The church stood dark, everyone moving through the last preparations for tomorrow with the specific quiet focus of people who had run out of time to be afraid of what tomorrow actually required. Ferrara checked the altar arrangements one final time. Sister Margaret carried supplies in from the sacristy, her steps brisk, purposeful. Father Aldric moved through the pews, placing small items according to Abigail's diagram with the careful precision of a man who had stopped questioning, days ago, why any of it was necessary and had simply decided to trust the woman who'd drawn it.
Normal. Purposeful. The particular, fragile normalcy of people preparing for something they didn't yet fully understand.
Then the main doors blew open.
Not wind. Pressure — the specific, violent quality of something exhaling, all at once, with a force that had clearly never needed weather to accomplish it.
Everyone stopped.
The candles along the walls extinguished. All of them. Simultaneously, the flames snuffed out with a completeness that no draft, however strong, could ever have managed on its own.
Darkness swallowed the nave. And within it, the hum.
Different tonight. Not exploratory. Not the searching, patient frequency Abigail had first heard bleeding through a laptop speaker weeks ago.
Certain.
"Show yourself," Ferrara said, his voice carrying into the dark with more authority than fear, though Abigail — arriving at the church doors in time to hear it, frozen at the threshold by what she found inside — understood how much that authority was costing him to produce.
A beat. The air itself seemed to tighten, pressure building behind him that had nothing to do with wind and everything to do with will.
He lifted off his feet.
He flew the length of the aisle like something discarded, a human weight hurled with an ease that made Abigail's stomach drop before her mind had finished registering what she was watching. He struck the first pew with a deep, thunderous impact that seemed to shudder through the entire building.
The pew tipped backward on its rear legs. Held a moment, impossibly balanced. Then gave, toppling in a slow, terrible arc.
Ferrara folded over the falling bench and hit the stone floor hard, the air visibly knocked out of him, both hands going to his ribs, his face contorted around a pain he made no attempt to hide. Blood beaded at his lip.
Sister Margaret dropped what she was carrying and ran to him.
The doors slammed shut.
Father Aldric came running from the back of the church, saw Margaret already kneeling beside Ferrara, and began, immediately, the only response thirty-one years of instinct offered him.
"Though I walk through the valley—"
Every pew in the church flipped.
Violent. Simultaneous. Each bench heeled up on its rear legs and slammed backward in a single, impossible wave that rippled the length of the nave in under two seconds, wood cracking against stone, the sound enormous in a space built specifically to carry sound.
Aldric stood in the middle of it, watching, understanding exactly what he was looking at.
"It's showing us what it thinks of us," he said, quietly.
Ferrara pushed himself slowly upright, one hand still pressed to his ribs.
"Let it."
The hum built toward some kind of peak — and then Abigail walked fully into the nave.
She took it all in. The overturned pews, dozens of them, wood splintered where the impact had been hardest. Ferrara bleeding, upright now but barely. Aldric standing in the wreckage, unbowed. She said nothing. She simply stood, and looked, and let whatever was in the room see her looking.
A long beat passed.
The hum receded.
The candles reignited, one by one, working their way down the walls in the same order they'd gone out, as if whatever controlled them had simply reversed a single motion rather than performed two separate acts.
The pews stayed down. Left tipped, exactly where they'd fallen — a reminder, deliberate and unmistakable, that this had happened, and that it could happen again whenever it chose to.
The four of them stood together in the ruined nave, the aftermath settling around them in a silence that had none of the church's usual reverence left in it.
Aldric looked at the pews. Then at the altar, still standing, untouched, as if the violence had been aimed carefully enough to spare only the one thing it needed to leave alone.
"We'll need to work around them," he said, quietly, and picked back up whatever he'd been carrying, and kept going — the specific, stubborn continuation of a man who had decided, somewhere in the last several minutes, that stopping was no longer an option he intended to consider.
Ferrara wiped the blood from his lip, wincing at the pressure of his own hand against his ribs. Looked at Abigail.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I will be."
He didn't sound entirely certain of it, and she didn't push him to sound more certain than he was. There was, she was learning, a particular kind of honesty this village demanded of everyone in it eventually — the honesty of admitting exactly how frightened you actually were, because pretending otherwise had stopped, several nights ago, being a luxury any of them could still afford.