My friend is very dangerous.

When we were children, we used to play in the meadow beyond my village. She and I would stare up at the clouds, or chase butterflies. Things children did. I never told the elders of course. They said that only demons lived in the western deserts. Nothing good could come out of there. But she did. I didn't think she was a demon. She had a face like mine, a body like mine. Well, maybe she was a bit too tall for a girl her age. A bit too pale. And there were her eyes, also. But that didn't matter. We bonded in the way that only children could, a deep trust born of naivete. But like all things, it could not last. We grew distant. My friend said her family didn't want her leaving home so often, for reasons they didn't know. I guess she kept me a secret as well. But it happened either way. Our visits grew rarer, our time together ever more fleeting, until one day they stopped altogether. Eventually I moved on. I even deluded myself into thinking that I had seen an apparition, or that it was all some fantasy I concocted from the dreamlike perspective of youth. But now I can no longer deny my memories as I once had. I am old now, but I know what I have seen was no mere imagining.

The leaders of my people, fools that they were, sought to slay the feared demons of the wasteland. A thousand gleaming warriors marched through the main road beside my village, and when they came back, a thousand more pale heads came with them, adorned on pikes and spears. The king and his court declared the day a time of celebration, and called for a feast. And so the kingdom sat in drunken stupor while the end came.

The pale things were subtle, first. Sweet little waifs, they sent. Creatures looking like they had only just blossomed into the flower of adulthood, their blackened eyes a visage of vulnerability and trust. Right until they slipped a knife in your ribs, I imagine. I think that's what got old lord Tarmandry, lecherous lout that he was. Others too, I'd hazard. More came after that though. Slender figures with swaying necks and mask-faces, no emotion to be seen. Knights with hardened, gleaming skin of black, thrice the size of a man. A menagerie of bounding creatures upon the heels of this host of ill omen served only to breed more terror as rumors and speculation flooded the lands. As a scribe, I saw them myself. The great sphinx-beasts that belched flame and invisible, cloying odors that sloughed off flesh. The living pedestals that woke the dead and turned them on the living. The many lumbering myrmitaurs that tore our homes apart. And I saw my friend again, too.

She really was beautiful. Taller than me, just like she used to be. Skin and hair like polished ivory and eyes black save for the speck of glowing white radiating from where the pupil ought to be. Arms and legs blackening and hardening into iron talons capable of ripping a man's offal to shreds. Pairs of black tendrils sprouting from her back, like an angel's wings. A goddess, almost. I wanted to run to her, to ask her why she had been gone so long, but I could not. I was so afraid. I looked into her eyes with my spyglass, I stared into the gaze of the girl I spent so much time with, shared so much with. I stared into her eyes and there was almost  nothing  human  in  them.

But now she's gone again. My friend has left me alone in this ruined old castle, surrounded by corpses and ash, as I write my final testament as scribe of my gutted kingdom. I will now journey to the lands of the west, and I will find her again. And that will be that.