The winter was long and harsh. The doors and windows, frozen shut and piled deep under the drifts of snow, would not even have been opened if they could be. Only the mad and the desperate would venture into the four month storm that winter had become. The sky had wept her frozen tears incessantly since the solstice. The manor was eerily quiet. Not even the babes in the nursery cried out. Everyone had long since cried themselves out. And no one wanted an ice coated face.

All semblance of a normal routine had been abandoned after the first month. No one could bring themselves to do the mundane tasks which made up their day. Maids wandered about in a daze. Some carried dusters or brooms and made negligent passes with them to no real effect, there were only so many places to circulate the dust to in a closed environment. The food that came out of the kitchen was imperfect to say the very least. Distraight chefs couldn't focus long enough to complete the meal properly. Food was regularly burnt to a crisp, or else served next to raw, if not frozen, like everything else.

No one cared, no one noticed a lot of the time. Not even the Lady, usually so meticulous, so precise in the up keep of the manor home. She now spent her days within her chambers. In fact it had been no few months since she had set foot outside of those rooms. She spent her days lounging on a divan, sometimes with an abstract maid attending to her hair. She hadn't seen her twin daughters for weeks, but the infants occupied her mind overwhelmingly, when she focused at all. Their father had fallen victim to pneumonia just shortly before their birth, and she pitied them for that. The Lady had had a very strong relationship with her father, and it had shaped her in many ways.

The birth had been a hard one and in the weeks it took her to recover the house was buried in the sparking snow. In fact the snow had begun on the night she went into labour, that solstice that seemed worlds away instead of a few months. She rearranged the soft, lavender robe she wore to better cover her legs. She glanced to her left and found herself staring into her own silvery gray, eyes in the reflections of her vanity mirror. She noticed her brow was creased in thought and wondered distantly what it was she was thinking about.

The maid next to her head, shook off whatever daydream she'd been involved in and resumed the motions of brushing her mistress' slightly curled, sable hair for a few strokes before losing her thoughts again. The Lady's thoughts were slowly and inexorably drawn back to her daughters, asleep down the hall. A lot of thought she had didn't quite seem to add up, but she couldn't figure out why. The discrepancies were there, she just couldn't figure out where they were, or why these thoughts shouldn't make sense. She caressed the Tiger Eye Jewel that hung in gold around her throat. Her Birthright Jewel, she'd felt a strange aversion to her Purple Dusk recently. The shade of purple reminded her of frozen skin. Surely her own thought must make sense. Why was she confused about what she was thinking? What was she thinking about anyhow? She knew it had been important but she couldn't even remember what it was she'd been thinking about a moment.

She felt that she must surely be upset by such a thing, it simply wasn't normal. But at that moment the young girl combing her hair drew the comb sharply along her scalp. She angrily brushed aside her abstract maid and sent the shuffling woman on to bed. Odd, she normally required her maids to aide her through the motions of preparing for bed. Why had she sent the girl away? She flexed her right hand absently, slipping the snake tooth smoothly in and out of it's sheath beneath her ring finger, also decorated with a piece of Tiger Eye. She absently reflected that it would need milking soon, the venom would begin to thicken soon. Thoughts of her two daughter slid on unnoticed at a deeper level of consciousness, reliving the event's of the past four months and arranging them into one thought, though she didn't know it yet.

Her husbands death from the sudden cold one week before the birth, the snows that began with the first pangs of labour. The snows that hadn't stopped and showed no signs of stopping. The little illnesses the staff had been picking up since the house had been closed. The dozens of little things that had gone wrong. The missing items, forgotten tasks. All the strange behaviour. And with a nearly audible click the thought and everything it entailed took hold of Lady Meriva's mind. She leapt from the divan, grey eyes flashing in shock and outrage.

This was all their fault.

Not even bothering to slip on a pair of slippers as guard against the cold stone floors, she swept out of her room and along down the hallway, into the nursery wing. She stepped through the closed door, it had been weeks since she'd performed even the simplest of Craft and the surge of Power felt alien and lovely. Sparring no more than a glance at the dozing nanny in an overstuffed chair on the far side of the room, she stalked on silent feet up to the huge ornate cradle which held both her sleeping daughters. The babes slept wrapped in each other's tiny arms, the picture of innocence. The thought disgusted Meriva.

Striking her ring finger nail against her thumbnail, she drew the snake tooth all the way out, and contracted the sack until a drop of venom glistened on the tip. They had taken her husband away from her and they were wreaking havoc on her house hold. She would not stand for it. She placed her hand on the pillow beside the sleeping infants.

She didn't even have a second to wonder at pain between her shoulder blades before she collapsed to the floor. She was roughly rolled over and into the moonlight streaming through the window. She watched her maid's expression turn from outrage to shock when she recognised her mistress. "Oh, Lady!" she cried out. "I did not know you. I thought you an assailant all robbed in darkness as you are." Meriva suddenly became aware of the black cloak she had draped about her as she left her rooms. "I will get help, wait here." But she could already feel the sweet embrace of the Mother Night.

***

"I swear, sir, I did not recognise her. I would never have struck at her had I known." The frantic maid ran over her own words in her haste to explain her actions. The head butler crouched over the still form of their former Mistress.

He idly bounced the tiny knife he'd drawn from the Lady's back in the palm of his hand "Do not apologise to me, Cida. I fear that what you've done was necessary." He looked at the young maid seriously, and met with a worried and confused stare he lifted the body's right hand into the circle of his candle light to reveal the still wet and gleaming snake tooth. Cida gasped, "Indeed, child. I fear the confinement had gone to our well loved Lady's head. She must have lost her reason, the Twisted Kingdom may well have claimed her."

"But why would she harm the children? Even in madness?"

"Who knows what she saw in the shattered landscape. Leave it now, Cida. I will make sure that the truth of the matter is known. You will not be penalised for this. You will get good references from this manor at it's closing."

"It closing? But what of the girls, Sir? What will become of them?" Cida asked earnestly, genuinely concerned for their well being.

"I fear that Rhoae and Mirne are no longer our concern."