<div align="center"><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Abigail</div><div class="spoiler_body">(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S9u0pn7Z5Ds/Unb0RvjqANI/AAAAAAAAADQ/2hGZgLEj4Pg/s1600/Details-Magazine-christina-ricci-688022_963_1243.jpg)</div></div></div><br/>She'd taken the winding path north by northwest two days' removed, slipping from the tavern as dawn's first pale light caressed her face. The pain bit at her relentlessly, but it was her own dissatisfaction that drove her to leave Tanhok, not the agony. She'd grown slothful in her liberty - any poor peasant could be wowed into obeisance by a simple wave of the hand and arcane incantation; but in resting on her laurels she had allowed herself to let her diligence wane, in perfect harmony with the dying moon. She had been punished for it - with no moontea to salve the symptoms of her girlhood she'd been chased from her duties at the inn by an agony she'd been able to circumvent her entire life. It was no more fitting a reminder, and she took it to heart. She'd told Doroka she had business elsewhere, and would return when it was concluded. She didn't wait for the girl's consent.<br/><br/>She winced as she walked, chewing her bottom lip to try to take her mind off the cramps in her stomach. As she neared the edge of the forest she fingered her component patch idly, another unnerving reminder of her lack of focus. She'd never have survived this past year had she allowed herself to run out of reagents and yet, here she was, floored by her moon's blood and nary a brew to counter it -<em>howfore,</em>she canted telepathically to Lenore, somewhere far above her in the morning grey,<em>think that I should have fared were my grievances the work of an outward assailant?</em>She ground her teeth against the pain, as Lenore squawked overhead. The raven dipped her wing and swung in a lazy circle around Abigail, signalling her malcontent. Abigail frowned and quietly ordered her to stay the course as they both passed through the first thickets of the forest's gaunt trees, whispering in the early morning chill. She remembered, as ever, to pause on the threshold of the forest, to kneel to and scoop up a sliver of cold earth in her right hand and throw it over her left shoulder, whistling three times - all the better, she though diligently, to ward off Baba Yaga.<br/><br/>She had spent the better part of the day refilling her component pouch, not just the ingredients for her moontea but each reagent for the spells and incantations she'd burned through since the...Her mind ran blank then, and she sensed Lenore at the edge of her consciousness, the raven's mind nibbling in at the edges of her own, trying to provide her with the missing link. She stopped in her tracks and scrunched up her eyes, shaking her head.<em>No!</em>she canted to the raven.<em>Pray you, stop, Plutonian devil!</em>Lenore had, to Abigail's relief, stopped, flitting away to the far edges of the range at which their minds could still be linked, ever present, a dull, dark pulse at the edges of Abigail's mind, but having turned her attentions to other things. She'd cried a little, then, as she returned to her work sniffing out and picking ingredients, her pain and mission momentarily derailed as she fought to dampen down the renegade memories of the Coven.<br/><br/>When she could go no further, she let herself sink to the soft mossy floor of the still forest, deathly quiet in the stark morning air. She'd lay there, crumpled up and gritting her teeth against the pain in her stomach, cursing her sloth and her distraction and her sex; cursing the moon whose dying light had revealed her to be the bare strip of girl that she'd been born...<br/><br/><em>But I wasn't born.</em><br/><br/>The thought was unprepared, a sort of flash of inspiration that came without warning and dammed a tumultuous sea of whirling thought. It caused her to open her eyes and caught her breath in her throat; for a split second, even the cramps that had chased her from Tanhok were forgotten as the words came sharp and clear, each syllable like a stake driving through her heart...and invigorating it with new life. New purpose.<br/><br/>She rose to her feet and sniffed, and wiped her sleeve across her face, then spat upon the floor. The events of a week ago had yet to reconcile themselves in her mind; for a year's worth of tribulation to suddenly come to a jarring end...She was weak, and exhausted, and, now, out of practice. That, the voice of wisdom deep within her assured her, would all change. She would find her feet again.<br/><br/>Her work had quickened its pace once she'd regained her composure - she finished the ingredients to her moontea and quickly and calmly mixed the broth, slitting her wrist and bleeding into her canteen to add the final potent reagent to her brew. She heated the mixture with a spell and drank it down, wincing at the rancid taste. Within a couple of hours, however, her symptoms had started to subside, and with a grim smile - relishing in the irony - she silently thanked the peasant woman who had taught her that remedy; and whose husband's throat she had slashed ere she disappeared into the night.<br/><br/>She made camp in the pitch darkness of a moonless sky, sending forth her thrall to gather the firewood and lighting it with a dismissive wave of her hand and an incantation in the Tongue of Spiders. Restored to her previous health, and feeling the firm weight of her component pouch all but refilled, thoughts turned to Tanhok and the peasants who flittered about their shrines to living gods and prayed for respite from the chill malice of the Reaper. Her amusement, though, was a thin veil which she disposed of as her musings took her into the dead of night - she had never seen a ghost before, if that, indeed, was what the peasants had described in their little hushed tones and ignorant ramblings. She had heard things, horrid things, ghastly things, howling and clawing at her bedroom door at night in the heart of the chapel, but Istvan had always told her to stay away, to stay in bed, not to come out. In her chamber, the sounds and moans of the unknown became monstrous dark shapes that invaded her nightmares and molested her waking hours. She did not fear the dark; the dark was a place of graveyards, of spiders; of hiding...all things that made her feel safe. All things that had, for the past year, felt very, very far away. But she feared those moans; those howls; those rasps. But underlying that fear, she knew, was frustration - Istvan wouldn't let her see. That just made her want to see it more.<br/><br/>If there really was a spectre haunting Tanhok, then, she could not bring herself to leave without seeing it for herself. A smile played across Abigail's lips as she settled down to sleep, the giddy warmth of childish intrigue and mystery licking her belly.<em>At last,</em>she canted to Lenore, who stood sentinel in a tree above her camp.<em>At last, a chance to practice necromancy.</em><br/><br/>She broke camp come the morrow, replenishing her supply of water and feeding herself on what berries and funghi Lenore could espy on her behalf.<br/><br/>Come first light, her course shifted as Lenore spied something unmistakable in the retreating gloom; a raised half-cylinder of earth, its dimensions too symmetrical to have been edged by nature's hand. Abigail felt a flicker of excitement shoot through her as she recognised it for what it was, and giggled as she skipped through the vanishing dark to dig her fingers into the cool earth of the mound.<br/><br/><em>An unmarked grave.</em><br/><br/>Of all the reagents she'd yet to replenish, by far the trickiest was the stuff of the mortal coil - she had made do, in the distant past, by grave robbing, and over the past year, by murder and mayhem. This proffered her a somewhat less complicated avenue to fill her quota.<br/><br/>She stood, and bowed her head in careful reverance, placing her fore and middle finger on her breast just over her heart. "Behold," she called out to the brightening forest, "a Pale Horse." Having paid the Reaper his due, she set about her work, dropping her packload and removing the earth to get to the prize below. It was not uncommon for peasants to leave a newborn to exposure in the forest, but these were of little use to her - their squalling usually saw larger predators like wolves or giant spiders carry them off before they could be harvested. More commonly, as Abigail herself recalled from bitter memory, a travelling peasant or outlaw girl who died in childbirth would be hastily buried before the tatters of her family moved on. (On thinking this, Abigail touched the locket around her neck, but at Lenore's squawk of concern she shot a glare at the raven and hissed).<br/><br/>Her presumptions proved accurate as she dug up the desiccated corpse of a woman, maybe a month in the grave by her state. Abigail twisted her head and frowned, aware that the corpse's value to her was diminished from that of what a fresh corpse might offer, but nonetheless: She slipped her runed sickle from her backpack and set about her work with careful and unflinching abandon, parsing through the dead woman's entrails to root out the offal that could be of use to her in future rituals. At length, Abigail collected her fill and finished her work by cutting off the woman's hands and stowing them away in her backpack. They would make for perfect specimens for her blood magic in future and she licked her lips with relish as she sized both of them up. Finally, she dropped her packload and rested as the sun slipped into the forest proper, and the day begun anew. She let Lenore feed, the large raven pecking at the corpse so defiled by Abigail's eager work until the bird had had her fill, then she summoned Lenore back to her and gathered her belongings to continue her journey towards Tanhok...and whatever mysteries it promised.<br/><br/>The sight of the pale girl with hair of midnight black, the deathly raven perched on her shoulder picking lice out of her hair as she walked back to the town was, by now, uncomfortably familiar to the locals. She regarded the first townspeople she passed coolly, and they her, the few who knew her to look at either greeting her with a nod - knowing her to be Doroka's nubile new serving girl - or glowering at her and putting up the Devil Horns, not trusting any child who would be so blatant in her employment of magic as Abigail was. To these, Abigail spat, and returned the Devil Horns in kind. "The Reaper feed your firstborn to maggots," she snarled in Undercommon to one particularly hostile older woman who spat at her and called her a witch. "I am not a witch!"<br/><br/>Fingers tapping the hilt of the eating knife she had tucked into her belt, Abigail's attentions were stolen however by the sound of a crowd gathering somewhere up ahead. Narrowing her eyes, Abigail took a few steps forwards, quietly dismissing Lenore from her shoulder and giving her liberty, insofar as their minds could stay connected. A little half-elf child blocked her way through the alley to where the crowd was gathered, and Abigail felt a wellspring of bile surge at the sight of the little klitczka mongrel. She kicked the child and pushed passed it, inwardly daring the whoreson that had whelped the bastard to come complain to her.<br/><br/>Two newcomers had arrived on horseback, the source of the town's impromptu gathering, and were being accosted by Peter the headman.<br/><br/>Abigail's eyes narrowed instantly as she took in the garb of the two riders. The queer looking male she couldn't make sense of, but the well-dressed female...she'd know her garb on any corner of the Earth.<br/><br/>"Pigfucker," Abigail spat venomously, her hands bunching into fists at the site of a Lady On High. She pushed into the crowd, moving towards Peter, eager to catch snippets of the exchange before the representative of the Witchmark and these...she hesitated to call them outlanders, but then what else could they be? Another sting snapped at her heart with the thought. Outlanders had brought her nothing but agony.<br/><br/>As Abigail approached Peter and the riders, her fingers curled around the hilt of her eating knife.<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">OOC</div><div class="spoiler_body">Sorry about the length! Because Aby was out of the game for the first few posts I just wanted to establish a little about what kept her from appearing; future posts will naturally not be as long.<br/><br/>Also, bit of housekeeping - though I make a few references to her youth and refer to her once or twice as a "child," she is in fact 16 - the idea of her being a child has simply been ingrained in her by successive encounters with older companions.<br/><br/>While she gathered components in the forest she used the Prestidigitation and Unseen Servant spells (the latter in its ritual format) at various points while relying on her raven familiar Lenore for incidental things like scouting for food.</div></div>