Time passed, but little seemed to change. Guards came and went, the light dimmed and brightened as torches sputtered and were replaced, food was delivered and taken away uneaten, and the demons that haunted her kept edging closer. She wanted to break their spell, to banish them along with the hissing and mewling of her Fury memories, but she could not gather together the will to do so.

One time only did she sleep. She did not know for how long, only that she did, and that when her dreams took the shape of her memories, she woke screaming.

The Straken Lord did not reappear. Hobstull stayed away. She did not know what they intended, but the longer she was left alone, the more certain she became that they had lost interest in her entirely. There was no use for such as her, for a woman who was willing to take the form of a monster, to assume the persona of a raver. There was no place, even in the world of demons, for something that lacked any moral center or recognizable purpose. She saw herself as they did, a damaged and conflicted creature, a chameleon that could not distinguish between reality and fantasy, able to be either or both, but unable to tell the difference.

She felt herself sliding over the edge of sanity. It was happening gradually, just a few inches at a time, but there was no mistaking it. Each day, she felt her Ard Rhys self fall just a little farther away and her Fury self close about her just a little bit tighter. It grew easier to embrace the latter and reject the former. It grew more attractive to see herself as inhuman. If she was no better than one of the Furies, her life became less complicated. The madness seemed to ease and the conflict to diminish. As a Fury, she did not have to worry about where she was or how she had gotten there. She did not need to concern herself with the increasingly fuzzy distinctions between different worlds and lives. As a Fury, the world flattened and smoothed, and there was only killing and food and the lure of life with her cat kind.

She began seeing herself as an imprisoned animal. She began making cat sounds all the time, finding comfort in the soft mewling. She flexed her fingers and arched her back. She bit her cheek and tasted her own blood.

But she did not rise or eat. She did not move from where she lay. She refused to come out of the dark refuge of her delusions. She stayed safe and protected in her mind.

Then, as if from a dream, she heard someone calling to her. At first she thought she must have imagined it. No one would call to her, not here or anywhere else. No one would want to have anything to do with someone as terrible as she was.