My sweet Maria, friend and lover and I trusted you. I should have known better - she was deluded, my poor girl, beyond redemption save the one I bring her. She will be beautiful and pure, stripped of the unholy caress of the so-called Dread Father, ripped from the embrace of the Night Mother. Because I love her. And so, it begins.
There is only so much she can take before she stops screaming.
I let her reach that point, every time, because otherwise she will never understand. Never understand how pure it makes her - every pierce, every bruise, every painstakingly slow slide of the blade under her thin, soft, almost translucent skin. I haven't introduced her to fire yet - my favorite friend, the greatest purifier of pain. Scalding, searing it all away to smooth black bone, like I do with every worthy corpse of every soul that falls into my web. But I don't tell her that, that when I'm finished - satisfied she will rest with the Divines - I will burn her body in the pyre above, the lightkeeper's flame unknowingly stoked by my work.
And it is work, because it pains me - to see her face contort, her eyes squeeze shut as she howls soundlessly. She whimpers because of the smell of the Foul Ones - ones that don't deserve to be burned, ones that rot in my cellar. I soothe her, of course. And I tell her I am sorry. It is the only way, but she doesn't understand that. But I am patient, and gentle, and I will bring more souls out of this world into the grace of the Divines, and I will be named a saint.
And my mother will love me for it.