Vess Manor, Stensia, Innistrad, Thursday Night (Fandom Time)

Rain hammered against the windows. A flash of lightning illuminated bare stone walls and a couple of shambling corpses. A boom of thunder followed half a breath later. Getting closer, then. Good. She needed the lightning, and the storm matched her mood. She sat on a high-backed stone chair, brooding.

How did it come to this?

Every path she sought toward freedom only seemed to lead her to more closed doors, more dead ends to escape. She'd made demonic pacts to make herself ageless, undying, at the paltry cost of a soul she was hardly using anyway.

Her breath no longer steamed, even on cold nights like this one.

But demons were harsh masters, and soon she found herself working to subvert her pacts, to kill her demons - to have immortality and freedom both. And so...the Chain Veil.

It whispered to her, even now, from the hidden pocket where she kept it. With it, she had killed two demons, lords among their kind. With it, she had once more commanded armies of the undead to nearly rival the hordes she had controlled with a thought before the Mending, had kicked a hole in the walls of heaven to spite angels that would damn an innocent soul to the Abyss.

But the Veil...

She could no longer bring herself to wear the thing on her face, to feel its silken-soft links against her skin. She hated touching it. But when she tried to get rid of it, it stubbornly clung to her skin and the pain for attempting was unbearable. Too many hours in Innistrad, working with Olivia's geistmage, in an attempt to suborn the Onakke spirits within the Veil, to turn them to her will. Too many hours that ended with her gasping on the floor, whimpering in agony as their laughs echoed inside her head.

But using it was worse.

( A familiar voice )

[Cut up and taped back together again from "Liliana's Indignation," by Kelly Digges. NFB, NFI, nine million thanks to chef_chocobro whose awesomeness cannot be codified by mere words. Comes after this, comes before this.]