The crimson petals blushed and cowed their heads as the seductive darkness of night swept over them. Beneath their blanket of thorns she stirred - a bride whose wedding day had never come. Each year, she rose and, with fingers reduced to brittle bones, she clawed herself from her grave. Each year she’d stalk the darkened streets, drawn to the doors of young women soon to be wed: compelled to deprive them of their marriage bed. Their suffering and loss fed the bitterness within her. As the morning sun crept over the horizon she would return to her grave, her pain satiated. Her grief satisfied. Lives ruined.