"Amilei..."

When the apprentice girl found herself, the unearthly voice still floated across the moaning highland winds like the mad wail of a wounded wolf. Amilei fought to her feet, her mind torn between fear of Death's harbinger outside, confusion at her continued existence, and humiliation at the stale, warm stain spreading in the crotch of her trousers. No one whose name had rolled from the disembodied lips of the Dullahan, the demon rider whose missing head was clutched within its own right hand, had ever survived more than a few moments afterwards. And yet... there she stood, bleeding, stinking, but alive.

Through the open window she stared, gazing fearfully down upon the still rider.

"Amilei..." it called again, its voice as uncertain as she herself felt.

"What do you want from me, if you aren't here to claim my life?" Her shouts echoed over what felt like the whole of Ireland, but the rider never moved, never made as if to answer. The devil's beastly steed pawed the ground impatiently, but still, the Dullahan remained in place.

Amilei could stand no more. She turned to flee, though to where she might run she could not imagine. Down a half a flight of stairs she went, her muscles groaning against the strain of her abrupt rush, her heart pounding against the fear in her mind. She knew in her soul that she should have been dead right away...

... unless the Dullahan is only heralding...? The thought crossed her inner monologue like a thrown stone crosses a pane of glass; silently at first, but making itself known suddenly and violently. A million other thoughts soon crowded in after it, thoughts of her friends and family, the life she would be leaving behind, the love she'd never had time to share.

And still she ran. Tears clouded her eyes so thickly that she could see nothing, but still her legs pumped, her hips swivelled to turn about the banisters. She ran so blindly, so quickly, that she never saw the man off of whose mailed chest she bounced at the crest of the fourth floor even after to the chilly stone ground she fell once again, the wind knocked cleanly from her lungs.

"A templar...?" Amilei's senses were nearly too muddled to understand that empty voice. "Rise, girl, or I will raise you myself."

The apprentice scrambled backwards, her fists held high and her lips chanting horrified words of magic, but there is no time for the spell to cast. The man in black flowed like the dancing shadows of torchlight, flickering across the distance between them until he knelt before her. The unearthly cold of his shrivelled fingers ground into the soft flesh of her throat until she could no longer breathe, no longer think. "I told you to rise," the assailant growled, his stinking, metallic breath bringing tears to the girl's green eyes, "not to try and get away. Templar. Tell me where I can find the Crom Dabhre."

Amilei whimpered in response, but it was a whimper only partially composed of pain. The Crom Dabhre of which this man spoke was a legendary sword supposedly housed by the Knights Templar in Ireland, a blade named for an obsolete fertility god with a mythical penchant for human sacrifice. It was known across the emerald isle as a legendary sword because, to the best of anyone's knowledge, it did not even exist.

"I don't... ggh..."

"Do not lie to me!" Amilei felt her body unfolding, the rough texture of the floor no longer pressing against her bottom. "I know the templars keep it. I know. So tell me."

"It doesn't... exist..."

"Lies! I will show you." Her arms dangled then, her will to fight against his unimaginable strength slipping further with every choking gasp. The assailant carried her without complaint up the stairway and back to the fifth floor study, where he tarried only a moment before stepping through the open window and onto the narrow ledge outside. "You will tell Korliss right now," hissed the man in black, his lips parting to show off his gleaming, elongated canines, "or I will drop you. There can be no more simple demand."

"Kor..." Amilei's voice wept, her eyes burned with pressure and tears wrung from her ducts by this irony. A vampire. The Dullahan had not come to kill her, but to warn her that her time had come... "There is... no... Crom..."

Her words gave way to silence. The bladed fangs that slid so effortlessly into her flesh allowed no sound, the blood that spewed forth from her severed jugular left no trace outside of the vampire's lips. Her muscles tensed and spasmed, arms and legs kicking uselessly in the air of the dawn until Korliss had taken his fill of her.

"Now," he growled into her ear, "remember me when you arrive in hell."

His grip loosened from her bloody neck. She fell, but knew nothing of it until her body shattered the surface of the tower moat. The coldness of the autumn water, however, did nothing to match the deathly chill that swirled about her innards, the same frost that had lingered upon Korliss's fingertips.

On silent hooves, the patient Dullahan rode away.