The soft clanking of wooden bobbins filled the small hut.

Cross, twist, cross again. A pin to secure the edge and repeat, again and again, the pattern burned into her mind.

The hunger stirred deep in her stomach, and she pulled on the thread with more force, struggling to focus.

Anything, anything but thinking about the hunger.

A hundred years of obsessing about lace, a hundred years of hiding her face behind a thick veil, a hundred years of self-loathing. A hundred years of nothing but hunger that had no chance to be satiated.

A pin slipped from her gloved fingers, a small sound breaking the monotony as it fell on the floor. She picked it up clumsily – the gloves were uncomfortable, but she had long since found out that it was best not to let bare flesh touch her work if she wanted it to remain unmarred.

She knew she’d fasted for too long; she could feel the flesh peeling off on her shoulder and back and her hands were probably not too far behind. She had maybe two more days before she would be unable to work; she knew from experience not to let things go that far.

She had tried to resist it, back when she first woke up in the middle of a flaming carnage. She didn’t understand what she became, she didn’t understand what her body needed.

Now, she grabbed the chicken with both disgust and resignation.

She didn’t have the patience to plume it; without the distraction of lacework, smelling the still-warm flesh made it harder to control the unnatural urges. Blood dripped onto her dress from where her own teeth tore into its flesh, and she almost choked on a feather, disgust almost enough to make her gag.

But it also felt so, so good to make the hunger quiet down for a single, glorious moment. Her body mended itself, satisfied with the gift of raw flesh, making her look more human even as the act itself made her feel anything but humane.

A necessary sacrifice, she reminded herself.

She should have died a century ago along with everyone in the castle.

She should have died decades ago from old age.

By all accounts she should have been dead, and in a way, she was – her body slowly rotting away with every day she didn’t consume raw meat.

A long time ago, she had tried to starve herself, unable to take it all anymore – the guilt of making it out of the carnage, the pointlessness of her existence, the inability to be around normal people ever again. She’d woken up in some farmer’s field, several half-eaten lambs torn apart at her feet.

She really did throw up then, and thanked the gods that no one had been watching the herd, because there was no difference in how humans smelled to her compared to animals. She’d never let herself grow truly hungry after that.

She wanted to die so badly.

Her very existence was exhausting, blasphemous. She had no purpose beyond satisfying or keeping at bay her hunger, and as much as she wanted to live in her last real, human moments, she wondered what she’d done to deserve such a curse and what she had to do to finally bring it to an end.

Her body mended itself faster than she could chip away at it with a knife, she didn’t need air and since she became that monster, poisonous plants only had a mild effect on her, fueling her hunger.

She had tried everything short of finding someone else to kill her.

She had considered it, but eventually rejected it in fear. Plenty of witch hunters and occult protectors would probably be happy to end her worthless existence, but as much as she craved an end she didn’t want to be judged, didn’t want to be known, didn’t want someone else to reject her in disgust.

Despite everything, a small, childish part of her hoped that a knight in shining armor would come, and look past her wrongness, and give her a miracle cure and she could live her life again.

But fairy tales weren’t real, and decades passed by with hunger as her only companion.

Cross, twist, cross. Miles of thread to distract from the inevitable.

The bobbins clank, serene, soothing.

Fresh blood shines on the dining table.