Sobs toughen the thin bars of post midnight. A girl, young and lithe, scurries on her knees to find refuge between meeting walls of brick. Her face is tiny, strange-even with it's large and ornamental pieces; her chin buds and slopes over the bone, cresting at a sharp point below white, cushy lips. Her nose long but lovingly brushed, the pink skins draped across easily mend below oversized nostrils, draining then into beds of flat, flat cheeks that feed healthy cheekbones. The girl's look conducts itself stylishly as the apices of nose, lip and eye exist within the portrait of smartly swept-in black hair. Though thin like winter straw, it protects her confidences with a neat curtain of straight bangs and two bars that slip in front of her ears, tracing her face. Large, dry-blue eyes look into the night, dry-blue and ignorant, dry-blue like cloud-bellies, ignorant like words spoken in sleep, meaningful to the dreamer, valueless to the world. She cries, "Please." Her pupils bounce around in her head like marbles in a child's palm as they dissect the approaching shadow.

The approaching shadow speaks. "Please," says the shadow; cool and feminine, airy and sublime. Sharp heels clack on the pavement, this assumed assailant devouring space between she and the girl rattling to pieces against the brick. "I'm sorry," she speaks again. Her words are free of mockery. The woman is a fluid wind of wiry limb and white blonde hair. She's a shiny centerfold, that silk-haired beauty of razor sharp features that lays on furs upon glossy pages. A straight and firm nose that had a tendency to rise below sunken eyes, red eyes depressed in the swirled ribs of the tired and blackened flesh that house them. Either iris blotted red, a moist slush, like when blood meets water, dark at the core with pinker translucent bands easing each ring outward. A pronounced overbite often left pretty teeth feasting on the long lower-half of her very long and devilish mouth, the ends of lip cupped-up like the omniscience and evil of a jester's smile. She hushes the girl, sewing her finger to trembling lip. "Please," once more.

"I would like your name."

There is of-course no response from the dry-blue youngling. She tries to worm her way into the very brick she inhabits, knocking her head against the unforgiving surface as she does. The Red-Eyed Shadow remains still, mindfully watching, bloodmoons reigning, from halved lids they speak, studying in her sleep. "Don't be this way," says the Shadow. "Did I not save you?" The cools threads of her calm unbuckle at the equator of her emotion-seams as anger takes the Shadow. Unhooked fingers are launched at the small girl's bulbed jaw. She shrieks as the Shadow's knived digits sink into her plush skin like frightened fingers into a pillow, the flesh that orbits each finger's depression a ghast, smooth and perfect white as the blood of her face sinks into the bottom of each well, just below the Shadow's fingernails. The Shadow keeps a firm hold on the jaw. "As for me," rattles the Shadow,

"I'm Nazareth."

"A-Aggie!"

Now in the air of her obedience, The Shadow, Nazareth, releases.

"A lovely name," Nazareth says.

"Thank you..."

"You're very welcome. 'Agatha'?"

"Agnus."

"Too-old a name for pretty faces."

"Th-....Thank you."

The exchange a natural fallacy; Little Agnus wears it while Nazareth plays it. The blonde rises through stretch, yawning the decidedly-bland meeting away while turning eyes over her shoulder. The embittered captive, Aggie, looks up with dry-blue eyes, cloud-belly eyes, ignorant eyes, ignorant and senselessly frightened eyes. Behind the pair lay mismatched pieces of severed forms. Arms, fingers, teeth, halved torsos and gaping maws, final moments horridly stretched from top lip to un-hinged chins. Neth's heeled boots had left tracks. Upon the cracked gravel a dance routine of blood-left steps traced her movements as she'd stepped through the crowd of once-men and carved them up. Nazareth's tired gaze preens over the scene as if it weren't. She's far away. Inside the bubble of passed-time, inside her own skin, but it wasn't, for she was inside the skin of a craftsman, an artisan and master of dismemberment. She remembers the pieces of their bodies squishing against the soft, dew-soaked pavement. Cleanly severed slabs and slivers of meat, their blood spilling and dripping from the torn vein and ligment; oh, the sound! Like the wringing of a dishtowel, like tiny, obese clouds emptying their bladders on little spots of earth.

Nazareth turns to Aggie, shocked.

"I saved you.

Why?"