For nearly forty years, Mother Talulla had been Head Matron of the Sanctuary of the Blessed — an orphanage in the filthy, Stygian heart of Blackport. It was here that the more unfortunate youths of the city ended up, either at the hands of brutes like Gan and Ort, or by some other stroke of ill fortune.

High Father Crowley of the Temple of Blackport had established the Sanctuary under the guise of caring for the city’s orphans. But in reality the orphanage served as a front for the temple’s illegal dealings. Children were rarely “adopted” from the so-called orphanage. Most of the time they were sold off to the highest bidder, doomed to slavery of one sort or another. Whether the people of Blackport knew this or not mattered little; no one who stood against High Father Crowley lived to tell of it. And so the Sanctuary of the Blessed remained, with Mother Talulla at the helm. And that was how she liked it.

The old crone often roamed the halls, glaring at the boys and girls like a hawk spying out a plump little mouse for its dinner. The menacing black cane with the crow’s head on the handle was ever at her side, rapping children on the knuckles if they looked too happy. 

“A smiling child is a sinning child,” she rasped as the orphans rubbed their aching fingers. 

Mother Talulla loved concocting punishments almost as much as she enjoyed doling them out. When she finally caught the boy who had been stealing extra rolls from the kitchen after supper, he had been forced to eat nothing but raw beets for a week. By the end of it, his teeth, lips, and tongue were stained a dark, ruby red that no amount of soap could scrub away.

Ever the shrewd overseer, Mother Talulla found that keeping the children on the brink of starvation made them more manageable. Not only that, but she had discovered that encouraging rivalry worked wonderfully to her advantage. Many of the orphans were only too quick to betray one another for her fleeting favor. Under her rule, there was very little of either mischief-making or camaraderie at the orphanage. Mother Talulla detested mischievous children, but she loathed laughing, frolicking children even more.

It was rumored amongst the orphans that Mother Talulla kept a large, glass bowl of chocolate truffles on the desk in her office and would use them to bribe children who were willing to rat on the others. You could be punished for just about anything at the orphanage: staying up past lights out, talking to each other in the bathrooms, smiling, even breathing too loudly. This was, of course, another tactic the matron had concocted, and quite an effective one at that. 

Sometimes the orphans would get so hungry and the thought of the chocolate would become so tempting they would make up things to report. Just last week a scrawny girl named Paige had appeared in Mother Talulla’s doorway claiming that another girl named Llewelyn had sneezed too loudly in class and disrupted the teaching. Mother Talulla tittered to herself as she recalled the scene: the skinny, pale girl stuffing her face with chocolate until it was smeared across her cheeks and dripping from her fingers, and the other girl, wide-eyed and petrified as she awaited her punishment. Llewelyn had been sentenced to wearing a clothespin on the end of her nose for a week while in classes. The old woman’s tittering grew to a cackle as she recalled the girl’s dented nose — it still had not gone back to normal.

Every week there was a Day of Reflection at the Sanctuary of the Blessed. This was Mother Talulla’s favorite day at the orphanage. The children attended morning rites given by High Father Crowley. These were, more often than not, full of explicit descriptions of the fiery tortures that awaited disobedient, ungrateful rascals such as themselves should they pay no heed to their evil ways. Afterward, the orphans lined up in the cafeteria, solemn-faced, heads hanging, to be assigned their “acts of atonement” — various backbreaking tasks and chores that worked their fingers to the bone. The children would spend the rest of the day cleaning the orphanage from top to bottom. Windows and walls; chimneys and fireplaces; dishes, dusting, toilets, and laundry. Everything was to be scrubbed, swept, washed, and scoured to perfection. Mother Talulla especially enjoyed watching the smaller children cower before the rickety wooden ladders stretching all the way up to the roof where, with much sobbing and trembling, they were lowered into the chimneys by ropes with long, bristly brooms in their tiny arms. 

Yes, the Day of Reflection was a most delightful day for Mother Talulla.

It was on just such a day that the worst storm to hit Blackport in over a century rolled in off the inclement sea.

Mother Talulla sat in her office in a high-backed wooden chair with maroon cushions, a self-satisfied smile upon her lips. She pored over a large, red ledger book and various receipts stacked on the desk in neat little piles. Mother Talulla prided herself on her ability to spend the least amount of money possible caring for the orphans at the Sanctuary of the Blessed. Instead, she funneled most of the funding the Sanctuary received (as well as its ill-gotten gains) into the Temple’s coffers. It was a well-known “secret” that she also skimmed a sizable percentage off the top to line her own pockets. She had just finished distributing a fairly large profit from the sale of two young children — a boy and a girl — between the Temple and her own private account when there was a hard rap at the door.

The smug smile faded from Mother Talulla’s face as she barked, “Who is it?”

“It’s Agatha, ma’am,” came the response.

Gently closing the ledger book, Mother Talulla pushed it to the side and commanded, “Come in.”

A large, lumpy-faced woman with ginger curls poking out from beneath her garb tromped into the room. She gave a polite smile, but her eyes narrowed slyly as she spied the ledger book sitting on the corner of Mother Talulla’s desk.

“Doin’ some calculatin’ are we?” she prodded.

Mother Talulla managed a small, cold smile in response. “What is it you needed, Agatha?” she said icily.

“Well, I thought yeh ought ter know, ma’am,” Agatha went on loudly, “that little Thomas fell while cleanin’ the chimneys today. We sent fer the healer, Fagan, but the little whelp is cryin’ and screamin’ sumpin’ fierce. Looks like a broken ankle ter me.” She said this last bit with relish, rocking on her heels and clapping her hands together in amusement. “Swelled up like a balloon, it did,” she added for effect.

“Thank you, Sister Agatha,” Mother Talulla replied stiffly. “See to it that you inform me when Fagan arrives. In the meantime, have Lucy finish the job.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sister Agatha said sweetly as she squeezed out the door, casting one more sidelong glance at the ledger book. 

Mother Talulla glared at the closed door for a moment, then resumed her work, the scratching of her pencil the only sound in the tomblike office. A quarter of an hour later, she closed the large book and rose to put it back on the shelf behind her, and that was when she first noticed the clouds. 

They were enormous — billowy, thick, and black as night — and building rapidly on the horizon out over the city’s harbor. Mother Talulla had never seen such clouds. She slid the book back into its place and approached the tall, mullioned windows with disapproving curiosity. Tongues of white lightning flickered here and there between the storm heads as they gathered, racing quickly toward the city. Mother Talulla supposed the other children on chimney duty would have to be brought down. A broken ankle was one thing, but a broken neck or electrocution was quite another. Dead orphans turned no profit. And they required so much more paperwork than live ones…

Mother Talulla bustled away to find Sister Agatha just as a low, ominous rumble rolled across the city, rattling the windows and shaking the floorboards. The first few drops of rain began to fall, pattering lightly against the panes of glass and the stone walls of the the orphanage as the children on the roof scrambled down the tottering ladders to the safety of the ground. It would be the most violent storm of the century for the city of Blackport, but as Mother Talulla scowled up at the sky, ushering the orphans back inside, she sensed something else was coming…

And indeed it was.