The Witch Awakens
The Source of Life. That was the name they gave Eldviorn, and it was no empty title. Within that ancient forest, countless lives were born — and among them, creatures of extraordinary worth. Rare beasts that nobles would pay a fortune to possess. Precious plants that could not be found anywhere else. And so, despite the monsters that infested every shadow, a surprising number of people still walked into Eldviorn of their own accord.
Most of them never walked out again. The forest's brutal terrain was as kind to the things that hunted men as it was to the things men hunted.
Sometimes, though, people entered Eldviorn for entirely different reasons. And on this day, a wretched young woman was being dragged toward its depths.
"Please, no. I'll do anything else — anything you want! What use could someone as frail as me possibly be in a forest like this?"
"Frail?"
The man hauling her along stared at her as if he could not believe what he had just heard. The one beside him jabbed him in the ribs, a warning not to get involved.
"Don't talk to her. What's the point of talking to a witch?"
"Shit, it pisses me off. You know how many people that bitch has burned to death with her own hands?"
The men dragged her onward with the look of people who had already heard more than they could stand. They were the forest keepers of Eldviorn, and transporting criminals was their charge.
There was only one reason they did it. At regular intervals, they threw condemned prisoners into the forest as feed, so the monsters would not come down into the neighboring cities. A criminal slated for execution was a nuisance even after death — someone still had to dispose of the body. Using them this way, at least, put them to some kind of purpose.
"I didn't kill those people! I didn't!"
"Shut it. You're not even a mage, and you're out here working some kind of twisted sorcery."
The forest keepers ignored her protests. They were right about one thing: she was no mage. If she had been, she would never have ended up in the custody of men like these.
"Just take your punishment and be quiet."
"It's not true. It really, really isn't."
Tears welled in her eyes, but the men paid her no mind. Before long they had reached Eldviorn's execution ground — a sunlit clearing, and at its center, a great pillar of iron driven into the earth. Bones littered the ground around it, along with dark, crusted stains of blood. Someone had died here recently. The place made no secret of it.
"Hhk — hiiik!"
The woman screamed and thrashed. She had understood, at last, that death was standing right in front of her.
"N-no — you can't, you really can't! Please don't leave me here!"
Her desperate pleas changed nothing. The men dragged her struggling body to the pillar and set about binding her to it. Even then she fought with everything she had, twisting and wrenching against the ropes.
"Damn it, look at her go. She's thrashing like crazy."
"Why are we even doing this the hard way? Just knock her out like we always do!"
"You idiot. Didn't you hear? If this one loses consciousness, she turns into a witch."
"I am not a witch! I'm telling you the truth! Please — please, you have to believe me!"
She shrieked and the two men strained to hold her. And then, the instant the last knot pulled tight against the pillar —
A deep, rolling tremor shook the earth.
The forest keepers' faces went rigid. The woman they had been tying froze with them, reading the sudden change in the air. In Eldviorn, no one failed to understand what a tremor like that meant. There was only one thing in this forest capable of shaking the ground that hard.
A monster.
"Damn it — we got her tied, that's good enough. Run!"
"They're coming! The monsters are coming!"
"W-wait, please!"
The forest keepers turned to flee, and the woman screamed after them, sobbing and writhing, begging them to take her too. In her thrashing the rope slipped. It came loose with a dull little sound, and she tumbled across the ground until a tree stopped her. She had struck her head on the way down; the world tilted and swam.
"Nngh — hh."
The dizziness did not last. A monster was coming. If she stayed here, she would be eaten alive.
"I-I have to run. I have to run now."
She shoved herself up off the ground, ready to flee — and then, from the opposite direction the forest keepers had come from, came the sound of running feet.
She snapped her head up. The same men who had just abandoned her were charging back the way they had come.
Had they grown a conscience? Were they coming back for her?
A swell of something almost like gratitude rose in her chest — and then she saw what was behind them, and she was on her feet and running too.
Three mid-sized monsters were tearing after the keepers. The tremor had come from the other direction. The monsters were coming from this one. She did not understand it and did not need to. If they caught her, she was dead. That was enough. She ran as if her life depended on it, because it did.
"Damn it, damn it! There's never been monsters on this path — why the hell are they coming from this way?!"
"Something's happening in the forest! Something big enough to get the monsters moving!"
The forest keepers shouted as the wrongness of it hit them. They were right. Something in Eldviorn had gone badly, fundamentally wrong.
Something was happening in this forest. But there was no time to wonder what. Whatever it was, being eaten ended the question the same way.
"Hey! Why are you following us?!"
"Because I want to live! Please, just let me — ah!"
The woman's foot caught. She went down hard and rolled. The forest keepers, of course, were going to leave her there —
Until the ground in front of them heaved.
The monsters stopped dead, all at once, as if the tremor was what they had been chasing all along. The fallen woman clutched her nose and tried to rise in the sudden stillness —
Something came tumbling hard across the ground and slid to a stop right in front of her.
"Hyaaaaah!"
The sound she made was barely human.
"Ow, ow, ow! This is getting worse than the monsters!"
A man with gray hair lay where the thing had stopped. He shook the dirt from his hair with a vigorous shudder and pushed himself to his feet. She had been certain a monster had arrived. Instead, it was a person — though he looked far more like something that had lived in the mountains for years than anyone from a city. There was a wildness to him, raw and unpolished.
She was still trying to make sense of him when something else stepped out of the brush.
"Hiiik!"
She screamed again without thinking — and then her mouth fell open, stupidly, and stayed that way. She had lived in a city. She had seen her share of men. She had never in her life reacted to one like this.
His clothes were no finer than the gray-haired man's. But the quality of him was different. There was a strange luster to him, as if the person himself caught the light. He was the kind of man who drew a breath of pure, unguarded admiration out of you before you knew you had made it.
Then his gaze turned toward them.
She flinched and dropped her head. Meeting those eyes was more than she could bear. His attention passed over her and settled on the forest keepers.
The man — Haren — said nothing for a while. He stroked his chin, slow and thoughtful.
The monsters took his inattention as an opening and came on with a shriek.
Everyone recoiled — and Haren drove his heel into the earth and dropped his weight forward.
"Hey! Why's everyone ignoring me?!"
All three monsters had gone for Haren. Wolfgar, who had been ready for a fight, looked genuinely put out. He made no move to help, though. He just eased the long spear and the short spear in his hands back down, the way a man does with a routine he has seen a hundred times.
The woman, who understood none of this, clapped her hands over her eyes. She was certain the monsters were about to tear him apart.
Three heavy sounds, one after another.
All three monsters hit the ground and rolled. The killing intent that had been pouring off them a heartbeat before was gone without a trace. What remained was only the quiet, pitiful rest of things that had died.
"Wh-what."
"What in the world — how —"
The forest keepers had seen it happen and still could not accept it. The monsters had not taken a single wound. And yet they were dead. It was a thing that simply did not make sense.
Haren lifted his head and took in the clearing. When the forest keepers' eyes met his, they flinched. Something in him pressed down on them — a weight they could not name.
He looked at them a moment longer, then asked,
"A criminal?"
The men wore matching uniforms. The woman, by contrast, was marked all over with the imprint of ropes. It was an easy scene to misread.
The dazed woman felt the shape of it click into place. This was a chance. A chance to survive.
"Oh, no — no, sir! Mage, I've been so terribly wronged!"
She had to sell it. She had to sell it with everything she had.
We ran into the woman and her escorts when I thought we were nearly through Eldviorn. She introduced herself as Seranea, and then she broke down entirely, sobbing out the story of how wrongly she had been accused.
"I was the only one lucky enough to come back from that inferno — but it was never me! Please, please, you have to believe me!"
Seranea looked like a woman who had been carrying more injustice than she could hold. Her eyes, at least, did not look like the eyes of someone lying.
Mine drifted back to the iron pillar.
I'd heard that the cities around Grandheim have a punishment for criminals — they throw them to Eldviorn as feed.
That was why I had taken her for a criminal the moment I saw her. And if she had truly been one, I had been fully prepared to end it there.
"Hm. You really do seem to have a grievance."
Wolfgar did not seem to catch any hint of a lie off her either. There were people in this world who died for crimes they never committed. That corrupt bastard we had run into in Jefran not long ago had been exactly the type to make that happen. She might well have found herself in the same kind of mess. Branding her a criminal without a second thought would not have been right.
"Don't listen to that garbage!"
One of the men who had been transporting her exploded.
"You witch! Inns burned down one after another for days straight, and you were the only one who walked out of them alive. And you want us to believe you're the victim here?"
Hatred and raw fury rolled off him. Judging by the way he said it, he was not lying either. Seranea bit down on her lip; that much, at least, was true.
"But I truly didn't do it."
Anyone hearing the story would have taken her for a serial arsonist. I could not even say I blamed them for putting her on an execution block.
"I swear I am no arsonist. What could I possibly gain by setting fires and killing people? Everything I owned burned too!"
"That's none of our concern. Odds are you're just a witch who likes killing people!"
The two sides locked, neither giving an inch. Was she a gifted actress, or was she exactly the arsonist they said she was? Seranea had latched onto our trouser legs, desperate to stay alive, and because we had stepped into the middle of it, the men could not simply drag her off again.
Great. Walked right into someone else's mess.
I had taken the shortest route to Grandheim. I had not expected to get tangled up in something like this.
"That's right — the witch, the witch! Knock her unconscious and you'll see! Milord, please, just trust us and put that woman out once. Then you'll understand everything."
Knock her out?
I let the question show on my face, and Seranea flinched. She looked as though she had no more idea than I did what would happen if they did.
"So if I knock her out, that'll settle it for you."
"Yes — just once, and you'll understand all of it!"
"W-wait, please!"
Seranea stumbled backward, her face gone pale with panic. She was already fighting for her life. Being told she had to lose consciousness on top of that was not something anyone would take calmly.
"That's their proposal. Seranea, you'd better cooperate."
"Th-that's — kyaah!"
She was still backing away when her heel caught, and she went over backward in a heap. She had fallen earlier, too. The woman had no sense of balance to speak of.
This time, though, it was different. The back of her head struck the tree behind her. There was no time to stop it. She hit, and she crumpled to the ground, her face gone slack in a way that said the lights had gone out on impact.
She had knocked herself unconscious. No help required.
I stared, caught somewhere between disbelief and exasperation. The forest keepers had gone very, very quiet. The truth of what they had claimed was about to come out. They had every reason to hold their breath.
We waited.
"Nothing's happening."
Seranea lay where she had fallen and did not so much as twitch. When I said as much, the forest keepers' faces went ashen.
"Sh-she's acting! She has to be acting!"
"Just wait a little longer, you'll see —"
Dismay was starting to crack through their voices when Wolfgar's eyes changed. He wrinkled his nose.
"...Something's coming."
Then came the sound of fire catching.
It was the sound of a life-flame changing color — a sound no one else would have heard. A wind carrying a lukewarm heat brushed across my face and was gone.
I looked at Seranea.
The air around us had already changed. The sunlight filtering through the trees had dimmed, as though something had drawn a veil across it. Darkness eased its head into the clearing — and there she stood.
The woman who should have been unconscious was on her feet. The light burning in her was not the ordinary white of a human life. It was the light of a crimson flame.
She'd changed.
Seranea had truly changed.