I woke with a start, and my first thought was what an underwhelming figure I must have cut during the first night we spent together. Soon it was followed by the joyful knowledge that this night would only be the first of many.
At first I took them for rose petals, spread about the entire room as a felicitation to us both. A deep red. When I lazily reached for one of them, I grasped at nothing, and when I lifted my hand to my face, I saw that my fingers bore the same red color. My naked body was stained and spotted. When I got to my feet and threw the blankets from the bed, it was her shroud I disturbed. Her skin was as white as the sheets. Her face was no more, lips in shreds over a gaping hole where the jaw hung broken. From this silent shout, the tongue lolled blue and swollen. Eyes unseeing out of the grimace bore witness to the terror of her last moments. Arms and legs wrenched out of place. The body that had just now lived was now simply a broken rag doll. Fragments of her were everywhere: strips of hair glued to the bedposts, blood on the rug and on the wallpaper, stains on the ceiling. And over all of her a cracked, yellowed membrane, fractured and faintly acrid, as if she had been painted with a varnish that was already starting to set. I screamed aloud for an eternity, vainly trying to shake life back into her. Her head rocked heavily on a snapped neck, and with my embrace I tried to give her back the warmth that death had stolen.
It was Jarrick who pried away my twitching arms and held my shoulders as if in an iron grip. Right behind him there was Tycho Ceton with an expression of shock and disbelief as he whispered in desperation. “Erik, Erik, what have you done?”