‘What she didn’t know was that her mother had been warned late in the evening that her daughter had been seen floating up into the trees by a man. A man who recognised her curse as evil and demonic. The man had rushed to meet with his companions, and together they had decided that the safest and best thing to do for this child would be to forcibly remove the demon from her body. The child would surely die, but the demon would perish with her, and that was a sacrifice they were willing to make, for the greater good of the people, of us all.

‘When the child’s mother heard of what they were planning, she took her daughter and they ran like cowards, intending to lie low in the lighthouse for a few weeks and then catch a boat across the seas to start a new life somewhere far away from those trying to save them from themselves. What she didn’t prepare for was that there was someone watching their household every single hour until the time came for them to take the child and rid her of her demon possessor.

‘On that fateful night, when they left under the oppressive darkness of a starless sky, they didn’t notice the hooded figure that followed them across the moors from their village home. He didn’t call to his comrades for aid, believing that if he caught the girl and the demon-harbouring woman who called herself the girl’s mother, he would be a hero. He was doing it for the Brotherhood, but he was also doing it to save us all. This was his chance to shine, and he took it. For a while, the girl and her mother hurried over the well-worn stone path that led to the coast. They had walked this route so many times that it was ingrained in their memory and they needed neither map nor candle to find their way.

‘When they were far enough away from the village and still too far away from the lighthouse and the little town on the mainland that was nearby, the man pounced. He leaped from an outcropping of stone just above their heads, knife in hand, and the girl’s mother took the full brunt of his weight, collapsing on her back, momentarily winded. The child stood in shocked, horrified silence. There was a struggle, and between the flying limbs, the screaming, and the tearing of hair, the mother managed to break free long enough to shriek for her daughter to run. She barely got five steps away when she heard a strained gurgling and glanced behind her back, just long enough to see her mother’s lifeless body, throat-slit, with terror still etched upon her features. And then she ran. She ran and ran and ran. She screamed as she ran, her body overflowing with grief and rage. They say that something snapped in the child that night and, although she escaped from the man trying to save her from the demon, she never truly escaped the fear. In a way, his work should have been done; she was forever changed.