My entry for Pengi's Lynne mini contest.. Hopefully this is on time. XD

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Lynne was the beautiful apprentice of a Wizard. Though she had unmeasured potential for magic, her master was short-sighted and rather archaic in his ways; Since she was a woman, this was merely idle schooling for her before she ran off to be married. Because of this, he paid very little attention to her, focusing instead on his male students.

Forced to learn from books in her room at night, Lynne grew angry. The trouble with magic, you see, is it feeds on ill will to become more powerful. It turned her angry heart into one that was completely black. But Lynne had a good soul. Inside, her pure soul and her blackened heart struggled to overtake one another, and everytime her master ignored her for a male student, her heart gained a little more leverage.

Then, one night, while studying alone, she came upon a spell. It would remove ones heart, so you could set it aside when you thought it was trying to get you into trouble. The only problem was that it needed a vessel of some kind to be placed in. Going to her old toy chest, she dug through it to find an old marionette that she had played with as a child, and had always been her friend.

The night, she removed her heart, placed it into the chest of the marionette, and went to bed.

Lynne awoke to horror in the morning. Her master and classmates had been brutally slain. As she ran for the door to tell the lawmen, a voice caught her attention. Turning, she saw her old marionette walking about on it's own, fabric bloody, it's strings and cross sticks bundled carefully.

"You cannot go. They will know it was you."

"But it wasn't me. It was- It was you!"

"Don't be stupid, my dear. I am a puppet."

"I will tell them! I will tell them what I did! About the spell. About everything."

"You will only be dooming yourself. This is your heart. This is what you wanted to do."

And Lynne began to fear. Her dark heart beating the chest of this puppet had caused it to kill. If she told, she would be digging a deeper hole. She used black magic to create an evil puppet. Who would possibly take pity on her?

So she resolved to run away. She ran, taking her puppet with her, intending to reclaim her heart. The problem she did not anticipate, however, is that a puppet never sleeps, and one with a black heart is always on guard...