He passed through the bucolic garden which was ripe with tomatoes and corn and other emigres of fruit and vegetable life. He entered the home that had once been his and looked around and saw nothing save for the ivory wainscoting against the wall and the flaring rebellion of the early sunlight which heated the room.

He turned with leather book in his muscular farmer hands and he tried the gardens. Routinely pacing through the cornpatches which hung over him like gargoyle guardians of the wildlife within. But he heard something.

It was near inaudible and there was the bare trail of a high-pitched scream that had echoed off into the woods like a flower's murmur. He didn't know how he heard it. He tried to suss out the direction of the cries which soared into the woodland mercilessly and without cease. Someone sounds like they're in pain, he thought, hesitantly.

He knew as he walked he was in the right of it. The sounds which had once been scarce echoes. Ghost whispers. They grew in his hearing like faerie warnings now and then gradually into human voices he recognized. He bit his lip hard and a frosty shiver wracked his pale body. It's a woman's voice..

When he got there lurid shock throbbed his head. He ignored everything save the man sprawled.

"Father?!" he asked. "FATHER?!"

His father's face came up from the hollow and fogged ground and he glared at Maerdantis with some alien vengeance on his face. The big man's cheeks flushed like a rose and he pictured the belt in his mind. His father rose with nothing but his anger and started to move with menacing intent. He felt all the fury in the world emanate from his father like a hot furnace.

The man would kill him. If he got to him the man would wring his neck and break it like he had broken his livestock for the years endless.

"Step back, father," he said, warningly. "Step back, or I will kill you."

The man laughed. It sounded off into the forest cold and barren. But the man stopped. He stopped and watched Maerdantis with the anger sizzling like fried eggs. "Boy," he said, with a pause. "You couldn't do anything to me if you tried."

And then he felt his own boiling anger which rose like some tidal wave willed by the Gods.

"Burn in Hell," he said.

His fingers outstretched and he closed his eyes. He said the words in a low chant, the words which had been taught him by his instructors and which had been ingrained in his mind as if he'd been born with it in its primordial origin. He opened his eyes as the spell was cast. The man was still after him when it happened.

Fire rose like Fatale himself manifested from his hands and shaking in a bubbling tornado of flame at the big man who approached and looked shocked and then looked nothing. The flames sought the man like a lost babe to his mother and surrounded him like the kiss of death and he felt his father's scream pierce the winds. The big man tumbled side to side and started to roll on the ground and then he ceased rolling altogether.

"I hope you rot," he said and spat on the man's corpse and turned and left the home that had once been his and which never would be again.