by Ther Renard
It was wonderful to see Ayla. It was not at all wonderful to see what Ayla was doing - or rather who she was doing. She seemed to be finger deep inside a soldier whose face was hidden in the witch's neck.
"AYLA!"
Atrocious shouted the witch's name. It was hopeless of course, she was but a toad. She could not speak. She could, however, hop forward, launch herself into the air on her thick bouncing toad legs and clamp her toadly jaws on the witch's ample rear.
Ayla turned to see what had attached itself to her bottom. Atrocious saw the witch's lips part in amusement. She realized then that she was not at all in the right creature's body. A toad could barely bite at all. She needed something better. Something fierce. Something capable of actually teaching Ayla a lesson.
Fleeing the toad, her mind raced off into the forest, where it found a bunny.
Perfect.
Leaping and hopping and skipping though the undergrowth, vengeful Atrocious-bunny rocketed toward Ayla. When it found the witch it let out a little squeal of bunnoyance and laid nip after angry nip at the witch's heels.
Slicing with its great bunniciular incisors, the bunny succeeded where the toad had failed. It seemed to rather enjoy biting the witch, quite independently of Atrocious' urgings. Between Atrocious and the bunny, the clearing was soon empty of canoodling witches and slutty soldiers.
It was satisfying to punish Ayla, but it was not easy. Within minutes, she grew tired and unable to sustain the connection. She felt herself drifting, and then she was back in her body in the little room at the end of Lesbia. She nodded to herself, an expression of great satisfaction plastered across her face as she returned to her work.
"Did you enjoy your trip?"
Atrocious looked over her shoulder to see the witch still in the same place, needles click-clacking away.
"Huh?"
"You were gone a little while," Ariadne said, finishing the end of a row and beginning anew.
"I suppose I was." Atrocious smiled to herself. "I have no idea how I'm doing this, but I saw Ayla."
"That paper in front of you," Ariadne said. "The one I've been urging you to study. It's a finding spell."
Atrocious looked at it. "Is it?"
"It is."
"But I can't read it," Atrocious said. "So how could I possibly use it?"
"Reading," Ariadne said, "is but one way of absorbing the truth. The spell wants to be known."
"If that's the case," Atrocious said, "then why doesn't everybody know it?"
"It had to find someone it could fit."
"What does that mean?" Atrocious hated when Ariadne spoke so vaguely. Life was quite confusing enough without making faint references to things that almost made sense.
"People are like vessels," Ariadne said. "Some are silver goblets, pretty, but holding little. Others are great bejeweled urns, containing all that is good and worthy. Still others are unfired clay pots. They soak in all they come into contact with and display it for the world to see."
"And what am I?" Atrocious thought she would probably regret the question, but curiosity made her ask it none the less.
The High Witch gave Atrocious a wise look. "You're a sturdy bucket," she said. "Quite suitable for the holding of all manner of things."
"A bucket! You call me a bucket!" Atrocious considered being offended. "And what are you then?"
"I?"
Ariadne slowly closed her eyes, smiling like a cat. She opened them again, the dark swirls under her skin congregating in thick thorned bands across her stunning orbs.
"Little one, I am the ocean."
Unimpressed by Ariadne's hubris, Atrocious pushed the papers aside. "I don't think I'm a bucket," she said. "I think I'm a spade. A simple tool you're using to get what you want. You don't care about all those people being hurt. You don't even care if Ayla gets hurt, or I get hurt. You're just..."
Ariadne lifted a hand and Atrocious stopped talking. The words would no longer come.
"Ayla might have indulged your chatter, but I have little time for it," the high witch said. "Our time grows short and you are woefully unprepared. It would have taken the entire span of your life to prepare you for the moment you are about to face, but it cannot be helped."
"Ayla indulges everything, including herself," Atrocious said, ignoring the warnings in favor of talking about her favorite subject: Ayla.
"Oh by all the powers..." Ariadne sighed. "You know Ayla to be a trader in flesh. You know her to be promiscuous as pollen. You know that she hails from the time before your grandmother's grandmother's grandmother was a twinkle in her grandmother's grandmother's grandmother's eye, and yet still you expect the same courtesies those with little time give to one another, promised tokens of eternity. One is not so quick to promise eternity when it is actually an option."
Atrocious shrugged. "Well, she has another thing coming if she thinks she's going to play around on me. I have the power now." A slow smile spread over her face. "I have the power now."
"Yes, a candle has the same power as the sun. It does not mean one can control the other. Forget Ayla, focus on what is immediately before you, the knowledge of generations."
"You have never known love, have you?" Atrocious was bold enough to throw the question at Ariadne.
Brows rose, followed by curling waves of black tendrils sweeping up across the high witch's face. "I know love the depths of which you cannot imagine. I know the love that wills a tender fern into existence, sees it uncurl on its first morning and watches over it until it lies rotting back into the soil from whence it came. I know the love that brings all life bursting forth from the earth. The love that sends birds soaring through the sky. I know the love of existence, the blooming of a world from void..." Ariadne's almost whimsical tone hardened as her marbled gaze left the ethereal plane and fell back on Atrocious. "Your petty, rutting, jealous lust is not love, Atrocious, never imagine that it is."
Atrocious was silent for a long moment, then she looked into the high witch's eyes and spoke.
"I'll take that as a no."
"You rude little wretch," Ariadne thundered, quite literally. There was a booming in the upper reaches of the rafters as she rose to her feet, prepared to unleash high witchly fury on her reluctant and argumentative apprentice.
"Let me tell you about the love you scorn," Atrocious said, sitting her ground. "Let me tell you what it is to miss someone so much it feels like your heart is being ripped out all day and all night. Let me tell you what it is to feel so safe in your lover's arms that the world could end and you would not care, because there you cannot be touched, not by time or death, or even taxes. Let me tell you," she said rising to her feet to meet Ariadne's approach, "what it is to feel yourself change right down in your bones, just because you know you are loved. This love you so disdain, it is what we were created to do. It is the one thing we are able to do wholly and completely. It is the one thing that matters, Ariadne. It is the only thing that matters." With her final words she stalked forward until she was nose to nose with the high witch. "If you do not know this love, then I pity you."
The high witch's gem-like eyes glittered. She reached up with thumb and middle finger curled and placed them in the middle of Atrocious' forehead. Then she flicked her. In a sudden rush, Atrocious was propelled up and backward. She came down on her bottom with a thump, skidding across the floorboards until she came to a stop in front of a heavy statue. Ariadne looked down at her with hooded eyes, the dark swirls under her skin curling in tight tendrils.
"Pity that, wretch."
Ariadne returned to her knitting whilst Atrocious rubbed the spot where she'd been flicked by the mighty fingers. She frowned and thought about summoning something to throw Ariadne off the cliff, but she figured that wouldn't end well.
"Tell me about this Blood Witch, then," she said, changing the subject. "What are we going to do? Stab her? Toss her into a volcano? Drop her in the ocean? How do you destroy a Blood Witch?"
"I told you once already,
you don't."
"Well..."
"This is not a fairy tale, Atrocious. This is not some simple story where the goodies and the baddies fight until the baddie is vanquished. Life doesn't work that way."
"How does life work, then?"
"The Blood Witch has her place. She will forever be. She has forever been. She is one of the avatars of the great darkness. We will go to her. We will speak with her."
"Diplomacy isn't exactly your strong suit," Atrocious said, pointing to the red mark on her forehead. "And I am guessing the Blood Witch isn't one who can be flicked across the room."
"Hush," Ariadne said. "You know all you need to know."
"You really have to work on your attitude," Atrocious said bravely. "If I were the Blood Witch, I'd not like your tone at all."
Ariadne lifted her eyes from her knitting and spoke mildly. "It would be a pity," she said, her fingers knitting without ocular guidance, "if we should have to wait for another summoner to be born."
"Why would you have to wait for that?"
"This one is being exceedingly tedious," Ariadne said dourly. "It used to be young ladies knew how to act. They used to come with offerings of flowers and burned flesh. Now they come with disrespectful attitudes and empty hands."
"So you let the world burn a bit, just to teach everyone a lesson." Atrocious curled her lip in an ill-considered sneer. "I'm tiring of the threats, Ariadne. If you were going to kill me, you would have done it already. You need me. And you're not as mean or as cruel as you like to pretend you are."
"Oh I'm not?" Ariadne put her knitting to the side and grimaced her way through a smile. "You think perhaps this is all an act, something I put on to scare simple villagers and peasants? You think, perhaps, underneath it all I am just a kindly old woman?"
The air had taken a definite chill. Atrocious shivered in her light clothing as Ariadne sat in her chair and looked upon her with a gaze that was precisely the opposite of benevolent.
"Why don't you look upon me, look upon me as I truly am."
"I...er... how?"'
"Just look," Ariadne said, her voice becoming harsh and elemental.
Atrocious looked and looked. At first, she saw nothing. Just Ariadne, sitting there in her chair all still. Only the dark marks under her skin were moving, becoming jagged, thorns, spikes, hard slashes radiating like a web. There were shadows too, gathering behind her in a way shadows shouldn't. Then, something else...
Atrocious blinked and clapped her hand over her mouth.
She saw.
She saw what Ariadne was. Not the form of Ariadne she had become accustomed to, but the essence of Ariadne, which was not bound to her mortal frame but radiated around her in dozens of dimensions. She was a glittering, glowing arachnid predator with eyes of golden fire and bloody lips from which sanguine rivers flowed. She was not human. She was not close to human. Her arms and legs were too numerous to count. She was woman. She was immortal. She was spider. She was daemon goddess. She was all those things and more, things that could not be named and yet Atrocious knew precisely what they were, for they spoke to her heart and to the darkness and the dread that lived in the crevices of her being.
"Stop!" She cried the word between her fingers. "Mercy!"
Slowly the impression faded until Atrocious saw nothing more than a woman sitting on a chair, knitting. She made a muttered sound of irritation as she accidentally dropped a stitch.
Atrocious was stuck on the floor, tears of pure terror pricking at her eyelids. What she'd beheld was the nightmare of a species, the original monster under the bed, the terror in the dark. As she watched, it tied a piece of pink yarn onto the existing skein and resumed the click-clack of creation.
Having knitted a cheerful rosy row, Ariadne looked up, her lips twisting in something like a smile.
"And I'm what you'd call one of the good ones."
Chapter Forty One
"Care to explain what just happened?"
In the aftermath of the wrath of the bunny, Normine had grown serious. The sensual mood was well and truly lost, replaced by questions and queries.
"Well, there was a toad, and then there was a rabbit..."
"I can sense magic, Ayla," Normine interrupted curtly. "Someone was trying to interfere with us. And I think you know who."
For a split second, an expression of guilt passed over Ayla's face. It was replaced with her usual smooth righteousness. "I am not bound to answer questions of..."
She stopped speaking, for Normine had stepped forward. It was a restrained movement, there was nothing inherently threatening about it, but it effectively stilled the words on the witch's lips.
"Does that usually work?" Normine asked the question with genuine curiosity, tilting her head with a soft smile on her lips. "People ask you something and you tell them that you don't have to answer, because you are the great Ayla?" She smirked and slapped her knee. "You do, don't you!"
"I..."
"You're something," Normine said. "You have everyone convinced that you're... that you're almost immortal. A deity. But you're not." She reached out and trailed her fingertips down Ayla's arm. "You're flesh and blood like the rest of us."
"I never said I wasn't flesh and blood."
"No, you just acted as if you were so far above all mortal concerns you didn't need to address them. Well I have news for you, witch. You do. So who was that with the bunnies and the toads? Do you have a lover?"
"I have many."
Normine's left brow rose. "I don't believe you."
"I have had many."
"Now that, I do believe," Normine said. "But there's just one now, isn't there? Another witch, like you."
"She's not a witch. And she's not like me."
"You mean she's not an elf?"
"I mean she's not..."
"She's not a witch?"
"No, she's not a witch."
"What is she then?"
Ayla shook her head tersely. "I do not wish to speak of her."
"Why not?"
"Because she is in danger. Because I cannot save her from it. Because it will, in all likelihood consume her. Because I know I have laid eyes on her for the last time and now my memories will have to suffice."
"Oh." Normine's lips drooped. "But she is still alive."
"In a manner of speaking," Ayla nodded. "Yes, she still lives."
Normine twisted her face up in confusion. "I don't understand."
"You don't need to."
Ayla turned on her heel and left the clearing. In her wake, Normine leaned against the tree, her legs crossed at the ankles, her strong arms folded over her chest as she watched Ayla's tall, voluptuous figure stalk away.
Chapter Forty Two
"I don't like brown rice," Atrocious said, picking at her dinner.
"Brown rice?" Ariadne's knitting needles stilled. "Is there any other kind?"
"There should be another kind."
"Well there isn't, and that's your dinner, so eat it or starve."
Atrocious cast a look at Ariadne, then one down at her dinner. It was rice. Plain rice. She supposed she should be grateful that it was cooked. There was no meat, though there was a thin sauce that hinted at the idea of meat.
Nibbling at a few grains, she missed Ayla. Missing Ayla had become part of her routine. She brushed her hair and she missed Ayla. She read her lessons and she missed Ayla. She ate her dinner and she missed Ayla.
The magic trick that allowed her to spy on the witch had only increased her longing. Why didn't Ayla just come back? Why was she hanging about on the front lines, canoodling with soldiers. Had she ever truly loved at all?
Atrocious' eyes filled with tears. She blinked them back, knowing them to be useless. Ayla was not in the village for the same reason Atrocious wasn't on the front lines. The illusion of choice was fast falling away in this world where things were done because they had to be, where puppets danced and pawns slid neatly into place. There was only one way to get Ayla back - and that was to cut
the puppeteer's strings and vanquish the evil keeping them apart.
"I want to go see the Blood Witch," she said. "I want to go see her right now."
"Eat your rice."
"I don't want my rice," Atrocious growled. "I want to go see this blasted witch. We've wasted enough time."
"Eat. Your. Rice."
With an impetuous backhand, Atrocious swept the rice off the little table. "You eat the rice," she said. "I am going to kill this witch. Even if she can't be killed. I will kill her anyway. I will kill her," she said, "...until she is dead."
Ariadne dropped her knitting and prepared to unleash consequences. Atrocious did not have time for consequences. It was time for action. Time to face this beastly creature that brought nothing but suffering and death. Before Ariadne could summon the elements to punish her, Atrocious ran and dived out the window.
She had practiced hurling herself into the abyss many times, but this was not so much the cliff of an abyss as the ledge of a second story window and she didn't have quite the same amount of time to make good on her mistake. Closing her eyes, she felt the whisper of wind between her and ground, the impending scraping of soil and rock. In the moment before becoming ground beef she was borne up by a buzzing confusion that was part creature, part idea of what a creature might be.
Freed from the tyranny of mundane forces, she flew straight toward the heart of the corruption, the throbbing nexus of misery. The land flew swiftly by, her speed so great that wind whistled through hair and teeth and every crevice of her being.
Atrocious felt no fear in her flight. The misery arising from the loss of her lover insulated her from petty fear. Fear was for those who had something left to live for, something to protect. Endless days of plain rice and lonely nights stretched ahead of Atrocious and she was tired of them. She was tired of it all. In her melancholy even Ariadne's great powers and true form seemed meaningless, nothing more than shadow play. Without the richness of love, even the ability to summon something out of nothing failed to satisfy.