That is our life now.

It is late afternoon by the time I climb down from the tower and walk back to the Cathedral.

The Sisters have been expecting me.

“So you have chosen to become one of us?” the eldest, Sister Tabitha, asks me. She stands facing me in front of the altar, flanked by two middle-aged Sisters.

“I have no other choices,” I tell her, because it is the truth.

She inhales sharply and I can see her lips tighten into a single line. She turns abruptly and walks through a door hidden behind a curtain near the pulpit. “Follow,” she tells, not asks me, and I do, the other two Sisters trailing be hind us.

We wind along a hallway deeper into the Cathedral than I have ever been until we reach a large wooden door banded with metal. Sister Tabitha tugs the door open, picks up a candle from a table inside and leads us down a steep winding stone stairway. The air becomes colder, damper, and when we reach the bottom we are in a cavernous room that contains row upon row of empty shelves.

But we don't stop. We cross the room and pause in a shadowy corner. I tell myself that I have nothing to fear in this strange place. That the Sisterhood has always protected the people of the village. And yet I cannot stop the chill that overtakes my body and seeps into my bones.

Sister Tabitha pulls aside a curtain, revealing a locked door. She pulls a key from a chain around her neck, opens the door and urges me forward. I follow her down another hallway—

this one more like a tunnel, with stone walls and a dirt floor and a ceiling held up by thick wooden beams. More racks line the walls and every now and then I see a dusty bottle cradled in the shelves.

“Did you know that long, long ago, centuries before the Return, this building used to belong to a plantation? Used to house a winery?” Sister Tabitha asks as we walk, our steps echoing around us. The flame of her candle flickers and she does not bother to wait for an answer because she knows we never learned about this in school.

“What is now the Forest just outside our village used to be fields of grapes. For as far as the eye can see. Guardians tell us that they still encounter remnants of the vineyard, that they still find grapevines smothering the fences.”

The tunnel curves to the left a bit. Every now and again we pass a door embedded in the stone.

The wood is warped and scarred, with thick bolts driven into the walls. I pause by one, wanting to ask what lies beyond it, but I am thrust forward by the Sisters trailing behind me. I wonder why this history—the vineyard and this tunnel—has been kept a secret and why Sister Tabitha has chosen this moment to tell me.