[Terrorchild.]
K0mori
Servant Supreme
You almost felt the scattered inklings of your feverish imagination forming a dream when the bouncing of the wagon wheels against the poorly-cobbled road brought you back to lucidity. It was cold outside, very cold, and you were tightly wrapped in a blanket fashioned from furs. The wagon was partially covered, but there was moisture penetrating through from the melting snow and it was beginning to irritate your bare feet. You let out a cough and a gag, and began to taste the berry juice on your tongue and numbed lips again- bitter. Horridly, horridly bitter. A hand dropped down and covered your mouth as a woman, unseen until now (as she was clad entirely in black and sitting atop a wooden bench within the wagon above you), quietly shushed you, and all the fear you had felt hours earlier came rushing back. Your urge to scream for help was tempered by the immediate threat of a swift death.
It had all happened so quickly. It was only yesterday that you were standing in the market square and felt the presence of magi for the first time. Rocco, a braggart of a young man from the far southern reaches of the continent, where desert turned to orc land, had come around that morning with his exotic meats and spices and was practically mobbed by the township all at once. They all wanted what he had to offer, whereas you, the little peasant girl with nothing to offer but the garden vegetables from your father's lot, struggled to be heard or seen. You carried it all on your back and in your arms... a burden for sure, but nothing compared to the indignity of being ignored, shoved, and even openly mocked. These people, the merchants, felt nothing but contempt for the very people whose labors they relied upon, and hated to share their spaces with the farmers and their wretched children.
Nevertheless, your family needed coin to pay the annual due to Lord Aelfred for his protection. The days were growing shorter, the weather colder, and soon there would be nothing to harvest or sell until the spring. Your family had fallen short once or twice before, and the militia captain had sent his recruits to intimidate your father as they made their rounds, shaking down half the village of Byrewood it seemed, until they had been sure that all would repay their debt. You had seen the way they treated him, humiliated him, and felt a deep, deep darkness in your heart that never quite went away. How, if the Gods judge all in the end, do these people expect to reach paradise?
Is there even such a thing?
You still agonized over it. The holy men liked to reassure you that the trials of this world would be so outweighed by the rewards of Heaven that you would scarcely even remember them. But how could you forget when they'd also say that the same nobles and merchants who degraded you in this life would be bumping elbows with you in the next?
And then, inevitably, you'd think of your sister.
Your household was a crowded one. Father, mother, three sisters, five brothers. They said you were fortunate to have so many brothers, as there were more hands to handle the land. You, the second of three daughters, would be "free" to do the washing and cleaning, and later, the cooking, for your crowded house before being swept away by whichever village boy whose father happened to have the most to offer for your hand in marriage, and then you would give him eight or so children to set to work before resuming your womanly duties unto infirmary and death. Your sister - the older one - got up one night and disappeared, and changed your world forever.
She was a teenager, and you were on the cusp. She crept out of your shared bed, inadvertently waking you, and donned a heavy coat as if she planned to travel a long way. She saw the gleam in your eyes - there were no words, as they would have awoken the entire family - but she smiled, and you know because you remember her teeth in the dark. Somehow you knew she was never coming back, and you didn't try to stop her. She was escaping. And when she ducked out the door without a sound, a part of you escaped with her and left hope behind in your heart. You didn't know how, but there must have been another choice. There must have been a different world that one could run to, to rewrite their destiny apart from the crushing anonymity of this existence. You didn't know she was heading to the bonfire, to the induction. You didn't know what they would ask of her.
And now they say she's burning in Hell.
About four years had passed, but it felt like much longer. In fact, it almost felt like the month between your sister's disappearance and her death marked the halfway point of your sixteen years. Sometimes it felt like you died with her, burned on that cross with her, and everything since has been a slow ascension to something more meaningful than the endless grind into obscurity and death. But whether that something would come from within or without was never clear, and now here you stood, nearly as old as she was, and you hadn't changed a thing. It ate at you.
A well-dressed man crashed into you yesterday. He caused you to drop an entire basket of tomatoes and didn't so much as turn or offer his hand as he moved along, heading toward the crowd surrounding Rocco and his valuable wares. You scrambled to collect them, and another merchant stepped on your hand, causing you to cry out in agony. He turned, and with a smirk only a lifetime of privilege and pampering could muster, told you "don't bother picking them up, sweetheart. Nobody here eats food off the ground."
And that's when you finally broke loose. "It all comes from the ground, you asshole!" you cursed him. Your heart was pounding like a drum in your chest, that dark shadow residing within creeping out, taking hold. "What are you, angels? Too pure for the bounty of the land!? How about you share some ambrosia sometime to replace my father's tomatoes that you're stepping all over-"
The slap came so swift and smoothly that the "crack" of his hand against your cheek was louder than Rocco's sales pitch. Your head whipped to the side so that you had to catch yourself to stop from tumbling over into the muck of the street entirely, and you froze there, unable to process what had happened for several seconds. But the people around you carried on as if nothing had happened. By the time you turned to face the man who assaulted you, he had already walked away, having taken the only thing he could possibly have extracted from such a desolate soul: satisfaction. He couldn't take your dignity because, simply put, you had none, and you knew that it would never change unless you made it change. The heartbeat kept up and the darkness kept creeping, and you could see the blue satin shimmer of the back of the man's coat. If a man like that was bound for Heaven...
Your place was in Hell with your sister.
You pushed yourself off the ground, dropping a few of your goods in the process, and began to push your way through the crowd, eyes sewn on that patch of cerulean, totally unsure of what you were about to do, but utterly certain that you would see it done. The darkness in your blood began to feel like energy, like a muscle twitching, waiting to be flexed in a tremendous show of power. You imagined hurting him. You imagined killing him. As you closed in he seemed to stoop, and then you lashed out and grabbed him by his shoulder, violently pulling him around so that you could look him in the eye. With one balled fist hanging in the air, you hesitated, as now you could see the mixture of pain and fear on the lines of his face, and a shadow closing in around his eyes like smudged charcoal. He let out a gasp and a terrified groan, clutching at his chest, and then collapsed dead in the middle of the market.
The people erupted into a panic, scrambling, fighting, clawing, all to get away from you. You and your victim stood alone in the middle of the plaza, and you remained there for some time wondering whether the church would send along their clerics and apprehend you, the same way they captured your sister, before you simply decided to run. You ran and ran from the scene, feeling numb to the situation. You didn't try to rationalize the fact that you were a witch and had never been one before this point, but you simply were. You were a witch, and as your first magical act you murdered a man for slapping you. The sound of hooves on the cobblestones echoed from the distance, as if they were right on the other side of the rows of houses on your left, or right around the corner, but you kept up your pace, too determined to think about your own breathing, until at last you found yourself at the town walls, where a pair of guardsmen held out their spears and warned you to stop.
You hoped they would simply drop dead, like the merchant you killed before, but they stood fast. You would later learn it was because it takes more than hope, it takes malice and intent. Instead, as you came near, a murder of crows dropped from the air and began to peck at the two men relentlessly, and somehow you burst through unscathed before darting for the tree line. Just a bit further, you thought as you crashed through the brush and shallow snow, your legs feeling heavier and heavier as you went, the cold air burning in your chest, nose, and throat. Just a bit further...
The ground suddenly fell out from under you. A sharp slope you hadn't seen behind the trees caught you unprepared and you tumbled down the hill, crashing over the exposed roots of trees and small rocks until you came to rest under a huge, thorny bush at the side of a burbling stream. You laid there, gasping for air until you could breathe quietly, and then breathing quietly until you could hold your breath, and there you waited for hours as patrol after patrol rode out of the gates in search of you.
A witch hunt. Wickham Township's first witch hunt in four years.
Now it felt surreal. Now you had time to think of what you had done. Did I invoke her spirit? you found yourself thinking, or were we both destined to be this way? There was no way around it now, there was no going back to the farm in Byrewood. Your old life, the one you hated, was gone. But what would replace it? Where would you go? How would you live, knowing what great power was at your fingertips? Slow down, think, you told yourself. It was one thing to suddenly discover your own magical prowess in the most disturbing way imaginable, but what did it even mean?
Magi is not uncommon in your world. However, it's important to note that there are two kinds. There's the good kind, the positive kind that reverberates from all living things- the magic of life itself. With the proper attuning, anyone can learn how to influence it, and eventually harness it, for the purpose of restoring balance and the natural order. That's what the clerics do for the church, by removing curses, curing diseases, and easing pains. Then, there's the shadow of life: dark magi. No one knows from where it comes, but its influence is malignant and abhors the natural order. Nobody can simply "learn" it, but there are plenty who are sensitive, mainly women. It's so rare to find a male dark magician that they created a word for them: warlocks. You, however, are what most people imagine when they picture a dark magi user, and that is a witch.
There was a crinkling of leaves nearby, and you cautiously peeked in that direction to find a slender pair of boots approaching you directly. Panic struck you, but you remained still, until their owner lifted the edge of the bush and revealed herself to be a woman in her mid-twenties. She gave a relieved sigh when the two of you met gazes and simply said "marvelous," before crawling under the bush with you. There, close enough to whisper in your ear, she said, "I helped you escape before, but we have to keep moving. You're hurt; I can see the blood on your clothes. I want you to drink this," she said, and she slipped a small tincture into your hand that contained an odd, purplish fluid. "It'll help, trust me," she said.
You downed the fluid in one gulp, and found that it tasted sweet and yet horrid, like poisonous berries. And that was quite an appropriate thought, because that's exactly what it was. Before you knew you had been poisoned, she whispered, "I'll be back with a horse, and we'll ride to a safe place together. It's good to meet you, sister. Show no mercy, and let Martazul bless you..." She then departed, leaving you with a terrible realization of exactly whose attention you had gained.
Martazul... the goddess of the Lythrefang Coven. You weren't just rescued by any old witch, you were being rescued - and recruited - by those witches.
Filled with dread, you waited there, realizing slowly that your lips were becoming numb and your chest was beginning to burn. Whatever she had given you was not meant for healing. Fear was building in you, but your strength was leaving you. This life, this vague idea of freedom that you so readily grasped, was now frightening you to your very core. You weren't ready for this, not by any stretch of the imagination. You weren't ready to be brought into that coven. Just as you considered running again, a weakness flooded into your limbs and your world began to spin, and you entered into a restless sleep...
[Choose your race:]
1. Human: You're a member of the majority, an occupant of these middle kingdoms. You may not be special, but this region has been tailored to your needs.
2. Elf: You're an immigrant from the east, accustomed to the deep woods but forced to live among this world of stone.
3. Gnome: Eternally childlike in appearance, you're a member of a minority race from the western coastlines. Many find you difficult to take seriously.
4. Drow: Dark and moody-looking, you carry an ancient curse which separated your people from the elves many eons ago. Some like to call you "dark elves," but that's rather obtuse.
5. Goblin: Others refer to your people as "civilized monsters" and poke fun at your appearance. At least you'll always have the element of surprise when you outsmart them.
6. Kobold: Similarly to the goblins, you can expect to be excluded a lot. Despite your size, however, you are quite fast and strong- more so than a human, in fact.
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