"Black Widows are the caste of mind-Healers," Karla explained, "so first and foremost, we learned about the mind, how it worked, how it failed, and how to put it back together again."

They were like therapists in corsets!

"But we also learned how to weave tangled webs, how to create illusions, to tell true dreams from false ones, and a lot about poisons. There's a lot that goes into Black Widow training, really."

"We call it 'wandering the Twisted Kingdom,' but yes, insanity. Sometimes it's just providing a listening ear and an open heart and guiding them back to sanity, other time it involves Craft and painstakingly putting a shattered crystal chalice back together. It depends a lot on why someone went mad in the first place."

Suuuuure. Totally hypothetically.

"Not really," Karla said. "There was an...asylum for girls who supposedly went a little mad because they had too much power, but that..." Her voice hardened a bit. "That place hadn't been built for the girls at all."

Briarwood is the pretty poison. There is no cure for Briarwood.

"Usually it's the other way around. Witches going into the Twisted Kingdom after having their power stripped away from them."

"No," Karla replied sadly. "Once a witch has been broken, that's it. There is no regaining the power that she should have had."

Something Karla had seen far too many times in Glacia before coming to Fandom, yes.

"What do you mean, 'mad with power'?" she asked, focusing on Rinoa's second question. "Like...unbalanced? Or they have some kind of power-craving complex?"

"It's just lost forever," Karla said. "You know how a sail works, on a boat? The wind catches the sail and propels the boat forward. Cut a hole in the sail, the wind escaped through that hole, and the boat goes nowhere. That's sort of how our Craft works. We have what we call an 'inner web,' it's a connection to our power. Sever that connection--tear through the web--and there's nothing."

Well, not nothing. Broken witches still had basic Craft. But to anyone who had once worn a Jewel, it was maddening.

Karla was quiet as she listened to Rinoa's almost-halting explanation of what she meant. "We have people like that, yes," she said slowly, when Rinoa was done. "It's not usually the power's fault, though. We receive our first Jewels as children and we grow up learning how to wield the power that is our birthright." She paused, thinking of Saetan's fears for Jaenelle, of serving a Queen who ruled from the Twisted Kingdom. "But what you say isn't impossible, especially for those of us who wear the darker Jewels." Birthright Black, and enough strength to bond with with thirteen Jewels. "I think it would depend on who the person was. What kind of bond we shared. Would she listen to me, or is she powerful enough to block me out. The first thing I would do was try to find her an anchor, something to cling to, even when nothing else remained, and then work with that to build a bridge out of the Twisted Kingdom and back to herself."