All Hallows’ Eve twenty-two years ago. One look at either and anyone at all would appreciate the aptness of their surname: Snow. Their skin is milk, and their corn-silk hair is white as white can be. But their eyes are the deep crimson of rubies, eyes that see as well in this gloom almost as any eyes may see. Their birth was not an easy passage, and it took the life of their mother, Hera. She saw them briefly, and then death came and delivered her from the blood-spattered crypt where the two were dragged out of the amniotic peace of Womb into the clamorous purgatory of the World. Had Hera Snow survived, herself only one-third a true Daughter of Eve, she’d have loved them and been proud, for the twins grew to be all that would have been expected of them by the three families and their Ghul father.
Hera Salem Snow, a Boston Brahmin Yankee born to the fortune and power her family bargained for centuries before. Deals with the ghouls and with dark gods, obligating each of the three families—Snow, Cabot, and Endicott—to offer once in every generation a daughter for the Ghul to do with as they see fit. And as they see fit is almost always the birthing of half-breed children. Hera was herself the child of such a pairing, and was also such an offering, when the moon decided it was her time to bleed. She was neither fair of skin nor hair, but she shared the twins’ red eyes, and she shared their hungers. However, she could only ever have aspired to the ferocity of their terrible appetites and desires, for the son and daughter have excelled in the expectations of their father.
Long before they were finally shown the way down through secret tunnels beneath Mount Auburn, they’d stalked and killed. They’d taught themselves the arts and sciences of torture, how to prolong the suffering of their victims as long as possible before the mercy of a killing stroke. It began—with kittens, puppies, songbirds, a hutch of rabbits—before their fifth birthday. As teenagers, they moved along to adult dogs and cats, a horse from the Snow stables, before, finally, they graduated to the cook. When they were done with her, they, appropriately, butchered the corpse and stewed the finest bits. They shared that meal, and then, for the first time, fucked beneath a full moon, upon an altar they’d fashioned to honor Shub-Niggurath, the All Mother and consort of the Not-to-Be-Named. That night they first tasted one another’s blood, and that night they became truly intertwined. They were wedded beneath and by the darkness between the stars, the void that watched on as they consecrated unholy, unspoken vows.
Now.
Here they stand, hand in hand, above the black gulf of Pnath. They have brought with them, in a burlap sack, the dry skeleton of their mother; they drop the bones, one by one, over the cliff, saving her skull for last. Isaac kisses its forehead. Isobel does the same. And then she releases Hera to her final resting place among the bholes. The twins drew lots to see which of them would be afforded that honor and responsibility. Isaac did a poor job of hiding his bitterness at losing the roll of a single soapstone die. Isobel has always found his sour moods especially endearing and particularly exciting.
Their sacred duty done, the two walk together along the narrow, cobbled road leading back to the great necropolis of Zin, a city once held by the race of gugs until two years ago when the twins led an army of ghouls to shatter the ramparts and breach the walls and rain hellfire. For the twins have become what was never suspected any half-modab beings ever could become. Together, by bold and secret sorceries, they unseated the King of Bones, the Queen of Rags—Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara, respectively—and took for themselves the thrones of Thok. They put to death any who dared oppose them or question their right to rule, all traitors and rabble-rousers. These public executions were accomplished by such cruel and unsightly means that very few were necessary to quiet the dissidents. And they made the kingdom anew. No longer did the ghouls cower in mold and offal, gnawing gristle and marrow from withered, pilfered corpses. Isaac and Isobel raised them up, and made a proper army. The gugs were enslaved, and the night gaunts, as well. Within the Lower Dream Lands every foul thing that