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 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.

She awoke from her unconsciousness to find herself in an unfamiliar location. Glancing around frantically she noticed rows of pale, dirty beds in a blinding room, before her vision became distorted and she blacked out once more. A nearby nurse checked on her condition but she was otherwise left alone. She was being treated for poisoning after being found, by a constable during the raid of her home, barely breathing on the slate floor of the kitchen where her father had tried to murder her.

The trial drew to a close at the end of its first hour. A guilty verdict had been passed and no plea of insanity could save his life. The girl’s father was to be hanged until dead and his body thrown into a communal grave, without a coffin or a blessing.

In the degraded hospital, the girl awoke. Finally, her head had cleared and she was able to leave. Leave not to her home, but to an orphanage already full to its brim of sick and vulgar creatures no longer pure and innocent children. The girl showed no emotion at the tale of her father’s verdict, she no longer cared for anything or anyone – not now her mother was gone.

The orphanage owners were remorseless machines, caring not for the children but for the money they could work the children for. The kitchen staff brewed food in their cauldrons that barely kept the children alive and often caused many to fall ill and die. Those that didn’t die were forced to work, when they could work no longer they would be beaten and when they cried from the beatings, they were beaten harder. Many of the adolescents in the building took their own lives to escape the torture of living in such conditions, using their clothes to tie nooses or drowning themselves in the baths.
The girl was abused in vile ways that were painful for her fragile body, and cried herself to sleep at nights, bleeding and wondering what kind of malevolent deity had allowed this to happen to any human being.

As the noose was placed around his neck, he thought up ways he could have covered up the crime and not been convicted. As the noose was tightened he cursed himself for letting the witness go unnoticed. When the trapdoor opened and he fell through, the terror finally struck him as he knew that he was going to die. He was going to die. The rope pulled taut and he couldn’t breathe. His eyes felt as if they were going to burst and he kicked and he writhed as everything turned dark. He fell still. Conscious, just, he opened his blinded eyes and stared into the gaping black maw of death.

II

The fire spread quickly through the building. The staff evaded the blaze and headed toward the centre of the city to alert the authorities to the fire. By the time they returned, many children had been unable to escape on their own and were consumed by the flames, left to their horrible deaths by the guardians of the orphanage. The layout of the building was such that after eating on the ground floor, the children were sent to their beds on the top levels and were hungry once more upon arrival.

The fire struck during the night, caused by the inner workings of a toil-machine one of the children had not powered off correctly. Nearly all of the children died, the sleeping quarters being situated above the work floors. This was the perfect excuse for one girl to slip by unnoticed and flee into the darkness. Thought to have been cremated alive, none searched for her.
The deadly inferno was eventually doused by the cold limb of the fire brigade and the wreck was abandoned for evermore.

The girl took a last look at the smouldering ruins as a single raven arced through the smoke into the murky sky, vanishing. Following suit, the fugitive disappeared into the trees.

She stumbled on in desperation, pressed upon by the surrounding fog through which emerged the bark encrusted cadavers of the forest, each branch a claw – drawing her into its deathly embrace. These were woods where the dead were alive and all living was dead. The personified corpses of the trees bore their roots, their gnarled, shapeless forms groping in the darkness at her legs and feet. One barbed tentacle wrapped itself around her ankle, tripping her and sending her sprawling into a rocky pit. The cavity swallowed her and her head fell upon a flat stone, knocking away her consciousness

III

Few rays of light shone down through tree-claws to the ground where she lay. The bottom of the pit she had fallen into was damp and multi legged creatures scurried back into their dark holes as she stirred, a few of the braver ones attempting to feast on her cold flesh remained. She screamed, shooing away the necrophagous beasts tearing lumps from her lips and face, and sat upright in a daze.

She could not recall any event prior to her awakening and, confused, began climbing her way out of the hole like a centipede brutally dismembered by a curious child. She lay at the mouth of the vertical cave and breathed heavily, desperately trying to remember her past and identity.

She staggered to the edge of the necrotic forest to find the remains of a building she no longer recognised. Hearing voices nearby, she drew back and lurked near the outer rim of the woods until she arrived at a battered wooden signpost bearing a single word, 'Fullhweol', the name of the undead city she had discovered.

The crooked spire of the cathedral pointed toward the setting sun as it descended toward the underworld, giving fuel to the demonic forces beneath the ground. The waning moon was rising and in the twilight a single dwelling stood out amongst all others.

She approached the gate of the property. On the wall, creepers of ivy grasped at the lichen set in the slate roof. The deep green of the ivy marred only by the blood-red veins coursing through its stem. She allowed her eye to follow them to the roots of the plant where she found a single crooked fence spike.

The vague sense of familiarity washed over her when she ripped the ivy from the spike and as she did so, she remembered it all. The pain and anger flooded back to her, driving her against the wall overgrown with her mother's blood. She burst through the door of her former home and stood at the window.

She threw herself from the sill and shuddered as the spike pierced her heart. She fell still as her blood flowed into the earth. Her soul became one with the plants, the roots drawing life from her death. The undying love between a mother and daughter shown only by the heart shaped leaves of blood-red ivy.