From the gaping void in her chest loomed a darkness so complete that it could not be pierced by the flames of her furious regret. Out from that depthless cavern groped the hand of her demise, conductor's wand waving about, needle-tipped and razor sharp, it snagged and sliced at the bedraggled memory of the creature she used to be and the false hope of what she could have one day been.

Gone, all gone, snipped and severed and burned away into ash and smoke and the fleeting heat of rage. She had thought for so long that she could escape that singular truth within her soul, that she could forge something new here in this land of opportunity. She hung her head as the weight of fate rested upon her skull, lips wetted and breath stirring the waters into delicate ripples. Shame, palpable and cruel, lashed at her, ripping that beautiful flesh to shreds with the frigid blade of reality.

She had been so stupid to believe anything would come of this or come of her.

A wretched grin clawed it's way to the surface, forcing through the wracking sobs and finding purchase upon parted lips. Why was she hiding? Her past and her present had merged to meet her here, chilled to the bone and soaking wet beneath an empty sky coupled with an empty purpose. The ripples she had made in the waters had vanished, the pool had stilled, any mark of her influence, her existence, had vanished beneath a mirror surface.

What a blessing.
What a curse.

She looked nothing like her mother, this she knew, but as her mind wandered, pulling thread after thread from the tattered tapestry that was her past, Orithia knew she looked everything like her mother. Like the whore begat from whores, the grinning face of death at the door, the slow acceptance of a fate within a gilded cage. In those days she had slowly grown silent, loving the moon for her silvery company and hating her for the terrors that rode upon the back of her nightly ascent.

Orithia blamed the moon for the blood that flowed from bite marks, hoof marks, raw skin rubbed away at the behest of primal pleasure. She blamed the moon for the blood that dripped down her legs and the pain that radiated from within her belly, her heart, her soul.

She blamed the moon for the wolves that came knocking on her door.

But blame was a living thing, fluid and flexible, dripping down her throat and tasting of tears.

The ripples had returned, emanating from the chest of a King, the bass of his voice setting her bones to trembling. He spoke the name the devil had given her and he spoke the name he had gifted her with, the smooth notes and rounded vowels of his mother tongue brushing over her skin like the softest caress. He pleads with her, that beautiful mountainous brute, to come out of the water she had stained with blood - whether it was hers or another's she could not remember.

"Do you remember being born, mfalme?" Voice as soft as a lover's first kiss, "Do you remember shattering her hips and escaping that deep velvet, the darkness within your mother?"

...Drinking the wine and drinking the blood, crossing yourself before the edge of oblivion and crossing between two worlds in a spray of agony. The same agony begat from your mother's mother.

And her mother...

And her mother before her, on and on toward eternity....

...But for what?

"Are you thankful?"

Eyes that had remained trained to the surface of the water, to the distorted reflection floating there, made their way to the face of that titanic figure, creased in worry and pain, understanding a fickle mistress that had escaped his grasp. The only mistress that would escape his grasp. An empty stare and a blank grin, head cocked to the side like a child's, words floating over a frigid pool to gather and curl about a plainswalker stallion.

"There is no future for me, nothing may be sown from me that will not wilt and die. There is nothing here for me or you or anything. What you are searching for cannot be found, it has died long ago."

Silence, deafening silence.

"Can't you tell? I should have died long ago."