Someday, the ground will meet the sky. Then they'll see. We who are claimed by the Earth, we who despise those who need not fear Death - we shall prevail in the end. We shall win. One day immortality will bless us all.

-S. Grosvenor

PROLOGUE

He spun tales like silky nets. All too late one realizes that the silk is coated in superglue, and one is stuck in his web. But still he continues, speaking and writing - and painting with his hands and eyes - the traitorous globes and glowing gems he called fiction. Never, never would one have thought the tales were true (for they were meant to be secret; family legends passed from lips to ears to mind, the brilliant mind of a Grosvenor). Never. Nor would one think that he would be running out of ink at this particular moment (each letter stroke of his confession is precise and non-negotiable), writing this as -

"Shit," swore the blond-haired man oh-so-eloquently. He ran of out ink. In the next room, what sounded like a whimper was suddenly muffled. A sad smile tugged at the corner of his unshaven mouth - even now, his wife played dutiful. Even while…

He shook his head, tossing the useless pen across his desk, only to have it bounce off the back wall and roll right back into his lap. Then fall with a clatter to the floor as he turned his attention to the desk itself, rummaging through drawers and diving through useless objects in pursuit of a pen. Hell, any writing utensil would do.

The letter opener he spotted much before he went back to it. It wasn't an option he would have liked but… Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say. And he was a Grosvenor, after all. His wife knew that when she married him. It was one of the reasons why.

"Rajani," he said softly, smiling when a similar response came from the previously mentioned "next room." She had the child, and she had the blade. She could not be touched while in possession of the blade.

That was his last sane thought before he plunged the letter opener deep into his arm. The pain was a distraction from that incessant clawing, at least.

x

A group of silhouetted figures (about eight or so, adult-sized) waited for the next move. Not a muscle twitched when a quiet, very child-like voice spoke - only eyes.

"How stupid," said the voice. It invited no replies.

Two bodies lay spent and drained on the floor of the cottage, one with a letter opener sticking perpendicular from the fleshy part of his left arm, the other with a deep hole in her neck - not quite their style. If there was a third, it was nowhere to be found. There was no heartbeat, no aroma of death (fresh or otherwise), nothing.

"A waste."

The figure commanding the voice stood slightly apart from the other eight, gaze caressing a piece of lined, schoolbook paper. There was a rustle as a ghostly arm lifted, and with a snap of pale fingers, they were gone - the paper with them. Only the two bodies remained, and a terrified pair of eyes watching the entire scene through a thick layer of tears. A hand was clasped over a mouth, frozen in place. The room still hummed with the Ninth Figure's dissonant parting;

"Sleep on, dreamweaver. Talespitter. Now it's my turn to live."