Stories reached the Nightjars of dead-eyed women in crimson garb with black, sparkling hands and flashing blades. They haunted the forests, hovered over the towns. Watching, waiting. Arson had become rampant and was generally attributed to this unsettling presence. What few interventions were led against them wound up ill-fated. Hung from treetops. Bloated in wells. Scorched with their fat run out of them, mixing into flickering pools of hot blood. If any were found alive, it was not a life worth continuing. People reported devils in their dreams and woke up raked with red, inflamed marks up and down their backs and along the soft flanks of their sides. Between the Red Devils and the immigrants from the flooded valleys, towns closed down and walled up, and the whole of Lith went dark. As for the flooded valley, the immigrants spoke of the waters doing strange things, and those who forged the rising tide on foot to try and scavenge the remains of civilization in that place showed their skin had become waxy and plastic. The forests filled with bandit camps. Cannibalism was rampant. Kate took on what skilled people she could to work and defend the property, and Mistrial set out a perimeter of cursed sigils, afflicting trespassers with devouring insects, tumors, wasting diseases, sepsis, derangements and hallucinations, and even personally visited them in dreams asking politely to have their property returned and that sort of thing tended to eat into her beauty sleep. Kate told them one day, seated at the head of the table, that the world went through phases, and now was a dark time, and that one day she might not be recognizable to them, but would take on an evil form and live among the shadows just as she had taken on a beautiful form now and lived with them in the light. A mostly good form, she corrected, after they eyed her dubiously. Mostly good. Some time after, Mistrial was taking a piss in the upstairs bathroom, or feeling she had to pee because of some toxic microdosing Victory and Valorie had talked her into with an effective dose narrowly similar to its toxic dosage, and was looking out the window at the lovely patterns of nausea when she saw a dark figure in the trees with inhuman, hollow eyes. She waved timidly to the apparition, uncertain if were real or hallucinated, feeling it were due some decorum either way. The crimson woman receded into the dark layers of kudzu and Mistrial slotted shut the irregular old window which stuck on its painted edges at intervals on the way down. She told Heathcliff who sprang up and plastered herself up against the wall, out of the sight of the two windows, certain they had come for her. They arranged with Kate to have Heathcliff smuggled down into the cellar. Down below among the carpets of daddy-long-legs, Kate handed off the broom. In addition to thank her, Heathcliff made a point to ecstase over the black cauldron,bringing up the subject of its origins. Kate confirmed it, saying it did indeed belong to Astaroth. “Cool,” said Mistrial, still in the clutches of recreational poison. She yawned and said goodnight and went back upstairs to bed, putting it out of mind entirely.