Chapter Text
The house deep in the forest was a house no longer. They’d burned it down as the hooded man had said they must. Now they lived in the charred remains of their cremated lives, inhaling soot and subsisting on charred slabs of something which they were sure had once been meat.
It was painful to think of what the meat had been, but the hooded man had said that they must keep it in mind, that they must learn to love the knowledge and weight of what they had done to please the thing behind the hooded man that they could not see but could feel deep inside themselves.
Sometimes one or another of them would try to tell themselves that it was the thing behind the hooded man that made them do these things; these things that made their numbers dwindle.
They knew it was a lie, but it was what they told themselves.