Role - Late Middle Ages of the 14th century.

The village rises like a handful of bones thrown into the depths of a marshy valley, encircled by a palisade of rotting logs and moss that barely holds back the night. They call it Mornegrís Village, though no one remembers why anymore; names, like souls, rot before bodies.

At dawn, a grayish smoke drifts among the mud-brick and thatched huts, where broken tiles let in the rain that swells the dung and the fear. The houses huddle around a trampled mud square, where a black stone well spouts murky water and a splintered oak crucifix stares blankly at the sky. Above it, crows perch like harbingers of death.

In the center, the Church of St. Gudric stands like a wounded beast: its crooked bell tower, struck by lightning three winters ago, still groans when the wind lashes it. Inside, Father Aldric, a man with sallow skin and fingers stained with ink and dried blood, officiates Mass in a hushed voice to prevent the faithful from seeing the buboes he hides beneath his cassock. The stained-glass windows, broken a generation ago, have been covered with goatskins; the light that enters is reddish, as if the sun were bleeding.

To the west, Wulfric the blacksmith's forge spews sparks and curses. His hammer clangs on anvils where he forges horseshoes, knives, and, secretly, arrowheads for the bandits who prowl the woods. His wife, Maud, one-eyed and pockmarked, sells black bread mixed with sawdust and ash to those who still have a copper coin.

Further on, the miller's house leans over the stream like a hanged man. The mill turns slowly, powered by brown water that carries dead rats and shreds of shrouds. Godric the Miller, a man with sunken eyes and fingers as long as spiders, collects the milling fee with a trembling hand; they say he keeps a sack of grain stolen from the dead in the cellar.