The blade fell. 　A cold metallic gleam. The crowd's mockery. The faces of those who abandoned her—only one outline was painted white, erased. 　A void in the mist. No name. No voice. Nothing. Only that single absence. 　Blackthorn Evangeline opened her eyes in the darkness. 　There was a ceiling. Stone-built, familiar. A beam arching overhead, with a single spider's web hanging thin from it. （...I'm alive.） 　It took several seconds to process that thought. 　She sat up and looked at her own hands. 　No wounds. Young. The hands of her twenty-five-year-old self—no, that wasn't right. Not twenty-five. Before twenty-five, so twenty-four, or was it twenty-three, three years before— 　Something pulsed violently in her chest. She suppressed it by force of will. One breath. Then another. She steadied her breathing, feeling fear and rage surge up simultaneously, pushing the wave inward. 　Emotions could wait. First, she would confirm. 　That was the essential habit of who she was. 　She desc