The streets were deathly quiet, not even the sound of birds punctuated the silence. Even the wind that passed through the bows was oddly muffled or so Efrain thought. Perhaps it was that smothering cold from the church catacombs, lessened by distance. Even so, it still held sway within the borders of the town.
Efrain began to wonder if the church really was the most defensible spot, if his magic was so weakened. He dismissed it both as egoistic and futile - the spot had been picked, and they would have to defend it. He began rifling through what spells he could use in such a ‘low-power’ environment. Certainly he had enough to cast a light, maybe several, to aid in the fight.
Perhaps that would be the length of his contribution, which made figuring out what happened in the basement of the church all the more important. Innie was walking beside him, no doubt thinking much the same thoughts. She was happy to be out of that repulsive cold, he thought, but that would do them no favours in the night.
He gazed out into the fog as he descended the hill. Had it moved? Or was it just a trick of the light? It seemed like his initial appraisal was correct - the creatures held no love of the day. Why, he couldn’t say, but at least it gave the defenders the chance to prepare.
He gave a pebble a good kick as he neared an intersection in the road, before turning up the left to where a bank of houses sat. They were a fairly decent kind, larger and made of good timber and stone - they would’ve been considered near grand in places like Visaya.
“Right near the end corner, one of the fence cross bars has fallen loose. You can’t much miss it,” Modred had said, before offering a quick bow of the head and returning to his labours.
And so it was, the house at the end of a row - well kept save for the fencing and the obvious lack of livestock that were meant for the small pasture to its back. Efrain rapped the door with his knuckles, and stood back, waiting for a response.
It was slow, and his appearance probably didn’t do him any favours, at least judging by the fear in the answering woman’s eyes.
“Who is it?” she said, not unkindly, but she held the door tight to the frame.
“Madame,” Efrain said, not entirely sure how to speak for this occasion, “would you happen to be Maisie?”
She pulled the door open just a little wider, revealing her to be probably in her forties, with a wide, sun kissed face and broad shoulders. A farmer’s daughter, if he had to guess.
“Yes. That’d be my name,” she said, almost sadly, “if you’re here about moving to church, we won’t go. Never again. We don’t care about the monsters, we’ll manage.”
“Actually, madame. I came because I want to know about what happened several months ago.”
Something stabbed across the woman’s eye. Efrain guessed it was pain.
“Think it’d be better if you left, stranger,” she said, motioning to close the door.
“Madame!” he protested, “my apologies for any hurt. I wouldn’t have come to bother you if this wasn’t important.”
Innie rolled her eyes at the overly formal language. Efrain had to resist the urge to tell her to shut up.
The door paused, still mostly shut.
“What’s so important about it?” she said, with a lightness that grated against Efrain’s ears, “go ask someone else. Half the village knows.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but Mordred sent me here. He said that if I wanted to know the whole story, and I do, I should ask you. It wasn’t his story to tell, or so he said.”
The door wasn’t yet shut, and Efrain took that as a sign to press.
“Please madame. I want to help defend this village, and there is a secret about the church that’s stopping us from doing so. I believe you might know at least a part of that secret. I don’t demand all the details, just the bare facts.”
“For the Losts’ sake, Maisie, just let the poor beggar in,” said a male voice from the back.
The woman opened the door, her face drawn, leading Efrain to a small table, where a slightly older man sat. His face was solid and eyes defiant but that same worn pain was there. Efrain politely refused the offer of refreshment, and settled down beside the man.
It was a child, he thought, not entirely sure why, but certain of it.
Both men waited in silence, Innie twitching at his feet, seeing who would speak first. Unfortunately for the man, Efrain had centuries of practice at the patience game.
“What do you want to know?” he said, sighing and slumping back into his chair.
“I know something happened, in the church, something unusual, several weeks or months ago. But no one seems to know, or is willing to offer details. What can you tell me? Before you speak, I should be fully honest with you.”
He held up his palm, which glowed lightly, eliciting a small gasp from the woman.
“I am a mage. But my powers are weakened in this town. I need those powers, for what I hope are obvious reasons.”
The man’s jawline had tightened, but he offered no response.
“Something dampens my powers - it’s in the catacombs under the church, in a blocked off chamber. I’m certain of it, and I have reason to believe that this… drag on your spirit originates from there, and that it can’t be more than a few months ago. So, here we are.”
He spread his hands.
“I suspect whatever happened to you, I’m going to guess it happened to one of your family. I need to address it, or I will not be able to protect you, and, not to be proud, but you need all the help you can get.”
He sat back in his chair, wondering if he pegged the man across correctly as one who appreciated honesty. Jove sat, his face darkening and folds deepening as he considered what Efrain had said. Maisie chimed in unexpectedly, with more than a little venom.
“Jove, turn him out. We don’t need or want a mage in here, after all it's his fault that-”
“I’ll make my own damn mind up!” he roared.
For a moment, a startled Efrain thought that he might throw one of the mugs at Maisie.
“You’re a mage,” he said, breathing heavily, “I don’t like your kind. But I have no love in the heart for the church. Not anymore. So I’ll tell you.”
He breathed deep, drained whatever was left of his mug, and stared directly into Efrain’s mask.
“It was maybe two months, three at most. Turn of the spring. Up to our eyes with the harvest work, slaving from daylight to dusk. Me, Maisie, and-”
He had to stop and gather himself, his voice growing hoarse. A moment later, Jove pulled himself together into a mass of sharp lines and fragile strength.
“And Liara. Our little girl. She had just turnt thirteen. Just old enough to start really helping with the pigs and sheep. She was good at it too, she-”
He coughed. Efrain waited.
“She could’ve made it as a trader I think. She wanted to go south, to Karkos, to see the sea, when she was a bit older.”
He leaned forward and with a sudden conviction, slammed his fist into the table, declared:
“She would’ve made it! Made money, hand over fist! She would’ve- She would’ve- If that fat cunt hadn’t-”
“Jove!” practically screamed, though her eyes were brimming with tears.
“Shut up Maisie, just shut up,” he croaked, tears of his own pricking his eyes.
Maisie left, the door to the outside closing behind her. He could hear sobs as she walked away from the house.
“What happened, Jove?” Efrain, pouring every ounce of delicacy he had into the words.
Jove gripped the edge of the table, leaning forward, his eyes now alight with a mixture of pain, guilt, rage, and grief.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” he snarled, “we were working the fields to the north, a favour for a friend. Maisie’d gone up to the brook over the fence. Barely a ten minute walk. A nice little cave, for her and her friends to explore. She was so happy about it.”
His face contorted into a horrible mask as he said the last line.
“She didn’t come back, not after twenty minutes, not after an hour, not for the whole afternoon. And we searched, oh we searched. We called up Krup’s boys and went tearing through the fields and the forests.”
The manic energy that had driven him subsided and he collapsed back into the chair.
“When we found her,” he said, barely above a whisper, “when we found her she was- she was. In this cave. That perfect. Little. Lost damned cave! She was lying there, not a mark on her and my heart-”
He stopped short, as if the air had been knocked out of him.
“My heart stopped. I was sure she was dead. Maybe she been bitten, or had accidently eaten a poison flower, or-”
“But she didn’t die, did she?” Efrain said, beginning to see the outline of where this story was going.
“No! No! And maybe it was better that she did!” he said, some of that energy blazing up, “when she sat up and spoke, I- I- That wasn’t my little girl. It was some fucking demon! Wearing her skin!”
Efrain only felt the slightest urge to correct the man and swiftly crushed it.
“What did she say, Jove?”
“‘Where is it?’ ‘Where is it?’ ‘Where is the gift?’ That’s all it said!” sobbed Jove, openly weeping now, “she got up like she was possessed. We tried to stop her, tried to hold her up, but she was strong. Too strong. Inhuman! ‘Where is it?’ That’s all she said!”
Efrain said nothing, merely waiting for the man to continue the story.
“So we- so we-”
He couldn’t continue. He merely buried his face in his hand, and wept. That continued for quite a while as Efrain started to push pieces together in his mind, and his dread deepened.
“You took her to the priest, didn’t you?” Efrain said.
To his unsurprised horror, the man nodded.
Heaving, nose and eyes gushing, the man managed to pull himself up with shuddering breaths.
“He took her, and us, to the church. We’d always gone to the church, always did what it said. He said… he said, it was a punishment. How? He said that she’d been cursed, that she would need to be cleansed. To be freed. He took her through the side door and that fat little fuck Blutarch followed him like a whipped dog.”
He seemed to crumple like a piece of paper then as he recounted it.
“Then we prayed, prayed for so many hours, the whole night and…”
“Nothing came of it,” Efrain said simply, without even a hint of sarcasm.
“No, nothing. Nothing at all, no matter how hard we-”
The man wiped his eyes furiously.
“Forty years at that damn building, forty years! Thirty-seven for my wife, thirteen for my daughter. And we got fucking nothing. Ain’t going back there. Not now, not never.”
“I see,” Efrain sighed, “can you tell me one more thing, if you would be willing?”
“What?” he sniffed.
“Your daughter, when she was ‘possessed’. What did you see?”
“What?” he said, his brow furrowing.
“What did she look like? Did you smell or hear anything? Was there a strange quality to her voice? Was she warm, cold?”
“She was hot!” he said, “hot, hotter than a fever, damn near thought I was going to get a burn. But I clung onto her.”
Efrain felt the list on his mind narrow, a good thing, but the remaining options were far from good.
“Anything else? Smell? Sound?”
“Her voice was different, like another speaking at the same time. It was like another were speaking through her. And she smelled like she was burning too. Like a fire was in her flesh. But she never even broke a sweat. And, and-”
“Yes?” Efrain said.
“Her eyes, she had these eyes. I can’t even- they were alight, with a flickering- like fire light. Blues and pinks and yellows and greens, every colour I ever saw. And-”
He stopped, because now filling that kitchen was also the smell of burning. Eyes wide, hair puffed out, and coat glowing, Innie sat up, fixed on the face of the man.
“Tell me, Jove, and please remember as best you can,” Efrain said, with all the dire seriousness he could muster, “you said you found her in a cave. Was there anything else in there that drew your eye? Anything even remotely out of the ordinary.”
“Aye, there was,” he said, “something was fading, as we found her, it looked like… cloth. Lots of it, dull colours, but a lot of them, just lying there. I only caught a glimpse, but it was like,” he stopped.
And that was enough for Innie to shoot out the door, sparks streaming from her coat. There was a startled yelp from outside, as Efrain passed a hand over his eyes.
“Dissolving into embers?” he said, his voice more exhausted and filled with dread than he could’ve imagined.
“Yes. That’s a way of putting it,” said Jove.
“Oh god no,” said Efrain, putting both hands on his head as he processed the implications of what the conclusion must be.
“What? What’s-”
“It wasn’t your fault, Jove, or your wife’s or your daughter’s for that matter,” said Efrain from within his hands.
“Wha- how could you know?”
“Because she was dead the moment she stepped inside that cave and touched that thing,” Efrain said as he got up from the table, “and we might all die because that stupid priest thought he could exorcise a fragment of a wisp matriarch.”
He ignored any of the further questions, offered a quick thank you, and strode out in a black mood. A wisp matriarch, could it have gotten much worse? Many of the scholars and mages he’d worked with thought they were just myths, some fun thought-experiment, a rogue hypothesis, fanciful tales spun by wanderers in distant lands.
But the matriarchs, or at least their fragments, were very, very real. Extraordinarily rare, perhaps, but absolutely real. Efrain had encountered one only once in his centuries of wanderings. That was a deep mine in Hebeen, deeper than any he knew of here on this continent. Efrain had come to inspect the wondrous crystal formations, unlike anything he’d ever seen. Instead, he’d watched an enormous mass of fire issuing from the hewn crevices.
Within seconds, the miners had screamed their last, their bodies already igniting and charring in the wash of heat. The last glimpse of it gave the impression of sculpted inferno, a robed woman of the purest multicoloured light. Then it had turned its attention to Efrain, the wall separating that chamber and his beginning to glow red and then white.
By that time he was running away as fast as he possibly could, blowing out the supports so that the tunnel collapsed behind him. Even as he ran, he could swear that the rubble was beginning to glow with heat. He had rounded a corner and sprinted for what felt like hours to the elevators. Then he had collapsed that shaft as well.
In the years later, talking to scholars, and reading many obscure texts and accounts, Efrain pieced together what it must’ve been. Half of the scholars didn’t take him seriously, but the other half did, including a young female student who’d suggested that the infamous burning of Nieth might’ve actually been the wisp matriarch. Efrain wished he could remember what her name was - but there was no time.
Now that he understood the power sleeping under the church, any sense of excited curiosity had vanished under the weight of dread. What had happened, what kind of fresh hell had the priest unleashed behind those doors? What was the gift that the fragment insisted on? What did that have to do with a tool that could mould black stone?
Efrain fumed as he stormed up the hill, more desperate than ever to get in and discover the truth behind the matter. He could imagine how easy it would’ve been. A young girl, wandering into an innocent looking cave, sees something wondrous - a hide of crystalized magical fire, shimmering and glowing. She might’ve not even felt any heat, the power almost completely dormant. Then she would’ve touched it.
And then it would consume her, burning not her body to begin with, but her soul.
Probably no more than a flash, a burning sensation, then nothing. The very core of the girl, incinerated with the primal power of the wisp matriarch. Efrain couldn’t even imagine what that single moment would’ve been like. Probably painful and terrifying, but mercifully quick..
The sun was beginning to dip as Efrain made his way past the barricades and rows of men. The soldiers were drilling the men in spear work. From the segments of the conversations, they were to pin creatures that made it past, then the professionals would do the dirty work of hacking them to pieces. Efrain hoped that it would make the difference, but he wasn’t confident.
Still war was their theatre, not his, so he left them be and moved into the church. The group inside was so busy they barely noticed him as he passed toward the altar. Niche and Lillian lay sleeping, the latter had his head on her shoulder. Frare was leaning back against the wall, but Efrain could see the glimmer of green under a mostly closed lid. Aya was telling Sorore about her life in Visaya - her chores, her sickness, her friends, the beauty of the mountains, lakes, and so on.
Efrain smiled thinly as he listened from the shadows of the wing, then departed up the stairs. He emerged, finding that guards had already been posted with bows and torches. That was good, he supposed, as he made his way to the front where Innie sat, Claralelle resting her elbows on the battlements next to her.
There was silence between them for a second, as they stared out across the darkening skies. Almost directly in front of them, due west, stood the bleak faces of the Alonshaze, before that were forests and before that, the ring of fog. North and south were much the same, east expanded out onto rolling forests as the Alonshaze curved north, eventually joining up with the Giant’s Spine.
“I hate them, Efrain,” said Innie.
He did not need to ask for clarification.
“I know,” he said, resting his arms on the smooth bricks.
“I don’t know what I’ll find down there, but I think I’m going to burn this entire church down.”
“When it's done,” he said, nodding to the still distant fog.
“When it’s done,” she agreed, turning her amber eyes bright with the colours of flame, “although maybe it would be better to leave them to get torn apart.”
“Innocent people, Innie,” he chided her gently, “you can’t blame them for that. The priests however…”
For the first time in a very long time, Efrain did feel the fervent urge to destroy something. To make something pay for some indirect office. His opinion of the church had already been poor, but the last few decades had particularly soured his disposition towards them.
“But when the time comes, if I choose to blast this building brick by brick. You won’t stop me?” she said, boring into him with her flickering eyes.
He held her gaze, completely steady, before looking back out.
“If there’s no people in it?” He said, “No. No, I don’t think I will.”
“Good,” she said, before joining him to stare out into the distance.
The rest was just waiting, really. The colours bled out of the sky as night rose, and the fog rose with it, through the town and finally up the hill. Efrain was vaguely aware that children were being brought in behind them. He felt the Bequeathed with their strange and strong magic. Torches began to flicker into life below and around them, letting the shadows dance around the brickwork.
The fog was perhaps a five or ten minute walk away when Efrain raised his hands. A dozen small lights, basic, but effective, swirled into life well above the heads of the soldiers. Under normal circumstances, it would’ve been fairly easy, but now it was taxing. Still, Efrain thought it was worth it - the monsters seemed to need little light, so why cede the advantage?
As the shambling shadows advanced out of the fog to the wall, Efrain chuckled grimly.
“Well,” he said, “here they come.”
The streets were deathly quiet, not even the sound of birds punctuated the silence. Even the wind that passed through the bows was oddly muffled or so Efrain thought. Perhaps it was that smothering cold from the church catacombs, lessened by distance. Even so, it still held sway within the borders of the town.
Efrain began to wonder if the church really was the most defensible spot, if his magic was so weakened. He dismissed it both as egoistic and futile - the spot had been picked, and they would have to defend it. He began rifling through what spells he could use in such a ‘low-power’ environment. Certainly he had enough to cast a light, maybe several, to aid in the fight.
Perhaps that would be the length of his contribution, which made figuring out what happened in the basement of the church all the more important. Innie was walking beside him, no doubt thinking much the same thoughts. She was happy to be out of that repulsive cold, he thought, but that would do them no favours in the night.
He gazed out into the fog as he descended the hill. Had it moved? Or was it just a trick of the light? It seemed like his initial appraisal was correct - the creatures held no love of the day. Why, he couldn’t say, but at least it gave the defenders the chance to prepare.
He gave a pebble a good kick as he neared an intersection in the road, before turning up the left to where a bank of houses sat. They were a fairly decent kind, larger and made of good timber and stone - they would’ve been considered near grand in places like Visaya.
“Right near the end corner, one of the fence cross bars has fallen loose. You can’t much miss it,” Modred had said, before offering a quick bow of the head and returning to his labours.
And so it was, the house at the end of a row - well kept save for the fencing and the obvious lack of livestock that were meant for the small pasture to its back. Efrain rapped the door with his knuckles, and stood back, waiting for a response.
It was slow, and his appearance probably didn’t do him any favours, at least judging by the fear in the answering woman’s eyes.
“Who is it?” she said, not unkindly, but she held the door tight to the frame.
“Madame,” Efrain said, not entirely sure how to speak for this occasion, “would you happen to be Maisie?”
She pulled the door open just a little wider, revealing her to be probably in her forties, with a wide, sun kissed face and broad shoulders. A farmer’s daughter, if he had to guess.
“Yes. That’d be my name,” she said, almost sadly, “if you’re here about moving to church, we won’t go. Never again. We don’t care about the monsters, we’ll manage.”
“Actually, madame. I came because I want to know about what happened several months ago.”
Something stabbed across the woman’s eye. Efrain guessed it was pain.
“Think it’d be better if you left, stranger,” she said, motioning to close the door.
“Madame!” he protested, “my apologies for any hurt. I wouldn’t have come to bother you if this wasn’t important.”
Innie rolled her eyes at the overly formal language. Efrain had to resist the urge to tell her to shut up.
The door paused, still mostly shut.
“What’s so important about it?” she said, with a lightness that grated against Efrain’s ears, “go ask someone else. Half the village knows.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but Mordred sent me here. He said that if I wanted to know the whole story, and I do, I should ask you. It wasn’t his story to tell, or so he said.”
The door wasn’t yet shut, and Efrain took that as a sign to press.
“Please madame. I want to help defend this village, and there is a secret about the church that’s stopping us from doing so. I believe you might know at least a part of that secret. I don’t demand all the details, just the bare facts.”
“For the Losts’ sake, Maisie, just let the poor beggar in,” said a male voice from the back.
The woman opened the door, her face drawn, leading Efrain to a small table, where a slightly older man sat. His face was solid and eyes defiant but that same worn pain was there. Efrain politely refused the offer of refreshment, and settled down beside the man.
It was a child, he thought, not entirely sure why, but certain of it.
Both men waited in silence, Innie twitching at his feet, seeing who would speak first. Unfortunately for the man, Efrain had centuries of practice at the patience game.
“What do you want to know?” he said, sighing and slumping back into his chair.
“I know something happened, in the church, something unusual, several weeks or months ago. But no one seems to know, or is willing to offer details. What can you tell me? Before you speak, I should be fully honest with you.”
He held up his palm, which glowed lightly, eliciting a small gasp from the woman.
“I am a mage. But my powers are weakened in this town. I need those powers, for what I hope are obvious reasons.”
The man’s jawline had tightened, but he offered no response.
“Something dampens my powers - it’s in the catacombs under the church, in a blocked off chamber. I’m certain of it, and I have reason to believe that this… drag on your spirit originates from there, and that it can’t be more than a few months ago. So, here we are.”
He spread his hands.
“I suspect whatever happened to you, I’m going to guess it happened to one of your family. I need to address it, or I will not be able to protect you, and, not to be proud, but you need all the help you can get.”
He sat back in his chair, wondering if he pegged the man across correctly as one who appreciated honesty. Jove sat, his face darkening and folds deepening as he considered what Efrain had said. Maisie chimed in unexpectedly, with more than a little venom.
“Jove, turn him out. We don’t need or want a mage in here, after all it's his fault that-”
“I’ll make my own damn mind up!” he roared.
For a moment, a startled Efrain thought that he might throw one of the mugs at Maisie.
“You’re a mage,” he said, breathing heavily, “I don’t like your kind. But I have no love in the heart for the church. Not anymore. So I’ll tell you.”
He breathed deep, drained whatever was left of his mug, and stared directly into Efrain’s mask.
“It was maybe two months, three at most. Turn of the spring. Up to our eyes with the harvest work, slaving from daylight to dusk. Me, Maisie, and-”
He had to stop and gather himself, his voice growing hoarse. A moment later, Jove pulled himself together into a mass of sharp lines and fragile strength.
“And Liara. Our little girl. She had just turnt thirteen. Just old enough to start really helping with the pigs and sheep. She was good at it too, she-”
He coughed. Efrain waited.
“She could’ve made it as a trader I think. She wanted to go south, to Karkos, to see the sea, when she was a bit older.”
He leaned forward and with a sudden conviction, slammed his fist into the table, declared:
“She would’ve made it! Made money, hand over fist! She would’ve- She would’ve- If that fat cunt hadn’t-”
“Jove!” practically screamed, though her eyes were brimming with tears.
“Shut up Maisie, just shut up,” he croaked, tears of his own pricking his eyes.
Maisie left, the door to the outside closing behind her. He could hear sobs as she walked away from the house.
“What happened, Jove?” Efrain, pouring every ounce of delicacy he had into the words.
Jove gripped the edge of the table, leaning forward, his eyes now alight with a mixture of pain, guilt, rage, and grief.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” he snarled, “we were working the fields to the north, a favour for a friend. Maisie’d gone up to the brook over the fence. Barely a ten minute walk. A nice little cave, for her and her friends to explore. She was so happy about it.”
His face contorted into a horrible mask as he said the last line.
“She didn’t come back, not after twenty minutes, not after an hour, not for the whole afternoon. And we searched, oh we searched. We called up Krup’s boys and went tearing through the fields and the forests.”
The manic energy that had driven him subsided and he collapsed back into the chair.
“When we found her,” he said, barely above a whisper, “when we found her she was- she was. In this cave. That perfect. Little. Lost damned cave! She was lying there, not a mark on her and my heart-”
He stopped short, as if the air had been knocked out of him.
“My heart stopped. I was sure she was dead. Maybe she been bitten, or had accidently eaten a poison flower, or-”
“But she didn’t die, did she?” Efrain said, beginning to see the outline of where this story was going.
“No! No! And maybe it was better that she did!” he said, some of that energy blazing up, “when she sat up and spoke, I- I- That wasn’t my little girl. It was some fucking demon! Wearing her skin!”
Efrain only felt the slightest urge to correct the man and swiftly crushed it.
“What did she say, Jove?”
“‘Where is it?’ ‘Where is it?’ ‘Where is the gift?’ That’s all it said!” sobbed Jove, openly weeping now, “she got up like she was possessed. We tried to stop her, tried to hold her up, but she was strong. Too strong. Inhuman! ‘Where is it?’ That’s all she said!”
Efrain said nothing, merely waiting for the man to continue the story.
“So we- so we-”
He couldn’t continue. He merely buried his face in his hand, and wept. That continued for quite a while as Efrain started to push pieces together in his mind, and his dread deepened.
“You took her to the priest, didn’t you?” Efrain said.
To his unsurprised horror, the man nodded.
Heaving, nose and eyes gushing, the man managed to pull himself up with shuddering breaths.
“He took her, and us, to the church. We’d always gone to the church, always did what it said. He said… he said, it was a punishment. How? He said that she’d been cursed, that she would need to be cleansed. To be freed. He took her through the side door and that fat little fuck Blutarch followed him like a whipped dog.”
He seemed to crumple like a piece of paper then as he recounted it.
“Then we prayed, prayed for so many hours, the whole night and…”
“Nothing came of it,” Efrain said simply, without even a hint of sarcasm.
“No, nothing. Nothing at all, no matter how hard we-”
The man wiped his eyes furiously.
“Forty years at that damn building, forty years! Thirty-seven for my wife, thirteen for my daughter. And we got fucking nothing. Ain’t going back there. Not now, not never.”
“I see,” Efrain sighed, “can you tell me one more thing, if you would be willing?”
“What?” he sniffed.
“Your daughter, when she was ‘possessed’. What did you see?”
“What?” he said, his brow furrowing.
“What did she look like? Did you smell or hear anything? Was there a strange quality to her voice? Was she warm, cold?”
“She was hot!” he said, “hot, hotter than a fever, damn near thought I was going to get a burn. But I clung onto her.”
Efrain felt the list on his mind narrow, a good thing, but the remaining options were far from good.
“Anything else? Smell? Sound?”
“Her voice was different, like another speaking at the same time. It was like another were speaking through her. And she smelled like she was burning too. Like a fire was in her flesh. But she never even broke a sweat. And, and-”
“Yes?” Efrain said.
“Her eyes, she had these eyes. I can’t even- they were alight, with a flickering- like fire light. Blues and pinks and yellows and greens, every colour I ever saw. And-”
He stopped, because now filling that kitchen was also the smell of burning. Eyes wide, hair puffed out, and coat glowing, Innie sat up, fixed on the face of the man.
“Tell me, Jove, and please remember as best you can,” Efrain said, with all the dire seriousness he could muster, “you said you found her in a cave. Was there anything else in there that drew your eye? Anything even remotely out of the ordinary.”
“Aye, there was,” he said, “something was fading, as we found her, it looked like… cloth. Lots of it, dull colours, but a lot of them, just lying there. I only caught a glimpse, but it was like,” he stopped.
And that was enough for Innie to shoot out the door, sparks streaming from her coat. There was a startled yelp from outside, as Efrain passed a hand over his eyes.
“Dissolving into embers?” he said, his voice more exhausted and filled with dread than he could’ve imagined.
“Yes. That’s a way of putting it,” said Jove.
“Oh god no,” said Efrain, putting both hands on his head as he processed the implications of what the conclusion must be.
“What? What’s-”
“It wasn’t your fault, Jove, or your wife’s or your daughter’s for that matter,” said Efrain from within his hands.
“Wha- how could you know?”
“Because she was dead the moment she stepped inside that cave and touched that thing,” Efrain said as he got up from the table, “and we might all die because that stupid priest thought he could exorcise a fragment of a wisp matriarch.”
He ignored any of the further questions, offered a quick thank you, and strode out in a black mood. A wisp matriarch, could it have gotten much worse? Many of the scholars and mages he’d worked with thought they were just myths, some fun thought-experiment, a rogue hypothesis, fanciful tales spun by wanderers in distant lands.
But the matriarchs, or at least their fragments, were very, very real. Extraordinarily rare, perhaps, but absolutely real. Efrain had encountered one only once in his centuries of wanderings. That was a deep mine in Hebeen, deeper than any he knew of here on this continent. Efrain had come to inspect the wondrous crystal formations, unlike anything he’d ever seen. Instead, he’d watched an enormous mass of fire issuing from the hewn crevices.
Within seconds, the miners had screamed their last, their bodies already igniting and charring in the wash of heat. The last glimpse of it gave the impression of sculpted inferno, a robed woman of the purest multicoloured light. Then it had turned its attention to Efrain, the wall separating that chamber and his beginning to glow red and then white.
By that time he was running away as fast as he possibly could, blowing out the supports so that the tunnel collapsed behind him. Even as he ran, he could swear that the rubble was beginning to glow with heat. He had rounded a corner and sprinted for what felt like hours to the elevators. Then he had collapsed that shaft as well.
In the years later, talking to scholars, and reading many obscure texts and accounts, Efrain pieced together what it must’ve been. Half of the scholars didn’t take him seriously, but the other half did, including a young female student who’d suggested that the infamous burning of Nieth might’ve actually been the wisp matriarch. Efrain wished he could remember what her name was - but there was no time.
Now that he understood the power sleeping under the church, any sense of excited curiosity had vanished under the weight of dread. What had happened, what kind of fresh hell had the priest unleashed behind those doors? What was the gift that the fragment insisted on? What did that have to do with a tool that could mould black stone?
Efrain fumed as he stormed up the hill, more desperate than ever to get in and discover the truth behind the matter. He could imagine how easy it would’ve been. A young girl, wandering into an innocent looking cave, sees something wondrous - a hide of crystalized magical fire, shimmering and glowing. She might’ve not even felt any heat, the power almost completely dormant. Then she would’ve touched it.
And then it would consume her, burning not her body to begin with, but her soul.
Probably no more than a flash, a burning sensation, then nothing. The very core of the girl, incinerated with the primal power of the wisp matriarch. Efrain couldn’t even imagine what that single moment would’ve been like. Probably painful and terrifying, but mercifully quick..
The sun was beginning to dip as Efrain made his way past the barricades and rows of men. The soldiers were drilling the men in spear work. From the segments of the conversations, they were to pin creatures that made it past, then the professionals would do the dirty work of hacking them to pieces. Efrain hoped that it would make the difference, but he wasn’t confident.
Still war was their theatre, not his, so he left them be and moved into the church. The group inside was so busy they barely noticed him as he passed toward the altar. Niche and Lillian lay sleeping, the latter had his head on her shoulder. Frare was leaning back against the wall, but Efrain could see the glimmer of green under a mostly closed lid. Aya was telling Sorore about her life in Visaya - her chores, her sickness, her friends, the beauty of the mountains, lakes, and so on.
Efrain smiled thinly as he listened from the shadows of the wing, then departed up the stairs. He emerged, finding that guards had already been posted with bows and torches. That was good, he supposed, as he made his way to the front where Innie sat, Claralelle resting her elbows on the battlements next to her.
There was silence between them for a second, as they stared out across the darkening skies. Almost directly in front of them, due west, stood the bleak faces of the Alonshaze, before that were forests and before that, the ring of fog. North and south were much the same, east expanded out onto rolling forests as the Alonshaze curved north, eventually joining up with the Giant’s Spine.
“I hate them, Efrain,” said Innie.
He did not need to ask for clarification.
“I know,” he said, resting his arms on the smooth bricks.
“I don’t know what I’ll find down there, but I think I’m going to burn this entire church down.”
“When it's done,” he said, nodding to the still distant fog.
“When it’s done,” she agreed, turning her amber eyes bright with the colours of flame, “although maybe it would be better to leave them to get torn apart.”
“Innocent people, Innie,” he chided her gently, “you can’t blame them for that. The priests however…”
For the first time in a very long time, Efrain did feel the fervent urge to destroy something. To make something pay for some indirect office. His opinion of the church had already been poor, but the last few decades had particularly soured his disposition towards them.
“But when the time comes, if I choose to blast this building brick by brick. You won’t stop me?” she said, boring into him with her flickering eyes.
He held her gaze, completely steady, before looking back out.
“If there’s no people in it?” He said, “No. No, I don’t think I will.”
“Good,” she said, before joining him to stare out into the distance.
The rest was just waiting, really. The colours bled out of the sky as night rose, and the fog rose with it, through the town and finally up the hill. Efrain was vaguely aware that children were being brought in behind them. He felt the Bequeathed with their strange and strong magic. Torches began to flicker into life below and around them, letting the shadows dance around the brickwork.
The fog was perhaps a five or ten minute walk away when Efrain raised his hands. A dozen small lights, basic, but effective, swirled into life well above the heads of the soldiers. Under normal circumstances, it would’ve been fairly easy, but now it was taxing. Still, Efrain thought it was worth it - the monsters seemed to need little light, so why cede the advantage?
As the shambling shadows advanced out of the fog to the wall, Efrain chuckled grimly.
“Well,” he said, “here they come.”
