The Lady in Flesh, Chapter 4: The Second Offering (1604)

Joshua Bish
Aug 24
4 min read

Snow-covered stone platform on an Appalachian summit at dawn; a thin vertical beam of light shoots skyward with faint ripples while fog pools in the valleys below. — 3:16 on Yula’mek, when the sky doesn’t open, it rips

“At 3:16 a.m., the sky ripped. Not opened, ripped.”

White glove resting on a frost-coated stone slab in a snowy field; a thin glowing seam of light runs along the horizon while mist curls sideways. — A single glove on cold stone, the price of “untouched” as the seam wakes.

Quick recap (light on spoilers)

Deep winter goes wrong. The wind lingers like a held breath; snow hisses on skin. After the first offering, the Tear reveals its appetite, not for pain alone, but for innocence. Wenonah scouts a new settlement called New Prosperity and fixes on Abigail Wren, the preacher’s daughter whose soul reads bright and whole. Midnight on Yula’mek brings a ritual without song, and a creature now more defined, more purposeful. What follows changes Wenonah, the altar, and the air itself.

Frozen lake with a perfect circular pool of layered ice ripples; two small stacked-stone cairns stand on either side while mist drifts across snowy hills in the background. — Silence made visible; rings in ice, two stones standing witness to the rite.

Why this chapter matters (themes & tone)

Horror of selection. The Tear is not gluttonous; it’s choosy. Its taste for the “unwilling” reframes sacrifice as curation.
Innocence vs. purity. “Untouched” is not a virtue here; it’s a price tag. The chapter interrogates cultures that fetishize purity while failing to protect the pure.
Silence as liturgy. After Chapter 3’s “song with too many mouths,” Chapter 4 replaces sound with ritual stillness—a colder, sharper theology.
Escalation of the 3:16 motif. In Chapter 3 the hill opens; here the sky rips. Same clock, bigger debt.

Snowy valley at dawn with a split-rail fence and a narrow path leading to a cluster of small wooden cabins; chimney smoke rises while bare trees and hills fade into mist. — New Prosperity at first light; quick cabins, thin smoke, and a footpath into a trespass the land will erase.

History lens: “New Prosperity” and what 1604 actually looked like

Where the record is firm: In 1607 the English founded Jamestown in Tidewater Virginia, North America’s first permanent English settlement. The Puritan story takes root later and farther north, with Plymouth (1620) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628–1630) during the Great Migration.

What that means for Appalachia: Interior Appalachian settlement by Europeans significantly lags the coast; present-day West Virginia remained Indigenous homelands throughout the 1600s, with sustained Euro-American settlement pushing west much later (18th century). So a 1604 Puritan outpost on the WV plateau would be anomalous; a short-lived, unsanctioned, or unrecorded encampment at best. The novel treats New Prosperity as exactly that: a brief trespass the land erases.

Open wooden food cache with empty shelves beside a frozen creek; frost-bitten corn rows and rime-covered grasses under bare trees and morning mist. — Empty shelves, frost-burned rows, the land’s ledger of scarcity.

Climate & scarcity backdrop: The Little Ice Age (16th–19th c.) frames harsher winters, volatile seasons, and crop failures that destabilized food systems—stressors that magnified inter-tribal conflict and made marginal colonies brittle. In Virginia, records and reconstructions tie this period to erratic weather, droughts, and severe cold.

Snow-covered porch of a plain wooden meeting house; two stools and an unlit lantern hang above; a dark door with a simple cross faces the drifted steps, winter mist beyond. — A cold threshold, piety on the door, silence on the benches.

Puritan texture (as characterization, not geography): Puritans emphasized doctrinal purity, covenant theology, and strict piety, useful for building Reverend Wren’s worldview even if this group’s placement in Appalachia is fictionalized and accelerated for the story.

The timeline is deliberately compressed for horror effect. The aim is respect: to acknowledge real settlement patterns and climate pressures while letting the land itself (Yula’mek) “edit” a trespass out of history.

Night on an Appalachian ridge with a circular stone altar hovering above a ring of rocks; a soft violet light pulses beneath while a wisp of mist rises like breath. — The altar changes, tone lifts, light pulses, and the hill begins to breathe.

Lore connections (series continuity & foreshadowing)

The altar evolves. It beats; it breathes. Geography is turning anatomical, a core truth of the Psalms mythos.
Entity progression. Faces organize; limbs gain intention; the chest seam glows. The monster is learning your world.
Memory as binding. Wenonah carries Abigail’s scream; remembrance functions as spell work and contamination.
3:16 expands. From hill to sky: vertical breaches scale up with the same timestamp. File alongside Room 316 echoes.

Night sky over a snowy plain as towering clouds part around a single vertical beam of light, an atmospheric seam splitting the sky. — 3:16, when the clouds are pulled apart and the world shows its seam.

Favorite line

“At 3:16 a.m., the sky ripped. Not opened, ripped. ”The diction shift (“ripped”) signals the chapter’s grammar: from rite to assault on the atmosphere.

Snowy night scene with a curving trail of footprints beside a circular ice pool filled with concentric ripples; three small stacked-stone cairns stand beyond, with a stone ring farther back on the snow. — Inevitable steps to the rite, prints lead in, water speaks in rings, three cairns mark the liturgy while the circle watches.

Behind the scenes (craft & intent)

Inevitable pacing. We open on the forest’s spirit turning colder; by the time humans act, the world has already decided. That inevitability makes the abduction feel like a punctuation mark, not a plot pivot.
Sound design via subtraction. After Chapter 3’s impossible music, Chapter 4 deploys silence as instrument, the absence that lets the rip register in the body.
Image systems. Repeated breath imagery (wind that won’t exhale, fog, the altar breathing) primed you for the final line: It breathed.
Thematic reversal. Puritan purity usually tracks virtue; here “untouched” equals target. Horror leans on that contradiction.

Tall, inhuman silhouette stepping from a vertical beam of light onto a snowy plain at night; faint glow and mist, long arms with clawlike hands. — It doesn’t enter, it arrives. A deliberate shape stepping out of the seam.

Content warnings for The Lady in Flesh Chapter 4

Abduction; ritualized, graphic body horror; cruelty toward a captive; religious abuse themes.

Call for Service

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Question for the Comments

By the end of this chapter, is Wenonah a protector, a participant, or an architect, and why?

Book cover for “The Lady in Flesh” (Psalm of the Tear: Book I) by Joshua Bish—painterly red/brown tones with a haunting, skeletal female figure centered. — **The Lady in Flesh** — Book I of *Psalm of the Tear*. **Read on Amazon (Kindle & print).**