She remembers fire, consuming a calm, Parisian morning even as it devoured her eyes, her flesh, the final sensation of her mortal existence the smell of her own melting skin as it sloughed from brittle bones, before the flames reached her brain. And that had not been the end, oh no. Greater fires, immortal fires, awaited La Voisin as bitter old eyes closed on one world and opened on a new, the insatiable pyre of her unholy master. Sealed within a coffin of stone, packed tight with burning coal, eternity is smoke and pain for the great murderess, the greatest murderess! How many had she slain, gutting them upon the altar, tearing lifeless children from eviscerated wombs? And how many more dead from the bane she peddled: infidel lovers and cuckolds alike, all to glut the diseased passions of those people, her people! Yes, she had killed them with glee, dozens becoming hundreds becoming thousands, oh the terror! Was she not La Voisin? Damnation was a formality for the greatest slayer who had ever lived.
How bizarre, then, how sickening to have her smoldering cairn smashed open above her, invaded by light, disastrous light! The coals suffocated at its touch, leaving her cold and naked beneath its hovering judgment. It felt holy.
And to hear it call to her, her! La Voisin! Oh, the irony! How sick was that lecher God, to bind her to this righteous purpose? She, who had swept across Paris as a plague, turning love to treacherous death wherever she should pass... to frame that now as some sort of Heaven-spawned punishment, making her the instrument of divine castigation... preposterous! Ribald and gross! She was a tool of the Devil, vile, obscene, bane to all mothers, and now to be called upon by Almighty God? Heinous obscenity!
Catherine shrieks within her burnt-out skull as the light wraps about her like chains and hauls her from her charnel seat. And suddenly she is once more in France -- she would know its corrupt air anywhere, it never changes. Home.
Standing before the man who would now function as her Master -- she knows this now, imparted knowledge by the wretched light. Studying him, Catherine cannot but nod in approval at his brazen, suicidal magics. To use his own body as a catalyst... well, he isn't Sathanas Domini, but he might suffice for now.
La Voisin curtsies in proper fashion, in the same motion proffering the Deck to her master. "Draw boldly, monseigneur" she implores him, "But know, every card is Death! We will murder them all!"
Her cackle is cacophonous.
Cold silence has a tendency
to atrophy any sense of compassion
between supposed lovers.
Between supposed brothers.