One. Words I did not understand, words that clung like shadows at the edge of every room. The meals grew heavier, laden with meat. Their gazes weighed on me as I chewed, as though they were testing the strength of something still forming inside me.
And I knew, without knowing how, that it would not stop there.
The seasons turned. I marked them only by the light in the courtyard and the taste of the air that slipped through the narrow windows. The monastery bell tolled at dawn, at noon, at dusk, and I learned to let my body move according to its summons. Prayer, meal, silence, sleep. Prayer, meal, silence, sleep. The rhythm of the days did not change, only thickened. The weeks fell one into another, dissolving until they resembled no weeks at all but one single, prolonged day that refused to end.
I was small, too small to bear the weight of all those watching eyes, yet they rested on me constantly, patiently, like vultures that had no need to hurry. They never scolded me as my mother once had. Instead they praised. Every word I spoke, every glance, every step seemed to please them, as though they were waiting for me to reveal something more than myself—something larger, something that belonged not to me but to their God.
I was not permitted to play as I once had. The fields remained, the sky remained, but Alina did not. She passed me in the corridors sometimes. We would glance at each other in brief, guilty seconds, as though we had been caught stealing from the same orchard. Her smile—small, fleeting—was always pulled away from me by some older hand. I do not know if she wept at night. I never dared to ask.
Instead, I kept my silence. It grew inside me like a second skeleton, holding me upright when I wished to collapse. They placed more food before me than I could finish. They pressed leather-bound Bibles into my arms as though I might devour them. I obeyed. What else could a child do?
It was in this manner that I reached my ninth year. No celebration was planned. Birthdays were not spoken of within those walls; the calendar was governed by saints and martyrs, not by the years of a girl who had been left upon their doorstep. Yet on that morning, something was different.
The air itself seemed to conspire. The corridors, always dim, carried a heavier silence. The bell's toll at dawn was slower, almost hesitant, its last vibration quivering in the air long after it should have died. The sisters avoided my gaze. The brothers crossed themselves more than usual, their lips moving around prayers too quick for me to hear. And when I was summoned after supper, I did not need to be told that it was not a routine call.
Brother Mikhail waited for me at the edge of the cloister. His face was not unkind, but there was a strange fervor in his eyes, a kind of brightness that frightened me more than anger ever could. He asked me to follow him, and I did, my bare feet soundless against the stone.
We descended.
The stairs coiled downward, deeper than I believed the monastery could reach. The air grew damp, tasting of minerals and old iron. The torches flickered against the walls, throwing shadows that seemed to crawl upward rather than down. I wanted to ask where we were going, but my mouth refused to open. The silence held me captive.
At last, we reached a door. Heavy wood, bound with black iron, scarred as though it had endured centuries of hands. Brother Mikhail pushed it open with both arms, and a smell rushed out to meet me. A smell not unlike the slaughterhouse, though sharper, more secretive.
Inside: a chamber. Large, cavernous, its ceiling lost in darkness. The floor was damp stone. Along the walls, candles burned in endless rows, their flames trembling as though afraid of what they illuminated. In the center stood a table, draped in cloth darkened with old stains.
Several figures waited there—men and women alike, their robes gathered close. They turned when I entered, their faces pale and solemn, though beneath that solemnity was something else, something that flickered and vanished too quickly for me to name.
I was guided forward. My knees trembled, but I walked. They did not force me. Their silence did.
Brother Mikhail's hand rested on my shoulder. It was not heavy, but I felt the weight of a mountain pressing down through it.
"Do not be afraid," he whispered.
But I was.
The chamber was colder than the stairwell, though no wind moved in it. The air clung to my skin, damp as if it had seeped out of the stone itself. I could hear water dripping somewhere far off, the sound small, yet steady, like the ticking of a clock that had forgotten the hour.
The men and women in robes shifted quietly. None spoke. None smiled. They seemed to breathe together, one lung shared among them, expanding and contracting in careful rhythm. The sound of my own breath—quick, shallow—betrayed me. I wished I could silence it, wished I could become invisible, melt into the shadows between the candles.
They led me forward. The table in the center loomed larger with each step, its surface covered in the dark, stiffened cloth. I did not want to know what hid beneath it. Still, my eyes clung to its edges, searching for some small detail that might comfort me. A frayed corner. A seam. Anything human.
The candles sputtered as I passed. Their wax ran in crooked lines, thick rivers frozen midstream. I counted them in my head, though I lost track. There were too many. They crowded the walls like watching eyes, each flame a gaze that could not be turned away.
Brother Mikhail's hand remained on my shoulder. It guided, it pressed, it forbade retreat. His voice did not come again. I wished it would. Even one word might have pierced the stillness, might have reminded me that I was not already dead.
We stopped before the table. The others gathered closer, a half-circle of solemn faces. They did not lower their heads. They stared at me. Not cruelly. Not kindly. Simply stared, as though I were a page they meant to read.
One of them stepped forward—a woman, her hood lowered. Her hair was silver, though her face was not old. Her eyes glimmered with something I could not name. She carried a bowl in both hands, and in that bowl a liquid darker than the cloth, thicker than water. She set it upon the table with reverence, though the sound it made was no more than a hush.
The silence grew. My ears strained against it. I could hear the beating of my heart, each throb a hammer against my ribs. I lowered my gaze to hide my fear, but that was worse: the floor was carved with symbols, circles inside circles, lines that tangled and broke, all stained darker in the grooves as though the stone itself had drunk too much.
I wanted to ask what they were going to do. I wanted to scream for Alina. I wanted my mother. But the words curdled on my tongue, and in their place, a stillness bloomed inside me.
The woman with the silver hair dipped her fingers into the bowl. She lifted them slowly, and the thick liquid stretched, clinging, before breaking free and trailing down. It glistened red in the candlelight. Blood.
She marked my forehead with it. Her fingers were cold. The smell was sharp, metallic. I shuddered, but no one moved to comfort me.
The others began to chant. Low, steady. Words in a tongue I did not know, though the rhythm struck something inside me—an echo, faint and terrible, as if I had heard it long before I was born.
The chanting swelled. The flames shivered. The chamber itself seemed to lean in.
And I, small and trembling, stood at the center, waiting—though I did not know for what.
The chanting did not rise quickly. It began like a whisper passed from lip to lip, uncertain, almost shy. One voice—then two, then three. The syllables lengthened, dragging like chains on stone, until the sound thickened into something that filled the chamber, pressing against my chest.
I lowered my eyes again, but even with my gaze fixed on the floor, I could not escape them. Their voices slid into the pores of the stone, burrowed into the marrow of my bones. They did not sing. They did not pray. They repeated. Over and over. The same sounds. As if the words themselves were not words at all but tools. Tools meant to wear something down in me until it broke.
The woman with the silver hair did not look at me. She dipped her hand again into the bowl. This time, she touched my chest—just above the sternum, where the skin thinned over the throb of my heart. The stain of her touch spread slowly, tacky and cold, and I felt it cling even after her fingers had withdrawn.
I thought of speaking. Of saying stop, of saying I don't understand. But the voice in my throat refused. It crouched there, animal-like, refusing to come out. And then the chanting thickened again. Louder. A tide pulling me under.
The circle around me shifted. Their feet scraped the floor, the smallest sound, and yet it cut through everything. They moved in closer. Cloaks brushed against one another, brushing against the air itself, the dry rustle of fabric like wings. I was enclosed now. A ring of breath. A ring of eyes. A ring of voices, binding me tighter than any rope.
Brother Mikhail's hand left my shoulder at last. It was almost worse without it. I had not known I had been leaning into its weight, not until it was gone. I felt myself sway, just slightly, like a reed caught between wind and water.
The silver-haired woman spoke—not to me, not really, but into the chant itself, as if her words were only another stone cast into the river. "Lux. Sanguis. Flos." Light. Blood. Flower. She repeated them once more. Then again. Slowly, deliberately, her voice braided into the rhythm.
A vessel was placed in my hands. I did not see who gave it to me. My eyes stayed fixed upon it because it was safer than raising them to the faces that watched. The vessel was small, iron or bronze, its rim uneven, its surface sticky. The smell rose up sharp, undeniable. Blood again. Warm still.
I gripped it tighter than I meant to, my fingers pressing crescents into the metal. The warmth of it seeped into my palms until I could not tell where the vessel ended and my skin began.
The chant slowed. The circle leaned closer. The silver-haired woman touched the back of my hand, guiding, tilting.
I understood.
I did not want to.
The vessel trembled in my grip. Not because I willed it, but because my hands betrayed me. The liquid inside quivered with each small shake, dark surface breaking into tiny ripples that caught the light of the candles. I stared into it. A mirror, almost, though the reflection was only fragments—the warped gleam of my own skin, the faint shimmer of flame above, broken and scattered into red.
The chanting slowed again. Louder still, yes, but stretched—each syllable a stone falling through water. My heartbeat answered it, pounding in between their words, an off-rhythm I could not silence.
The woman's hand remained on mine, not forcing, not pulling—merely waiting. That was worse. The silence of her expectation. She knew I would obey. They all did. Their voices never faltered. Their circle never broke. They waited for me to break instead.
I lifted the vessel slightly, almost without meaning to. My arms felt weak, as though they belonged to someone else, someone smaller. The blood shifted, heavy and slow, kissing the lip of the vessel but not yet spilling over. A warmth against the iron. A weight that wanted to be released.
I froze.
The circle froze with me—not in body, not in voice, but in spirit. Their chanting did not falter, yet somehow it felt paused. As if each voice was poised on the brink of inhalation, waiting for the instant I would move. Their eyes did not blink. I did not have to look up to know this; I felt it. Like the air had thickened with their attention, pressing against me from all sides.
The iron rim touched my lower lip. Not wet yet. Not enough to stain. Just the cold kiss of metal, bitter and strange. My breath fogged faintly against it, a small ghost dissolving into nothing.
I thought of Alina then. Her voice, her laughter, the way her hair shone when we crowned each other with daisies. I thought if I could just hold her in my mind firmly enough, then perhaps the vessel would disappear, or the voices would fade, or the hand on mine would soften and let go.
But the hand did not let go. The chanting deepened. The iron pressed closer.
And the smell… It grew heavier, richer, until I could almost taste it without drinking. A taste that was not a taste, a memory of copper filling my mouth though I had swallowed nothing yet. My stomach clenched as though already bracing.
The blood shifted again. Just slightly. Its surface leaned toward me, and in the candlelight it gleamed—not only red, but dark gold in places, black in others. A universe of colors hidden in its depths, if only one stared long enough.
My lips parted. Not wide. Not a surrender, not yet. Just enough for breath to slip between, and for the rim to settle more firmly in place. The iron kissed teeth.
Still, I did not drink.
I held. I trembled. I waited.
And they waited with me.
The vessel rested against my lips, cold and unyielding, its metal pressing a strange insistence against skin that had never touched anything like it before. I did not tilt my head. I did not inhale the scent fully. I merely felt it—its weight, its temperature, its promise.
The chanting softened slightly, or perhaps my ears had sharpened, catching each note as if it were a single thread in a dense tapestry. I could hear the subtle shift of bodies around me: a foot scraping stone, a sleeve brushing against another, the quiet sigh of breath contained. Every small movement became magnified, a pulse in the room that threatened to undo me.
I swallowed. Or thought I did. My throat tightened as if some invisible hand pressed against it. The liquid pressed closer, leaning into the curve of my lips, daring me to act. My chest rose and fell in shallow rhythms, each inhalation shaking the vessel slightly. Ripples ran across its surface, breaking the stillness into tiny, impossible waves.
The hand on mine remained patient, guiding, insistent without force. Its warmth did not comfort me. It reminded me only that I was caught. That if I willed myself to stop, it would still be there, pressing the choice toward me. Choice. Obedience. Fear. The words hovered inside me, none of them quite formed, none of them fully mine.
I looked down, at the liquid, at the tiny reflections trapped in it. They shimmered with candlelight, colors I could not name: deep red, almost black; glimmering gold that vanished when I blinked; a dark brown like wet earth. I imagined it spilling, imagined the smell thickening, imagined the stain that would remain if I faltered.
And I did not move