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.
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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.
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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 . . .