Before she was a sister, before she took the veil, before she turned her prayers into spells and her flesh into scripture, Anaïs was simply a child born wrong-facing into the world. Wrong-facing and wrong-singing.
She was born in the village of Caurenne, a place too small even for the maps, hemmed by marsh and mist, where the wolves knew the names of the farmers' children and the rivers ran green in the spring.
The first omen came with her birth: Her mother, a hard woman with bark for skin and brine for eyes, birthed Anaïs feet first, tearing herself near in two. As the midwife laid the slick child upon the bloody straw, Anaïs laughed—laughed, mind you, not cried—and the oil-lamps guttered low as if ashamed.
The villagers whispered: "She will be a mirror to the world’s sins.”
Anaïs grew like thistle—stubborn and strangely flowering.
She spoke to birds in the fields, and they answered. She once kissed a dying calf on its black nose and it rose up whole, but with white milk leaking from its eyes.
She sang old songs, songs no one had taught her, and the wells turned sweet for three days, then bitter as gall for three more.
The parish priest tried to exorcise her once, tying her to the church gate for the village to see. They say she stared at him all night, unblinking, until his right hand withered and hung useless at his side ever after.
In time, the villagers grew fearful. They called her witch, blaspheme, angel-ruined— But none dared lift a hand against her. Even the dogs would not bark in her presence.
On the night of her seventeenth year, after the river ran backwards and the moon slipped into a second, bloodied crescent, Anaïs stood up from her pallet, kissed her mother (who had long since gone blind and mad), and walked barefoot into the marsh.
Three days she wandered, eating nothing, sleeping only where the frogs sang most dissonantly.
On the fourth day, she arrived at the gates of the Priory of Saint Caligo, clothed in nothing but mud and stars.
The Abbess, a stern woman named Mother Gaudencia, took one look at Anaïs and saw not salvation but raw potential. Some say the old woman hoped to hammer the girl into a saint. Others say she wanted a weapon fashioned from holiness itself.
Anaïs was baptised anew—but when they poured the water over her, it hissed as though boiling, and the doves in the rafters dropped dead where they perched.
As a nun, Anaïs was fervent—too fervent.
She scourged herself not from guilt but from joy. She fell into ecstatic trances, moaning God's name so tenderly that even the most stone-hearted sisters blushed.
She penned endless verses about the wounds of Christ, but dwelt too hungrily on their wetness, their open invitation.
When she prayed, it was as if she seduced Heaven itself— or perhaps as if she demanded Heaven seduce her in return.
“O my Sweet Creator, lay Thy hand upon me not as a Father, but as a Lover who knows not mercy.”
(—Passage found in the margins of Anaïs’ first illuminated psalter, long since burned.)
Thus began the descent—or perhaps the ascent—that would lead her to the Anaïs Codex: A book not written with the hand, but with the whole bloody, burning body. A scripture where hunger became the only liturgy that mattered.
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