Prologue

In a slowly widening puddle of lifeless moonlight lay a small figure. Swathed in twisted colorless sheets upon a bare mattress in a small, slanted and darkish room, one could discern the palest of female hands wrought about a frail body like ivy on a white pillar. Strewn in glistening rivers were the seemingly endless tresses of her hair, woven around her throat like a noose. In her trance-like sleep she sensed this; her face was downturned into her bare chest, her small arms around her, grasping – the nails burning into the skin of her back. The tears flowed from her clenched eyes in fiery torrents, hot with pain, seeping into her single pillow.

She wrenched in her dreams; her frame bending into itself violently, lips parting mouthing the same words over and over and over again. But her voice was lost – gone, for if you were here in this room, standing in her pitch black corner among the tattered pointe shoes and ruined textbooks, adrift the cobwebs she could never clean, among the lengthy, distorted shadows that never left her, even if you listened she would never divulge her secrets to you, because she did not know them herself.

Her blood was boiling, steaming through her pulsing veins. The hairs on her nape stood erect with undiluted horror. She wrenched again, more violently, her torso moving on its own accord – rising away from the mattress, her head dangling listlessly in its wake, shrouded in gleaming black hair. The sheets fell away from her as she rose to her feet in the center of her bed and slowly stood. Her was body illuminated in the cold aura of the moon's inverse light. A small foot stepped forward, a tear streaked hand felt for the handle, grasped it –

The shriek of grinding metal.

It was not the first time Rain LeClere had woken up to the sound of her own screaming.