Askatla tried to jerk away from the spindly spectre skittering out of the shadows, gangly arms unfurling from behind his back like the wings of an emaciated raven. The entire room around her tilted, and she pitched lamely back onto the stiff rubber mattress of the operating room, her limbs leaden and clumsy. Brilliant white lights seared her retinas, leaving her vision spotty around the ghastly visage that closed in on her.

“Come!” crowed the avian beak and angular features, his raucously nasal tenor impossibly loud in her face. “Let me look at you!”

She tried to scramble away as his eye filled her vision, but her hands slipped incessantly on the slick surface of a gown with sleeves that grew out past her hands so long they could be wrapped around her chest and tied behind her back. 

“You are not well, Topolina. Let me make you better.” His head was haloed by the harsh lights it eclipsed as he brought his face closer to hers, its only discernible features a pair of glowing garnet eyes. “Let me make you mine.”

He seemed to hover in the air directly over her, untethered from the ground and unburdened by gravity….