That night the Inquisition struck like a hurricane. Doors were smashed in, people were dragged from their beds bewildered, and any who resisted were butchered where they stood. At dawn the villagers were herded into the square and a summary inquisition began.

As already noted, the adults were unanimously deemed guilty of deep heresy and consigned to the flames. None were spared.

With the children, the judges feigned leniency. They questioned them, and though the children could not possibly grasp what “heresy” meant, terror made them pliant. Under pressure they said what the Inquisitors wished to hear: they named relatives, spoke of pagan ceremonies they claimed to have been forced to attend, and so were granted their lives. The children were taken away, entrusted to ecclesiastical institutions, and began a new existence beneath the Church’s roof.

All but one girl.

From the outset she refused to accuse her parents. The child insisted — with a stubborn clarity that unnerved her interrogators — that her family had never tried to turn her from God. The “ceremonies” she had attended were nothing more than ancestral customs handed down through generations: old rites whose deeper meaning, she argued, bound man to the earth and to the living things upon it, knitting him into a natural balance willed by the Creator.

To the inquisitors, such words were an insult and a provocation. They redoubled their efforts to force her to confess and to join in the condemnation of the adults.

But the girl would not yield. Her stubbornness marked her for the same scrutiny as the rest: she was subjected to every torment and, in the end, condemned to be purified in the fire.

On the morning of the sentence, when the pyres were lit and the air filled with the torn cries of the condemned, the tortures inflicted upon that young body had left their trace: she lay at death’s door, barely aware of the licking flames, of how her hair burned away to nothing, of how skin blistered and peeled from muscle.

She was spared the worst of that unnameable agony. Soon she slipped into total unconsciousness; her mind began to wander and to rave, conjuring blurred, tumultuous memories of a past life — fragments that sometimes seemed to belong to days before the Inquisition, yet felt as if they came from another age. She dreamed of family days, of strolls in the wood, of work in the fields, and of the distant peal of the vesper bell.

There was, however, an odd seam running through all these visions, a thread that stitched them together: every scene unfolded at sunset beneath an eternal amber sun, and all bore the same unsettling distortions that bent logic. Trees and houses leaned where they ought not to; sounds came muffled and remote. Loved ones spoke in the voices of others; places she knew were subtly wrong. Her mother used words spoken by her father. Her little siblings played in fields they had never seen.

In dreams, time dilates, and so it was for her: as her earthly life waned, within the dream she wandered a landscape of nostalgia for a span that felt like an age. She trod it thoroughly, returning to the pivotal moments of her existence, observing them with a strange, premature adulthood.

The years passed in that dream, and with them came a deep ripening of spirit. She matured there into a woman, and gradually she felt ready to delve deeper still into that Ambered World.

She discovered how vast that place was — a dimension in which the dreamer, should they wish it, might roam never-endingly across forests, plains and cities, never rediscovering the same spot twice. Yet one thing always eluded her: a place at the heart of that realm, a solitary glade bathed in a peculiar crepuscular light. It was visible from the surrounding hills, but whenever she attempted to descend and reach it, the clearing faded, inexplicably slipping beyond her grasp.

She resolved, perhaps aware that both dream and her life were now measured, to try once more. This time she succeeded: she crossed ridges, skirted chasms, followed faint paths that guided her through ever-thickening, near-hostile woods until, suddenly, they opened upon the threshold of her vision.

To step into the Glade was to step into the very heart of the dream. A wave of warmth and serenity washed over her; she felt part of something vast and almost sacred. The perpetual sunset flooded everything in a still, amber radiance that seemed to arrest time in that single, perfect instant.

In the center of the Glade stood a long, stately table that silently beckoned her closer. Each step stirred a sense of nearing an ancient secret; an expectant hush lay over the place, an invisible yet solemn presence.

As she approached she saw the board laid out in lavish array, and those gathered about it seemed partly known, partly alien: some faces flickered with familiarity, others were nothing but vague silhouettes, almost incomprehensible. All, however, appeared content — smiling, toasting, conversing with lightness and cheer.

Yet as she watched a knot of unease tightened within her. A shadow gathered, an encroaching darkness that blotted the harmony of that scene; she understood that something terrible was about to occur, something that would alter the course of her life forever.

A voice rose from the deepest places of her soul — at first a whisper, then a surging insistence — urging her to give voice to the yearnings of her heart. Her thoughts turned to the screams of her parents, to her brothers and sisters taken by the Inquisition, to the charred heaps where once human bodies lay. A single wish swelled in her mind: the power to avenge them, to ensure no other child would endure what she had to.

In that instant the Ambered World began to recede, and she knew the time to wake had come.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, an Inquisitor stood satisfied amid the fruits of the day’s labour. His men completed the last searches around the village, and the fire had done its work of divine judgment. It had been a productive day.

His thoughts were broken by a commotion from the square’s perimeter, where a few pyres still burned. Two soldiers approached him in a flurry, wild-eyed and babbling fragments — “the body will not burn,” “it rises in the flames,” and other inchoate cries.
He tried to calm them and decided to see for himself. The trembling soldiers followed at a distance, whispering broken prayers.

He reached the girl’s pyre and froze in horror.

Within the heart of the flames, a ravaged body was knitting itself whole before their eyes. Muscles swelled and regained strength; scorched skin smoothed and went pink; the fire seemed to feed rather than consume.

By the time the Inquisitor recovered enough composure to act, it was already too late. From the pyre a young woman emerged, naked but for the flames that clung to her like living garments, moving with her and dancing at every step. She fixed the three men with a look of infinite disdain, as a goddess might view crawling insects.

The last thing they saw was the pyre explode in a roar as a torrent of fire swept over them from every side.

Today, should a traveller pass the site where the village once stood, all they would find is a desolate expanse; ash covers the ground in a layer so thick and weighty that even the wind seems powerless to lift it. No greenery remains save for a few twisted, sickly shrubs.

A passerby would assume the obvious: a place struck by terrible flames, marked forever by God’s purifying fire, a blighted soil shunned by men. He would cross himself and hurry away, warning friends to take a wide detour through the forest to avoid that cursed ground.

Yet again, this would be merely the daytime ending of the tale.

The night side is known to few, for it holds a meaning that is terrifyingly subversive to the values commonly accepted.

That ash-lain land, by its sacrifice, gave birth to an organization founded on principles utterly opposed to those of the Church: not submission to a higher power, but the celebration of the individual and of his or her personal might; not a life of mortification, but the pursuit of pleasure in all its guises; above all, the destruction of the Church and of its false God — root and crown.

It is said that at the head of this institution sits a woman utterly devoted to this cause, one who pursues it with fire and with blood.

Even within the highest circles of the ecclesiarchy, however, few truly believe that an organization known as the Black Church exists.

Fewer still would dare give voice to the terror that such a thought inspires by speaking the name of the woman said to lead it: the Popess.