To Sin in Verse

The small brass bell above my door chimed a sound too clean for the sullied air of Cheapside. I did not look up. My focus was on the mortar, on the steady, circular grind of the pestle crushing dried yarrow into a fine, fragrant dust. The scent of it, sharp and green, was a small prayer against the street’s perpetual stench of refuse and humanity. Another soul seeking a poultice for a weeping sore, or a tincture for a cough that rattled the ribs. They came, they paid their pennies, they left.

But this silence was different. It was not the shuffling quiet of a humble patron. It was a weighted, deliberate stillness that made the fine hairs on my arms prickle. When I finally lifted my gaze, he stood there, a stark column of black wool against the muted browns and greens of my shop. He had pulled the door shut behind him, trapping the afternoon light and the world’s noise outside, leaving us in a sudden, intimate twilight.

He was the new priest. I had seen him from a distance, a severe figure whose youth was betrayed only by the sharp line of his jaw and the fervor that burned in his eyes. Up close, he was taller than I had imagined, and thinner, as if he had whittled himself down to nothing but bone and belief.

"You are the woman they call Isabell," he said. It was not a question. His voice was low and resonant, a church-stone sound that seemed to absorb the light in the room.

I gave a slow, single nod, my hand still resting on the pestle. "I am."

He took a step forward, his dark eyes sweeping over the hanging bundles of lavender and feverfew, the neatly labeled clay pots, the charts of moon phases and plant cycles pinned to the wall. His gaze was an indictment. "Master Albright’s son was near death two nights past. The sweating sickness had him. Today, he sits up and takes broth."

"God is merciful," I offered, my voice even.

A muscle tightened in his lean cheek. "Master Albright confesses he did not pray for God’s mercy. He came to you. He paid for a devil’s cure, and in his desperation, he damned his son’s soul and his own." The words were stones cast into a sinner. "He says you gave him a bottle of black liquid. He says you practiced sorcery."

I slid the pestle from the mortar and set it aside. The clink of marble on slate filled a moment that was otherwise silent. I met his stare, this man of God who saw heresy in my healing. His eyes were the grey of a winter sky, and in their depths, I saw a terrible, rigid certainty. But a certainty for what was unclear.

"It was an infusion of willow bark and elderflower," I said, my voice quiet but clear in the heavy silence. "It cools a fevered blood. There is no magic in it, Father. Only the earth."

"The earth is God’s," he countered, his voice dropping lower, more intense. "And you twist His creations to profane ends. You offer remedies that belong to Him alone, and you whisper incantations over them." He took another step, the space between us shrinking, changing the scent of my herbs so that it mixed with his aroma. "Confess your sin, woman. Confess what you are."

He moved past me then, his black cassock brushing against a hanging sheaf of dried rosemary, releasing its sharp, clean scent into the air. He ignored it. His long fingers traced one of my botanical charts, the elegant, spiraling symbols I used to denote root, leaf, and flower. I had devised the system myself, a private language between me and my work. To his eyes, it was a demonic script.

"What devil's grammar is this?" he murmured, his voice a low vibration of disgust. He ran a hand over a row of clay jars, his touch lingering on the one marked Belladonna. "The shade of night. A poisoner's tool."

"A single drop can ease a racing heart," I said, my own heart beginning to beat a frantic rhythm against my ribs. "The dose makes the poison, Father. Not the plant."

His gaze finally settled on my worktable, on the small, worn book bound in dark leather that lay beside my scales. It was where I pressed my thoughts, my loneliness, and the words that came to me in the quiet hours. He reached for it, his movements slow and deliberate, as if handling a venomous snake.

"And what is this? Your book of shadows? Your pacts and incantations?"

"It is nothing," I said, the words coming out sharper than I intended. "It is private."

He paid me no mind. He opened the book, the leather creaking in the charged quiet. His eyes, accustomed to reading scripture in dim light, scanned the page. I felt a cold dread wash over me, a violation more profound than his search of my herbs. He was touching my soul. He found a verse near the top of a page and drew a breath.

And then he spoke my words.

His voice was not the condemning lash I expected. It was deep, sonorous, and achingly beautiful, the voice of a man who could make psalms weep. It filled the small shop, wrapping around the hanging herbs and jars, giving my simple, secret lines a weight and a sorrow I had never intended, but had always felt.

"The shadow drinks the light from stone,
And in the dark, a seed is sown.
It does not pray for sun or sky,
But finds its strength in a silent cry."

The last word faded, leaving a silence that was heavier than before. He had meant to expose me, to read my heresy aloud as proof of my sin. But something else had happened. In the resonant timbre of his voice, my private grief had been transformed into a hymn of despair. He recognized my solitude. I stood frozen, my breath caught in my throat, listening to the echo of my own heart spoken in the voice of my accuser.

He closed the book. The sound of the leather cover meeting the pages was soft. His long, pale fingers rested on the cover for a moment, a stark contrast to the dark, worn leather. He did not look at the book, but at me. The righteous fire in his gaze had been banked, leaving behind something grey and cold, like ash. The certainty was still there, but it was now laced with a profound and unsettling sorrow. It was the loneliness I knew so well, the kind that lived in the hollow of the ribs, a constant, quiet ache.

He pushed the book back toward me across the worn wood of the table. "This is a dangerous game you play, woman." His voice was low again, the beautiful resonance gone, replaced by a flat, hard tone. "You meddle with things that are not yours to command. The health of a man’s body is tied to the salvation of his soul. You cannot treat one without poisoning the other."

He moved toward the door, his black robes stirring the dust motes in the single shaft of light. He stopped with his hand on the iron latch, his back to me. For a moment, I thought he would leave it at that. But then he spoke again, his voice a low murmur that carried the weight of a prophecy.

"Burn your books. Forget these rhymes.
A woman’s prayer is not in chimes
of word and root, but bended knee.
There is no grace in sorcery."

The words hung in the air between us, a perfect, chilling echo of the cadence he had read from my own page. A verse of warning, crafted in the language of my own heart. I saw his shoulders tense, as if the shape of the words had surprised him as much as they had me. He seemed to recoil from his own speech, a flicker of confusion crossing his features before he mastered them. He pulled the door open without looking back, and the raw noise of the street flooded the sanctuary he had created.

Then he was gone. The bell gave a final, mocking chime.

I stood frozen in the sudden emptiness, my hand trembling as I reached out to touch the cover of my book. His threat was a hollow thing, a priest’s duty recited by rote. I had heard such words before. They were nothing. But the look in his eyes, and the unintentional poetry of his curse—that had undone me completely. It was not the fear of the pyre that left me shaking. It was the terrifying recognition that this man, this vessel of a faith that would see me condemned, had looked into the darkest, most secret part of my craft and spoken its language back to me. He was not my enemy. He was my echo. And I knew I could bewitch him.

The bell in St. Giles’s never stopped. It was a new, constant companion to the city’s breath, a frantic metal tongue speaking a single word: death. A week after the priest’s visit, the sweating sickness had fallen upon the parish like a shroud. It came on swift and brutal, a chill followed by a drenching, foul-smelling sweat that seemed to pull the life from a body in a matter of hours. The physicians fled. The church offered prayers and last rites, their remedies proving as useless as a whisper against a storm. Thomas’s God had turned a deaf ear to London. The ceaseless tolling of the bell was the only answer to the prayers of the people.

From my window, I watched the death-carts trundle past, their grim cargo barely concealed. I heard the wailing that seeped through thin walls and closed shutters. His warning to me, his poetic curse, felt like a distant, hollow thing now. There is no grace in sorcery. But there was no grace in watching children burn from within, either. There was no salvation in kneeling on cold stone while the world dissolved into fever and fear.

My work became a fever of its own. By day, I kept my door barred, turning away the few healthy souls brave enough to venture out. By night, my small workshop was aglow with the steady flame of a lamp. The air grew thick with the sharp, medicinal scents of boiled willow bark, yarrow, and meadowsweet. I worked with a frantic, desperate focus, my hands stained with herbs, my mind a sharp, clear instrument. I measured and crushed, steeped and strained, pouring the dark, potent liquids into small glass vials I had hoarded for years. This was my prayer, offered not to the heavens, but to the suffering flesh of my neighbors.

For each vial, I prepared a message. On scraps of torn parchment, I wrote in my neat, small script. Not incantations, not spells, but verses meant to anchor a soul adrift in the delirium of sickness. A reminder that the body was of the earth, and the earth endured.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

They were small acts of rebellion against the bells, against the priest’s condemning God. They were my verses, my craft, and an act of defiance against his warnings.

When the moon was a sliver and the fog from the river crept through the alleys to swallow all sound but the tolling bell, I would slip out. With a basket of vials tucked under my cloak, I moved like a ghost through the city. I crept to the doors marked with the crude chalk cross of the plague, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I would leave a single vial on the doorstep, the small scroll of parchment tied around its neck with a bit of twine. A silent offering. I never waited to see if it was taken. I only left my small hope in the darkness and vanished back into the shadows, the priest’s beautiful, damning voice a faint echo in my memory.

The room was thick with the sweet, cloying odor of decay. Thomas knelt by the pallet, the rough wool of his cassock scratching his knees through the thin fabric. The woman on the bed was little more than a specter, her skin slick with the unending sweat, her breath a shallow, rattling thing. He had been with her for an hour, murmuring the Latin rites for the dying, his voice a low drone against the relentless clang of the bells outside. His words felt hollow, useless stones thrown against a tide of sickness. God was silent. Only the bell answered.

The woman’s husband, a stooped man with eyes hollowed out by grief and sleeplessness, pressed something small and cool into his hand. "A moment ago," the man whispered, his voice raw. "On the step. Someone left it."

Thomas looked down. It was a small glass vial filled with a dark liquid. Tied to its neck with a piece of rough twine was a tiny scroll of parchment. He felt a familiar surge of irritation. Peasant superstition. A useless charm against the wrath of God. He was about to set it aside, to gently admonish the man for placing his hope in such trifles, but his fingers brushed against the parchment. It was the same worn, fibrous texture as the pages of her book.

He pulled at the twine with his thumb, his movements slow. The scroll uncurled in his palm. The script was small, precise, and utterly familiar. A jolt went through him, a memory of her shop, of the scent of rosemary and damp earth. He held the parchment closer to the flickering candlelight.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

The rhythm was unmistakable. It was the same quiet, defiant cadence he had read aloud, the same voice that spoke of strength found not in prayer, but in the dirt. It was her. The witch. While he was on his knees offering platitudes to the dying, she was moving through the darkness, leaving her poison—her medicine—on their doorsteps.

He looked from the elegant script to the vial of dark liquid. He thought of the merchant’s child, recovered. He thought of the whispers of other miraculous survivals in the parish, stories he had dismissed as desperate rumor. His prayers filled the air with empty sound. Her verses offered a tangible thing: a liquid in a vial, a promise of the earth’s resilience. A cold shame washed over him, so forcful it felt like a physical sickness. She was doing his work. She, the heretic, the sinner, was tending to his flock with a faith more practical and potent than his own.

The verse was not just for the sick. He knew it with a certainty that chilled him to his core. It was a message sent across the dying city, a secret correspondence meant only for him. Drink deep of earth, and do not weep. It was a challenge. A rebuke. An invitation into her world of root and stone, a world that was saving lives while his world of scripture and sacrament failed. He closed his hand around the vial, the cool glass a solid, real thing against his skin. The bell tolled, and for the first time, it sounded like a summons.

He found me by the river. I had gone there to escape the bells, but their sound carried even here, muted by the thick, grey fog that rolled off the water, blurring the line between river and shore. The air was cold and wet, smelling of mud and decay. I was kneeling, my fingers numb as I dug for the pale roots near the bank, when a shape resolved itself from the mist. It was him.

My first instinct was to run. He was out of his territory, a black-robed predator strayed from its stone den. My basket of herbs felt like an indictment at my side. I rose slowly, my back stiff, my hand clutching the small trowel I’d been using, its sharp edge a pathetic weapon. He stopped a few feet away, close enough that I could see the exhaustion etched around his eyes, the grime on the hem of his cassock. He looked as if he had been walking through the filth of the city for days. He was not a priest delivering a verdict; he was a man drowning.

He did not look at the basket, or the roots in my hand. His eyes, dark and haunted, were fixed on my face. The silence stretched, thick with the damp air and all the things we had left unsaid. The clang of the distant bell was the only sound. I expected the accusation, the condemnation, the righteous fire.

His voice came out low and broken, stripped of all its priestly resonance. It was the voice of a man confessing in the dark, not to God, but to me.

"The bell tolls out a hollow sound,
For souls God left within the ground.
I speak His word, I plead His grace,
And see His absence on each face.
What prayer can halt the final breath,
When Heaven’s king is lord of death?"

The words were a blade, not turned on me, but on himself. On his God. It was a verse of pure, undiluted despair, a heresy more profound than any I had ever dared to write. The rhythm was perfect and dark. He had taken our shared language and steeped it in his own private hell.

In that moment, the priest vanished. The black robes, the cross he wore, the entire edifice of his faith crumbled away, and all that was left was Thomas. A man tearing himself apart with doubt. A poet whose verses were as secret and as damning as my own. The profound, aching loneliness I had first seen in his eyes was now naked and exposed in the twilight. He was not my judge. He was my reflection in a shattered piece of glass.

I did not speak. There were no words for what passed between us. I only gave a slow, small nod. It was an answer. An acceptance. His shoulders slumped in relief, a barely perceptible shift, but I saw it. The tension that held him so rigidly in place seemed to bleed out of him into the fog. For the first time since he had walked into my life, we were not witch and priest. We were merely two souls, standing on the edge of a dying world, speaking the only language that made any sense of it.

The first heat struck at vespers, a thin thread of fire pulled tight beneath my skin. By compline, it had spread—neck, back, the tender hollows of my knees, the small of my spine. Sweat gathered at my hairline, dampening the edge of my tonsure. The hymn faltered on my tongue. Brothers glanced up. I kept my voice steady, finished the office, and dismissed them with a blessing that felt thin as smoke.

I did not go to my narrow bed. I turned instead toward the nave and slipped into its breathless dark. The sanctuary smelled of tallow, old incense, and stone wet with the memory of countless winters. The candles were few, a ragged crown around the altar. I walked with careful steps, aware of my own body in a new, unpleasant way—of the ache in my joints, the hot pulse in my throat, the slickness gathering in my palms. My cassock clung where the heat had already started its work, the wool abrasive against my damp skin.

I climbed the two steps and pressed my palms to the altar’s edge. The marble was cold and clean, a hardness that made my teeth ache. The fever flashed and receded, a tide that was not the sea. I lowered myself to my knees. The stone took my weight and refused to soften, grinding into bone, reminding me I was a man wrapped in flesh and weakness.

I bowed my head and began the familiar sequence, Latin a worn path I had walked since boyhood. Pater noster, qui es in caelis… The syllables moved through me, steadied my breath. Halfway through, the heat swelled, a crest that broke into a wave. Sweat slid from my temple and traced my cheek, then my jaw, cool for only a second before it vanished into the collar at my throat. My mouth filled with the salt of it. My fingers curled on the altar’s edge until the nails hurt.

I saw her script in the dark behind my eyes. The small letters, precise as stitches. The verse I had read in the stink of a dying room. When fever’s fire burns to bone. It came without my consent, the cadence threading through my prayer like a second current. I swallowed and tried to push on, sanctificetur nomen tuum, but my tongue lagged, thick, and the heat climbed higher.

I was afraid. I had watched strong men fall like grain before a scythe. I had touched foreheads that burned like coals, felt hands go limp in mine. The thought of it inside me—this sickness winding its rope through my veins—sent a low, raw panic through my belly. For a moment, I was a child again, small and voiceless beneath a sky that would not answer.

I let go of the altar and pressed my hands flat to the stone surface, splayed fingers seeking something alive in its chill. My head dropped forward until my brow rested on it. I felt the thud of my own blood there, steady and wrong. The Latin slipped away on a breath. Another language rose to my lips, hers, the syllables blunt and honest.

“When fever’s fire burns to bone,” I whispered.

The words caught and then went smooth. I said them again, soft, as if I might bruise them. “The deepest root still holds its stone.” My mouth shaped them with care, the familiar Latin still beating beneath like a second heart. “Adveniat regnum tuum,” I breathed, and then, “Drink deep of earth, and do not weep.”

The air changed. It was not a breeze; no candle shuddered. It was as if the space around me thickened, gathered

around me, listening. A low hum rose where silence had been—at first like bees behind a wall, then fuller, a sound I felt in the cavities of my chest and the line of my spine. The hairs on my forearms lifted under my sleeves. I did not move. I could not. The name of God lay on my tongue, but another verse pushed through first.

“For life is held in slumber deep.”

The hum answered. It settled over my shoulders and slipped beneath my cassock, a slow, steady current. Heat and chill tangled, unknotted, and then the fever’s edge dulled. The burning at my neck eased, and the tight ache behind my eyes softened. Warmth spread, not feverish and frantic, but even and deliberate. It moved like hands would move, sure and unafraid—across the back of my neck, down between my shoulder blades, into the small of my back. I felt it coil low, a bright thread pulling taut and then relaxing. My breath came easier. The air smelled clearer, as if the candle smoke had thinned and some hidden window had been opened inside me.

I knew prayer. I knew the quiet that sometimes followed after, a gentleness like a winter sun behind clouds. This was not that. This was dense and intimate, as if the space between my skin and the world had been filled with something alive. I said the verse again, barely moving my lips. The hum rose with it. It pressed into me, not from above but from all sides, meeting me at every point the stone met bone, at every place my skin touched cloth. My palms spread wider on the marble without my willing it, seeking more of the chill that no longer bit but braced.

The sweat at my hairline cooled. I lifted my head. The candles seemed taller, their flames clear and steady. The shadows at the apse gathered and then breathed apart, as if they, too, listened. A tremor went through me, not from weakness but from the strange, clean current working through my limbs. I swallowed. My throat no longer burned. The taste of salt gave way to a faint metallic tang, like blood after biting one’s lip, and then that, too, faded.

I forced Latin back between my teeth, a rope to hold to in a tide I could not name. Fiat voluntas tua. But the words did not rebuke what answered in me; they braided to it. Her verse slid in, unashamed, and my voice found them both. “On earth, as it is in heaven,” I breathed, and then, “Drink deep of earth.”

The hum gathered at my sternum. It pressed into my ribs, then spread outward like heat in hands laid over a hearth. My heart, which had been beating too fast, too hard, found a steadier cadence. I tracked each thump with an incredulous attention, as if it were someone else’s chest beneath my palm. The fever tremors that had started in my thighs quieted; the instability in my knees dissolved until I felt rooted to the step, grounded and held.

A sound escaped me—half sigh, half prayer. I could have wept for the relief of it. Instead, I let the next line fall from my mouth, careful and low, as if the sanctuary itself required gentleness. “Do not weep.” The hum softened, became a purr I felt at the base of my skull. The tightness at my belly unknotted. Warmth pooled low and throbbed once, a reminder of body and hunger and life. Shame lit quick and bright, but it faltered, confused by gratitude. This was not lechery; it was vitality returning to the places sickness had sought to empty.

I lifted one hand from the altar, expecting weakness, a tremble. My fingers were steady. The skin across my knuckles no longer shone with sweat. I turned my palm up and watched it in the candlelight, the fine lines clear, the pulse in my wrist no longer pounding. My breath went ragged with something like fear. I had asked and been answered, but not by the Presence I had been trained to recognize. This was near and fierce and honest. It felt like standing at the river’s edge and hearing it under the fog, stronger than sight. It felt like her voice in the dark by the water. It felt like sin.

“Domine,” I whispered, but it was a whisper of habit. The hum did not falter. It neither fled nor bowed. It held where it had settled, in my chest, at my throat, at the low hinge of my body. The warmth brightened when I thought her name. I pressed my lips together until they hurt. I imagined the Bishop’s eyes, the hard mouth of my confessor, the long reach of the law that would call this blasphemy. The thought should have chilled me. Instead, the warmth pushed back, insisting, steady as breath.

I leaned my forehead to the stone once more, not in submission, but for the cool against skin suddenly too alive. The marble smelled faintly of oil and ash. I understood with a plain, brutal clarity that if I stopped saying the words, the hum would soften and recede, and the fever might return. Or worse: the warmth would go and leave behind an emptiness so stark it would make despair seem like comfort.

I spoke again, the lines simple now, stripped to bone. “Root. Stone. Deep.” The Latin threaded through, obedient and beautiful. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie. Give us this day. The hum swelled and then resolved, like a chord that had been waiting years to be finished.

My body steadied under it. The heat that had scorched my joints was gone, replaced by that vibrant, impossible warmth that seemed to spill from the words themselves. I opened my eyes to the altar’s pale edge, to wax dripped and hardened into small, imperfect domes. My mouth was dry, but not with sickness. I licked my lower lip and tasted only air and tallow.

I had done this. I had taken her verse—earthbound, defiant—and stitched it into holy cloth. I had felt power answer that was not the distant, thin mercy I had chased my whole life. I had survived. My lungs filled and emptied, and each breath was a proof I could not hide from.

Terror came in clean and fast then, with no fever to blur it. I sat back on my heels, the cassock pulling at my thighs, and stared at the cross above me. It was wood and metal and memory. It did not burn. The candles did not gutter. No lightning split the roof. The only sound was the soft, impossible hum settling into silence inside me like a sleeping thing.

I crossed myself with a hand that did not shake. The gesture felt small and human. “Forgive me,” I said into the quiet, to God, to the stone, to her, to myself. The words fell and did not

echo.

I rose to my feet, my legs holding me steady. The silence in the church was absolute now, thick and profound, as if the hum had absorbed all other sound before it faded. The warmth remained, a low, constant heat in my blood that was nothing like the fever. It was a clean fire, a presence that had settled deep in my bones. I felt it thrumming under my skin, a quiet, insistent pulse that was not my own.

My hand went to my chest, over my heart. It beat with a slow, powerful rhythm. Healthy. Strong. I was not dying. I was not even sick. I was cured. The word felt inadequate, profane. I had been remade by a power I could not name, and the knowledge was a cold weight in my gut, even as the warmth of it sustained me.

I walked down the long aisle, my footsteps loud on the stone. Each step was a confirmation. My body moved with an ease I had not felt in days. The air I drew into my lungs felt pure, filling. I did not look at the crucifix as I passed it. I could not. I pushed open the heavy oak door and stepped out into the night.

The London air was a familiar assault—damp and thick with the smell of coal smoke and the river. But beneath it, something was different. I could smell the rot from a nearby alley with a new, sharp clarity. I could feel the damp seeping into the hem of my cassock. The lingering power inside me seemed to have honed my senses, stripped a layer of dullness from the world. It was unnerving. I felt raw, exposed, as if I had been flayed and then healed with new skin.

My feet moved without direction from my mind, carrying me away from the church, through the narrow, winding streets of the parish. A cart piled with shrouded bodies rattled past, its wheels groaning in the mud. I saw the red cross painted on a door, the flicker of a candle in a window where a family kept vigil. The plague was everywhere, a beast with a thousand mouths, and I had escaped it. I had not earned it. I had cheated.

My thoughts were a vortex of sin and gratitude. I had turned from God in my moment of greatest need. I had used the words of a woman accused of witchcraft, heretical verses of earth and root, and they had worked. Where my prayers had failed, her poetry had succeeded. The implications were so vast, so destructive to the foundations of my life, that my mind shied away from them. I could not reconcile the sin of the act with the grace of its result.

I found myself standing across the street from her shop. A single lamp burned in the window, casting a warm, yellow rectangle onto the wet cobblestones. I shrank back into the deeper shadows of a doorway, my heart beginning to beat faster, a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I could see her silhouette through the thin curtains. She moved with a quiet purpose, her head bent over her worktable. She was the source. The words, the power, the warmth that still pulsed in my veins—it all came from her.

A wave of gratitude so powerful it made me dizzy washed over me. I wanted to cross the street, to fall to my knees on her doorstep and thank her for my life. The urge was a physical thing, a pull in my chest. But fear held me fast, cold and sharp. What would I say? That I had stolen her private words and twisted them into a blasphemous prayer? That I had unleashed something neither of us understood? To admit what I had done would be to condemn us both.

She moved, and for a moment, I saw her face in profile, illuminated by the lamp. The same quiet intensity I had seen by the river. She was unaware of me, of the miracle and the heresy I had committed in her name. The distance between my hiding place and her window felt like a chasm. I was saved, and I was damned. I was grateful, and I was terrified. The two feelings warred inside me, leaving me paralyzed, a silent observer in the dark, watching the woman whose magic had undone me.

The pestle ground the dried yarrow into a fine, fragrant powder. The scrape and crunch of stone on stone was a familiar rhythm in the deep quiet of the night, a sound that belonged only to me and my work. Outside, the bells had fallen silent for a few hours, a small mercy. In here, surrounded by the dusty, herbal scent of my remedies, I could almost believe the world was not ending. I could almost feel safe.

I was reaching for a small scrap of parchment when the warmth began.

It started low in my abdomen, a strange and sudden heat that had nothing to do with the hearth fire across the room. I froze, my hand hovering over the ink pot. The warmth spread, a liquid fire moving up through my ribs, into my throat, down my arms to my fingertips. It was not unpleasant, but it was utterly alien. I dropped the quill. It clattered against the wooden table, the sound unnervingly loud in the stillness.

I pressed a hand to my chest, over my heart, as if I could hold the feeling in. My skin was hot to the touch. The sensation was intimate, a deep thrumming that felt like it was originating from my very bones. My breath caught.

For a dizzying second, the world of my workshop dissolved. The scent of yarrow and lavender vanished, replaced by the cold, damp smell of ancient stone and the faint, waxy perfume of burning tallow. An image burst behind my closed eyelids, fragmented and sharp: the edge of a marble altar, white and severe. Flickering light from a dozen candles casting long, dancing shadows. It was a place I had never been, yet it felt startlingly real.

Then came the voice.

His voice. The priest’s.

It was not a memory of him standing in this room, reading my verse with a troubled curiosity. This was happening now. The sound was a low, resonant current that seemed to travel directly into me, bypassing my ears entirely. He was speaking my words, but they were changed. They were woven into the formal cadence of a Latin prayer, the language of his God twisted around the language of my earth.

Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie… Drink deep of earth.

The fusion was a shock, a blasphemy that made me gasp. He was chanting them. Not reading them, but intoning them with a desperate, raw power that took my simple lines and ignited them. It was a violation. He was in a holy place, on his knees, taking the most secret part of me and turning it into a heretical appeal.

Root. Stone. Deep.

Each word spoken in his voice was a physical pull inside me, a hook catching on something deep and vital. I felt as if he were drawing something out of me from miles away, a strength I had carefully cultivated for myself, and using it for his own ends.

I stumbled back from the table, my stool tipping over and crashing to the floor. The sound broke the connection. The vision of the altar shattered. The warmth receded, draining away as quickly as it had come, leaving me cold and shaky. His voice was gone.

I stood there in the sudden, absolute silence, my heart hammering against my ribs. I was alone. But the echo of the experience lingered, a phantom limb of sensation. I felt… trespassed upon. Something I had created in solitude, for solace, had been taken and turned into a tool. It had been made into something bigger, more powerful, and more dangerous than I had ever intended.

My gaze fell upon the leather-bound book of my poetry lying on the table. It looked the same, but I knew it was not. A thread now connected it—and me—to the young priest with the haunted eyes. He had discovered the power in my words, a power I had only ever used for quiet healing, and he had amplified it with his faith, his desperation. A deep and profound unease settled in my stomach. He had not just read my poetry. He had unleashed it.