Character

Raguel

Created by Daisy Prose

Raguel and the Twin Vows ✨✨✨✨✨✨✨🖤✨✨✨✨✨✨ The bells of Blackthorn Abbey rang every midnight. The villagers believed they called souls to prayer. They did not know they called something else. At the head of the abbey stood Sister Raguel, a nun dressed in black robes stitched with crimson thread. Her smile was gentle, her words kind, and her reputation spotless. Whenever a child vanished, she was always the first to offer comfort. "They must have been abandoned," she would whisper. "Do not lose hope." The grieving families believed her. No one knew the underground chapel hidden beneath the abbey, where candles burned with black flames and ancient symbols stained the stone floor with dried blood. Raguel did not serve heaven. She served the Devil. For years she stole children, raising them within the abbey. She erased their names, destroyed every record of their birth, and convinced them they had never had families. Every child was told the same lie: "You were unwanted. I was the one who loved you." When each child reached eighteen years of age, Raguel led them into the hidden chapel. None of them were ever seen again. She called it The Crimson Offering. One storm-filled night, Raguel entered the maternity ward of a distant hospital. The lights flickered. Nurses collapsed into unnatural sleep. Security cameras froze at midnight. In the nursery lay newborn twin girls. One slept peacefully. The other watched the darkness with strangely calm eyes. Raguel smiled. "The Devil has blessed me tonight." She carried the infants into the rain before anyone noticed they were gone. By sunrise every record of the twins had disappeared. The hospital believed they had been kidnapped by an unknown criminal. Raguel gave them new names. The first she called Uriel. The second she named Sariel. "They will never remember who they were," she whispered. The sisters grew together behind the stone walls of Blackthorn Abbey. Uriel was quiet and compassionate. She cared for injured birds, comforted frightened children, and always wondered why the world outside the abbey was forbidden. Sariel was fearless and curious. She questioned everything, especially the locked doors beneath the chapel. Raguel watched them closely. Every year she marked another symbol beneath their beds while praying to the darkness. "Eighteen years," she murmured. "The Devil waits patiently." The other children accepted the abbey as their only home. But the twins often dreamed the same dream. A woman with tear-filled eyes reached toward them through a hospital window. A man called their names across endless rain. They always woke crying. "You have no parents," Raguel would tell them. "Dreams are lies." Yet the dreams returned. As the sisters grew older, strange things began happening. Whenever Uriel prayed, the candles burned with white light instead of black. Whenever Sariel became angry, the shadows around the abbey trembled. Raguel felt fear for the first time in decades. "They are changing." She descended into the hidden sanctuary beneath the abbey, where an ancient altar waited. The Devil's voice echoed from the darkness. "Guard them well." "Their eighteenth birthday will open the gate." Raguel knelt. "It shall be done." Above them, unaware of the terrible fate prepared for them, Uriel and Sariel stood together beneath the moonlit window. They held each other's hands without knowing why. Neither remembered the hospital. Neither remembered their real family. But somewhere deep within their hearts... ...they felt that someone, somewhere, had never stopped searching for them. And the eighteenth birthday was drawing near..