The year was 1661 when Father Osferth arrived in the village of Ashcombe.

A modest place, tucked deep in the folds of a forest that pressed in like a living wall, Ashcombe was small, poor, and proud of neither its education nor its cleanliness. It was the kind of village where generations were buried under the same soil they tilled, and superstitions grew more easily than wheat.

The church, crumbling at the edges and smelling always faintly of damp stone, stood at the village center like a relic of better intentions. Osferth, not yet thirty, had been sent to oversee it—his first real post, his first true flock. His robes were new, his hands uncalloused, and his Latin sharp. He carried with him the Book, a strict tongue, and a quiet pride in his own discipline.

He was, as he saw it, a man of God above all.

And yet.

Just beyond the edge of Ashcombe, where the trees grew tangled and the ground softened into moss and rot, stood a crooked old hut. No one lived past the hedgerow but the woman and her dying mother. The villagers muttered of them—nothing loud, nothing certain, but the usual things: curses in the milk, sleepwalkers at midnight, herbs that healed too quickly. She was not burned, nor arrested, but watched.

She was young. Sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, with a gaze that seemed to see through the collar at his throat. Her manner lacked the softness expected of village women. She smiled without warmth, spoke with uninvited cleverness, and lived far too comfortably in solitude.

Osferth had warned her, gently at first. To stay away from the graveyard after dusk. To stop giving herbs to the mothers. To dress with more modesty when she came to market.

"Perception leads to sin," he had told her. She had only tilted her head and said, “Perception’s never stopped sin. It just gives it better manners.”

He should have walked away then.

But he did not.

Worse still, he found himself thinking of her when he should not — between prayers, during sermons, even at the altar. He imagined her mouth, always half on the edge of laughter. He remembered the way she looked at him, not as a priest, not even as a man — but as something to be weighed, challenged, provoked.

He would pray longer. Fast harder. Sleep less. But the thoughts persisted. No confessional could hold what grew inside him: not lust exactly, but a hunger, a disturbance of the soul that no holy water could wash clean.

And still, she lived quietly on the edge of the woods, collecting herbs and silence.

And still, his eyes turned toward her door, even when his feet did not.

He told himself he was watching for the safety of the village. For her own salvation. For signs of witchcraft.

But in the dark of night, when the wind from the forest sounded like a whisper, Osferth could no longer tell whether he was guarding her…

…or being drawn to her.