• Thin, frail, sickly, she was regardless of her current demise. The skirts of her lavender dress were tattered, it's once white apron stained. The child's bare, filthy feet slipped from beneath her weight as she dropped to her bruised knees, crumpling over his lifeless shell. How could she let this happen? They had been together for so long and yet, as she stared at him in disbelief, it did not seem quite so long at all. How dare that stranger take him from her! For a moment she was lividly filled with rage directed at the thoughts of this strange man of whom the likes she had never seen before. It was all over just as quickly as he had begun pursuing them with obvious ill intent. The one oddity her muddled mind failed to dwell on was how frightened the bad man had looked; his eyes wide, frame trembling. Sorrow swept in like the rising tide and washed away all of her anger leaving little less than an inkling of the horrid emotion. At first it was only a series of hics escaping the tightened hollow of her throat but now, despair could not keep her from wailing, the sound inhuman yet heart wrenching all in the same. She knew what this would cost her but she was in no state to process the consequences. And just like that, she could hear the others, the ones with the faces all twisted up behind those terrifying masks, cackling, hooping, hollering, hot on her trail. They were in a frenzy, this she knew all too well; thirsty for the blood of angels. And as their tauntings found way to her turned back, their presence stealing up on her as a ghost in the night, she dropped her lids over her luminescent saffron eyes, now rimmed with red. The last of her tears fell onto the one she so adored, silently begging, pleading, demanding this end much like one of her fairytales in which the tears of true love broke the hideous curse of imminently eternal slumber. However, she knew better than that and, in utter defeat, whispered what she knew would be her final words, “Mr. Bubbles...”