Witch Hunt

I have no idea where I am.

My back lies against something physical, of an impossible material. Unnaturally smooth, yet with enough traction to be not be slippery, and having give like cotton while also feeling cold and hard like stone. My eyes open to a pure white expanse, an empty endless ocean of blinding colorless light. I look down at myself, and I am still here. Light shines on me from nowhere and everywhere, leaving no shadow on whatever unreal achromic surface I find myself. In that empty, cold, and clinical space all I can hear is the deathly slow thump-thumping of my own heart.

"Hello?", I shout into the voidless void. 'Hello - hello - hello', my echo shouts back.

A strange sense of movement catches my eye. Along, or under the floor, or whatever passes for floor in so absurd a nonplace, shifting milky strands of light begin to stretch out like the stream of a river, flowing below and beyond me. Like hair-thin lights underside a sheet of paper. The threads of thin material like massive wires caught in a stream glow a separate shade of pale gold from the expanse, giving a strange contrast. And occasionally, they twinkle and sparkle, as if the glinting of coins in a well. This twinkling fills the space with chimelike sound, bells of strange omen clinking onward into a ceaseless horizon. The fibered stream is matched likewise by two more, hanging in the air to my left and right, creating the illusion of a wide cornerless hallway, all flowing in one direction - forward.

Nothing for it but to walk, I suppose. Unless I intend to test the limits of my own stubbornness by staying in place to starve. As I rise to my feet a panicked thought shoots through me. I pat at my chest, trying to feel for the watch.

Nowhere to be found. I search in a manic state over the rest of my person, the surrounding un-area, to no avail; my deliverance is missing. Yet... I still feel no famine. My wide-eyed stare looks over the streaming sideways river walls like they might print answers between their shifting lines.

And to my surprise, they nearly do.

The glowing gold of one section begins to shimmer brighter and brighter, before shifting into other colors, expanding out over the waving gossamer threads. An image comes into view... a moving image, like a film, but in full color, and somehow less flat. Like I'm seeing it through eyes instead of a camera lens. My eyes.

The familiar sight of the trio of thieves calm their lycanthropic knight to a more natural form in a dismal cave by Bassarin River, as I watch on from the darkness.

Another memory floats by. I'm looking at a trio of cards set out before me by Faylie, printed potential the underside of an explanatory spread, as the faun and knight smile under warm orange candlelight.

And another. Alabastra and I scream at each other in her flat, until we've demolished the mutual trust we'd built in likewise shared destruction.

And another. She's making me a pair of promises. Then I'm staring into her emerald eyes, as she swears she'll help me fix the mess we made. Then I'm trying on a dress in my lost friend's dorm room.

Then I'm in an alley, blood on my hands. Blood on the floor. Blood on a bottle. Blood on a blade. Blood on my tongue.

The threads of the river start to turn an angry, crimson red.

My lungs pull at the mystery air around me, sucking in a mouthful of otherworldly oxygen. "Wha- what is this?!" I fail to stop myself from sounding as scared and small as I feel, against the unreality of the place I have been left.

"Those are your memories!", a voice says behind me.

I turn in a panic, as the threads turn back to their neutral silver. Standing just a few feet away, a human girl I do not recognize, perhaps 14 or so. She wears her hair in a long red braid down her back, and clothes like a common serf in the bygone feudal age, a long ratty beige tunic and corset. Freckles dot her face, as she tilts her knowing smile sideways, her head following in a curious gaze.

"I... I know...?" I shake my head. "Who are you? What is this place?"

Her smile curves into a devilish grin, sullied and stained with knowledge beyond the years her physical form would belie. "The Timekeeper, of course!"

Despite the objective absurdity, curiosity starts to take hold of me. "Wait, which question was that an answer to?"

She doesn't say, only covers her mouth and giggles.

I consider the implications. The memories, similar to how I have been inundated in my dreams; the feeling of unreality, of latent potential hanging in the air. I'm inside the artifact, somehow? Some sort of pocket dimension, or metaphysical concept made manifest by the act of being here? If this... girl is anything to go by, I'm unlikely to receive such answers in so concrete a fashion.

But no sense in not trying. "How does this place exist? Why are you here?"

The mystery girl walks past me, practically skipping. "You'll learn more by seeing than hearing, Oscar Bromley."

Perhaps I shouldn't be shocked, yet all the same the question spills out of me. "You know me?"

The holds her hands behind her back as she goes, not turning back in her mirthful gait as she says, "That's right! And you know me!"

Before I can retort about the unlikelihood of that, something about the way she said that strikes an errant chord. Her words interlace with the time-locked possibility around us, harmonizing, reverberating off walls that aren't there, and pass through me in an oddly familiar way. A memory shines in the strands hanging in the air, and I see The Timekeeper... the watch form of the Timekeeper, anyways, swinging from a chain, held by the halfling matriarch of the Cozzo family in the basement of Tinker Tack Antiques. And I remember that strange, inexplicable urge: to reach out.

She was watching me as long as I've watched her.

The strange past-lost girl speaks with a dreamlike affect for a moment, "I saw something in you, the moment we met. And I've been helping you ever since. Even now." She points to my last memory, falling from the wheel ride. "That was some spill you almost took!"

"... You saved me." Of course, I knew that already, didn't I? This strange... person... if that's even what she is, she was always the cure. "Why?"

Her head careens around to the whisps of memorializing thread, and they begin to twist and bend themselves in new shapes. Folding in, creating vertical lines that wrap around to continue their onward stream, contorting anew in the approximation of... trees. Large trees of pine and oak, wrapping around in three dimensions, branching out into leaves that loop back around in their ever-flowing strands. Soon the parallel sideways rivers have rebound themselves into a veritable forest of light.

The girl walks off the edge of the path I had been following, trotting into the luminescent woods without a care for the lack of discernible ground. "It's what I was made for!", she answers, brushing her hands against the woven canopy. With every step, the ground reverberates with a soft metallic sound.

"You were... made?" I stare at the... girl suspiciously. Is she even technically a person, I wonder, or is this just a form she's taken for this? "Were you someone before?"

She turns back on a dime, eyes dark, a batlike crinkle to her nose as she sneers my direction. It seems I've committed a faux pas. Her arms cross. "I'm... I'm more than that, now." That seems to have answered my question, at least. Not that I don't regret asking.

In the trunks of the knitted trees, a memory starts to surface, scattered across several bits of bark and branch, creating the illusion of a flat projection despite the multiple surfaces. Immediately, I realize that I don't recognize whatever event is being recalled.

A tall man of stark white skin like ash strides through a burning village. His tattered black cloak has several holes burned through to cinders at the edges, and his dark armor writhes with light and shadowy magic alike, twisting around him in tendrilled pairs like the twin snakes of a caduceus. He carries a nasty grin, heavy on his face, dug deep through the tough leather of his scratchy cheeks. Screams ring out from the threads in warbling cymbal tones, as the wretched mage reaches out a hand toward the perspective of the memory.

The strands burn hot and fiery orange, before returning to their neutral glow. The girl winces. "They made me better. They ensured I would live forever." She stretches her hands out. "And I have!"

I try to rack my brain for any sign of relevancy, a catch on any of the details in the memory she showed me, but nothing comes to mind. She's claiming this mystery mage forced her soul inside this watch? Or something to that effect? "Then, what came first, you, or the watch?"

She doesn't answer. Instead she continues to walk, and changes the subject. "You're not like the others, you know." Don't I know it... "The ones who have held me before."

Before I can ask after these others... she's already showing me. Images flash through the canopies of the trees, brief still-captures of figures from clear ages past. The armored mage from before - a fiendling woman dressed in leathers - a bookish, wiry elf in glasses - a hooded priest in officious robes - a wild-looking woman covered in scars and blood - a black-furred catfolk missing an eye - a testudinate beastfolk adorned in strange magic contraptions - and even Ma Cozzo, in all her halfling criminal terror.

The implication is clear. "These are the other wielders?"

She nods. "Just a few of them! All kinds have held me... adventurers, artificers, assassins, bandit queens... tyrants." The girl practically spits the last word. "But of all those who have wielded me... you are one of my very favorites!"

I sputter. "Me?" What could I possibly have over the heroes and villains of history alike?

The watch-entrapped girl comes to the edge of where the ersatz woodlands meets the path I've been walking. "Of course! Most of them wanted things. Wanted to use me as a cudgel, a source for their power, an advantage against their enemies, to weave time to undo mistakes or send themselves ahead of their competition." As she steps in front of me, the strand-invoked forest slowly starts to unravel and unwind itself, returning to its long-stretching dormant form. "But you! You don't want anything!"

That felt like it should have hurt. Yet I can't deny the truth in what she says... Though it feels strange, that my lack of ambition would be a blessing to anyone at all, even if that someone is the trapped soul of a potentially ancient girl made to perform time-bending miracles.

For once, I won't lambaste myself for not seeing that one coming.

Around us, the threads begin to weave their way inward, trickling out like the frayed edges of a cloth banner, stretching themselves from infinity to a definable length. They begin to knit themselves together, passing between their meeting lines like shuffling cards, until afore me a semi-circle of glinting rememberant energy grows into a wall. Below me, the river-like strands that ran out below the un-floor start to pool together, creating a basin of shining silver-gold magic as if a dragon's hoard.

My guide says, "All you ask of me is exactly what I was going to give, anyways." She tilts her head, suddenly looking unsure. "At least, that's what I thought..."

"What do you mean?"

Suddenly, the white expanse is broken by the arrival of shadow. A building-sized cloud of gathered fog-like darkness swirls itself into shape, emanating beyond the thread wall. The cloud forms itself into the facsimile of a devil-like monster, complete with vague horns atop where its head would be, and even glowing red eyes. The dark shadow slams itself into the wall with a massive smash, sounding like a crashing train rolling over itself. I back up.

The girl only tsks. "You're fighting me. Keeping that out is a lot of work, you know! I can't wage a war on two fronts!"

I look over the dark cloud again. Strange as it is to think, something about it is... familiar. "That's... the hunger. You're blocking it." Suddenly it seems obvious... none of this is real. She's constructed all this to make it coherent to me; we're in a metaphor outside of time.

And I didn't even wear my good shoes.

The joke I can't help but snark to myself brings with it a more pressing concern. "... Where is Alabastra?", I ask. Despite the anger I had been carrying like nails in my skin outside of this space, in this moment all I can feel is worry for her.

"Well, I definitely couldn't have that thing interfere with this!" She puts a hand to her hip, mimicking the rogue's signature stance. "I put that little nuisance in time-out. Showing them their own memories, over and over again. They really don't seem to like that!"

For a moment, terrible guilt and pleading takes over me. Alabastra doesn't deserve that... and from what the rogue's told me, I'm not exactly alone in having my share of terrible memories to relive. And this figure is referring to her strangely, avoiding her name, something only cowards who objected to her gender would do. Yet as I'm about to say something, the headache rips through me again, sundering and shattering the thought like hammer to glass. I grip the sides of my head.

The girl groans. "Ugh. You're doing it again!"

Through gritted teeth I strain, "Doing what?"

Her foot stomps. "You're supposed to hate them! That's how you felt before - and if you don't, then you might start thinking about all the things they said to you! And then our whole partnership is risked!" I try to digest what she means, but my head still feels like sharp rocks jabbing each other. She continues to rant, "We made such a great team, because you understood!"

I wince, forcing myself to understand through the pain. "You're... making me hate her?"

"I'm not making you do anything! You felt that way! I'm just reminding you, so you keep feeling that way!" Her hands fall to her sides, and she motions with her right behind her, to the monster of shadow still beating and banging against the strand barrier. "After all, that's the whole point! That's why you wanted me, isn't it?! So that you would never have to change!"

Part of me wants to object. To complain that I never quite agreed to these terms. Yet, I can't deny... she isn't truly wrong. I did want this; the only foolish expectation was that it would feel positive. There was never not going to be side effects, miseries to endure, mistakes to wallow in. That has been the story of my life; why would this have been any different? Why would it ever be simple?

She continues, "And of course I agreed! Change is... terrible. Time is a monster! Forcing us all to- to march to its tune, to evolve... maybe some of us don't want to grow, to age, to wither away, to watch it all degrade! Maybe we liked it just how it was... or maybe we don't want that risk!" A shaking faux-proud smile crosses her face. "But here, time can be my prisoner!" She huffs once, still smiling, and sticks out a hand. "Our prisoner."

I still have questions. "Why did you make me cut my hair?"

Her hand drops, and she groans. "Ugh. Again, I don't make you do anything! So what if I give you a little shove and you go running the opposite direction? At least I'd have saved you some trouble!"

That's it, then? I hurt myself; she just got the ball rolling? I think back on the memories she bid me endure when I entered this place, and on the ones she's tormented me with, nightly, since I seized the watch. "And why insist on reminding me of all those moments I'd rather forget?"

The artifact's soul rolls her metaphor-eyes. "So you wouldn't forget where you came from. Thinking about the past - dwelling in it... it's so much nicer than having to think about the future, right? Like a warm, terrible blanket - no matter how bad it hurts, at least you always know what's next." She takes a step forward. "Now, quit making this so difficult on us."

Blood draws from the side of my cheek. That's the whole truth of the matter, then. Continue on as the worthless nothing I always was, to keep the monster inside. I suppose nothing's really changed, anyways. That was always the assumption, the raison d'être for why I wanted the watch at all. It was all just a touch more literal than I thought. I've been frozen over, encased in amber, long before I took possession of the artifact.

Yet, I fear I cannot guarantee my own cooperation. I've already faltered. "You will continue to keep the hungers in check?"

She scoffs. "That's the deal, isn't it?"

Even if I can't fully comply, the headaches will ensure I stay in line. The nudging pain like a brace to keep me in the proper shape. It was never supposed to be easy, or painless. I didn't deserve an easy or painless cure. If those are the terms, to calcify myself in antipathy, fossilized forever as the spite-filled thing I've always been, then there was never a choice. I never freed myself. Only swapped my cage. And at least this one has a guard on duty.

I'm ready to return to isolation... but there's still one matter to settle. "And when I agree, rededicate myself to this... you'll let her go?"

The Timekeeper crosses her arms. "That depends. Will you?"

For a moment, I stare. And I wonder if she, too, can read me. I wonder what she'd see if she could. Because, if I were brutally honest with myself... I don't have a clue how to answer that.

But I know the answer she wants to hear.

The white of the void brightens to the intensity of the sun, as a squealing whine takes my senses.

* * *

Music and merry-made sound relapse in dropping pitch, as my senses readjust to the returning world. Sunlight streams through autumn leaves, and the crowd still shouts in shock at the strange events they've, from their perspective, just witnessed. I'm on the ground below the wheel ride, the other side of the waiting line, below canopies of trees, and behind the back of a line of cloth-covered booths.

And beside me, hands and knees on the ground, Alabastra heaves wide-eyed, panicked breaths beating into the floor as if she had a near-miss with a train, shock coursing over the blonde in fury as she digs her hands into the soil. Leaves crunching under the grip of her fingers, she shouts out, to no-one in particular, a shaken, "Fuck!"

I thought my relived memories were haunting... what exactly was Alabastra shown in there? I shake my head... it hardly matters. Now that I know to look for it... I actively push down the care I might've had for her in this moment, shooing it away, broken clouds of empathy sundered into flecks of guilt.

Finally, she stands, and turns to me. "Gods...", she exhales, "I... I didn't know. Fuck, I had no idea..."

My arms cross, and I keep my face blank. "What do you mean?"

A sad little smirk overtakes her, despite her bruised psyche. Not one of amusement, but my least favorite emotion. Pity. "I shoulda known it wasn't really your fault. The watch, it..." Her head cocks to the side, only now taking in my calmer demeanor. "What'd it show you?"

I consider a lie. Perhaps I could tell her that I saw much the same as she likely did... horrifying memories and long-felt regrets. But ultimately, the truth is easier. This way, she might still leave again, like she was about to, before. Otherwise she'll never stop trying to pry it from me. "I spoke with it. With the person inside of it."

"You... what?!" She looks like she's been slapped. I'd thought nothing could shock her at this point. "There's... a person inside of there?!"

"More or less. Though I'm not sure she considers herself to be anymore." I pull at the chain, back around my neck where it belongs, though I'm not sure how. The face rests once more with the single long hand at 12. "It works just the same as we thought... only, with more agency than I realized. It keeps me exactly as I was. Which means no mental changes - no hunger - no monster. No danger."

Alabastra stares at the trinket we stole together, hatred fomenting in her eyes. "Listen, that thing is... wrong. It's fucking sinister, it..." She chokes up. "It threw my past in my face. Felt like nails in my head, resurrecting old shit that... ah, fuck. I don't know how you can stand it! I'm so sorry."

I shake my head. "Don't be. I wanted this." I stare a moment longer, then tuck the watch away again behind my shirt. "And I still need it."

She stares at me, a sideways glance, like she's afraid to face me head-on. Her brows sink to her irises, commiseration that fails to grant me a drop of solace. All the yearning in the world for those forest eyes can't soothe a time-bound sorrow. "It's hurting you..."

It's better, that I turn away. So I do. "I know."

"But you're... you're keepin' it anyways?" She huffs. "Os, please don't do this. We can find another way, that thing is not the answer you need!"

The headache starts to grow again. Yes, yes, I know. "It's better this way. I'm not harming anyone but myself." I turn back to her. Though the mawkishness strikes crimson chords through my mind, I say anyways, "Isn't that what you wanted from me? To not be selfish? This is just another debt to pay."

The rogue swallows down the frog caught in her throat. "Do you really think this is the only way? There has to be some part of you that knows you don't really want this."

My gaze locks with hers. She needs to understand. "Use your Insight."

"But, you-"

"I give you my permission. Use it." She stares a moment longer, then sighs, closes her eyes, and refocuses. "Ask it again", I intone.

She bites her tongue, afraid to speak. How can she be so brave facing her own mortality, but so terrified to lose the one person she should hate most? Finally, Alabastra opens her mouth to say something.

But before she can get a word out, she is interrupted. From the other side of the fairgrounds, a voice says through static-laden speakers, "And now, please welcome to the stage - Lyla Serrone, wife of Councilman Beric Serrone, Blessed of the Effigial, and head of the Woman's Coalition for Family Affairs!"

We look wide-eyed for a moment. Alabastra's forlorn expression dissipates, and sharpens into diamond-hard resolve, like the adventurous sort I know her to be. She turns and marches toward the stage.

And despite it all, I have a job to do. So I follow behind, for what I imagine is the very last time.