Rare were the days when the harsh, empty world provided the thieving urchin with cause to study rather than steal, but when it did, there was only one place she could go. It was a humid, hazy bog where few ever dared to tread, for the people believed it to be cursed. She knew better than they did, though. She had no cause to share their fears.

Disgust colored her features as she trudged through the muck to reach the ramshackle shack near the center of the bog. Ambient chirping, hissing, bubbling, and crackling bade her to turn back, but she brushed aside their wordless warnings as she had dozens of times before.

Reaching the shack, she banged her fist against the rotting wooden door. "Hethys!" she called as she paused her knocking. Hearing no answer, she resumed her assault. "Hethys!" she called again.

Inside the shack stirred a hunched figure whose patchwork cloak of wool and burlap did its best to warm her dark, wrinkled flesh. She drew it about herself to maximize her comfort, casting bloodshot gray eyes at her rattling door.

"Leave me!" came Hethys' high-pitched cry. "No scraps from the refuse. No succor for thee. The maralekt is luckless today!"

The orphan girl winced at the final slight, the favored slur the elder ever levied against her. She knew not its meaning, unique to the woman as it was, but Hethys commonly spat it at her with the spite-filled tone of a toad-throated crone. Surely, it was no compliment.

Gritting her teeth, she beat the door all the harder. "Open, hag!" she shouted.

"Get, maralekt! Return thee when the winter hen has eaten of Death's trough again!"

Hethys was again in the grips of madness, it seemed. The urchin sighed. She turned her back to the door and slumped against it, sliding down until she rested upon the moist earth. The urge to abandon her effort came and went; where else had she to turn? No others would deign to speak to her unless she caused offense, and she would earn no aid from the offended. Hugging her knees to her chest, she rested her head upon them and let her eyes fall shut.

"My blood's glowing," spoke the girl at volume to project her voice through the door. "Shines when spilled. Why?"

She scarcely expected an answer with Hethys in her harried state, but inside, the elder raised her head. Eyes sharpening, she rose and made for the door. "Shiny blood?" uttered the hag. "Bloody shine? Speak thee, bloody shiny."

At this, the girl perked up. "My nose got hurt, and I bled. It was glowing. D'you know why?"

The door creaked open, and the girl turned to meet Hethys' weary stare. The aged hag offered her hand to help her guest to her feet. "Come thee," she said. "Show me."

Hethys' grip loosened then, but the orphan was not so eager to break contact, instead letting the hag lead her by the hand; nonviolent contact was too rare to be so readily cast aside. She did not let go until the old woman left her at an off-kilter table and approached a chest of baubles and wooden dishware.

"Nay, nay, not today," she muttered to herself as she sifted through the chest’s cluttered contents. She winced as her bony fingers slipped against something too smooth. "Out, thee!" Gripping what turned out to be a broken glass goblet, she pulled it from the chest and flung it against the farthest wall. The orphan recoiled to protect her face against any stray shards.

"Dangey, mangey glass!" Hethys seethed. "Step not, maralekt!"

She continued her searching while the urchin watched on with violet eyes touched by a shade of fear. It was rather an unpleasant thing to see and to suffer the lunacy of the hag: a tendency toward mad ramblings and grand delusions, a habit of growing violent at the slightest provocation. The reviled spinster Hethys promised wishes and charms to anyone who would listen, but to the only one who ever did, she seldom delivered more than the odd moldy morsel.

"Bowl!" Hethys exclaimed. She lifted a cracked wooden bowl from the chest and held it aloft, swaying and humming in momentary celebration. She hobbled back to the table where sat the orphan and set the bowl down upon it.

"Now we see. Your hand."

Once again, the orphan girl readily placed her hand in Hethys' grasp. The hag's wild eyes softened as she looked down at the limb and took note of dark red markings and scrapes on the skin.

"Hurt like your nose?" Hethys asked.

The girl only nodded. Gingerly, Hethys placed her free hand over the blemishes, her lips curling into a somber smile as she sought to meet the orphan's gaze. Slowly, the orphan found the corners of her own lips twitching upward as well.

It was a little easier to let herself know levity in the grips of the morbid sort of affection that drew her back to Hethys time and again. With her widowed mother gone, that unlikely bond was the last she had left.

Hethys, at least, could be trusted not to abandon her for the first merchant with the means and the mind to leave Hovale behind. After all, no man would ever want her. They had that in common.

In all of tiny Hovale, there were none who cared to keep the company of a crotchety old witch who might not have her wits about her from one hour to the next. None but the unkempt orphan, who unfortunately suffered as often as not when the integrity of said wits inevitably turned.

"The maralekt must bleed."

"What?"

Hethys’ grip tightened the instant before she drew her jagged nail across the orphan's forearm. Inexplicably, she sliced the flesh quite cleanly, and blood came pouring out into the bowl she'd set while the young girl shouted her agony.

"Lies!" exclaimed Hethys over the girl's groaning. "Filthy maralekty lies! No shine, no glow, so she must go!"

Confused by the rapid shift, the girl had but a moment to note the plain dark red color of her spilled blood before Hethys shoved her away from the table. She managed to stay on her feet as the old hag slapped and scratched at her to drive her from the hovel. "Wait!" she entreated. "It glows! I saw!"

"Mad and muddy maralekkkkt, you are!" Hethys countered, letting the slur’s last syllable linger like phlegm in her throat. With a final shove, she pushed the girl into the muck outside of the ramshackle shack. "Get thee gone! Now the winter hen will be thrice fed before you'll see any scraps from me!"

Then, Hethys’ disposition sweetened as swiftly as it had soured. "Hope you like weasel heart stew, love."

Scowling anew, she slammed her door and left the girl to deal with a wound that would likely fester in short order.

She stood in place against the door for a time, her ears tuned up to ensure she heard the sound of bare feet plodding off and away from her shack. Only once she had did she straighten up and return to look over the bloodied bowl.

A swarm of faint sparkles rose from it as she dipped her fingers into the urchin's blood and ladled that blood into her mouth. The golden shine the blood had failed to display overtook her eyes a moment before she closed them and moaned in bliss.

Her lips then parted to let out a voice far too deep and gravelly to be bound up in so frail a frame. "At last, it begins anew."