Amarillis crashed through the branches, tears stinging her eyes. The branches that grabbed hungrily at her auburn hair couldn't stop her. Nor could the rocks and snow grasping for the calloused skin of her feet. Her teeth clenched and blood rang in her ears as she burst into the clearing.

Tears and smoke stung at her eyes as she looked over the fire.

As she looked over what was left of the village. Her home. Her family.

"You're dead," Ama muttered, turning to the horned woman that emerged from the forest. "You're dead!"

The woman lit a cigarette with the tip of her finger and stared at Ama with dead eyes. "My sweet, you shouldn't say things you can't fulfill." A smirk snuck onto her perfectly ruby lips, "Technically I was never alive, it depends who you ask."

"You killed my family, don't mock me!" Ama said, tears streaming ceaselessly down her face.

"Ulga the kind and those orphanage rats, your family?" The woman laughed, running her pale hands through her black hair. "No, no my sweet, we both know you wanted them dead. I just fulfilled wishes you didn't know you had."

"I'm not that kind of person! I-I would never..." Ama's voice tapered off.

"Would never what?" The woman asked, exhaling smoke. "Never wish people dead? Then just what did you want when you tried summoning a demon?"

"I-I didn't think it- it would work, I thought..." Ama gasped, her hand covering her mouth as she began to sob. The weight of what she had done forced her to her knees.

"You thought what? It wouldn't work? It was a fun parlor trick?" The demon flicked the ash from her cigarette at the fallen Ama. "That's an ouija board, my sweet."

"You-you did this, can you f-fix this? Fix it please!" Ama said, groveling at the woman's feet.

"Wishing me dead, then asking for a favor?" The woman let out a rotten laugh.

Ama continued to grovel silently at the woman's feet, the girl had no idea what else to do.

"Meddling in underworld affairs so young is such a Staten move..." The woman let out a smokey sigh, her icey blue reptilian eyes fixing on Ama. She took a step closer to the fallen summoner, before gripping Ama's hair and pulling her up. "A lineage that should end." The woman said, lifting her up painfully by her hair to eye level.

The woman lifted a clawed hand in front of Ama, taking careful aim at the young girl's throat. Tears ran down Ama's raw cheeks as she swallowed an apple-sized lump.

The snowy wind howled in the valley.

Then she let out a sigh then dropped Ama into the snow. "That's what I'd like to say, but you brought me back. It'd be rude of me to kill you, not to mention the royal ass-chewing I would get for it. Besides, I feel like death would be a blessing to you right now. I don't do blessings."

The demon flicked the butt of her cigarette at Ama.

"Live with what you've done," the woman said, then snapped and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

Ama laid in the cold as snow and ash fell.