Chapter 3: The Hungry Flock

Chapter 3: The Hungry Flock

“Kenneth Thorne! Show yourself! Your flock is waiting!”

Silas’s voice, raw and serrated, cut through the wood and straight into Kenneth’s soul. They weren't calling for a dead prophet anymore. They were calling for him. The heir. The name was a brand, searing him with a responsibility he now knew was a death sentence.

He was frozen, a statue of terror propped up by a bookshelf of lies. The goatskin book lay open on the floor near his feet, its terrible truth glowing in the lamplight: sanity shall be given as tribute. His sanity. It was his inheritance.

The sounds from outside mutated. The rhythmic, desperate pounding gave way to something more chaotic. It was the sound of a mob’s patience snapping. Heavy thuds echoed as bodies slammed against the walls. The scraping of wood on wood suggested someone was trying to pry at the window shutters. A low, collective moaning wove through the shouts—a sound of pain and zealotry twisted into one. The entire shack, their sanctum, felt like a coffin besieged by ghouls.

“A Shearing!” a woman shrieked, her voice thin and hysterical. “My Elara needs the Shearing! The blighted rot is on her skin! Cleanse her with the holy thorns!”

A Shearing.

The word plunged through Kenneth’s paralysis like a shard of ice. Not a sermon. Not a prophecy. A blood ritual. It required the Prophet to wield the bronze shears—the ornate, thorn-shaped tool that now lay near his father’s body—and make a precise, ritualistic cut on the afflicted, letting their ‘tainted’ blood flow into a consecrated bowl. It was a sacrament of pain and faith his father had performed dozens of times.

Kenneth couldn’t do it. The thought of holding those shears, of replicating the cold, steady-handed cruelty of his father, sent a wave of nausea through him. He would falter. They would see his weakness. They would see the truth.

They would tear him limb from limb.

“We have to barricade the door,” he rasped, his mind finally sputtering back to life, grasping for the most basic, primal instinct: survival. “The cellar—we can hide—”

“And then what?” Samantha’s voice cut him off. She had moved away from their father’s body, her unnerving calm a stark island in the sea of his panic. She looked at the groaning door, then at him, her eyes clear and pragmatic. “We wait for them to starve us out? Or burn us out? They won’t leave, Kenneth. Their god is in this shack, and they won’t abandon it.”

“Their god is dead on the floor!” he hissed, gesturing wildly at the corpse.

“His body is,” she corrected, her gaze flinty. “But their idea of him is trying to break down that door. They don't want Abel Thorne. They want a Prophet. They want a ritual. They want a show.” A strange, dangerous light sparked in her eyes. “So, we’ll give them one.”

Before Kenneth could process her words, she was moving. Her grief and her fury had been forged into something new: a chilling, absolute purpose. She walked past the altar, past the body of the man who had tormented her, without a single glance. Her destination was the copper still in the corner, the apparatus Kenneth used for his sacred duty: brewing the rosewater.

The shack, for a lifetime a place of prayer and scripture, transformed before his eyes. It was no longer a church. It was his sister’s desperate laboratory.

She worked with a quiet, furious intensity that was a stark contrast to the cacophony outside. She stoked the embers beneath the still, her movements economical and precise. She took a clay jar of last season’s dried rose petals—petals he had gathered and blessed himself—and dumped them unceremoniously into the boiling chamber. She added purified water from their well. It was a mockery of the ritual he performed with such reverence, a holy process reduced to mere chemistry.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice trembling. “They want a Shearing, not rosewater.”

“They want a sacrament,” she replied, not looking at him. “A Shearing is for one. This,” she patted the warm copper of the still, “can be for everyone.”

Her words made no sense. Rosewater was for purification, for preparing the mind for visions. It wasn’t a cure for the blighted rot.

Samantha ignored his confusion. She moved to a heavy, iron-strapped chest tucked away in the darkest corner of the shack, a chest their father had always kept locked. A chest he’d once said contained ‘remedies for faithlessness.’ With a grunt, she pried the lid open with the sharp end of a firewood poker. The hinges screamed in protest.

Kenneth watched, transfixed, as she reached inside. He expected to see whips, or branding irons, or other tools of their father’s ‘discipline.’ But instead, she pulled out a small, leather-wrapped bundle. She unwrapped it on the workbench, and Kenneth felt a fresh wave of dread.

Inside was a gnarled, blackened root, the size of a man’s hand. It was twisted like a thing in agony and covered in a fine layer of minuscule, needle-sharp thorns. It looked profoundly unnatural, dead yet menacing. He had never seen anything like it.

“Samantha, no,” he whispered, a primal understanding dawning. “What is that?”

“A different kind of truth,” she said. Using a stone pestle and mortar—the very same one used to grind holy incense—she began to crush the desiccated root. It broke apart with dry, crackling sounds, crumbling into a fine, dark powder that looked like soot mixed with crushed glass.

The sounds from outside were getting worse. A heavy log, used as a makeshift battering ram, slammed into the door. CRACK. A split appeared in the thick oak. Voices poured through the gap, a wave of noise and hate and fear.

“In the name of the Devouring Truth, open this door!” Silas roared. “Or we will bring it down upon you!”

Samantha worked faster. She took a pinch of the black powder and, just as the mash of rose petals began to steam, she added it to the still.

Kenneth recoiled as if he’d been burned. “You’ll poison them!”

“Father poisoned them their whole lives with lies,” she shot back, her face illuminated by the glow of the fire. “He fed their fear and called it faith. This… this is just a stronger dose.”

She didn’t wait for the slow drip of distillation. She forced the process, drawing off the first flush of condensed steam, a raw, potent liquid that hissed as it collected in a silver chalice. It wasn't the pure, clear elixir Kenneth was used to creating. This liquid was faintly cloudy, with an oily, almost imperceptible sheen swirling on its surface. The scent that rose from it was wrong. Beneath the overwhelming sweetness of rose, there was a bitter, earthy undercurrent, something that smelled of deep soil and decay.

She held the chalice up, her knuckles white. The lamplight caught the tainted liquid, making it glimmer with a sinister beauty. The mob outside roared, and the door shuddered again, threatening to give way.

Samantha turned to him, her face pale but resolute. The blood of their father was drying on the floor, the cries of his flock were at their door, and in her hand, she held a new and terrible gospel.

“They are hungry for a sacrament, Kenneth,” she said, her voice dangerously calm. “They want a sign from their new prophet.” She pushed the silver chalice into his hands. “Go give them one.”