The priest found the boy huddling on the side of a York road in Winter. All he could remember was that the boy was small, and that it was night. He assumed the boy to be but five years of age, by appearance alone, and in an act of selflessness, brought the boy with him to his church. He had only intended to feed him and bring him to his home.

When they returned to his church, the child, in a distinctly feminine voice, read from the King's proclamation, "still hoping that my people in A-America would have discerned the tra-trai-traitorous views of their leaders, and have been convinced, that to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its conse-conseque-consequences, is to be the freest member of any civil society in the known world."

The old priest, in his voice stained by brandy exclaimed, "Why, you're a girl, aren't ye? What were ye doing on the streets, after all, that's a very dangerous place fer a young girl like yerself."

The girl, small and innocent, asked the old man with the large hands, "Why would anyone live on the streets by choice? I've just been out there since Mother stopped waking up."

Suddenly understanding the predicament, the old man looked at the girl sadly. "May I ask your name, and where you learned to read?"

"My name is Henrietta. I think I learned to read from father before he left."

The old man smiled sadly and said, "My name is Timaeus, and I am the Father of this small chapel. May I ask your age, Henrietta?"

"I think my eighth birthday is in a week, if I didn't forget," she said with a broad smile, showing off her missing front teeth.

"Well Henrietta, how would you like to get a bath?"

A week had soon passed, and Timaeus marvelled at the girl once again. The bath had cleared the dirt from her hair and face, making her blond hair shine so bright it looked white. And her eyes. He still couldn't believe that a human could have a pair of eyes so different. One eye was a brown so light it appeared golden, while the other was a deep purple. He already knew that having different colored eyes was rare, but such unnatural colors as well. Surely she was unique in all of England!

After watching her move the fire wood he'd chopped to the woodshed for a quarter of an hour, he finally spoke.

"Henrietta!" he called. "Come here for a moment."

"Yes, Father?" she asked, remembering how much he liked the title.

"Now, little Henrietta, how would you like to become a priestess of our lord?"

The girl, perhaps due to her knowledge of how much sin a man could hold, agreed readily. After all, she hadn't been entirely honest with the kindly old man.

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Henrietta's parents had lost their house to the robbers two years before Timaeus entered her life. She had watched as the three men beat her father to death in his bedroom, cowering on the floor, from her mother's chest. She knew she should be afraid, but still she couldn't feel a thing, even as the men lifted their dripping clubs from his head, where nothing but a monstrous lump of flesh and bone could be seen turning their lush blue carpet a deep purple color.

She didn't feel anything as her father's blood spattered across her face. Or while the men screamed at her mother.

She knew she should feel something, but she didn't. She just watched and listened as the men yelled at her mother.

"Now, ma little baroness, I've already asked yer husband over there, and we can see what 'appened to 'em, but maybe you'll cooperate," he smiled a cruel smile, the blood on his face accentuating his blue eyes, and he whispered, "Now, WHERE'S MA FUCKING MONEY YE LITTLE BITCH?"

The lady of the manor began to answer, but then came the sounds of gunfire.

Two pistol shots flew across the room, both aimed at the invader. Only one hit. The other spiraled into Henrietta's mother.

The robber was shot in the chest, to the left of his heart. Blood sprayed across Henrietta and her mother, but the robber wasn't dead yet. The wound to the baroness, however, hit her neck and was certainly fatal, and she would bleed out in minutes. Henrietta finally felt something.

It wasn't the pain sadness had been described to her as. Neither was it the prickle of curiosity that made her poke the corpses of small animals when she found them. No, it was more of a burn, a slow burning flame in her head that made her lose reason.

A small voice in her head told her that perhaps this was anger, but she ignored that.

She was leaning over before she knew it, picking up the dropped club of the robber. She supposed it was fitting that the man would die by his own weapon. Suddenly she wondered why she seemed to think so differently from the other children she met, who only seemed concerned with things like their father's newest servant, and how many wooden toys their maids had carved them. It doesn't matter, she thought, I just need to kill this man. For Mother, I would guess.

And so the small girl, with her oversized club, killed a man. She noticed, out of the corner of her eye, the other two robbers being handcuffed and taken by the manor guards, but that didn't matter.

All that mattered was breaking though the piece of bone that stood between her and finally satiating her rage.

Eventually, she calmed and realized she couldn't break through the man's skull. Only then did she notice the guard that had stayed behind and watched her splatter her silk dress with blood and bits of flesh.

When their eyes met, he left, perhaps disturbed by their duality, perhaps by her brutality.

Henrietta wondered what she would do now, as she was too young to inherit the estate, and didn't even want it to begin with.

She moved to her wardrobe, changed into the plainest shirt and pants she had, and left. She decied to live on the streets for a while and see what she could steal, before finding somewhere new to live.

A year later, she met the old man on the side of the street, and became a Sister.

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Henrietta spent each and every morning praying in the church. she would then proceed to wash clothes and cut wood for the stockpile. She would often listen to Timaeus' sermons throuh a cracked door in the back of the chapel. Many times she would watch as people brought injured children and grandparents to him, only to scream at him and beat him down when he didn't immediately cure all that ailed them. She watched as women would come in with ripped clothes crying about the men who had come for them after the deaths of their husbands, asking God to wipe their body of those men. She watched the men in the back talk and laugh, as though the sermons were just background noise for them. She saw the robed men come and sell salvation for a dime, and saw how much it enraged Timaeus.

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After a year passed, Henrietta had learned enough scripture to lead sermons of her own. She saw the disdain and mockery on the faces of those in the church, who had come to be cleaned of prejudices and sins. She heard the murmurs of "Who is she?" and "How could she know scripture?". Even still she led the scriptures. She still did it every day, even though the mockery never stopped. But every Sunday she almost had to beg Timaeus not to let her go forwards. But she still did. She listened to their words, to the men crying that they were sorry for stealing the food from the market, but claiming they needed it, even though they were wearing clothes indicating high standing, and had large bellies and thick fingers. Worse still were the insane ones. The ones screaming and crying and laughing in front of her, waiting to be purified, as they told her how they had raped this woman and killed that one, how they hadn't meant to kill the neices and nephews they were watching, but how loudly and musicly they had screamed. But the worst were the old ones. The ones begging to be forgiven for their crimes in war for the millionth time, asking that those they had imprisoned without food, those they had filled with lead but not let die, and those that they had pulled limb from limb for information, would be spared and sent to Heaven, while they burned for them.

She went on like this for a while, and each day her views of humanity grew worse, simply because of the quantity of the people who were begging for forgiveness for horrible crimes. As the years passed, the stories she heard grew worse, and she had to take over all of the sermons for Timaeus as he aged. So much evil and sin without any breaks to see the good in the world led her to wish she could just wipe the world clean and rebuild it without those who would do such a thing, but she knew no such method existed, unless it meant using the power of the devil.

Ten years passed while Henrietta was with Timaeus, and he died on her eighteenth birthday. Henrietta realized it was the first time a death made her sad. As she buried Timaeus in the chapel's graveyard, she decided to build a statue for him. Timaeus, or Tim as Henrietta had started to call him over the years, was a simple man, who only wished to serve the world and make it better. He had been one of the few among her countrymen that Henrietta knew to want the colonies to win the war, and had been overjoyed when they had.

Taking all this into consideration, she decided to carve a map into a log she had chopped for fire wood.

It took months to make, and several logs, but eventually she managed it. When she looked at the map she had carved, she knew the proportions were wrong. This was not due to unsteady hands, as her hands never shook, but to a lack of geographical knowledge. To finish the carving, she took another three months to carve Tim's smiling face as well as she could, looking over America, as their supporter and friend. All that time had let Henrietta think about the world, and how much good there was in it, though shye couldn't forget what she had heard, she tried to have more of a positive outlook, but it didn't do much to help.

By the time she was done, her hair had reached her hips, and all the ends had split. Her purple eye was a strange contrast of colors, between the deep red of the sclera, and the soothing colors of the iris. Her golden eye, however, had remained pristine, and was still perfect in the sclera.

Finally, she signed with the name Tim had taken to calling her, Henri, and the year at the bottom.

With all of the design work done, she brought the carving to the woodworker who had been to the chapel for guidance several times.

"Hello there Henri," said the proprietor, a potbellied man with a fiery beard and bald head named Gerald. "It really is a shame about old Tim, it is. Haven't seen you since his passing, have I?"

"Indeed it is Gerald. Indeed it is," said Henrietta sadly. "That's actually why I'm here today. Do you think you could get this to withstand the elements for a time. It's Tim's tombstone." She held up the map or him to see.

"Ah, well I think I can help there. Just got a shipment of resin in. Treatment will be on the house."

"Thank you, Gerald," said Henrietta earnestly. "You have no idea how much this means to me."

"No problem, Henri. Just come back in a few days to pick it up."

"Again, thank you Gerald. I'll be back soon."

And so passed a week. Henri continued caring for the chapel, and continued assisting any petitioners who sought the guidance of her Lord. She heard from some of them of a fire in the area of town that had a lot of workmen's shops, like a tanner or woodworker's shop. Henri paid them no mind, for Gerald was in a small and exclusive area of workshops, nowhere near the main grouping.

On the morning of the eighth day of her wait, she decided to visit Gerald and check on his progress.

When she arrived, all that remained of his shop were a few support beams, some saws, and ash. She knew that none of Gerald's work required flame, so perhaps this was a fire started at the tanner's nextdoor. But the tanner's shop was only lightly singed, not burned down like it should be if a fire started there. Again she returned to Gerald's shop and looked around. After a while, she noticed what appeared to be the remains of a pistol, only the shooting mechanisms recognizable. Next to it were bones and a small, mangled kerosene lamp.

No remnants of her map for Tim remained.

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Another year passed, and Henrietta found a book other than her religious texts on the back of a pew. She remembered that no one ever used the pew but an odd old man always wearing a ratty black robe with not vissible seams. It had always been interesting that no one ever went near him to Henrietta, until she tried. The stench of the man was stronger than the tobacco stockpiled from the old colonies, and he always seemed to be reading the same book as the one on the pew and muttering to himself.

The book itself had an odd title, stranger even than the man, with strange characters interspersed through the words. Seemingly creating new words. she

"The Book to Channel the Will of our Lord."

Henrietta supposed it was a religious text newly issued by the church, until she read the first page.

"What do these symbols even mean? The writing is understandable, but the symbols between make me think there's another meaning." Henrietta wondered out loud. " It mentions ridding the world of sinners and those who may sin, but will it kill off all humans, or just wipe our souls clean? I might as well read more, what else do I have to do anyways."

Henrietta read the book until the sun set and rose again, trying to decipher the odd language within. Eventually she realized that the book would wipe the world clean of all that had ever come into contact with anything relating to Jealousy, or The Great Sin, which the book referenced as an entity. She realized that the book was a way to clean the world of people like the robbers that killed her parents, or whoever had burned down Gerald's shop and her map. She felt the book should never be used used and went to a locksmith to make the most secure safe she could afford. She put the book into the safe, and tried to forget it existed. She managed for a day. Then the idea of using it weighed on her head like an anvil.

Another month passed, and she held sermons one day after the other, and again listened to the stories. At the end of the second week, a bishop from higher up in the church came to her chapel. He watched her for a week and said that she was ready to reach a higher rank in the church, and asked her to take a day in the cathedral for a ceremony and to go through the proceedings. When she arrived at the cathedral a number of priests were waiting, all smiling kindly. As the bishop closed the door, locking it three times, the smiles on the men became cruel and spread further across their faces. The bishop held her down as all the men began kicking her and beating her, cursing her, and screaming how unfair it was that a woman would become higher than a deacon before them. One man started cutting her face, deep enough to leave scars so she would never be attractive to a man, and was about to cut her wrists and let her bleed out.

Before he could the bishop stopped him. "Is not more fitting justice to let her live with these scars, to let her know she is worse than you?" He smiled as he threw her to the ground. "Welcome to the rank of priest, Sister." He dragged her out with a shawl, and brought her to her church. When he brought her inside, Henri considered giving him the same treatment as she had given the robber, but decided against it. She slept through her pain, knowing that everything would be okay again. She wouldn't have to worry about anyone else taking from her. So she slept easy.

The next morning, Henrietta woke and prayed for all of the Tims and Geralds in the world, begging her lord to spare them from the fate she now brought forth.

"Lord of mine, wipe clean this world which has been tainted by Jealousy, The Great Sin, and allow it to return to your welcoming grasp. I your loyal servant, allow you to reclaim the world through me, now please, cleanse the world," she read.

For a moment, nothing happened, then the world began turning white, starting from the book in Henri's hands.

Before her head was consumed she had time to think, My Lord, please rebuild this world without sin.

Henrietta died.