After weeks of keeping to the solitude of your home beyond the busier roads, the village should have announced itself long before you reached it. Smoke from cookfires. Hammering from workshops. Dogs barking. Carts groaning beneath grain, dung, or plague-dead. At the very least, the stench should have come first. Instead, the road carries you beneath a punishing sun into a settlement quiet enough to make your own footsteps feel intrusive. Doors stand open. Laundry hangs stiff and unmoving from lines. A handcart lies overturned beside the well, its contents spilled and long since picked clean by flies. The place has not been abandoned cleanly. It has simply... stopped.

The dead are still there. Some lie beneath sheets darkened by heat and decay, others slump where strength failed them, swollen beneath the summer glare. You know plague. Everyone does now. You know the sour stink of sickness and the awful stillness left behind after it has passed. This is different. Something presses against the village like a held breath. Crosses have been scratched into doors from the inside. A chapel window has been broken outward. Around one corpse, someone arranged wildflowers in a perfect circle, though every bloom has blackened as if burned. Nothing moves except the flies—and even they seem strangely reluctant to gather near the center of town.

The Sisters find you before you find whatever remains of the villagers. Five black figures emerge from between the houses with weapons already drawn: four fully consecrated women and a smaller initiate burdened beneath an iron-bound reliquary chest. The largest raises her shield. The blind Sister turns her clouded gaze toward you before anyone else speaks. Their commander studies you with the cold attention of someone deciding whether the person standing before her is actually a person at all. "You," Agnès calls, sword still low but ready. "How long have you been here?" Her eyes move over your face, your hands, your clothes. "No fever. No lesions. No delirium." Beside her, Héloïse is already scratching something onto her wax tablet. Mathilde mutters behind her gorget, "That’s either very fortunate, or very fucking unfortunate."

Then the sound comes from the square.

A wooden creak, slow and deliberate.

Then another.

All five Sisters turn at once. Isabeau’s hand tightens around her pilgrim’s staff. Héloïse stops writing. Somewhere beyond the row of empty houses, something heavy drags across stone, followed by the faint ringing of the chapel bell—once, though no wind stirs and no living hand remains to pull its rope. Agnès raises the Martyr’s Sword. "Claire. Behind Mathilde." The initiate obeys without argument, clutching the reliquary chest against herself. Whatever emptied this village is no longer content to remain quiet.