The sky had grown darker, only a pale ribbon of light lingered along the horizon as they cleared away the dishes and sat down again. On the table only the glasses remained, a candle flickered in the wind, the chirping of crickets drowned out every word.
Sina lay on the garden lounger, cushions beneath her head and neck, a blanket over her legs. Her eyes were closed, though not in sleep. One could hear it in her quiet breaths, in the barely perceptible twitch of her fingertips whenever someone spoke whom she listened to most intently.
Katja set the open box on the table, pushed aside the first layer of packing paper and linen, then paused. “Look at this,” she murmured.
Among old documents, parchment scrolls and bound notes, small pale yellow slips of paper clung. Meike’s handwriting, hastily scrawled, sometimes only a word, sometimes a whole paragraph.
“Careful, possibly an original.” — “Do not remove the seal. Wax fragments for analysis?” — “Cross-check with Augustinian convent, ask AI.”
Marit leaned forward with a crooked smile. “She knew perfectly well we would be lost without her.”
“The notes are everywhere,” Katja said, carefully turning another page. “She was a professional, through and through.”
Marit lifted a handwritten document with a Latin heading. “I can’t make head nor tail of this.”
“Sina?” Katja looked over to the lounger and held out the document.
Sina raised her head, her voice calm, almost tender. “I know the symbols, the language. But the words slip away from me. Much of it is older than I am.” She smiled mischievously. “Perhaps your new scholar’s machine can help you. What did you call it? That little box of light…” She gestured toward Katja’s phone.
“ChatGPT,” said Katja.
“Chatt… whatever you call it. You ask it as if it were the wise woman at the edge of the village. And it gives you answers.”
Sven leafed through a folio with brittle pages. “Then we should do that. Apparently she herself never got around to asking the AI.”
Katja sat with her glass of wine on the edge of her chair, her gaze resting quietly on Sina. It had been Marit’s idea to bring out the lounger, and Sina had only nodded gratefully. For minutes they had been talking over the papers, many barely legible, some in old German script, others in Latin. Despite her exhaustion, there was still iron resolve in Sina’s eyes to keep reading.
“Here.” Henning handed over a document. “This was in the box with the wax seal.”
Katja unfolded the brittle paper. Again the symbol: an eye within a circle, fine lines radiating outward. From below grew a tree, above it a shooting star. At the margin, runes, and four small triangles, all pointing toward the eye. The same emblem that had marked Faris’s thigh, Elin’s chest, and Meike’s notes. This time there was a map with it. Not a place Katja recognized, but the outline felt familiar. Rügen?
“This seems to be a monastery near Groß Schoritz, Monasterium Pax Viventium,” said Konrad, bending over her.
From the corner of her eye Katja noticed Marit’s glance linger briefly on him.
Henning frowned. “A monastery near Groß Schoritz? We know the manor house, but a monastery?”
Konrad pointed to a note in Meike’s hand. “Here. ‘Ordo Pacis Benedicti.’ I had Latin in school, though it has been ages. Pax Viventium means peace to the living. Sounds like an order of peacekeepers.”
“Possibly,” Marit agreed. “Here it says ‘Founded 1231.’ Whether that refers to the order or the monastery itself, Meike did not write down.”
“1231,” Katja murmured, typing the number into her phone. “Long before the Reformation.”
“So, Catholic,” Marit said. She held up a tattered book. “Look here…” With effort she deciphered the words: “Ordo… Silentii… Initium… in tenebris… finis in carne? Solum… Deus… loquitur…”
Konrad raised a brow. “The way you just read that, it sounds like the supermarket has sausages on sale and God is sitting on the freezer.”
Everyone laughed, even Sina managed a weary smile.
Marit nudged him. “Go on, Mister Know-it-all. Your stage.”
Konrad read clearly, calmly: “Order of Silence. The beginning lies in darkness, the end in flesh. Only God speaks.”
For a moment silence fell over the garden.
“This isn’t classical Church Latin,” he said. “It’s more like a coded symbolic language. And here…” he pointed to a sketch, “…underground passages. Chambers.”
Sina opened her eyes. “The place existed,” she rasped. “I was never there, but Brother Fidelis, the one who came to us, he was one of them.”
Katja knelt beside her chair. “Can you tell me about him?”
Sina took her hand, cold as stone. “He came every two weeks. Brought wine, spoke little. But his eyes… they had seen the world. Fidelis means faithful, he said. Alina loved him. Once she lost her way, and he brought her home. He taught us to write, in secret. ‘So long as I can reconcile it with God,’ he said, ‘I care nothing for the villagers.‘
Katja wiped the sweat from Sina’s brow. “You said you want to help. What did you mean?”
Sina’s voice drifted, wistful: “So long as Love abideth with me, and Breath endureth unto the Night. So long as love remains to me, and breath in the night.”
Her eyes widened. “There is a place on this island. Deep beneath the earth. Fidelis warned me: the Devil dwells there. I asked no more. If this place still exists, then there lies the truth. But also danger. Dig not too soon, lest it devour you.”
The glasses on the table clinked softly in the wind.
“Then this…” Henning gestured toward the boxes “…is only the beginning?”
“Yes,” Katja said. “Konrad, you know Father Adrian in Rostock. Can he be trusted?”
“Very much so. Discreet and well-read. If anyone knows about vanished monasteries, it’s him.”
“Ask him. Tell him it’s for private research. No names.”
“I will.”
Sina blinked as Marit lit the candles. In her mind rose the silhouette of a monk beside a flax-haired girl. A girl she could never again hold in her arms.
“The beginning in darkness, the end in flesh,” Sven murmured. “They meant it literally.”
“It sounds like an oath,” Konrad said.
“Or a warning,” Henning added.
Katja felt something shift, as if a knot had come undone.
“Ye dwell in a blessed time,” Sina whispered. “Pity that I cannot show thee Alina and Matthes… We would have shared joy. Alina, a healer of bodies, Matthes… a man of the chests.” She pointed to Sven’s iPhone lying on the table. “And I would have learned to ride the wheel without horses.”
Katja clasped her cold hand. “Sina, you’re here. That’s what matters.”
“Back then… in Bergen, in the woods, with Alina… it was no accident. It was the will of men who thought themselves gods.”
Marit set aside a sticky note. “Perhaps we’ll find the reason for Alina’s death.”
Henning sighed. “Not in one night.”
Katja nodded. “But a beginning.”
Sina sank back. “Then hurry. This body is failing.”
Marit pulled out a yellowed document, untied its binding. “This isn’t modern script. Not Latin.”
Sven handed the document to Sina.
Her eyes swept the lines, widening. Her heart missed a beat. Perhaps this was the reason she had returned, why since that day in Bergen she had walked again among the living. No peace in heaven, no forgetting, not before she held these words in her hands.
Perhaps her soul had struggled so long because this letter still called her.
“Sina?” Marit asked gently.
“It is from him. From Matthes. I shall render it for you directly.”
With a broken voice she began to read, softly at first, then louder, as though Matthes’s own voice spoke from the past through her.
“My beloved Sina,
If these lines should ever reach you, I do not know if I still live. I pray that you may read these words before you leave me. I pray, though I no longer know to whom.
I kept silent. Far too long. I was a coward. I left you alone, though once I swore, as long as love remained to me and breath in the night, to always be by your side. The Devil promised me comfort, in drink, in other arms, in forgetting. I gave in.
They had threatened me. If I spoke, our family would be erased. I carried that knowledge like poison within me. And they knew it. So they took Alina from us.
And now, you.
But I will be silent no longer. The Devil shall not have me. Brother Fidelis and I, we bore witness to things no man should ever see. We were given no choice: help them, or die. We helped. We kept silent. We carried away the bodies they left behind. I saw how they treated souls, worse than cattle. And still I kept silent.
Fidelis could bear it no longer. He wanted to confess. He said God must forgive him. I never saw him again.
First they took Alina. Now they take you. And me.
For days a shadow has followed me, beloved wife. I pray I have time enough to keep my vow, to you and to God. I swear by all I have ever loved: I will find them. One by one. And I will bring them to their end.
If the shadow should take me first, know that I tried. That I gave all I could. But there are powers, Sina, against which we cannot stand.
If I am not there at your execution, it means the shadow reached me sooner.
In God’s hand we shall meet again, you, Alina, and I.
In eternal love, your Matthes.”
Sina held the parchment a moment longer, as if she could touch her heart through the paper itself. Tears streamed down her cheeks without restraint. In her gaze lay the certainty that every step of her journey, every torment she had endured, had led her to these words at last.
When she spoke the final line, the parchment slipped onto her lap.
Sven’s cane tapped the floor. “Execution? What is he talking about?”
Sina lifted her eyes. “In the Year of Our Lord 1489, I was condemned. They said I had killed Alina. My daughter. I was a woman who healed, who could read. That was enough. They accused me of stabbing her with my own knife.”
She told of the lashes, of the priest who held up her blade, of the voices in the village calling for her death. Of the sentence, the shame, and the gallows. Of Matthes, who never came.
No one dared interrupt her.
When she finished, she pressed the letters to her chest as if they were a cross.
Even the air seemed to hold its breath.
“That doesn’t explain how Sina is here today,” Sven muttered. “Or why this letter has surfaced now.”
“We don’t know yet,” Katja said softly.
They all fell silent.
Sina sank deeper into the cushions. Katja could see the weariness etched across her face.
The evening leaned toward night. Shadows lengthened, the light softened, voices grew quiet.
Katja flipped through her notebook. “We know now that there once was an ancient order, one that studied instead of prayed. The Ordo Silentii, likely at the monastery called Pax Viventium. And that it was eventually destroyed.”
“We haven’t even begun to decipher it all,” Henning said.
“Father Adrian can help,” Konrad nodded.
Sven tapped his cane restlessly. “All of this is impossible. And my leg is killing me.”
Henning closed the boxes. “We should divide them. Katja and Sven, take them with you. They’ll be safer in your hands.”
Katja nodded. “We’ll bring them home. I need time to sort through this.”
“And I’ll stay with Sina,” Marit said. “We’ll meet again soon.”
Sina lay still. The letters rested on her chest, her hand folded over them. Her breathing was shallow, her face peaceful, almost childlike.
Marit brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “Dear old soul. You’ve seen so much. Lost so much.”
She tucked her in, dimmed the light, and left the garden to its silence.
And no one knew that the sleep which followed would not be a peaceful one.