Oh, she did understand.. her Riddles made perfect sense to Dark, whose intimate knowledge of the carnival keyed in the missing pieces of her words. She understood well.. it amused Dark in the ugliest ways.
"Backward! It makes you younger, and forward! Older. No death, no birth. Just.. timelessness. No age!" He was a true immortal, by the hands of Lucifer himself, and only the happiest of things could destroy him. But very few people were happy enough with themselves to kill the beings like Dark.
"What you see in the mirror.. is truth," he said, "it's desire. I do give people their pathetic desires, my dear. We feed on them! Your torments call to us like dogs, in the night. We stuff ourselves on those torments, use them to butter our plain bread with delicious pain." He laughed again. "Funerals.. marriages, lost lovers, and lonely beds.. that's our diet. We find it sweet.
"We can smell the young, dying to be men a thousand miles off! And hear the fools like yourself groaning with midnight despairs from halfway around the world. And so they come here, the Autumn People! I give them what they desire, for a price."