The world outside the Church was vast, cold, and indifferent. They travelled by night, two shadows fleeing the reach of the cathedral's bells. Jeremiah, stripped of his collar and his identity, walked with a heavy limp, his hand never leaving Celestine's.
They found refuge in a derelict cottage on the edge of the Gray Moors, a place where the fog clung to the earth like a damp wool blanket. It was a house of rotting timber and shattered windows, but to Jeremiah, it was a palace. It was the first place in his life where he wasn't "Father"; he was simply a man who belonged to someone.
For the first few weeks, they played at being a normal couple. Celestine traded her velvet gowns for a rough wool tunic, her hands—once soft and scented with rosewater—becoming stained with the soot of the hearth and the dirt of the garden. She tried to cook, she tried to mend, she tried to create a sanctuary.
But the silence of the moors was often broken by the sound that terrified her most: Jeremiah's cough.
It was no longer a dry rattle. It was a deep, wet sound that seemed to tear at his very soul. Every morning, Celestine would find the handkerchiefs he tried to hide, soaked in that shimmering, oily blackness. The "Unknown Decay" was progressing.
"I shouldn't have let you stay," she whispered one evening as she watched him try to chop wood, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. "The further I am from you, the slower it works. I'm killing you just by sitting across the table from you."
Jeremiah dropped the axe, his chest heaving. He walked over and sat on the bench beside her, pulling her head onto his shoulder. "Do you remember the story of the Great Divorce, Celestine? The idea that heaven and hell are so far apart that the soul must choose? I made my choice. I would rather have one month of this—of looking at you without a screen between us—than fifty years of hollow prayer."
The "Great Divorce" wasn't just between Jeremiah and the Church; it was between Celestine and her own nature. She began to hate her beauty. She began to hate the magic that still sat dormant in her blood.
One night, she caught her reflection in a bucket of rainwater. Her eyes were bright, her skin glowing with a vitality that seemed to be stolen directly from Jeremiah. As he grew paler and thinner, she seemed to grow more radiant. The curse was a parasite; it was feeding her on his life-force.
In a fit of rage, she kicked the bucket over, sobbing into her hands.
"I won't do it," she screamed at the empty moors. "I won't take him! Take me instead!"
But the wind only whistled through the cracks in the walls. There was no answer from the dark gods of her ancestors, and the God Jeremiah had served for so long seemed to have turned His back on the excommunicated priest.
By the end of the month, Jeremiah could no longer leave the bed. The black veins had moved from his throat to his temples, tracing a dark, marbled map across his skin. He spent his days in a feverish sleep, murmuring fragments of Latin prayers mixed with her name.
"Celestine..." he whispered in the dark of a Tuesday night. "The light... it's changing."
"It's just the candle, my love," she lied, wiping his brow with a cool cloth.
"No," he gasped, his eyes fluttering open. They were cloudy, but there was a strange peace in them. "It's not a candle. It's as if the ceiling is opening. Can't you see Him?"
Celestine looked up at the thatched roof, seeing only the shadows and the spider webs. "There is nothing there, Jeremiah. Only us."
"He's watching," Jeremiah insisted, a small, bloody smile touching his lips. "He isn't angry. He's... fascinated."
Celestine felt a chill that had nothing to do with the drafty cottage. She didn't believe in a God of fascination. She believed in a God of rules, a God who had let His most loyal servant rot because he dared to love a woman.
She crawled into the bed beside him, wrapping her arms around his skeletal frame, trying to shield him from the invisible gaze of the heavens. She didn't know that Jeremiah was right. High above, the Great Architect was leaning in, watching a phenomenon He rarely saw: a love so pure it was beginning to weigh more than the ancient laws of the universe.