The Forest of Looming Death is, as one might guess by the name alone, a dreary place. To say the least. Through it runs the Brook of Dashed Hopes, which is as bleak a brook as one could imagine. It is full of bony, inedible fish which are the only creatures hardy enough to live there; the brook is where the coal mine upstream dumps all the byproducts of its mining operation. Since the fish are the only creatures living in the brook, they are cannibalistic by necessity.

Just beyond this brook, and over the Bridge of Misery, it is just a hop, skip, and a jump to a cave which (unlike most landmarks in The Forest) has no name. But if it did it would be called The Dwelling Place of Mirabella the Traitor. The Forest was where banished criminals of the land were sent to live out their remaining days, and Mirabella had been a resident of its shades for nigh on twenty years. She was the sister of the Queen of the Land of Fritillary, and as if that wasn’t enough distinction and rank for her, she was also the only person in all the land who did not have a soul.

At least, no soul that anyone could detect.

Most days since her banishment to the Forest of Looming Death, she spent her waking hours hunting, tending her vegetable garden, and fighting other criminals off her prime forest real estate. Most nights (Mirabella didn't do much sleeping due to all the other banished criminals) she plotted revenge. She had been plotting with her partner-in-crime for nearly twenty years, so it was as nice a revenge plan as ever a villain could hope to concoct, full of twists and turns and heartbreak and (for her) sweet, sweet justice for all the wrongs she believed herself to have suffered.

When our story first finds the soulless Mirabella she is bent studiously over a piece of paper on the stone floor of her cave, scribbling away energetically on the paper with a large black quill. She pauses, ponders for a full minute or so, and dips her quill in the bowl of raven blood she's using as ink. She had made the paper herself by hand out of plant pulp and water, and -- since if you are going to do a thing you might as well do the thing well -- she had decorated the margins of the paper with various pressed wildflowers and pine needles, so it is quite fancy and arty.

Mirabella writes a bit more, reads it all over, and with a pleased smirk on her gaunt face (adequate nutrition is hard to come by in The Forest) she breaths, "It is ready.” Then her creepily empty eyes turn their attention to a crudely-made sundial on a flat bit of rock just outside the cave entrance. "And just in time, too," she adds as she quickly scoops up the paper and adds it to a stack of others that sits on a small wooden table near the wall. She then glides around the cave, drawing a chair and an upended log that serves in a pinch as a second chair over to the table, grabs two cups from her meager supply of kitchen goods, and goes to the cave entrance to wait for her guest and tend to the fire that is heating a kettle for tea.

As she waits she doesn't fuss with her hair or worry about her appearance because, for one thing, she doesn't care one iota about the opinions of others (a nice byproduct of her soullessness), and for another thing she is just one of those ladies who always looks good without trying.

Though she's spent half her life in a in a cave being harassed by murderers and thugs of all descriptions, she has unnaturally good skin and long, wavy black hair unsullied by any gray. Her face is a bit lined from all her brow-furrowing and squinting through late-night plotting sessions by the light of a single thin-flamed candle, and her ratty old clothes are pretty filthy, and she is way too skinny since she never really got the knack of hunting even after all these years of banishment, but all in all it could safely be said that she looked a lot better than one would think she should have considering her circumstances. If she had only not had those soulless eyes… But then if she had had a soul she wouldn't have been in a cave in the middle of The Forest of Looming Death and there'd be no need for me to be carrying on about how she looks pretty good all things considered. She had found that the lack of stress and worry that accompanies soullessness did wonders in the anti-aging department.

A great horrible swirl of smelly smoke appears out of nowhere, startling a few chubby doves Mirabella has been eyeing hungrily, but not startling Mirabella in the least since this is the visitor she has been expecting, and his smoky mode of travel is nothing new to her. Her eyes still following the doves, she almost lazily waves some smoke away from her face and finally turns her eyes from the doves to watch as the great evil magician, Farland Phelps, strides all smooth and fancy from the depths of the thick smoke, too cool to cough. She often wondered how long it had taken him to perfect that, not coughing as he walked out of his big magic smoke column. Did he just hold his breath? Did the smoke seriously not bother him?

“Mirabella,” says her partner-in-crime in his sleazy voice that one would expect more from a Vegas magician than a real live wizard -- it made it sound like he was thinking all kinds of slimy thoughts, when in reality his thoughts ran more toward the chilling than toward the commonplace slime of the everyday degenerate.

“Farland,” she responds. “The plans are complete.”

“Excellent,” he sleazes, and follows her into the cave to see what she’s put together. She holds out the stack of papers to him, and he begins to scan them, cackling evilly at what he reads. He laughs harder with each page, until he’d flipped too many pages for that to be sustainable, and then the laughs remain at the same intensity for the rest of the stack. It is really a pretty big stack of paper. Again she suspects him of pretension and that those demonic chortles are perhaps rehearsed.

It takes him so long to peruse the papers that she has time to make a mug of tea for each of them, which she puts down on the table just as he finishes up and says, “Perfect. Perfect. These plans are all I could have dreamed of. And,” he adds, impressed, “the paper is quite pretty, too.”

“Oh, thank you,” she says. “I made it myself. Be careful not to touch the red flowers. They’re poisonous. Just a little safety measure to keep the information between us alone.”

He quickly and gingerly readjusts his hold on the papers and says, “Very clever.”

“Tea?” she asks, gesturing to the table.

“Oh, lovely!”

They sit across from each other and sip in silence for a few moments. Mirabella is thinking about her garden and wondering how the asparagus crop is faring, and Farland is thinking about Mirabella. The closer they get to the completion of this revenge plot, the more acutely aware he becomes of the fact that over the span of these twenty years of plotting with her something has happened to him: he has fallen in love. Or something like it, anyway. She was smart and pretty and funny (if you liked mean-spirited sarcasm, which he did). He has not analyzed his feelings too much so he isn’t sure of whether it is love exactly, but he knows for sure that he really likes being around her and that all too soon he will no longer have a reason to be around her, and that knowledge makes him gloomy. She has never expressed any interest in doing anything other than plotting revenge with him; no walks along the riverbank, no picnics, no anything; so he has a good feeling that once their plans are completed she’ll be fine parting ways forever.

“Good tea” he says, wishing she were weak-minded so that he could read her thoughts. He can only effectively read the minds of people who are not very smart, and Mirabella is the exact opposite of not very smart.

“It’s from my garden.” Ack. He's looking at her with that sappy expression that she’s been noticing on his face more and more in recent months.

“Ah.” Pause. “Weather been good out here in The Forest?”

“Yup.” It had been a mistake to make tea and give him a reason to stay. She sips a small sip from her cup. Stares at him witheringly over the rim.

“Because it’s been raining like crazy in the capital.”

“Mmm.” Sip.

He shuffles about uncomfortably on his seat.

She taps her fingers on the table and stares at the roof of the cave. Stalactites.

“OK, well I guess I’ll be off then. Gotta get these plans moving,” he says at last, looking toward the stack of poisoned papers.

“No time like the present.”

He sets down his cup. “I’ll come back in a week to keep you abreast of the developments.” Genius! He's manufactured a reason to see her again soon!

“No need,” she responds, looking at him coolly.

“But won’t you be curious to--”

“Nope.”

“But --”

“I don’t like you, Farland.”

His face turns red. “I never said --”

“Your sappy eyes as good as said it.”

He stands up quickly, embarrassed and angry. “I – I --”

“It’s nothing personal. Farland, you know I don’t have a soul. I can’t like people.” When she had been younger and hadn’t known herself quite as well as she did now she actually had considered him as a potential husband, but since her banishment she had had plenty of time to think it through and now knew that marriage (to him or anyone) was not for her, no matter how dreamy and smart he might be.

“Yeah, but I thought maybe, given time...”

She laughs. “Right. Whatever. Look, you’re a good-looking guy and I like the way you think, but I--”

He cuts in sharply, unable to take the embarrassment of rejection a moment longer. He grabs the papers. “I’ll be going now.” And he goes.

Poof!

Mirabella gives a cry of frustration and makes her way, coughing and bumping into things all the way, out of the smoky cave. He could have at least had the decency to have disappeared outside the cave; now it was going to take ages for the place to air out.