The Village had once been a happy place, filled with life and laughter, but that had ended a good many years ago. Or, at the absolute least it had once been a perfectly ordinary place, nowhere could be seen as being perfect, but the matter of comparability meant that things were inarguably worse than they had once been, not that there were many who could remember how it was. Now, it was a dark, sad place, one that had been tinted with a complete and total sorrow, a fear that had settled so completely over the area that it was simply a fact of life, as tragic as that is as a concept. Even those villagers who did still live in the area were tainted by darkness, a fear that made it all too easy to keep them from straying beyond the forest surrounding it. A valid fear too, as the dangers lurking in the darkness, hidden in the trees, waiting just beneath the water were all very, very real. It was the isolation that came from this that allowed them to be so entirely trapped beneath the wing, literal and figurative, of Mother Miranda, the leader of the Village and prophet of the supposed Black God. Even in their devotion, this did very to save them from their inevitable fates. Death loomed over the Village on black wings.
One would think that, if the Village was so dangerous and altogether sorrowful, they would have done all that the could to flee, but the fear of a potential demise was outweighed by the very real, far more immediate fear of the monsters that lurked just out of sight. Bestial things, stripped of their humanity and left as something altogether wrong. There was nothing in the Village that had not been ruined, distorted and twisted into something unrecognisable, and this did not exclude those who ruled over the madness.
Now, the priestess Miranda did not rule the Village alone, and so she had the duty symbolically shared between her and her children, the Lords of the Four Houses. The first of these was the fearsome vampiress Alcina Dimitrescu who lived a life of hedonistic luxury in her castle with her daughters, feasting on the flesh and blood of those who drew too near. The second was the mysterious, tragic dollmaker Donna Beneviento, hidden away in her manner by the waterfall, driving those who visit absolutely mad. The third was a pitiful sight, the former doctor of the Village, Salvatore Moreau had been twisted into something grotesque and utterly unrecognisable from the man he once was. The fourth and final was Karl Heisenberg, an ego driven madman who spent his days hauled up in his Factory, working on clandestine experiments that never should see the light of day.
It all seemed like something out of a book, utterly impossible in every way, and yet this was the reality that Mia Winters landed herself in, and she was not happy about it, not one little bit. Fortunately, if there was anything even slightly fortunate in her utterly woeful and altogether unfortunate circumstances, she was altogether far too accustomed to impossible possibilities and so she did not seem nearly as flapped by things. Instead, she was left with having to deal with the unpleasant matter of having very rational feelings. Rational feelings were, as the name suggested, tragically justified too so she did not have any excuses or means of justifying them beyond having to admit that things were bad again, just as things were beginning to seem like it could finally take on a semblance of normal.
Nobody could fault the poor woman for being a little frustrated, she had just had a hell of a night and was then stuck trudging through the snow. Over the past week and a half she had noticed something deeply wrong with her husband and, fearing that the mould had finally overridden his mind, she had been doing her best to keep an eye on Ethan for as long as she could without worrying him. The poor man was already caught up in his own worries, some of which were admittedly more valid than others, so it just felt outright selfish to burden him with her own. Timing was a tricky thing, one that seemed to be laughing at her at that moment, as she had finally made up her mind to confront the man about this before the gunfire started and he was shot down. To make matters worse, rather than being given even a scrap of explanation as to why her husband had been murdered - and it was murder, damn it all, Chris might have tried to insist some sort of moral correctness to the order but it was insanity - right before her eyes, she had to instead deal with her child and - thankfully - herself being dragged off to goodness only knew.
Not that they even reached their destination as, because why not at this point, the cars so conveniently crashed before she could convince the exasperatingly silent men to give her even a single answer. It had seemed that she had been so very close to this too, and she could thank the need for practiced people skills that she had honed in the past for that. Too bad it was all for nothing.
Her phone had offered no signal on the trek away from the wreck, and so had been stuffed back into her pocket in case she needed it to take the role of a flashlight since it didn't seem to be much good at anything else at the moment. Without any means of a map, all she had to rely on to guide her was a series of footprints leading away from the road. She presumed that it must have been Chris or one if his men, and so - she prayed, having found no sign of an infant in the vehicles - would be the most logical place for her daughter, sweet little Rosemary, to have been taken. If she could just find her child, maybe things could feel a little less terrible and she could possibly even have the chance to understand what had happened.
And this, dear reader, is why we found Mia Winters dropping the last little way into the supposed Village Of Shadows, and this story could truly begin.