The trans Mrs Mulberry didn't particularly believe in the Godfolk. Or at least, she didn't believe that the lives of any such Folk touched the lives of Folk like her. Maybe there were heavens above? Who could say? If yes then most probable there would be folk there. There were folk most places. The trans Mrs Mulberry was happy to grant that if there were heavens then as like as not there were folks to be found in them. Hopefully any such heavenly Folk were getting on with their lives properly. Hopefully they were working hard, being being compassionate, minding their own business and remembering their manners. Hopefully any Folk who lived in any heavens were trying their best to live decent. All the trans Mrs Mulberry knew was that she lived in the village of Spetlamu, in the Kingdom of Forfeiture, in the Lands of Lust and Pain, and that she was damn sure she was doing her best to live decent down here.

Like most beekeepers, the cis Mrs Mulberry had been raised to worship Priapus. There had been a Mulberry tending a hive in Spetlamu for longer than there had been a Madame Sausages tending the omens, and if there are any two things an apiculturist loves near as much as honeybees then they are traditions and mysteries. The traditional mysteries of the Priapus cult were part of the cis Mrs Mulberry's birthright. Gentle mysteries of health and gardening. Cruel mysteries of bodies and nature. Secrets of the world. 

So neither Mrs Mulberry had much use for Mister Jesus.

But both of them loved the church.

"We've had some times here, eh?" said Mrs Mulberry.

Mrs Mulberry smiled and looked around her. Trying to bring those times into her mind's eye and project them right back out onto the plaster and pillars of Saint Lidwina’s.

As a child, she had played a cow in a Nativity play here. As a teenager she’d set up the LGBTQ+ Youth Group, one of the first church-based queer organisations in any of the region’s quasi-medieval village communities. Her wife ran the art classes here. They both served on the fundraising committee. 

They had met here.

They had married here.

Mister Jesus was not their Lord, but Saint Lidwina’s was their church.

And that was true for so many in the village. It was a large sturdy building and no matter what sanctified purpose a large sturdy building might be intended for, once one is in the hands of community then it will become one in which to gather and live. It was a place to worship, but it was also place to sing, and gossip, and paint, and organise jumble sales, and shelter from the cold when all other shelter was denied. 

When the sun shone, Spetlamu could gather on the green. 
When there was coin to spend, Spetlamu could gather at the Grin.

The church came with no such conditions. In poverty and inclemency alike it was still a place where people could come together, and that constant potential for assemblage guaranteed that Spetlamu was a village and not a bunch of farmhouses that happened to be near each other. 

Its doors were always open.

It mattered that its doors were always open.

Its doors had been bolted shut for five days.

The cis Mrs Mulberry had opened the doors.

“Let’s get this place clean,” she said.

The women got to work.

After Irene Ivermectin’s most recent rape and first death, the village Bailiff had bolted the church and declared it a crime scene. The Mulberries conceded that that had certainly been the best course of action at the time. The church absolutely needed to be closed while the strewn fragments of Irene’s corpse were scrapped up and shovelled into a grave outside. But there was no reason for it to stay closed much longer. Surely there was no forensic investigation to be done. The whole congregation had witnessed Rutt the Minotaur tear off Irene’s jaw and sever her brainstem with his ding-dong. The Bailiffs men could be as sure of their suspect as all could be that he would not face prosecution.

It was time for Saint Lidwina’s to get back up and running. Maybe not as a place of worship - the new clergy that the Capital were sending to replace the Parson had yet to arrive - but as a place of community. Choir practice was scheduled for tonight, and the Mulberries intended for that schedule to resume.

They had determination and they had keys. They had mops and they had buckets.

“Cor, it stinks in here.”

“Well, I expect it does, dearest,” said the trans Mrs, “There’ll still be a lot of stale seed and rotting Irene to mop up…”

“Are you getting caca though? I’m getting strong notes of caca.”

It was true. The stink of shit filled the air. A puzzle. Many parishioners had pissed themselves during Irene’s murder, including both Mulberries, but to their knowledge nobody had shat.

“I’m getting dried shit… I’m getting fresh shit… I’m getting mortifying bodily odour…”

“It’s not a wine tasting, Delia.”

“We’re not alone.”

The women looked at each other. They both knew it was true. 

The atmosphere had changed. Moments ago they had been poised to briskly work. Grisly work, but work that needed doing and work that they’d get through in companionable reminiscence about their history with this space. Now they stood afraid. Now this space was darker and less familiar.

Someone else was there inside the sealed church. Someone… or something. 

In fact it was both.

There was someone crouched behind the lectern, cowering and crouching in his own filth.

There was something that had just entered behind them, through the door they’d left unlocked.

It was that that they saw first. Turning to survey the scene, the elderly lesbians beheld the face of death.

Stood in the vestry. Bleak and blatant. Grinning and expressionless. Body language silent from this skinless scaffold. Bones without binding. Form without flesh. 

It moved. No meaty muscle to move it, but it moved. It walked. No sinew to hold it together, but it held.

The skeleton advanced towards the elderly sapphic Beekeeper and Piemaker.

“Gracious me! Gracious me!” exclaimed the trans one.

The ladies thought about death a lot. If you’re in your seventies and living in a quasi-medieval kingdom then you’ve cause to. Death was something they’d considered and something they’d known. They had lost children. They had lost friends. They had witnessed Irene’s end in the room where they now stood.

But now death had a new immensity.

They had seen death before.

Now death saw them.

But it was just a skeleton, right? What’s that in Fifth Edition? 1/4 challenge rating? If the two old ladies beat it to death with their mops they’d only get 50 XP for it, right?

Yeah, but it’s all context. It might just be a 13 hit point monster to you and me, but it was fucking terrifying for the Mulberries. 

It walked past them. It wasn’t here for them. 

The skeleton had a mission. It had a target. The fourth figure in the room. The wretched non-responsive ruin of a man festering in the apse. The skeleton had come for Camenzind Ivermectin.

And when the skeleton reached him, and when it seized him, that was when he was revealed to the Mulberry women. That was when they saw the unwashed, unshaven clergyman clad in the clothes he’d been shitting in and pissing in since the moment that broke him - his first sight of the inscription on Irene’s grave. Since that moment he had taken no volitional action save to put a little distance between himself and that obscene stonework. Ivermectin had smashed a window at the rear of the church, crawled through, laid down and waited for death. Its face now regarded him.

The skeleton took the priest by the collar and dragged him insensate back down the aisle. He left a filthy trail behind him. Past the transept the Skeleton pulled him, his thinning skin tearing on the stone. Mrs Mulberry and Mrs Mulberry were aghast at the lack of consciousness apparent in either creature. The skeleton gave off no sign that it was aware of doing anything. Ivermectin gave off no sign that he was aware that anything was being done to him. Impassive and dead-eyed as he was trawled through flakes of the Minotaur’s dried semen and putrid morsels of his wife.

“Parson!” shouted the trans Mrs Mulberry.

No response from Ivermectin.

“Now just you let him go!” shouted the cis Mrs Mulberry.

No response from the skeleton.

The dead and the dead-inside were united in silence and in trajectory as they approached the vestry.

“This isn’t right,” said the cis Mrs Mulberry. She had come here today to make the world a little better. A little safer, cleaner, and more companionable. She had foreseen the day ending with a sense of satisfaction and pride in her good deeds and hard work. She had foreseen sleeping well that night.

She threw her bucket at the skeleton. 

It struck. It clattered. It spilled. Its frothy contents sloshed onto the priest, the stones, the bones. The priest, the stones and the bones all offered the same level response.

The procession continued.

The cis Mrs Mulberry screamed.

This wasn’t right.

She raised her mop like a lance and began to charge at the skeleton.

And then she stopped. Arms held her, held her tight. Her wife’s arms thrown and clasped around her. Her wife was holding her back.

The trans Mrs Mulberry thought about death a lot. She accepted death. But she was not ready to lose her wife that day.

The cis Mrs Mulberry began to cry, but fell in to her wife, a surrender that turned the restraint into an embrace.

The skeleton bundled Parson Camenzind Ivermectin out of the church and into a waiting carriage, which dark horses then drew in the direction of Castle Vesh.

The women watched it go.

Maybe Mister Jesus watched too. Maybe so did Priapus. Maybe all the Godfolk looked on. But if they did then they minded their own business.