Below Lamia rested the remnants of a man, or at least she supposed that was what it was. To her, it looked like crusted yellow leather left in the sun until it began to crack and crumble. The surface was riddled with punctures, some recent, some years old. She withdrew her weapon and found not blood but dusted bones caked in rusty grime. She staggered back from the sight and whipped around, trying desperately to remove the horrible image from her mind. That was when she saw her. The Woman was there, her partial image floating detachedly above the dresser. She had a look of terror on her pale face that somehow seemed to light the dark room like a desolate moon in a starless sky. Lamia stared, and, for the first time, she did so with no fear of Alastor’s shadow. She continued to stare and began to recognize amity in the strange face that stared back at her. The Woman was familiar somehow, like a dream that never quite returned to the conscious mind, like the silhouette of a thought, and like the trace of a memory. The Woman stood before her, clutching a pair of rusted scissors, much like Lamia’s, in hands whose age-worn fingers were all too familiar, and she wore a simple blue gown, much like the one Lamia wore, and her eyes held such pain, much like the pain Lamia knew deep within her heart.

A thought began to bubble in Lamia’s mind, something that until this moment had always lingered out of reach. An answer to a question that she never asked, or perhaps that she always asked, subconsciously. Just as it began to form into the likeness of a tangible thing, The Woman opened her mouth. It was as if she were preparing to ask Lamia something, and by the look on her face, it was something dreadfully important. But, as the words prepared to gurgle out, both Lamia’s eyes and mind went dark.

The tentacles of darkness still entangled the crisp fall sky when Lamia Breen Blanchet stirred from her fitful slumber. As she lied silently in the familiar blackness, she traced the numerous scars that littered her body with a cold, pale finger. One, on her cheek, was from a shattered glass that she barely managed to dodge, another, on her upper arm, was from the splinters of a weak, wood table as it shattered under her weight. She thought long and hard about these marks of torture, these brands of anguish — not merely physical, but mental and emotional as well. As she stood up, her hair brushed faintly against her knees. She wondered when it had gotten so long. It was only last year, on her ninth birthday, that she had gotten it cut up to her ears. That thought quickly faded, however, and in its place echoed the knowledge that today was the day of his death. It was all she could think about.