Mary had a little lamb

The chapel was gone.
In its place, a field of ash stretched into the gray horizon—windless, breathless, still.
Mary stood at the center, her palms glowing faintly, threads of golden light weaving from her fingers into the sky. Ash knelt beside her, quiet, reverent.
Sebastian… lay collapsed.
His body was no longer shifting. He was no longer transforming. The wool had peeled away entirely now. His hooves were hands. His face—delicate, human, eerily angelic—stared up at her with wide, black eyes filled not with hatred… but fear.
Not for her.
For himself.
Mary stepped toward him, her voice hoarse.
“Who were you… before?”
Sebastian shook his head.
Ash, watching silently, finally spoke: “He wasn’t always this. You deserve to know what they did.”
And then the world began to remember.

The Real Origin of Sebastian
It began in the village of Vehl, nestled in a valley choked with superstition.
Sebastian had been a boy no older than six when the rains stopped falling. The crops died. The livestock were born deformed. The sky turned a sickly yellow.
The elders, drunk on fear and desperation, demanded a reason. A scapegoat.
And they found one in him.
A child too kind. Too quiet. With hair like bleached snow and eyes that unsettled the priests.
A child who had been there—present—when the mayor’s daughter went missing.
What no one cared to remember was that Sebastian had tried to save her. He’d followed the scream into the woods. He’d found her doll in a bush. He’d run to the village, gasping, sobbing, begging someone to help.
But by the time they arrived, the girl was gone.
And the doll—soaked in blood—was still clutched in his hands.
The real killer stood behind the crowd that night, expression calm, face smeared with holy ash. Elias, the herbalist’s son. Seventeen. Jealous. Clever. He had found the Tome of the Devourer by accident—buried beneath his grandfather’s floorboards. He never meant to use it. Until he saw the boy with the snow-hair smiling too brightly, too innocently.
He planted the evidence. He told the priests. He showed them the cursed book.
He whispered, “The child is a vessel. The demon has entered through his birth.”

The ritual began on the night of a blood moon.
Sebastian’s mother did not stop them. His father looked away.
He was dragged from his home barefoot, crying, trying to hold his brother’s hand. But no one reached back.
They stripped him naked in the village square.
They painted his chest with runes that burned on contact.
They broke his toys and scattered them around the circle, muttering that no soul could remain attached to “worldly tethers.”
And then they cut off his tongue. To prevent the demon from “whispering.”
He didn’t scream. He couldn’t.
But his eyes—those impossible, dark eyes—watched them all.
When they chanted the incantation, the air twisted. Time buckled. Something answered. But not the way they hoped.
Instead of banishing darkness—they poured it into him.
Sebastian had never been a demon. But the ritual made him one.
It cored out his heart. It poured in sorrow, confusion, rage. It stitched the wool into his skin. It closed his voice forever. It made him immortal.
And very, very alone.
The ritual ended. The child slumped forward.
And the villagers cheered, blind to what they had truly done.

For centuries, Sebastian wandered. At first, silent. Confused. A lamb with hollow eyes and blood on his hooves. He did not remember being a boy. But he felt the betrayal. The pain became his compass. The hunger, his company. Until he met Mary.
She had picked him up from the field, just as the villagers once dragged him away.
She held him. Fed him. Named him.
She did not know what he was.
And for the first time in centuries, Sebastian felt warmth.
But warmth, twisted through torment, becomes obsession.

Back in the Present

The ash field rippled.
Mary fell to her knees beside him.
Sebastian stared up at her, his blood-red lips trembling. His voice returned now—soft, broken.
“They told me I was a monster. And I… became one. But you…”
He reached for her hand.
“…you made me want to believe it wasn’t too late.”
Mary wept.
Not for the demon.
For the boy beneath it.
Ash said nothing. He knew grief when it was sacred.

And then Mary stood.
She looked at the ash-covered horizon and said: “If I carry both of you—truth and shadow—then the world must change.”
And it did.
The ash blew away.
And a new path unfurled before her. A path only she could walk.