Unleashed

It was precisely when I renewed this oath that the wind shifted. A subtle spirit of numen laced the air, an echo of vitality detectable only in vacant buildings, empty streets, and serene nature; the fidelity of the shift was familiar to me. Coaxed, I strained to listen.

Men’s voices sounded, lucid and yelling but quieted by distance into mumbles, from over the dune.

I peeked over the dune. In retrospect I can’t explain the urgency that overtook me then; I was soon on my feet, and soon running, before I even registered the silhouettes of these twenty or so men engrossed in some altercation, which demanded my attendance. This was not the Hunger firing me with joyful, manic sadism, but a similarly deep-rooted instinct against which I would not argue but rather concorded – it was the same instinct that fired when I knew a treasured pet was about to fight a potentially harmful intruder, and I needed to intervene.

To coast on that weird liberation, well, it was kinda like flying. The first man that saw me jolted – he had not realised my presence until I was already striding past him.

“What—”

“Ah,”

The motions that followed flowed out from me as a heron stretching its neck. The men were grouped in a loose arc around a cloaked woman, and though these men – palatines, I saw – wielded their sabres as though poised to attack her, palisades of ice barricaded her from them. The two palatines from earlier today were among this contingent. Heshidah, the younger, pointed at me aghast in the short moment he could.

Again, I can’t explain the instinct that fuelled this reflex, but it came so naturally to me the truth of my capacity to do this. I touched my stomach and extended my arm, and by whatever numinous alchemy bring a limb to move or words to speak by the consciousness’ decree, down my forearm a breeze decanted and crackled in the walls of my flesh, ventilated the nerves, as much as weather drifts, so out it went — the magic belonged to a screamer, calmed now; his name was Satchjeir.

Green light cloaked the palatines, under whose blades I slipped and from whose formation I broke. They wouldn’t pursue, their space infested by my conjuration of these pulsating faery globe-lights, which transfixed them all still, hands limp at hips, mouths vacantly agog, and everything behind the eyes dumbly mystified.

I dipped through the palisades and scooped the woman into my arms. She squawked.

Now, this one’s soul owned some real diablerie, unlike other witches I knew. If you’ve ever seen overhexing – well, not that I’d seen it before then, though I recognized at a glance what it was – she was one cast from burning her hands off, as the keraunographic marks of the condition thickened into charcoal down her arms.

She wheezed, not frightened by the flight, but exhausted and moribund similar to an impala with tongue lolled only inches from an oasis, collapsed.

She’d been staving off those palatines for hours. Whether fallen to the cold air, her overhexing, or their blades, she wouldn’t have survived that confrontation to morning.

I laid her against the base of a tree. We had gone northeast out of the desert, to where her limp flailing directed me, a dry creek stippled with shrub below the mountains, though in the way of a lamb kicking to escape a hold rather than considered navigation. Her panic still blinded her at present.

I gazed back over our route. Even if the enchantment on the palatines had lifted, they would not be coming here soon.

My composure faded and fear reclaimed me. I turned back to the witch – she, coughing, gasped as would a man who swallowed thick pollen, her sharp teeth brimmed around her thrashing double-tongues. Her deformity was overt in that way, again, with a fox’s muzzle and jaw that blended around the eyes into white ptarmigan feathers, altogether a witch-face for witch-eyes as obvious as slaughter is sin, but elegant, dressed ever for masquerade, as a bestial mirror to pleasant folk, who keep their wilderness tempered and chained on the inside.

Are the faces we choose filters to enable honesty we cannot express? If you contemplate that question, then answer it with two minutes of a witch. As Czjeir and the Church always knew, they are just lying scum, who worship piss and puke, useful only for how fun they are to kill. These unbalanced idiots think they’re wonderful for being inside-out, well, there is a reason why potential energies weaken when released, and a reason why skin goes on the outside.

She was the second witch I’d met, and perhaps a more genuine specimen of one. Her withered hands scrabbled at the dirt, when her eyes cleared to see me.

“What are you!” she screeched.

I shrugged at the desert we had fled. “I mean...”

“Oh—oh! Oh, you poor little partridge. You carry me out from quite a tiff, then what do I do? Yell such cruel words! No, sparrow, you did everything rightly. You even got me here to my cot! Now how did you know to do that?”

“Uh, you know.”

“Yes, it’s a silly question. I’m sorry, feather, I’m a touch still out of sorts. Hoouh – those churchhounds, so rabid after my tail. I haven’t done a thing!”

“Yeah. It’s the, uh, the Vamu, stuff...”

“And I haven’t the faintest what’s riled them now! So unreasonable.”

She then conjured a small icicle to suck on. That is the thing about witches. She’s already half-dead from overhexing, her hands want to drop into stumps, the air is fizzing with ozone from poorly-filtered magic, and she just fondles an ice-lolly into her muzzled cheeks, grinning a merry fox-grin. Even knowing what they’re like, the brazenness astonished me.

So, screw this bitch. Maybe a throttling around the throat would help her appreciate her soon dwindling life span, and I could, clamp my paws around her neck, thrust in my thumbs, part the flanks into fillets dripping in my palms lunge for the exposed windpipe and khahahahahaaahaaAA! HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAH!

You see, she was the end of the gradient. Shadow seeped over the moon, but oh, no, go ahead, no problem, I laughed, go ahead and dim that light quicker.

I wanted. A bowstring pulled taut. Palpitations concentrated into even throbs, wildfires in my blood flushed into a cold burn. This witch couldn’t know how monochrome everything in the world was, except for the dense, silver sun that pulsed in her core.

Ice flakes shaved against the witch’s teeth. She yanked out the lolly and threw it aside, finished with her little refreshment. When she heaved against the ground to stand, however, her weakened arms gave, and reached up to me.

“Would you help me up, feather?”

I did.

“Whoof – upsy-daisy. There we go... my, you’re a delicate touch. Someone’s trained you very well, or ticking there in that ickle bosom is quite a soft, lovely heart.”

She ventured to a large sycamore with a door carved into its trunk, then glanced over her shoulder to again address me. “Whose are you, duckie?”

The answer my mind flashed was Czjeir. “Uh, Nails’.”

“Nails! Soft Nails?” The witch’s brow knit. “I thought her toy was a big gnashing thing, a ha’penny more gruesome than this?”

“...Mm. I’m ah, from before that.”

“Dearie me. Your mistress is quite the jackal then, frolicking about with a jaw full of secrets. Oh, but now she’s frolicked even to here, so far from her Amsherrat! What is that meddlesome quail doing? She’s a bale of trouble,” the witch mumbled into her fist. “Now come, come, feather, we can keep our elopement from those dogs as a caper shushed between us. Your mistress seems a troublesome sort to stay too far in the debt of.”

Maybe, probably. Hah.

I ducked under the doorframe and followed her inside the sycamore, which had been hollowed to form an antechamber for a small cottage – or really, shack. Neither she nor I needed to deposit any shoes, though the ostentatiousness of having this passage against the worthlessness of it as a place to do anything meant it was a shoe-sit, predictably bare. What visitors was she expecting?

Shoddy drawers, benches, a table, and a bed choked the cramped shack as if strangling it, each level surface smothered in worthless knick-knacks and doo-dads, which included snapped wooden spoons, rusted shears, and dusty glassware among others.

“Ooh, homely as home. Now what Church dogs could have found me here? Nope, nope, none! Nails’ pouncing plover came here merely for tea. Now, isn’t that such a nicer way for things to have gone?”

Witches all think they’re so cute like this.

“Yes, the kettle is just there in the corner, pipit, under the broom and behind the pots, then in the cupboard and up on that shelf is the water and tapers. Step-by-step, pipit, one bit at once. You want the kettle behind you there, just there, behind the pots, you are looking there, partridge, why are you so still? Take it, pipit, that’s how you start... you do see it there? Oh, I’m sorry, feather, how I talk and talk. These demands must have made you nervous. Nothing to worry, whippoorwill, I won’t stare so long. Why, I’m a tired goose myself, and here I’ve a cozy bed for a nap!”

She nestled her rear into the burlap mattress opposite the junk-covered bench. Her round eyes stared up at me, imploring, and too disgusting to have connected to anything in who-knew-how-long, except me.

“Turtle-dove, would you look over me? If those Church hyenas come back,” she said, “These hands won’t be well for hours...” Months, actually. “...and I’m aching a touch, for a spot of rest.”

Nobody can avoid tamping their fingerprints upon a canvas, doubly so when it’s blank. I suppose it’s to have something comprehensible to look at, whether foul or pleasant, whichever is best in the moment. There’s a sick sentimentality to it. It’s never right, but it exposes the heart.

I could not conceive what on earth this witch thought she was seeing when she smiled at me. She was a lonely person, pitiable, the type even to genuinely stay in this hole of a cottage without hassling Yeshimar’s inhabitants, and maybe that’s how she survived the Abbott’s attention for so long. Her blackened arms reached to sweep bottles and pestle off her blankets, meekly, she strained to lift a heavier pot, looked to me as if I would help her.

When she switched to kick it off instead, she still grinned as if I’d done a favour. Or I had joked, or I had laughed, or I had lovingly clapped and encouraged her towards silliness, through I sensed that if I had actually done these things, she would not have taken it kindly.

Maybe you question how I could hold these rational thoughts while face-to-face with a magnetic current that demanded I leap out of my skin and gut this woman alive. I could feel my mind peeling, is how, stretched into a thin layer of transparent vellum that, while wobbling in the turbulent air of the cold room, was sliding, stickily, slowly, from my corpus, and would soon flap and fall free.

I only wished, though, for my intentions in this moment to carry no ambiguity.

“I’m going to kill you,” I said.

The witch cocked her head. Far beyond the wooden wall at the foot of her bed, her quiet gaze settled on the horizon, flush with sunset in her world.

“I’m going to kill you.”

I took a step—

With eyes snapped clear, she shot to the wall: “Wait, wait, no!—

Too late. Sorry.

The final strands of adhesive snapped; a torrent of pressure roiled up from below like a wave, and though I knew myself moving to crest in the current of this incorporeal mass, when the air crashed down upon the witch, I stood across the room, faced away from the bed, arms crossed, head tilted, fully myself as I wished to be, in a state of incredible peace. The gnashing, the rolling, the screams and playful cackling that echoed from the tempest behind, the ripping and the shredding, the lashes of blood and fleshy detritus that smacked against the wall into view, all of this butchery came distantly from and was constrained deeply inside my cast shadow, miles behind me.

Profoundly I thought that all was in its right place. Every rhythm of growth and wilting was progressing along its ordained schedule, from the mechanical marches of ants to the celestial tides of the weather. All was a cell in an organism that could not individually know where it stood but by its own functioning serviced the whole. Recurring patterns, predictable mathematics, were the permeating matrices that bound this ecosystem, and these logarithms while summed would produce waves that could be expressed as music.

An odd hallucination came to me that I was standing in daylight. Photonic rays speared into the image of me, though without pain; the light was more solid, I dissolved immediately. I found that I did not exist. I panicked, screaming, for any tangible waypoint to shape me, and I fell rolling full within the cages of my guts, swept and drowned inside the rapids of a boiling bloodstream, pushed deeply back within myself, closed, and I was upon the bed having fun and MY LORD!

WHY DID I EVER DO ANYTHING ELSE WHEN THIS WAS SO AMAZING! WOW, I AM ASTOUNDING! AND THIS IS INCREDIBLE.

I love it! This surge, this violence, this agony, this sympathy, all this wanton spontaneity, if this fire is life, then I love it!

I saw how I could starve for this, if this brilliance is what everyone had! Right there, under the flesh! Right there, under the heart!

And I send curses on all of you!

All of you, all of you, all of you! Every one of you, yes!

All of you reprobates who malign the gift that you have, all of you worms who shake squeal and suffer, all of you engorged slugs who slop callow thoughts to the ground, all you blameless ticks, all you skinless leeches, all of you children picking your toys, all you masturbating wrecks, you oath-breakers, you airheads, you oh-so-pained filth, and all of you nonchalant murderers!

All of you – you all taste like Heaven!

The warmth of the communion lingered. Having exited the cottage, I stared over the sea of moonlit sand, and drew my fingers down from my lips.

I suppose it’s odd. Despite being fed, the Hunger had shrunk. It circled around itself thrice, stretched, yawned, trotted in place, and curled quickly to sleep.

I felt myself in an unfamiliar living room, seated upon a large leather sofa. The windows all were dark, edges of swaying trees and empty houses springing discernable from the night outside, but the room’s interior was lit with clear daylight. I was holding a workbook, but most pages I fluttered through were blank and in the written ones I could read nothing. I let it fall shut.

The hunger slept coiled at the foot of the sliding glass door. It was breathing slow, in-two-three... out-two-three, as much content in its slumber as would be a housecat in the sun. Harmless for now, and smaller than before, a strange temptation crept in me to poke and bother it awake.

Of course, to actually entertain it sounded a nightmare, but its presence in this state was weirdly not unpleasant.

You like that spot, huh. It baffled me how I thought this. It leapt fully-formed from the heart of every cell, unbridled and untreated by any intelligent trammels, those which in sterile folds and controlled synapses I meticulously wrought any thought, but impressed me to retreat and ride as would a victim of possession.

And yet, the lapse did not frighten me. It left as would a fallen leave flow down a river. Contemplation was all it demanded. I folded the workbook to my chest and brought my feet onto the sofa, until the scene around myself dispersed, and the black sky melted into silver-capped dunes.

Cold desert air nipped across me and dragged my limp hair all over my face. Blue in the light, the sand whispered on.

I sighed out, lungs pricked clean by the chill, and let my fingers fall from the flame on my breast. Hands clenched, I marched into that desert, into that endless fallow sea, no dream of horizon before.

The magnetic net of perception in me spanned far. Blunted by the Hunger’s sleep, the tyrant had left his chains to wither into what was instead a great web, threaded dimply with ephemeral silk that was present when I desired it, absent when I did not.

Currents flowed along the web, but these I could switch freely between. East, west, forward, back, in whatever wayward combination, I helmed this navigation, the ocean vast, but the course always clear.

Static nexuses, congealed beacons, these tickled me like invitations. North I knew was Amsherrat; nearby which, Soft Nails’ coven. Even distanced by thousands of miles, the crackling suns that were these witches rose and groped faintly my soul, it very plain in my senses that out meeting was fairly appointed.

Little question troubled me, on where I needed to go.

There surety I feel in these moments, that I do not need to think, yet know where I am with certain control, is something that puzzles me still. Perhaps I’d die truly, without this.

Sand spilled off my heels, and the wind swept what I left clean of my feet.