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