The foolish girl lay asleep in the middle of the field, soft sighs escaping her lips with every breath. He had feigned indifference to her actions when he walked into the cabin. In truth, he had observed her quite closely once inside. The Mind's Eye, his man-sized looking glass, had proven incalculably valuable in his machinations, and this had been no exception.
After a few hours had passed Halethiel hastened down to the red plateau where the girl lay resting, the malleable dreamscape giving itself over to his will as a dark bed took shape beneath her prone form. Waving a hand, the walls of the cottage on the hill above the bed collapsed - taking shape around them: the floor and very air changing shape and swirling coalescing into the interior.
He then worked quickly, his arachnid limbs slipping free of the robes that contained them as he placed a sleeping stone the girl's right hand and tore open the hem of Emalia's robe above her right shoulder, grabbing a quill with one chitinous limb and an inkwell in another, he began jabbing intricate runes into her flesh. He then drew the syllables of rest and cast a spell of sustaining over his subject as he reached with human hands into his robes to retrieve the vial of black makou.
Almost before he knew what he was doing, Halethiel had grabbed the scherinj and poured the ichorous contents of the vial into it. All of his limbs raised together for a moment,the pinnacle of the ritual, he eased himself down into Emalia's ear, his tongue almost flickering as he whispered to her 'We must all make sacrifices to achieve balance, my pet' and thrust the cherinj and its vile fluids deep into her body - and womb - to work its unholy magic.
* * *
He watched her over the next few months: the swelling of her belly, the grayish complexion her skin had taken since the injection darkening, and her dreamless sleep were all maintained through a complex set of spells woven about the room and into her tattoo. Occasionally, he would have to intervene and cast a spell of healing to slow the progression of the poison, but it was a small chore when weighed against the potential benefits. He was uncertain, at first, if the child would even survive. Not so now: the unborn infant now seemed to thrive in its slumbering host's womb.
Eventually the time came when the fruit was ripe and had to be plucked from the tree, and, using every weaving limb that he had, Halethiel did just that - delicately slicing the host open and extracting the child, Brin, from Emalia's uterus. Careful to safeguard his prize, he quickly placed the infant in a waiting receptacle to protect it and began tending to his guest's needs.
Taking some coarse black thread, he wove shut her belly, casting spells of healing over the wounds so that only a small scar remained. That done, he let the woman sleep and heal as he went on his first hunt in what seemed as ages, bringing home the heart of a gluttonous woman and placing it in a puppet and giving it the glamour of a dead animation. Placing the 'dead baby' in a waiting coffin, he then prepared the remainder of his lie for the woman, taking care to feed the living infant and stowing her away before resting.
When he awoke the next morning, the tattoo on Emalia's shoulder already re-woven into spells of pure healing, he wiped the sleep from her eyes and told her, chuckling inside to himself all the while at the predictability of humans, what she feared most: Her baby was dead, taken by the illness she was so certain she did not suffer from, and her husband was missing.
