The Master explains how his 'children' feed on blood and why the soldiers' deaths were compensation.
Dawn finds the children asleep. The cold open leads into a remote Romanian village near the war's end, a place where fear seems to have stayed behind after everyone else vanished. Colonel Victor Kruger arrives ready to take what he wants. He demands shelter and supplies, sneers at the locals as hiding peasants, and treats the empty streets as another inconvenience. Animals wander loose. The rock church looks like a poor sniper position, and Lieutenant Eichel reports it abandoned, but the story keeps pulling attention back to that old medieval building and its silence. Then two soldiers turn up dead, their heads nearly severed. Kruger wants someone to blame, and the person waiting in the church gives him a target. Findrel does not flinch. He invites the colonel to sit and meets every threat with a calm that feels worse than fear. His robes offer no comfort. When he says he is no man of God, the church stops feeling like shelter and starts feeling like a lair. Eichel sees the shadows move. Kruger waves it away as candlelight and nerves, but the room keeps behaving as if the dark can listen. The interrogation turns personal. Findrel tells Kruger they both know unspeakable horrors and unforgivable sins, putting the colonel's soldiers beside his own hungry children. Daylight is the clue Kruger notices too late. Findrel rests during the day, but by then the bodies are already there. The episode keeps its horror direct: military power, village dread, and old appetite trapped in one church, where rank and prayer do not help much. By the end, judgment feels cold and final. The conqueror is not the worst thing in the room, just another kind of monster.
