The Lady in Flesh Chapter 3: The First Offering (1603)

Joshua Bish
Aug 17
3 min read

Content warnings

Graphic violence; ritualized body horror; youth mortality; famine and inter-tribal warfare.

Snow-covered Appalachian ridge at night with sideways-drifting smoke under a bruised, stormy sky — Midwinter over Yula’mek, smoke crawling sideways beneath a bruised sky.

Quick recap (light on spoilers)

Midwinter breaks wrong. Smoke crawls sideways, the land feels watched, and hunger arrives wearing a neighbor’s paint. At dawn, a starving Tutelo raiding party tears into the village. In the ash-bright aftermath, Wenonah drags a wounded boy, an unnamed Tutelo youth, to the stone at Yula’mek. There, she sings a song that does not belong to this world. At 3:16 a.m., the stone opens. Something answers. This chapter delivers the story’s first death and the series’ first true glimpse of the Tear.

“Symbolic winter altar shaped like a keyhole, sideways smoke, and clock-hand shadows at 3:16 under a bruised night sky.” — A door without a house, waiting for 3:16.

Why this chapter matters (themes & tone)

Hunger becomes a theology. Scarcity isn’t just atmosphere, it’s motive. Famine turns need into doctrine, and Wenonah chooses ritual over mercy.
The cost of naming. The Tutelo youth remains unnamed, not because he’s less human, but because Wenonah withholds him from memory. That refusal is the hinge that turns her from witness to participant.
3:16 as an omen. The time stamp isn’t an easter egg; it’s a bell toll that will echo into Room 316.
Ritual > spectacle. “She did not cut to kill. She cut to open.” Death here is a mechanism. The body becomes a door; the altar, a keyhole.

Snowy Appalachian valley at twilight with fading footprints; a translucent parchment-style map of winding rivers and subtle arrows overlays the sky, suggesting migration and changing borders. — Winter valley beneath a ghosted river-map, footprints fading as paths shift.

History lens: winter, war, and why the raid feels real

This scene threads horror through a documented reality of the early 1600s: brutal winters and crop failures (the tail of the Little Ice Age) destabilized food systems across the Eastern Woodlands. Short harvests and disease amplified inter-tribal conflict, migrations, and brittle alliances. In the Appalachian/Piedmont borderlands, Siouan-speaking nations (including Tutelo relations) contended with shifting territories, captives, and survival under extreme pressure. Important: depicting a ruthless raid isn’t about caricature, it’s about the ruthless arithmetic of survival when winter and illness close their fists. Communities met catastrophe with courage and complexity; the novel compresses names and timelines for narrative clarity while treating that history with respect.

Winter twilight in the Appalachian hills: low fog hugs a snow-covered slope; a small pond shows concentric ice ripples; moonlight reflects across the water; frost-covered stones line the shore. — The hill breathes; the water listens, ripples frozen mid-note under moonlit fog.

Lore connections (series continuity & foreshadowing)

Yula’mek is a container, not a backdrop. The hill breathes. The land keeps score.
The Tear wakes through sound. The “song with too many mouths” is your earliest acoustic marker; later, characters hear it before they see it.
The thing’s “sword.” A rusted void etched in runes that weep, an implement that rewrites matter and memory.
“I remember you.” Wenonah’s vow binds. Memory is power here; remembrance is a spell.

Moonlit stone slab in a snowy field with a thin vertical seam of light rising behind it—minimal, eerie, symbolizing an opening rather than harm. — Not to kill, to open. A cold slab, and the night splits.

Favorite line

“She did not cut to kill. She cut to open. ”That’s the grammar shift, from haunting to cosmic surgery.

Snowy Appalachian ridge at night with a single path curving toward a circular ice pool. Concentric ripples glow on the water. Three small cairns sit around the rim, and a wider ring of scattered stones has a deliberate gap. Low fog hangs over the distant slope. — A choice in footprints, sound made visible, three stones for the rite—and a broken ring for the unnamed.

Behind the scenes (craft & intent)

Inevitable pacing. Wenonah walks toward smoke because the choice was made before the scene begins.
Impossible audio, on the page. Notes “bending” signal that natural law is slipping. Your inner ear should flinch.
Liturgical cadence. Triads (fire/ash/bone; open/enter/claim) build ritual rhythm, repetition as spell work.
The unnamed boy. Denying him a name is a moral injury that will stalk Wenonah’s arc.

Snowy Appalachian ridge at night with a circular stone platform; a thin vertical beam of light rises from its center, mist drifts sideways, and faint light-trails ripple across the air, reflecting in the frozen water. — The hill remembers, stone in a circle, fog that crawls, and a seam of light opening the night.

Teaser (no spoilers)

Chapter 4 - Deep winter tightens its fist. A new colony arrives, the Tear develops a taste for innocence, and at 3:16 the sky doesn’t open; it rips.

Call for Service

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Question for Readers

Where do you think Wenonah crosses the line, from protector to participant, and why? Give your answer in the comments at the bottom of this page.

👉 Read The Lady in Flesh (Kindle Unlimited/print) and grab series updates, extras, and lore drops at joshuabishwritings.com.

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