The Witches, Part III
In the ensuing weeks, my champions and I tried to convince my sisters that the siren songs thatbeckoned us toward the mountains were the melodies of a dark fate. But our urgings to flee were weak for so many reasons. Where could we have escaped? We had met nothing but danger and hatred wherever we had roamed. And the foreboding I felt was indistinct even to me, Krassal’s sister, and the magical surge we had all felt was still vivid and fresh. I don’t blame them for what happened. I shoulder my share of the guild for the travesty atop the Brocken and ask no one else to bear the burden except the guilty parties, which my sisters were not.
The trees and the grass thinned and the land quieted as we approached the Mak’Tosh, but the mountains felt like living, breathing giants. As if the landscape beheld them with reverence. Or as if they had drained the energy from their surroundings. Rocks scattered themselves at the feet of the range like bodies on a battlefield, or a refugee camp. Our wagons had a difficult time making it to the entrance to the mountain caverns. The heroes helped us without our request or their complaint. It was natural to them by then. When we reached the door to the mountain, Amaryllis released the adventurers, as was her right. I handed over the diamonds I had promised them, as well as my best wishes for their lives ahead. Oh how I wish they had just gone.
---
They began to depart, but Jancaryn and Diomedes’ instincts held them back. Where we saw blank walls, they saw recent struggle. Where we saw glowing lichen that was meant to provide light to the tunnels dead on the ground from apparent starvation, they saw sabotage. A new deal was struck: for their continued protection, we were to grant Jancaryn the thrill of more adventure, Diomedes more riches, and Moses a taste of our recovered power. I told them of the history of the mountains, how the Gar’Bosh Akar warchief had organized a great (and successful, despite the deaths of all his workers) expedition to recover the Mak’Tosh Diamonds that would make him and his progeny sultans. The mining tunnels they made, I suggested, would be our way into the heart of the place. We searched all over for an entryway to the sultan’s centuries-old operations, all the while aware that something had come here before us and did not want us to proceed. Eventually a wall crumbled to reveal a set of tracks with mining carts still on them. The adventurers got in. I let my jealousy show through as I told them to find a way through that my sisters and I and Nerzum could use and handed them a loquitir with which we could communicate. To be young again, I thought. Soon, I told myself.
It was in these tunnels, I was told later, that they first encountered the spirit Virishem, who was a guardian of the Mak’Tosh. He was a powerful entity from another realm who used illusion and other mental trickery to keep the heroes from their goals. I did not meet him, but I heard him described as a purple, skeletal cat dressed in royal regalia. He put them through trials they would not speak of to me. He was a servant to two masters, we learned, being torn asunder by two gods. My adventurers persevered through this meeting and after they disembarked from the carts. They found another, safer passage that allowed us to join them in the inner caves.
The guardian spirits were curious visitors to our plane from the fey realm. They were so childlike that they did not realize the dangers of crossing dimensions, and so mighty that they never learned fear. Not until they came to Aralia. The Old Gods saw their usefulness and teased them away from their frolicks into their lairs. Some of the Old Ones made friends with the spirits. Some enslaved the creatures. They became heralds. Most perished in the clash with the New Gods, defending their masters with ferocity until their last breaths. Or whatever the spiritual equivalent of breathing is. Some survived, though. They grew spiteful and assumed the forms of what we now know to be Djinni to torture mortals. This Virishem, however, had apparently remained beside Baba Yaga to preside over her long death. He did so faithfully until Krassal ripped him away from his duty to make him serve her. He was not the first battlefield on which Baba Yaga and the Great Witch fought, but he was the one I think must have felt the war most acutely. When Krassal chased our progenitor from Aegas Goeol, the mountain was not wracked with the pain that Virishem must have been.
We sat on the ledge which my heroes had opened up for us while they scouted ahead once more through tunnels twisted by magic. While they battled through the writhing tunnels undoubtedly put before them by Virishem, we waited. In silence at first. Clover, of course, was the first one to speak after the sounds of the footsteps of the heroes had died away. She stood up to gaze out over the ledge into the bottomless chasm behind us, then angrily moved back to Amaryllis, who was hunched over on a rock, her makeshift throne. By the time she openly challenged our leader’s ability, Hattie was already at her side, trying to talk her down. Clover brushed her sister off. “You are weak, Amaryllis. You have known this as we all have. Because we have followed you, we sit here now at the mercy of a mountain filled with the arcane energy that should be inside of us! We wait on the success of three outsiders we met when we found them spying on us! Outsiders who work for us because they want the last few coins of our wealth.” She turned to the rest of us. “We felt our abilities return to us! And now we sit in the dark at the feet of a naive crone who already got herself killed once and almost took the rest of us with her. What foolishness to seek our freedom through rote obeisance to one such as you!”
Amaryllis rose then slowly from her stone. She was a bit taller than Clover, even hunched with age of an old body. “We will regain our powers, sister Clover,” she said calmly. “And when that time comes, you may challenge me for the right to lead the Final Coven. I forgive your words, treacherous though they may be, for it is not my place to stifle the proud thoughts of a Witch. But do it again, and I will need no magic to aid me in slitting your throat and throwing your body off that cliff.” She looked past Clover to the rest of us. “And that goes for all of you,” she added quietly. Then she sat back down. Hattie succeeded in coaxing Clover away to sit on the other side of the outcropping. Her eyes burned with what I thought was simple hatred.
---
The adventurers again opened the way for us. They looked tired. We approached and I naturally fell into step with them. Moses told me of the encounters they had, and one in particular, a room heavy with Baba Yaga’s essence. They had a dream which was a vision of the last days of the war between the Old Gods and the New. They witnessed it from her castle, a giant hut atop a pair of long chicken legs which strode through a field of fire. Magic beyond reckoning made the earth to quake and the sky burn, and magnificent figures clashed all about. The tails of the world dragons snaked through clouds oppressing the entire landscape. A woman they saw, twenty feet tall, with wild white hair and a hooked nose, floating over the battlefield, conjuring spells. A hulking man arrayed for war trumpeted a call to battle from his curled horn and charged at her, our god, who grew to be a hundred, two hundred, a thousand feet tall before being cut down and crashing into a lake. Thus was the nourishing mother defeated by the violence of Heimdall. Millions of years later, she dragged herself from the lake to rest in a tall, snowy peak to the south. The Fell Peak. Cracklespire Mountain. Aegas Goeol in the elven tongue. There she was set upon by another, who siphoned nearly all of what power remained to her. Only then, diminished almost to nothing, did she fly north, to the Mak’Tosh, becoming one with the mountains, which began to glow a faint purple.
---
On the other side of the tunnels we found life. Sentient and real and familiar. It was the Necromancers, who had fled into the Mak’Tosh for reasons similar to our purpose. I even recognized many of the faces I saw milling about, though many were zombies, raised from the dead out of respect. I did not know Muhjar and her zombie husband Yusri when they met us at the outskirts of the settlement. The magic that held Yusri together was feeble and it pained me to see that Muhjar thought that she could not go through life without this pale imitation of her soul’s twin, but she seemed contented enough. She pointed us to the tent of the current Necromantic leader, Abdur Raank. The scent of incense swam in the tent, making our heads ache. This pallid thing itself was a zombie, albeit one imbued with intelligence by the elders of the tribe after he was voted to lead them. In times of peril, Necromancers raise their former paragons who have displayed exceptional intelligence or bravery or powerful magic to aid them.
Abdur, a clever, humble man in life I remembered having met a hundred and fifty years before, was not, however, the leader the Necromancers wanted. He was raised in order to locate the bones of Sahl Marn, the greatest of chieftains of times past, in order to help them break out of the Mak’Tosh caverns, which had trapped them for two years by then. The adventurers sensed they were about to be sent on yet another quest, and abruptly told Abdur to get on with it. He pointed them toward what his tribe called merely ‘Below,’ a set of haunted caverns beneath their encampment that had already devoured all the Necromancers who had sought Sahl Marn’s remains. With his bones, they could resurrect him, and he could release them from the Mak’Tosh. So it was assumed. And it was also assumed that if Sahl Marn could break the magic holding us all there, it could also open up the way to the Brocken where we would find out salvation. So it was assumed.
Jancaryn, Diomedes, and Moses were granted the service of Akram Holm, a reasonably powerful Necromancer so devoted to Abdur that he was willing to brave Below. It was a solemn group that crossed the threshold into the deep places of the mountains. And solemn were those left behind. We had all--except for Clover, perhaps--grown used to the comforting presence of the three. That they had not been with us in the Mak’Tosh since we arrived, and that the place had done everything it could to stymie our progress gave us both a feeling of urgency and even panic, and also of uncertainty. They had driven away the dangers ahead of us since they had joined us and now were descending into a darkness so complete that even an ancient order of powerful mages who could raise the dead were afraid of it, and we did not know whether we would ever see them again. And in a way, we didn’t.
---
We never found out what transpired in the caverns, for the most part. They came back with the bones of Sahl Marn, so they succeeded. They also recovered a small part of the power of Baba Yaga, which Virishem had kept hidden from Krassal. Krassal was mighty even then, and bent this cat to her will, but the Guardian was still able to conceal something of our god from her. Without these things, we would not have opened the way to the Brocken. But at what cost did they venture thither? A grave one, to be sure. One I would not have paid, had I known. There are old things in the earth, older than the Old Gods. Things that predated the concepts of pity or mercy, things driven from their thrones atop a primordial kingdom before recorded time, who lay in wait still for the death of divinity to reclaim this land and unite it under a banner of perpetual misery. I think perhaps this was what was Below, though the Other will not let me name it.
And so the story of the Witches does not include what my heroes did Below, harrowing though it may have been for them. I know not what they bartered for their lives in the far reaches. I do, however, know what price we were forced to pay back in the Necromancers’ village. We were sitting in silence in the center of our waystation. We had placed our fates in the hands of others for so long, but something about this waiting brought out an anxiety we had not before felt. Some of us stared at the opening to Below. Some paced. I watched Amaryllis, who was impassive and who made it a point not to acknowledge me. What was she thinking then? What did she hope would happen? Did she see herself leading the Witches into a new world, empowered once more? Did she see herself young again? Did she dare dream that she had the ability to create more Witches so that we would spread out over Aralia and bring to heel the obsequy that plagued mortal life?
It doesn’t matter. After waiting until she was sure the adventures were gone, Clover marched into Abdur Raank’s hut and ripped him apart, then exited and uttered a power word that broke every single one of Amaryllis’ bones at once. The remaining Necromancers didn’t know what was happening until most were already dead. Muhjar saw her husband dissolve in fire before a conjured stream of acid devoured her heart. She lit the huts on fire not to burn them up but to chase their inhabitants outside in order to strike them down with whatever magic she pleased. For what might have been an age of this earth she strode around the village, razing everything and slaughtering all. Except we Witches. The Witches she left alone. I cradled Amaryllis and saw in her eyes the reality of the nature of our failed quest: in the end, we feared death as much as anyone.
It was not Clover who spoke to me, of course. At some point since entering the Mak’Tosh, she had allowed herself to become the conduit of my sister. With eyes that glowed red, she looked at me and laughed. “It is good to see you again. I have missed you.” Words failed me. Krassal I had always held in awe. Someone so far beyond my comprehension that I could not even treat with her. I felt no sorority with her, no love, nor even hatred. For I did not hate or love the sun or the ocean or other force I would have had more success controlling than I would Krassal. I did not have to speak, however. The adventurers returned, then. So I yelled at them, instead. “Heroes! Krassal is come! She sits now in the body of our sister Clover!”
“I have taken nothing I was not offered freely,” she spat. “Clover saw the weakness of the Witches and their supposed leader.” She gestured toward Amaryllis, the bag full of chipped bones draped across my legs and arms. “Yes, I am here to feed on the rest of the Old God’s essence, as I did once before. I will become a god to end all gods and destroy the rigid yoke under which we all labor.” She turned to the cowering group of Witches. “Join with me and be saved. Join with me and be free! We will receive our true inheritance on this, the final night of Walpurgisnacht, as it should be!” She disappeared then, but her whispers echoed in the chamber that all could be restored to the heroes that they had lost in their long, hard lives if they joined the cause to protect the freedom of choice. Several of my sisters wept openly with joy and called to Krassal with news of their loyalty. They passed through the invisible veil that kept us beneath the earth to join their savior. Those remaining among us were silent for a long while. We understood at that moment that there would be no salvation. If fortune blessed us beyond measure, we would escape with our lives. But the Witches’ power was lost to them unless they submitted to the tyrant above.
I was different, though. While Hattie and Clover had learned to be trackers and survivalists, I took another route to prepare for this day. There are many magics in this universe, and many creatures who wield them. Not all those magics are kind, and many of those creatures are cruel. Long ago, when I was young, when I still yearned to be like my sister in the way that she awed all those who beheld her, I treated with such entities. Not speaking, at first. Not offering. Just watching, and accepting of being watched. There was one who approached me from a barren, frozen realm of which he was the only inhabitant. He whispered to me sweet things about what we could do together, if I would only let him join me. His breath on my cheek left my skin frostbitten for days and had I not possessed a sliver of the spirit of Baba Yaga, surely it would have struck me dead. I never let him through to our world, but I never bid him let me be. That I liked his flattery despite what I knew about his desires to leave his dimension for my own should have told me how weak I was. I reasoned with myself that having allies such as he meant that I was fearsome instead of foolish. I thought him an angel, not a demon. After a long while, I stopped visiting him, and he grew silent. I closed the window through which we spoke. But I did not lock it. And so I was different from my sisters. I was worse.
---
The adventurers had not lost as utterly as we had, though. They had recovered some of Baba Yaga’s concentrated essence, which Virishem had given to them before he had perished. Though Abdur Raank was gone, Akram Holm and Nerzum Kost could still perform the ritual to recall Sahl Marn from his bones. And so they did, imperfectly. The ghostly form of the necromancers’ great hero appeared before us just long enough to break enough of the curse on the Mak’Tosh to allow us up to the Brocken before fading. It spoke to Sahl Marn’s incredible ability that he was able to intuit our situation so readily while stuck in the reality-warping cracks between the planes, and then reach out with his magic and break some of the locks Krassal had placed on that prison. He would have been a valuable ally in the fight ahead, but it is likely that his consciousness was ripped apart and spread across the infinite expanse of the demi-planes.
I tried to save what was left of Baba Yaga. She is our nourishing mother. It was my duty alone to preserve what I could of her. And so I took the gem we used in the ritual to summon Sahl Marn. What else could I have done? Not gone to the Mak’Tosh? Not hired my heroes? Could I have accepted a mortal life all those ages of man ago? Would any of that have prevented that next moment? Whatever I could have done, I should have done it, for what happened then was not worth my long life. This point, this triumph of Krassal, had been in the making for a longer time than Diomedes or even the elf Jancaryn could comprehend. The forces at work were far beyond the mortal ken. But they did not recognize that. Perhaps that is what made them so great, that they did not understand their limits and did not know their places in the hierarchy of this universe. They were atop a throne of their minds’ creation, one that required constant defense. And so they challenged my claim on what they saw as a small purple gem. Our words grew heated even as Krassal waited above. It was the elf who shot first, felling poor Astrid. It was I who acted, second, and the Other who acted after that.
I invited him onto our plane, using Baba Yaga to open that window once more. “Come to me, dear one,” I called. “Fell my enemies and take this world for yourself. I care not for its fate now. My sisters lay dead around me and their murderers stand before me. That is all I know on earth, and all I need to know.”
“I am here,” he said, from inside me. “I will destroy them for you, my love.” I sat and watched from eyes that were not my own as the Other advanced on my heroes while they slaughtered the Witches. Only Moses did not attack, but left with Akram Holm to save who he could and retreat up to the Brocken. Diomedes and Jancaryn followed him, and my champion gave chase. What we saw at the top was unlike anything else. The Brocken itself is massive, and reaches far above the clouds, which glowed a violent red on that day. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled below us. Wind like daggers must have ripped through even the tough cloaks of all who stood there. Cracks in the rock spewed red and purple energy as Baba Yaga battled for her soul. In the middle of a ruined altar stood a gray-haired woman in tattered clothes with cruel creases on her face. She spoke to Moses, offering him a last chance to become an agent of freedom, to stand against both the Grand Magician Kahlron, unwitting agent of Chaos, and the Priesthood of the Divine Guard, blundering foot soldiers of Order. But for the warning in my heart, it would have sounded like wisdom. But for my rage, I would have called out to the warrior who had saved me so many times. He bent the knee after securing Krassal’s promise that Hattie be restored to life. Jancaryn submitted soon after, sensing her impending desolation from either the enemy she swore to defend us against, or the Other, who was just behind her.
Diomedes the traitor, the murderer, the proof in this world that evil exists, the reason my rage burns still hot enough to keep the Other at bay, of course betrayed Krassal as soon as he stepped forward to pledge his allegiance to her. He yelled to Moses to aid him against their enemy and hurled some concoction he must have found Below into one of the energy geysers in the Brocken, causing an explosion that rocked the mountain and threw the Witch to the ground. Or, not the Witch. If we were no longer Witches because we had lost our power, if I were no longer a Witch because I had bonded with the Other, then Krassal was certainly something else then, and had been for quite some time. She began to rise and from my seat within the Other, a being with the arcane knowledge from a thousand worlds, I felt time slow before it stopped completely. There is no way to tell for how long we were frozen, but when time resumed, I saw the two halves of Diomedes being flung in opposite directions by the Dragon of Red Shadow that stood where my sister once had, his sword Flametongue spinning through the air far beyond the edge of the peak. I have seen a dragon before, one of the ancient ones who were Tiamat’s children. It was a beast of nigh-unmatched might and terror, and it filled my vision. It was Scatha the Blue, who circles the skies above the Wilds unseen for hundreds of years at a time, never landing. Never had I seen such a thing as that. And yet, it was of this world, born of Aralia’s air and its water and its earth. This was something else entirely. It had the shape of a dragon, yes, but it was easy to see that the form was but an avatar of annihilation. The embodiment of the will to nothingness. Even the Other quailed in its presence, and retreated from me, so that I was left on the mountaintop.
“This is not over,” I screamed above the howling wind, pointing at Moses and Jancaryn. “You are mighty, adventurers, ‘tis true. And you have taught us well to stand for what we want in life, and to hide no longer. For that at least, I thank you. Mark my words, the Witches will fight you and Krassal as long as we can, with whatever weapons we can summon.” Imploring Baba Yaga to save me, I squeezed her essence, and she bore me far away from that peak before the dragon could kill me. She brought me to Loth Maren, two thousand leagues away, and then grew quiet. I have heard little of her since.
From what I have managed to discover, Krassal remained on the Brocken that night of Walpurgisnacht, inheriting everything that Baba Yaga was, as had been her goal. Much remains for her to do if she is to cast the Red Shadow over the entirety of our world, but all that presently stands in her way is time. She has her Witches as her slaves, and my adventurers as her generals. Whosoever finds this record must know the truth about what fate awaits Aralia. I am the sole remaining guardian of Baba Yaga and so I remain hidden.
I wrote these words to quiet the Other, who strains to be released again. If this brief respite is all I accomplished, so be it. But if I can help this world, so much the better. The Witches were foolish to remain above the fate of our fellow men for so long and it is time to correct that error. So, search me out if you will. If you are worthy, you will take up the greatest trial any hero has ever faced. If you are not, you will discover this when I kill you. Should you succeed, your reward will be the continued existence of our reality, and more power than you can now imagine.
The End
The Witches, Part II
Chapter 2: The Town of the Dead
I was of two minds when these horrors were visited upon us. Naturally I thought it foolish to retreat to the Mak’Tosh, to suffer losses to our dwindling sisterhood for the presumed safety the caves would offer. What would we find there? The cold and the dark. Why prolong life when life itself is the burden from which you seek to flee? And yet our troubles gave me hope: hope that if we could overcome what plagued us, we would be rewarded. More the fool I.
It was Jancaryn who wondered if the creature could have been a dragon, after our sister Anita described it as having a dark body and leathery wings with holes in it. It had not announced itself in any way except for tearing Sabine in half, though, and so we thought that this thing did not exhibit any of the arrogance of dragons. It wanted to remain hidden while it terrorized us. It would have been comforting to put a name to our fear, but alas, we were to stumble blindly for quite a while longer.
We broke down camp and moved on with but a few whispered words and pressed on along the forest road toward Metz, a town now lost to history. In its day it was a sort of haven for the unwanted, a waypoint lying at the edge of the Callarhad region’s civilized penumbra, just before the Mak’Tosh rose to overtake one’s vision. We had been there before and had been accepted, though I wonder now if that was only because none of the villagers in that hamlet dared oppose us. Before arriving there, though, we had to get through the forest, which was no easy task. For days we pressed on, listening to the caws of the ravens and the creaking of the oaks in that nameless wood. The dread there is less than in the Reth, the wood here in Loth Maren where I write these words, for it is not haunted, but we could not help but perceive a foreboding as we passed through. The adventurers were silent at first, perhaps contemplating what their contract with me truly entailed. They did not seek to break their bond, however. I doubt it even ever occurred to them. It was a day before they asked me who my sister was.
Krassal. That name, it is like a power word to me, such is its harrowing impact when I utter it, even now. My elder true sister, when the Witches were still being created. Looked on by our god with favor she must have been, for the magic invested in her was vast. She was Walpurga come again, so our forebears deemed. But it was not Walpurga’s footsteps she followed in, but Anlara’s. Krassal was the second to leave the covens to seek the world at large, and like Anlara, she found her way to Teltar and even took Anlara’s son Kahlron as her lover. For hundreds of years before she found the bed of the would-be emperor, however, she passed beyond all thought into realms of which we still know almost nothing. By the time the rumors emerged of Krassal’s reappearance in Aralia, she was something quite different than she had been--much more than just a powerful Witch. This I told to my adventurers, for it is what I knew for certain.
---
Days afterward, just after dawn, if time even mattered under the layers of broad leaves that choked off light and air, a squealing Rhinoceros Beetle crashed into view ahead of us, pursued by a party of what would have seemed to be hunters, if not for the mail they wore, which gleamed in the torchlight. They flipped the beetle with their pikes and skewered it before slowing to a stop right in our way. Their leader was a handsome man who bore himself much in the fashion of the day: long, untied hair with satin garments of baby blue very visible beneath his armor. In contrast to everything else he carried, he bore an ugly maul on his back with the twin heads of a grimacing boar and a raging bear adorning its top. It hummed with energy taken from the lives of its previous owners, I knew: for this was Meteor, the great weapon of the Wilds, said to pass to a new bearer only on the death of its last. We knew--everyone knew, for it was advertised at every opportunity--that it now belonged to the Heralds of Order, a self-styled peacekeeping organization in the Wild who hailed from Torrin Fold in the northwest, who were really a band of robbers and thugs who flew under the banner of ‘civility.’ Their leader’s name was Everard, and his dislike of the Witches was well-known to us.
Everard flipped his hair back--he was the only one who wore no helm--and addressed our protectors, who were spread out around us in order to keep us safe. “Whither do you journey, adventurers, in such company?” I could tell that Moses Montipied bristled at what he considered a poor imitation of manners, though their ways of speaking seemed so similar to me.
“Questions slow feet more than bogs and bugbears, so it is said in the Wilds, friend,” replied Moses.
“Indeed, my lord,” said Everard, taking care not to drop his respectful countenance for a moment, “but also it is said in the Wilds that you can travel farther with honest companions on a muddy path than you can with treacherous ones on the Sultan’s Highway.”
“It is well, then, sir, that our only impediment just now is that such fine men as yourselves have intervened on our behalf to slay such a troublesome beast,” said Moses, sickening in his feigned politesse, but by no means misunderstood by anyone present.
“Indeed, my Dwarven friend, said Everard thinly. “Come away, Heralds of Order!” he bellowed, raising his spear and turning his horse. “We depart to civilize more willing parts of this wild land!” And they turned as one and left, speeding away in the direction from which we had come. Some of us looked at Moses with new respect, and some with renewed distrust at being able to speak the tongue of such an obvious enemy. I found him misguided in his attempt to tame the chaos that should be left to flourish, but I was glad he was there.
---
We continued on the road to Metz, but did not reach the town without further delay. A child in tattered rags we found along the path, which Amaryllis swept up at once, comforting and petting it like a mortal mother might. I do not know what had come over her. My adventurers were wary, having been attacked already by one creature masquerading as a youngling. Their fears were well-founded, for this Newt was a Hag with a glamour upon it that led a pack of cannibals. This was the sort of thing that convinced people to hate Witches, of course. A Hag is little more than a beast with a bit of innate magic, but because the tendrils on its head makes it look feminine, many think of it as a Witch. My adventurers put it down easily and the rest of us took a lot of satisfaction in watching the deed, but we were all troubled by the ease with which Amaryllis had been deceived. Her apparent maternal instinct was revolting to us, and concerning to me. This was not the leadership we needed in such times.
Metz was never a lively town, but it had its charms, and more importantly, it was safe. Because it was so remote, it did not have the luxury of turning others away who were willing to trade, and after a while, its residents grew mostly used to the Witches and necromancers and other strange souls that passed through. It had a tavern, a den of healing, and even one of the old libraries, built in a time when knowledge was revered. The library’s arcane wards and solid construction could have held off a small army for a long time. Unfortunately a small army was the least of Metz’s problems in its last days.
We left our wagons outside and walked into Metz single file, finding it abandoned. But whatever confusion we had quickly turned to dread as we saw the church of whatever New God the villagers feigned worship of smoldering with its door chained. Moses touched his sword, which constantly emanated an accursed chill, to the chains, which froze and then shattered. We entered the temple, ascended the stairs and looked down into the amphitheater to find the town there. Many had huddled together, some obviously to protect their children or spend their last moments grasping their lovers. All had burned or suffocated. All but one, who was no mere townsperson. It was Jancaryn who found the small, pale, and balding man lying underneath charred corpses. When she and her companions dragged him out from the pile, he told him he was Nerzum Kost, a necromancer of the Mak’Tosh.
While not terribly powerful on their own, the necromancers did hold sway over a particular branch of magic that others often find too tortuous to engage with. The Witches felt some measure of kinship with them. Those who were said to defile the dead by raising them to life as slaves were not welcome in many parts of the world. So we were both outsiders. We were also both sorcerers whose magic sprung innately from us without study or toil. This would have been enough to endear them to us, but we respected them most for laughing at the hard line so many drew between life and death. They raised their elders to honor them and seek their counsel and strength. Nerzum had gone further, though.
When Nerzum climbed out from under the bodies, he was shaking. With a fearful stutter he told my heroes that the Heralds of Order had done this as punishment for their harboring of him. The danger was not over, however. He pulled up the sleeve of his robe to reveal something attached to his arm. It was a fleshy-colored creature about six inches long with a segmented body and twelve long, spindly legs that had sunk into Nerzum’s skin and a tail like a scorpion’s that nearly doubled its length. It had an oversized humanoid skull, like that of a newborn baby. Ugly strands of black hair sprouted from its scalp. Its sunken eyes were beady and stared out at nothing: it was dead.
“A tethay,” said Nerzum in his peculiar necromancer accent. “A creature born from glorifying in death. A bottom feeder from the Plane of Death, no more than a pest, but here,” and he looked around at the solid walls of the church of the mortal plane, “here it will absorb necrotic energy meant for a mortal to feed, staving off the expiration of its master. I live yet because of it, but it absorbed too much. Its final act was to gorge on the massacre here.” He shook his arm as if to show us it would not wake up.
“Quiet!” he whispered harshly to us in the assembled crowd as we began to murmur about this intriguing magic. “The danger here has not yet passed. In my dealings with the world of the dead I have called forth more than this insect. A shadow grows over this town, and in this pagan temple.” Amaryllis--still, I imagine, wracked with guilt over having led us all into danger in the woods--began to gather us up immediately to usher us out of the place. It must have been her movement that attracted the shadows--I do not think they could have sensed that she was our leader. The darkness that we had not seen settle in the reaches of the building rushed upon her and snapped her up before even the warriors could react. And just like that she was gone.
Panic set in, which may have been the point. We fled the arena of the church as my adventurers drew their weapons. The last thing I saw was the blue and red glows of the Blade of Cold Comfort and Flametongue, the swords of Moses and Diomedes, as blackness surrounded them. We piled out of the church to discover another terrible sight--the Heralds of Order had followed us to Metz.
“That’s far enough, ladies,” said Everard from atop his horse. A dozen men in armor quickly surrounded us and accompanied us to the town square. “Nerzum! Come out, Nerzum! I know you did not perish in those flames,” called Everard. “If we must drag you out of there, we will!” The adventurers emerged soon after, tired but victorious against the death creatures that had emerged from the shadow over Metz. Nerzum was braced against them.
“Such ill company you continue to keep, my friends,” said Everard, tracing a circle around them on his steed. “You have discovered, I imagine, that the death creatures cannot be stopped by simple fighting. If it were that easy, we would have eradicated them long ago. Nerzum here has experimented with the natural state of things and it has resulted in anarchy.” His stupefyingly facile concepts of order and chaos sicken me still. He did not even know which side had pressed him into service.
Discarding his cordial veneer, Moses growled that their massacre of Metz would not go unanswered, but the lordly knight scoffed at the thought. The Heralds of Order had attempted to cauterize a wound in the mortal plane by burning off the infection of the dead in Metz. There was nothing else to be done. Unfortunately the cure didn’t take. They needed to find the source, and hoped the adventurers might be able to find it. And so a deal was struck: we were to go in the custody of the Heralds of Order, for Everard did not trust our magic, as a perimeter was set up to drive the creatures back into town if they tried to escape. Of course my warriors would bear the weight of responsibility in rooting out the shadow’s genesis in town. Only Nerzum, Hattie, and Clover, great lovers of Metz and experienced in its ways, were allowed to accompany them.
---
So I was not there as the adventurers moved through the town. But I heard the tales later. They contested the grip of death on Metz and pried its fingers back. The spirits seemed at times almost to be curious children rather than the malevolent energy we were told. And why should this not be so? To death we go, and from death we come. We are tossed into this world after being wrested from the confluence of eternity, ignorant of division, delighting in everything until we are instructed that this is not the way. Yet I do not blame my heroes for banishing the creatures, though I wish they had allowed them to flourish. They merely sent the shades back home, and probably only temporarily. The interaction served our purposes well enough in the end.
More curious, I found, were other tales that came out of Metz during their exploration. An ancient riddle wall impressed on Hall of Execution apparently foretold the conflict at the Brocken, on Walpurgisnacht. It told them:
Just one last thing before I turn to sleep
You’ll ‘rrive at Mak’Tosh on Walpurgisnacht
Beware the Brocken, mountain’s final peak
For there you’ll find the Witches’ might unlocked
These trickster entities are not always wise, but this one was old and powerful, and had much of value to relay. I went back to Metz many years later to converse with it myself, after the dead had returned, when it had been renamed Starnolk. It told me much of the coming conflict. It tried to trap me within it, so that it might use me, a Witch, as a weapon against the danger on the horizon, but the Other intervened. The riddle wall is now in ruins, which I regret. Too many of the old ways have now been erased.
Psychic remnants also remained in the town. My adventurers and their companions witnessed echoes of Bullvie’s descent into madness, how he was tricked and coerced into hunting us, and how Metz’s anger drove him to seek us out. I can never forgive him, but I understand it, and I pity his wretched existence.
It was the library that was the source of the trouble in that town, as I understand. My heroes collected parts of an arcane key that opened the library’s door--it was one of those old magicians’ fortresses built upon the idea that knowledge was the thing most worthy of defense in any town. A commendable notion, and one that has fallen out of favor. They stormed the keep to find the Illithid known as Yon’Arug, one of five Mindflayers banished from the Realm of Madness for plotting to overthrow the Zenith Hive, researching interplanar travel. He was gathering the dead to lead back to his home to kill his family. The fool was slaughtered by the adventurers of the Wilds. I am told the battle was not easy.
While Diomedes, Jancaryn, and Moses distracted Yon’Arug, a deathly dissident found its way through the veil. It appropriately inhabited the original conduit of the death energy: Nerzum Kost’s tethay. Imagine our dismay when the monster stepped through the darkness right in front of us after the Heralds of Order had rounded up the remaining death creatures and were on the edge of victory.
But then came an unexpected salvation: the dark sky turned red and we felt our powers return to us unbidden. Such delirious joy I had not felt in centuries, nor have I felt it since. We whooped and hollered and our ecstasy quieted the chittering of the tethay and its followers and the bellowing of the Heralds of Order. Some called for the death of the men who had oppressed us. Some were ready to banish the tethay. I let the decision fall to my adventurers, for I feared their power still, even when invested with my own. They sided with Everard. A stupid decision, some might say. Or an easy one, to ally with those who look most like you. I think, however, that the move was tactical. The death energy was bound to Metz and would be no use to us outside its walls. The Heralds of Order, however, ranged across the Wilds. Useful allies, even if also reprehensible. They could be killed at any point. And death holds no grudges.
I also admit that I was eager to discharge my power at that point at anyone or anything at all. Just to feel it coursing through me again was a singular sort of intoxication. I forgot myself in that brief delirium. We all did. By the time we had burned the death creatures away, the tethay was a crumpled shell once more, thanks to the heroes, Anna, Sandra, and Mala were dead, and Amaryllis lay on the ground where the beast had once stood. She had been saved. By our god Baba Yaga, according to many of my sisters. By the Red Shadow. One and the same, they believed. As the rush left me, though, I came to a different conclusion. I told Jancaryn this as she fumed over letting the Heralds of Order escape unpunished. I was reminded of a dream I had had.
“I fear for my sisters and I fear the Mak’Tosh, but I must attend them and you must go with us to complete your mission. When I felt the Red Shadow, I was reminded of a dream I once had, a dream of my sister. In the dream, Krassal scaled the God Finger, Cracklespire Mountain, and comprehended the incomprehensible: the thread of the universe woven by the World Dragons. It was a swirling light in more dimensions than I could rationalize, but Krassal understood. She was always smarter. But even that was not the extraordinary thing--there are legends of the greatest throughout history being allowed to glimpse the so-called ‘thread of the universe.’ Krassal saw beyond that. A Red Shadow that surrounded the multiverse, untouched by the dragons. Slowly they seemed to push it back as they extended their flights throughout the eons, but its presence was too vast. The Red Shadow cannot be Baba Yaga, though it aided us here. It harassed us for so long, driving us ceaselessly toward the mountains, but when we were about to lose the path, it stepped in and saved us. For what purpose? It wants us there. No, no . . . Baba Yaga protects the Witches. This thing is . . . nothing less than extinction, and Krassal is its herald. We must prove it to my sisters. They cannot be allowed to succumb to it.”
We left Metz then. We left the carcass of the tethay and we left the Heralds of Order. We left the corpses of three of our sisters. We the unwitting left the quotidian dangers of the Wilds for the real nightmare that lay ahead of us.
To be concluded . . .
The Witches, Part 1
What follows are the words of Ulvira, the last Witch known to have lived in Aralia. Her tale of the demises of the Witches is fractured, and the meaning of many of her references are lost to time, but I have been able to independently verify several important points of her story by cross-referencing it with contemporaneous writings, and therefore feel justified in presenting it as a historical text. The adventurers who supposedly traveled with the Witches are not mentioned in any other texts that I have uncovered, and so they may be aliases, but their complete fabrication by Ulvira is unlikely.
The Witches, as many know from childhood ghost stories, were a race of beings that did in fact once inhabit Aralia, mostly in The Wilds, but some accounts have them traveling as far west as Loth Maren, or even to the far continent of Teltar, in one instance. Long ago they were feared as magic wielders, but for reasons unknown lost their abilities and were either persecuted or brought to justice for heinous crimes, depending on whom one asks. The following has intrigued me greatly, and I plan to make a study of them. I will of course update my findings accordingly, and hope that subsequent generations will carry on the good work of recording the history of Aralia, lest what once was cease to be a part of our collective identity.
~ Gideon Harker, state historian of the Republic of Loth Maren, in the year 1051 ALM
She comes to us when night is dark,
When all is quieted
You’ll know her by her herald sign,
A glow of bloody red
But does she come by power’s draw?
For crowns upon her head?
For wealth amassed around her feet?
Or something else instead?
Old Krassal comes for just one thing,
A moment for to dread:
To see the world around her fall
With all the Witches dead.
~ Aralian rhyme, c. 315 ALM
Prologue
I write these words for no one’s benefit, perhaps, save my own, and only then to quiet the Other for a few fleeting moments. The peace he gives me is less and less the longer he stays. I agreed to have him here, and I would make the same choice again, but the price has been hard to bear. That, however, is not the point. Read on, if you hold any love in your heart for Aralia, and think yourself strong enough to participate in its salvation.
I was a Witch, when such a thing still existed. I was not a part of the Arch Coven except in the days when we were all one, but I knew the great members of our order. I was there when Walpurga gave up her gifts to seek a mortal death. I was there when Anlara fought all of us together to a standstill with every ounce of her might to save the life of her newborn son, and then fled to Teltar. And I was there when Krassal rejected the covens and sought out her path to power, journeying farther than any before her. In the latter days, I was part of the Final Coven, who retreated from our settlement in the southern reaches of the Wilds to the Mak’Tosh Mountains, pursued by nothing short of extinction. Much has been written about the Witches, but this, our last story, has never been told. I tell it now not to justify our actions or even our existence, or that of those who traveled with us, for nothing we were or have done requires it. As I said, recounting the events gives a hint of brief peace, and allows me the fantasy of hope.
Our powers had begun to diminish in those days, in the year 306, by the common reckoning. We huddled around a campfire, two dozen of us, scarcely more than old crones who had to scare off the Orcs in the Lowlands with sparks from our fingers and shadowplay that left us bedridden for days afterward. We decided to make the journey to Lake Callarhad, where the bones of our god were supposed to lie. Or, perhaps our escape was decided for us, for the dangers in the south grew too much for us until thence we flew. Callarhad was surely majestic, but its crystal waters held nothing for us save some idle beauty, and the reflections of wizened refugees we barely recognized. Still, we stayed, hoping that the bustle of Gar’Bosh Akar would shield us from notice. Perhaps it would have, for a time, but that was when Asfeld attempted to commune with divinity, and found something else on the other end of her entreaty. Madness came on her gradually, and in the end it devoured her. Her actions drew the attention of those who would harm us, Bullvie in particular.
---
Bullvie had been a hero: he had slain the Mother of Wend in her lair and had kept his town safe from the were-creatures that plagued the northern Wilds. But the red frenzy consumed him as well. He hunted us with a malice I had never known in my long years, even before his daughter was destroyed. He said that Asfeld ate his child. I do not know if this is true, but nothing would surprise me now. We left the lake to travel north, to the Mak’Tosh, where the wretched wait to die.
With were-creatures slavering all about us and Bullvie not far behind, I did something that I had never done before--I disobeyed our leader, who was named Amaryllis, a fearful Witch possessed of a modest level of intelligence even after losing her modest level of power, who cared for us very deeply. I sent letters to heroes who I thought could help us. I promised them Mak’Tosh Diamonds, though I had not the right. At once I snuck away and met them in Gavodin, which is still a small town in the northern Wilds that survives because of its warm, comfortable inn, the Rusty Cradle, and light trade with the Eastern Fiefdoms. There were three of them who answered the call: the first, a rogue who distrusted magic, her name was Jancaryn. And there were two men, one with some magic of his own, Diomedes, and another who wanted some, Moses. Were they good people when they answered my call? I do not know. That is not why I chose them. I chose them because they were of the Wilds: hardened and greedy to survive. And because they were mighty, and had all killed before.
Chapter 1: Bullvie’s Hunt
Scarcely had we left Gavodin before Diomedes slew a man who had taken a dislike to us with a sword he had that burned bright with fire on his command. It was an heirloom, I believe, from a previous life when he and his allies thought to dry up the oncoming tidal wave of Teltar with matchsticks. It worked well enough on the assassin who thought to waylay us, though, when combined with a dearth of pity. It was pleasing to me that he thought so little of doing this thing.
As I led them back to our encampment, I explained my betrayal of my sisters’ trust and the need for secrecy, and I told them what hunted us. Amaryllis assumed our trouble was merely the were-creatures, simply a calculated risk one took when journeying north. I feared Bullvie, though, for I knew his appearance was no coincidence. On scalesteeds we raced the setting sun, which glowed an unnatural red in those perilous days, a dull light which never seemed to dissipate. It stained even the night stars. My new companions did not speak overly much, so it was for a while that we heard only the clop clop of our mounts in the muddy road. Until, that is, we came upon the boy and his father. “An empty road is a treasured boon,” as is said in the Wilds, and so I was not heartened to come upon such an odd pairing in the late hours. I would have gone immediately, but the men wanted to tarry. We broke bread with Joon and his father Tabir before Moses and Diomedes wished them well and pointed the way to Gavodin. I was not there when the adventurers were forced later to slay the monsters hiding in the skins of the travelers, but from what I gathered, things could have gone far more ill and it was good to put the business to rest. It was but one of innumerable nudges that the Red Shadow gave us.
My hirelings discharged their duties admirably: they left a trail of dead werewolves behind them that were never able to catch up with my sisters and me. The three of them stayed hidden for days and even managed to spy on us, if I am not mistaken, learning of Asfeld’s sorry fate, and our quest for the Old One. Eventually, however, their bloody clashes attracted the attention of our scouts. Hattie and Clover were older than I by some years, but had been the last to lose their ability to form new bodies, and so appeared much younger than the rest of our coven. The brown had not left Hattie’s hair entirely, and there was still a lively spark in Clover’s eye that shone when she was fierce. Their apparent youth endeared them to each other, though they could not have been more different, as far as Witches go. Perhaps, though, they counterbalanced each other. Hattie was kind and loyal and far too forgiving. She yearned to bring her sisters with her into the wider world about which she was so intensely curious. Clover resisted this pull with all the stubborn strength of a scalesteed at an ant hill. She was fearful, unpersonable, and wanted nothing more than for those of us that remained to be left alone until the end of time. To Clover, the coven was everything, and the world was an enemy. She would have done anything for Hattie, though. I loved them both.
The pair brought my mercenaries to our camp and presented them to Amaryllis, though Clover probably would have killed them outright, had she still possessed the magic to do so. The discovery deepened the rift between our leader and me, but only, I realized, because I engaged them without her consultation. I could tell that Amaryllis was relieved that I had taken the initiative. She did not suffer challenges to her authority, but was often on the verge of buckling beneath it. I had done what she could not have convinced herself to do, lest she suffer further disapproval in the eyes of Clover and the others who whispered evil things about their mistress.
Rather than send my trio away--not that any of us possessed the ability to do so if they had resisted in the slightest--Amaryllis decided to use them. She told them of Bahamut and Tiamat and the thread of the universe, the path that the dragons weave endlessly throughout reality, bringing order and chaos to all life in equal measure. And she explained that the Witches believe that the choice between creation and destruction is a false one, that true freedom lies in the rejection of the World Dragons. We were invested with our magics at Tiamat’s original defeat by Selikon: when the Old One awoke from her deathly slumber after her slaughter at the hands of the New Gods, who now divide the world. For this, for our preference not to align ourselves with either side of a divine and bloody conflict, each of which recruits an endless stream of mortals into their armies, we were hated. And when our magics waned, we were hunted. Amaryllis told this to our recruits with all the simmering rage of a true Witch, and for a moment I was reminded of our sisterhood. I do not think Jancaryn and the others truly understood. But how could they have?
I stood back, then, knowing it was not my place to direct those I had brought with us, though it was my wish. They moved freely throughout the camp, at home among those who wanted them gone, true men and women of the Wilds. They spoke to Astrid, whose magic fled her first of all, and who was almost dead. She gave them a deck of magic fortune-telling cards, probably because she hoped it would kill them, or erase them from existence. It holds the power of the Witches in it, the only relic left now that does. We had not the strength to wield it anymore, but it hummed with life as Jancaryn took it.
---
In the days that followed, the adventurers hunted with Hattie and Clover and brought back more food than we had had since we had set out. Those who could have been swayed to accept the outsiders were swayed. Hattie found kinship with them such as she had never known outside of Clover, and even Clover suffered to let them accompany her, for though she and her sister had foreseen the day when magic would fail them and taken up tracking in order to survive, they had not the skill or the strength of these warriors. She likely thought to steal what knowledge she could from the three, and perhaps use it against them when she came into her power again, for they still thought that their weakness was temporary.
It was not only food that they brought back, however: ill news was also among their spoils. There was something with intelligence hunting us. It used the same pattern of concentric circles to move ever closer to us that the adventurers had. Diomedes reported seeing the silhouette of a man on a scalesteed backlit by lightning on one of their sorties. This was Bullvie, I told Amaryllis. I forgot my place and I screamed it at her. She was calm while I paced about her tent and ranted about marching toward our deaths in a place that wanted to erase us. She was a leader, then. I did not realize it. She told me to give them what they needed to defend us. She did not believe in Bullvie, but she sought our safety ahead of her pride.
The adventurers did not need much. We gave them a sturdy wire we had traded for long ago. My heart raced at the thought that they intended to draw in our would-be killer. I had imagined the fighting would happen far away from us, where the clang of steel would not make us wince. What a difference it makes in life, to know fear. Where once I could have torn the soul from a knight’s body long before he could have set upon me, I shuddered then in my frailty at the pointed sticks that the rabble brandished. Still, I could not abandon them, my fellows. My friends, as I could not yet admit I thought of them as. Amaryllis stood with me in the woods that had thickened around us as we had made our way northward.
He appeared as a giant atop his mount, flanked by the were-creatures I knew to be under his control by some arcane mechanism. He spoke to the three as if he knew them. “Adventurers,” he said--I remember so clearly. “Do you know what you protect? What did it take to purchase your loyalty to death itself? You guard murderers, the consorts of demons. I do not relish the thought of cutting down those who seek to do right, but I will, to bring justice to my daughter. And it will be swift.” He told them of his child’s gruesome death, and proudly proclaimed his slaughter of Asfeld.
I never truly knew what life was like for the three before I met them in Gavodin, but it must have been hard, for they did not quail for an instant at the scene. Jancaryn let loose an arrow that would have felled any beast I have ever come across in the Wilds. Bullvie in his bloodlust only charged. She retreated, sliding deftly underneath the wire they had strung. Bullvie’s mount fell when it tripped, breaking its legs and throwing him off. When he rose, he was no man. He was growling and writhing. And changing. His face hardened and lengthened. Feathers and fur grew out of his skin. His bulk tripled. Before us stood the most grotesque mutant anyone is ever likely to see. This was old magic, and the use of it struck me. Then the adventurers attacked.
Moses charged the monster head on. Diomedes lit his sword aflame with a word of power. And Jancaryn stung the wretched beast in its arms until it could not lift them. In its eyes until it could not see. And in its throat until it could not breathe. The warriors slew the foul amalgamation, and it retreated inside Bullvie’s human form. He was not dead--the butchering by the three was precise--but he was powerless, and alone, after his sway over the other creatures failed. His prone, mutilated mount watched its master with the wide eyes of an animal who does not understand that death will soon take away its agony.
The wretch ignored the warriors completely, crawling instead, naked and bloody, toward the woods. He mumbled “my daughter. She calls to me. In the day and the night, never resting. Not the little girl I knew, but a vengeful spirit, thirsting for the blood of those who wronged her. Oh how I long to be rid of her! To be at peace! She has driven me so far, but--forgive me, Marte--I can go no further.” He took no heed of any of us, but exclaimed “there . . . there in the trees! Marte! My beautiful girl! Release me from your anger, dearest daughter! Let me die here and we can be together again with your mother!” To nothing he spoke. To the air and the leaves and the reddish dark. He was mad, so we thought. After his entreaties, he was lifted off the ground and blown backward. Registering no shock or pain, he gestured and wailed “look there, she begins to fade! Marte, no! I am sorry! I will do as you wish! I will kill these heroes and then I will slaughter the Witches! I cannot bear to leave you!” He tried once more to assail us, but Diomedes cut him down lazily, both cold and merciful at once.
Punctuating the demise of the great hunter was a scream from our camp. We rushed away, the gore of battle still upon the warriors, and arrived to see an even more terrible sight. Astrid’s wagon had been crushed by the severed lower half of our sister Sabine. Her torso lay at the camp, where she had been spooning soup into a bowl. Blood and broth now covered her face, which would be twisted into a look of shock until her corpse faded into the earth forever. A winged shadow, my sisters said, had swooped down to pick her up, then bitten her in half.
While my sisters scrambled to gather their things to flee from the accursed woods, Amaryllis turned back to me, so that only the three and I could hear. “Ulvira,” she whispered hoarsely, “what do you know about the whereabouts of your sister?”
To be continued…