The Eighth Day — Meet the Trinity: Mind, Body, Machine

Some characters aren’t created. They arrive like hauntings. They tap the glass. They sit in the corner of the room. They ask, quietly but without mercy: “Will you write me as I am?”

[Note: I accidentally reverted this piece to draft and had to re-publish it. Thank you for your continued support and patience!]

Welcome to Post 2 in the Eighth Day series, a journey through the marrow of the novel. Last time, I shared the foundation. The cracked chapel. The whisper that started it all: What if the eighth day was not God’s rest, but the body’s resurrection?

Now, let me introduce the three forces of this story. They don’t just live in it, they shape it. They are not heroes or villains. They are truths in motion.

Séraphin Delorme | Age: 33 | Pronouns: He/They

Role: The Mind / The Firebrand / The Witness.

Occupation: Former seminarian, radical theologian, underground writer.

“To be unmade by faith is not the end. It is the beginning of revelation.”

Séraphin is ink-stained and famine-eyed, cloaked in black like he’s mourning the God he once loved. Raised by Jesuits after being abandoned as an infant, he was meant to become a vessel of piety. But vessels crack. At 24, Séraphin discovered the surgical records the Church kept hidden, records that proved his body had been “corrected” under divine decree. Since then, he’s become a ghost in the margins: writing anonymous treatises that deconstruct theology, reclaim sacred texts, and burn down binary interpretations of flesh and spirit.

Voice: Measured. Homiletic. Quotes scripture like it’s kindling.

Motivated by: Dismantling the religious justification for intersex surgeries. Offering a theological refuge, not just legal or social. Being understood before he is erased.

Fears: Becoming the very silence he writes against. That his truth will be misunderstood, or worse, buried.

Symbol: Fire in the mind.

Camille Noiré | Age: 38 | Pronouns: She/They

Role: The Body / The Protector / The Catalyst.

Occupation: Underground midwife, document forger, outlaw caretaker.

“Not all wounds want healing. Some want remembering.”

Camille is muscle and memory. She survived a convent’s “correction” and carries its brutality in her hands, which were broken when she tried to run. She escaped with the help of a disillusioned nun and now runs a hidden network, helping intersex people secure false documents, sanctuary routes, and sometimes, just a moment to breathe. She speaks in metaphors born from childbirth and pain. She doesn’t trust easily, but when she does, she will move heaven and hell to protect you.

Voice: Gruff. Practical. Relentless. Occasionally poetic when no one’s looking.

Motivated by: Protecting others from what she endured. Documenting lives before they are lost. Proving that survival is not silence, it’s strategy.

Fears: Being recaptured. Failing someone who depends on her.

Symbol: Fire in the blood.

Archbishop-Doctor Alaric Vaillant | Age: 56 | Pronouns: He/Him

Role: The Machine / The Sanitizer / The Believer.

Occupation: Bishop and Head of Ecclesiastical Medical Ethics Council.

“I do not punish them. I restore God’s intention.”

Dr. Vaillant is not a monster. That would be too easy. He is precise, polished, pious. He believes every scar he makes is holy. He believes Séraphin is an infection, and Camille, a blasphemy. A former surgeon turned church official, he now oversees state-sanctioned "restorative procedures" for intersex bodies, ensuring that no “errors of creation” remain uncorrected. His faith is not blind. It’s laser-focused.

Voice: Cold, ritualistic. Speaks as if he’s delivering absolution.

Motivated by: Absolute belief that the divine created a binary. Fear of disorder masquerading as mercy. Pride in his surgical legacy.

Fears: That the chaos Séraphin and Camille represent will unmake his entire theology. That his work is not divine, but desecration.

Symbol: Scalpel wrapped in scripture.

The Tension Between Them

This is not a love triangle. It is a theological war. Séraphin intellectualizes. Camille embodies. Vaillant sterilizes. Each of them is a scripture in conflict. Each of them is right in their gospel. In the chapters to come, their paths collide in crypts, in confessionals, and eventually, in blood.

Next Post (3):

Saints of the Shadows – Meet Moss, Sister Marceline, Maël & Ruth, and the quiet resistance network hidden in graveyards, bathhouses, and forgotten alleys.