And so now I return to your confessional and sink down upon my knees beneath your patient stare. Have I disgusted you yet? Have my errors stacked so high upon each other that you can no longer see over their towering house of cards to where I kneel? Or is it that you haven't pieced it all together yet? If so my pride would take a lesser blow which means in layman terms I would dearly love to leave you in the dark. It's a jealous pang on my part. I wish I was still wearing a blindfold.

Asmodeus was my dark secret. The way a girl might hide rich confectionaries and truffles under her pillow as a guilty pleasure best describes my own handling of this man. I told no one about him, nor why I was sneaking off to the Weald practically every day.. and not returning until well after dusk. He, in turn.. convinced me that he was an outcast, shunned and hated by those of Carver's Post and therefore banished from ever stepping cross the villages borders. An outcast, like me. It was my language he was speaking.

Asmodeus also told me, a horrible magic enchantment had been unjustly cast upon him by a consortium of seven mages and until those seven either died of natural causes or simply... died.. we could never be together. I know it sounds trite, hearing it from an objective stance as you are. But when I was with him, I burned with hatred for these seven misers who would dare lock away the one man who understood me from the outside in. They were the twisted, political hand of the Outpost's town council, all of whom were jealous of Asmodeus and sought to sweep him aside for their own gain.

I killed one of the mages, traveling to his home which lay on the fringe of the City of Gates to see it done. And you know, he wasn't some manipulative, greedy old goat. He was a little old man who had one shiny star in his life. A garden. A garden he wanted to share with me because I was masquerading as a peasant selling fresh field flowers. The elder invited me right into his sacred, beautiful Eden and I desecrated it with bucketfuls of his blood. I don't know how many times I stabbed him. I lost count after he fell.

Asmodeus is not who he led me to believe but now that I have blood on my hands -- in HIS name -- it is as if some invisible power has overcome me almost completely. He is Master and I am slave.. and I will slay his captors one by one if I cannot find a way to break his hold over me.. or to kill the Briar King himself.

The legend.. lives. Both of us.

I am his Briar Rose.

[0 petals fell]