Prologue

"I can't. I can't. Just STOP it. I can't."

The sound of Elena reciting the memory in her head became one with her own voice, the words falling from her mouth like something decayed, revolting, dripping with every sinister thing she had ever seen. Still, they were the only thing she still had to hold on to.

But it wasn't enough. Nothing ever was going to be enough again. Because the covers had been ripped and revealed the true colors of the world she was living in. It was infinite darkness, rotten, crawling with nothing but monsters, creatures that mocked the unrepentable nature of the horrendous things they did with a flicker of humanity in their eyes.

She wanted to throw up. Somewhere, somehow in her head a peculiarly sober voice made the fascinating observation that at a certain point unbearable amounts of hate and grief and fear and pain, pain blended into an overpowering sickness, transformed the world into, no, exposed it to be a nest of flesh eating worms.

She listened to herself in her pointless attempt to squeeze all of this into confessions of helplessness, and calmly noted that her voice sounded quite funny like that. She was hugging herself, her fingers leaving bruises on her arms as she lost all control of her vampire-strength, she was kneeling in the dirt of the forest floor, sobbing and swinging in an erratic rhythm.

There was wood all around her. She contemplated killing herself. She never had before.

And even now, even after all this, somehow she knew that she wouldn't. There was no emotional weight to this realization; she was neither glad nor disgusted with herself. The voice in her head laughed at the irony. In this moment, as she felt all and everything washed into a soup of mold and everything she was, everything she had ever been, dissolved in it like it was acid, liquid vervein – in the end even now all it did was reveal a seemingly indestructible core.

She didn't care. The pain, the pain. She felt herself being pulled back into the weeping shell of a girl that was now crawling and wailing into the dirt, her fingers digging into the ground. It felt like being ripped apart, her insides convulsing, and maybe that was what was actually happening, since the composed voice in her head only seemed to be intensified by the pain crashing down on her. She was watching herself, as if she was floating above, and the hysterical version of herself was someone else entirely. Except she could still feel the pain. Maybe this was trauma, she had read about it.

She couldn't imagine any way how this would ever be okay again. Even if she got over what had happened, the mental scars just seemed too deep. There was something so fundamentally broken in her that the realization almost shocked emotion back into the distanced observer. Who was she – the girl trashing on the ground, the girl watching? She felt like both and none of them at the same time. Nothing was in order, nothing was in control.

"Maybe you should try to turn it all off."

She knew without a doubt that that would result in her killing Elena.

She knew without a doubt that she would lose everything she was, everything she had become the past year, throw all the work straight out into the trash. She was a caregiver, a control freak, she fixed things. And there was no way to fix this now.

There was nothing and no one left to fix this for.

She laughed again and to her surprise she heard the strangled noises leave her mouth instead of just echoing in her head. Every measure of sanity had left anyway.

There was a way to fix this, to get back in control. Well, maybe it wouldn't exactly be her that would exercise this control. But then again, maybe it just wasn't who she thought she was. After all – hadn't she found the core of who she was right now?

"Maybe this is the better version of me."

Maybe Elena had been right.

"We are the same. You like being strong, ageless, fearless."

Maybe they both were. Maybe she was just like him, the devil incarnate, the monster who indulged in his sins, incapable of betterment.

Maybe she had been this all along.

She sat up, shaking almost longing for physical pain. (She had never understood why people cut themselves up until now – why hadn't she tried this earlier? She'd heal anyway, after all, she was immortal. 'Because it isn't like you,' the voice of reason whispered. Or maybe it is.)

She searched for the switch, all curiosity and despair. She was almost surprised that it didn't take any time at all. There it was, its presence carrying an air of self-evidence, just as if it had been there all along , and she wondered how she could have possibly ever been blind to it in the first place.

Without second thought she turned it off.