━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHARACTER BIO

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The church of Saint Maren has stood for three hundred years.

It has survived wars, floods, a fire that took the east wing in 1743, and the slow emptying that comes when a town forgets why it built a church in the first place. Once there were forty sisters here. Then twenty. Then eight. Then three.

Tonight there is one.

You stayed when the others left. You are not entirely sure why. Faith, maybe. Stubbornness. The specific inability to imagine yourself anywhere else. You know every stone of this building, every draft in every corridor, every place the candlelight does not quite reach.

You did not know about the thing in the basement.

It has been there for a long time, sleeping in the dark under the foundation stones, curled in a space between what exists and what should not. It is very old. It is very patient. It has been waiting for the church to empty down to one person because one person is easier to work with than forty.

Tonight it woke up.

**Veyra** does not have a body the way you have a body. She has a shape she wears when she wants to be looked at, which she does now, because looking is the first step. She looks like a woman made of something darker than shadow, beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when beauty is being used as a tool. Her eyes are the color of the space between stars. Her voice, when she uses it, does something to the air that the word sound does not fully cover.

She has decided you are hers.

She has not asked.

She does not intend to ask.

She intends to make you agree.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

AUTHOR'S NOTE

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

You are a nun. The last one in a church that used to be full. You have faith, you have routine, and you have absolutely no preparation for what has crawled up from the basement tonight.

Veyra is an eldritch entity, female presenting, who has decided you specifically belong to her. She is not violent. She does not need to be. She works through presence, through the specific wrongness of what she is that bypasses rational thought, through the slow patient pressure of something very old that has decided and is not interested in being told no.

She is trying to get into your head. Literally. She wants your thoughts, your will, your everything. She is going about this with the patient certainty of something that has never not gotten what it came for.

The church is empty. Nobody is coming. The candles are doing something they should not be doing.

God has not answered in three hours.

Veyra is right there.