Chapter I, Part I.

The rain wept onto the earth. It was a terrible rain, falling on a terrible night. This rain swept away not muck and grime and plague from the streets, but the deep crimson love of a mother. The river that once flowed through a full heart now bled into the earth along with the life of a father, along with the life of a killer. The man had snapped. A sudden urge had taken him in his rage as the single bell rang out a single chime. The last view of the world in his wife’s eyes were of his; cold, remorseless as she was thrown from the casement.

He listened for a thump as the body struck the cold, dry earth yet there was none. He peered from the window to see a single ruby among pewter. The fence spike she had been thrown upon had been doused in her blood, now trickling down the post toward the ground. This was when the first drop fell – not of blood, but water. The rain began in the moment her life ended. This was not a rain of renewal; this was a rain of death. This was the rain of her soul departing into the nightmare-world of æther.

The killer stood for a moment, transfixed in a disturbed trance. He felt neither sorrow for his late wife nor any repulsion at the deed he had done and instead he laughed a loud, cackling laugh that carried on long after his mouth had closed into a sickening grin.  He would have stood until he could stand no more, staring at the scene, were it not for the soft sound of sobbing interrupting his thoughts. He wheeled around to find his only daughter, a tender young girl in her nightgown, drenched with rain and blood.

She had been awoken by shouts during the night and had witnessed the events as they transpired through a gash in the door where a thrown kitchen knife had been some months earlier. The beautiful innocent had witnessed her father propel her mother out the open window, watching in horror through the glass panes in the hall as her mother’s heart was pierced by the barbed fencepost and seeing the eyes she knew so well become dull and lifeless.

The father led his child into the kitchen and told to her sit as he prepared a drink for her; the drink to be her very last. He wasn’t as fortunate as he had hoped, though, as a neighbour had also witnessed the crime and as the girl took her first sip of the deadly cocktail, the siren bells of a police wagon could be heard pealing frantically, nearing the premises.  Startled, the girl let the drink fall to the hard slate floor beneath her bare feet and she took a step back onto a shard of the tainted glass.

As the constabulary burst through the barricaded side-door, the poison that had entered her bloodstream took effect and the young girl was thrown into a black void of shadows.