I wanted to do more character studies. Primrose seemed a good place to start.

She has forgotten her own name.

Oh, she knows it, knows the way it's whispered in the long nights, knows the way it's hissed between clenched teeth when she wakes in the morning. She knows its pattern, remembers the way her father used to hum it on the sunny afternoons. She hears it. Answers to it.

But it's not hers.

Not anymore.

She lost that privilege ten years ago when she, a doe-eyed, bright-spirited girl of fourteen, a slight, innocent child learning to grow, walked into that study. She lost her name when she watched her father die, watched him bleed his life out on the floor, just one slash to the throat as his downfall. Geoffrey Azelhart, inimitable and unstoppable, felled with one blow.

He was dead by the time his murderers strode out of that study. She hadn't even had time to say goodbye. All in one night, aged up too quickly, lost too much too fast.

And where would she go then? That's when she truly lost everything she was, she supposes. That one moment, where she lost everything but her purpose, everything but her unending rage, her thirst for blood, the quiet storm inside her rising, circling like a harpy, waiting until a chance to strike her down, pierce her own black, traitorous heart. There was no House Azelhart anymore. There was no home. No family. There was only her, alone and frightened and angry.

And thirsty for vengeance.

She made the trek to Sunshade. She stood outside that dancer's prison and chose, always it is her choice. She chose to cross that threshold, she chose what fate she began to tread, she chose to be lost in the sands of time, for her name to disappear from books until the only thing left of what she is in this material world is the steps she makes in the sand, the whispers of the wild, beautiful thing on the stage.

She knows now, for sure, nothing but this. She has no name anymore. Azelhart, she knows herself as, the last of them, and perhaps that's all she'll ever be known as, if she survives this alcohol-flooded trash dump. If she ever manages to shed the skin of dancer, of kitten and plaything, and become what she knows she is. Azelhart, hunter and prey all at once, shielded from the world only by faith, only by a desperate need for justice, and nothing more. Not dignity, nor pride, nor friendship. Faith, and faith alone. Faith didn't save her father from collapsing in front of her, but she hopes it will at least provide her with the strength to avenge him.

But even that faith, that strength, is slowly slipping away. Time has eroded it, the endless humiliation has torn at it, the aching loss of the father she will never forget, the blade, the crows, the spray of red and the relentless beating of her own heart, eroding away her patience, her endless, bitter patience, tying her back like a choking noose, breathe, she can't breathe, she can't fail-

Always, the same dream.

Perhaps that is why she will never forget.

She won't. She can't. She is incapable of forgetting, incapable of losing this last shred of memory, this barrier between the life before and the life now, the last connection she has to who she was, until she sees black blood splattered across a dark floor. Until there are less killers in the world (kill three killers, then two less will be left, you will be one but they will be gone), until she finally stands over a corpse, the last of three, and stops feeling that hunger, the furious embers of rage. What she will feel then, she doesn't know. Fulfilled? Happy? Empty, she knows is the likely scenario.

But even empty must be better than unsung fire, fueled by rage and faith.

So she stays. She will know what it is to kill, and if it is done with her dying breath, so be it. She will reclaim the name Primrose Azelhart, last of a noble line, and she will do it with pride. She has suffered much, and she deserves it, now, doesn't she?

And until then, she will wait. She will force herself to wait. She will be nothing, nothing but an unsung name, an anonymous figure on a stage and one girl in a dusty, squalid prison of many, until she has her revenge.

And until then, she will dance.