Nasty Little Witchling

I trailed a finger through a deep gouge in the stone foundations of the auxiliary town that would have once stood as a thriving and independent settlement. Little was left up to the imagination about what could have caused its destruction with claw marks marring the stone.

The wooden framings had rotted to nothing, and grass had overtaken the cobblestone streets. Metallic debris littered the ground, above and below. A rusted helmet, dented and deformed, suggested they were all relics of a past battlefield.

The shadow of the wall fell over us, the mid-afternoon sun drifting behind it. A shiver went down my spine as the small solace the warm light provided went with it. We were out in the open and too close to it for comfort.

Ulia was searching for something in this dilapidated ruin at the furthest point between two gates, away from the watch towers. The wall had crumbled at the top, but not enough to warrant defences here. But I was still wary of a patrol catching us without any place to hide. Ulia picked through the debris, lifting sheet metal and wooden pallets that crumbled at her touch.

“What are we looking for?” I asked, watching our backs.

“The blacksmith’s house,” she said.

I eyed the stone barely stacked above the tall grass and wondered how she could describe any of these as ‘houses’ with a neutral expression. It was saddening to see the last vestiges of a settlement, utensils and toys scattered underfoot. My heart dropped at what awaited us inside the walls, and I joined the hunt, starting in the area with the most metal.

The largest block of it turned out to be an overturned anvil partially sunk into the ground. I whistled to Ulia in a way that could have been mistaken for a bird that, on second thought, may not have been of this region. It brought her over, and she started stomping around the anvil without explanation.

Her target was probably the hollow section of ground near the anvil. Unable to point it out without garnering suspicion, I went over myself. Instead of hearing a hollow thud from my stomp, there was a crack.

The ground fell out beneath me, my scream echoing off the walls, almost immediately turning to a grunt of pain. I recoiled from the hard landing, writhing on the ground and clutching my ankle. The fall had been short, partially cushioned by the wood of the broken hatch. Dirt rained down around me and made breathing more difficult than it already was.

I shook my head to get rid of settled dust, yet I felt I’d be stuck picking out clumps from my hair for dayss.

“Hello?” Ulia called down, sounding unsure of my well-being.

“Yes...”

“Oh…it doesn’t sound that deep.” She almost sounded disappointed at the sound of my voice.

“It’s not,” I confirmed, trying to put weight on my ankle and clear the crumbling wooden boards.

The room I found myself in was a regular old stone-walled cellar. Rusted brackets ran up the side of the wall near me, which had once held a ladder. Ulia was reaching down to place a boot onto one of them and use it to climb down. It shifted between the stone blocks, and dusted mortar fell from the crack.

I could catch her when she inevitably fell.

The bracket slipped out. Ulia squeaked as she clawed at the edge of the shaft, finding nothing but loose soil. I stepped back as she thudded to the ground, away from the new wave of falling dirt.

She whipped her eyes and spat to the side, looking up at me in scorn as if this was my fault. If anything, my tumble should have been a warning.

I offered a hand to help her up. “Hello?”

She ignored me and dusted herself off. “Shut up.”

The shaded sunlight that made it down here wasn’t much, but it was enough to illuminate the cellar's sorry state. Torn sacks that used to hold grain were strewn across the floor. Wooden crates that had toppled over and their lids flipped off sat stacked against the walls. Skeletons lay in shambles, heaped in a corner and another more complete one off to the side.

Two of the skulls belonged to children.

I knew millions of people had died here. Turned into or mauled by the monsters witches created. These few deaths were a more sobering reality than hearing the story and the unimaginable number. I stood over the bodies of people who died even while hiding in their cellar. I’d guess the skeleton off to the side was a ghoul, or a more heinous thought, a greedy neighbour who wanted the cellar for themself.

I sighed, wishing this new coven taking up residence near the capital wasn’t the one responsible for this. It was unlikely, but I could hope.

“Why are we down here?”

Ulia was on the hunt again, lifting crates out of the way. “Not sure.”

The hole in the stone was most likely her goal, but again, I couldn’t readily reveal that. “A way into the capital?”

“Possibly.”

If she wanted to be difficult, so could I. I groaned, settling down on the floor to give my ankle a break. A doll sat amongst the neglected belongings, the stitching coming undone at the seams of the bloated animal. I froze, my fingers moments away from brushing against it.

I pushed down the spike of fear that overtook me from the memories of another doll resurfacing.

Would I have to go through that same ordeal again?

I was an outsider, and they couldn’t let me leave once I found where they hid. Would they figure it out when their curses slipped off me and find a similar solution as Mother?

My cover story had been close to the truth, not considering this development. So, if any of them knew about her, I may be in over my head. It all depended on how much information had gotten out of Ulasa and how accurate it remained after passing through so many people to get here.

As well as how much Mother talked to other witches.

If I was considered the spawn of evil plotting to kill the entire town, as some thought, then my cover was solid amongst this group. If I was the unwitting kidnap victim like Annalise had suggested, I was going to have to some explaining to do.

I wondered how they were handling my disappearance, which they should be finding out about now. Was I a horrible person to hope they were worried for me? Faraya should have found my pebbles leading in the wrong direction, and Yis would have worried about my absence in the forest.

Ulia moved the correct crate out of the way, failed to notice the missing mortar around the stone block, and pushed it back in place. I rolled my eyes but leaned back and kept my mouth shut. I’d been prepared for a day of trekking through the sewers and traversing the Red Forest. And while it ended up being significantly easier to ride in a carriage, I was exhausted.

A particularly nasty piece of iron filing was lodged in my throat, and I desperately wanted something to drink and wash it away. I would even be okay with a private lunch with the duke to accomplish that.

Two schools of thought warred in my mind: how to go about escaping or how to make the most of my infiltration. It involved a lot of talking myself off of impulsive actions to get out of the area entirely. If every remnant knight was anything like Tometh, I didn’t want to be around them either.

I decided I would be fine among my ‘peers.’ Getting to learn techniques and knowledge that had been denied to me over the years. Being unhelpful wasn’t the best way to win them over. Rather, ingratiating myself with Ulia by being a useful and fervent follower may be best.

“I think I saw a loose stone behind that.” I got to my feet, leaning on the wall for support. “If you know this entrance exists, why don’t you know where it is?”

She huffed, going back to move the crate again. “Because we learn of every known smuggling tunnel growing up, doesn’t mean we’ve explored all of ‘em.”

I helped tug the stone, shifting it from side to side to wiggle it out. Luckily for us, it was significantly thinner than those beside it and fell flat to reveal a crawl space behind.

Ulia stood dusting off her hands. “You’re much slimmer than I; push ahead and see if it’s wide enough for me.”

I frowned up at her from my crouch, half a mind to laugh in her face. But, it was a fair request if I looked past it being phrased as a demand. “If you say please.”

“Please.”

I smiled sweetly, ducking into the tunnel, pushing cobwebs out of the way. The moment my body was fully inside, it turned pitch black, and I started the usual pulses to find my way. The stone was cold, and the air turned stale, but there was still a breeze pushing past me to get to the space ahead.

The tunnel angled down the entire time, sometimes to the point that I stopped myself from sliding rather than crawling.

“Is it safe?” Ulia’s voice echoed from behind.

“Yes, hurry up.”

The stone changed once my knees hurt, where I guessed the wall started. It became rough, and the pulses of mana I sent out were absorbed into the wall, slowly dissipating throughout the structure. It hadn’t held its full capacity in decades and attempted to slowly drain me as I crawled over it.

It wasn’t a fraction of iron’s pull, and I easily resisted once prodding it to test. The tunnel also turned circular with indents suggesting a pipe had once been there. I tentatively lowered my hand out of the tunnel and into the wider space beyond. My fingers crunched onto small, jagged bones that broke under my weight.

Instead of recoiling, I pushed through and tumbled out to more cracks as my back rolled across the floor. I stood, begging the echo of the snaps down the passage to shut up. The air was still and smelt of stale dust. After my clatter, there was dead silence.

The mana in the air was being absorbed by the speckled wall beside me, leaving a lower concentration than outside. Mana leaked out of my entire body, attempting to equalise with the surroundings. Clamping down on it was pointless as there was too much space for it to escape.

I shivered, feeling weaker than I had in ages.

The multiple passages that lead away from my dark entrance disappeared into the distance. It may have been the graveyard of small animals scattered across the stone floor I was standing on, but something had my hair standing on end.

I quietened my breathing, yet it still sounded too loud.

My eyes darted about in the darkness, but my pulses returned nothing strange further ahead.

The air shifted to my right, and I spun to face a section of distorted mana creeping toward me from the nearby wall. It wasn’t like anything, animal or non-mage, I’d sensed before. This distortion slowly absorbed the mana as I did but almost instantly used it to give the impression it had none inside.

I tracked it with my senses, taking a step back waiting for the natural motion to dissipate.

It didn’t, and I was too late to retreat further on a wounded ankle.

The abnormality pounced, and a physical weight crashed into me. We hit the ground, a cold, clammy body atop me. I braced my arm against its chest, keeping the gnashing jaws from reaching my face.

Claws raked against my shoulder, and it pulled back for another attack. My other hand shot out to catch where I sensed its wrist. I screamed out in pain, hoping it would encourage Ulia to hurry rather than abandon me.

Peluda venom built up in my saliva, numbing my gums. The ghoul's free hand caught my face in its thrashing attempts to sink its teeth into me. I bit into the joint of its thumb; my head was thrown against the floor as it struggled to get free.

It reeled back, and I pressed my palm to its chest, flinging it off me with a blast of air. It bounced off the ceiling, and I rolled away to avoid its landing, unsure how far I’d flung it.

There was no mana left for me to use after my panicked outburst.

“Leave me alone!” I thought, crawling backwards until I hit a wall, wincing at the throbbing pain in my shoulder. “Go away!”

An inhuman screech invaded my mind and ears.

I clamped my palms over my ears, struggling to keep my eyes open despite not needing them in the dark. The creature thrashed and ran into a wall, stumbling to the side and escaping the room. I concentrated on the surrounding mana, making sure I wasn’t mistaken.

I hadn’t thought communicating with it would work. There was no other possibility in my mind that it was a ghoul, and those were supposed to be walking corpses—nothing but the puppets of witchcraft. Except, something sentient brushed against my mind in that scream. Something that sent shivers down my spine and rooted me in place.

“Hey,” Ulia hissed from far up the tunnel. “Patela? Are you still there.”

I groaned. “Yes. Come help me already.”

She hesitated. “Is it dead?”

“No, I chased it away,” I said, thinking it sounded better than running away.

“...They don’t flee. They only avoid those with the right engravings, which you don’t have.”

I grit my teeth, annoyed at her pointless delay. “It went left if you want to interrogate it about its peculiarities. Just come out here and fucking help me already.”

She hesitated again, and I almost bashed my head into the wall while prodding my shoulder to test how deep the gashes were. Ulia entered the circular passage, and a faint light shone from it into the room.

I wondered where she got a lamp from before seeing the light source fly out of the tunnel ahead of her. A miniature sun floated to the centre of the room. flames licking the air around it. It emitted no warmth, and to my senses, there was nothing there.

It revealed the dingy room covered in small bones and yellowish mildew. The walls were those of a cave, rough and made through strikes of a pickaxe rather than a mage. Rusted pipes taken from the passage were stacked in the corner the ghoul had been crouched in over the body of half a rodent.

I spat, attempting to get the vile sludge from its veins out of my mouth. Ulia shyly peered her head through the opening, seeing me spit out more of the black blood. “It really did leave…you’re not one of them, are you?”

I didn’t deign to look at her, inspecting my shoulder in the light. “What are you on about?”

She extracted herself from the passage, sending her flame ahead to shine upon the entrance. “Some of the older kids used to tell stories about ghouls that could infect you or take your body. Damned souls searching for another body.”

I winced, deciding the gouges weren’t that deep and stood up. “Witches scared of their own creation?”

Ulia’s face twisted into a loathsome scowl. “It was an oversight; the king tricked us. Ambuya Tasareth wanted to give everyone an equal chance regardless of their birth. This all was simply an unfortunate side effect.”

I was sure that was what she had been told, but it didn’t mean it was true in the slightest. The death of an entire city was not an unfortunate side effect, and worryingly, I didn’t think they were as dead inside as I’d been told.

“Who’s your friend,” I asked, gesturing to the fire orb with my head while I cradled my arm. “And why couldn’t you go first with that?”

She gave me the look I was used to from our integrations, the one that meant I was asking a stupid question. “A fire elemental?”

“And how did you get him?” I asked slowly, entirely uncaring about making a fool of myself after my ordeal.

“If you ask stupid questions like that when we meet the elders, they’ll execute both of us. I know you’re a witch…of sorts, but they won’t be so lenient.”

“Do you know the way to wherever we’re going now?”

“No…we need to move towards the interior, past the third wall, and we’ll be fine.”

“Well, lead the way,” I said, having no intention of going first again.

Ulia stared at the path before her and hesitated before following the light she sent far ahead, craning her neck around any corners. I kept my eyes locked on the elemental without the first idea of how it existed. Mother formed flames for our fireplace, but those were the run-of-the-mill variety and not the floating ethereal kind.

In times like this, I hated my past self for letting her know I could do magic. How long could I have carried on under her care and tutelage before she found out? Witchcraft being impossible for me was a foregone conclusion for her, but what if someone taught me?

“You don’t have the engravings to chase them away, do you?” I asked.

“I don’t have any selenite or the tools to carve and imbue it.”

I watched our backs, the light fading close behind me. “Ah.”

Now that I knew what to look for, I was sure nothing could sneak up on us, but I wasn’t sure what to do after finding a ghoul. I’d used the last of my excess mana and was now at the same low levels as our surroundings. This meant I was vulnerable even if I could use mana without alerting the person I needed to vouch for me.

Our footsteps echoed off the walls of the underground passages, sloshing through murky puddles that had sat in the same place for ages. I spent most of my time looking behind us, constantly feeling like we were being watched from the darkness.

Our surroundings changed often from the dug-out passages to sewage tunnels and natural caverns with stalagmites. Ulia picked off a few pale white crystals after inspecting them for a space large enough to carve, but she still didn’t have the tools needed.

Eventually, our passage ended at a grey wall more speckled than the outer wall. The tug it had on the surrounding mana was more significant, making me feel sluggish at the even lower concentration of mana.

“We may have to backtrack,” Ulia said to my frustration.

Yistopher Keracal

The howler monkeys swung through the trees away from our approach. They were intelligent creatures, able to understand not to go against mages. Most of the predators in this forest were. They avoided each other and forcibly maintained their established territories to hunt the unwitting prey that wandered in.

If a lone mage or group of maneless walked in, they’d be slaughtered by a combined effort of creatures that knew what it meant for their forest to let people get too deep.

An entire team could go through the outer regions unmolested…for the most part. A few javelins had been flung in our direction as we set up around the exit. The only other hindrance was nets from the night mantises discarded when they attempted to lift an adult decked out in steal.

They made Sweeka refuse to walk along the forest floor despite being stubborn about being here in the first place.

We waited outside until the squads got bored enough to play briscola behind their tree trunks. I stared at the hidden hatch, mentally tracking where Val should have been in the sewer. When she didn’t show up, I added delays that could have occurred in the plan. Eventually, I added enough delays that I started waiting for the pulses to recall us because it was cancelled.

A mage with an easily recognisable mana signature travelled through the tunnel, the knight squads picking it up a moment later. We walked out of our cover to stand by the hatch. As she got closer, I noticed weird shifts in her mana as it swirled around gaps in her core. I clutched at the hilt of my blade, now unsure if it was who I thought.

“What happened?” I asked as soon as Faraya climbed out, releasing my grip.

Her eyes widened as she looked over our group without finding Val. “Shit.”

My heart sank at the exclamation. “What happened?”

“Fuck…the witch ambushed me with a curse right before our plan proceeded, but we decided to carry on. I assumed that they'd still come here even if the witch led them.”

“No, ma’am. Not a soul,” Captain Alari replied.

The girl was a messy presence wherever she found herself, but she was the most endearing person I’d met outside of family. Val was certainly capable, which was the entire reason I bit back frustrated outbursts on why we adults were letting her do this in the first place. I got involved to assuage that frustration and ensure her safety.

But now, that plan had gotten her lost with a heartless witch involved in the opera attack.

I suppressed my guilt about playing a part in her disappearance. She couldn’t be too far away, and we needed to find her trail before it went cold.

Sweeka showed her anxiety by weaving through our legs and purposefully pricking us with her antlers, not entirely understanding what was going on.

That may not have been true since she was easier to convince to join us in the dark tunnels than expected. When we got to the overpowering smell of the sewers, she may not share that same cooperativeness, but I hoped she could pick up Val’s scent regardless.