Eh, at least I know I'm continuing the proud tradition of distracting people when they shouldn't be, WriterGreenReads, that's happened to me too many times to count.

Also, I forget when, where, or why, but I actually have been on a tiny plane such as Arya described last chapter. It was when I was a kid on vacation, and it really was something in the range of a twelve-seater plane –if I remember correctly, it was for local flights or something similar and we were only in it for a few hours. It might have been in Utah or Wyoming? Can't remember exactly, but I remember the surroundings were arid and dry and we went over some mountains and it was in the western US. It would've been ten years ago or more (I turned ten on the Wyoming trip, and I was seven in Utah) so I think those memories are, sadly, gone past retrieval.

May 20th, 2021

Arya's POV:

People always talked about intense, dangerous situations as a linear storyline. "I made my choice, so I did such-and-so."

Reality though, was a bit different. There was no cutoff point, usually, no "do-or-die" moment that everything hinged upon. The world didn't slow to a crawl as I philosophically pondered each and every possible outcome that my actions might have. It was quick and fast and it didn't end with my choices.

Example A, me currently hiding in an old haunted(?) church, Rex's handle loose in my grip and every nerve on edge.

I'd "made" my decision, to stay here and hopefully slice up a Kishin. Now I just had to follow through with it, which was easier said than done. At any moment, I could acknowledge that this was a bit too much for me and stride out the door, Rex's blade flat across on my shoulders. Nothing in the world stopped me. If I chickened out, I could run. We were right next to the doors, and from there it was a straight shot across the smooth paved road to freedom. The doors were solid wood, sure, but it was really old and the hinges were brittle –a quick chop from Rex, or even a kick of my own, could probably win my way to freedom. Even if the Kishin were dead set on stopping me from leaving, it'd be hard-pressed for the task.

So I could flee. That was an option that was available to me.

And it was a seriously weird feeling. I might be many things, but I did pride myself on at least two of them –I wasn't an idiot, and I was good at surviving. In the past two anime worlds I had traversed, that had stood me in good stead, but things were different now. In Hetalia, things had gone something along the lines of "Oh sweet, I'm in an anime, yay~…oH SHIT WAIT PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO KILL ME WHAT THE FUCK-", and in Black Butler it had kinda been "I wanna go home now please…oh OH WAIT NO STOP I DON'T WANNA FIGHT YOU FUCK DON'T KILL ME AAAAAAAAAH TRY ME BITCH I'LL KILL YOU BEFORE YOU KILL ME DON'T THINK THAT I WON'T AAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

In either case, the threats had come to me, and if I had wished to keep my innards where they belonged, I'd have best fought back. My options had been rather limited between those two choices, since anything but extreme usage of self-defense had meant that I would have otherwise died an immediate and painful death.

Now I was deliberately seeking out various threats, intentionally, with armed malice aforethought. It was sixty kinds of stupid and there was a humming itch under my skin that told me to just get out of there you fucking idiot, you ain't no shounen hero! Live your life as far away from this shit as possible! You can totally find your way back on your own!

Right sentiment, I supposed, but technically morally wrong actions. As a survivor who cut her eyeteeth on avoiding conflicts as much as possible (despite an apparent magnetism for trouble, so I ran into them anyways), deliberately running after danger felt about as natural as putting a pig in a parlor. This wasn't right. I should not be here, actively killing things, I should be among my safe, secure magic books.

Granted, I had sort've-killed before. I'd stabbed/shot an immortal, and collaborated with others to kill someone, shot at people from a distance on a dark night and maybe killed them, and done my fair share of zombie-bashing (okay maybe the Bizarre Dolls weren't literally zombies, but other names for animated rotting corpses that chomped down on the living and could be killed via headshot were kinda thin on the ground), but I had never definitively struck the final blow that resulted in death of a living sentient creature in a way that I could see.

Well, Kishin Eggs weren't technically very sentient, but still. Big moment for me.

Now, mind, I was not a coward. I was smart, and even though that sounded like a cheap justification, there was at least a subtle difference. Being smart meant that you avoided danger if you could –being a coward meant that you couldn't handle it if it came and would avoid it at all costs. My smarts told me that survival was a lovely thing, and I was threatening mine by being here tonight. But neither could I leave, A) because duty and B) because I needed Kishin souls to turn Rex into a Death Scythe. Nothing more complex than that, but since obeying those danger-avoidance instincts was the only reason that I was still amongst the living (if battered and scarred), it put the fur up on my back –so to speak– to ignore them now.

But anyways, back to my earlier point. I had so many choices now, and making them by no means finalized my situation. I could stay here and be attacked, but what then? I could step out into the middle of the church and draw the Kishin into the open so we could trade blows in a freer setting –but what gave me space also would do the same for the beasty, so maybe that wasn't smart. Then again, if I stayed tucked-away and hidden like this, it might give me the slip or box me into a corner, being as, though the windows were glass and the door was barely a barrier at all, the walls were of thick stone bricks that wouldn't be much minded to move just on my say-so. If we did start trading blows, how should I go about it? Which way should I cut –diagonal, horizontal, vertical, what? Probably not vertical, I didn't have the upper arm strength for that even if Rex was a very heavy, semi-magical weapon. Unless our Kishin was thin and wispy and yielded well to previous cuts, I wasn't risking it.

That brought up another range of inquiries. How should I slash it? From the side, top-down, on the left, or favoring the right? It was going to defend itself, that was a given, but how so? How could I counter that? Could I use the space to my advantage, or would that be foolish on this thing's home court? Was it even its home court, or just a quick refuge to take place in?

People really don't understand the kind of heavy thinking that goes into a fight, especially when you have very little idea what you're doing and had no kind of backup whatsoever. There was no plot to any of this, no kind of self-assured "Yes, of course that's how this is going to work out, because I'm the hero~!" that I got from anime and fiction. There was no meta knowledge of knowing how this event was supposed to go in canon. There was no meta knowledge of the characters involved, either.

This was me, a semi-average American teen with a buster sword she only vaguely understood how to use, about to try and kill a bloodthirsty monster in an old graveyard. I'd "made" my choice, and I remade and reconsidered it with every skritch and skitter of bugs and birds echoing among the empty hall. Despite how tiny the church was, the acoustics of the chapel made the silence seem echoingly huge, like a vast concert hall, and I was honestly worried about alerting the Kishin Egg with my breathing or the subtle sounds of my movement as I flexed from foot to foot to keep my muscles from locking up.

Rex was quiet, which I both was and wasn't grateful for. One the one hand, I didn't want any chattering from him, mental or otherwise, that might alert the Kishin Egg to our presence or distract me, but on the other hand, we'd been waiting her for a solid two or three hours at least –it was too dark to check my watch and I certainly wasn't going to flash a light to find out– and absolutely nothing had happened. True darkness had fallen outside, and the crickets chirped and the various nighttime birds made their nighttime calls with mundane regularity. If this part of town hadn't been abandoned, we'd have heard the sounds of cars rushing by every so often, a lack that had initially had me on edge, but now was something we were both used to.

The interior of the church was chilly, enough so that I was very glad of my jeans and jacket and sensible sneakers, but staring at the darkness and listening for a monster, for anything weird, had gotten boring after about the first hour. Nothing was happening –and while I knew something might at any second, that didn't mean that the hours we'd already spent here got any less mind-numbing.

It really was dark inside the church, and cold, too. Not so much that I could see my breath, but enough that my hands felt icy where they held Rex, tip resting quietly on the floor. The moon hadn't risen yet, so that even after our eyes had adjusted, the pews were still just bulks of shadow against more shadow, with lighter smears of the grey walls and slick black blankness where the arched windows were. I rocked on my heels a few times, but didn't dare pace, my movements limited to shifting my weight and flexing my fingers to make sure I didn't lose my grip due to cold or stiffness.

God, it was boring, and the simultaneous stress of knowing something could try to whack my head off at any second was a particularly vexing addition. I couldn't just zone out and wait.

Eventually, I noticed that light was beginning to ooze into the chapel. The windows weren't slick panes of blackness any longer, but brightening with a blue-black color. If I strained my ears as hard as I could, I could hear familiar, faint, huffing laughter in the distance, and guessed that the moon had finally started climbing into the sky. About damn time, too: as another hour crawled by, and I meant crawled, the light of it began to glimmering through the windows, silver-gold and surprisingly bright after so long in near-complete darkness.

There was an irregular hiss of wind through the trees, something quiet that was heard more in the rustle of what leaves remained and the Spanish moss rather than the wind itself gliding over branches. It ebbed and flowed through the night, a bit eerie in its way, but only if you let it prey on your imagination: otherwise, it was a slumberous addition to the night, calling up images of bobbing branches and quiet gardens.

It was when one of these infrequent gusts died out that I heard it. A noise, so small and faint that at first it blended completely with the wind –and when I finally picked it up, for a second, I thought it was the wind, or a twig being scraped against a window somewhere.

The irony of such a thought was not lost on me, when the wind finally oozed into nothing and I still heard that faint, fragile, sickly noise, scraping gently against wood. Chills that had nothing to do with the unheated church raced down my arms, and I lifted Rex from the ground as my grip on him tightened.

We weren't alone.

At first, the noise remained faint, fragile, the scraping sort of skitter you got when you dragged a thin twig against something smooth. It was a short noise, like a nail scratching an itch or a shovel digging a grave, but it was repeated over and over again, with long pauses in between, like the maker of that noise had to gather their strength to make it all over again. As we listened, it got louder, and we started to pinpoint where it was coming from, rather than just hearing it and knowing it for a new noise that didn't blend in the night.

It was coming from behind us.

More specifically, it was coming from behind us and to the right, where the church doors were. My back was pressed against that entrance wall, and I thanked my lucky stars that there were no windows in the front of the church, because I wasn't sure if my heart could take looking outside right now and seeing whatever was at the door –or worse, seeing whatever was at the door leering down at me from the other side of the glass.

As though emboldened by our lack of response, the scratching grew louder still. Now it was a rasping, dragging, hissing sound, like drawing a file over wood, but in a higher, softer register. It was a noise like someone scraping their nails against the door, but not in a way that anyone would –not a living someone who cared about splinters under their nails or the hair-raising feeling of clawing your fingernails so firmly against something that they pulled against your nail bed.

And yet it still wasn't a loud sound, or a demanding one –it was plaintive in a way, like someone at the last gasp of their strength begging for sanctuary. If it was just done once, and I had no idea about what very probably prowled this area, I probably would've opened the door for whatever poor soul was on the other side –but I did know what was here, and this plaintive, pathetic, dragging noise wasn't repeated just once. It was over and over and over again, like whoever was on the other side of those doors was clawing out their last each and every time –and then doing it again. Normal people didn't sustain this level of pathos for that long.

My heart pounded a double-beat against my ribs as that scratching changed, becoming a slow hiss of something over metal –the brass over the door's handle and keyhole. Now the noises were irregular, choppy, little blunt clicks of a softer substance against metal, accompanied by more idle scrapes and taps on the wood. There was something about that delicate scratching that had my heart leaping up into my throat –something almost loving, or playful, as though a creature with thin, thin fingers and long sharp nails was twirling their fingers around the keyhole, fidgeting them in the lock just to hear that sound, like a nonverbal giggle. Like it knew we were there, and hearing this, and wanted us to know it knew that.

I didn't want to look away from the doors, but I still risked a glance down to Rex's blade, where he briefly flashed over into his reflection, giving me an uncertain, plaintive look. He obviously didn't trust his ability to telepathically communicate with me, and he wasn't going to try talking unless I gave him a signal that that was okay: and he had no idea of what to do.

Somehow, oddly enough, that nervous look pulled my wire-tight nerves back into configuration. Somehow, the helpless look of expectation made me take a deep breath and roll my shoulders, settling myself. Somehow, the way he was so visibly relying on me to come up with an idea here calmed my racing pulse.

Maybe those noises were more than a bit creepy, but I wasn't out here and alone. I had Rex, and he had me. We had each other, and by god, I wasn't going to disappoint someone who looked at me like that, who put their trust in me like he did. My responsibility towards Rex settled me: I'd sworn to make him a Death Scythe, and by all that was freakish and unholy, I wasn't going to let something spook me into breaking that promise.

It was a very good thing I'd glanced down, because when I was in the very act of looking back up again, there was an audible click and the heavy door was pushed open with another ultra-theatrical creak, flooding the church with moonlight. I stepped hastily away from the wall, bringing Rex down and to my side, but even after calming my nerves, even after knowing that something was about to happen, I still jumped and let out a small shriek as an adult woman popped her head through the open door, holding onto the other one with one hand.

"Hello." she said, grinning broadly as she looked directly at us. I had time to register her dark hair, her conservative pale clothes, the black choker at her neck, and her surprisingly normal appearance –nails included– and feel nonplussed. She looked nothing like a ghost –no blood spatters, no disheveled clothing, no missing head. She wasn't even transparent. She was the one we were looking for, right? Not like, some weird tourist or something?

Then my veins flooded with ice as I realized that she had known exactly where we were –as in, she had popped her head in facing us, and didn't seem at all surprised to see a teenager standing in a dark chapel with a buster sword.

Maybe she just likes video games, my brain nonsensically quipped as I leaped aside on sheer reflex, away from the wall –at the same moment she lunged for us with a bloodcurdling shriek, raising her razor-nailed hands. Nope.

I wasn't going for tournament rules or sparring, immediately swinging Rex up in a full-blooded diagonal strike aimed at her center mass the second I landed on the ground again. My nerves were on fire with adrenaline, and if Rex wasn't feather-lights in my hands, he was still damn maneuverable –revulsion shuddered down my spine at how easily we cut into her, like her flesh and bone was nothing but fabric and dust as a great gaping rent opened in the woman's side and she was slammed back against the wall with enough force to make her head fly back against it.

I didn't like that it was easy.

I didn't like that I could injure someone so much, so easily.

I swallowed down my gorge and tightened my grip on Rex as the woman staggered upright, moving like our blow had dazed her as blood poured down her side, one arm cradling the wound as she dug her other hand into the wall, hard enough to gouge lines in the stone. Her eyes blazed hatred at us, but she –wobbled as she stood upright, moving drunkenly, like all her joints hadn't quite learned to work together as a team. I wasn't quite sure what to do from here as we measured each other up in those precious few seconds of recovery, though –I was used to reactive fighting, and taking the initiative made me feel exposed, like I was giving the enemy room to plan.

When she lunged for us again, her head fell off.

I shrieked again, more from surprise than from squeamishness, and had to contend with dancing out of the way of her head as it rolled down the aisle while also guarding against her body as it lunged for me.

"What the fuck?!" Rex cried from my hands as I awkwardly parried the flashing blows from her hand, the other arm still pressed against her wound, shuffling backwards and trying very hard not to find her head with my feet.

"Well-" I took a huge, risky step back as the headless body moved in and down to try and cut under my guard, flailing at me viciously. "-ngh, she was decapitated, wasn't she?!"

"Then why did her head stay on before-"

"Rexthisisnotthetimetoargueaboutit!" I yelped in one breath, slicing him hard at the woman's headless body and trying to lop off her offensive arm and hand, but thwarted as she jumped back out of range. "Shit, what now?!"

"Um…" Rex said, and I groaned as the woman crouched to try another rush. Wait, if her head's off, then where's the head now-

Right as I had that thought, my retreating ankle knocked back into something round and irregularly-shaped, and I barely had time to make a squeamish face before I felt the head against my ankle move. I'd seen this bit in movies and immediately squealed, lifting my foot up and then kicking backwards as hard as I could –sure enough, interrupting the head what felt like mid-chomp as I twisted to hold Rex over my body like a shield, blocking the downward strike of the woman's body's hand at the same time. I strained against the force of her body, but almost as soon as she hit me, she wobbled again, and my brain clicked two and two together.

If I had actually had the time and breathing space, to be fair, I'd have thought of it earlier, but the main bulk of my concentration had been deservedly focused on, you know, not being disemboweled by the creature in front of me. But when I kicked backwards at her head, hitting it solidly and launching it off to who-knew-where, the body lurched. In other words, this woman –this Kishin Egg– still needed her head to function. Or at the very least, it was a vulnerability.

Eh. I mentally shrugged. Better than nothing.

"Rex," I said as the body recovered almost immediately and we both stepped back to lunge together again, me doing my best to fend off that sharp-nailed hand with his blade and the Kishin Egg doing her best to use her irregularly-shaped body and maneuverability to duck under him and kill me. "-could you be an absolute doll and tell me where her head went?"

I yelped and ducked under a ferocious swipe.

"Like right now?!" I cried.

"Um-" Rex probably didn't have a much better angle than I did, since I was obviously holding him in front of my body to block blows, but he at least could look in the opposite direction. "-ah, by the altar! I think she hit it and bounced down –her head's on the second step down on the dais!"

"Didn't need that many details but thanks!" I gasped, and was then confronted of the problem of how to get to and destroy the head when the body would probably punch its hand through my chest the moment I exposed my back to it. "Ah, shit, okay, I'm gonna throw you back there and you need to destroy the head!"

"But-"

"Don't argue!"

I felt rather than heard Rex's assent, and took two giant steps backwards before whirling the giant buster sword behind me and away. As soon as my hands were free, they shot to my waist, pulling out my Colt and aiming it point-blank at the charging, headless body. As I pulled the hammer back, I was suddenly confronted by the realization that I was about to be in a lot of pain if Kishin Eggs were immune to regular weapons, but fired anyways.

Blam!

Well, the good news was that I hit her. Dead-on, actually, right in the chest, right over the heart, the kind of perfect insta-kill shot I'd dreamed of making at the beginning of my gunmanship, and never mind the fact that this was basically point-blank range. Bad news?

Didn't slow her down at all.

I hissed in panic and stepped as far back as I dared, out of the range of her swipe as we came within mere feet of each other, and before she could try for me again I pulled the hammer with my free hand and tilted my Colt down, at her knee.

Blam!

Another smoking bullet casing tinkled to the floor as I took several more hasty steps back, and I wheezed in relief when the headless body staggered a little as it tried to keep lunging after me. I didn't even dare do something as simple as dodging, because Rex was somewhere behind me, taking care of the head, and there was a high chance that if I did dodge to the side, the Kishin Egg would see him as the greater threat to her (comparative) life and limb, and go for him instead of me, which kinda ruined my whole plan of defending him and distracting her until he whacked the head into a messy pulp.

Speaking of which…

As I swayed out of the way of her clawing hand as best I could, readying my Colt for another shot at her other knee, there was a gruesome, meaty crunch, like breaking open a watermelon. The Kishin Egg's stiffened, and I winced backwards, raising my free arm, as her form suddenly darkened, turning into a black cutout of a person before that silhouette exploded into inky banks of darkness. They seethed and whirled around me for a few moments, before rapidly shrinking inwards again, condensing in a heartbeat into a roughly apple-sized glowing red orb, hovering above the floor at chest height.

Unlike Shaula's smooth purple Witch's soul from before, this was a deep, angry-looking red. Flaky protrusions in a darker red-black, like scales or scabs, crept up its side almost all the way up to the gently-undulating tail at the top, and in the center was a blot of red, darker than the surrounding glow of the soul, but lighter than the crust creeping in from the edges of the orb. Having never seen a Kishin Egg from this close up, I was fascinated and disturbed to see the faint flares radiating outwards from that central clot of red, like fine hairs or fibers.

"Ew." I said to no one in particular, before looking behind myself and holstering my Colt as I saw Rex kneeling in human form by the altar, practically on top of a bloody smear from the now-vanished head. "You okay?"

"Yeah." Rex stood up, massaging his shoulder for reasons that probably had to do with his partial manifestation of his Weapon form. He stared at the floating, malignantly-glowing orb in front of me as he walked back down the aisle towards the both of us. "I…guess we did it."

"Guess nothing." I said, companionably slapping him on the back as he came to stand beside me. "That there is a Kishin Egg that we harvested. No guessing involved."

"No proper procedure, either." he muttered, his shoulders sinking, and I raised an eyebrow.

"Rex." I said, slinging an arm around him and pointing gently to the red soul. "Dead Kishin Egg. Live meister and Weapon. Nonexistent damage to the structure around us. We won."

He gave me a look that was thankfully more pitiable than frustrated. "But we didn't even work together-"

I interrupted that statement with an ungraceful snort.

"Dude, you kidding?" I asked, making him blink. "I just relied on you more than I've relied on anyone in months. What do you think would've happened to me if you didn't smash that head? I had a gun with five shots that needs a cocked hammer between each one, and no way to defend myself when I reloaded. I trusted you to get the job done before I found myself defenseless, just as I meant you to trust me when I defended you. This was teamwork out the wazoo."

Rex blinked again, clarity starting to dawn.

"Yeah." he said slowly, and his shoulders straightened under my arm as his chin lifted up. "Yeah!"

"There we go. Just to make sure we're on the same page." I said with a pleased pat to his chest, and unslung my arm. "Now please eat or absorb or whatever else you need to do to get rid of this godforsaken thing. It's starting to creep me out."

"I eat my souls." Rex said, in what sounded disturbingly like some kind of suburban health nut who was bragging about their food choices. Part of me was tempted to ask him if he only ate a certain brand, but I refrained, and watched in morbid fascination as he grabbed the thing –which certainly looked like it was rotting or flaking or otherwise unwholesome– and swallowed it whole. No chewing, no nothing, just one solid gulp. I'd seen that with Soul in the anime, but it was surprisingly bleh to watch in real life. The anime really didn't capture the sheer level of repulsion that Kishin Egg souls radiated.

Rex exhaled shortly after his gulp, then looked at his hands.

"Huh." he said.

"Huh?" I parroted.

"It feels…weird." Rex said vaguely, wiggling his fingers. "I've never eaten a soul before."

"I figured." I said blandly, deadpan, and he flushed.

"Ah, I mean, um…" Rex sheepishly tugged at his earring. "It's just a new feeling, I guess. Kinda like I'm suddenly not tired anymore, even though we've been up for so long? Like it revitalized me? I could feel it…making me stronger?"

"Like you just chugged a five-hour energy and it hit you right away?" I asked, and he blinked at me. "Uh, like you chugged a soda and the sugar rush hit you right away?"

"Yeah." Rex said, nodding comfortably once he understood my explanation. "A lot like that, I guess. Anyways, it was kinda a weird new feeling."

"Well, get used to it!" I said, slapping his back again. "Because we're going to be doing that a lot. Well, you're going to be doing that a lot –eating souls, that is. We're a badass Kishin-slaying team, and nothing's going to stand in our way from here on out!"

I paused, then hastily clarified.

"Eh, barring weird twists of fate and sudden revival of enemies."

"Was the caveat really necessary?" Rex asked as we started towards the half-open doors, and I laughed sheepishly, rubbing the back of my neck.

"You ever heard the whole 'Never say things can't get any worse, because then things will immediately get worse' thing?" I asked. "Like the superstition that by suggesting something is inevitable, you tempt fate to fuck you over? Barring one of us making a catastrophic mistake, I plan to have everything planned out, so the only way things can go horribly wrong is that if I plan wrong, or if something unexpected comes to fuck everything up. Hence me adding the caveat that nothing inside of what I have already planned for can stop us, because everything else can probably fold us like a deck chair."

"I…really don't get your logic sometimes." Rex said after a moment, which was fair, coming from someone who had probably been imprisoned by the shackles of anime tropes his whole life. "But whatever, if it makes you happy and nothing bad will come of it, you do whatever crazy things that you think will help us."

"That's the spirit." I said, then put out an arm to stop him as we stood on the doorstep of the church. Rex looked at me blankly, and I grinned at him and then took a deep, satisfied breath, closing my eyes.

"Smell that?" I asked rhetorically, opening them again. "That is the sweet, sweet scent of victory. As of right now, there's nothing that anyone in EAT has done that we haven't also done, just with less frequency. We killed a Witch, and took a Kishin Egg's soul. We've got this."

"I guess we do." Rex agreed, looking up at the cackling crescent of the moon with a soft, hesitant smile. "Yeah, I…guess we do. It's a nice feeling."

"Indeed." I clapped my freezing hands together and rubbed them vigorously. "Anyways, let's get to that house and call in our ride. The sooner we can tie up all these loose ends, the sooner we can be on a plane and asleep for the ride home."

1-Spooooooky:

This one was a mixture of various bits and pieces, with a ghost template layered over it all. I pulled most of the murder/origin story from the movie Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

The Kishin itself is otherwise pulled from the urban legend of a girl with a ribbon around her neck, which, when removed, has her head fall off. The earliest versions showed up in 1824, by Washington Irving of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow fame, and Alexandre Dumas, of Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo fame. They "have similar plots," (I wasn't able to find a description of Dumas's) and discuss a woman with a broad black (velvet) band around her neck, clasped by diamonds, who follows a man home to his apartment during the French Revolution, and is revealed to be dead the next morning. After being summoned, the police recognize her as a woman executed by the guillotine. They pull off the velvet band, and her head falls to the floor. It's unknown if Dumas was inspired by Irving, or if they both pulled from the same source.

Another variation, told in 1970 in a children's book, talks of a woman who married a man that grew increasingly frustrated with how she never removed the black velvet ribbon around her neck. Eventually, he cuts the ribbon with sewing scissors while she sleeps, and her head rolls off. Yet another children's-tale version has a girl with a green ribbon grow up with and marry a boy, never taking her ribbon off, until they are both ready to die of old age, and he removes it –at which point, again, her head falls right off. I read a nearly identical story in which the ribbon was blue, and I've heard others where it was red, and so on, and so forth. If you've got a regional variation I didn't mention, please share!

10.56 AM, USA Central Time