[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






The shrine doesn't have visitors much anymore. Those who find their path unfortunately cross with the steep stone steps don't often know much what waits at the top and suppose they don't care much what does until leaves part and an ancient testament to the protection of Chenlong makes itself seen. (They don't tend to stay long after that.)[break][break]

Junko was much younger when offerings were still slipped through the opening in the box and the forest's inclines still rang with the sound of people come from near and far to pay tribute to the divine. It's hard to reconcile that vague memory – forged ideal in the fires of dream, no doubt – with the greening corpse laid out on their front lawn. Where there was a cacophony, there is now only the tinkling of chimes bothered by the breeze. Where there was faith, there is now only a distaste so vile it has soaked into the land and spat it back out, leaf by browning leaf.[break][break]

She sweeps the steps painstakingly, anyway.[break][break]

When the silhouette of children breaks through the monotony of under, she thinks at first that they must be lost in the woods, far from home, bound to be spirited away by whatever horrors her god no longer promises to guard against. Her broom only stills once their ascent up the stairs can no longer be written off as chance. As it turns out, up close, they stand nearly as tall as she does; orochi to ratfolk and all it entails.[break][break]

“Th-the shrine is n-n-not a playground,” Junko says. Curse the stutter. Sanae tells her it will go with the dawn of spring, but fall's winds tease the air again and her tongue only continues to betray.[break][break]

“Are you – ” the shorter one (thought the difference isn't much) starts, breathes in harsh from the ascent, and starts again, “Are you Miss... Miss Himura?”[break][break]

Oh. The shrine doesn't have visitors much anymore, but the shrine has never seen a guest that asked for the rat at its door over the dragon who sleeps inside. (Never, at least, with good intent.)[break][break]

Without an answer, impatient, the little girl offers her weapon and ill intent: flowers, their petals in brilliant red. “If you see her, could you, um, could you give this to her?”[break][break]

“Her medicine helped our mother feel better when she was really, really sick!” Interjects the other, finally brave enough to speak. Courage begets courage, and childish naivety grants a stranger a glimpse into the life of a struggling family.[break][break]

“Our father said not to come here – ” The first, not wanting to be spoken over;[break][break]

The second, unrelenting with their newfound high ground: “ – but he also tells us – tells us a lot,” interrupted by a mutual giggle of girls, an in joke the ratling cannot understand and does not care to, “to be kind to people who are kind!”[break][break]

They finish in staggered union. Its a phrase that must be passed around a lot, or a simplified version agreed upon by siblings who have practiced without intention. To Junko, who has just witnessed a battle of supremely end in synchronized compassion, who stares at green leaves and scarlet slashes... Well. She wishes she could say she was moved. Visitors don't come here much anymore; the part of her that could have appreciated a visit from village twins two decades ago has not ascended these steps for winters longer than they will ever see.[break][break]

Still. She takes the gift.[break][break]

“I'll... I'll m-m-make sure she s-sees them.” With a wave, she tells them, “G-go home, b-b-before it gets... gets dark, n-now.”[break][break]

They do – or begin the journey, at least, a gaggle of girlish joy racing with semi-careful steps down to the beaten path that leads to a place more alive than the shrine will ever be again. Whether they will make it before the sun bids them farewell is less certain; whether they make it at all, Junko is afraid she doesn't much care.[break][break]

“A perfectly good dinner gone to waste!”[break][break]

Nezumi steps from his voyeur's seat with blood lust, not unusual, in his beady, human eyes. His hands, also human, can carry his body, inhuman, much faster than a child could through these woods. His teeth can sink and his belly swell and his body flow with the death of the young, and he asks, “Can I? It's been so long.”[break][break]

“No. You w-won't starve.” Sometimes, she wishes he would, empty out from the inside like the home (cage) up the stairs, rotting, aching for that which once haunted its halls. There are plans in the making, though – designs to be seen to their conclusion. It is not appeasing when she tells him, “But... but s-s-soon.”[break][break]

The flowers can't just be flowers, after all. No one visits and no one means well. Kindness? A thought too childish to entertain, too good to be true. Junko drops them to her feet and crushes them underfoot.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






You dream in clarity; wake in somnolence.[break][break]

Another you rattles at bars you don't see and tugs at chains you don't feel. Sometimes, you catch glimpses of her in the corners of your reflection when you turn from the glass just right, but every time whiplash snaps you back for a glance at the Other wearing your face, she's gone back from the haze that she's come. There's a lot of that, these days – haze.[break][break]

You used to daydream, sometimes, silly, about marrying Iona. It's hard to shake the image of Behdi's brilliant smile from your mind (haze or no haze, one of few things that seems to make it through) when he held his wife's hand in his own for the very first time. A younger you would have thought it impossible. Today, and yesterday, and maybe the day before that, it feels impossible. Iona holds you at a distance. Close. A cavern deeper than it is wide.[break][break]

Are you supposed to be okay with that? (No, the Other cries. No, no, no.) What does 'supposed to' even mean? You're happy so long as she's happy. Today, and tomorrow, and definitely every day beyond, you'll all be happy.[break][break]

(You're a prisoner, the Other tells you when you sleep at night. You are everything you've fought against. Get out.)[break][break]

In the morning, you'll remember the shape of her mouth, the fear in her eyes. Come breakfast, you won't even remember that. What's she got to be afraid of, anyway? The show trudges on without threat. You (whether you want to or not) will see it through to its conclusion.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






Death is not the end.[break][break]

003.[break][break]

This was how it was supposed to go:[break][break]

A city razed, its buildings turned fuel for fire that licks at a sky blacker than death. At its center would be a creature raised from Hell, six faces, six wings, six horns, whose napalm breath would terrorize, whose Armageddon hands would dissolve. You would stand before it, blood and sweat worrying your brow, knees given out beneath you and only your sword to support your weary stance – but the civilians would go from this fireflight graveyard in the moments you would go down to your last, and history would have come to claim what it had failed to the first time. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hellish monster for another hellish monster. You would die that day, but you would not die alone, and your story would inspire heroes to stand up with weapon in hand for generations.[break][break]

It does not go this way. Of course it doesn't. Fate lets you live when all you want is to die, and when you've finally got something worth carrying on for, it remembers its power to take away. No, no, it doesn't go with heroism and hearth. It goes:[break][break]

A smelling bar that hasn't got any booze worth its price. That bitch with her beautiful voice, Akemi's eyes all over her, and no small portion of all the jealousy you can muster. A mad queen you've never met and now never will. Your murderer comes with chain cuffs left on her wrist, the void in her eyes, and a mop of pretty pink hair, and when you point your rifle at her head and swear on this day to protect everyone you love in this room – [break][break]

Well.[break][break]

Hard to protect anyone when you're dead.[break][break]

(Akemi, splattered in blood you don't realize is not her own, cries over you when you're dragged back into this awful world without assent one more time. You don't realize until later that night you had honest to truth died. Worse – you don't realize until later the magnitude of what you were unable to protect.[break][break]

(What good is a martyr if no one is saved?)[break][break]

002.[break][break]

It's routine, you tell her carefully, the same way you tell the others to walk with no fear and to plan for the future unfettered. You have slain a thousand monsters, and you will slay a thousand more. What does it matter if tonight's capture has petrified all who have come before it, assuming there was anything left of those who'd trespassed on its lands at all? Why, just last month, you carved a thing whose hobby was to cast civilians into other planes, wild planes, planes that must be seen to be believed, carved it into pieces so small you could and did cook it into stew. Tonight is no different. Together, you'll march on the wicked and make an example of it. No one will be left behind.[break][break]

“Before I go, Akemi, I – ”[break][break]

She's watching you, full attention, the daughter of a goddess, but she might as well be one herself. A thousand tales have been told of those led on by a personal lust – curiosity, greed, the need to love and be loved in turn. How long you have struggled with the feeling the bursts in your heart, sharper than any blade that has ever cut your flesh and fiercer than any rage you've thrown yourself into to come out alive; you want her more than you want blood, but you exist as machine, not man. What are you when the blood dries up? (Nothing.) What can you promise her if you lay down your weapon? (Nothing.) What can you promise her if you don't?[break][break]

It doesn't matter. The others call your name over the din, arms waving, minds set. You tell them you won't be long, and when Akemi tilts her head and asks you in the voice of a celestial, “You...?”, you know there's no speculation.[break][break]

If you hold onto this much longer, you'll burst, monsters be damned.[break][break]

“I'll... tell you once we get back.” The expression she makes is almost flat, the look of a person who can see a dodged bullet without even opening her eyes, but it brings a smile so much more common these days, common only because of her to your lips just the same. “Wait for me, okay?”[break][break]

(You lead them to the slaughter like pigs. 'Routine'. What a farce.[break][break]

(They were your friends, brothers and sisters in blood. You held them when they cried and bandaged their wounds when they slipped up in battle, but today, you can do nothing as death comes for them all one-by-one.[break][break]

(You would stand before the beholder, blood and sweat worrying your brow, knees given out beneath you and only your sword to support your weary stance. You hope Akemi doesn't wait too long. Moreover, you hope they tell her you did not go gentle; you did not go alone.)[break][break]

They tell your stories across Syntixi: the Unyielding Lucretia Bellerose, died as she lived. And then one day in a field, a little off, a little odd: Lucretia Bellerose wakes up.[break][break]

001.[break][break]

You have an image in your head that's hard to place. Not because of its uncertainty, no, no; there's only one place it time it could ever possibly go, sandwiched between the fog of bakery smells in an unfamiliar kitchen and the first illness that sweeps through your camp, wraiths among graves. In this image, hands reach out to you from a light too bright to face, the hands of strangers you once called Mother and Father, or strangers you must have. Did they reach to pull you to safety, you wonder, when the city that is home no longer could hardly house a place considered safe? Or did they reach to pull you beyond, already too far gone themselves, family bonds reunited in death?[break][break]

She's with them. The 'you' from back then – who loved confectioneries, who sat on her papa's lap, who sang harmonies with her mother, who spoke in excited whispers of the day they'd go back to their real home in the plane of shadows, far, far away from the fires of death and destruction. You don't remember what the confectioneries tasted like, or even what they're called. Your parents are halflings now, and yes, you'll shout it defiant to any who would protest. You'll never leave this plane, never if you can help it, because it's all you've got.[break][break]

It's enough to save one world with two hands, isn't it?[break][break]

It's already killed you once.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






Summer outside her backyard is nothing special. The trees reach taller and the flowers bloom broader, the creek runs livelier and the birds sing louder, but these are all little variations on a world she's already long ago memorized. The familiar holds no charm for Felicity anymore – not in the monolithic shadow of stories.[break][break]

There's that which she's read about in books, to start with. Wax poetic about the brilliant orange of dawn and the somber violets melting into indigo of dusk, how temperatures warmed and tempers boiled with the water on the lake and the summer of Imperial Year 819, or maybe the 1274th anniversary of the Liberation became history lived by history's told. Summer's the season of young love, all things come around to, but she's got not patience for courtings rushed and affairs half-believable. Winter was always the more interesting setting for war, anyway.[break][break]

Then there's the stories that don't come from ink and paper, but a different sort entirely.[break][break]

When she was younger, her father was very adamant that she keep her distance from the students who would come to train under him, whether or not they were amid a bout with swords crashing and muscles straining. He was a man with a reputation, after all, and a good one; one that could probably withstand a nosy little girl poking her nose into business it had no place in, but one that wouldn't allow for it just the same. Safer from a distance, anyway. Less chance of 'family' quickly morphing into 'skewer'. The thing about her father, though, is that his patience, however infinite seeming to any onlooker, is without question quite finite. Whether such can be said about Felicity's determination once she's set her mind on something... well, there are better, more fruitful topics for debate. Irregardless, these days, she watches their routines first-hand (from a safe distance as necessary, of course), and when training for the day has ended in favor of dinner and a good night's rest, the things of interest begin.[break][break]

People from all over the world come. It took her until her early teens to realize just the scope of the fame that single man possesses, but even then, it had to be seen, or rather heard to be believed. And from their little corners of the planet, their islands off at sea or the massive nations on continents from afar, they bring little bits of their history and their homes with them: if not physically than in the pictures they weave with their words.[break][break]

Summer in northern Elibe, on the southern islands, in Syntixi. What does the hottest season look like the frigid ice caps of the north? What do the elves see within their winding woods?[break][break]

Nothing at all that compares to your backyard, mundane in its reliability. Every year, the creek will run its course, however lively. The trees will yawn tall, the flowers bursting blue, the infant birds who fall from their nest and learn how to fly – beautiful, but an image she can see with her eyes, not her mind.[break][break]

And then the travelers go home, and with them, these tales of seasons in places she will never go disappear. And one day, too, her father is gone, her bags packed and her home relocated to tall walls and a bustling city where no trees stretch and few birds sing.[break][break]

(But there is always Emi, constant as old as memory, warmth as welcome as the sun in the east in the morning. When the stories have trickled out and Felicity's eyes too tired to read another word, Emi rest her head on her shoulder and tell of a story only she can: of a summer by a lively creek where two girls met and fell in love, again and again and again. Believable. A slow tumble into affection unspeakable, power incomparable.)[break][break]

She remembers that a familiar summer holds its own charm. Someday, she dreams they'll go back to that backyard with its trees and flowers, creeks and birds, and come home with a story as true as it is their own.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






This is your love:[break][break]

Revolution on the lips, brimstone at his fists. He's a point of the finger, walking judgment day, Rapture come early, and it's such fortune, such wondrous fortune that you were born in this lifetime, in his city, that you may be the trigger man to transform divine verdict into reality. He's your universe, the diction of your existence spelled out with his own words (and the word: all of you). If he died, what would become of you? What would be left? Surely, you are only alive to be part of his greater whole.[break][break]

Fate takes form as a rally, a screaming crowd shouting out for retribution. Everything that comes after is simply what's meant to be.[break][break]

(But what do the divine know of a mortal's love?)[break][break]

“I can – we can save her. Doc, please, you just have to give me a chance – ”[break][break]

The eyes of the all-merciful, all-powerful, suddenly turned dark, left cruel. Mary wasn't supposed to die like this. Mary wasn't supposed to die.[break][break]

The fault born between you, spelled out in one pitiless word:[break][break]

“No.”

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






After your mother goes ('goes', a word so detached, so neutral, as though she was not taken brutally and without love, as if she were not ripped from your bleeding fingers for spectacle), you are left frightened. Not of what has been left of your personal life, if it can even be called; you're a child without a home and without a family, left to fight the world alone. Not of being taken against your will by men who harm and woman who ruin, stolen off like a thief in the night, by thieves in the night, of to a strange new world. You are afraid of what your mother has become in her absence. Even you, young and foolish as you are, know what they took her and the rest of them for.[break][break]

Before the starvation sets in or the rains without roofs pour, it is the wonders of what's happening to her and the helplessness of being unable to stop whatever the nebulous it may shape itself as that keeps you up night after night. 'Only a child' cannot cast away the guilt so easily, after all.[break][break]

After, the fear shifts. It's impossible to forget about your beautiful mother, stripped of her crown and cat for sport, but her torment is an idea and your own is irrefutable reality. How easy it would be to slip into her tracks, fall to the pit that she was dragged to. Could you stand it? Could you survive? (You can barely live with the image of it happened to somebody else.)[break][break]

The seed that plants the great tree of avarice, then: the realization that freedom is only ascertained through wealth. That if being a liar and a cheat and a steal can spare your existence – could go so far someday as to buy back your only family's – what have you got to lose? Your morality or your life.[break][break]

It's hardly even a question.[break][break]

– because it isn't. (Just not in the way you expect.)[break][break]

A pretty smile and a skirt hiked high is what draws the attention of dirt bags with money to through around. Adventurers like to hear stories nearly too good to be true when it comes to cure-alls and wonder items to help them traverse the arduous seas of sand between (once-)home and the optimistic horizon named Lestine. You know how to lie to the best of them, sell something ten times its worth and crocodile tear your way out of the consequences. They will never take you captive, and when you finally make your way to the southern sea, you will greet the mother you lost with a golden halo – give her the life of luxury she never had the chance to give you.[break][break]

“What do you think the Bleeding Hearts will be like? Other than pushovers, I mean.” You're not keen on the idea of interacting with a princess (sickened by the idea of someone who was born into wealth, born lucky, didn't have to fight her way out of prison walls to stand where she stands), but if you view her as a bigger coin purse, you can probably stomach it in the end.[break][break]

Kenko, though – who has already met the princess you will one day love, who has pulled you along on this so-called 'whim' to pay back dues – simply hums beneath a frigid nighttime. Together, you're following a script you can't possibly know the end of, all while playing the part perfectly.[break][break]

(What is 'freedom', anyway?)

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






“Thought experiment: Can something created by something that's wicked ever be considered 'good'?”[break][break]

Lucretia wrinkles her nose when presented with a question so reeking in its simplicity. Fionnuala, by comparison, has barely been given three moments of pause to consider the question in whole before her bulkier companion is slamming a hand down onto her knee and shouting: “Absolutely not! Next question.”[break][break]

Finn blinks, once, twice, before saying, “Wait, now hold on a minute – ”[break][break]

Unsurprisingly, Lucretia will not wait, nor hold on a minute. In fact, the very idea that someone would need to in this scenario has a nerve in her brow twitching, signaling not quite irritation, but a completely healthy level of skepticism. “C'mon, this is easy, right? Whatever made the thing was evil, so it was made to do something evil. That means it's evil. Next question.”[break][break]

“Assuming this evil creature doesn't have, like, hobbies – ”[break][break]

“You mean other than eating people?”[break][break]

“That's...” The half-elf's mouth hangs open for a moment, probably due in no small part to her own marginally less health level of skepticism before she finishes, “... weirdly specific, but yeah, other than eating people. What if the evil creature just wants to make a delicious stew? Does that make the stew evil?”[break][break]

“Then it's probably poisoned.”[break][break]

“He's poisoning the stew he's making for himself?”[break][break]

“It's a training method.”[break][break]

“As someone who ate holly berries as a kid on more than one occasion, I can assure you I'm not any more immune to poison than your average berry eating elf.” Lucretia wants to tell her that means more than she didn't bother eating enough of them, rather than the fact that repeated contact with poisonous berries was a completely ineffective method of training your body against poison. In fact, she wants to tell her this and also that stew is an entirely different beast when it comes to honing the body than random forest berries, but... well, she's a sheltered forest child. Let her play with her frogs and eat her holly berries. “More importantly, though, let's just pretend that he's making non-poisoned stew, entirely for himself, and his only goal is to make a tasty, non-evil meal.”[break][break]

“You're pushing my suspension of disbelief here.”[break][break]

A narrowing of the eyes! That's an accomplishment. The fetchling wasn't sure she'd ever seen Finn glare before, discounting playful stares shared with her sister. “Just try, okay?”[break][break]

She does. Very hard, in fact. Turns out that imagining a great world-ending monstrosity, the one that single-handedly ruined her early life bowed over a campfire attempting to create a harmless little bowl of food for itself is an exercise in patience as much as creativity. Despite herself, she can't help but saying, “I bet this stew tastes awful. I bet this is the worst stew ever cooked.”[break][break]

Fionnuala murmurs something that sounds like a curse to the gods beneath her breath before, as someone who has watched cowards march into war zones to die can say, steeling herself for the impossible. “Maybe we need a different example... Oh! My horns. You think my horns are neat, yeah? You've said so before.”[break][break]

She does, and she has. They perhaps lack the sheer stabbing potential of Eunika's obsidian daggers pointed out of the top of her head, but the bone-like protrusions and their wear give them an almost ancient air, reminiscent of beautiful decay, juxtaposed against the youthful image of Finn's usual dirty appearance. They are made all the more horrifying, then, when she takes them right off, plucked from her skull like one would petals from a plant.[break][break]

“They're fake, see! Well, I mean, obviously, half-elves don't... grow horns, but...” An embarrassed little cough. At least the collective only transmits thoughts actively sent through, else the embarrassment felt would be far more mutual. “It's a crown made of bones. But do you know where I got those bones?” No pause for answer. “Undead. And you know what undead detect as, don't you?”[break][break]

“That's not the same,” Lucretia grumbles. “You made the crown, not the undead. If an undead were making crowns out of flesh, that'd be an entirely different story.”[break][break]

“I – I guess that's fair... Oh! But it's still technically made from something evil. But you wouldn't call this evil anymore, would you?” More grumbling, albeit with less conviction toward forming a coherent disagreement. It's unnecessary, anyway, considering the look of quiet disappointment on the other's face. A change of tactics is at hand. “Okay, okay, one more try. If an evil creature tried to make something evil, but they did it really bad. Just horribly, like the stew. And they messed it up so badly it actually turned right around to being good – [break][break]

“Could you forgive that creation?”[break][break]

'Forgive'. The fetchling chews on that word, but settles on it being a change of pace in phrasing for the sake of intrigue. Argue it a thousand ways, but the answer is still... well... maybe not quite so obvious. If a creature failed so poorly to make something wicked it actively worked against its creator, did that not technically work in the favor of the greater good...? But to expect it to only, and by accident work against its maker...[break][break]

“I'm... not sure,” she settles on, dissatisfied. “I think it'd depend on the creation. How badly it was made.”[break][break]

The smile Finn gives her is – wrong. Not the smile of a person who's finally find some leverage in a losing argument, but that of someone whose pity has overflowed, unable to be stopped at the expression. “Recreating life from scratch isn't an exact practice...”[break][break]

… Huh? “Who's getting weirdly specific now?”[break][break]

That smile is unwavering. The longer the Dragoon leverages it against her, the more unnerved she becomes. In fact – who posed this question to begin with? It wasn't Fionnuala, whose late start had lost her the tactical first strike, but the clearing is... clear, devoid of anyone but the two of them, and the stars are gone, blotted out from a kaleidoscope sky.[break][break]

“Children aren't just the will of their parents. They can guide us where they want us to go, but we make our decisions in these lives we have. We build our worth with our own hands. We're measured in history by our hearts and our souls. I'm sure the 'me' you know will realize this, too, someday.[break][break]

“I hope that when you learn the truth about what you are, you'll remember what we talked about here.”[break][break]

The world is beginning to unravel, some loose thread tugged too tight to let the whole thing loose. “Am I sleeping?” Lu asks her.[break][break]

Not-Finn only continues to smile, falling to pieces with the dream (is it?) around her. As Lucretia stands up among crumbling rock and a hemorrhaging sky, her guest has become no more, leaving nothing but her voice, echoing, haunting: “Sleeping is all the dead can do.”

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle"]

[attr="class","sumreign-1"]






Junko thinks of her mother has she holds the knife to Na's throat. It makes it a bit easier, steadies her trembling hand – only just.[break][break]

It's a knife she's held dozens of times, spirited from where the meals are prepared (once for crowds, now for three) and poised to ascend from a meager cutlery knife to the edge that killed a god. And it would be the end, death of the last successor, no hope for children, not when god incarnate has a stare that lingers too long only for women, and certainly not when the reputation of the shrine has fallen to the depths of despair. There is no secret heir stashed into the woods, either; Nezumi and the other ratlings made sure of that. There is only the incarnate – a rat – and the silver edge between life and death.[break][break]

What Junko does not know is that love, for all its glorification, is what's pushed them here. Love was what was felt by the wrong woman at the wrong time, and for the wrong person, no less. Her mother is dead because of jealousy and hate so strong it could destroy the lives most dedicated to their holder; because of a passion so warm and moving it turned the faithful to traitors. Junko does not know of affairs or betrayals, of envy and lust taken to their worst extremes. All she knows is Na was there when they found the body.[break][break]

All she knows is that revenge is made simple with a sleeping body and a sharpened blade.[break][break]

(As if anything between them could ever be 'simple'.)[break][break]

The knife never moves. It never could. The ratfolk woman will tell herself it stayed in the name of self-preservation: that killing Na would not bring the worshipers back, and won't only starve her to death on a lonely wooded mountain in the end; that if the village came with pitchforks and torches, who would be there to call thunder from the sky and let their miserable trio live another wretched day?[break][break]

She will never tell herself that love plays its hand here, too, wicked schemer, impartial and cruel. The knife will fall and tears will rip through her eyes, unbidden, unwanted, but she will never admit that they were summoned up by a despair that belongs solely to the thought of living in this world without her – (how uniquely miserable and wretched that would be.)[break][break]

Morning brings with it the old paranoia, polished and presented in a new and ghastly way – but if Na ever knew what happened there, she certainly never says.

[attr="class","sumreign-triangle-1"]