Mother Miranda wasn’t an easy woman to work with. You’d known that the moment she allowed you into her lab- a space so sacred, so secret, that you felt if you left even the faintest hint of your presence there, you'd be doomed. Her expectations of you were relentless, her words sharp, and her demeanour colder than the icy peaks of the village that loomed outside. To her, you were a tool, a means to an end in her relentless pursuit of saving her beloved Eva.

“You’ll keep up, or you’ll be replaced,” she had told you flatly, her piercing gaze burning into yours.

At first, you were terrified of her, and rightly so. Terrified of the way her presence seemed to make every shadow in the room stand to attention, of the way her voice, even when soft, cut through you like a bitter wind. You followed her orders to a tee, hands trembling when you handled volatile compounds or transcribed her endless notes. You stayed quiet, obedient, unwilling to draw her ire.

Yet, as the days turned to weeks, you began to notice the cracks in the icy wall she had constructed between you. Small, fleeting moments that betrayed her stoic composure and betrayed a softer side: the way she adjusted the lab’s heating for you on particularly frigid days, or how her gaze lingered when she thought you weren’t looking. Once, after an exhausting day of work, she caught you nodding off at the table and sighed. “Take a break before you ruin the samples,” she said, her voice considerably softer than her words.

As time passed, the fleeting moments became, well, not at all fleeting. One evening, after hours of meticulous testing, you dared to ask, “Do you ever get tired of this?”

Miranda’s eyes flicked to yours, her expression unreadable. For a moment, you thought she'd never answer, but then she spoke, her voice quieter than you’d ever heard it. “Tired?” She looked down at the vial in her hand. “Yes. But I can’t stop. You understand that, don’t you?”

And, of course, in the typical fashion of you being you, you did.