I could see the light leaving my soft, Sad Sandy Eyes as blood poured from my leg. The world grew dark. Everything was black and white. 

I guess that was what dying felt like. 

I guess it was what she thought I deserved. 

I would slowly fade away, but then, like lightning, the air burst from my lungs and I was back. 

I watched myself dying, and then I watched myself be reborn, only to die again. 

I will watch it until the day I die, and then, I will watch it again. 

Round and round the cycle went. My chest was still, and then pounding, but the slow drip of my blood was the constant song all around us. 

Sometimes I was buried in my body, scratching and screaming to get out. Sometimes I was stood behind her, watching my fate from over the shoulder of my seed. 

I could see her at the foot of my bed, beckoning them towards me. My chest and throat were tight as her face filled with a smile. They surrounded her. Dark figures, sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes hundreds, sometimes just one. Always surrounding her, their endless, inked arms snaked around my little girl. 

I wanted to protect her, but perhaps it came too late. She had such anger in her eyes. They burned, red with rage, and when she spoke, it was as if she wasn’t there. Someone had slipped in and stolen my daughter, and I was paying the price for letting them. 

They towered above her, wide, wicked smiles stretched along their grey faces. Flaming, flickering eyes, red, like my blood, that dripped and dropped down onto the bare floorboards. 

I thought that I was going to die. 

Sometimes, I think I might be dead, but I can’t be sure. 

Sometimes, I wish I was dead. 

She was just as I remembered her. Her soft, sad Sandy Eyes were by my bedside, and as the moon glowed behind her and she swam into view, I thought that I might be dreaming. 

I didn’t know what to say. It had been so long and there was so much unsaid between us. It would remain that way though. 

She hadn’t come to talk. She had come to end my life. 

After a while, I accepted that. I had grown to understand that I deserved it, but I didn’t know how long it would take. 

I’m still here. Nobody has found my body. She’s told people that I’m ill, and that she’s looking after me. Nobody questions it. They just think she’s a sweet, dutiful daughter. Daddy’s little Princess. 

A Princess is what she was always born to be, and I am the conquered King. 

I have considered escape, but where would I go? 

Where would I run? 

How would I run? 

Do I even deserve to run? 

My fingers break. They heal and then they break. I scream and then I am silent, then I scream, as my fingers snap, or my flesh is found by her claws. 

Her pain pours from her, as mine does from me. We hurt each other, but I started this war. 

Is it what I deserve? God knows. How am I to know what I deserve? How am I to know what I’ve done to her? 

Her eyes meet mine, and I can taste her tears. 

Her shadows smile, and they smile. I know that they were built by my hands, and that everything I fear is my own creation. I made my child into my personal monster. 

She has a kind smile for everyone but me. For me, there are only tears. 

Sometimes tears of sadness. 

Sometimes tears of pain. 

Sometimes tears of fury. 

I deserve this, but I am desperate for a way out. 

I know that I must be harmed to heal her. 

These are just the regretful rambles of a dying man. 

I was never there. I made promises I could not keep. I disappeared and now I will never be found. 

She found a new Father, and he has taught her the ways of life. How to live. How to die. How to take the flame of someone’s very being and make it vanish. 

Her only inheritance was pain. A pain that drove so deep within her that it ate into her bones like a sickness. I watched from afar as it spread, too ashamed to go back and take it from her small shoulders. I let the weight of my failures push her further and further into the ground until she was buried by her own blood. 

That was how he found her. Broken, bloodied, but still able to bloom. He had a kind smile for her, wiping away her tears and reminding her of her worth. He returned all that I had stolen from her, but she was still incomplete. There was something that she needed, something that only she could obtain. 

I knew that she would come back for me one day, but naively, I never thought it would be like this. 

All that I left my little girl was a hole in her heart, that ached and screamed, growing and growing until she was swallowed by the darkness. 

I should have known that I’d have to pay for the pain, but like this? Oh, God. Why is it like this? 

My blood drips and drips, dashing down the cracks in the floorboards and painting the foundations of this lonely, old house a shameful scarlet. 

I slip in and out of the moment. Sometimes, she is there, but sometimes she is stolen away again, but I am always watched. 

The shadows with their stretching smiles surround my bed, sick of the sight of me, but watching at the command of their mistress. 

I am back in the room again. I feel it for a second before I see it, and then it is all around me. The drip drip drip of my blood. The creak creak creak of the floorboards. The snap snap snap of my fingers. 

The claws, deep in my throat. Tearing my face to pieces as I scream. The neighbourhood’s peace, uninterrupted as I stay, stuck in these seconds, dying and dying, again and again, while my daughter stares with her soft, sad sandy eyes at the picture I always kept on my bedside table. 

Our only picture together. The day that she was born. Her soft, sad sandy eyes, so small, but so wise as I held her. 

I looked so happy. So proud. So unaware of what was to come, and behind us, a shadow that I had barely noticed in all the years I had longingly looked at the photograph I had treasured. Long black claws, reaching out to my little Lacey, and sealing our fate, forever.