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gazing into the woods.
The taste of the name the Father had chosen for her.
“Immanuelle,”
“A little curse, just as she said. Just as she told me.”
“The woman in the woods,” the dying girl whispered, barely breathing. “The witch. The Beast.”
From the light came the Father. From the darkness, the Mother. That is both the beginning and the end.
the younger of the two Moore wives,
Leah was to marry the Prophet.
once she was cut,
She was nearly seventeen years old and she’d never once had her flow.
She was not to bleed or be a wife or bear children. She would remain as she was now, and everyone else would grow up, pass her by,
“It’s not sickness,” said Immanuelle, tasting the tang of lamb’s blood on her lips. “It’s sin.”
the Prophet stood among his wives,
and they all bore the holy seal, an eight-pointed star cut between their eyebrows that all the women of Bethel were marked with on their wedding day.
which largely centered on some poor girl who had been sent to the market stocks for tempting a local farmer into adultery.
Ezra hadn’t had his First Vision yet and wouldn’t until his father’s life was coming to an end. Such was the way of succession—a young prophet’s rise to power always meant the demise of his senior.
“You’re a woman. You’re a woman now.”
to the Darkwood.
Now Martha was one of the few midwives in Bethel with the Gift of Naming, and only prophets possessed the Gift of Sight.
apostles were limited to a select few with the power of Discernment—a Gift that allowed one to tell truth from falsehood—or the Healing Touch.
she could have sworn he saw the truth of her.
only able to conceive Miriam, and her birth was succeeded by a series of stillborns, all of them sons. Many later claimed that Miriam’s birth damned the children who were born after her, said that her very existence was a plague to the good Moore name.
On account of Miriam’s crimes, Abram had been stripped of his title as apostle, and all the lands that went with it.
shadowed by the same rambling forest to which he’d lost his daughter.
Miriam, newly betrothed to the Prophet, had taken up illicit relations with a farm boy from the Outskirts.
that same farm boy had died on the pyre as punishment for his crimes against the Prophet and Church.
Miriam had fled into the forbidden Darkwood—the home of Lilith and her coven of witches—where she disappeared without a trace.
she emerged from the Darkwood, heavy with child—the sinful issue of her lover, who had died on the pyre. Mere days after her return, Miriam gave birth to Immanuelle.
While his daughter screamed in the midst of labor, Abram was struck by a stroke
But Abram had suffered for Miriam’s sins, and he would continue to suffer for them until the day he died.
Immanuelle, the shepherdess,
Immanuelle had always felt a strange affinity for the Darkwood,
“You never go into those woods, you hear? There’s evil in them.”
THAT NIGHT, IMMANUELLE dreamed of beasts:
yearling ram, Judas,
like she wasn’t fit for the world she was born to.
Darkwood, like all of the cursed and wretched things of the world, had been spawned by the Dark Mother, goddess of the hells.
the Good Father wrought the world with light and flame, breathing life into the dust,
Lilith, Delilah, and the two Lovers, Jael and Mercy—had first emerged. The Unholy Four
But while the four witches wore the skin of human women, their souls were made in their Mother’s image, and like Her, they sought to destroy the Good Father’s creations, choking His light with their darkness and shadow.
The four witches planted seeds of discord in the hearts of good Bethelan men,
Immanuelle felt as though the Darkwood still had a hold on her, as if it was calling her home again.
Hallowed Gate,
only the Prophet’s Guard, apostles, and a selection of esteemed evangelists were allowed to leave Bethel, and only on rare occasions.
But Immanuelle knew those ponderings were far above her station. The complexities of the world beyond the Hallowed Gate were better left to the apostles and Prophet, who had the knowledge and discernment to parse them.
The Outskirters were exiles, after all, dismissed as the lower, less-favored children of the Father.
claimed that the rich ebony of their skin was an outward sign of their inner allegiance to the Dark Mother, who bore their likeness.
she had stopped her formal schooling at age twelve, as all girls in Bethel did
she never felt closer to the Father than she did in those moments under the shadow of the book tent, reading the stories of a stranger she’d never met.
Such privileges were reserved for apostles and men who had money to spare. Men like Ezra.
