Carabas

A woman made a deal with one of my kind, a short man in a black suit who irritates me, and so he's placed his mark on her wrist, a symbol in the shape of a sword, representing "Iudex," the judge. This will allow him to possess her, though she was unaware of this. I'm furious. He's well within his rights, but I deeply dislike him and his people who bear that symbol; I'm going to destroy his mark. It's not difficult, any changes to the lines in her skin will do the job. I ask her to choose the method (a knife) and if she wants me to do it for her or if she'd rather do it herself (she asks me to do it), three horizontal cuts distort the symbol sufficiently, and then I set out a bandage for her.

A woman's coming out of my workroom, which she'd stepped into to give herself some space, taking a break from our conversation. The things I've been telling her have been disturbing her. There's another man here who'd tried to get me to tone it down, break it to her more gently if at all, he didn't understand why I was pushing her like this; but I'd ignored him.

Now that she's back, I see she's taken something from my workroom, two long dull knives which are smeared with a kind of colorless substance. I'm alarmed. I assume she must know what they are or she wouldn't have taken them, but I can't believe she'd be holding them like that if she really understood - I tell her, "This is the substance you - the real you - uses to mark her new bodies, don't-"

She uses the substance to mark the skin of her forearms. She's saying something about why she's doing this, some kind of statement of defiance, but I'm not really listening - I'm horrified, I got to my feet and grabbed her by the shoulders as if I could stop her, but that's pointless; I just need to make her understand this thing that she's done, trapping herself in a single body, how wrong and unnatural this is. The body still won't age, but someday it will fail, and she'll still be tied to it, and she'll die - not just this small version of her who doesn't remember what she is, but the real her will die, something that should never have happened. The death of something that should have existed always. I can't begin to explain to her how horrific this is, the shock and sense of loss; in the end I'm just repeating, "This will kill you, this will kill you, you will die from this," as though if I just emphasize it enough she'll understand the significance of it. She doesn't understand, but she's beginning to see just how horrified I am.

There's a woman who's been unknowingly designated to play the role of Mary. (A reference to Mary Vetsera and/or Mary Kelly - the point is that she was remembered for her death, and that a certain amount of time has passed since, so it's time for events to repeat themselves.) She'd been running from a stranger with a knife, found a friend of hers to help her, and they've wound up barricading themselves inside a room. Due to a struggle at the door, the stranger's knife wound up on the floor inside the room with them. But the stranger wasn't the threat here - he was trying to help her. I'm in the POV of the thing possessing her friend, though possession in this case means only a certain amount of influence over his thoughts - he's the one fated to kill her.

There's a man, a servant, who I made immortal a long time ago. He came to resent me, so I sent him away to the household of a woman I'm close with. From her letters, I believe that's worked out well for them both. I'm staying with her at the moment, and he's showing me something I hadn't realized before - the wounds he had when I made him immortal never healed. The pain is very minor, but it never goes away.

A teenage girl with long red hair is standing in a field at the foot of a mountain. The image changes to show her standing in this same field when she was younger, standing under a tree while her father spoke to her with his hands on her shoulders, while the rest of the family walked away into the woods and left her there. She was known as something like a witch. She shouts after her family not to leave her, and when she tries to calm herself down some sympathetic man - also present in the scenes where she's a teenager - tells her no, go ahead and shout that if it's what you feel, call what you see, refuse to be quiet, make it your power.

She's older now, and as a disembodied observer I'm watching her walk across that field towards the mountain, watching her from behind and I'm struck by the vivid colors of her now compared to when she was younger - the red hair in a thick braid now and down to her legs, the vivid blue skirts. She's walking past a wooden house with something going on in the woods on her mind, something urgent, possibly dangerous, her thoughts feel very determined and she's intercepting a group of people walking across the field towards that house - I think of them as the Freyhella (name taken from Wraeththu, but the resemblance stops at the name). As she walks towards them she takes a knife and cuts off her hair, right to the scalp. "With shorn hair," she says to them, the first words of a ritualized phrase, citing her right to be heard as one of them, as their neighbor, and as a 'witness' - a reference to whatever it is that's going on in the woods that she was thinking about earlier, and that she needs their recognition for. She ends by saying "Turn, and you can't yield to this," and she gets this hard expression I fall in love with.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

Her again, in the woods, walking a path around some people at a distance far enough that she won't be seen, forming a protective symbol around them.

I'm walking along a road and find a dog walking around on its own, separated from its owner. I read the owner's name on the collar, and I bring the dog back into town with me, ask around after the owner and almost immediately find her apartment building. I ring the buzzer and ask her to come down.

When she comes down, she gives me some water to carry. The plotline's changed: there's no dog, we're going somewhere together, two distinct groups traveling together, I'm in one group, she's in the other. I can feel the added weight of the water in my backpack and am annoyed at having to carry more than I'd originally packed. Some of the people in the other group stop to get some water from a stream, and most of the people in my group find this disgusting. My IRL sister L., with my group, says there's nothing wrong with it, running water is clean; the rest of us disagree with her, saying that's not exactly wrong but not exactly true either, and then saying that it's a matter of belief. IRL sister S. says that's why she and her friends have agreed to stop believing in anything, it affects too much.