Just outside the small pantry door is a tiny courtyard enclosed by a thick brick wall. A few pots ring the perimeter, ready for planting. In the middle is a pump that brings fresh water to the house and garden. There is just enough cleared ground for Argos to sleep his afternoons away in the sun.

It's apparent that the original owners of this house were expecting this, were expecting the inevitable breach that would leave them stranded. An island in the sea of Unconsecrated.

Upstairs are four rooms: three bedrooms and the nursery, the door of which we closed that first day here and haven't opened since. Just like my old shack of a house back in our village, this grand house has a ladder bolted into the wall at the end of the hallway upstairs. I climb it and push against a trapdoor that leads into a large space that spans the length of the house.

Up here there is more food lining the walls and more weapons amassed in neat piles. There are trunks stacked at one end that I don't bother to explore. At the other end of the room is a small white door. I flip the latch and struggle against it and finally it shudders, the vibrations moving up my arms as it jolts open.

Outside is a small porch with thick railings on the left and right and nothing across the front.

As I step into the bright sunlight I caress the threshold to the right of the doorway, habit causing me to rub my hand over the Scripture that is always carved there.

But these walls are bare and smooth. Nothing written on the wood, no reminder of God or His words. I think back to all the other doorways I've walked through here and realize that they too have all been bare.

I wonder why the Sisterhood of this village didn't compel the people to inscribe the Scripture and then I realize that there is no kneeling bench in this house. No tapestries on the walls containing His prayers. This house contains nothing of God. The realization startles me—how could a structure in this village be allowed such blasphemy? Such freedom?

And I wonder, for the barest moment, if the Sisters of this village didn't control as tightly. Or perhaps didn't control at all.

I lean against the porch railing, staring down at the throng of Unconsecrated over two stories below. I notice that none of them wears the garb of the Sisterhood, none of them wears a tunic.

I glance at the buildings around me: none bears the trappings of God. As far as I can see there's no Cathedral.

My head spins, trying to understand this new village. Trying to figure out if it was a place absent of God or just the Sisterhood. Trying to figure out if it's possible to still believe in God without the Sisterhood.

Dizzy, I sit down, my feet hanging off the edge of the balcony and swinging in the air, making me feel even more groundless. I have never known a life without the Sisterhood, without their constant presence and vigilance. It has never occurred to me that God could be separated from the Sisterhood, that the two had not always been so intimately intertwined that one could exist without the other.