She left the prince of snow and winter’s breath behind, and ventured past the heat of Helovia’s burning heart, to a land frozen with waters dead and silent, holding precious secrets within its dismal putrid waters. Never once did she look back to the winter king standing on the banks of the glacial river cutting between the meadow dry and yellowed, standing in the sugar that was not sweet.

This mare was Lady Death, Mystique, the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, the villain who stalked the forest dark, and this land was her dream, for here she concocted the terrible nightmares of children and danced unholy tributes to monstrosities of nature. The darkness so deep she embraced with the passion of a lover, whispering her prayers of thanks to the obsidian velvet that hung over the world, so-called Helovia, and dreamt her sickly dreams. She walked with a gleam in her eye, the shine of a woman who walks on the precipice of madness, knowing she can fall over into insanity at any moment, the lone wolf, the black tigress, the bitter panther, waiting for a particularly succulent piece of pray to tear her teeth into. Peace she devoured with a voracious appetite, shredding it with glee, taking pleasure in the causing of pain and slaughter, the butcher wielding her knife to the living pig.

Her name was Confutatis, and her mind was fractured but not quite shattered.

She was the harlot, dreaming of a man’s warm touch against her scarred skin, but her shrivelled heart was wrapped under too many layers of obsidian velvet, swathed against the true indulgences of amity and ardour, devotion and tender kisses. The Lady Death was not a fair maiden, a pretty whore to fondle, nor did she walk with a swing in her scarred hips; she was a feral beast to be kept on the end of a chain, to be studied but not loved, to be petted but not wanted, to be both feared and admired for her callousness and bewitching behavior.

Nefarious and malignant, she stalked the lands of eternal night, seeking the delights of wreaking havoc and shredding the tenebrous peace of the herdlands, wishing she could cast ill to each and every walking horse of this Helovia, the land of the dead sun swallowed by the night.

The hellion bathed in the death that would come of the darkness, her initial fears wiped away, and her laugh echoed through the land of the dead as she gambolled amongst the corpses of the tepid cadavers. “Why so serious?” She cackled, and she threw back her skull-masked head and grinned, baring her teeth in a savage smile, a gruesome parody of a grin, a snarling wolf not even hidden underneath her façade of controlled ladylike movements. The cold did not bother her, not today; today she continued her cavorting under the eternal night, dancing languidly and quickly, light on her feet and swift with her cruel little smiles, enjoying the dance with the dead, with the bloated bodies glistening in the water, staring at the living with jealous eyes.