There is a place where the river curves and where it has curved are striated deposits of multi-colored mud. Blues, grays, ochre, russet.
These are the colors at the end of the world.

The sky was weighted impossibly with swollen purple cloud in endless banks. The wind blew crazily and shrieked.
In the cave where Georgina was it howled and echoed until she screamed trying to outshout it and when she could not hear herself however loud she screamed she prayed to become deaf all the while knowing this prayer too would go unanswered. Even its perversity would not call forth the trimera in the sky. Georgina gripped the rock anchoring herself and waited.
She kept her unwavering raptor eyes on the point where the track touched the ford across the river.
Maria would come. Despite the storm she would come. When she came Georgina would embrace her, icy, drenched, beating with warmth, in the ring of her strong arms. Georgina waited in the cave, watching the road for Maria.

Waiting, waiting, she was never found. Twice bones were discovered in the caves, but they were not identified as Georgina's. These were the last of others who had watched for the return of a beloved or searched for the opening into the spirit world.

"Georgina likes to see her victims realize their imminent and agonizing deaths. She prolongs them and the awareness.
She is without mercy.
She cannot be diverted."

"Have you seen her eyes? They are truly coals, black smouldering pits. The flame in them is something I have never seen before, in any living creature.
She will be successful."

I was 5 years old when Georgina caught my arm and held it tightly. "You're little Alma, aren't you?"
I nodded.
"I thought so. You look just like Cella used to." She have my arm a shake.
I didn't say anything. I was looking into Georgina's mad glittering eyes.

Atop the squat stela like a weight of legitimacy Georgina stared directly across into the carven pits which were the glowing eyes of the goddess of death and renewal who had taken the planet Venus for her own. The pits glowed, pulsed, because Georgina had ruled that coals from the sacred fires were to be set there to burn always.
Smoke stained the rugged flutes of stone which rose up all about her. Flame illuminated them roughly, irregularly. That is the way Georgina liked it.
Reparation would be made. The balance set.
It would not be left to chance or to time.

What coiled within Georgina like a potent snake? What coiled, grew, devoured, transformed?
Maria was gone. She was no more. Rare, precious, exotic spirit. Rare, precious, heated body.
Dancing.
Daring.
It was Christian whose steadfast allegiance to her religion of faith and science had ended that. Christian's strictness. Christian's propriety. Cold unfeeling. So gracious and soft her clamp of death.

Georgina constructed a cathedral of her life lavished with idolatrous pictures, statues, fabrics, scents, oils, incense, alcohol, choristers, and the flame of defiance and of hatred and of bringing down.
But extremes grow twisted.
Stone, or metal, yet they do twist round.
Extremes become not enough.
It was not enough to live life in extreme opposition to Christian's and flaunting that.
Venus, goddess of death and rains of renewing

blood.

Power.
Power lies in secret design within wealth and desire, weakness and yearning. It waits to be extracted.
Georgina knew how.

This was an evil place.

Where are the bodies?

Echoes.

Blood washed the stones.

Blood washed the stones.

Blood washed the stones.

Blood washed the stones.

Blood washed the shores.

"I will take. I will take from her what she took from me. Eye for eye for in these caverns I will need no sight save what strikes and sears within my brain."

"She has taken all that I have. All that I have. She has taken everything. Changed everything. Forever. She has left me in the ruins of shadow and reaps the praises of all who see her. I will take from her. I will gather up the finest linen, lace, velvet, damask, beaten metals, precious gems, feathers, crystals, I will gather them and with fire bring them here and I will wield the power of the mighty uncontrollable. I will use it. I will destroy her cultured reasonable faith with lusty vicious evil. True strength, as the truth of secrets, is in darkness. I will destroy her."