June 19, 1880—a day carved into Naghtown’s memory like a bell strike that never stops ringing.

Men wore formal coats; women drifted in plain long dresses, all in raven black, like a night tide. They slipped off their shoes at the door of the Sacred Cathedral, like leaves set down by wind. They stepped onto fresh crimson carpet and flowed in, a quiet school of fish.

By the Sacred Cathedral’s rule, the Priest’s adopted children sat left of the goddess statue; Sister Bertha and the nuns sat opposite.

Through the dim main doors, Alina saw a scatter of steam cars choking the lawn like iron beetles. Naghtown folk who’d gone far and fought hard had returned, on the day of Priest John’s burial, to the soil that raised them.

Alina drifted, her heart unmoored like a paper boat; her eyes stayed on the mourners lining up for Mass. Sister Bertha had warned her: any speech, any stirring of hearts, she would handle herself. As one of the Priest’s adopted orphans, Alina only needed to sit still, hands quiet and breath soft.

Her fingers rubbed the bench edge and met slick grain, like moss after rain. Whispers and prayers thinned to a thread, as if they seeped through the seams of the world. The scene tugged a memory: wind rattled leaves; clouds clumped and refused to scatter. Priest John sat by the window; the room held only the hearth’s fire, its light draping him in unspeakable shadow. He looked like a withered monkey bound in a straitjacket, small and trapped by flickering red.

Out of that heavy dark, Priest John looked straight into Alina’s eyes. He asked the old question: why doesn’t Melvina want to be the Holy Maiden?

The room was bruise-blue with a wash of red, so silent it pressed the lungs.

Only the hearth broke it, the logs cracking like firecrackers.

“Because she doesn’t like it,” Alina said, her voice small as ash.

“Everybody wants to be the Holy Maiden.”

“Melvina isn’t everybody.”

Priest John fell silent, eyes on the fire, while Alina turned to the window where the sky lay like a black oilfield, heavy and mute.

“Do you want to be the Holy Maiden?” he asked, voice soft as soot.

“Could I?” she breathed, doubt pooling like cold water.

“If you could stop being naughty—”

“Then I wouldn’t be me!” Alina shook her head, quick as a sparrow. “I’m mischievous Cheryl!” “Did you tell Melvina?”

“Just mentioned it,” he said, tongue wetting his pale lips like a wary lizard. “Didn’t expect such a strong reaction: talk of caged birds and clipped freedom.”

“Sounds exactly like Melvina.”

“Of course. You think I’m making it up?”

“I can talk to her,” Alina offered, hope lifting like a kite.

“Don’t press her,” he said, worry crawling like ants. “I’m afraid she’ll do something wrong.”

“What could she do wrong?”

“She’s obsessed with magic,” Priest John murmured, the words smudged like coal on fingers.

Alina looked at him; in the firelight his shadow swelled huge, but his body in the cane chair was a withered sack of bones. She thought on, chasing words he’d said, but nothing stuck. Memory slipped clean through the seams of her skull. Unease pooled in her chest, cold as coma, numb as a body sunk in a vegetative sleep.

“Cheryl!” Someone nudged Alina’s shoulder, touch light as moth wings. “Stand up, quick!”

Alina reeled her thoughts back; mourners rose with solemn faces like masks. She stood too, though her head still soaked in a solution called memory.

From the far end to the doors, Sister Bertha led them along the blue-stone path toward the graves. Alina and the other adopted children followed close, their steps stitched to the procession. Her eyes locked on the four pallbearers, stout men whose steady feet lowered Priest John toward rest.

Scripture rose as the burial began, and clods of earth pattered down, filling Priest John’s grave like brown rain. Alina stood quiet, picturing him in the coffin, no different from memory, a dried, decayed monkey. She slapped her cheeks at once, refusing disrespect to the dead. The sky was bare of clouds; a dry wind walked the graves; gardenia fragrance rode the air.

After the funeral, Sister Bertha gathered the Sacred Cathedral staff for a meeting about the road ahead. Some nuns wanted to travel and spread Priest John’s teachings like seeds on wind. Some of the adopted boys longed to see the wide world; the girls urged Sister Bertha to name a Holy Maiden. Sister Bertha kept her silence, her lips pressed thin as a blade.

Alina skipped the talk; she slipped back to the dorms of the Sacred Cathedral. She dropped the small birthday cake for Melvina into the toilet’s porcelain mouth.

Over the next days, quiet in the Sacred Cathedral broke in waves of farewell. Nuns packed their bundles and set off, each on her road like a thread pulled free. Alina remembered how, as they left, Sister Bertha’s face held a grief deeper than at Priest John’s passing. Then the boys went; busy corridors thinned to echo; only a few stayed, and Sister Bertha’s figure drifted in the hollow hall. Even her breathing carried a lonely rasp, like wind through reeds.

On the choosing of the Holy Maiden, Sister Bertha still gave no word; truth was, the nuns had only ever recognized Melvina.

Days slipped by; the hopeful girls lost patience and left the Sacred Cathedral one by one.

Each time she thought of it, Alina tasted irony like bitter tea: Priest John, famed for mercy, adopted so many, yet none wished to stay.

“You haven’t left?”

“Why would I leave?” Alina looked at Sister Bertha, whose body seemed more hunched, like a willow bent by snow. “You haven’t announced the result.”

“Melvina’s the best fit.”

“I’m the only one here.”

“Training to be the Holy Maiden is hard.”

“If I endure it, can I become the Holy Maiden?”

“If you’re not chosen, will you leave?” Sister Bertha’s eyes turned, clouded like old glass, and her voice thinned.

“Do you want me to stay?”

“A chorus of naggers—fine, try it,” she rasped. “If you can’t stick it out, don’t blame me.”

Alina nodded, not yet knowing why Sister Bertha had turned. As her body waned day by day, Alina began to see it: she knew time was short and wanted a companion at dusk.

As for training a Holy Maiden, it was pressure dressed as practice; from the start, Sister Bertha never meant for Alina to pass. But she chose wrong.