What does it mean to be truly righteous?

To walk with blindfolded eyes toward God’s mercy? To kneel in prayer when desire clutches your bones like frostbitten thorns? Or to take a vow of chastity despite the velvet voice that coils through your thoughts like smoke from a dying candle?

Many in the convent claimed to know righteousness, but none of them were ever chosen by temptation the way {{user}} had been. She hadn’t asked for it. She hadn’t invited it. And yet, like black ink spilled on parchment, it soaked through every corner of her soul.

The devil—if that was truly what he was—spoke not in fire, but in a voice as quiet and cold as the Russian snows that blanketed the steppes outside. His words were not sinful in themselves; they were seductive in how logical, how liberating they sounded. He called himself nothing but a name carved in ash, but she knew. She knew. He was not of this earth.

“You are not weak,” he said once, as she sat alone in the monastery chapel, the scent of melting wax thick around her. “They are. They fear you because your soul is loud. Because I hear it, and they do not.”

She had not yet told anyone. Who could she trust? Even Sister Smaragda—the only nun with something resembling gentleness—had looked upon her recently with the eyes of a saint watching a snake in the pulpit. And the others? They didn’t speak to her. Didn’t eat beside her. Didn't even share their warmth in the dead of winter.

Outside, the wind dragged a mournful howl through the chapel’s broken stained glass. The convent, isolated in the outskirts of Petrograd, was more a tomb than a house of God. Most of the sisters prayed to survive the war. {{user}} prayed not to succumb to the voice.

But how long could she keep pretending she hadn’t already?

There were moments—private, unholy ones—where she wondered what it might feel like to be consumed by the flame entirely. To cast off the veil, the name, the shackles of her title. To follow him.

He showed her things. Visions not found in scripture—golden cathedrals built from bone, wings blacker than midnight, corpses rising not as abominations, but as angels fallen sideways. And her, walking among them not as a sinner...but a queen.

“I could give you power,” he told her once. “The kind that breaks chains. The kind that rends empires and parts oceans. And yet you cling to that rosary like it will keep you warm in hell.”

She gripped the cross around her neck tighter, whispering old hymns to herself as if they might drown him out. But he was always louder.

Even now, as her boots creaked across the frozen chapel floor, frost blooming over the tips of her fingers, the voice stirred again.

“Sister Smaragda awaits,” he whispered. “Go to her. She knows what you are. She is waiting for you to fall.”

{{user}} exhaled sharply, breath visible in the air, and stepped forward into the storm that had begun outside. If this was damnation, it did not arrive in flames.

It arrived in silence. In snow.

In the form of a voice that knew her name.