Mara scowled at the exceedingly ominous words on the wall in front of her. The wrinkles on her forehead grew increasingly deeper as her impatient, glassy eyes passed over the tattered etching. She remembered when these words had been spoken to her under the hush of darkness, as a scary story. Mara brushed them off then, believing that they had been told to her to keep her in line by her teachers. Everything had been in preparation for the day she would take her mother's place, and it wouldn't surprise her if her mother had employed those fools in order to make or break her. But they did neither, really, and she was all the wiser for it. The words followed her for the next seventeen years, creeping into her dreams, where she could not brush them off further. As she traced the message with her finger,...

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