The trip back to the Fredrickson household was short, for my feet were light upon the earth as warmth cradled my heart, and my spirit just soared with a delight that sang joyously within me. Salvation was upon me, and I almost leapt with the self-assurance that although I may yet be a damnable creature: I was not condemned to an unlife in self-enforced solitude.

  Those beautiful stars smiled upon me, and the vividly green grasses seemed to cheer for me with every footfall. The unease which had so gripped me before had relented in entirety, and I knew that even though my son would certainly have misgivings at my presence: he surely would come to appreciate what it offered in this dangerous frontier.

  I stood now before the door that had once filled my heart with a tangible apprehension, and I was unable to smother a giddy laugh as I thought of how incredibly wooden it’d really been. The world, which had become so cruel and lonesome and dreadful to me, was still the same world I used to know, with its warmth and happiness glowing around every dark corner if I was looking to find it.

  The sweet scent of life drifted out of the house, and I had to chuckle that Bart’s drafty workmanship had led me to such a wonderful idea, which had been hidden behind literal darkness. A notion had occurred to me on that doorstep, that although the gruel I’d eaten earlier was ash for me, it couldn’t have been all that much better for any of the children, and so I spoke to my dearly departed,

  “Rianna? Do foodstuffs rot inside that strange space you’ve access to?”

  She hummed in my ears for a while as she pondered, then I felt her shrug inside me, “Only one way to find out.”

  That blackness began to spew forth from the phylactery around my neck, and I turned to where it was pooling into a mass behind me. Tables, chairs, and even the rough outline of a house — in that it had pillars, cornerboards, and a roof, but no walls at all — had formed up a short ways away.

  Inside that new structure appeared a veritable feast, and the black mist became all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables. The autumn harvest was close at hand, and we must have collected near all the crops in the village through the sorcery that remade us — we’d long been unable to expand the fields too far beyond the protection of the houses, due to the wild beasts that would come to gorge upon our undefended foodstuffs.

  Out of the mist, I saw cooking appliances that I’d recognized, as they’d come from other people’s houses, and I should know since I’d been in most all of the houses in the village by now, though Nestor’s family always firmly maintained that they never wanted much to do with a doctor of my persuasion. 

  The man himself, though, had come by to beg for cures to any ailment that ever surfaced in his household, and I liked to imagine that he simply kept where he got my medicines from secret by way of lying that he’d found them dropped off a wagon, or that a wandering healer provided them. Roguish fellow really did like keeping his cards to his chest, and having been born of Olga and Dmitry Orlov, I could endlessly sympathize with him.

  Still, this staggering scene continued to develop into the finest feast I’d ever seen, lit so brightly by the aetherlamps which spawned from the purest blackness that the building was blotting out all the starlight! It was so packed with food that it even made the Cardinal’s dinner party look paltry — if the one I’d ever been to was anything to judge by, though that’d ended with ‘fireworks’, so perhaps the memory was more unpleasant than it otherwise deserved — and altogether this incredible sight had rather answered my one question, and by way of astonishment had raised in me another,

  “For just how long are you able to do this?” 

  All at once an almost manic grin sprang to life inside me, and since it most certainly wasn’t upon my face: my heart murmured with unease, and when I’d heard her chuckle I instinctively knew what was to come. I shivered as she said in a voice deeper and far more dangerous than was usual,

  “Only one way to find out~”

  “Stop! Stopstopstopstop! Rianna please! Don’t do this!” I begged her then, for I knew that tone of voice, and it screamed at me that she was going to get herself addled with aether, if not go into aethershock itself! To say nothing of what might happen to me, us being somewhat linked and all!

  But as was typical, she was beyond the point of listening, and a column of fire rose into the sky some distance away. Not as usual, however, was that I found myself unable to turn away from the dreadful firestorm that burned so hotly despite being so far from it, as with this new connection to her: I felt at least some amount of her pyromania, and in this way I was rooted where I stood with a fascination spiking within me.

  Her cackling and giggling went on for quite some time, and I found that I was feeling terribly dehydrated, and I felt sweat seeping down my skin as my mind slipped away inside the fire. I could hear her mentally counting the seconds with a luscious ferver, which seemed to intensify greatly with every second she’d gained over her old ‘record’ of just over a minute. 

  The door opened some ways behind me, but I wasn’t able to shake myself to see, so it came as no small relief when Lisset managed to do it for me with a tremendous hug from behind, and I heard her gush in her usual airheaded manner,

  “It’s such a relief that Arianna’s alive, Mira dear! I’m so happy for you! I didn’t know she could build a house with magic, but look at this feast! Where did it come from dear? I’ll get the kids, they’ll love this!”

  Lisset was so sweet to celebrate my happiness, and yes, having a building full of food appear outside your front door is probably incredibly exciting for such a large woman as her, but rather than surprising… shouldn’t she be panicking more? That fire was the biggest Rianna’d ever made, and she’d been going at it for quite a while longer than was normal, and the voice inside me was warbling with enough ardor to bring me shivers with every additional count,

  “Two hundred forty six! Two hundred forty seven! Two hundred forty eight!”

  It was all too much for me to endure, and I shouted out as I reached the very end of my patience,

  “Enough! Just make it really big and be done with it already!”

  For the first time in my life, I wished that she hadn’t heeded my direction, for she sent the column of fire so high into the sky as if to take the place of the sun at noontime. There it’d sprung forth a maelstrom of conflagration such that it stretched near to the horizons, and its colour became lighter and lighter until it was a blindingly white fire like only the Pope had ever been known to conjure up, and never in such a massing as this!

  Would that I’d had more time to look at it, for it was astounding, and beautiful, and a testament to my Arianna’s ascension, but my body just scorched under the heat of it all! The fire seemed to affect me rather similarly to the sunlight in that it burned upon my skin, if magnified immensely such that soon all I knew was fire, and the agony of immolation was upon me.

  All I can remember for a while after that was the pain. The white flame in my eyes turned black as they were burned right out of their sockets, and a terrible screeching sounded in my ears before they too became as ash and fell from me, and in a hundred other unknowable but unforgettable ways: I was aflame. 

  The skin across my whole body blistered and peeled; it would erupt with flame, and my very bones seemed to take fire, and they burned with a bitter cold that had me retching. I experienced a searing agony as boiling water roiled across what remained of me, but the fire yet blazed. 

  Soon I was suffocating, and the fires upon my person were fast becoming smaller, but being only a small amount on fire is still being on fire, and I writhed for so long a time that the blackened bones of my arms had both splintered quite far from me, and I became rather paralyzed despite that agony I could only recoil from.

  For so so long, there was only the pain, but a deep red haze came out through it all, and though I didn’t know it, for I could neither smell, nor taste, nor even feel it: I was again feasting upon human flesh.

  When my scars and blemishes had disappeared, I’d rather blamed Arianna for it, and I’d held a seed of grudge in my heart even though we’d reengaged in intimacy after death, but it was infact my very own doing; a byproduct arisen of my newfound ghoulish nature: a consumptive regeneration borne of the very evils inherent in my unnatural resurrection. 

  Every part of me was healing, and I shortly could ‘see’ why, for my prototypical eyes could not close without their eyelids, though I only knew it in a daze, for the healing process was rather akin to burning backwards; rather than a fire eating away at me until it burned me through, I was burning through with such a heat that I felt I could erupt into fire again at any moment, and I greatly feared of this happening!

  I couldn’t move my limbs, and so immobilized the heat overwhelmed me, and my heart was seized as I screamed out with dreadful apprehension! If I’d realized that my voice was muffled by flesh, I might’ve held them back, but my ears had not yet reformed, so I did not know why I would be choking on congealed blood with every terrified inhalation, and this only frightened me further!

  The flesh would take my brittle teeth with each bite, only for them to begin growing again alongside the most vicious toothache I’d ever had, which I felt from somewhere deep in my skull, and ever so terribly it pounded and panged! It was as if an ogre were banging a gong right over my head, and was more often than not missing the instrument in favor of me!

  But I ate, even though my jaw felt like it was near about to fall off of my very face! I ate, even though I burned between fires both inside and out! I ate, even through the agony that wracked my body from toe to top — which was more from thighbones to cheekbones if the dreadful state of my body were to be considered — and I was so well departed from my sense of ‘self’ at this juncture that besides the pain and the eating: I registered nothing but burning images wrapped in pain for me to later suffer through!

  Those torments would surely come to me still in the future, whenever I was exposed again to the feeling of burning, but as I lay exhausted in a darkness surrounded by an assortment of human remains: my ears finally came back to me, though at first they rung with such an unpleasantness that I’d rather wished they hadn’t!

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, sorry, I’m sorry, Mira, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m-” In the distance, and through the crackling, I faintly heard my beloved weeping, and endlessly apologizing, and yet I didn’t really understand it for what it was, even as I absently broke apart a femur with my own bare hands, and I drank of the marrow which had secreted itself away from me.

  In this manner, I continued to gorge myself unconsciously for a long time, such that it wasn’t until much later that my awareness came back to me. I was so surprised by what I saw when sense finally returned to me that I’d flung myself away from that gruesome scene until my back had painfully found an obstacle: a shockingly cold stone wall, and there I stayed while I surveyed my terrible handiwork.

  Certainly I was rather impressed with the horror of what I’d done, for the gory details before me told the story of at least four corpses, and what little of my morality and humanity that remained told me that I should be off mumbling with madness, but I was instead almost startling stoic about the corpses scattered around me. I held a femur still in my hand, and an immense strength could be felt in each of my limbs, such that I knew I could yet shatter it for marrow within, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  Not because I didn’t want to, for I very much did, and not because of the moral implications, for I was very much past those… no, it was for my beloved that I couldn’t debase myself so. Arianna’s voice was wracked with sobs, and she kept saying that she was sorry over and over again, and while the fire was a horrible enough experience to defy even the primal language of pain: it was long over, and I wouldn’t have her hurting while I was able to do anything about it. 

  I cradled her gem against my breast, and I murmured to her for a while that I was alright, and that I didn’t blame her, but she was inconsolable, and not even the soft kisses I placed upon her with my lips affected much change in her state. Still, I kept at it, moving eventually to gentle song, and I would have departed from that stone box full of bones to give her a less grisly scenery, but it was closed save for the top, and so the best I could do was to stay where I was, and sing to her.

  Her sobbing came to an end in time, but I didn’t stop singing to her or snuggling against her all the while, for that dreadful guilt and sadness tugged at me from within her. She must’ve felt absolutely horrible for what she’d done to me by accident, and it was clear that she’d been quite terrified of losing me forever. For these reasons I’d not seen any obvious method by which to take the burden of fault off of her in a way she’d believe.

  She always was too clever for her own good, if selectively so when it came to the arcane, but I had a plan of action nonetheless, although it wouldn’t be nearly so effective as my last employment of the technique: diffusing with what humor could possibly be gleaned from this situation. So I said to her with the most chipper voice I could manage,

  “Three times in twenty four hours, Rianna, and I think I’ve rather understood the message by now: you just hate it when I wear clothes!”

  I might have tried for it a little early, as although I heard her lightly scoff: she had no response to give me. But no matter, there were millions of funny things just waiting to be said by me, and if I only could have found them: she might have been happier.

  My expertise with humor was in teasing her, and what little talent I’d ever had with that didn’t also extend to general witticisms. Neither of us much needed them in life, and that was Carmen’s role anyway; we’d not seen fit to replace the void she’d left in our lives. But since we were both as dead as she, and my beloved was feeling so hurt by her own actions: I rather would have appreciated my old friend’s inevitably inappropriate assessment of these events, for surely she could have brought Arianna to laugh, even though I couldn’t begin to know how.

  Somehow, she could have turned the words I feared to so much as touch upon, ‘hot’, and ‘firey’ into such clever remarks as to make my beloved run and hide behind me. I’d have exchanged the power that had grown in each of my limbs a hundred times for the power to make Rianna smile again.

  Since I had not the power to tease my way out of this quandary of upset, I opted instead to do what I do best: the practical. I looked at the femur my hand had quite refused to let go of — despite my earlier decision that I would not consciously make her witness the monstrosities I was recently capable of — and as I turned it over and around in my hand: I simply couldn’t understand what ghouls found so ‘good’ about rotting corpses. 

  Rather, I found myself feeling repulsed by even the slightest idea of letting a corpse rot, not while they were so wonderful to eat when fresh! The marrow inside bones reminded me of the succulent treasure I’d previously sought from inside the chassis of a crab’s shell, and to allow Rianna to sweep away this femur as if it were trash… was not something I felt particularly able to do, the more I thought of it. It may have been only one femur, but I didn't want it to go to waste.

  They were already dead, I figured, and my foundling morality made itself known to me here, so it wasn’t as if I was hurting anyone. They’d even meant to make us dead, and they’d succeeded with me at least, so surely they ought to pay reparations from beyond the grave?

  I let Rianna’s gem gently down from my hand, and so she rested against my sternum, and I seized the bone in both of my hands as I prepared to snap it apart, but that wasn’t to say that I’d completely and totally forgotten about my beloved, no… I’d just grown used to my way of unlife, and so I whispered to her, though I knew I was making her suffer to see this,

  “I’m sorry, Rianna… but I think I really need to do this.”

  With a terrible splintering snap that made her wince inside me, the bone gave way, and it wasn’t a clean break, for some small bit of it went flying away some distance with an even smaller amount of what I sought upon it, but no matter, for the marrow was shortly upon my tongue, and I slurped it up rather greedily. 

  Amazing, just what an incredible flavour it really was, and I was soon quite finished with that femur, so as I calmly chased down the piece that had gotten away from me: I glanced around to see if there was anything else remaining, and since I didn’t see much else left to be eaten, I lapped up the small amount that had earlier escaped. I wondered then, as I more closely inspected my ‘accomplishment’ of eating four men in full — though their bladders remained, interestingly… wonder why the first guy’s didn’t — how many eating competitions I might have won if only they were of corpses, and so I asked my beloved,

  “Do you think that the hunger ever really stops?”

  She shuddered inside me, and apparently disgust had rather worked to bring her back to reality, and I’d figured that it might’ve, since she’d been such a prude before. I could feel her thinking, it was almost like having a thousand ants crawling across your heart, but oddly not uncomfortable in the slightest, and finally, she said,

  “I sure hope so, and I really don’t want to see you do that again, so… I hope that you won’t?”

  A small portion of disgust arose in me when she’d said that terrible word, and twice at that, but as I’d just willfully engaged in eating a corpse: this probably wasn’t a good time to tell her that she mind her manners. I was very glad that she was talking to me again, for that was always the method by which she healed the best, and I answered her icky inner feelings,

  “I won’t, love,” I’d begun, then I had to chuckle so for a moment, and I could feel her wariness rising within me, so I explained with a grin, “just so long as I don’t find myself another femur in this mass grave~”

  “Gross, that’s just gross, Mira!” She whined from inside me. “Oh,” she then realized, “oh right, I’ll get it cleaned up, sorry.”

  The blackness I was fast becoming fond of came out, and it rapidly consumed what little remained of my four course meal, and it cleaned my stained skin better than a thousand showers might have done. I felt a weight disappear off of my body with the grime, and I was feeling rather relaxed, when suddenly the stone house started to sink back into the ground it’d formed up from, and I was brought back to my nakedness and likely location — being entirely in sight of all the children, and never mind Lisset — so I shouted,

  “Clothes, Rianna! I haven’t any clothes!”

  A yelp sounded out inside me, and though the stone was still falling at an alarming speed: the blackness came back to my body, and there it deposited the red and black dress I’d been wearing before I’d rather soiled it with gore, and not a second too soon I was dressed, except for something which vaguely tugged upon my heart.

  The children were indeed partaking of the feast, and most all of them turned to see me as the stone barrier completely came down, and I breathed with no small relief that she could apparently dress me up without my asking, which I could only imagine would lead to further atrocities against the Lord in the future.

  Except… something was missing. Nobody could see it, but I’ll be damned if I couldn’t feel it, and so I muttered through my teeth,

  “Underthings, now!”

  She squeaked, and the black mist somehow hid itself underneath my clothes as she placed them around me, and if I wasn’t mistaken I heard her breath hitch, which set a slight blush upon my face, but she’d luckily left it at that. Would that she could’ve so subtly placed stockings upon my legs, but I would simply have to endure being bare-legged for a while.

  Lisset was seated at the furthest table from me, and she’d rather set herself in against such a mountain of food that I briefly had to wonder which of us might have really won that eating contest, but she’d somehow managed to miss the stone walls disappearing back into the earth, and therefore she wasn’t looking at me, so Luca made it to me first this time.

  He stayed a healthy distance away, but was close enough to ensure total accuracy, and I saw the dark bags under his eyes which told me he hadn’t slept since the attack had happened… apparently he’d well-realized that he was the only one present with appreciable combat prowess, and he’d taken it all upon himself to protect the well-being of the other kids, and I was proud of him for what I saw.

  That said, the spellcraft he was working on, if I wasn’t very much mistaken they were glowing in quite the wrong manner. Not that I’d ever seen them glow at all before in life, since I’d been quite devoid of aetherial senses before I’d ‘risen’ with the world’s most powerful lich inside me, and my total absence of aether was now inextricably bound to her absurd abundance of the stuff, so I quietly asked Rianna,

  “Love, is that what ice looks like before it skewers me?”

  I heard her absolutely groan when she looked more closely at our son, and she muttered back to me in such a way it felt like she was spiting herself,

  “Yeah, that’ll be ice, God what was I even teaching that boy that he went with ice? What’s he gonna do, throw a snowball at you?! He’s been faced with an undead so freakish — sorry, Mira, but it’s true — as to make the fucking Vampire Lord look like a twice-damned wisp! To say nothing of me: I’m a lich of all God’s damned things, and I’m inside that freakish monstr-”

  There was an awful lot that she’d unpacked there, but because it all sounded like pretty rude stuff, and never mind how unhurt she thought I’d be: I rather didn’t want to be skewered by icicles, or be frozen inside a massive block of ice, so I tuned her out, and I spoke to Luca,

  “Fire, Luca. Fire against the undead, my boy. Ice will only hurt my feelings, and my dress.”

  The spell he’d called up wound down with such a rapidity that I’d caught myself worrying that he’d lost control of it, but my son was better than that. He soundly rebound all the aether he’d been about to unload, and for a while I let him rub his eyes with such a terrible ferocity that when he’d come back to himself, and set them again upon me: he’d made them all red.

  This was inexcusable, so I took a step towards my son, and his eyes absolutely ignited with what surely must be fiery spellcraft, but I was never one to be deterred in the face of my duty as a doctor, and my duty as a mother ran deeper still than that. 

  I carefully took another step towards him, and I could see his wide red eyes expand with further fire, but in this manner I continued towards him, and although he’d very much been threatening to: he never let his magic loose upon me, and I soon had him in my arms in as tight a hug as I dared to give him with my much increased strength.

  “Rest, Luca, it’s alright to rest now, dear. We’re fine now, and I’m not going to hurt anyone, I promise, and she wouldn’t let me besides.” I assured my son, for he so terribly needed the rest.

  The aether in his eyes dimmed, but it didn’t entirely go away, and he asked with an uncertain doubt in his voice that bade I hold him ever more tightly,

  “Mum, if she really ascended, then where’s Ma been all this time?”

  It was a rather hard ask, for I’d wondered the same when I’d first lost her, but I knew better now. That said, it sounded so mental that I rather didn’t know how to describe it at the time, but I did my best,

  “I know how it sounds, Luca, but… Rianna’s inside me.”

  He snorted, and his chest shook with barely restrained laughter, as apparently I hadn’t really known how it sounded, because I’d been figuring it sounded ‘demented’, but on reflection, it rather instead came out as a touch ‘inappropriate’.

  “Mercy, Luca! I’m being serious here! Did I really raise you, or was Carmen’s ghost responsible?!”

  “I’m, Mum I’m sorry,” he burst out with, and for a while he was unable to contain his laughter anymore, “I’m probably just lacking sleep, but I understood what you meant — despite how you said it.”

  Just like that, he was lost to another fit of giggles, but he soon straightened up under my glowering,

  “So, you’re both sort of in the phylactery, right?”

  Mother of astuteness, I’d almost had to be told that before it’d really sunken in, so how in the blazes — here I made myself wince for a moment, but I brushed past it — so just how had he arrived upon that conclusion I wondered, when he supplied,

  “The ridiculously huge fire spell, Mum,” — oh Luca, how could I forget being burned alive, well not alive, but burned undead just doesn’t seem to do being immolated with holy fire justice — “I already knew that Ma was mostly successful from that, but I guess I was just waiting on confirmation before I could accept it.”

  That made some sense, I could admit, albeit not aloud, since Lisset had rather discovered my reunion with my son, and we suddenly were both being crushed in her tremendous arms — really, I had always wondered how this two and half meters tall woman had ever been satisfied with a man of Bart’s stature, for the guy was barely taller than me, and their relationship honestly defied my understanding of normal women… which it had to admitted, Lisset was not. Nobody else I’d ever met was so capable of touching upon secret truths as she was despite being so mind-bogglingly, well… her.

  “You’ve made up!” she boomed with happiness, “I’m so happy for you! It hurt so much to see you two fighting! Where’s Arianna, dear, for I must see her! With the well gone, there’s just not enough water for a proper bath anymore! If my Bart was still here, I’d have him wash my back for me, so you don’t mind if I borrowed Arianna for a while, Mira dear?”

  Rianna’s lust was leaping to life inside me again, but I couldn’t even chastise her in my heart, for I could well understand why she might be feeling that way… and it wasn’t even the first time Lisset had requested a bath in such a manner! Since we’d taken them together with the giantess so many times: I wasn’t feeling particularly interested in judging her for it, but since Rianna was clearly waiting on my ‘go ahead’, I numbly nodded my head. 

  Evil blackness streaked back to where I’d devoured all of those bodies, and there it formed up a stone building with no roof with such a swiftness that I’d wondered idly if she’d acted so fast to put the fire off of me, for I’d certainly felt that I burned for an eternity and some. As might have well been expected, Lisset wasn’t the slightest bit perturbed by that darkness made physical, and never minding how it bothered Luca beside her: with an excited squeal she’d rushed into the building, and the doorway disappeared into solid stone behind her with not so much as a scraping sound.

  Luca looked at me with a slight confusion, and when I stared blankly back at him, he enunciated,

  “You’re not going to join in, then?”

  My eyes grew wide with the accusation my own son had levied upon me, and I fell to my knees in shock of what he’d said to me! It must have taken me a number of seconds to formulate a response, but I glared at him, and I studied his unimpressed face carefully, before berating him,

  “Do you really think so little of me, son? I’ll have you know that we’ve never done anything with Lisset that’d strain her marriage!”

  I heard Rianna snicker inside me, “But Mira, Bart isn’t around anymore! Well, he’s a corpse we’ve got stored of course, so I guess part of him still is, not that it matters,” and she continued to babble, but I knew she was just winding me up, so I let it go.

  Luca shook his head with a small smile forming upon his lips, and with his eyes closed, he said to me,

  “That’s not it, Mum. You’ve just never fully trusted Ma not to get frisky with Lisset, so you always chaperoned them before. The trust in your eyes now… Mum it’s a good look on you.”

  The warmth I’d felt earlier, before the disaster with holy fire, was rushing back in full, and though I lightly associated it with that horrid occasion, it was also quite apart from that feeling. A few hot tears went down my cheeks, and I sniffed, but it wasn’t because of any insecurity I had towards the heat: it was because of the loving warmth that only family can bring a person.

  Soon, Luca had come down to my level, and he hugged me, so I warmly sank into these happy feelings for a while, and I could tell that Rianna felt rather put out that she couldn’t exchange such an embrace with us herself, so a small pit of jealousy came out from her general direction.

  Still, I felt that I had to admit to Luca the reason for the change; since he was my son, I couldn’t leave him in the dark about such an important thing, and I said to him,

  “Luca, I… my perspectives on a lot of things have been changing since I… I’ve…”

  I swallowed, for I found it hard to get the words out, and I found the words would rather catch in my throat each time I tried to express them, so Luca quite surprised me by completing it for me,

  “Since you’ve eaten… bodies, Mum? Yeah, I can see how that’d change things, I’m sorry.”

  His arms squeezed me in support, and tears just streamed from me, and I held him all the tighter myself, as I’d been dreadfully afraid that he might’ve been wholly repulsed by my actions, for I truly deserved it if my old morality were to be the judge. I shook so with something between fear and confusion, and my voice shakily voiced the question of my son,

  “H-how, did you…?”

  I could hear him crying himself now, or rather I could feel it as his chest would heave now and again, and as he finally swallowed back the lump which must have been forming in his throat, he managed,

  “I… I heard it, Mum, when I’d barricaded you inside… for a while you’d been making the door shake and I backed off a bit in case the… if the worst came to pass, but then you stopped and I drew close again. I’d kind of thought I heard bones… s-snapping, and just… the noises, Mum…” and here he shuddered greatly, as if still quite affected by the event, and I felt a tremendous amount of shame gripping around my heart, but he continued, “When I saw the, the ‘banquet’ out here, and I heard those sounds again faintly from inside that stone room, I was…”

  He breathed for a while, as if contemplating how to say it, and he concluded,

  “I was pretty sure, Mum, but seeing you act like this, it just… you were so… so shy, and scared, and cowed, and just so horribly unlike you… so that’s how… that’s how I knew, Mum.”

  Luca’s grip upon me tightened such that I almost felt like I was being squeezed by Lisset, and tears and sobs left me all the while, but after crying together for some time, I raised my courage, and I asked him,

  “Luca, how… how can you trust to hold me now, when you… when you know what I’ve done; what I… what I almost did to you?”

  He shook his head, and he patted my back some as he told me with much more security in his voice,

  “No, Mum, it was new to you then, and you didn’t know what was happening to you, it was obvious to see. You promised me just a bit ago, remember? ‘I could rest easy, because you weren’t going to hurt anyone’,” and he released me from the hug, and he looked at me with a proud smile upon his tearstained face, and he said “and my Mum always keeps her promises.”

  I positively blubbered for a while after, and I held my son to me in such a tight hug that it surely was uncomfortable for him, but the cry was doing wonders for my emotional state that I didn’t even know I’d been so affected before it, as the numb terror that’d beaten through my reformed heart and veins had finally released me, and though I couldn’t have been said to be fully recovered: I was well and truly on my way now.

  After a bit, I’d released him, and as I noticed Roger at the dinner table, I’d thought back to what he’d said when we’d just been finishing up with Petyr, ‘only ones who might need looking at are Roger and Lisset when they get back’, and Lisset looked pretty good to me, so it must have been Roger, but before I could ask Luca what’d needed looking at: Arianna’s speech was overwhelming me with words again,
  “Wow Luca, that was amazing, now I just need a body for myself again, and Luca and I can cry it all out too! I’d complain about how I don’t have a body, and he’d complain about how I stole the well, and we’d talk through how I almost burned you to ashes, I’m still really really really really sorry about that, sorry, and anyway, we’d carry on crying together until I’d tell him about all the weird new arcane things I can do now, and anyways: Miss now-very-single Fredrickson is clean, and clothed, don’t you worry, so brace yourself, alright?”

  Brace myself, Arianna, really, you waited until the end of that to tell me to brace myself? I saw Luca’s eyes widen for a moment, and the next thing I knew: I’d in a rush suddenly gone away from the ground, and I was being carried like a princess in the mighty arms of an absolutely sparkling Lisset, and she’d unleashed her unnecessarily radiant smile upon me such that my face reddened as if sunlight itself were shining down on me!

  “Let’s get you something to eat, Mira dear! Truly, your Arianna is an amazing girl, dear, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so clean before in my whole life!”

  I felt my mind slipping at being treated in this ‘handsy’ manner by her, such that I really wanted Lisset to tell me about it, and I had some trouble stopping myself from begging that she not leave even a single thing out about the affair, when she’d so spontaneously sat me down in a wooden seat she’d pulled beside her mountain of food that I’d almost gone dizzy!

  Though I tried to break myself out of the mindset Lisset had just raised me into: I could hear Arianna’s evil giggling come from inside me, and I blushed all the fiercer as I knew that I would be paying for the feelings that had come to me unbidden, but I didn’t have to sit for this behavior from her, for I wasn’t the one who’d gone and gotten herself an eyeful in such an indecent manner earlier! To say nothing of cleaning Lisset, I was feeling rather vexed with Rianna’s indecent behavior, when that giant beauty came to intrude upon my deliberations yet again!

  “Have a steak, Mira dear!” Lisset happily cried out, and a huge chunk of steaming mutton had appeared upon a plate before me. I could see that it was almost perfectly cooked, and so my eyes almost bulged with indignation that someone would ruin so much fresh meat by cooking it! 

  “Your Luca told me that vegetables were no good with the state you’re in, so I went and butchered one of those sheep for you! Odd thing, but I’d barely had to bleed him! I can cook you some more later if you’re still hungry, but your Luca told me there was no need, that this’d be plenty enough for you!”

  Oh, that poor sheep… not only had I fed off of him once, but I’d also encouraged Lisset to slay him while I’d been locked up in that stone chamber, but I had to wonder, as I looked upon the depressing sight before me: could I eat meat if it was cooked? I brought a fork down to it, and I was relieved to have been provided a knife as well, so I cut up a small piece, and I anticipated the worst as I’d brought it to my mouth.

  I bit down on it, and at first I thought I’d been right to fear the bite, for a terribly burnt flavour quickly went over my tastebuds, but I’d kept at it, and it would seem that although it was very unpleasant: I indeed could actually eat cooked meat, if only to be polite. 

  Not that there was any call for that level of politeness here in the frontier, but I figured it would be good news if for whatever reason I was made to dine in an ‘ordinary fashion’... though I would probably do my best to keep it as ‘rare’, and even on the side of ‘raw’ as I could possibly manage.

  “Lisset?” I asked her, “This is great, but could you finish this one? I’d rather try it…” and I paused, because even though Lisset was probably the single most accepting person that the Lord had ever placed upon this Earth: I couldn’t be sure about how she might react to my… more beastial traits.

  “Raw, right Mira dear?” Lisset absolutely beamed at me, and when I simply couldn’t hide the shock that had erupted across my face, she chuckled and came in close to me, and said in a conspiritorial whisper, “I’m stupid my dear, not blind.”

  My face should have paled to have heard her say it, but instead her closeness was making me feel rather uncomfortable in other ways, and I was suddenly wishing that Bart would show up to distract her attention away from me, for he was always so gifted at doing that.

  Still, however she may have come upon the fact that I’d become more drawn to raw meat, I still felt that my friend should ought to know why, so I asked her,

  “Lisset, for how long have you known that I’ve been dead?”

  “Well!” her voice boomed, and in my current state, I was rather more appreciative of that element of hers than I would have normally been, damn it all Arianna, but Lisset kept ‘talking’, 

  “Your Luca was telling me as much earlier, but you sure seem pretty lively to me!”

  More than once in my life, I’d had to wonder if Lisset knew what she was doing or not, so I’d always been erring on the side of ‘it’s probably unintentional’, but the way her eyes gleamed as she stared at my growing blush was rather affecting me more than it should've, so I’d awkwardly coughed, and I told her as full and honestly as I could,

  “Lisset, I was… I was stabbed through the heart, so I promise you: my son isn’t mistaken. I’m a… I’m a man-eating monster now, and you really shouldn’t get so close to me anymore.”

  Suddenly, Lisset had pulled me out of my chair, and she’d lifted me so high into the air that her neck was right before my eyes, and I could hear her heartbeat just thundering away beside me, which just pounded away at my former security that I could easily restrain myself if I’d only drained from animals. 

  She wasn’t squeezing me as tight as was usual of one of her hugs, and I was so startled by this sudden hug that it seemed she’d rather misunderstood my fears, as she gently patted my head, and began to mollify me of all things,

  “You poor dear, I’m so sorry you had to eat a man. That must have been so hard on you, Mira dear! If I can help in any way, you just tell me dear!”

  “In… in any way…” I repeated dully, for every beat of her heart just made my eyes flash with red, but my sanity came back to me before I did anything rash, and I asked with a terror so strong that I could feel my face draining of colour, “Lisset! You can’t possibly mean… that I can…”

  My voice had rather trailed to a self-accusing whisper, and I felt just dreadful to even say it aloud, for obviously it was just stupid to even think, but I finished with my heart full of shame, “... bite and… and…”

  I couldn’t even finish saying it, but the response that came from Lisset was so absurd that I’d thought it made up, “Yes, Mira dear, like the sheep. I found the poor bugger wobbling around like he’d found wine! Don’t be scared, Mira dear, I’ll stop you if you’re going too far!”

  She then hoisted me such that my lips were against her neck, and my eyes had gone quite permanently hazed with red, but before I went completely delirious from the sound of blood rushing through Lisset’s veins, I barely managed, “Rianna… did she just say… what she just said?”

  Arianna seemed entirely flummoxed, and from the feelings that I was receiving from her, it seemed that the way her pyromania had affected me: my bloodthirst was affecting her! So even though I’d certainly heard her respond in the affirmative in a dozen different ways, I simply couldn’t trust her, so I cast my voice out for my son, for I was sure that he must be nearby enough to hear me at least,

  “Luca… don’t let me… hurt her…”

  Then I was lost, for both the monster inside me, and the monster within me had come to an agreement about the course of action to take, and I was too dreadfully taken to stop either of them. My teeth sank into Lisset’s collar, and the gasp I then heard from her sent me entirely over the edge.

  If the sheep’s blood but for a moment separated from its source was ‘divine’, the only word I knew for Lisset’s blood come directly from her was ‘ambrosiac’, for she was wonderful beyond words, and I greedily sucked down her lifeblood without even a thought in my head left to say ‘control’. All my carefulness, and Lisset just had to barge right past it all, and I could hear encouraging sounds from both Lisset and Arianna, although it had to be said that Lisset’s were subtler by far, for Rianna was being an absolute pervert about my whole ordeal, and this was rather flushing me with a dreadful desire.

  Then, all of a sudden, that sweetness was cruelly stolen from me, and I fought to push myself back up, but I felt strong hands firmly upon me, and I was panting and gasping such already that they were rather bringing me to a felicity I couldn’t have even dreamt of pushing away.

  Luca’s voice came out through that fuzzy happiness, though I could barely string together the words he said,

  “Mercy, but I wish I hadn’t had to see that… are you alright, Miss Fredrickson?”

  I could hear Lisset’s voice “Yes, Luca dear, I’m quite a bit more than alright! If my Bart had been the one to do it, I don’t think I’d have had it in me to stop him. Goodness but I wish he was back, even if in the same way Mira here is. Luca dear, could my Bart come back to me too?”

  Arianna must have heard them talking, because although her voice was a bit huskier than usual, I’d heard her quite well saying something akin to, 

  “Actually, like, I think I can do that, why didn’t I think of it before?! Mira, I’m a lich! For fuck’s sake! What’ve I been dooooing?! Liches summon undead, fuck I’m a ditz sometimes! We’ve even still got hold of their souls, Mira! Just think abou-actually, just stay right like that, wow. Anyhow, I’m absolutely going to try my hand at this!”

  The words Arianna said were sounding incredibly dangerous, and although I wasn’t fast sobering up from literally the best experience of my unlife, I knew somewhere deep inside that something irrevocable had been broken, and it’d happened when I was in no state to argue against whatever it was! Was it that she’d more-or-less promised something incredible to me?

  The blackness swept out, and I felt a terrible dizziness come over me, and as my sight faded from me entirely and I fell to sleep, I heard Lisset ask the most terrifying thing,

  “Bart dear? Is that really you!?”