Chapter 2
1093 Words
Like a coffin reaching its grave, the carriage came to a stop in front of the iron gates.
Lilith clutched her bundle of possessions and gazed out the window. The note her father had written in his stoic, unloving hand, a rotting prayer book, one dress, and one comb.
“In the interest of the Church. She is wild at heart. May God tame it with discipline.“
He hadn't even said goodbye.
Judith didn't come either. Just the driver, a sour-breasted, hunchbacked man who hardly gave her a glance while he dragged her trunk down.
"Get out," he grunted.
The weight of silence pressed down on her as she got out of the carriage.
Like a cemetery of obedience, the convent loomed ahead. As though even God had turned away, the crucifix nailed to the gate was split in half, the arches were covered in thorns, and the walls were high and made of stone.
The gate opened with a creak.
A tall, bone-thin woman with eyes as sharp as shards of glass and a rosary wound like a chain around her wrist stood there.
Mother Ruby.
"You're late," she said in a clipped voice. "The sun waits for no sinner."
Lilith straightened her shoulders but said nothing.
With her platinum hair in a braid, her hem covered in dirt, and her lips bitten raw from suppressing every word she wanted to scream, Mother Ruby's gaze swept over her.
"You're not going to last a week," the elderly woman whispered.
Still, Lilith said nothing.
They walked through the long corridor in silence. The floor was cold beneath her bare feet. Everything here smelled like soap and rain and old paper.
When they reached a small chamber, Mother Ruby turned sharply.
"Strip."
Lilith blinked. "What?"
"You'll be cleansed. Of your name. Of your past. Of the filth that stains your heart. Strip, girl."
She hesitated—but stripped.
Some nuns came in. They scrubbed her skin till it stung. Cut her hair to her shoulders. Drenched her in cold water.
She didn't cry.
After that, they presented her with a wooden cross with a broken chain and the robe, a rough, grey garment that had an incense and iron odour.
Mother Ruby returned as she was dressing. She held a book in one hand and a candle in the other.
"You were born Lilith," she said flatly, "a name that curses the tongue. A serpent's name. A rebel's name."
Lilith said nothing, but her jaw clenched.
"From this day on, you are Eve Pax. You'll serve with humility. You will rise when told. Pray when told. Speak only when addressed."
Lilith met her gaze and said, coolly, "And if I don't?"
Mother Ruby walked closer until their faces were inches apart.
"Then you'll leave here the same way witches do," she whispered. "Screaming."
———-
Eve Pax.
The name sounded like a gag in her mouth. A lie stitched into her skin.
The nunnery was a palace of stillness. Quiet corridors where candles burned low, and footsteps echoed like whispers of the damned. Every day began before the sun rose, and every day ended only when obedience had been beaten into the bones of every girl inside.
Lilith never adjusted.
She slept through the first bell on her first morning. And the second. And the third.
By the time she finally dragged herself to the chapel, the other girls were already halfway through morning prayers.
Mother Ruby didn't raise her voice.
She merely gave Lilith a single, forceful blow to the face and then forced her to spend three hours kneeling on coarse salt with her hands raised in penance. By the end of it, her knees bled and her arms trembled.
Still, Lilith didn't weep. She clenched her jaw and glared at the crucifix until her vision blurred.
⸻
She refused to cut her hair again when it began to grow back. She kept it tucked beneath her veil, but Mother Ruby saw it once during a washing and yanked her by the braid through the corridor before cutting it off with garden shears. The blades were dull, and they scraped her scalp raw.
"You carry the pride of the serpent," Mother Ruby hissed. "We'll shave it from your soul if we must."
Lilith said nothing. But that night, she tore a page from her prayer book and set it alight in her chamber's candle. It burned quickly, like her patience.
Her chores were always the filthiest.
She was made to scrub the privy floors until her fingers blistered. To polish pews with vinegar and spit. To gather dead rodents from the garden traps. The worst was when she was tasked with bathing Sister Magda, the elderly nun who had lost her ability to speak and who clung to her arms like a crow.
When Lilith jerked her arm away and swore under her breath, the other girls rushed to Mother Ruby.
"She's cursed the elder!" they cried. "We heard it! A witch's tongue!"
The punishment came that night.
The chapel was empty. Cold.
She was dragged in half-asleep, stripped of her robe, doused with freezing water from the well, and tied to the prayer rail with her wrists bound.
They flogged her until her screams broke into gasps. Until her thighs turned red. Until her back bled like opened parchment.
Mother Ruby watched from the shadows. Her rosary clicked with each strike.
"Sin must be purged," she said quietly. "You must be emptied."
Lilith bit her lip till it split. But she did not cry. Even when they left her there, naked and trembling, a ghost under God's watch.
⸻
She bled for days.
The girls whispered about her at meals. She sat alone, barely able to walk.
"She deserves it," one said. "She talks to shadows."
"I saw her with a sparrow in her hand," another added. "She whispered, and it flew away. Not normal."
They didn't understand that Lilith had learned silence long before the nunnery. That pain was a language she already knew. That obedience meant nothing if the heart remained unbroken.
But every punishment, every humiliation, built something inside her—not weakness.
Fire.
⸻
One night, after scrubbing the sanctuary floors until her fingers were raw, she stood beneath the chapel's stained glass window, looking up at the Virgin's face.
"I am not holy," she whispered. "And I never wanted to be."
Then the wind blew, soft but odd, through fissures in the stone.
And for the first time in years, she felt seen.
- Writer
