It was no wonder they were all insane.

Wild eyes flew up, locking without the need to search the sky, on the rising circle of silver that pulled on his blood like it did the tides, watching him. He was always being watched—at least the moon was tangible. The curse—no, the curse wasn't tangible. But it lingered. Sickly oppressive,a weight that wrapped around his family like a poisonous Dementor's fog, with a thousand angry eyes staring, unblinking, from the black. Watching. While you slept, while you ate, while you walked, hovering on your shoulders but never touching, never quite touching, your skin. You could turn, hair on your neck raised, and never see them staring at you though you knew some thousandfold vengeful stares peered at your flesh. Watching.

He spared a bitter moment to be glad Aisling, not he, was the Seer in the family. He didn't envy her Sight.

He was sitting an alley, knees to his chest, arms crossed on top of them, face hidden except for the sunken, bloodshot eyes and dry, pale hair.

Rage, as it always did, choked his heartbeats, useless and violent. So hot it left his skin cold, so roaring it was silent and still: the mute beating of fists against a stone wall, bloody, broken impotent folly from which disengaging was tantamount to something less than lifelessness. Every avenue was a dead end. No help. No kindly hands, nor spared thoughts and spells. Every answer was "no".

Except one.

One that let the shattered mind surrender. Where the staring eyes didn't recognize him, cloaked in the anonymity of fur and claws that hid his name from the Ministry as well, where rage fulfilled instead of emptied, burned the throat and was blind.  Where exhaustion was something to gorge on, instead of despair of. Where the desperate, wild incoherencies of his broken thoughts were drowned in the uninterrupted roar of something wilder.

The moon broke the horizon.

And the hysterical, shrieking laughter of the irrevocably damaged was strangled in the mad howl of an abomination.

Dotty couldn't sleep.

Insomniac episodes were nothing new to her. It wasn't even that late, yet nobody wanted to do anything fun! The night was little or whatever the term was. Too tired, they said, because we've been working all day. Pah! If Anadotti Squiggs could stay awake for what was soon becoming 18 hours devotion to a singular task, why should they be tired because of work?

She'd sustained herself on soda and candy bars from her stash, sugary caffeine that left her jittering throughout the day. Although her hands were trembling, her tasks were completed without too much issue.

Beside her was a now empty sack devoid of its previous occupants expect for bits of fur and mottled blood like someone looking to invoke the damage deposit on a hotel room. She'd seen the two wizards making a trade at an owl emporium. A sack of vermin, he'd said. Mice, moles, stoats, rats, squirrels, all manner of rodents to feed some stupid owls. Squirrels! That was what had set her off. When they weren't looking Dotty snatched the bag and became secluded in her hideaway attic space.

Which was now infested with the walking--err, crawling dead. Dotty's pet zombified critters. No plan or purpose, just that the little vermin should be able to be free instead of morsels for birds. Actually, there was an idea. Sic her pets back on the emporium, see how the birds like it when the food trying crawling their way out after eaten.

Hedgehogs, though, were the worst. Half of their quills fell out during the process to become undead, plus they ended up rather stiff.

"Come on, curl up in a ball," Dotty encouraged/demanded out of a recently turned hedgehog. It was stuck in a c-shape, unable to flex the full distance. "Just...a little...further..." She squished it's sides together.

There was a snap. She placed the once dead hedgehog on the floor. Well, it's front legs were still working. Suddenly Dotty felt very sore, her backside numb from the sitting angle she hadn't moved from for a few hours, her bladder fit to burst. She needed to move, do something.

"I can't take this anymore!" she shrieked over her self-suffered activity of Dark Arts. After shaking motion back into her limbs, she inadvertedly pinned a rat by the tail with her boot...the rat subsequently continued to crawl away without the tail. Her restless sleeplessness needed an outlet.

Within minutes she had stunk up the bathroom and was out in the moonlight alley. There had to be something worthwhile out here, a door to jimmy open, anything not bolted to the floor. There were echos of laughter and howling that made her freeze for a moment. Was that a party? If anybody was getting liquored up she wanted in, her booze supplies were low, and the stuff Dietrich's receptionist kept stocked in the tattoo parlor was too icky tasting for "uncultured swine like Anadotti."

The night was little. Short. Childlike. How did the dang term go again?