Nietzsche once said 'When gazing long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.'
Though simple, it was a memorable quote. The kind that revealed its depth like strips of flayed flesh; it took a certain kind of experience, a precise dance with darkness, to truly understand what it meant.
And honey, that abyss had gazed right back into me, laid its eggs and hatched all kinds of wrongness inside. I knew evil. I knew devils and beasts, the rotten and tainted. But none compared to her. Didn't even come close.
Staring into her eyes, two ghastly little pinpricks that seemed to blaze beneath the wild flames eating away at the drywood in the fireplace, it was like looking into the wickedest cavern Hell had to offer. A tentative war inhabited them, chaos battling against knowledge, manifesting into an untamed energy that bled throughout the dingy, single-roomed cabin. It had the hairs on the back of my neck standing erect, and an unsteadiness knocking at my knees.
"Your anger, boy," she crooned, lips peeling back into a ghoulish grin, the paper thin flesh of her face pulling taut against the sharp array of bones that threatened to cut through, "Oh, it is ravenous. It called to me the second you stepped foot in my woods."
Her woods. Cursed, the sheer mention of the place enough to have folk invoking the sign of the cross, it was a place of nightmares. A man had to be damn near insane, or just plain desperate, to enter.
Standing here, soaked to the bone in cold sweat, hands bloodied and bruised from fending off one of the abominations - creatures of the vilest of heritage - that called the forest home, it dawned on me that perhaps I was both. Few survived the journey, and out of those that did, I'd never heard of anybody willing to make the journey for a second time.
I was all in favour of that. Six years lived between my last visit, and it wasn't anywhere near long enough. The trauma still haunted my dreams. Everything that ever was or is, everything that crept through the perpetual myths and legends that the humans told, that they passed down through the generations like silly little ghost stories, they were locked away inside the Peccatorum woods. It acted as a prison, keeping in the foulness that would have wreaked havoc on the world; it kept them in, but it didn't keep us out.
I had vowed never to return, but one of the world's greatest joys was to force a man to break his own oath.
"Lady Vide," I greeted, taking another step into the room. The rotten planks beneath my feet groaned, bowing, threatening to buckle. Lead. My legs were like lead. Each step became heavier. Every breath seemed harder.
She had been expecting me. Neighbouring her own armchair, a moth-eaten lump of fabric, another recliner sat, angled towards the only source of warmth. Reluctantly, I took a seat.
In a forest of monsters, she was their queen.
She was the Vidua, and if nothing else, she demanded one's respect.
"I told you that you'd return, Sterling Grey," she rasped, her head turning from the spitting embers. Power radiated from her. The raw kind. The kind that charged the air, creating a loud buzzing that swallowed up the silence and resonated through my ears. "Just as we will meet once more."
"Not if I can help it," I muttered, swallowing hard. The inside of my mouth felt like sandpaper, and every breath was like swallowing sawdust. "You know why I'm here?"