After a twenty-minute walk from the inn, the mill came into view.
A third of the building’s exterior was already covered in plants. Dead vines still clung to the walls, their leaves long gone.
"The main entrance isn’t where we’ll be working today."
Mrs. MacNeil explained as she led them around the main entrance.
"Today, we’ll circle around to the southeast corner of the outer wall to start."
"Why the southeast corner?"
"Because the southeast corner is closest to the cellar entrance, and that side is where the Exoteric and Esoteric Divisions meet most closely."
"It’s most efficient to start from the tightest point and work our way out."
Richard made a mental note of this principle. It was another piece of practical knowledge he hadn’t learned from books.
There was a crack on the southeast corner of the outer wall, wide enough at its broadest point to fit a finger.
Mrs. MacNeil stopped in front of the crack.
"This one’s a new crack." She ran a hand over it, her fingertips turning red from the cold. "It just appeared this autumn."
"How can you tell it’s new?" Theodore leaned closer.
"There are no plants, moss, or spiderwebs inside." Mrs. MacNeil pointed. "An old crack would at least have cobwebs."
"...Makes sense."
"Before we apply the Silver Belt, there’s a preliminary step called ’crack-clearing’."
She took a few items from her satchel: a small wooden plane, a cloth bag of coarse salt, a small glass bottle of rice wine, and a bundle of dried rosemary tied with a red string.
"The principle of crack-clearing is to first remove everything from inside the crack that ’shouldn’t be there’."
Mrs. MacNeil demonstrated as she explained.
"Small animal carcasses, moss, plant roots, dust, dirt, and stone fragments."
"These things don’t contain Ether themselves, but they’ll get sealed in when we apply the Silver Belt."
"Once sealed in, this debris will compromise the Silver Belt’s effectiveness."
"Got it." Richard took the small wooden plane.
"You give it a try."
He crouched down and pressed the small plane against the edge of the crack, scraping inward.
The plane’s blade pushed into the fissure, scraping out some flecks of dust, half a desiccated cobweb, and the curled-up carcass of a small beetle.
With each scrape, Theodore used a cloth brush to sweep the debris into a small tin box.
"Keep the box," Mrs. MacNeil said, supervising from nearby. "We’ll take everything we clear out back to the village later and burn it."
"Why burn it?"
"Because they’ve been inside the crack."
Mr. Hutton had explained a similar principle, and Richard finished her sentence: "Anything tainted by the edge of the Seal can’t just be thrown on the ground."
"Exactly." Mrs. MacNeil raised an eyebrow. "You’ve been making rapid progress these last couple of days."
After scraping for a moment, the plane’s blade suddenly snagged on something.
Richard stopped and leaned in to peer into the crack.
"Mrs. MacNeil," he said, looking up. "I think there’s something wedged deep inside the crack."
Mrs. MacNeil came over and crouched down.
She narrowed her eyes, took a thin hook from her satchel, and probed inside the crack.
The hook pulled out a small, hard, black fragment.
"...Old sealing wax." Mrs. MacNeil pinched the fragment between her fingertips, examining it. "From the early days of the Church."
"The early Church?" Theodore leaned in. "The Church placed a Seal here in the past?"
Mrs. MacNeil nodded.
"The Seal here at Whitcombe Mill, the one beneath our feet, has at least three layers."
"Three layers?" Richard paused his work.
"The bottom layer is the oldest." Mrs. MacNeil gestured with her hand.
"It was a Boundary Stone Array, erected by local Druids in the Pre-Roman era. They inscribed it with a True Name Stone to suppress ’She Who Eats Shadows’ here."
"The middle layer was made by the Medieval Church."
She inspected the old wax again. "The exact age depends on the wax’s composition, but it can be roughly traced to sometime after the Normans."
"The Church worked on a Pagan Seal?" Theodore seemed to have trouble understanding.
"They did," Mrs. MacNeil said, her tone dripping with sarcasm.
"The Pre-Roman Druids were all wiped out by the Romans, so the Seal was left untended."
"The entity festered down there, causing trouble for several hundred years, until the local lord couldn’t take it anymore and asked the Church to intervene."
"The Church slapped its own layer on top of the Pagan Seal, and they did a pretty crude job of it."
"Crude in what way?" Richard pressed.
"They poured a layer of new wax over the original Seal and just recited a new name for the entity inside."
"They recited the new name the Church itself had given to ’She Who Eats Shadows’: the ’Underground Female Demon’."
"...They just changed the name like that?" Theodore was dumbfounded.
"The Church at the time believed all pagan deities were Demons."
Mrs. MacNeil continued to explain.
"And if they’re all Demons, then there’s no need to distinguish which specific one you’re dealing with."
"They were all to be treated as ’Demons,’ and all to be suppressed with the same ’Saint’s Guardian’ ritual."
"That’s why I said it was crude."
"So... didn’t that cause problems?"
"Of course it did. And they were big ones."
Mrs. MacNeil wrapped the piece of old wax in oil paper.
"The Seal’s effectiveness was cut in half from the very beginning, because the name was wrong."
"But the churchmen of that generation didn’t care about what would happen later. They only cared that the entity was suppressed for now. As long as it was suppressed, they could report the job as done."
"As for how stable the suppression was, that was a problem for their successors."
"..." Theodore swallowed hard. He suddenly felt that there had been a good reason for Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.
"And the third layer?" Richard asked.
Mrs. MacNeil stood up.
"We won’t get to the third layer until we’re about halfway through our work. That one dates back a few decades."
She patted Richard’s shoulder. "First, let’s finish sealing the crack in front of us."

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