As darkness and silence encroached upon him, he seemed to hear her voice in his mind, contemptuous and cruel, lingering on even when all of his senses had completely failed:
So be it, my ungracious knight. You refuse my favour? Then you shall have no more than my mercy. But you need not fear, unfit though you are to be my daughter. You will have immortality… as a maidservant. You have denied yourself the true womanhood I had destined for you, but after a century in my service, I think you will still make a pleasingly meek and pretty little thing, though not half of what you might have been. Reflect on that, from now to eternity… my little Alexandreina.