"Sweet mother, sweet mother, send you child unto me..."

She kept stabbing.  Her arm was sore, she'd been at this all night, but she had to keep going.

"...for the sins of the unworthy must be baptized in blood and fear."

She didn't know how long she'd have to do this until her prayer was answered.

"Sweet mother, sweet mother,"  Her voice was raspy beneath her tears.  It didn't even matter if she could stop, she had all of this pent up inside her and it needed to come out somehow.

"...Send your child unto me..."  Her words were echoed by someone behind her, it seemed.

"For the sins..." she turned around.  It was endless darkness.  She swallowed, and wiped the tears from her face.   "For the sins of the unworthy must be baptized..."

"In love and fear, my child."  The darkness said, deep and hissing.  Her body went cold, her voice left her, and she'd never been so aware of-

She sat up straight in bed.  She gasped for air, the dreaming sensations still with her, and her eyes darted around her bedroom.  She looked next to her, and Vorstag was sleeping soundly.  She was in her bed, in her house in Solitude, and not in the Void.

The Void.  The endless darkness her soul would visit someday.  As Listener, Sithis would greet her with open arms.  Well, from what she heard, he was bodiless, but the sentiment still stood.

She quietly got out of bed, not to disturb her husband in his sleep, and silently left their room.  She went through her house to her balcony, so she could look up at the stars and try to figure out her startlingly real dream.

She had always had fuzzy dreams, some of which she thought were distant memories from her childhood.  Ever since she woke up in the cart, leading to her unlawful execution, she didn't remember anything from before that moment.  She'd asked Ralof, and he said that an Imperial soldier lobbed her hard enough in the head to knock her out for hours.  That's why she didn't remember.

But this dream, her performing the Black Sacrament, seemed like a memory.  Of course, as a member of the Dark Brotherhood, she was familiar with the act, the way that clients prayed to her Unholy Matron so her children could carry out the assassination.  But this dream...it had happened, and she had done it.

How would she have known about the Dark Brotherhood as a young girl?  Who would've she wanted to kill?  She knew from faint memories that she was a violent girl, and she'd killed before, but why would she need an assassin?

And did that voice come into her head, the voice she now knew as the Night Mother, that time long ago?  How could she be the Listener as a child?  How would the Night Mother know?

In the back of her mind she had a desire to do the Black Sacrament to talk to an assassin about what had happened, but then she remembered that she was the second-in-command of the Dark Brotherhood and no one but the Night Mother would know what had happened.

The Night Mother scared her, and she wasn't going to set off for Dawnstar in the middle of the night just to ask a corpse about something that may or may not have ever happened.

But maybe Cicero would know.  There was a slight chance that it had happened before the last Listener was killed, and he had heard of the contract, that couldn't be fulfilled...

Or had it been?  Any chance of her going back to sleep was gone.  She needed to know.  

But thankfully, for once in her life, she had people that could help her.