Before he knew it, she slammed the tome closed and threw her quill into the dirt below, grinding it mercilessly beneath a prettily laced dress-shoe, pulverizing her life essence until it tainted the soil below the faintest hint of luscious sangria. That she did these things, still showing no regard for witnesses, and continued her blank stare, struck him as horrible. Her last foray into writing, even with her own blood as ink, wasn't a tale of redemption, no matter his wishes and dreams on the matter.

He said she was broken before, assumed it was maybe a product of his overactive and pessimistic nature concerning the fire, but now a grim reality chuckled in peals of hate as he realized his folly. She wasn't merely chipped, cracked, or even snapped into infinite shards spread across the cosmos. No, maybe melodramatic, but there's nothing left of her at all—not a shred, or a splinter.

And still she sat. Holding the heavy book, a diary in another life, a little oversized perhaps, but still functional for years of rumors and girlish dreams. Even if she left it aside with her youth upon starting a family, it would document her coming-of-age, and illuminate her past, should she wish to share the sundries bled across each speckled page. And through Kyle's imagination, rode a wisp of man and horse, rippling in subtle waves of light and shadow, and others—long and ragged things scraping the ground and drinking the mix of mud and coppery liquor, without substance, but hungry all the same.

He blinked to drive away the images, blasphemy against God and everything he knew. But they were ever so alluring, appealing to his basest natures, of greed, malice, or the ever shallow desire. You can still have her, it whispered, through wind and mottled lips. Mind or no, she's a brood mare. Nobody else will have her, and she is beautiful. Even a shell can provide comfort, protection and shelter in the darkest of days. Who would blame you for such compassion, even as she withers away?

He closed his eyes and strove to fight back against the black bile thundering up his throat, inspired by the sickening entreaties frolicking without care while he almost slavered in anticipation. Terrible! Even the thought! It didn't matter whether or not he could find some tangible immunity against somehow adopting and ultimately owning what was left. He shuddered and shrunk in the suspended seat, wishing he could vomit, to regurgitate the evil that had somehow taken residence in his soul.

Except there was nothing to expel. He knew, as a teenage boy should, his own desires and they alone planted those corrupting seeds, made him willing to warm his bed with a girl who would have admittedly become his wife anyway. What exactly was he stealing, or corrupting in the bargain? Really, he'd be doing her a favor. Suppose one day she regained her senses, five or ten years down the road. Better to be a mother of a few healthy offspring than dead, or worse.

Each possibility and inevitable rebuttal churned his mind into cacophony, a colloquial miasma of obligation, lust, and revulsion. Sitting there, confused as he was, he never saw her stand up and walk away, clutching the book as a trusted lover, blood still running down an abused arm and staining her powder blue and white spring dress. Unconcerned she ambled, weak and weary from eating little, and drinking less; her dry husk shambled away, eyes cast blankly upon a distant hill where a certain house once blazed like God to Moses, offering obliteration and strife instead of escape or liberty from oppression.

Kyle's mind was consumed by tainted fortune, and even while his spirit battled valiantly to repel each hateful undermining of his resolve and morality, the flesh was weak. When he failed, he was yet another victim to the insidious aura that rippled around Sad Girl, and the real reason she neither ate, nor drank, nor cared of life at all. Kyle's original theory had merit, but what he couldn't see, or possibly comprehend, was the mark of Elder Evil, a crawling substance that drove nightmares like a team of punished horses, and brought them low in worship.

Yggdrasil. Sometimes deemed the Tree of Life, the beginning of all things, was really the progenitor of Chaos. That being without form which drank the milky haze of human thought and corrupted each expelled fragment into damned and inexorable madness, plunged the peace of emptiness into fractured conundrum. It spawned sentience and life, true enough, and slavery and death, and all things in between. Its latest subject, Kyle, tilted his head into the rough chain of the swing, eyes rolling backwards in spasms of overwhelmed presence. His chance to save Sad Girl were all but chemistry in his hormone-addled body.

Life, it seemed, desired to spread, and the girl, unaware and uncaring of her role, wandered without direction, to a destiny singular and final: her death.

The boy on the swing was finished, but Kyle remained. Everything from the confusing allegory of life's destructive influence to the sad girl's final destination, clear as a sharp tone struck from a clear and pristine bell, ringing through his consciousness, that he must witness. Witness what?

You shall see.

"Damn you and your stupid games!" he barked, drooling with ferocious rage, ready to deprive his tormentor of organs, should the opportunity arise. Only silence answered his overt challenge, uncaring of his ultimately impotent raving.

Watch, it said, and learn.

What choice did he have? Kyle realized he was standing again, pushed back to his original position surveying the playground, where a befuddled boy sprawled, limbs akimbo and spent of purpose. He's been drained like a straw! His short stint as that hapless youth taught him much, but still provided no answers. So the girl, apparently sad, supposedly struck dumb by distress and otherworldly influences, was significant somehow. How did any of this concern him? Sure he was curious—what feeling human being wouldn't wonder at her misfortune and possible redemption—but that was no answer.

Why him? Why now? Why in Tammond Dale, when thousands or millions of other places, through time and circumstance would have served? Other actors, women and men reduced to mere pawns in some grand scheme of greedy shapes and shivers in the background, all possible sources of entertainment for uncaring beings. But as he turned around to see Sad Girl continue her listless ambling, his ego deflated; he had to know. Somehow, though he ground his teeth in admitting defeat—and indeed, even if his involvement was only secondary—he needed to understand why, just why any of this was necessary. Why her suffering, Why the undulating reality of past and present boiling away landscape and scenery into insubstantial spectre, why him?

But the girl never paused. Still she walked, leaving behind a dirge of ethereal cackles and increasing joy, as the vibrantly empty dirt and sky swallowed her remaining vitality and further contaminated the diseased skin barely concealing the yawning and gibbering fiends clamoring to guzzle his every liquid and grind away his sinew. Kyle knew it would peel away, falling to the sky like spent ashes upon a funeral pyre, and finally unleash the heinous misshapen throngs he'd come to expect.

So he followed her. Dragged by fate, if not fear, to at least witness this final act, the culmination of several diverging, conflicting, and encompassing agents of pandemonium. With any luck, he'd wake up before the end, and forget everything. No matter the conclusion, Kyle wanted nothing of this, even if his cursed lust for a conclusion was satiated in full.

Better to forget, he thought, than to be a part of this crazed delirium.