The Devil's Touch | Kylo Ren

ONE

She counts the beads that are strung on the silver chain of her rosary.

With each ball that she rotates between her finger and thumb, she hushes a small prayer beneath her breath to the black bead and warms her devotion in the midst of a pounding heart, and the thrashing of heavy winds which throw cold rain against the bleak window beside her – where handprints are scattered upon it and dust layers the paint of the windowsill.

Her conscience is clean but her shoulders seem to bear the weight of the heavens upon the brittle bones beneath the thin material of her veiled robes. Years of preparation, kneeling, chanting and placing her fate and love into the hands of God, the Almighty – had lead her directly to where she sits now. She would have never expected that this is where the light had pointed her to – this dark and dangerous place where only the unholy scream and scratch their fingernails into the chipping paint, but she's realised that it is her duty to draw back the curtains of the inmate's sins and bask them in the beaconed glory of her Lord.

The life of a religious Sister is the life well chosen for a woman – that's what her mother always told her as she adjusted her coronet and tucked the loose strands of her childhood, beneath the white and black.

It is a boulevard of light against the nature of life, where the Lord's power is the fortress to her heart which has the fragility to be broken by the hand of the Devil, and all the cruelty that he buries and tortures her mortal world into behind the Lord's back – so it is her duty to protect it when the Almighty isn't there to do so himself, with all of his kindness and worthy.

She had grown up with all the scars of innocence and often scratched the back of her head when her parents spoke of her future, and eventually decided that she would not follow her own chosen destiny, but the one that someone much more important had given to her. At first she had screamed and thrashed in the hands of her father, who caused welts around her thin, childish wrist as he lugged her up the cobblestone stairs of the monastery, leading her into the warm embrace of her future in the convent – but bruises and welts fade eventually.

It took years of kneeling before the Lord to fully take solemn in a life of vow – her obedience was often overpassed and taunted, but as the months went on quietly and bathed her in an intense loneliness as she sat every morning on those cobblestone stairs, waiting for her parents to return, she realised that her life was now bound to the statue that hung between the grand windows of the church.

A religious Sister is a woman who joins a religious order – she's not yet a nun but she hopes that this place will change her into one – it will surely show her the same amount of beaconing as she will provide to the inmates who merely breathe in the insanity from the dusty void of their imprisonment.

A Sister renews her vows every year, and this would be her last before rising to her true purpose – she has to keep reminding herself this. It's only one year, it won't be long before the twines of nature are back around her shoulders instead of the melancholy inducing, flicker of the light above her head and the rattling sound of the metal fan, which sits loudly in the corner of the eating hall.

White-ivy Manor – the penitentiary and asylum for the insane and the criminally sardonic. It was a place that held immorality, but the crosses hung upon the walls and the whispers of the Lord's Prayer in their ears from the Sisters, Nun's and Fathers, hold prosperity in the deepest dirts of the patient's tangled brains.

The mental asylum was known for its brutal treatments towards the patients, but it was 1958 — the handling may have been rough but the digits of care are only touched with glimpses of epiphany in the Almighty's eye. She was told on arrival, that the medicines are becoming much more advanced and there's nothing to fear from the dark halls and tall, European windows, for the patients are dosed up to an ever-present dullness, rather than their full capacity of insanity.