Minthara can't sleep.

This is why she had opened a book.

But, worse still, she can't focus.

As she lay on the mattress of their present lodgings, all she can feel under her back is the cool, polished stone of the altar. The dimly lit darkness jeers her by glimpses of silver and red, though the dwindling, rational part of her knows them to be but phantoms, conjured and kept in the back of her own wretched mind.

And when she closes her eyes, just the slightest bit, she can swear there is metal pressing down her throat, tilting up her chin, and a voice taunting her in a sickening lilt.

She swears there are fingers crawling over her, pale and thin like underfed maggots, feasting on her fear.

And she lets them, is the worst part.

For how can she fight one that resides in but her memories? How does she kill a woman already dead?

Orin is gone. The words taste bitter and ephemeral - wholly unlike a vendetta done.

And yet, it is true all the same. Even shapeshifters can't reform out of a pile of viscera, she's rather certain - and that's the last she saw of her. A puddle of flesh and sinew, spilled over the floor of her own warren.

A fitting death. Would that she could say it was by her hand..

Oh well. There is no use to fret over spilled blood.

And yet..

How her face haunts her. Pale skin and even paler eyes, and the snarl that twisted the tar of her lips as she caressed her with a blade instead of a hand; laved at her flesh with a scourge instead of a tongue; burrowed those putrid words into her ear..

The floorboards creak, and all of a sudden she is wide awake, wide aware. Though Bhaal's little bloodletter is dead, she half expects to see her, to feel her hand on her neck as she laughs in her face at her naïvety.

It is not Orin that she sees, however.

Just you.

"My love," she calls, whisper-soft voice hoarse from disuse.

The pages of her book rustle shut, and the tome soon lay forgotten in her lap. There is no reading she'll manage to do for tonight, it's been made clear.