First Witch's Tale

There were more dead bodies lying on the ground as I followed him. Small birds, small rodents, all killed to cast a handful of spells. Dark magic lingered around them, like embers from a fire that had burnt itself out. The air felt clammy, unpleasant to the touch. My skin crawled despite the hot summer day. It was surprisingly cold under the trees and yet …

I frowned as I spotted the latest body. The mouse should have been eaten long ago. Dead bodies didn’t remain intact for long, not in the woods. A carrion-eater should have taken the body, or it should simply have decomposed, but instead it was just … unchanged. There was no hint of decay, even though I was sure the mouse had been killed at least a week or two ago. The poor thing had been tortured to death. I gritted my teeth as I straightened up and made my way onwards. I knew how to live off the land, but I also knew to be respectful to the land. This was just … something else. I remembered Cemburu’s bragging and shuddered. It was one thing to kill an animal for food, but quite another to do it for fun.

The trees parted suddenly, revealing a tiny clearing. Cemburu knelt in the heart of the clearing, his naked back to me. I tried not to roll my eyes as I realised he was naked. It was hardly the first naked body I’d seen – there was no such thing as privacy in a village - and hardly the best. I couldn’t help thinking he looked suspiciously pale, without a tan or any other sign of honest living. But then, he hadn’t grown up working to keep his family alive.

My eyes narrowed as he picked up a knife and started to cut himself. I was surprised he had the nerve. Blood dripped down his arm, allowing him to use his other arm to take the blood and use it to draw lines on his skin. A wave of cold air seemed to press against me as I caught a glimpse of one of the lines, drawn from his head to his heart and below. He moved on to use his blood to draw a simple circle on the ground, then placed five candles around the circle. It felt dangerous, as if something very bad was going to happen. I wanted to act, to slip up behind him and bop him over the head, yet my limbs refused to move. For a panicky moment, I thought he had spotted me and frozen me without giving me a chance to react, but instead I was just too scared to move. It felt as if the world was about to end.

Cemburu sat upright and muttered a handful of words. Each one sounded fundamentally wrong, as if the mere act of speaking them should have destroyed his voice forever. I couldn’t recall the words, the moment they were spoken. It was as if they had gone in one ear and out the other, without ever passing through my brain. Even trying to remember them made my head spin. I felt sick, almost feverish, as the world to grow dim, as if it had tilted off its axis, as if I was on the verge of death. The surge of tainted magic grew stronger and stronger. Cemburu leaned forward, peering into the circle on the ground. I saw …

There was something there. It was … it was a thing. My eyes seemed to skip over it, as if they refused to look at it directly. It was always in the corner of my eye, even when it wasn’t … it wasn’t. My head could not grasp what I was seeing. It looked like a tiny man-shaped shimmer, but the thing was so fundamentally wrong I couldn’t be sure of anything. It was just … just looking at it made me feel sick.

Cemburu was looking at it as if he had never seen anything more beautiful. I couldn’t believe it. He was naked, covered in his own blood, and yet he seemed to be taking it in stride. He was jerking back and forth, his arms moving silently. I had the impression he was speaking to the thing, but it was hard to be sure. Was it speaking to him? I couldn’t hear anything, but that was meaningless. There are plenty of ways to speak without being heard. I knew a few myself. His hands moved in patterns that were disturbingly familiar. It struck me, in a moment of horrific insight, that the thing was teaching him magic.

I leaned forward, trying to parse out what he’d done. It wasn’t easy. The thing was a blur of raw magic, a creature born of magic and magic alone. It looked, to my senses, so fantastically complex there was no hope of untangling its very being. The spells linking the thing to Cemburu were much easier to understand, but rooted in his blood. I felt cold. Magic ran in the blood, I had been told, and any spell that involved blood was suspicious and had to be considered dark until proven otherwise. I had been cautioned never to allow anyone to get a sample of my blood. If someone did, they could curse me from a safe distance - or worse. And Cemburu had given his blood freely …