[i]"It was a dark and stormy night....."[/i]

That was how most scary stories began, a cold and lonely cemetery of cracked and moss covered gravestones, alight by a sinister streak of lightning and a deafening crash of thunder raging through the ominous dark clouds above, all while the rain poured heavily upon the foreboding scene. However, this story did not begin as such. True, there was a great and terrible storm billowing through the tumultuous black skies above the quiet little hamlet nestled between the forest, the mountains and the sea, but rather than taking place in a graveyard of ghostly fog and mist or a decrepit, old house wrought with an uspeakable evil, this story began upon the cracked and muddy cobblestone streets of the village, whereupon lied the disrobed and disheveled corpse of a young woman, protruding from her belly a once magnificent, shimmering rapier, now crimsoned and marred with her blood. The rain drizzled over her deathly pale skin, seeping into the ruby-ish puddle that oozed from her ghastly, gaping wound, and her hair, as dark as ravens' feathers, clung wet to her fragile, lifeless expression forever frozen upon her beautiful face. Suddenly with a loud crack of thunder, the woman sprung to life and wrenched herself from the ground crying painfully into the stormy night. She ripped from her belly the accursed weapon, only to realize.....it was hers.... "Aquilius....." Faintly she whispered clutching the hilt of the sword fraily in her dainty fingers. Much more to her baffled astonishment, the wound upon her belly healed instantly, not a scratch remaining, skin smooth as porcelain. "I.....I'm alive...? But.....this cannot be. I was.......I was....." Murdered..... She was viciously and coldly struck down in her own home, but by whom? To identify her attacker, the woman had not the faintest of evidence. All that she had seen before her wicked demise....were shadows...an infinite sea of black... Try as she may to recollect the killer's face, or rather any feature, it had all came as a blur to her. Who were they? Why did they kill her? Such questions, such inquiries....they plagued her mind with a pulsating ache. She felt dizzy, almost nauseous from her rude awakening, her return from the gaping jaws of Hell into the land of the living. "My manor.....I must return there...." Perhaps upon the scene of her murder, Erza may find some answers.