Nietzsche once said 'When gazing long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.'

Though simple, it was a memorable quote. The kind that revealed its depth like strips of flayed flesh; it took a certain kind of experience, a precise dance with darkness, to truly understand what it meant.

And honey, that abyss had gazed right back into me, laid its eggs and hatched all kinds of wrongness inside. I knew evil. I knew devils and beasts, the rotten and tainted. But none compared to her. Didn't even come close.

Staring into her eyes, two ghastly little pinpricks that seemed to blaze beneath the wild flames eating away at the drywood in the fireplace, it was like looking into the wickedest cavern Hell had to offer. A tentative war inhabited them, chaos battling against knowledge, manifesting into an untamed energy that bled throughout the dingy, single-roomed cabin. It had the hairs on the back of my neck standing erect, and an unsteadiness knocking at my knees.

"Your anger, boy," she crooned, lips peeling back into a ghoulish grin, the paper thin flesh of her face pulling taut against the sharp array of bones that threatened to cut through, "Oh, it is ravenous. It called to me the second you stepped foot in my woods."

Her woods. Cursed, the sheer mention of the place enough to have folk invoking the sign of the cross, it was a place of nightmares. A man had to be damn near insane, or just plain desperate, to enter.

Standing here, soaked to the bone in cold sweat, hands bloodied and bruised from fending off one of the abominations - creatures of the vilest of heritage - that called the forest home, it dawned on me that perhaps I was both. Few survived the journey, and out of those that did, I'd never heard of anybody willing to make the journey for a second time.

I was all in favour of that. Six years lived between my last visit, and it wasn't anywhere near long enough. The trauma still haunted my dreams. Everything that ever was or is, everything that crept through the perpetual myths and legends that the humans told, that they passed down through the generations like silly little ghost stories, they were locked away inside the Peccatorum woods. It acted as a prison, keeping in the foulness that would have wreaked havoc on the world; it kept them in, but it didn't keep us out.

I had vowed never to return, but one of the world's greatest joys was to force a man to break his own oath.

"Lady Vide," I greeted, taking another step into the room. The rotten planks beneath my feet groaned, bowing, threatening to buckle. Lead. My legs were like lead. Each step became heavier. Every breath seemed harder.

She had been expecting me. Neighbouring her own armchair, a moth-eaten lump of fabric, another recliner sat, angled towards the only source of warmth. Reluctantly, I took a seat.

In a forest of monsters, she was their queen.

She was the Vidua, and if nothing else, she demanded one's respect.

"I told you that you'd return, Sterling Grey," she rasped, her head turning from the spitting embers. Power radiated from her. The raw kind. The kind that charged the air, creating a loud buzzing that swallowed up the silence and resonated through my ears. "Just as we will meet once more."

"Not if I can help it," I muttered, swallowing hard. The inside of my mouth felt like sandpaper, and every breath was like swallowing sawdust. "You know why I'm here?"

Although the words presented themselves as a question, we both knew it was rhetorical.

She knew everything. Or so it was acclaimed. She was sought out for her wisdom. Dumb cubs who yearned to know what their life held in store for them, who were thirsty for insight on their fate.

I had been one of those dumb cubs. Her words, they lived with me still, and not in a good way.

"Your reputation has taken you far, little wolf king." Adopting the guise of a kindly old grandmother, it was easy to fall for the venus fly-trap routine, but the small tells, the true nature of who she was, they showed, preventing the illusion from consuming me. Movement stirred beneath her cheeks, like a maggot was crawling just underneath the flesh, before it was gone, replaced by the innocent facade once more. "Your name is known by many. Feared by many. You wear the bones of your enemies like a crown."

"I became Alpha," I said. The tickling aroma of freshly cut lavender slithered up my nose, but it couldn't completely disguise the undertone of rotting meat and decay that fermented in the air. The scent of death. I switched to breathing only through my mouth. Not that it was much help. It seemed to linger at the back of my throat, so strong I could practically taste it. "It comes with the territory."

Violence was in our blood. When challenged, it became us. I refused to apologize for my nature.

"The time is coming." She smiled a terrible smile. Far too wide. Far too many teeth. Like she'd taught herself how to smile from a children's picture book. "And enemies new and old will rise up to meet you, little wolf king. Your path grows dark. Approaches a fork. Your future . . . it hangs in the balance."

"I didn't come here for me," I cut in. Answers were never straightforward with her. Last time, they wound around each other so tightly that it was only after certain events had transpired that they began to make sense. It was enough to drive a man mad. "There is - "

"You're here about the boy," she cut in. "But you are as impatient as you are blind, little wolf, for you cannot possibly begin to understand the boy until you first understand yourself."

Smoothing the blanket that concealed her legs, she shifted. Her thin shoulders, looking so brittle that they seemed in danger of crumbling to nothing, lifted and slowly, her hands rose. Turned until she was gazing into the valley of wrinkles that were her palms. "If you wish for the answers you seek, you must be willing to meet my price."

Grimacing, hands curling into the dense material of the armrests, I glanced at the fire, watching as the stabs of light forced the shadows into the corners of the room. A being such as the Vidua did not deal in mundane currencies. Money held no value to the likes of her. Her stakes were much, much higher.

My last encounter had cost me greatly. She had required a sacrifice. A personal one. She had demanded a memory. The precious kind. I couldn't remember which one she had taken, which was the whole point, but I felt its loss like a hole in my heart.

Whatever it had been, it must have been important. Cherished, even. But nothing came without a cost. Least of all knowledge.

Knotting, churning in panic, my stomach flipped. Heart sunk. Forcing a nod, I asked, "What do you require?"

"One month," she whispered, grinning that terrible smile once more. Shadows scaled her face. Danced along the off-white blocks of her teeth. "A month sacrificed from the total span of your natural life."