Herbert listened as the tattooed aberration climbed the stairs, towards the muffled and echo-distorted voices. Was it possible that Twain was of the party from whose bags his own had stolen, and that they had returned, or would he simply be part of another miscellany strung together by necessity and equally lost and clueless? The answer would come in due time.

The ruby-red flames danced in the fireplace. Hunched and shivering, the woman held a strong semblance of defiance with strained muscles in a clenched jaw, barring against the pain. It was an admirable effort, but ultimately self-destructive. Herbert knelt in front of her at eye-level. The fire warmed the left side of his body, and sent twitching shadows dancing across his right. 

There were several moments of quiet, with only the crackle of enflamed wood and the heavy breaths of Rozalind to punctuate the passing of time. 

“You would do best to relax,” Herbert told her, his voice flat, his stare unwavering. The advice seemed more like a threat when delivered with such a dosage of apathy. It was not that the voice held anger or malice, but that it lacked any emotion altogether. It was the voice of hard fact. 

Herbert drummed his fingertips upon the knees he had his hands rested upon, quite tunelessly, as he stared at Rozalind, no, through her; for though he was looking into her eyes, it was quite apparent his thoughts went beyond. There was a fleeting familiarity about her, odd for a person of her condition to bring about. Yet it nagged at Herbert, like a thick fog in his mind; when he grasped at them with a cerebral limb, they slipped through his fingers, dancing away in swirling ideograms, further taunting him with dim impression of what should have been known, yet was sorely missing in the oblivion to which it was consigned. There existed such a void in his memory that he was thankful he had retained some sense of self. 

A snapping log roused him. 

He coughed and stood up. 

Thankfully Rozalind’s eyes were somewhat glazed over, apparently the fatigue and pain was catching up with her. The medicine could only help so much. 

“I shall follow your acquaintance, perhaps against my better judgement. It seems your Twain may not be so far after all,” he spoke to the semi-conscious woman. “I hope for your sake he is a miracle worker. Finding a husband with such ugly scarring will be quite a chore.” 

With that, Herbert went up the stairs, slowly, as he too was feeling exhausted. The wrongness still pervaded the very fabric of this space. When he crested the top and entered into the altar room, he saw a Charonian cage of bone and viscera that encapsulated the room, punctuated with vicious chunks of ice and ever-present snow. 

There were faces he did not recognise, and faces that he did, but he stood, petrified, with wide-eyes and a detached numbness.