Now of the Night
by Arilyn
Fri, 7 April 2000, at 5:57PM EST

Methodically, she crept.... A thin, glimmering steel blade swirled in violent movement in her right palm; she hid it behind her back. Ducking from shadow to shadow, her hood of black velvet obscuring the deep shadows of her delicate features. She blazed through the deepness of the night, her wits sharpened to a keen, lethal edge. She paused, her senses alerting her to motions chaotically simmering in the thin veil of night. Silently, she thrushed the blade into the ground beneath her feet and bent to the forest floor, looking closely at the history of motion the ground recorded. She looked up, her eyes bent into gleaming slits of superb precision, she had learned much over the past months, she recalled week after week of witnessing, she always lay silently and patiently, learning from every movement that took place around her. It was long since she had been in these forests, and spying around her she knew that she knew them well... but did not know why... Her body tensed, and she pressed her lips together, licking them hungrily. Her past, a thin blur of motion, a past she hardly recalled, and almost didn't care to... All she had was this short bow, a finely shaped weapon of destruction; its curling intricacies always remained a mystery to her. But as the man had said, just before she spilled his blood onto his own mother's gravestone.... The past flashed before her, in shades of ghostly gray.... she remembered the moment well, her first moment, the moment of her creation, she had awoke, dressed in a strange black robe, laying motionless in the middle of a dew covered field, it had been night, and she was know born.... that night was kind to her, a fool visiting his mothers grave, and she, too hungry to fulfill her needs spilled his blood, smattering across the gravestone in which her knelt before in prayer.... she shook the memory back, focusing on the present... and she was back... back to her place of origin, Yew, she now knew was its name... she came to find the solace in knowing why she.... a dark spectre of death was brought to being here...