Kat welcomed both sides. She commanded a nurturing tender touch, which could coax even the frailest, most neglected plant into bloom. But part of her miraculous gift to bring life was in understanding how to feed life from the essence of death. Her gardens, the envy of many, were by her hand a graveyard as well, for Kat succored the Soul Gourds upon her land with the bodies of the fallen creatures she found within the forest. She tended the dead in remembrance, and in turn, their bodies and, perhaps she hoped, their souls tended her plants as well.
To save Goliath, first, she must break the seals upon the body. That was difficult enough, but the runic brands, which would tell Kat what spells the old priests used and how to undo them, were likely far too damaged from the humans’ steel weapons for her to read. But, most of her life, she had been doing things differently.
While the old priests, who trained her, relied on ritual and precise runic application, Kat felt more drawn towards feelings and instinct. The amazing feats they accomplished in hours of sacred chanting ritual, Kat discovered; on her own, of course; she could do in a fraction of the time and without half of the fuss. It was this gift she would have to rely on now, she understood.
She was a child of earth and soil. Her powers were heightened when her bare feet and toes were buried in the damp earth of the enchanted forest. She drew from more than the soil, though, but from all the living creatures which lived in or from the earth beneath her. The plants and trees, the worms and beetles, they were beasts to which she felt akin, and they seemed to sense this about her. At times of great need, she even found she could summon them. But that was only a fragment of the gift she would need to call upon in this moment, though it was the one she was trained to her whole life. She needed the darker part of the forest to draw from, the part she had been studying on her own in secret.
A leaf is a life, a life lived among a thousand other fleeting green lives, and all interconnected through a greater, older, more eternal life. The older life gives a part of itself each year to create them. And for a while, it sustains them all, only to cast them into oblivion when the sun begins to fade for the year.
The notion was romantic in a way. But it was also a source of power for Kat. For each of those fallen leaves was a life with a fragment of the tree’s soul. Like a graveyard, the forest floor was rife with soul energy. And that didn’t even include the numbers of dead and buried forest creatures that may lurk among the leaf litter and dirt. It was this private understanding, and her gift with it, which she would use to save the gentle giant.
Her tutors had only ever meandered among the edges of death just enough to bring the enchanted fairy creatures back and give them new life. Sustaining life was their goal, and it was the power they studied. But while Kat was fully interested in the forces of life, a part of her always felt courted by the darker nature of earth and its element. Death was a part of the earth and a part of life, and no matter how much her teachers attempted to dissuade her, Kat became her own tutor and learned how to draw from death to feed life, the very way life renewed itself every day of every season.
She drew a sprig of forbidden Belladonna from a pouch at her waist. It held the touch of death within its root, stem, and berry. The only life it bore was to further grow death. To her mentors, it was an herb with no purpose. It was too dangerous for anyone living to tamper with such a strong essence of death without being drawn into the embrace of it themselves. But again, Kat was arrogant.
She smashed the black berries in her hands until they were smeared with the purple pulp and seeds. She was marked with death now. The poison of the herb was amplified with her touch, a gift of her people in their bond with the forest. Every herb was enhanced if they willed it. But by granting strength to the Belladonna, she violated precepts, for she used the gift of life to empower death.
Kat was new to the power of death, only having learned its potential potency in the last season through accident and experimentation in the forest by herself. She wasn’t always able to call it to her command as fully, for the balance between life and death seemed to ebb and flow with the changing of the moons. She had not yet learned the cycles and the proper timing of the peaks in this dark, forbidden power. Although she was certainly trying. She didn’t have time to consider such things now, though, as the giant’s soul was fading. Yet, she still had to test the level of her command before attempting something so daring.
A crumpled vine of ivy lay partially smashed by the battle so recently fought between man and beast. Blood splatter from the soldiers that Goliath managed to maim or kill in self-defense marked the deep emerald leaves with wet droplets, even as they were smashed into the soil of the forest floor. It was alive, but barely, caught just between life and death. Kat touched it with her tainted hands, the poison glowing with a purplish bruised light from the amplification of her gift. That touch made the decision for the plant. Live or die was no longer an option. Death was made certain.
With a dark smoldering vapor, the ivy withered and blackened, coiling in upon itself like a retracting spring. The roots, which once held it to the ground, crumpled like the fine dry rotted hair of a long-dead corpse. She drew every last drop of life out of it through that touch, yet when she picked the crumbled vine up, she held it gently, as if protecting a newborn baby. Not a single dry crackling leaf was damaged.
Kat closed her hands around the corpse of the ivy, the purplish glow of the Belladonna’s poison fading, replaced by the dark shadowy haze of a new energy, which Kat was harvesting from the plant’s demise.
She didn’t need all those special runes to do powerful magic like this, she had discovered. While the priests withheld teachings from her, Kat found a way around the restrictions. True, this was a forbidden method. But it felt more natural to her somehow. Life and death were one single force in her mind. There was no way she could separate the two to wield one without the other.
She opened her hand to look upon the withered tangle. It was bathed, as were her hands, in a shimmering black flame, tinged with slight violet shades from the remnants of the Belladonna’s poison. She had killed. But she felt no guilt because nature was a force that created new life out of death, and she was about to test her ability to do the same now.
With a slight jolt, a tendril of the dead ivy quivered to life. It was not true life yet, more a manipulation of life at her command, but it served its purpose. She threaded that shriveled vine into the fibers of her bright forest green gown. The blackened husk of the ivy stood out starkly upon the lively color, especially where the shriveled brown leaves still hung with tenacious persistence. The stub of the roots she worked into the bodice of the gown, and with a flare of the black flaming magic, she fused the broken plant fibers into the fabric seamlessly. She reshaped the dead plant to be more like fungus, no longer dependent upon soil or light but able to feed upon the fibers of her gown as it grew to replace the fabric with stronger, more protective, and, frankly, more attractively colored attire.
As the last of the plant husk was woven into place, she set it aflame with a momentary flare of deathly black magic. Life returned. The leaves unfolded, blackened and mottled but thriving. The vines thickened and swelled like pulsing veins spreading across the garment with new vigor. She had reformed its body from death and brought forth a new unique form of life.
It was a silly parlor trick, really, especially considering the forces she had already learned to command with the essence of death. But the trick worked to test her strength this day and to get a feel for how much energy she would need for the tremendous task at hand.
Besides, she hated the pretty, lively patterned robes and gowns of her people. She preferred the shadowy colors of the forest. They fit her soul more closely. This replacement, she mused, would be more fitting than anything the seamstresses of her village could provide.
Her test complete, her power readied, Kat turned her attention to the fallen heap, which was Goliath. There was only one way to bypass the runes upon Goliath’s body. She would
have to destroy the form completely, give it over entirely to death to release the spirit within. But such a feat would take a great deal of power — more than she was used to drawing upon. Yet, the daunting nature of the task hardly shook her arrogant certainty.
Chapter 2:
Power’s Embrace
It was late autumn in the enchanted forest. The dark solitude of the canopy was waning as the leaves dropped, allowing the first rays of sun in months to touch the forest floor. But although the sun brought a return of light to the shadows, there was a building sense of darkness beneath the skeletal limbs of the trees. For there was a graveyard of the year’s bounty, orange, red, and gold cast upon the ground with indifference, and not even provided burial considering how precious they truly were. They were fragments of a great soul discarded, unused.
Well, unused until now, Kat considered with a dark musing smile.
She buried her bare feet into the leaves and duff of the forest floor, feeling the cool touch of the damp and moist beneath and the scurry of the scavengers which lived among and fed upon the fallen treasure.
Kat’s people used their connection to the forest to enhance the forces of nature, such as the herbal effect of plants, but Kat had found another force inherent in all things within the forest, which she was able to manipulate and enhance. Rot and decay were no different, in essence, from growth and blooming. They were all natural processes, and for Kat, at least, they could be tapped into as easily as all the other powers her mentors advised her to use. She could speed the breakdown of dead plant material to release the essence of its death for her use. She had never tried it to quite this extent, but she was determined to succeed.
As she was taught from a young age, Kat reached her mind out to the creatures of the forest; only her call was directed downward, delving into the dark and rotting hidden world of the forest floor.
“Rise my beauties. Feed and release the forces I require.” Her voice was darkly melodious, almost musical in a sinister way, which made it feel as if each word bore cruel, threatening talons, though no assault was ever made with them. Like with the Belladonna, Kat directed her gift to amplify forces of nature in an aura around her, but it was not plants which she gave her strength to now.
It began with a scurrying among the leaf litter, the faint sound of rustling beneath the mantle of the season’s fallen bounties. She was summoning an army to battle; only the conquest was happening beneath her feet and beyond her sight. But soon, the activity grew to such a frenzy that its effect could be detected by more than just sound alone.
The leaves upon the ground began to tremble and stir around her as the decomposers of the enchanted forest did their work with a fury unrivaled. Beetles, worms, centipedes, mold, fungus, all the contributors to the slow process of decay and recycling within the forest, now did the work of seasons in mere minutes, with the amplifying aid of Kat’s gift.
The layers from years of fallen leaves began to sink and vanish as they were devoured by the vermin. And as the brittle vessels for the fragments of the trees’ souls were consumed, the essence was released up from the ground in vaporous little geysers. The wispy, barely shimmering murk gathered in a swirling haze around Kat’s feet, building in preparation for her next feat. The magic of death and decay hung at the tips of her fingers, waiting to be wielded, but still, she needed more, so she urged the swarm of carrion feeders to greater frenzy with her gift.
It could take days to unravel the locks and safeguards on the runes holding Goliath’s body together. And to make matters even more difficult, he was an ancient one transferred centuries ago into this body. The powers which bound him could likely have been forgotten even by the most powerful priests of her people. There was simply no way to free the spirit by conventional means. But there was no magic in a runic brand, even an ancient rune if there was no body for the brand to enchant, to begin with. And that was exactly what Kat had in mind.
She needed the reservoir of magic at her feet to fuel the next step. She summoned it now around her like a wispy mantle of shadowy smoke and fog. Kat fed the power into her aura, fueling her small army of vermin forward. The power of decay and death began to feed into a black vortex of semitransparent flames swirling around her as she drew it to her command. They licked across the expanding tendrils of her dark ivy gown and up to her flowing black mane. The upward surge of the powers lifted her hair as it gathered around her form in a roiling frenzy, yet these flames did not burn her. They empowered her, fueling life with the powers of death, as nature intended.
“Free the bramble lord, my children. Remove from him this fallen body which holds him prisoner.” And with her stark and cold utterance, she sent a swarm of devouring mouths and mandibles to consume Goliath’s rune bound form. The squeaks and screeching, the flutters and chittering of the horde, was nightmarish in volume, yet it was music welcomed by Kat, as it was the dark beauty of nature so many failed to notice, amplified beyond any chance of dismissal. Would the humans have dared trek these forest paths if this were the powers her people wielded? She couldn’t help but wonder as the pure essence of death swirled in chaotic patterns at her will.
The magic of the runes and the spells of protection held only momentarily against the forces of rot and decay. In mere minutes, the heap of vines and branches sank into a shrinking pile of composted sludge and debris, still quivering with the activity of the feasting guests. But as the last of the bindings’ magic faded, the spirit which had been held within the plant form burst forth, raging and angry, seeking a target for its wrath. The carrion-feeders which freed him were the first to draw his attention.
With a concussive force, the spirit splattered the vermin in a wide circle around its decayed form. Green and brown froth oozed from the cratered pile of the bramble lord’s remains, where it pulverized the swarming thousands with barely any effort. The glowing gaze of a fierce ancient beast stared out from amidst an indistinct shimmering form, hanging in the air and locked with vengeful hatred onto Kat. Her part in destroying the body and releasing Goliath from his prison was apparently not seen as an act of kindness. She was suddenly not so arrogant.
Frantically, she drew the power of death from the obliterated smear of multitudes to shield herself from Goliath’s attack. It wouldn’t be enough, she feared. She already consumed the soul fragments of the leaves for a wide swathe around her. And while the vermin had been plentiful, they were insignificant dim lights when it came to lifeforce. Their deaths, while valuable, could never amount to the kind of power she would need to subdue this giant. She was not even sure if it would be enough to shield from its first blow.
As Kat sipped the meager energy desperately, an unexpected surge flooded to her call and ignited a whirling vortex of black flames around her, much stronger than what she summoned before. She almost lost control of the raging inferno from surprise, but she was a prodigy with the forces of death, and it bent to her will almost deferentially. She was stunned for a moment. Such creatures should not have provided this much energy. But before she could consider any further, Goliath struck.
The wall of deathly black flames is all that protected from the spirit of the giant. As the brutal strike met the barrier, the force withered and shriveled in upon itself, until only a light breeze remained to fan Kat’s pale face as it passed. But it took a great deal of the flames to diminish the spirit’s assault so greatly. And the vengeful soul was still enraged and held more than enough power to repeat the battering blow.
There was no time to delay; she had to find a new source and raise the magic again before Goliath could finish the job. Kat drew on the energy from what remained of the giant’s decomposed body and the pulverized scavengers’ deaths, but she searched for the source of that last surge, the one final potential vestige of hope open to her.
A glint of ivory drew her gaze, and as her focus turned to the bones protruding from the debris pile, a surge of dark energy flooded to her command again. This was no rat or insect, she realized as her arroganc
e returned. Only one type of mortal creature could provide this amount of energy in death: humans.
The human soldiers had carried away all their dead, or so Kat thought. She wouldn’t have easily overlooked such an ample source of magic carelessly. But the triumphant humans must not have noticed several of their compatriots were crushed beneath the tangled heap of the forest giant when it was slain. Their bodies remained. And the energy of three humans’ lives was hers to wield in defense. She drew them in a great gasping flood and raised the wall of flames just in time.
The spirit of the rampaging beast froze midstroke, sensing the increased fury of death’s essence between him and his target. He knew that every strike through those roiling black flames would cost him valuable energy, and in turn, any time the beast had remaining of his existence to strike out at those who attacked him. But the denied fury didn’t simply dissipate. It hung anxiously in the air with building tension, tearing at low hanging branches around them, as if the maddened need to lash out could not be contained much longer. Kat knew she had to do something quickly before the giant’s attention turned from this denied target to the rest of the world.
“You can be reborn anew, great one,” Kat called amidst the swirling energy and chaos of the unleashed spirit, hoping to reach the deep intelligence within the center of all this madness. “The priests can implant your soul in a new body. You do not have to die this way. Because of them.” As she mentioned the humans, Kat drew deeply on the power of their nearby corpses, readying her barrier in case this tactic enflamed the giant’s rage toward her once more. The haze of Goliath’s entity seemed to waver in hesitation. Perhaps her words were getting through, she considered.
Then, all at once, the trees, every branch, and root of the forest in a ring around Kat and the fallen giant came to life, flaring with the light haze of the spirit’s energy now infusing all of it. Like an avalanche, the enchanted forest around Kat collapsed inward upon her, attempting to smother the black flames enough for something to reach the offending beauty within.
Ravenfell Chronicles: Origins Page 12