Strife of Witches II

VIII.
Strife of Witches II

Afterwards we were presented with our ‘real’ commission by Deichtire, by the gate leading out of the garden. Written on the parchment stamped with seals belonging to the Church and the Con Laecht household, there was a simple request; establish contact with the Witch of Ridge Point, and investigate the disappearances of the messengers. I had come to expect a lack of detail when dealing with commissions related to monsters, or otherwise any problemathique which stretched beyond the average human’s comprehension, but in regard to a potentially dangerous witch it wouldn’t do. Stuffing the scroll into my satchel, I questioned the mayor’s daughter.

“Anything you can tell us about our witch of honour? The difference between us and the inquisitors is that we’ll try talking first, but if push comes to shove… It’d be nice to avoid unnecessary surprises.”

“I’m sorry,” Deichtire grumbled apologetically, “There’s very little I can tell you. We haven’t had many dealings with her, and she’s secretive as a mole in its tunnels. We don’t even know her name. However, it’s clear that she’s skilled. She fought the Dragon Witch and drove her off with ease, not to mention the monsters she’s slain.”

“Dragon Witch?” Laionne prodded. “Is she a troublemaker?”

“She’s been declared a heretic by the Church, but repelled an ambush of thirty inquisitors. The survivor claims she’s a real dragon in the body of a woman.”

“Survivor, is it?” I scoffed, perhaps a bit rudely. “She’s a cocky one, leaving a witness to sing her praises. So a witch, stronger than a dragon stronger than a Church hunting party.”

“Is it too much trouble?” The Tuatha asked.

“Nope. We’ll set her right in a flash. Ain’t that so, Lai-o?”

“I would prefer to avoid confrontation…” She sighed, averting her eyes into the distance. “So I shall strive to deliver news of a happy ending.”

Had anyone else said this with the same conviction, I might have called them naïve. However, I knew that Laionne had the power to make good on her word, so I smiled instead, and ruffled her hair from my position at her side. Nodding, I made a promise to them both.

“Yeah, we’ll make sure everyone’s happy. So get ready to double the reward! Nobody can do what Laionne does; I won’t let you cheap out on her.”

“I see. Fufu, then we shall await your return expectantly, o’ great witches. Farewell.”

We said our goodbyes to Deichtire and set out on the road again. Being as far away from our home as we had ever been, we were given the general direction of following the river towards the tall ridge one could see rising in the distance. Wanting to avoid needless wandering anyhow, we asked the occasional person we encountered for the proper way to the desolate forest-town, walking away with mixed results. The first man we encountered—riding a horse—assumed us to be beggars, so treated us with a level of disdain I couldn’t put up with anymore. As he attempted to ride past us with his nose pointed contemptuously at the sky, I tugged at his stirrup and burned through it with a discharge of mana, before slapping the behind of his horse. The animal was startled into a sprint, and the man, caught off-guard, lost his balance immediately and fell. He was dragged away through the grass as he desperately held onto the side of the saddle, and it took Laionne’s long, displeased stare to stop my laughter. On the other hand, we also met a lone fisher by the river. Being a down-to-earth, elderly fellow, he was quite nice to us. He provided a detailed layout of the area, and even offered us a part of his catch (alas, neither I nor Laionne were fond of fish.) Laionne attempted to hand him one of our gold pieces in exchange for his help, but he unsurprisingly declined. That didn’t stop me from tossing one into his fish-bucket when he wasn’t looking, of course.

Based on the information he shared, we were still a good way’s off from our destination. This could be attested to by the presence of life. Once we finally began encroaching upon the outskirts of Ridge Point, it was as if the entire forest had ground to a halt. One by one, the songs of the birds were silenced; the rustling of leaves and the buzzing of insects stilled; even the wind had lost its breath, like we had entered a moratorium, or a taxidermied corpse of what should’ve been a forest. I shivered. Not only because of the uncanny emptiness which used to be the symphony of the weald, but also in response to a sudden cold, creeping up my spine and limbs. I looked to Laionne, who had also began shuddering, and saw that her soundless breaths left her lips as a frosty, white mist. Her head turned to face me, and before I could offer to rummage for our spare clothes, she snapped her fingers without a word, creating a sphere of blue flame to keep us warm. So, with her index raised like a torch spewing forth cerulean flame, we braved the chilly woods. With every step forward, the trees bore a greater mark of frost. The bark froze over and eventually turned into solid ice. We had trouble not slipping on the whitening ground, meeting us with our reflections like a lake polished into a mirror by the throes of winter.

“Niccolina,” my companion suddenly halted.

“I know. This is…” We were stunned, shocked into a lack of words. The ever-present, cold mist in the air parted like a curtain, revealing what must’ve been… Ridge Point, frozen into an installation of ice.

I almost believed we had stepped into a dream of some winter wonderland, where pillars of ice had been carved into the rough shape of houses. Everywhere around us were wintry sculptures resembling a village—dwellings, animal pens, granaries and watchtowers—all the way to smaller statues, which in their twisted and deformed, refracting forms, closely resembled human beings. No, there’s no point in skipping around the unavoidable puddle; they were people frozen solid into ice. Then, at the centre of it all, sitting on the edge of an unmoving fountain was the ice witch herself, though she didn’t bear such a hexensign.

She was the Never-Changing Witch.

She wore a strange sort of grey-and-blue overcoat, asynchronous to everything around her. Her hair reached all the way to her knees in thick, bristly strands, and was painted the same, dull brown as her melancholic eyes. Two groups of human statues were positioned in opposing semi-circles in front of the fountain, like waves about to crash into each other. Judging from the extended ice-spikes in their hands, they were holding weapons, some of them lunging in the moment they were frozen. I swallowed down the breath stuck in my throat and moved first, approaching the woman with Laionne close behind. The blue of the flame danced around and bounced off the sharply twisting surfaces, casting an unearthly light on top of an already unnatural scene. We stopped about three to five paces away from her. She didn’t seem to find us important enough to acknowledge at all, so we stood for a while in awkward silence. Once the awkwardness toppled over the fear in my head from its throne, I hacked out a cough and announced us.

“I’m Niccolina Artelli, and this is Laionne. She’s the strongest with to ever live, y—“

“—How cavalier,” she interrupted. Her voice was sad and exhausted, in a way unlike Laionne’s, yet it still overpowered me. Perhaps I was taken aback by the cut into my recital, or it was her seniority as an adult that got to me. Laionne was now peering at me searchingly, hoping I could diffuse the situation I had sparked by bragging in her stead. Before I could, the older woman continued. “The Auburn Witch and the Witch of Ashes—have you come to melt away my wonderland?”

This prompted Laionne to speak up. “Did you freeze these people? Please release them, humans aren’t meant to be frozen.” It was a childishly simple reason, but through these simplistic paradigms Laionne’s heart remained kind. Being frozen obviously wasn’t good, and that was enough for her to act.

“So you did,” responded the Never-Changing Witch. “I’m afraid I cannot allow that.”

“Hold on a minute—!” I attempted to reason upon seeing her materialise her staff, but instead I found it pointed at my face. It had a strange and intricate design, with a wooden body built for easy gripping with both arms, and a thin, metal barrel at its end. With the exception of the several small, blue orbs found along its length, it reminded me of a wildly more complex version of the ‘hand cannons,’ weapons rarely used by the royal army. Its drawing spurred Laionne into action. She reared her arm back and slung the fireball she commanded at the woman, forcing her to jump from her seat to avoid it. The sphere exploded into harmless sparks before it could reach anything; it was a mere warning shot.

“You should never point your staff at anyone,” Laionne reprimanded her. “I see you had a teacher far less thoughtful than mine.”

“I will preserve this scene locked in time for all eternity. Either you leave, or you join them.” The witch pointed her staff at the clouds. There came loud noises like the creaking of ice, and in response it began to snow, even though there had been no clouds overhead before we stepped into the wall of mist.

“Tsk! Another wacko reading too much into their epithet!” I snarled, summoning my own staff. I tapped it against the ground, and the ice glowed with a red sigil twenty paces in radius. It was a ward that would explode anytime anyone stepped on it. “Laionne, let’s beat her until she can’t move! Then we’ll get her to unfreeze everyone.”

“That won’t be necessary. I shall demonstrate the futility of attempting to defeat me—that should suffice.” Laionne’s staff appeared through a rift in her hand, and her feet lifted a small distance off the ice. She began hovering instead of walking, and around the orb of her staff danced dozens of blue fires like treacherous wisps. They crawled down along her arm and up to the hand of the other. She pointed an index finger at our opponent.

“Raw power is nothing in the face of experience. You’re just like that wyvern.” The Never-Changing Witch stomped her foot atop the fountain-water frozen like a podium, causing several sloped walls of ice to emerge around her. Without skipping a beat, she dashed to one of them, and with frozen blades she conjured at the bottoms of her shoes, she skated around us at an impressive speed. She glided to the end of one ramp and leapt to another. Then came a forceful cracking, similar to when it started snowing. From within the barrel of her staff, she rapidly fired a dozen bullets of ice at each of us, which we barely managed to destroy with return fire. Laionne blasted off the wisps with her index finger, and I met the projectiles with scarlet beams. One of them passed through my defences, sending a burning fire through the flesh of my right arm. Swearing loudly, I saw a mass of icicles growing from my wound like a sea urchin.

“Kh—This ain’t fair! Is she making ice out of nothing?!”

“No. Witchcraft cannot create matter, only replicate phenomena. She must be flash-freezing the moisture in the air.” Laionne followed our enemy with her eyes, calmer than I but nonetheless upset. She traced her trajectory to the end of another raised slope; and; channelling her mana into the ground, transformed the adjacent one into clawed hand, large enough to grasp a human being. She moved it to slam into the Witch’s side and force her down onto my sigil, but the woman instead reshaped it again into a vertical slope with her touch. She flew into the air, firing another volley.

This time, Laionne erected a great wall of her blue flame to protect us, making sure to snake it around any of the frozen village folk. I attempted to utilize this opportunity to fire a few beams at where I predicted she’d land, but when the wall subsided she was untouched. She had created tiny frost mirrors to absorb my attacks, so cold that they didn’t even melt before fully absorbing them. Waving her hand, she dispersed the mirrors around the area. When she fired her next volley, the bullets were directed at their surfaces, and they shot through the air with unpredictable trajectories between them, before flying at us from too many angles at once. Laionne attempted to melt them away in a blast centred on herself to protect us both, but it wouldn’t get to me on time. Not wanting to experience the pain of being shot again, I raised the defence which I had not yet acknowledged. My skin briefly ignited into roaring, scarlet flame.

“Your body has been coated in that the entire time, hasn’t it?” Our opponent mouthed away casually, all the while freezing more mirrors in the air. “I’d wonder why, but I think I know.” She directed her stare at Laionne. By now, the buns in her hair had been undone once more, burning blue-white. “Your mana is volatile. There’s so much that it can’t absorb properly, and just burns. That’s interesting. Let’s see if your volatility can overcome my stillness.”

She aimed her staff, however… It was suddenly joined by a hundred perfect, crystalline copies behind her back. The hands on her real staff froze over like icy hedgehogs, as did the ends of her locks. She was issuing a direct challenge to Laionne.

“I cannot meet you with my full power, lest I endanger the ones you have trapped. Nevertheless, allow me to demonstrate I am more than just volatile. Behold—an inverse of your witchcraft.” For the first time, Laionne pointed her staff at another person. The air around her crackled at an ear-piercing volume. The white mist slowly thinned out, replaced by a mirage of heat, and instead of freezing… the air ignited. Matching the Witch perfectly, Laionne formed a hundred copies of the other woman’s staff, built of her cerulean flame. Both of them snapped their fingers and fired at once.

As their barrages met, it immediately became obvious who the victor would be. Instead of bouncing off the air-bound mirrors, Laionne’s bullets burned them away in an instant, denying the Never-Changing Witch her alternative flight-plans. Inferno met hail, and swallowed it up without mercy. While the Witch’s bullets were eaten up, Laionne’s advanced like a deluge upon her, poised to incinerate her. Moments before impact, they exploded into a roaring wall aimed towards the sky—melting the ice underneath, but harming not a hair on our enemy’s head. With a final flare, the wall dissipated.

“I surrender,” she acknowledged, empty hands raised into the air.

“Do you intend to free these people now?” Laionne queried, allowing her staff to disappear.

“You’ll have to kill me if you want to do so; I have no intention of it.” She stubbornly refused, looking on at her handiwork with a sour expression.

“Right, like hell she wants to do that. Are you dense?” I marched closer, eye twitching. Feeling that we held the upper hand now, I provocatively tapped the tip of my staff against her skull. “For milady’s sake, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. What happened here? Oh, and give us your name. If I have to write a report, it’d be annoying to constantly write ‘The Never-Changing Witch.’ Too long, that.”

She sighed in annoyance, grabbing hold of my staff and prying it away from her head. “Ayenna. Satisfied?”

“You were asked two questions, methinks?” I grumbled.

Laionne nodded, adding, “Yes, I would like to understand what led to this.”

“Fine, since you’re the one I acknowledge as the victor.” Ayenna faced Laionne, and I felt the urge to hit her again. “This village has been housing me for a long time. I don’t enjoy socialising, but I’ve been thankful to them for as long as I remember.” As she spoke, she slowly walked back to the fountain, nearly stepping on the sigil I had forgotten to deactivate (to my credit, I quickly did so.) Tracing a finger against one of the statues, she continued. “However, not everyone agreed with my presence. Seeing as I spent most of my time holed up in my shack—practicing witchcraft—dubious claims started spreading. I think… the inciting incident was when I agreed to look after the local baker’s son when he had to leave for the capital. Nobody knew anything about me, so they let their imaginations run wild.”

She paused, casting her sad gaze at a frozen person shorter than the rest. The child stood in the middle of the two semi-circles in front of the statue. If they were suddenly thawed out, would they trample over him?

“The man who hated me the most was an unremarkable villager, but he had a life and family to care for.” Ayenna’s narration resumed. “Some months ago, his wife fell ill. He pleaded with me to heal her, but what could I do? My witchcraft can do one thing only—freeze. I was unable to help and she died; he blamed me for it as a useless witch. Others hated me simply because I am a witch in the first place, and had no reason besides their prejudice. When I allowed the baker’s son to stay in my home, the man who spited me galvanised anyone who would listen. He insisted that I was indoctrinating that child, and rumours of that sort are insidious. The village split into those who supported me and those who wanted me gone, in a battle I didn’t ask for. Eventually, it all spilled over. Hearing commotion in the square here, I saw two mobs ready to lunge and kill each other. The child was in the centre.”

“So you froze them, because you didn’t know anything else you could do.” I scratched the back of my head, sucking in air through my teeth. Now that they were frozen, what would happen if they were suddenly thawed? Would they continue in their battle, blinded by hatred, or would they direct it all at Ayenna, who only felt thankful? Humans weren’t meant to be frozen, but the world was complex.

“Yes, I turned this village into a never-changing painting, on the brink of turning into a battlefield. Even if I unfreeze them now, their bodies might’ve been damaged if the seals are imperfect. So they must stay frozen. I couldn’t stand to see them devolve into beasts. When did I ever ask them to murder each other? I was simply thankful for the place I was offered. I suppose this fate was written the moment I became the Never-Changing Witch.”

Hearing this, Laionne—who had grown weak after their battle, and may have been feeling shy—whispered into my ear. Though her face remained as unmoving as stone, I smiled in her stead.

“Laionne says… that the only thing which never changed was your love for these people. She finds it admirable, so she’ll break them out in your stead. That is, as long as you deliver this commission for us.” I fished out Deichtire’s commission from my satchel, handing it over, as well as the scroll I had purchased from a passing trader. “On top of that, you should write a message on the blank side of this. Just let them know you’re thankful. It’s unfair to you; I won’t pretend it’s not. You’ve unjustly lost your place here, but the risk of staying is too high. At least it might stop them from killing each other, and if you want, you can come with us to Cerulea. Nobody will hurt anyone there.”

Ayenna stood still for awhile, her gaze falling from statue to statue. The world was unfair and oftentimes horrible. Unfreezing these people would not return things to the way the used to be, and she might never be able to return. However, people weren’t meant to be without a home either, that’s what Laionne had told me.

“I’ll consider it, but first… I’ll need some alone time, I hope you understand.” That was Ayenna’s response, and shortly after she set out. Laionne watched her leave with a slightly conflicted expression. We ate some of our packed biscuits to regain our energy, my injury was healed, and then she set to work. Standing atop the fountain podium at the very heart of Ridge Point, she raised an arm over her head and chanted. From the tips of her fingers, tiny blue flames danced like seductive wisps, and in swarms of thousands offered their warmth to the people frozen as statues. Slowly and gently, they were thawed out of their prisons, as the lights fluttered about and drove the life back into the town and the surrounding forest. Everything shone brightly. Once even the largest buildings were freed from their cases of ice, only the fountain remained. The mobs—which were poised to tear at each other’s throats—slept under its evening shadow peacefully. They had been pacified by the lingering cold, and their bodies could do naught but rest as the warmth returned to them. Laionne needed to rest as well, and that’s why I carried her on my back as I marched away from the sleeping Ridge Point, or Druim as it used to be called.

The only reminder of the Witch they fought over… was the still-frozen fountain, and the heartfelt message attached to it. We never learned what exactly happened after we had left, but I don’t think it was anything we needed to hear. We knew at least that no blood was spilled, and that’s what mattered the most.