HFTH - Episode 190 - Saints

Content warnings for this episode include: Gore, Impaled with Nails, Body Torn Apart, Suicide (Implied), Violence. Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Birds, Gun Mention, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Body horror, Electrocution, Religious Violence

Intro - Dragonslayer

You were—and I do not mean to offend you—no one in particular. You were born in a small town on the shore of France. You were never fair or kempt, and you were more at home in cattle pens than among the other young ladies of your village. You reached to God for answers, asking him why he had made you so strangely. You cut your hair short in repentance for a sin you felt but could never describe. You were lucky that the priests of your village took kindly to your particular flavor of fanatical desperation, that they noticed the fervence in your eyes and measured it as faith. You never met a monster beside the one that lived in your spirit, yet you rebuked a mystic from a foreign land about his beliefs so loudly in the town forum that he left your village. Illustrations of the event depicted you as a knight slaying the twisting dragon of paganism.

This comic passed throughout the cities neighboring yours, re-illustrated again and again, carved into stone, rendered as a statue, and you were immortalized as a dragonslayer. You became a nun in your elder years, and found good company cloistered with other odd women and did not miss the company of men for the remainder of your life. Your personality and your struggles and the women you loved would be forgotten, but years after your death you would be named a saint for your stand against the dragon, and an abbey in your city named for you, one that would one day be visited by genuine monsters bearing a Hello from the Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now I hover in the fog over an abbey that looks out on the Atlantic. A beam of light travels from its watchtower across the grounds, down toward the front gates, where silver glints in the light as battle breaks out in the mouth of Abbey Saint Loris. It is exactly the kind of conflict that they have aimed to keep outside of their walls, but for the frail figure at the center of the madness, it is a second coming. The theme of tonight’s episode is Saints.

Story 1 - Harm's Way

The words of the Saint Loris echoed over the inner grounds of the Abbey Saint Loris, carrying through the fog even to those who could not see her. It was strange, Hope thought, that someone who spoke so quietly could be heard at all.

“Citizens of the Abbey of Saint Loris,” she said. “A deadly evil has invaded your grounds. I, the Saint Loris, and my knights of New England will remove it. Those found harboring or aiding it will be punished like to the evil itself. Those that crave repentance return to your homes and pray for the lord’s servants to triumph.”

“What is that?” said Marco, listening to sounds of screaming and growling that echoed from beyond the front gates of the abbey, outside. Hope followed close beside him, but they moved as a group through the gardens—her new friend Olivier kept pace with Buck and Mr. Spade, with her father and mother following behind them. She still held the large jar in which the black bubble of miasma named Mort swirled, or at least, one drop of the huge black mass that was still waiting for them in the ocean beyond the abbey.

“Not sure we want to find out,” said Mr. Spade, the pistol exposed on his belt.

“That’s my family,” said Mort from his jar, catching glances from the group of detectives. “I guess they’re fighting.”

“We’re talking about the growling,” said Dashiell. “I suppose that means blackwater beasts are in Europe too.”

“So am I,” said Mort. “They’re not beasts.”

“I assure you, Mister Spade, I have seen both of these women enter very ferocious forms. Very considerate of them to take it outside,” said Buck, glancing back through the fog to the doors of the abbey, where a crowd of the other residents—clad in a mixed assortment of handmade textiles and old raincoats—had gathered to greet the Saint and her retinue. “Unfortunately, the Saint herself is in here, along with I’d wager a baker’s dozen of her knights. Shall I ask her diplomatically to leave?”

“I think that’ll make you a target, boss,” said Marco.

“Am I clear to move her from our list of allies to our list of enemies?” said Brooklyn. “I take it that’s the way it’s gone but it’s been a wild week.”

“Honey, lists is maybe not the top issue right now, which I would say is what we’re going to do to get our daughter out of harm’s way,” said Marco. “Buck, Mr. Spade, we could see if there’s another exit from the abbey…”

“Used to be. It’s been barricaded,” said Mr. Spade. “Everything that comes in or out comes through this door.”

“Big Mort is in the ocean,” said Hope, speaking up. “If we can get up to the wall, I bet he could help us if we needed to leave fast.”

The adults exchanged glances, and then looked down to her all together, weighing whether to disqualify her input automatically on account of her being their little lost baby. It made her want to kick gravel. She did.

“I suppose we have put our trust in Big Mort once already,” said Buck. “I can bear a little more.”

“You can trust Mort for sure,” said Olivier. His eyes and his hair shared an inky black, almost blue hue with the night sky where the fog did not quite reach, and his dark brows were fixed on the Saint and her knights in the distance. “I remember that much.”

“In which case I think this is where we part ways,” said Mr. Spade, looking back to the group. “Mr. Silver, get your family to safety. I’ll do what I can for the duchesses on my way out.”

“I am sure that we are safer in this foreign land together, Mr. Spade,” said Buck, and sighed.

“Have you forgotten, Mr. Silver?” said Dashiell. “The disappearance of the Daedalus with my daughter on board… that is my mystery. My labyrinth to solve. You came here to carve out a nice life here with your family. The abbey seems pleasant enough, but there’s a village nearby. I suggest you stay here and enjoy what you have.”

Mr. Silver opened his mouth to speak, but then looked up to Marco and Brooklyn, and Hope, standing with her jar.

“It is time to move,” said Buck, stiffening up, and looking back to Mr. Spade. “If you are dipping out before the conflict here provides an obstacle to your expedition then I wish you the best. As for you, my loves, I do believe Hope’s suggestion of the tower is one of the better places you could take shelter. Barricade the door in case the knights make themselves too at home here. I believe I can convince them to leave and so I must attempt it.”

“Protecting the abbey is my job,” said Olivier, nodding. “I can handle it.”

“Boss, you should come with us,” said Marco.

“You’ve been shaking since we made it to shore,” said Brooklyn. “I don’t know if you’re in the shape to…”

“Oh come on!” Hope said, tugging the hands of both of her parents towards the wall, and she looked up to Buck and nodded solemnly. He nodded back, and they understood the meaning well:

Take care of them, he was saying.

I will, she was saying back. Someone has to.

Other thoughts occurred to her as she pulled her mother and father through the foggy gardens, to the safety of the oceanside tower, and they began to scale a white and curling spiral stair that ascended the tower’s insides. How happy she was, just for once, not to be left alone when the world fell apart. How they didn’t always trust Buck just like they didn’t always trust her; felt they were two birds, one young, one sickly, that both needed to be wrapped in a blanket and fed worms one by one. How they were both so ready to fly. And of course, she was already planning on all the ways she could try to help once she was sure her parents were safe.

Interlude 1 - To Become a Saint

What does it take to become a saint? Must you be chosen by man as an emissary of god? If so, perhaps the saint of the Hallowoods would be Walter Pensive. He was a humble man, dreamer, and I do not know if you will remember him. The forest certainly will. His name is carried by watching-trees and written on the tongues of denizens in its deep darkness, and carried in the hearts of Scout City, however faintly, which it is certain would not have survived to grow through the years without him. He did not pursue a saintly status. He simply was gentle, and sought understanding first and the silvered sword second, and that was all it took to change the shape of life in the Hallowoods. If a saint must be chosen by god, then the Hallowoods has three saints—the king of life, the king of death, and the king of the place where life and death meet. One currently resides in the Northmost woods, and two in Marolmar’s World. But in a way, Marolmar’s chosen are perhaps not just those entrusted with crowns and keys and doorways to guard. They are perhaps all who are graced by his power. And in that case, dreamer, you are a saint of the garden of the end, for a little of that shadow runs in your blood, in your mind, and with each taste of water you drink you give your praise unknowing and embrace a dark communion.

We go now to one who is tired of saints.

Story 2 - Has Your Heart Changed

“Miss Saint Loris,” said Buck, calling out through the fog as he drew near, Olivier walking at his side and a little behind him. He came to stop within view of the saint. She was quite tall and incredibly thin, an emaciated giant. Her dress of white lace was soaked and torn by the sea, but she still wore the silver brace that armored her shoulders and neck, the steel halo of radiant rays that was affixed over her head. It seemed to take all her strength to hold her two-handed sword, which lay with its end in the gravel; the rubies of the sheath gleamed with a soft red glow in the fog. Her knights had their swords drawn, half of her regiment facing the doors which rattled and shook, and the remaining knights spreading out across the gardens, two approaching him and Olivier. Buck did not see Sir Fen among their visored masks.

“I am troubled by your presence here, Sir Silver,” said the Saint. “Has your heart changed? We rendered an agreement between us, to root out the darkness aboard the East Wind. You have seen its power now with your own eyes. The lives of all that perished in the waves are on the hands of the duchess. I hope you have been called to aid in avenging their drowned souls, and to rip asunder the heart of this black beast in a woman’s skin.”

“I must say I think new information about that particular case has thrown my alliance with you into a period of reconsideration,” said Buck. “Notwithstanding, the so-called monster you are seeking is clearly outside the doors of this abbey. I do not think you have a place here if you bring violence.”

“We are here to expunge the darkness, yes,” said the Saint. “But also to embrace the light. I understand now the lord’s purpose in calling me here. My namesake has held this vigil, waiting for me at the oceanside, for seeming centuries. I have come to this, my holy land, to fulfill my purpose in the lord’s grace.”

“Lady, listen, you have not been cleared by Guillaume. You are not welcome here,” said Olivier from beside Buck, stepping forward. Olivier glanced up and down at the two knights that had drawn close, studied the twisted scrap pauldrons they wore. “This is a peaceful community. I’ve come to recognize evil when I see it. The best thing you can do for us is leave.”

“Thou,” said the Saint, tilting her head, and her eyes became half-hooded as she smiled. “The lord’s gift abounds in thine own blood. Have you not wondered why the power of the devil’s rain has not touched thee? Thou art pure of blood, christened by his power. You could join us, and protect more than just the abbey in my name.”

“Oh Downing Hill would have loved you,” Olivier muttered.

“What are they talking about, Olivier?” Buck whispered. “She loses me with the blood stuff.”

“Covenants,” said Olivier, rolling his neck, and sighed. “A lot of the weird stuff in our world… people who have strange powers. It happens when sometime along the line, someone made contact with an indescribable being, something they could only describe as a god. Humans are fragile. Just being around one is like being plunged into a nuclear reactor, except radioactivity melts your bones and these do other things. She’s got it. They’ve got it. Everyone at my school had it. And for whatever reason, the blackwater doesn’t like it. Or maybe it senses they’re already taken.”

“For I am a fierce and jealous god,” said Buck.

“If thou wilt neither of you help us, then flee and take shelter and beg for the lord’s forgiveness,” said the Saint. “If you will stand in our path, then we shall take thee as harboring of the evil that dwells here and we shall eradicate you as I purge my home of its innate sin.”

“You don’t know what you’re getting into here,” said Olivier. “This abbey is not to be fucked with. There’s more here than you understand. Tell your knights to back up.”

The two knights, one with a helmet constructed of the spiked rim of a hubcap, the other wearing a modified welding mask, drew their swords, and behind them the Saint Loris reached a hand up into the fog and gasped. As she did, white fire began to blaze in the runes of her sword, casting long beams of light through the mist. But there were other lights, too—white points in the hollows of her eyes, and her frail and twisted legs rose as she began to hover over the surface of the earth, and two long horns of white flame grew from her forehead, carving a circle through the air before meeting in the center to become a twisted halo, and from it beams of radiance poured through the mist.

“I sense my cane is not the ideal weapon for this fight,” said Buck. “Did you perchance still have that zeus-defying control of lightning and wind and rain and hurricanes and such?”

Olivier shifted from glaring at the saint and her knights to looking at Buck.

“Nope,” said Olivier, meeting his gaze blankly. “Time to run.”

Marketing - Talk To Me

Lady Ethel Mallory

Oswald.

Oswald, you have got to answer me one of these days. Doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it get under your skin that I am, one inch at a time, taking hold of your company? I have five now. Dreaming boxes. More on the way. Isn’t that enough for you to talk to me?

They love me. They adore me. All it took was time. Everything horrible becomes beloved with a little nostalgia. I was a symbol of a better time, and they are grasping for me. They want the good times back. Outside, not that it’s a real title, but I might even be Queen of America. You know how I loved that imagery. Elvis and Monroe are smiling from heaven as they pass down the crown.

If you don’t open a channel soon I’m going to have to start telling them who you really are. You’ve had no compunctions about smearing dirt on my name. Don’t forget, I knew you all through the process. When you were just a sweaty man in a pinstripe suit before the rains. The rains you knew about. How did you know? Don’t you think the public would be interested to find out? You’re no saint. You’re no special founder. You’re just a man, who made a mistake the day you underestimated me. Talk to me Oswald. Talk to me!

Story 2, Continued - Has Your Heart Changed

You were not so glorious then either. But you did resemble a human being, and now you are so far removed. Not because of the spider thing, but because of your choices and your soul.

We return now to Buck Silver.

“Right,” said Buck, nodding to Olivier as they both came to slide behind an outcrop of the towering brick wall of the abbey, out of sight of the knights. “If I had to guess, from the lack of muscle mass and bend of her limbs she is not physically well. I’d surmise that outside of the power she is using to float and wield that flaming sword that she cannot withstand physical exertion for long lengths of time. Do you know of any way to weaken her, if you cannot fight her directly?”

“I never said I couldn’t fight,” said Olivier, nodding. “And… yes. But… it’s risky. There are these symbols, runes, that hurt things like her. Things like me. There’s a lot of them I’ve put onto a chapel deeper in the abbey, on the other hill. But protecting that chapel is something I have to do at all costs. She cannot enter it, you understand? No one can disturb it or it will unleash something way way worse than the knights. I wouldn’t lead her there unless it’s the only option.”

“Noted,” said Buck, and looked up to the side as two knights moved past them at a quick clip, searching the fog for where they had run. There was an illuminating light through the fog as the Saint hovered forward, and Buck wondered where they could move to next without being seen, if they had any chance of evading her burning gaze.

And then a great darkness moved in the fog above them, and suddenly descended, long black angles of wings whirling in the mist. And the saint was nearly bowled over as it collided with her, pulling her into view of Buck and Olivier’s alcove. The burning saint with her sword of flame snapped to her feet and came to face the shadow who had fallen—the Countess, coming to stand in a storm of drifting black lace and folding sections of wing and cloak, her red-point eyes glinting. Six knights came to form a circle around the Countess, who watched the saint with a vicious smile.

“Thou wilt have wished to have drowned,” said the Saint Loris. “It is a crime that thou hast lived when so many innocent perished in thine wake. Rest assured, thine trail of death ends at this blessed abbey. Thou standeth on hallowed ground.”

“I hate you,” said the Countess. “I hate the fake way you talk. I hate that you won’t let me rest. I hate that you doomed that ship and you can’t even see it.”

“If thou wilt not go into death willingly, then prepare to meet mine blade,” said the Saint, and the radiant beams of her halo shone brightly as she dragged her sword swiftly through the air, and an arc of light leapt from it to shine off into the fog. The Countess dodged the crescent of flame, and then she was beset by the knights. A sword swung high for her head, and she ducked backwards. A sword swung low for her legs, and she drove a black bootheel down into the sword and pinned it in the gravel. A silver net came flying for her which she twisted to avoid, and it clattered across the armor of the knight on the other side of her, and she leapt, airborne over their blades, black wings expanding from her sides again as she hurled herself at the head of the Saint.

There was a brief, triumphant moment as she reached through the halo of burning flame to seize the one of silver steel and wrenched it, and the saint was ripped through the air by her momentum as they both twisted into the ground and rolled across the garden stones. But then the Saint reached up, and caught the Countesse’s face with her palm, and there was a shock of radiant light that caused Buck to bury his face in his coat to avoid the agony. The Countess shrieked, and stumbled back, scrubbing at her eyes, and in that instant the Saint Loris had regained her massive sword and her bent footing, and swung her sword again. This time the cleaving blow’s light arced through the air and cut straight through the wing of the kneeling Countess, and the wing dissolved into splintered fragments of shadow as the Countess screamed, and the Saint and her knights closed in for the kill.

“Olivier, I can step out there and maybe trip one, distract two. It’s not enough,” Buck said. “If you have anything you can do, now’s the time. Even if you can’t make it rain.”

“That’s been the difference,” said Olivier, looking up to him. “Growing up at Downing Hill, I was taught that I had to control my power. To make it rain, make it storm, call lighting out of the sky. Force it to be what I needed it to be.”

There was a glimpse of light through the fog overhead, a distant blue lightning, and moments later a rumble, and a thin patter of rain began to cut through the mists. Olivier looked back to the Saint closing in upon the Countess with her sword, and turned towards them.

“But that’s not how it was ever supposed to work,” he said. “It’s a relationship, it’s an inspiration. It’s not something I was made to control. It’s something I’m supposed to feel. I don’t move the weather. The weather moves me.”

Olivier turned, and strode out into the open, and the Saint Loris looked up to him. There was another rumble of light in the heavens, closer, brighter and blue. Wind began to swirl, and with it came a thick torrent of rain, black and pelting, cascading across the gardens.

“Still thy tempests,” said the Saint Loris, and the Countess crawled backwards, one-winged and squirming, leaving a long black trail of spatter across the stones. The Saint took a step forward, a wolf with no intention of letting her rabbit escape, and her radiance became nearly blinding again, illuminating the rain. “Neither wind nor water can hold the servants of lord God from their commanded will.”

“Wanna bet?” said Olivier, and then a typhoon struck Abbey Saint Loris. Buck swore he felt the stone walls crack and settle with the force of the wind that came to whirl inside, and gravel and soil was carried into the air as the rain became a storm of stinging needles, whipped around the centrifuge, the quiet eye of the storm where Olivier came to kneel beside the bleeding Countess. Buck cried out, and his vision became blurred by the blue haze of the storm as he found his way seeking backwards into a tower door and was pushed by the storm through it; rock and rain poured in after him in a torrent of water and he scrambled to push the door closed; it rocked and jolted on its hinges.

Just before he pressed it closed, he had a last image of the Knights of New England scattered, flipping this way and that in the gale, and the Saint Loris struck once, twice by furrows of lightning screaming from the heights of the storm, before she was torn through the gardens by the massive might of the wind, and the rumbling light above seemed for all the world like a blue eye, a crackling iris orbiting a dark spot watching down upon the abbey.

Interlude 2 - Cosmic Pedigree

Indescribable life is something of a firm definition in that if you cannot define it, it is. But there are varying degrees of relativity where you and I meet, in different ways. There are living beings that are created by indescribable beings, often to serve a particular purpose. The demons, devils and auditors that work in the Industry of Souls are created by Syrensyr, but also a part of him, of his flame, splinters of the great mass of life that he is. The cells working inside of his body to digest and put to use the souls he drinks. And then there are those who are contacted by an Indescribable being, and changed by their experience. Sometimes this is a gift given knowingly, such as the first vampires that Xyzikxyz bargained with, or the starwolves created by their pacts with Tolshotol Who Guards A Thousand Suns, or even the Heralds of the End which have accepted their crowns from Marolmar’s World. And lastly, there are those who are descended from the first covenant-makers, for a little of the indescribable remains in their blood throughout the generations. Sometimes every other generation, and frequently different in their outcomes. Even among those whose ancestors were touched by the same indescribable being, the power that lurks in the blood can be vastly different, for we are all a thousand aspects.

We go now to one who prizes her blood.

Story 3 - Loris Eternal

Lord, thought the Saint Loris, looking up to the heavens and finding them devoid of his warmth. Have you forsaken me? The thunders and winds crashed around her, raked away at the tender flesh of her ears. She had broken bones upon her landing, torn by the wind down the long garden paths. Her silver halo had become bent and twisted, ripped asunder by the hand of the vampire, and her sword of truth had been wrested from her hands by the cruelties of the storm. Her body burned and blistered where the lightning had connected with her; her flesh was blackened, and where the wounds had cauterized, white embers lurked beneath her skin. The fire of my own soul, she thought? She was alone, cast away by the storm, and both the vampire and the witch, and all of her knights were gone, and she grit her teeth and wept bitterly for her desolation.

But then the howling of the wind around her, pulling at her, the stinging rain, died, and there was a sound—a clear voice, distant, singing the Ave Maria. She turned her gaze up through the black torrents of the storm to find a chapel loomed over her, with stained glass panels reflecting the lightning.

She smiled a bloodied smile, and reached out for the stone steps, clawed her way up them. Please, lord, she thought. Let me enter into your glory. The voice within the chapel embraced her, and she knew deeply then that her calling had not been simply across the sea; that the runaway vampire was only the mechanism by which the lord had brought her to her true purpose. And she could feel it, waiting, his power on the other side of the chapel doors. Join me in communion, he said. Wilt not thou eat and drink of me?

She gasped for breath against the tearing winds of the storm, and as flashes of blue light told her that her aggressors were drawing near, she reached up to touch the bar that lay across the doors. She hissed and withdrew her hand; her fingertips had been branded, and she could see a white-hot string of letters across the boards. Burning tears streamed from her eyes, and she pounded her bloodied pale fist against the lower boards. Her purpose was so close, and yet, what fragile tricks of pagan witchcraft now held against her mission. She was surprised by a movement; a bent man, withered and tanned, who shifted in the darkness beside the chapel steps, watching her. She looked over to him as he was illuminated by the broken rays of her halo.

“Please,” she said. “I must go in. I bring the lord’s light. It is my purpose. My mission.”

“Can you save him?” said the gatekeeper, looking up to her radiant light in awe. “My Andre? Clearly you are sent by God. Can you save us from this evil? I am so tired, so tired of watching it…”

She did not let her confusion show, and nodded. There was no evil that could not be overcome with faith.

“I can,” she said. “If you open the door.”

The old man looked between her and the boards, and his face tightened, and he nodded. He pulled a crowbar to attention and she winced as nails bent and buckled, and one rune-encrusted board came free of the doors. The song became louder, clearer with each one that came loose, until the doors of the chapel were free.

The gatekeeper knelt beside her, and took her frail hand in his ancient one, and helped her to her feet. There was a spotlight, then, a shaft pouring through the storm from the distant watchtower, and she felt the abbey had in some way turned against her.

“Guillaume!” a voice cut through the storm a moment later, following the beam of light; it was the weather witch, from the distant gardens. “What are you doing?”

“I am sorry,” said the gatekeeper, half calling to Olivier, half to himself, choked by the storm and by his tears. “It must end.”

Loris moved suddenly, pushing forward, and burst through the chapel doors, and the storm and the night beyond became a distant memory.

A long bridge extended into a vast and unknowable place. The bridge was of obsidian stone and silver filigree, and lettering that was far more ancient than her latin. It hung over a vast abyss, one that stretched infinite up and down, lined with stained glass alcoves, down into shadow, up into a violet and golden light. And at the end of the bridge was an apostle, facing her. Its clothes were of a starless night, its face and skin of smooth porcelain, and it had seven hands with seven palms and seven black iron nails transfixing them.

Loris stood, with her tattered white robes and her halo of light, with Guillaume behind her. The Ave Maria was still, as if it had never been sung, and the Apostle studied her eyelessly.

“Lord?” she said. “Is that you?”

“Please,” whispered Guillaume, looking up. High above her, a swarm of something was descending, glittering white and silver. Were they birds? “Save him.”

Loris kneeled before the Lord, and turned her gaze respectfully down to the surface of the bridge. She felt so frail, so empty, all the truths of her life had run dry and washed her into the arms of his embrace. She trembled as she knelt, and focused only on the images carved into the stone beneath her. It was of a man, she could make out, but his arms were split down the middle from palm to shoulder, and his legs in two, and his tongue in three.

“Lord?” she whispered, and then felt cold hands reach down to touch both sides of her jaw, and they guided her gaze up to the smooth porcelain surface of the apostle’s face. He had no mouth, and yet black spots began to well up beneath the white surface of the porcelain oval of his face, and as they did a voice reverberated through her jaw, spoke in her mind.

“I do not know thee,” he said, and then a cracked crooked line of black welled up beneath the porcelain. “But know thee I shall.”

There was a piercing sensation all of a sudden, and she screamed; she looked down to find that the apostle had jammed the twisted nails through both undersides of her jaw, twisting out through her cheeks; that two more hands grasped her hands and locked their fingers with hers, pushing the twisted metal spikes through her own palms, and the last three pierced her side, buried grating metal with a twist between her ribs. She was pierced also by an infinite coldness; and the warm light of her halo, the fire that coursed in her veins, died immediately, and her pupils widened until they encompassed all the whites of her eyes.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

She was pierced by enormity. The god she had served, whose calling she had felt from birth, was so small, she realized. A candle alight in a vast empty ocean of darkness. A light so easily blown out. Breath ceased to move in her as her blood spilled across the obsidian dais.

The apostle stood now, with a long line of a barbed wire leading from each of his seven hands into the seven nails that pierced her. He raised his hands, and she felt the nails pull, grinding against her bones, pulling apart the halves of her jaw, opening her ribs, cracking her wrists and elbows and shoulders with their tension. And she began to laugh. A woeful laugh, at her own folly. How had she ever thought of herself as a saint? How had she dared wear such a name for a false god, a lord of a little light? She screamed in praise, and thanked the Lord for his understanding, for his redemption, for her second chance. The chance to truly become a saint, a servant of eternity. Reborn in pain. Reborn in nothingness.

And a rising wave of darkness poured out from her like a flood, too deep for light to escape, utterly empty. And the emptiness poured out down the bridge, around the old weeping gatekeeper, and out of the chapel doors with force that shattered the infinite stained glass windows and tore apart all stone and matter in its path, swept up gardens and hedges in its infinite grasp and unmade them, and the Abbey Saint Loris was baptized in the torrential nothing of the Black Eternity.

Outro - Saints

Saints. What are you, dreamer, but one who listens in visions and strange tidings to the voice of a god far away? But take my words with a grain of salt, dreamer. I am larger than you, and full of more eyes, more intangible matter, more complexity than you could ever understand. And the Council of Heavens would tell you that thusly I am a superior organism, but I am not so sure. You are complex as well, in the way your body is woven, but more than that in your thoughts, your ability to choose, your ability to dream. I ask you to listen and to remember, when you wake. But I would abhor your worship. Please redirect it to the Temple of Dream in Distant Kazanth. Until you are enshrined, dreamer, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting sanitarily for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Communion' and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more! Until next time, dreamer, please knock before entering. Sometimes a moment is needed to drag the lid back onto the ark so you are not blinded by the incredible power of the god within. Too many faces have been melted by just bursting the door open.