http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cloister,_Fontenay_Abbey,_Marmagne,_France.JPG

Snow was wrapping the abbey in a woollen shroud, a mantle of muteness. Silence descended like an opaque fog in the cathedral close, in the holy world that existed unto its own.

One man, robed in night, with the swiftness and purpose of the messenger god Mercury approached a second man in the sympathetic shadows of the cloister. He moved with such a motivated human purpose that the divinely imbued cloister walls leaned in a protective manner. Like a scalpel through velvet, a scream lacerated the ebony starless air. The voice became voiceless when a dead thud on the cobbles replaced it. Dusky robes absorbed much of the crimson as though by heavenly order.

Corpse and dagger soon slipped into the sin-absolving depths of the murky river below whilst the assassin was immersed into the hallowed halls of the house of God once again.

The lecherous abbot’s supremacy was over. His sins against male and female would be erased from the collective consciousness out of their mutual void of shame and the forgiveness of forgetfulness. Tomorrow the sun would gleam on a community now purified by the falling snow presently veiling the abbot’s remaining blood.