The typewriter was romantic. Its sleek black lines were confident despite its age, and the comfortable, familiar feeling of its keys against her fingers, were so much warmer than those of a computer keyboard. It was almost like it had a soul that somehow appreciated and remembered every character and story that it helped its owner create.

Alina closed her eyes and ran her hands along the keypads, feeling the slight give beneath her fingertips-they waited for her to decide which would be the first. The resin from the polish she used to clean it permeated the air with a warm forest smell. Let the weight fall slightly and it responded instantly, the tap as the inkpad hit the paper melding with the idle bareness of the room. She typed until her breath caught in her throat and suddenly she was dizzy. Had the keys jammed, were they finally objecting to her work, the deal she could not retract?

Reeling backwards from her seat she landed hard on the polished wooden floorboards, now open eyes wide and fearful, hand clutched around the pendant at her throat. Her gaze darted wildly, trying to find something to focus on. The walls were white and bare, amber floorboards seamlessly laid, a wooden table, a hard backed chair, a pile of cushions with a hand knitted throw rug. The window-doors along the east wall were shut, dry leaves nesting in the corners of the decking, and the kitchen in the south-west corner was white and metal, gleaming clean. Hardly anything to suggest the studio apartment was inhabited, and her desperate search found nothing of comfort, so she settled for closing her eyes again as she lay on her back, knees up, forcing her breathing to calm again.

It happened every time, and each time, as now, she forced herself back to her feet and crawled back to the chair, placing her fingers in the worn hollows of the keys again. The chain around her neck seemed unduly heavy and hot, chafing the burn marks that marred the surface of her skin. The little character that hung from it gleamed brightly against the rusty colour of her top, possibly a symbol from some long forgotten language, or maybe just an icon and nothing more.

It was curvaceous yet oddly spiny, it had a look of deceitfulness to it, and violence. Rimmed with points, the silver cords that made the body of it looped over and over themselves like the innards of some robotic creature. She began to type again, her pulse increasing, eyes closed and focusing solely on the words she typed so slowly and heavily. Her face began to pale and her increasingly whitened lips moved softly, murmuring to the emptiness.

Knowingly her hands turned the knob at the side, re-positioned the paper, muscle and bone moving beneath the translucent skin like gears and cranks in some untiring machine. When she removed the paper, there was a narrow block of text down the middle of the page, and she set it carefully in an envelope, folded once, right down the middle, and sealed it before stamping it with the same symbol she wore around her neck. The sealed package joined a stack of identically unusual sized envelopes in a drawer, which she swiftly closed and locked.

She tucked her chair in neatly, lining the back parallel to the table edge, and glided over to the kitchen were a tall slender bottle of something very strong was waiting for her eager fingers and dry, dry throat. She downed a glass. A second, breathlessly. Wipe out the memories. Her left hand gripped the edge of the bench tightly while her right turned the tap on full, and then they were cupped together, dipping and splashing her face repeatedly until the water ran down her neck and jagged fringe to drip on the parquetry and soak her clothes in patches.

From under that jagged red fringe her eyes darted again, this time towards the window as a bird flew past, like a rabbit in an empty field, exposed and vulnerable. There was no emotion in their stormy depths, they were grey and haunted but somehow dead, as if the soul within them had long ago fled in terror. Alina's footsteps echoed in the bare room as she crossed back to the desk and stood a long while beside it, one hand resting lightly on the lock, the other clasped around the heavy pendant at her throat. Her breath hitched in her throat again and her lungs were full of fire. Eyelids fluttered as she gasped for breath and her hands clenched spasmodically, one tripping the lock while the palm of the other began to bleed where the spines on the silver medallion pierced the skin.

She snapped the lock snib shut again and fell back a few steps, raising both hands in front of her face and staring at the myriad of scars and half healed cuts that adorned them, and now the fresh blood which tinged the air around her with the subtle tang of iron. Tit for Tat. The sounds of madness spun around her, birds calling outside singing songs of freedom to taunt her. The pulse through her neck began to beat more strongly and she could feel the chain heating up, a small cry finally parting her lips as her skin was once more branded.

There was a spattering of sound from the eastern window wall, a line of light taps like someone running a stick along a row of metal bars. She stumbled across to the door, a high pitched ringing sounding through her mind like a siren scream. Her shirt did little to stop the burning from the pendant, the thin material seeming to part around it and leave her naked skin the central focus of the heat. She fumbled with the handle and slid the door aside, falling back as a strong wind whipped past her and twirled in the centre of the room. As Alina pushed the door closed against the now heavy air the leaf bearing wind seemed to solidify, condensing into an almost opaque sphere of twisted white and grey.

It fell to the floor and the room juddered, throwing Alina's balanced off again as the leaves that had been caught up in the breeze scattered to all corners of the sparsely furnished room. A woman now stood in the centre of the room, scowling disdainfully down at Alina's crouched form as she raised a hand and pointed to the desk, coughing weakly and drawing air desperately down into her lungs to try and cool the aching burn that coursed unsympathetically through her body.

The other's strides were confident as she crossed the room to open the drawer and remove the packages, sorting through them with narrowed eyes. Her nails were long and her hands bony, the veins under her skin looking far too dark as they writhed with her movements like tiny serpents. Her hair fell straight to mid back, red with a jagged fringe like Alina's own but shaved at the sides, her pale white scalp engraved with twisted scars. Her eyes were stony green and when she smiled, a sickeningly false expression, her teeth were revealed as vaguely pointed. Her voice was harsh and rough, disquietingly low pitched, and it seemed to loop through the air towards its target in a serpentine manner, often sounding louder or quieter as if the snake looped back on itself occasionally causing its scales to rub against each other gratingly.

"Excellent work, as always... Still... I expected more than this."

Her tone was honeyed and full of deceit, iced with danger. The threat cut through the air like a hot coal dropped into the snow, burning and smouldering where it lay upon Alina's ears and thoughts.

"You came... earlier..."

The air sang with that same high pitched keening and she thought her ears were going to burst. The other woman narrowed her eyes and hissed.

"I don't care. You know what's expected of you, and you know that you agreed to it. You must pay, nothing is free."

With a snarl she pushed her hand palm up towards the ceiling before drawing her fingers into a tight fist as if wrenching a cord from a place where it had been caught. The pendant around Alina's neck jumped and glowed, the heat increasing, burning right through the cloth this time. She clutched at it vainly, trying to lift it over her head, but it would not budge and where she tore the spines away from her flesh it came away charred and sticky. The other mocked her efforts snidely.

"You know as well as I, fool, you will serve your sentence and until then you are ours!"

The ambient noise was now a scream on the edge of her audible range, tearing through her mind and pounding away from inside her skull. Out of the edge of her blurring vision she saw the woman open one of the envelopes and her eyes widened, fear being the only emotion that chased itself across her face. With a flick of her long nailed fingers the corner of the paper burst into flame and a dull red smoke spat in droplets from it as it quickly ignited and the ash fell in a pile to the floor.

A creature arose from it, shadowy and undefined, and slid across the floor towards her. A monster of the imagination- her imagination. It reached a clawed hand towards Alina and closed around her throat as her eyes rolled back, and then it was inside her head, pushing aside all her memories and prowling foremost in her thoughts. It was her creature, and it knew what she feared most, and played upon it. Such things were never made to be used against their creators, and its resulting power was far stronger than something she might have crafted for another. She opened her mouth and a silent scream tore at her throat trying ineffectually to escape.

The other leant back on one leg and casually inspected the thin lines of the tattoos along the inside of her wrist. Finally she circled her fingers outwards, snatching nothing from nothing, and Alina was released, gasping.

"Now you're three short. Making me waste your hard work on you... how extravagant."

She was beside Alina suddenly, nails poised beneath her chin, at the place where the flesh was softest and most vulnerable.

"You'd better make it up by the time I come again."

She was gone, there was another bang and Alina fell backwards, vertigo shattering painfully into existence as the piercing shrill was abrubtly silenced. One of the large panes of glass was shattered, shards spilling out onto the landing, and a cold draft eddied around her, as she curled over herself. Her full black skirt spread around her where she had fallen, spirit re-broken and tamed, body and mind aching. Her involuntary tears mingled with her blood and salted the wounds, the sting dwarfed by the pounding in her head. Her red hair fell around her green clad shoulders like the tendrils of some brave new flower that was drowning even before its life could begin in a lake of cold dark futility.