Hood slips fitfully into a dream - a neither place that perhaps hints of things past and things future - an abode of foreboding and questionable memories:

Stairs, the daily grind of an initiate but these stairs do not twist about like those at the towers of Arkanthor but lead straight up, between earthen walls. Hood ascends the steps, timeworn and moss covered, from depths of darkness, to find himself standing on the uppermost step, upon a grassy wagon-way which, winding through a field, ends at a gate. Hy-Jinx is there, leaning nonchalantly against it, a long stem of grass between her teeth. Seeing Hood, she flicks the grass stem away and flips backwards, in a whirl of bells and tinkles, onto the top of the gate, walking backwards along its edge, with both arms outstretched for balance, reaching the hinged end as Hood reaches the gate itself.

“Lleb a naht erom hcum os si lleb a,” she says, pulling a bell from her hat and tossing it to Hood who catches it in a gloved hand - tinkle tinkle. Hood holds it before himself, he can see through the slit into the bell’s inside, can see the ball rolling to and fro.

“It is a riddle - only six left…” she says glumly, before perking up: “Or is it sixteen?” she asks, cartwheeling off the gate into the field beyond. But there is something in the sky, a shadow that appears accompanied by the mechanical tick of some strange machine - a metal bird, sunlight glinting off its angled body. The bird flies at Hy-Jinx who, laughing and giggling loudly, flips and rolls, cartwheels and tumbles to avoid its attacks. But her nimbleness is not enough and darting this way and that the bird seems to anticipate Hy-Jinx’s dance, and with one swift motion dives straight for Hy-Jinx’s chest and disappears, seemingly absorbed by her body.

Hood watches as Hy-Jinx’s japes halt mid flip, her skin turning frost blue as she slowly ices over, freezing, a look of horror on her face. But the sound of her laughter continues, echoing over and through itself until it no longer sounds like laughter but terrified gasps. Cracks start to spread across Hy-Jinx’s panicked face, extending across her body before she suddenly shatters into a thousand crystalline shards, each reflecting off the other, each holding within their faces images of Hy-Jinx who appears to be trapped and banging frantically upon them, desperate to escape.

Placing Hy-Jinx’s bell into a pocket, Hood leaps the gate into the field beyond. He runs hither and thither, picking up the pieces of Hy-Jinx, lifting the front of his smock to create a place to hold them. Having gathered up the totality of Hy-Jinx, the heavy mass of crystals emanating a strange ringing sound which resonate with each other, Hood stumbles across to a river that skirts the edge of the field. Even though it is day time, the river seems nothing but a reflection of the night sky, not even a reflection, for as he gazes into its depths he realises that there is no water, just a mass of stars flowing onwards. Hood pours Hy-Jinx into the river and watches as the shards drift out and take the place of stars within the river’s firmament. It is then that Hood notices the cut and ripped ends of his gloves…and his fingers. He must have sliced them open whilst picking up the pieces of Hy-Jinx. Blood starts to pool and drip from them, plopping into the river.

Hood suddenly feels something move in his smock. He panics slightly, patting down his garment, realising that the movement is coming from his pocket. Placing his hand inside, he feels something coiling around his wrist and panics even more. As he pulls out his hand he realises that what was the bell has turned into a snake. He shakes his arm frantically, droplets of blood spraying from his finger ends, shakes his arm again until the snake drops to his feet. But looking down, he sees more snakes slithering out from the river and twining themselves about his ankles. Each opens its mouth and hisses, exposing a single long needle of a tooth. And each raises its head simultaneously and bites.

The world turns white and is wreathed in dark flame. Hood is rising up into the sky towards a black sun from which emanates twisting geometric knots that slowly change and rotate. Shadow birds fly the sky and a thousand red tendrils rise from the fields below like a carpet of red grass, swaying gently, hissing in the breeze. The white soil from which they rise falls away and there, writhing beneath it, a mass of giant worms, fully the size of a person wide and three times the length - distended, pale and purple, sliming over themselves. But, revolting as they seem, Hood feels an attraction towards them as if to dine on them would satiate some desperate need, an attraction that he cannot fight.

Down he plummets, his vision narrowing, talons extending beneath him to grasp and rend but his claws do not hit the soft giving flesh that he expects them to, instead, they clatter against something hard and unforgiving. He looks down, along the length of his curved beak, to see an equally curved smile and the shadows of two eyes blinking back at him. His head twitches back and forth, back and forth, his eyes blink as if a mirror to those beneath him - and he cannot stop himself. Something inside starts screaming, but he cannot stop himself. He wants to stop himself but he cannot, he wills himself to stop, pulls and tenses every fibre of his being but nothing can prevent it from happening, nothing can stop his beak from plunging through the carved space of the mask’s eye socket, and the scream that he thought his own echoes back from beneath him.

Hood begins to sob, uncontrollably - “Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry….” he hears his rasp of a voice repeat itself over and over and over again…feels tears roll from his eyes and across his face like rain upon a glass window. And peering through the window, he sees the reflection of his dark beady eyes, sees the reflection of his beak, feels it’s tip tap and scrape the glass before him, sees Madeleine, sitting on a bed with her back to him, Nurse Weevil before her, carefully removing the mask that cannot be removed, carefully brushing back the thick tresses of Madeleine’s hair to reveal the enormity of the loss that she has suffered. Where a head should be only half remains. The curling tresses of Madeleine’s hair growing out only from a limited scalp, used to disguise the scarred and twisted skin that remains. But the damage is not limited to just here. Helping Madeleine remove her tunic, Nurse Weevil wields a pair of scissors and carefully cuts through layer and layer of bandaged material, each layer piling up on the bed, darker and grimier than the last until she has to peel off the final one to reveal a painful mass of puss glistening skin, reddened and raw, cut through with puckered scars. As she does this, Nurse Weevil notices the silent eyes that are staring at her through the window and returns the silent stare, her deeply lined face filled with empathy, her eyes with disappointment.