Chapter Two: The Tear, When the Sky Bled Black
- Joshua Bish
- Aug 10
- 5 min read
In The Lady in Flesh, Chapter One introduced us to a world still untouched by the full weight of horror, the calm before the descent. Chapter Two, The Tear, rips that calm apart.
This chapter steps away from the immediate events of the 1603 Appalachia opening and gives us a haunting glimpse into the private trial of Wenonah, years before she became a wife, a mother, or the central figure to the catastrophe that would one day follow.
It’s a passage steeped in Lenape tradition, specifically the coming-of-age rites for those believed to be spirit-touched. Historically, among many Indigenous nations in the Eastern Woodlands, a vision fast was a rite of passage reserved for those marked by unusual dreams or a sensitivity to the unseen. These were the “listeners” and “dreamers,” people who could move between the ordinary and the spirit world. They would seek visions alone, often at an elevated, windswept place where the world’s noise fell away.
In Wenonah’s world, that place is Yula’mek, “the lip of the world.” Her fast is meant to invite the spirits to speak, but instead, it is something else entirely that answers.
The Historical Backbone
The imagery of the ridge, the stars, and the silence mirrors accounts of Indigenous fasting grounds, sacred places where no fires were lit and no words were spoken, sometimes for days at a time. Such places often became the backdrop for pivotal spiritual encounters.
But in The Tear, authorial research takes this tradition and bends it toward cosmic horror. The night Wenonah sees the seam of reality rupture, the event is timed with precision, 3:16 a.m. This recurring time will become an unholy marker throughout the Psalms of the Tear series. The number is deliberate, a distortion of biblical numerology (John 3:16, often associated with divine love) inverted into something alien and insatiable.
Where real-world accounts might describe visions of ancestors, animal guides, or symbolic omens, Wenonah’s experience is more violent. The sky doesn’t open with light, it bleeds black. This is a void given agency. A hunger.
The Birth of the Root
The “root” planted in Wenonah that night is not a metaphor. The objects she collects afterward, the crow’s skull, the cloth from no loom, the whispering stone, are not charms but anchors for the Tear’s influence.
This ties back to documented beliefs in contagious magic, the idea that an object can retain the essence of a thing it has touched. But in Wenonah’s case, the energy isn’t spiritual guidance. It’s an infection. Each jar she buries beneath her lodge is a silent agreement, a ritual feeding. The sigils she carves are described as “angles that didn’t belong in this world,” evoking non-Euclidean geometry, a classic hallmark of cosmic horror from Lovecraft onward.
The Slow Corruption of the Hearth
One of the most unsettling aspects of this chapter is how the Tear’s influence seeps into Wenonah’s family life.
Ahyoka’s sleepwalking: counting backwards from three hundred, echoes documented trance behaviors in sleepwalking children, but the “voice too deep” element anchors it firmly in the supernatural.
Tamakwah’s reflection moving independently of him is an inversion of an Indigenous belief that reflections and shadows hold part of the soul.
Takoda’s fear of the trees aligns with Appalachian folklore of the “watching woods,” where certain groves were avoided for their silent hostility.
All of these elements show the Tear’s reach expanding beyond Wenonah herself, a root system that is growing, unseen, beneath the surface of her family’s life.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter Two is the first time we see the Tear not just as an event but as a living force with memory, hunger, and a tether to its chosen witness. Wenonah’s silence in the aftermath, telling the elders she saw “only the stars”, is one of the most chilling moments in the book.
Thematically, it’s a warning: in The Lady in Flesh, the most dangerous horrors aren’t always the ones that announce themselves. Sometimes they plant themselves in the dark, and wait.
In short: The Tear is where the series steps over the threshold. It takes a rite rooted in real-world Indigenous history and twists it into the origin point for something much larger, much older, and infinitely more dangerous.
This chapter is not just backstory. It’s the seed from which the entire horror of the Psalms of the Tear series grows.
Author’s Note: Research & Lore
When building this chapter, I pulled from both Lenape cultural traditions and Appalachian supernatural folklore. The vision fast Wenonah undergoes draws on historical accounts where young people, especially those marked as spiritually gifted, would spend days in isolation on a sacred height to receive guidance. While the details of such rites vary greatly between Indigenous nations, the core elements of fasting, silence, and a symbolic location remain consistent.
The Appalachian side of the research comes through in the imagery, the “watching woods,” the whispers in stone, the frost in the middle of summer nights. These reflect regional ghost stories and mountain superstitions where natural spaces were considered alive, and not always friendly.
The “3:16” timestamp is one of the most important seeds planted in the Psalms of the Tear series, a number that twists a familiar religious comfort into an omen. In Wenonah’s life, it becomes the point where the human world and something far older briefly intersect. And for the reader, it’s the moment the true horror begins to grow roots.
Reader Question
Wenonah never tells the elders what truly happened on Yula’mek, instead, she keeps the Tear’s secret buried, just as she buries the strange objects she finds.
If you had witnessed the sky “bleed black” like she did, would you have told someone, or kept it to yourself like Wenonah?
Share your answer in the comments — I’d love to know how you think you would have reacted.
Read The Lady in Flesh
If you’ve enjoyed exploring the deeper history, research, and hidden horrors of Chapter Two, you can experience the full story for yourself.
The Lady in Flesh is available now on Amazon, step fully into the world of the Psalms of the Tear series and witness the darkness from its very beginning.
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