Introduction

Henrietta Crystal was a too-good-girl, raised by a loving aristocratic Father in the Realm otherwise known the Dark Forest ? far into a different plane of existence other than Rhy?Din. She lived a good life ? and a fantastically peaceful one at that, and despite the lacking of a Mother-figure she turned out to be quite the Lady and the apple of every man?s eye. Long raven black hair with brilliant green eyes, a tall and thin woman with unrivaled beauty and intelligence in her Father?s Kingdom. She was kind, gentle and totally in love with another noble man that was far older than she. He was fourty-five years old ? while she was merely a twenty-one-and-a-half year old woman and of course, these kind of marriages between the noble and royal were frequently used in attempts into marrying higher up the hierarchy.

Henrietta did it for? Love.

She was marrying DOWN the aristocratic food chain ? lowering her standards ? fending away the better ? the wealthy ? the younger ? the beautiful over something as small and insignificant as love. Yes, she was indeed na?ve little woman.

Their marriage was spectacular and the wedding dress had to be scrapped for her stomach had already been bulging at now twenty-two, readying to give birth to her first born. She wished for a healthy baby but longed for a beautiful girl?

It was never meant to be.

Now she lay dead in the coffin with her stomach deflated and a small wrapped up silken body in her arms? She was cleaned up good considering on the conditions they found her: dead in her room, with her legs open wide and her night gown torn and covered in blood, with a dead baby lying unmoving and grey down on the floor below the bed.

Her face?s muscles frozen in a contortion of an eerie smile.

Both Mother and Daughter died in child birth.

And as the coffin was lowered into the soil, families and friends too numerous to name and recognize in the dark attires they wore, standing before that hole in the ground that the coffin now would finally lay forever.
Pattering soil could be heard from outside of the coffin as it struck the black polished varnished wood of the lid. And with each thump it grew duller? And duller?The coffin creaked until the wood settled under the weight and the vibrations of footsteps led away. The woman and her child inside of the coffin could hear nothing now, for the soil ate away the outside world?s liveliness? And the rain had already begun to sink into the coffin and fill it up with its wet rot.

He sat in the bath scrubbing away until his skin ran red with a rash ? the muck was gone but there was something far dirtier laying under that grime. The husband sat in the bathroom, the room was wide, expansive and completely white ? the bathroom itself was lit up by a great chandelier hanging high above his head, and the tub was old and metal (Victorian in it?s design) full of hot dirty water up to the brim and leaking with the erratic movements he made of the dirty cloth scrubbing against his arm, chest and up to his neck for fifth time.

?There is no such thing as ghosts,? He repeated himself in that constant echo, cloth now wiping across his face.

?Is there such a thing??

?Can the dead come to life??

?Shut up! Fool! There is no way for??

?? Then maybe I am going nuts??

?Finally,?

?Yes, finally.?

The cloth was rubbed across his face again and with a loud resounding sigh sunk back into the tub with the cloth still clinging to his face, fingers gently moving across the sides of the tub to lay rest and his feet rising up to hang over the sides.

A smile passed his lips.

?The bitch is dead, she cannot hurt you. The dead do not walk the earth ? what was I thinking?? Yes he did sound amused and there was a deep dark rumble within his chest, his arms shook and his head arched with his back? He cracked up into a guffaw of a sinister deafening tone.

?Why??

That mirth was cut clean off with a blade of dread ? not a single sound came from him then, just the bathwater rippling about him as he leant forward and slowly removed that cloth clinging to his ruggedly good facial features. Of course it would have appeared good-looking, that was unless he was not looking directly at the face of the woman he murdered.

Again, for the second time that day.



There she was completely physical before him and sitting in the bath between his legs, naked, and fresh. Her long hair wet and hanging down over her cheeks and over the naked flesh that he once tainted, into gaining the child he murdered. Her knees were drawn up to her breasts ? and her eyes stared directly into his ? bloodied, red? She looked like a curious child with her head canted to one side, face showing not the tiniest sign of remorse or pain.

Eyes wide.

Glaring?

Those paled lips parted.

?Why?? They uttered again.




A frantic scream and a mad dash, he erupted from the closed doorway in a sprint ? swinging the door open and not caring even if the door cracked almost from its hinges. He ran down the long-long hallway naked and every other four meters he ran past a window ? large and arched and gothic in its appearance. The ground was layered thickly in a soft red carpet ? and the walls had no design to them, just bare bricked walls further deepening that gothic thesis.

There was a reflection in each window, strangely.

Waiting for him to pass every time, her head swung into watching him fly by, screaming madly with his arms waving about in a crazed fleeing dance.

Another window: ?Why??

Another window: ?Why??

Another window: ?Why??

?Leave me alone!?

?Your dead!?

?Dead!?

?D-E-A-D!?




?DEEEEEAAAAAAAAAA-?

A door ? he ran into it head long and cracked his forehead against the wood so hard it cut off the word before it had ended, his body recoiled and his mind went numb, his eyes rolling back and he fell into a slump upon the ground shaking violently and foaming at the mouth.
Standing above him in that ever darkening view with double ? no ? triple vision; each cracked perception he saw HER, uttering silently that special word he plagued her with? Echoing out in a delay moments later in a deep, slow motioned voice before he finally passed out...

And awoke moments later in another scream ? leaning up on a rather large king sized-bed ? the four poster hanging down long drapes of black netting and purple curtains; closed of course, moving ? turning his head and body about on the bed like a writhing fish out of water, ?Wha?! No!? Ah!? Such words of alarm passed him with each twist and turn.

?Where am-?Ka-pause, and then a violent shooting pain erupted from his stomach. It sent him reeling into yet again one of his death screams, moving to the edges of the bed and parting the curtains to only stare down upon a brick wall surrounding all four sides. Even the ceiling was low enough for him not to escape.

His stomach bulged out?

?AAaaaargh!?

The impressions of fingers stretching out just above his belly button ? his lower right portion of his ribcage?

?M-E-R-C-Y? He cried.

Stretching?

?Spare me!?

Stretching until the epidermis cracked open ? like the shell of a cooked lobster, and then lastly the dermis ? revealing the fatty insulation and the muscle beneath.

?AHHHHHHHHHH!?

An arm exploded out guts and gore across the bed in a fountain of macabre beauty... A head came through... Then a torso?

Then legs?

And like a new born the wife cried there for a moment by her own husbands gore, and slowly and purposely stood above - casting her shadow down, looming over as his Angel of Death.
His ribcage blossoming out like the petals of a white and red dotted rose, his guts displayed in neat and separate junks all across the bed? Grasped in her hand was his heart. Still beating.

Henrietta refused in letting him die so easily.

The bed morphed into a dark pit almost at random...

A grave?

Dirt was now being deposited into that empty torso and somehow he was still alive, crying, clawing at the walls of soil about him and shouting every curse and pleading word(s) imaginable.

She stood not as a rotting corpse, not as Renna the Betrayer.

But as Lucy?

"I?m coming for you?? She chided almost in a song.