They passed through a towering door made from a single monstrous slab of stone and Alice found herself in an open, cavernous room. There was a large altar at the far end and a roaring fire in a hearth along the wall to her right. On the walls, on the weapons, even around the necks of the women escorting Alice, a symbol was repeated over and over again. It seemed that the Shadow Sect, or the High Priestess herself, had an emblem: a crooked tree pierced by a lightning bolt, all encircled in a golden ring of pale light.

The room itself could have been comfortable, almost cosy. Yet, the presence of a woman, reclining with her endless legs hanging off the edge of the wooden altar table on which she was perched, made Alice’s blood run cold. She was willowy and tall, with a fiery halo of deep-red hair that fell to her waist in delicate, soft waves. From this distance, Alice was both compelled and repulsed by this woman. She looked no more than twenty, maybe thirty, years older than Alice, but her eyes told a different story. Her eyes were clandestine, inscrutable; they were the eyes of someone who had lived through centuries, perhaps even millennia. Alice could feel the power pulsating from her.

‘Alice, my dear girl, welcome!’ called the woman, as Alice was forced to move closer. The woman’s voice was smooth and lyrical, like treacle flowing over polished granite. The woman pushed herself off the table with an elegant leap and sauntered forwards. She wore a corseted black dress and a heavy hooded cloak. Her wrists were covered by hammered bronze cuffs and her hands were weighed down with a variety of gemstone-encrusted rings.

‘Oh dear.’ She frowned as she grew closer, eventually stopping directly in front of Alice, so close that Alice, out of pure instinct, took a step back to widen the gap. ‘I do believe we have treated you rather poorly. Look at the state of you!’ The woman brushed her hand over Alice’s crusty hair and then lifted her chin so that Alice was looking directly into her eyes. ‘I think we’re going to be good friends, you and I. After all, you’re the mirror image of your dear mother. How could we be anything but friends?’

Alice’s heart was hammering a tattoo in her chest and her stomach clenched and knotted. How did the woman know her mother? Alice herself barely remembered her mother, and they’d lived far away, hidden.

The woman was effortless and charming, otherworldly in her beauty, and yet there was also something rotten and degenerate about her. Alice could sense the mould and decay in the woman’s core and her physical beauty did little to hide the putrid soul within. Alice was confident that she’d rather spend a week locked in a cell with toad-face than spend five minutes alone with this woman.

Amused by Alice’s unease, the woman stepped back and smiled, a wicked glint shining in her eyes. She held out a hand.