A sound nagged at Shana's ears, just past the edge of audibility.  All she wanted was to return to the grey fog of sleep, but the noise was irregular enough that she couldn't quite shut it out.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip-drip...  She tried to call out to Amber to do something about it, but all she managed to produce was a low sound, half-murmur, half groan.

The new sound filled her head like a church bell, and brought with it pain...a deep throb in her skull, and a sharp ache in her chest every time she drew breath.  The pain should have been enough to drive her to wakefulness, but Shana's thoughts were still sluggish, confused.  She couldn't seem to open her eyes even if she'd wanted to.

"Amber..."  She'd managed to produce her apprentice's name, though weakly, and followed immediately by a burst of coughing that sent further jolts of pain radiating outward from her chest and abdomen.  Her lips seemed wet, and she felt a quiet note of alarm, though she couldn't quite think why.  Instead she wondered why the girl wasn't responding.  Her bed was in the same room as Shana's own, and the log-walled space was cramped enough that even a whisper could be heard between the furthest corners.

Perhaps she was already out.  Amber's chores had expanded enough lately that she sometimes rose before Shana, well before the sun, to ensure she finished everything and still had ample time for lessons.  So eager to learn, so talented...Shana had been lucky to find her.  Still, it was deucedly inconvenient for the girl to be away if Shana had somehow taken sick.

That didn't sound quite right.  Not sick.  Something else.

Her sense of alarm was continuing to grow, even as her thoughts still seemed wrapped in wool.  Shana tried again to open her eyes, and this time realized they were actually physically stuck somehow.  She began to alternate squeezing her eyelids shut hard enough to encourage tears, then trying to open them.  Eventually this succeeded, though at first her efforts were rewarded only by a burst of agony as daylight stabbed into her eyes.  Her head swam and she rolled over as she felt her her stomach empty itself, accompanied by another burning jab in her chest.

As she tried to calm herself and stop the cycles of pain and heaving, she felt incongruous gratitude that she hadn't soiled her bed with sick-up, but the implications of this thought slowly penetrated her confusion.  Shana managed to turn her head slightly from side to side.  She was not in her bed.  She was lying on the floor of her workroom...or at least so it seemed.  There were broken jars everywhere, the ingredients of her art scattered and mixed together, some covered in her sick-up.  Red.  That was bad.

Shana slowly brought a hand to her mouth and drew a finger over her lips, then peered at it blearily, still squinting against the light.  Blood.  She was coughing up blood.  Before she could try to puzzle this out, her chest burned again, and when she put a hand to the pain she cried out at the new agony the light pressure produced.  More blood on her hand.  She looked down at herself, dully.  Her blouse was soaked nearly through with red, and there were three obvious slits where the fabric had been cut.  No, not cut.  Stabbed.  And blood had run into her eyes from when they'd struck her in the head.

They?

Soldiers.  She was beginning to remember now.  Soldiers had come to the house.  Men of Kalane, come for healing.  Such hypocrisy...when they took injury their butchering surgeons could not repair, they called her an "herbalist" and thanked her for her service to the crown, even while they surely knew her true art, and by the King's own laws ought to have taken her before a magistrate for judgement.  Perhaps hypocrisy was harsh and it was only practicality...the kingdom was at war, after all.  But practicality only went so far...it's not as if they would allow her to truly aid, perhaps shorten this interminable and seemingly senseless conflict, and prevent some harm rather than only trying to undo it.

But the soldiers hadn't been satisfied with having their wounds mended.  They'd wanted other comfort.  Stupid.  The power to heal sprung from purity, a fact they would have known if even the basics of the art were permitted knowledge, which of course they weren't.  And thus ignorance claimed another victory, and when Shana refused them, they moved to take an armsman's favored succor by force.

The witch had called strongly upon Wind and made a chaotic storm of her workroom, things flying everywhere, Amber screaming, the soldiers shouting.  But they hadn't fled, they'd fought, and then Shana had been struck a blow on the head and thereafter knew nothing.

A chill gripped the witch's heart, somehow stronger even than the pounding in her head and the searing in her chest.

Drip.  Drip-drip.  Drip.

With a slowness only half born from the pain of her wounds, Shana turned her gaze towards the sound.  A pool of dark red spread across the floor.  The ripples from each drip did not travel far in the half-thickened fluid.  She raised her gaze further.  Bare feet dangled, once-fair skin stained crimson.  Each drip gathered slowly on the lowest toe, swelling and then falling off.  Shana forced herself to look up further.  She couldn't bear it for more than a moment, but she found the sight was burned into her eyes no matter where she looked.

When the skies were right, Amber had always taken pure joy in dancing sky-clad, bathed only in grace and silver moonlight.  Once, when the girl had truly lost herself in the flows of light and life, Shana had seen her briefly fly, her hands leaving trails in the air as she spun, rising a few spans into the air.

The sight that haunted Shana was a dark reflection of that moment.  Her torn dress had been cast aside, and Amber's unclothed body turned slightly from random currents of air, twisting beneath the rope around her neck.  The girl's thin frame was battered and bloody, and it was clear her purity had been taken before her life.  They'd left Shana for a corpse, and a normal woman would surely have succumbed to her wounds, but long practice with the art gave a witch vigor and resiliency far beyond the natural.  Practice her apprentice, despite all her gifts, hadn't yet enjoyed in sufficient measure.  Nor at this point would she ever, or indeed enjoy anything again...she was quite dead.

For some uncountable time, Shana just lay on the floor, floating in an ocean of grief and pain.  It would be a grave insult to the gift of Life itself, but she flirted with the idea of simply letting her misery drown her, giving up, leaving this world to its stupidity and horror.

But as her head slowly cleared, her grief began to twist into a cold fury, the killing chill of a winter storm without relief or mercy.  No.  This would not stand.

Shana dragged herself painfully to the pool of blood beneath Amber's body.  A moment's trepidation slowed her hand, but she drew upon her deep reserves of will and quashed the hesitation.  The witch dipped a finger into the blood and began to draw.

---

Shana wiped sweat from her brow, unheeding of the smear of blood the gesture left across her forehead, blending with her coppery hair.  A third of the workroom's floor was covered in runes and sigils, many which she had never used for anything other than to protect against the very arts she now intended to employ.  The symbols spiraled out from beneath the apprentice witch's body, and continued up onto her now pallid flesh as well.

The work had taken hours, and with it the sun.  But the moon was shrouded, and thus the workroom was illuminated only by the flickering glow of the single candle Shana had deigned to spark alight.  She took it up now and held it close to the eldritch writing, verifying all was ready.  The witch's motions were still stiff and slow...though her wounds had stopped bleeding, she had not taken the time to properly heal them.  But the pain was only a minor distraction now, it helped more as fuel for the fury she'd need.

Standing before her apprentice's hanging corpse, she considered her actions.  It was not too late to stop.  But searching herself, Shana felt no regret at the course she'd chosen.  Amber's spirit had long since fled beyond the veil, and she would know no harm from this.  Only her body would become a vessel.

Shana herself, her art, would be changed beyond recovery.  But she had already changed.  She knew she could not continue to live in the world as it was, and if she was going to give insult to Life regardless, she would make it count for something, she would buy change with that terrible price.

The witch knelt and placed her palms on the boundary of the diagram, and began to chant.  The words had no meaning, they did not invoke some dark power beyond the world.  They only served as rhythm and tone, to guide her to unlock and channel certain parts of her own spirit.  Despite what the High Clergy would have everyone believe, there was no true hell, no place that demons dwell.  The only source of real darkness in the world dwelt in the hearts of mankind.

And she would use some to forge a weapon.

Shana's chant rose to a crescendo and dissolved into a wordless scream of grief and rage and determination.  The diagram, dried nearly black in the soft glow of the candle, burst forth with a deep red light, painful to look upon.  The spiral began to rotate, then contract upon itself, gathering directly beneath Amber's feet and rising to meet them, her congealed blood flowing once again, but in reverse.

It spread rapidly upwards, and the corpse's skin hardened and darkened in its wake, even as the sigils on the body glowed with the same grotesque light.  The crude noose snapped from the rafters and the body fell, but lightly, remaining upright after only a slight bend of its knees.  The rope of the noose shifted and twisted around her neck, remaining coiled there but extending skeins out to wind around her arms.  The light reached the top of the figure's head and as it passed, the girl's once-brown hair became a deep black, streaked in places with that painful red.  With that, the rope settled and stilled, the light dimmed, and once more only the candle lit the scene.

Shana rose carefully and stood for a moment, regarding what she'd wrought.  Amber's form and features were still visible, but only as an echo...just enough reminder to keep the wound to Shana's spirit fresh and dripping.  The witch reached out and gently placed her palm on one deep red cheek.

Fast as a viper, a thin hand gripped Shana's wrist, squeezing with painful strength.  That dull, horrible light flickered within her creation's eyes.

"I have power.  And anger."  Her voice held an unnatural timbre.

"Good.  I have given you both."  The figure nodded, and seemed only then to notice its grasp on the witch's wrist.  It stared at it for a moment, then released her.  Shana rubbed her wrist gently, trying to restore some feeling to her hand.

"How may I serve, Mistress?"  Even in the strange voice, there was a memory of Amber's gentle tone, and they were the exact smiling words the girl had always eagerly given whenever she finished her chores, hoping instead for more instruction in the art.  But there was no smile, and if there was eagerness here, it held no joy, only foreboding.  Shana blinked away her sudden tears and steeled herself again, ignoring the pain in her wrist and her spirit equally.

"The High Clergy fears the art as a power it cannot check, even though it has harmed so few.  But somehow neither church nor royalty alike fear war, which pours forth death and suffering without cease.  You are truly War, and together we shall end their meaningless stupidities.  We shall teach them such fear that no one within a thousand leagues will ever again dare to raise a banner!"  In her vehemence, Shana did not notice the trickle of blood that began anew from one of the wounds on her abdomen.

"It is good to learn," intoned War.  Now she smiled, but it was utterly without warmth, and the soft red glow in her eyes brightened for a moment.