Everything around her was burning. Blazing with white fire, cutting like the crone's sickle. The entire village would soon be ash, along with the men who would have burned her. They would die slowly, as they would have had her die, she was burning them alive. The death and rebirth of the fire sang through her blood, it ran through her veins and the markings on the ground, it sizzled and burned and blazed. The symbol of the goddess, of life and birth and death. The moons, waxing and full and waning. It burned like a brand on the ground before her, scorching the earth as she grinned, the cut on her arm from which she had drawn the blood for the mark, was alreaying healing. Her long midnight hair swept up behind her in the night's breeze. The women and children of the village were safe, only the ones who had come to her door with torches and pitchforks were burning now, no the rest were in the meadow having been warned by her to leave before dawn the previous day. But tonight wasn't one watched over by the maiden, nor by the mother, no tonight was a night watched over by the crone who looked on with her sickle in hand. Tonight was a night for death, and it would be long indeed.