As darkness fell upon the corpse-city, so rise did its ghosts.

  A spectral sonata tormented empty and silent streets, slipping through gashes in decrepit walls and fallen roofs as easily as the rising moonlight. From the smallest potsherd to the largest boulder, it made itself known to the whole of that sea of broken stone.

  It was somber like quiet weeping. And yet the beauty of its sadness was still unfitting, there. For those ruins told of a crime so terrible that they were desecrated to be touched by beauty of any sort. In that place, it was wrong to be beautiful. It was wrong to be anything but silent, and still.

  Yet a single soul remained there, haunting the dead city. She bathed in the darkness and the sound against the silence, and there created beauty where it should not reside.

  A crown of fire midnight black burned above her, silhouetted against even the night. Wisps of dark flame shed in all directions as it spun, chained to her pirouettes as she danced alone, in perfect rhythm, carried with eternal listless sloth.

  And as the music crested, and she swept the pointe of one foot across her realm, blood’s abundant crimson smeared across the cracked marble courtyard in her wake. The sickness of the color painted a great arcing brushstroke, left to dry in thick glinting beads under the full moonlight.

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  Then the dance was shattered, and the music overcome by a shriek of furious, impotent rage, shooting into the sky before dissipating into the silence of the night.

  * * *

  The beauty of music still carrying in aimless codas was lost to Thjali, as she clung to little more than focus enough to keep her stomach from turning against that which she devoured.

  The juicy blood of heart-flesh dribbled from her chin, as she squatted like a feral beast over her meal of viscera. Liquid juiced from between her fingers dried another coating of burgundy crust over her wrists, just as the blood of her other former subordinates caked over her naked skin elsewhere.

  The meat’s richness and the blood’s salty acidity put her on the verge of vomiting at any moment. But through sheer force of will she swallowed bite after bite. She would need her strength, some sane fragment of herself managed to remember.

  Before lucidity left her once more, and shrieking again echoed through the sprawling ruins.

  Raising more than six thralls had always brought her to the very brink, in times past. Her last coherent thought was of glee, as she sensed how many more she’d managed that night, almost without strain.

  She swallowed the last of her meal, and the heartless corpse of her twentieth drew to its feet, shambling to join the others. And so at last she fell into the full embrace of madness.