As you may have guessed, this is part 8 of the Phryniverse, which has been following our lovely couple for a year and a half through their adventurous relationship. (And they will make an appearance soon, I promise.) Enjoy.

Prologue:

A moonless night, far in the past. Maybe, if it had been a different story there could have been a thunderstorm. Lightning ripping the sky apart. Heavy rain drumming on the hat of the darkly clad figure.

But since the universe tends to be not quite as fond of cliches as writers would like it to be, the only sound was a tiny baby screaming through the still night.

"Quiet," the man hissed.

The risk of being discovered was slim, nobody came this way in the dead of the night. Yet, the squealing unsettled him. As far as it was possible for him to be any more terrified than he already was.

The woman leaning pale against the trunk of an old tree with a tiny bundle wrapped in her arms, nodded and rocked the child as if she could protect it from a cruel world. She was trying her hardest not to look at the bloodied body lying at her feet. The cracked skull. The twisted limbs. The empty eyes staring into nothing.

The man returned to his work, lifting shovel after shovel of dry dirt. Sweat dripped into the shallow grave in what felt like hours. The child fell finally into an exhausted sleep in his mother's arms.

"What are we going to do?" her thin voice asked into the tense silence.

"Not a lot we can do," he answered, lifting the almost weightless remains of what once had been a woman into the hole. "We get on with it and all of this never happened."

She nodded again, holding the baby closer to her chest while her husband started to cover the body. The sickening sound of dirt falling on cooling flesh was for a long time the only thing they heard. She watched him work, his strong hands flexing around the shovel, a pattern appearing on his dirt covered features. It was impossible to tell if he was crying or there were just streaks of sweat painting their way through the grime. Did he feel remorse? Not that it mattered. He was right. What was done was done and now they would have to keep it quiet. Shuddering she glanced at the cluster of rocks towering above them, just barely visible against the dark sky, but ever the more threatening. The old stones were good at protecting secrets.