The Feyborne Witch: Melody

She looked less like a master of dark rituals and more like a lost child playing dress-up. But the power that eminated around her was a palpable and sickening thing. She raised a delicate hand, and a bolt of raw, chaotic lightning, the color of poison, leaped from her fingertips. It struck the Lamia with a terrible crack, sending her skidding across the stone. Another bolt flew toward the Widow, who dodged with an arachnid's speed.

She failed to evade the third green luminescence, and it struck her chest as a seed of terrible force planted within her, which then bloomed instantaneously into an act of propulsion—her body flung across the air as if she were a spore released on a sudden wind, her journey ending against the far wall with the soft, final sound of a dropped fruit breaking open.

The foul, acrid taste of the venom in my mouth gave way, at the last, to the familiar, intoxicating sweetness of Xiao Ru's blood. I drew back, wiping my mouth with the back of my gloved hand, which came away stained with a smear of carmine and sickly green. Xiao Ru, her part in this drama concluded for the moment, had fainted. I laid her gently to the side and rose, my gaze locking with the feyborne witch.

Her smile was a small, cocky, and irritating thing. I began a slow, casual walk toward her. Behind me, the hiss of webbing and the shriek of the Lamia were a chaotic orchestra to our quiet prelude; the last two shadow fortresses were ensnared but not yet dispatched. Before me stood the witch, a final barrier between us and the two dozen remaining children.

"It is too late, you know," the witch chirped, beginning to levitate slowly from the floor. "Besides, what is it you plan to do?"

"I am curious," I said, my voice even, "why one has such a dedicated concern with murdering children."

The witch hummed with a pause, her gaze analytical, as if deciding if I were a curiosity worth indulging. "And who might you be?" Something about her did not seem so childlike at all.

A certain trepidation touched me. My identity in this world was a fluid, uncertain thing. But I chose the one that felt most true. "I am a detective," I said. "And this is an investigation."

She laughed, a sound like tiny, breaking glass. "A detective? Did the Indomitable One send you?"

I offered only a placid look in return.

She sighed. "Not working for the Empress, then? And yet… you seem so confused. Are you even from this world?"

I scoffed. "Wouldn't you like to know?"

"Tch, tch, tch," she shook her head. "Then you shall receive no true answers from me."

From across the chamber, where she lay in a heap of bruised limbs, Ashley's voice came, weak and fractured. "Mei… be careful… That lightning is enough to…"

I gulped, and the fear was a glassblower's furnace in my gut, a heat now accompanied by the curious and delicate sensation of my own bones being spun into fine, hollow filaments, each one lighter than air and humming with a new and terrible potential.

The witch repeated my name, tasting it. "…Mei. Interesting. Such a strange name indeed."

I put up a coy, but nervous smirk. "Is it not only fair that I know your name, at the least?"

She performed a small, mocking curtsey in the air. "Of course. The dead should know the name of their executioner. I am Melody."

She let the name hang in the air, a single, perfect note. "As in, the sweet and simple tune that begins a grand and terrible symphony. I am the opening verse to the chorus of your screaming, and my work here shall be a rhapsody composed of your beautiful, final death."

Her final, poetic threat still hung in the air as a new bolt of green, venomous lightning leaped from her hand. I moved with a startling, instinctive celerity, the bolt searing the air where I had stood a moment before. The witch’s smile widened with amusement. My feet danced around the small, still forms of the fox children, their pale faces a gallery of stolen innocence that made my stomach clench with sickness.

But a greater sensation, a strange and exhilarating lightness, now sang in my veins, making me feel strong. Could it be? Had the venom, mixed with Xiao Ru’s blood… have created some new, volatile reaction within me? For a fleeting, monstrous instant, I wondered what this witch's blood might taste like, but the memory of Xiao Ru's, a taste like captured sunlight, was a ward against the notion.

I raised my pistol and fired once, then twice. But where my bullets flew, she was not. For the briefest of moments, her form dissolved into a humming, indistinct blur, a shape of pure static, before resolving back in the air, her mocking smile intact. The bullets were left to spend their fury on the stone wall behind her.

"Dammit," I hissed, holstering the useless firearm in my pocket. I would have to rely on my body.

My movement became a sudden and startling arpeggio, a series of swift, darting notes that left her surprised gaze far behind—a ziggy zig right, a zaggy zag left—and my lunge was the final, climactic chord aimed at her throat, yet my hand found no substance there, passing through her form as a sound passes through silence, the lack of resistance a jarring rest in the music that caused me to stumble.

A high, childish cackle echoed behind me. "Really?"

I spun away from a green luminescence that acted as a spade, digging a violent hole in the stone floor from which a dark and noxious miasma bloomed—then, with the casual air of a gardener, she sent a second attack, the invisible pruning shears of the air, which hummed past my head to make a series of clean, perfect cuts in the stone of the far wall, as if trimming the chamber to her liking.

A cold sweat, like a lover's caress, traced a path down my temple, lacing my black hair. But with the fear came a strange observation. I was only getting faster. My very skin seemed to hum, to vibrate with a rising, resonant power. A sudden understanding fell upon me. Whatever this volatile gift was, this venom, it had not yet reached its apex. It was still climbing, a fever rising to its peak. Which meant, with an awful and inescapable logic, that there would be a moment when it broke… and a moment, thereafter, when I would inevitably falter.

A low, resonant buzz began to fill the chamber, and the intricate, blood-painted sigil upon the floor started to pulse like a living artery. It was a soft, sickly uterine light, undoubtedly representing the unholiest of communions. The witch, Melody, let out a soft, delighted laugh to herself.

"Too late," she sighed, as one might greet an old and cherished friend. "The guest is at the door."

But if some terrible thing was to be born into this world, it would be born into a war. For the sake of the pale, still forms upon the floor—for the sake of everyone… I would play the role of the heretic at this unholy christening. I had to strike her down.

I pounced as a leopard would, a blur of motion across the glowing sigil. This time, my attack was not entirely without purchase; my outstretched fingers grazed the fabric of her cloak—managing to tear a small ribbon from the fabric of her sleeve. Her expression soured, the petulance of a spoiled godling. She raised her hands, and the air itself screamed, rent by a storm of blood-red lightning and those invisible, scything winds—a tantrum of annihilating power.

And then, the world dissolved into a slow and beautiful dream. The screaming wind had turned to a lover’s sigh against my cheek, the crackling red lightning became a gallery of frozen, jagged sculptures—all of it held its breath, a lazy and harmless ballet of destruction. My own heartbeat was a slow, steady cylinder. The fever in my blood had reached its zenith. I had a moment of perfect, crystalline clarity—a perfect divinity. I caught my breath, a single bead of sweat tracing a slow path down my brow, and I wiped it away.

My every step was an eternity as I began to walk, then run, toward the witch. As I drew closer, I could see her form flickering, shifting rapidly from left to right—a nervous, twitching motion. It was not a conscious act. It was an enchantment, I concluded, a spell of automatic evasion, involuntary as a nervous tic.

And in that moment of perfect understanding, I reached out my hand, not to where she was, but to the space between her flickers. My fingers closed around the delicate column of her neck, the contact real and solid. Her face did not have the time to react. I pulled her from her frantic dance into my own moment of stillness and drove my fist into her jaw.

The world roared back into being. The sound of the blow was a wet, concussive crack that echoed with a terrible finality. The witch went flying, a small, broken, magenta-clad doll tossed aside, and slammed into the stone wall with enough force to leave a spiderweb of cracks. She fell to the floor in a crumpled, winded heap.

As she fell, so did I. The fire in my limbs began to cool, replaced by a feeling of immense and sudden heaviness, as if my bones were turning to lead.

I spared no time. I scrambled to my feet and dashed to the great, crystalline vault. With a groan, I pried the heavy door open and began to usher the last two children out. They were of a febrile weakness—their limbs like fragile twigs, their eyes dull. It was not the simple weakness of malnutrition, I felt with a dawning dread. It was as if this entire chamber was a great, parasitic lung, and it had been breathing their lives away.

And as the last child was pulled free, the great, bloody artery on the floor erupted into a searing sheet of white fire that bleached the world of all sight and sound.