I'm SO sorry. I had a huge case of writer's block for months and months and months. I didn't write anything, not even dumb little short stories that never make it on to the internet.

Kitty

Darkness. A classic way, a classic word, to start with, but nonetheless that is all there was in the dungeon where Kitty sat. It was damp, too, the wetness gently seeping into any clothing rested on the floor--but it was the darkness, ah! what darkness! Such a level of gloom she had never seen!

But she knew that she had not lost her sense of sight, because someone who had been there before her had managed to slice (minimally) into a corner of the door, and every now and then a guard (she supposed) walked by, casting flickering candlelight through the corner crack which soon slipped by, leaving her once more in darkness.

The cell was four feet by four feet; she couldn't lie down, but she wouldn't have wanted to anyway. Whoever had designed her cell hadn't given much thought to the comfort factor of it--comfort or escape routes. The walls and floor were composed of stone blocks and mold, while the door was thick and carved of oak, heralding no escape from those quarters

She had plenty of time to think; no guards came for her, and if she slept too long she would end up on the ground and die of pneumonia from the damp, so all she could do was stand and think. She wasn't sure how long she sent in that cell, but by the time the guards did come for her, she was half-slumped against the wall, her breathing uneasy, knowing even in sleep what her predicament was.

Even her contemplation followed her, pursuing her mercilessly as the Furies. Just once, she wished, her short recesses of standing rest would be dreamless, leaving her to the sundry delights of blandness in sleep. But ghosts followed her their from her past, stroking her chin and gazing at her from behind one-way mirrors they carried everywhere.

If only she could see them! But they hid viciously—(viciously?)—oh, yes, viciously, for she would have liked nothing, nothing better than to see them, to hear them, to understand them.

And oh! the pain she felt because she couldn't.

She was asleep when the guards came. For come they did, two burly men with black executioner's masks, who grabbed her by the arms, waking her with a start. Kitty was suddenly clear as an untainted forest pool. No bleariness remained in her startled countenance; alertness shone in her face, determination worked her mind like clockwork, determination that she would find out who her captor was and why she had been taken there.

They dragged her through several classically fire lit hallways, and Kitty imagined that she saw dark creatures in the flickering shadows. She tried to snarl at the men, "I can walk on my own," but she could only hiss and spit at them, as her vocal cords had become rusty with disuse. She spent the rest of that journey trying to retrain herself to speak. She could feel harsh amusement radiating from her captors.

They arrived at last at a solid oaken door, very like her own cell door, but rising twenty feet high and with ornate bronze handles. An imperial feeling pervaded the air as the doors opened. It had something of an 'open, sesame' effect, with no visible entities behind the doors to open them. There were probably demo—spirits grounded inside the wood who were used as catalysts to open the doors.

Abruptly, she was thrown to the floor. Her hands were free but she was too surprised to catch herself and she fell directly onto her front. Her chin hit the stone floor with a crack; it didn't feel as if anything had fractured, but she could feel an omnipresent bruise rising in her.

Struggling furiously not to cuddle herself, to try and soothe her 'omni-bruise' (Kitty felt her mouth twitching—maybe she was feeling happier because she was out of her cell), she looked up.

And found her voice. "You!"

The tall, schoolteacherly librarian looked down at her, expressionless. Somehow her harsh pince-nez lent a sort of ludicrous air to the scene. Kitty began to giggle.

"She's hysterical," a voice grumbled. Something about it made Kitty look up, and the smile faded on her face. She had not noticed before the large throne situated next to the librarian, or the very large man on it. He half-smiled at her. "Shut her up," he said.

One of the men behind her chuckled, and Kitty turned around just in time to receive an unfortunately well-aimed blow. She fell back on the cold, hard stone floor. She looked at the man on the throne, who was closely inspecting his fingernails. Her gaze was bewildered, accusatory: What have I ever done to you?

The librarian's gaze was no longer as frozen as the floor Kitty lay on. It looked almost as if there was…pity in it. Kitty looked directly at her, pleadingly. Their eyes met. The woman shook her head once, so slightly that Kitty though it could have just been a twitch of her head.

And perhaps it had been. She never got a chance to ask.

The guards and the librarian were ordered to leave the room. The guards seemed reluctant to leave their leader alone with anything that could harm him. One of them whispered something in his ear, and was summarily shoved back onto the floor with such force that Kitty saw one tooth roll down the floor. The man whimpered, "But he ordered us to--"

"You leave him to me," snarled the man on the throne. "Do you honestly think a little girl like her"--he looked at her distastefully--"can put me in any danger? She can't be more than..." He glanced at her, a venomous glance. Despite herself, Kitty took half a step back, but then, steeling herself, brought that one foot a half a step forward again.

"...twenty." The man completed his sentence, turning back to his henchman. "Anyway, you've seen me in action." His eyes grew spiteful. "Perhaps the young lady would like to see you shrivel up until you're nothing but a husk."

"I would, actually." Kitty's voice, though still rusty from disuse, sounded unnaturally loud in that large stone room.

"Ha! She's got some spice in her!" murmured the evil-looking man. "What do you think, my dear?" he silkily asked the librarian, whose head looked cooler than anyone else's in the room.

She snorted. "As if you care what I think. A lowly 'demon', am I, and you ask my opinion?"

Kitty's gaze shot over to her. Her eyes widened.

"You're a spirit?!" she blurted out, proud that she hadn't even begun to say the word 'demon', despite its presence in the back of her mind.

The spirit looked briefly unsettled as she turned to Kitty.

Then her gaze focused, and Kitty was shocked then by the intensity held in that gaze. It said, "What do you know?" It said, "Spirit? Not demon?" It said, "Are you crazy?"

Most of all, it said, "We shall have to talk."

She turned back after that moment, that single burning moment, when their eyes met and said that much. Kitty hoped the man had not seen that look.

The...spirit hurriedly bowed and, along with the guards, walked out. The doors smoothly shut behind them.

There was silence, cold silence made colder by the dank setting of the room. Idly, a thought entered Kitty's head: why did setting matter? Why did it affect the feelings of people? Why did--

She was cut off from this line of thought by the sudden voice of the man, who had reseated himself on his ugly throne. "You are Kitty Jones, Clara Bell, and Lizzie Temple. Am I correct?"

She did not answer right away. Instead, she thought, Well, he gets straight to the point. She giggled. Her mother had often said jokingly that Kitty should only marry someone who got straight to the point. She had always looked at Kitty's father, who had a hard time getting to any point, when she said this.

She began to answer, but his black brows met as he frowned at her, rather as if she were a petulant child. "Am I correct?"

Kitty waited until his face was smooth as the stone walls around them before she answered.

"I suppose you could say that..." she murmured.

He gave a harsh laugh. "Could I really?"

She didn't know what to say, so she remained silent.

"Can't you speak?" he asked, almost teasingly. She said nothing.

His brow darkened and he rose from his seat. He bent down to the level of her ear, which he cupped in his hand. "Can't you speak?" he whispered, so softly she almost didn't hear it. Still she said nothing, hating him suddenly, passionately, so that even if she'd wanted to answer the fire burning in her breast would have glued her mouth shut. Why was she here, anyway?

She felt him frown at her. But she heard him take in a deep breath. And oh, she heard him scream in her hear.

"OR CAN'T YOU HEAR?"

The words blasted through her eardrum with something more than just volume. Magic? she thought hazily. But he's human, right?

Right? Right? Right?

Everything seemed to echo inside her. She wanted to scream, to cry. To punch the scumbag who had done this to her, even if he was holding her up at the moment. Louder, louder. She became frenzied in her fear of what was happening to her. She did scream, she did cry.

She did punch him. He did drop her.

She hit the ground, the stone floor rising to meet her.

Oh, and she did faint.

When she woke up, the very first thing she was aware of was that everything was dark again.

She sat there, silent. She could feel that frenzied feeling was climbing towards her mouth again. She slowed her breathing in an attempt to calm herself down. Her throat felt oddly raw, as if she had been screaming and screaming.

She remembered screaming once. And then... had she fainted? It was an odd feeling, knowing that something had pressurized you so much that all your body would do was force you to sleep.

Sleep? Actually, she did feel better. Perhaps she should faint more often.

Ridiculous, she thought. Fainting is not something I should get into. Especially not since I'm trapped in a dreary castle in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no way of escape.

She considered this. Nathaniel was stuck in the Other Place. Her only chance was if someone Summoned him and he somehow got away from them.

Unlikely, to say the least. And anyway, he wouldn't know where she was. Maybe she was in the middle of a desert. Maybe she was on the outskirts of Alexandria. Maybe--the thought occurred to her--maybe she was in another country entirely. Maybe she'd been taken to...Denmark, or somewhere.

Her heart was sinking lower and lower. It was in about the vicinity of her ankles, and getting dangerously lower.

She got up, but there wasn't a lot of space to pace in. She sat down again, and then she heard it; clinking sound. Keys! She bolted up again and got in a fighting pose. Maybe--just maybe she could kick one of the guards in the shin and escape!

The door swung open. Kitty tensed herself for a fight. Her heart was steadily rising. It was almost where it was supposed to be, in her chest. Then she saw who it was. She sighed. "You stick like a bad penny," she told the spirit.

The librarian glared at Kitty through her pince-nez. "I was interested," she said, not deigning to answer Kitty's remark, "about you."

Kitty waited for a moment. "Is that it? Because, you know, I'm interested in me, too. I'm interested in saving my skin from this miserable castle and all of the maniacs who live here."

The librarian grimaced in an attempt not to smile. She glanced behind her, and then closed the door before Kitty could say anything. They heard a lock click on the outside of the door.

"Why did you do that?" Kitty asked furiously. "I could have tried to escape." She jumped when a voice came out of the darkness across from her

"I wouldn't have--couldn't have let you," the librarian corrected herself. "The master of the castle has bound me to it unless he takes me with him on his walks outside. But that doesn't matter now."

"But you're trapped in here too!" said Kitty, before she remembered that spirits could shapeshift.

The spirit--Kitty realized she didn't know if it was a, a foliot, or a marid, or whatever--lit a spark in the air, showing Kitty the look of high disdain etched on her face.

"Alright, alright," said Kitty, irritably. "You might as well tell me why you came here. To brighten my hopes and then shatter them? I wouldn't put it past you."

Now the spirit looked hurt. Kitty sighed. "Okay, I'm sorry. Will you forgive me and tell me what you came here for? I'm sure it was somehow meant to be beneficial to me."

"I don't normally tell people about this," said the spirit, after a short silence. "I don't think very many know about this. You see, there's another kind of djinn besides the ones in the Other Place..."

Kitty sat, and listened, and wondered.

Thank you everybody, for putting up with my long silences on FanFiction. Thank you for not bombarding me with hate mail. This may or may not have lived up to your expectations, but thank you for reading it anyway.

The ANAFHTWRTLBC goes to the following wonderful people...

XIII Dragon, kaillinne arami, The known author, the-emerald-raven, Thunderstorm101, wingsgirl1313, Soul Collecter, Jarlaxle Baenre (my most faithful reviewer! thankyouthankyouthankyou!), Kishuroxmysox, NaginiFay, T (anon.), DYoda (anon.), The Wineglass, and LM1991.

Thank you all so much!

ano-nimmus

P.S. For any FOB fans out there who don't know yet, A NEW ALBUM IS COMING OUT SOON! 11/4/08. IT'S CALLED 'FOLIE A DEUX'. NEW SINGLE OUT ON 09/15/08 (I think)!!

(Sorry, others, didn't mean to alarm you.)