A/N: And now for something a bit different...
~ With Me, Into The Dark ~
Nine-year-old Lilith had taken a liking to knives, and spent the last half hour in the backyard cutting a pattern of ivy vines into her arms.
She only stopped because a Thestral colt landed beside her and began lapping up the spilled blood. Once there was none left on the grass, the creature began to lick the little witch's bloodied wrist.
By the time her father thought to look for her, the Thestral had finished its meal, and the child's wounds - with a bit of prodding from her magic, which had more of a sense of self-preservation than her conscious mind did - had begun to scab over.
When Caius Goyle tried to shoo the creature away, his daughter threw her arms around it and cried, "But Daddy, I love him!"
Still, he would rather not have such a creature here. And but for the fact that this was the most emotion his daughter had shown toward another living being since her mother's death, he would have rushed the child inside and gotten rid of the creepy death-pegasus once and for all.
As it were, his household gained an unconventional pet.
Caius never saw the knife lying in the grass, and would not find out about his daughter's wounds until much later... when it would be too late to prevent them from becoming scars.
Twenty-four-year-old Lilith knelt before the Dark Lord and turned out her left arm to receive the Mark.
Voldemort frowned at the pattern of scars criss-crossing her proffered wrist.
"Give me your other arm," he commanded. He had never branded any of his followers on the right wrist before, but he didn't care for the aesthetic of having his Mark surrounded by a frenetic tangle of white ivy vines.
The woman did not move to follow his order, however.
"It looks the same, my lord," she said.
Scowling, still unwilling to set his Mark to nest among those unsightly scars, he asked, "Who carved the vines?"
"I did, my lord," she answered.
It was the truth. She had no reason to lie - or, at least, she did not think to lie because she had not understood why he had asked.
"Why?"
"It seemed like the thing to do at the time," she replied with a shrug, not knowing how else to explain it.
She made no attempt to shield her mind, and he caught a flash of the memory as it bubbled up.
Lilith departed from that meeting un-Marked.
~end of scene~