The Ominous Witch and the Hunted Girl
There is a place called the Black Forest.
The trees there swallow even the sky, and beneath that canopy not a handful of sunlight ever reaches the ground. Through that dark a girl was running for her life.
Two men and a woman were hunting her—mercenaries, hurrying after the girl who had slipped away while they let their attention wander.
"They call this the Black Forest... the place where the cursed witch is supposed to live."
The woman said it as she ran, unease riding every word.
The man with the white beard, as if the years themselves had settled on him, answered her fear without a flicker of feeling.
"Nothing but a story made up to scare people. If you and that wench had been watching properly, we wouldn't be out here."
As if to shove the old man's words back at him, the young man raised his voice and aired his grievance for all it was worth.
"Tch. Don't go taking credit like you were enjoying yourself. You weren't keeping watch either—you were just pouring liquor down your throat! What kind of bitch is this runaway, that they'd send the three of us chasing after her like this?"
"A sacrifice an important guest was meant to use. Nothing more, and nothing less. Lose her, or let her die, and you can resign yourselves to living on straw for a while."
The woman swallowed hard, nerves drawn tight, and ran on with her hearing thrown wide. She had driven her five senses to their limit; for this one fleeting instant she could see and hear things very far away.
"Not far! She hid in a cave over that way!"
"Let's go!"
At her word the young man tore through the forest, bright with the old thrill of a driven hunt.
Dark.
She had to hide from people, so she had come to a place where she could see nothing at all. From the time she was very small, her grandfather had told her something.
A witch who eats people lives in the Black Forest. So no matter the reason, you must never go in. Perhaps because that story had been passing from mouth to mouth for so long, everyone shrank from even drawing near the place.
"Hah... hahh..."
Her breath was climbing.
It was like this even if she ran only a little. Her heart hammered, her body burned, her head spun. She had never run before without even being able to breathe.
She would be safe now that she had entered the Black Forest—and safer still, she told herself, for crawling deeper into this darker cave to get farther from people.
Thinking so, she walked with one hand braced against the wall until the way ended.
"Hahh... haaah... hup... haa... haaaa... I... I'm alive?"
The lock on the carriage had not been properly fastened. When she pulled it, it opened, and she had fled with the other children. Once they scattered, there was no way of knowing what had become of the others who had been taken.
"They'll have lived, I guess."
"Ah..."
A cold reality met her.
The old man who had chased her showed himself, chiming in on the girl's words as he did.
"You got far, dragging that sick body of yours."
"Old man—the one the guest was supposed to use. I couldn't have a go at her myself, could I?"
"If you don't want your crotch cut off and your face shoved in the dirt, do your job and nothing else."
"Tch."
The girl could see nothing. The dark would not resolve around her; only voices, circling, lingered in it.
She toppled backward.
Something gave way with a heavy thud.
"Ow, ow..."
She still could not see, but she felt that her fall had shoved something aside—that there was a space within, and something inside it.
"Old man, you see that? The little one opened a chest."
"I see it."
"A treasure chest in some cave?! You don't usually find those."
Each of them reacted in their own way, and only the woman felt something ill-omened. Even so, what each of them saw was gold and jewels heaped high.
"How much is all of that worth..."
"If we just had that... ghk...?!"
The woman's throat opened under a sharp dagger, and she fell.
"Hey—old man, have you lost your mind?!"
"One less mouth."
"She's the reason we came after the brat at all. She's the reason we've been able to get by."
The moment the girl fell, the people who had hunted her turned on one another. It was a scene so strange and so cruel that it could not help but be wrong. Because what lay inside the chest was...
"You talk too much."
"I trusted you!!!"
When the old man's dagger went for him, the young man struck back—but overcoming an old man tempered by skill and experience was a long way off.
"Ghhk—!"
He cut the young man's throat as deep as he had cut the woman's, and without pausing drove him on, blow after blow, into certain death, believing all the while that now the treasure would surely be his.
And yet...
"...!"
It had been a long time since she last slept.
Before this she had been awake far too long, and none of it had been any fun. She no longer had a reason to go on living, but regrettably, a witch cannot die.
Long, long ago, for a reason she could no longer remember, she had been made ageless and undying. Her body could not die, by any means. But being unable to die was not the same as being unable to sleep. She decided to live through eternity still beautiful, just as she was, keeping a beauty that would stir envy in anyone. Some had pointed at her and called her a wicked witch, though she could not remember how that had come to be.
"All of it belongs to an age long past."
This time she would try sleeping like the princess in Sleeping Beauty, a tale she had read ages ago. Magic would see to making a path, so that someone might find her. She never thought the fine details through. She simply did the thing.
And she closed her eyes.
She did not dream, and the magic acted otherwise than she had intended. It touched the forest where she lay. The trees grew vaster than ordinary trees, feeding on mana, and in later days the place would be called the Black Forest. Even the idle thought that the spot where she lay must not have its sleep disturbed became a mountain and settled into place. But the truth was that the vast mana birthed monsters, and the place called the Black Forest became a monster's den, forbidden to any who might enter lightly...
"What is this?"
At a clap of the witch's hands, the cave grew bright.
The witch considered.
A little girl, white from head to toe and utterly wrecked, sat before her, grimy and bedraggled. She did not think she would get a proper account out of this child, so she stopped the old man as he came closer.
"M-my body won't move..."
"Explain it for me."
Blood stained the blade in the old man's hand, and the corpses of two people lay tumbled across the floor, as if he had killed while something else rode him.
"I slept for a looong time, so I don't really know... Won't you tell me the story?"
Bang—!
Powder flashed, and the shot took the witch in the head.
The old man's body came free. The witch's folded, and she sank to the floor.
Brain matter spilled and soaked the ground, and blood spattered the pure-white girl.
"Eh..."
"Magic, is it... or some psychic power? You certainly know how to use the relics of the past. If I hadn't replaced my arm with a machine, I'd be dead."
The old man's left arm was grotesquely wrought of iron, and in the palm was a gunport he could use when things turned urgent. The old man who had survived the Erasure War was a viper among vipers.
"So the treasure just now was an illusion this wench made... Damn it."
"Aah..."
The girl made a sound.
The old man spared not a glance for the dead comrades around him. The girl, soaked in blood, wailed at the people who had died before her eyes.
"How, how... Mister killed them...! Mister killed the brother who chased me, and the auntie! He even killed the unnie who was lying here!"
"Noisy. Well, the job's done, so I doubt my head will come off. Hah..."
"Murderer! Mister is... a murderer!!!"
"Tsk-tsking at me. You're a sacrifice, but nobody said I couldn't knock you around a little, did they?"
She was a guest's merchandise, but the old man was already sour that a team he might have wrung more use from had been wrecked. A little brat screaming at his side only made it worse.
"You talk too much."
At a voice that should have been impossible to hear, the old man turned his head. It was the young man's—the one who, even with years on him, had still spoken as if everything were a game. A voice that could not possibly be heard.
There was a monster there that no words could hold.
Where the outside of it lay bare like skin, scales had pushed up through. Things like wings were exposed, and none of them matched: a bird's; what looked like the wing of a dragon long extinct; several that belonged to monsters and could not be understood at all. A huge eyeball stared. Beneath that great eye, smaller eyeballs squirmed and shifted, or were crushed dead beneath the roll of the great pupil.
"···· ····?"
No monster could have been more frightening than this. It seemed to be speaking, but the sound would not become words.
"····, ····."
The old man understood anyway.
A line drew itself across his throat, the same as he had drawn on his comrades, and he died spraying bright blood. He collapsed among them, his body soaking through—and yet what was there was not the monster he had seen.
"Unnie, pretty."
The witch with the bullet hole in her head rose and began to speak, and then bright red blood poured from the mister's throat and he died. But the witch before the girl's eyes was so beautiful that none of it seemed to matter.
Revolting.
Revolting, revolting, revolting.
I should have crushed him the moment I first saw him. A hole in a pretty face, a blemish—what did he think would happen then, firing a vicious lump of iron at me? I hadn't even expected it to punch straight through my head.
What I could guess was that technology had advanced that far. If so, perhaps there were more things to enjoy now. But having a hole blown in my head the instant I woke was not pleasant, so I made the neck of the man who had flung that iron the same as the others around him.
I had a simple ability: to make imagination real, exactly as I pictured it. I knew it was a power I could bring into being whenever I wished, but I did not abuse it. I had drawn a line there. Use it like a cheat, and the world I lived in might be turned inside out... and most important of all, living would stop being fun.
At any rate, a little blood-soaked thing was sitting there.
"Unnie, pretty."
Pretty.
I looked at the girl who looked at me and called me pretty, and I thought it was absurd.
Pretty, pretty, pretty.
This child is terribly pretty.
Prettier than I am.
If I watch her grow, how beautiful will she become?
What kind of beauty will she show me?
Once, if I judged someone more beautiful than myself, I killed them without mercy. The thought still comes. But more than any wish to kill, I had fallen for the frail child at first sight.
"You. What's your name?"
"Don't have one. Me, sacrifice. A thing you use and throw away."
"May Unnie choose your name?"
"Yeah."
That lovely head nodded.
I bent and fussed at the girl's cheek, and wiped away every bloodstain that had been smearing her beauty. What remained was a pure-white face, and hair to match. However I looked at her, she seemed an albino. Her eyes were bright red, and she was pretty.
My prince, who woke Sleeping Beauty.