Ciara o’Brien had been sixteen years old then, her last remembrance of that feminine whisper in her ear.

Autumn leaves crunched underfoot as she made her way through the grounds of her estate.

She did that a lot; She disliked the men her mother so often hosted at the estate, and liked the way they looked at her even less, but there was nowhere else to go.

Always these whispers, half-forgotten.

She weaved her way through the ashen trees, to find the massive form of the Bodyguard blocking her way.

Perhaps there was a time Ciara had known his name, but she felt no desire to remember it any longer.

All she knew about the Bodyguard was that he was as much a constant as the whispers; He had been a constant as long as she could remember, a silent giant shadow to her mother, brutal and implacable.

She saw the effect the man had, even on the other men that came calling to the estate.

He turned a cold gaze on her.

“Your mother requires your presence.”

No argument would be tolerated, and the bodyguard would break her legs at the knees and drag her inside if he had to, the unfailingly loyal machine that he was.

So she did the only thing she could; She followed, obediently, even as the whispers of some girl she didn’t know grew louder in her ear.

Her feet crunched over the gravel as she walked back to the estate, and she kept her footfalls light, afraid of what might reach upwards through the Earth.

Back at the estate, her mother had wrapped herself in a mink shawl, with a shorter, overweight, bespectacled man in a suit awaited her by the door.

“I’ll be out tonight, dear,” Maeve O’Brien addressed her daughter, “It’ll probably be dark when I return. You should retire to your room now, we wouldn’t want you roaming the grounds for too long and damaging yourself.”

The Bodyguard escorted her back to her room, then the door clicked shut behind her.

Locked.

Cooped up in her room until the sun sank below the horizon, she occupied herself in her collection of fiction, until she saw the pale lights from the headlamps of her mother’s car approach.

They were using the back entrance.

The grounds at the rear of the estate had a ghastly ashen pallor, bathed in the pale moonlight.

The Bodyguard emerged from the car, and Ciara ducked beneath the windowsill, peeking over the edge, even as the voice whispered ever more insistently.

From the rear seat, her mother stepped out and the Bodyguard pulled out a sealed black barrack bag.

This one must have been smaller than the rest of them.

The Bodyguard began to turn over the earth, silhouette moving rhythmically in the dim light as Maeve looked on.

Ciara pressed as close to the window pane as possible, and the whispers grew ever more insistent.

How many times had she seen this exact scene before, with the Bodyguard burying her mother’s dirty secrets in the ashen soil of the estate grounds?

Did Maeve think Ciara never saw her, or did she simply not care?

When the dirty work was done, the Bodyguard piled dirt onto the spot he had dug up, then evened it out with the flat end of his shovel, before stamping on it a few times for good measure.

Ciara came away from the window and put out her lights as her mother and the Bodyguard began to walk back to the estate, and slipped under her sheets, screwing her eyes shut.

After a while, the lock opened with a click, and someone peered in through a crack in the door, before shutting it once more.

The lock didn’t click again.

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Ciara wondered how long she waited in the silent darkness before slipping out again, then cautiously opening her door by the smallest margin, peeking out into the dark hallways to make sure no one was still awake.

She pushed open the main gates cautiously, making sure it didn’t creak to give her away, and when she was safely out in the open, she rushed to the spot where the newest inhabitant of the grounds had been buried.

She didn’t know what possessed her to dig up the earth with her bare hands, and she certainly wasn’t making any headway, for fingers were not meant to unearth soil like a shovel could, especially with the strength of a fifteen year old girl.

The whispers in her head grew louder and more insistent with each passing second, although whether they were spurring her on or warning her away was impossible to tell.

She had to see this; She absolutely had to.

A star blinked in the dark night sky above.

Ciara did not know precisely what frenzied strength took hold of her limbs, but within minutes, she had unearthed as much dirt as the Bodyguard had with the aid of his shovel, with only her bare hands.

The star overhead burned ever brighter.

And massive fingers closed in a vise-like grip around Ciara’s skull.

The Bodyguard had arrived.

“What-are-you-doing?” He hissed.

He eyed the unearthed barrack bag, then the girl's dirt encrusted fingers.

“If you want to see what’s inside of that so badly, go ahead.”

He shoved her roughly onto her knees in front of what she had unburied.

“Go on then.”

With trembling hands, Ciara reached for the zipper, and pulled it down.

And found herself staring back at her, eyes glazed, skin a lifeless grey, from the bag.

The whispers in her head had turned to shrieks.

Or perhaps that was all her?

The star overhead blazed ever brighter.

The Bodyguard’s hand tightened around Ciara’s skull once more.

“Get a good look?”

“Please,” She wailed, confusion churning in her gut as her own dead face stared back at her, “Please…”

“This is where nosy little girls end up; in the dirt. Do you want to be there too?”

Ciara did not understand; From what she could see, she was already there.

“Do you?”

“Please…”

“You’ll speak of this to no one. You will tell no one. Especially not your mother. Do you understand me?”

“Why are you- Why…?”

“Do. You. Understand?”

“I understand! I understand!”

The Bodyguard shoved Ciara’s face ever so slightly closer to that of her own corpse.

“Not like that- Say it clearly, without all the blubbering, so I know you’ve understood.”

“What- Please-”

“Say it!”

Ciara modulated her voice, no longer one belonging to a terrified child, an icy tone that would be right at home on her mother’s lips.

“I will tell no one about what I saw here. Not even my mother. I swear it.”

Something inside Ciara’s head was tearing, and she was surprised she felt no blood trickle down her face.

“Good,” The Bodyguard pulled her straight, “Remember this for-”

A star broke and fell on the O’Brien estate, a flash of light that drowned the ashen trees for a moment before fading to black, yet burning a lasting impression on the retinas of any onlookers.

“Fucking bridgeport- Told them to turn the settings down… I’ll skin those stupid Hollows alive when I get back…” A youthful male voice grumbled from somewhere in the night, and a man in what looked like a leather jacket, his face adorned with several piercings, stepped from somewhere in the woods.

The estate staff would soon start spilling out of the grounds, as well as Maeve herself.

In one smooth motion, the Bodyguard pulled his Taurus Raging Bull handgun from his side and emptied three rounds into the stranger with deafening reports.

The man did not even budge, brows knitting together in an expression of irritation.

“Look, Hollow, I’m really at the end of my patience today, so-”

Another shot fired- to no effect.

“Alright,” The man sighed.

The next moment, a blade erupted from the Bodyguard’s chest, clear as glass, thick, and impossibly sharp.

The Bodyguard, constant presence throughout Ciara’s life, looming, implacable spectre, fell, nearly bisected into vertical halves, even as the blade disappeared into thin air.

Ciara was vaguely aware of the presence of her mother, ashen faced as the soil of the estate, but her attention was mostly consumed by the Bodyguard, or the mass of flesh and blood that used to be a person, now just another corpse she was responsible for.

(Where did that thought come from?)

Until the stranger approached them both, Ciara being too slow to retreat from his descending hand that landed on her head, grabbing on, not hard like the Bodyguard’s grip had been, but possessive and uncomfortable all the same.

“I’ll be taking this with me,” He told her mother.

Such was to be her first introduction to Apotheosis.

Even in the present day, she would often think about that shallow grave, with her own corpse staring back at her.

It couldn’t have been her, her rational mind told her.

Perhaps it was an illusion, the first manifestations of her Power, or simply a mundane manifestation of her fraying sanity.

Perhaps she’d find out what it meant one day, or perhaps she didn’t really want to find out.

Either way, it was a problem for the future, and Ciara presently put these thoughts out of her mind.