The Wayward Witch Chronicles

Lights shot to life overhead. West swore silently, adjusting his position to better his concealment. The lights didn’t reach the seating area, however. Instead, one by one, they lit up the central dais, painting it with bright light.

“And admissions are now closed.” A smiling voice, decidedly male, rattled through the chamber. The whistling resumed, slow and warbling. Around the edge of the platform, one by one, small depressions set into the floor filled with a numb gray light. They eased the room into an eerie twilight.

West appraised his companions. Roman’s pillar fully hid him from the figure on the stage. But unless he wanted to gamble on being seen, he was stuck there. West, screened from the stage by the sitting corpses on the next tier, stood a chance of easing to the next tier down without being spotted, but it wasn’t guaranteed. Vera was the best positioned– maneuvering behind the row of seated corpses with little chance of being spotted, she slipped to the edge of the room, getting an angle on the stage.

Drawing once more the stiletto-thin spike, Vera trained it on the stage, searching for a target. In the barest of whispers, Roman ordered, “Not until I say, Vera.” If the Glamori heard, she gave no indication, and Roman didn’t repeat himself.

Among the twisting shadows at the back of the platform, something moved. The sound of slow, purposeful footsteps– thud, thud, thud, punctuating the whistling tune– echoed off the bare stone. West could barely discern a tall, lanky silhouette as he paused and spread his arms to the audience of living and dead. In his right hand, the silver shaft of a cane gleamed in the dim light.

The whistling cut dead, and a whisper cut out into the silent vacuum: "Once more, friends, shall we? The greatest show, one night only...." The creaking voice sliced through the air with malevolent glee.

Something changed in the atmosphere; an insidious force creeping into the room. Closest to the stage, it reached Vera first, and she bit her cheek against a muffled whimper. Roman's fingers trembled visibly on the pommel of his gladius, and he pressed a palm against his chest.

West realized the danger before it swept fully through him. It was a type of psychic aura, a power that turned unguarded thoughts into shaking fears.

West was an old hand when it came to facing down nightmarish magic, though. As the terror slipped through his mind, he didn’t fight it, but let it ease in and settle among the bric-a-brac of his mind like a wary guest. It flashed old familiar hurts at him– great men with bloodied boots, freezing waters and screaming hunters, savage creatures with dagger-sharp claws– but as long as he kept his mind steadied, there was little for it to pick at. He exhaled silently. Balanced and refocused, West returned his attention to the stage.

A spring of motion, and the figure bounded forward into the light, gesturing grandiosely out with his cane. “Well! Our collection is coming along quite nicely!”

He wasn’t human, whatever he was. Beneath the brim of his cavalier hat, he smiled too wide, each tooth pointed like a dagger in his jaw. His limbs stretched a touch overlong, but the details of its form were concealed by his tailored suit and sweeping, tailed coat. But, West noted with growing trepidation, he was very much living. West saw no rotting or mummified bits that would mark the creature as undead. The more he saw, West couldn’t help thinking that he should know the thing. Even that whistling tune had a horrifying nostalgia about it, something that was just too far back in memory to recall….

“I count three new cast members tonight; come, introduce yourselves!”

West winced; Roman startled, pulling his sword a finger’s length from its sheath; Vera froze in place like a rabbit beneath the eyes of a hawk. Miraculously, all three of them had better sense than to take the bait. The creature waited several beats, then relaxed his arms. “Oh, drat. No leaps to heroism? No bravado, no dramatic speeches? What a shame! What a bore!” The creature’s fearsome smile grew. “Well, if none of you care to make your opening lines now, let’s break right into the first act, shall we?”

Turning his back to the audience with a flutter of coattails, the creature strode several paces downstage, then whipped back around. With a burst of energy, he twirled his cane and announced, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce: our lovely ingenue!”

Arresting the cane’s motion, he reached out as if plucking the corner of a cloth over an invisible statue. The air shimmed, as though from a wavering mirage. He flung the imaginary thing aside, and the shimmer peeled away.

In the place of the withdrawn nothing, something grand and glittering rested: A gemstone, larger than the figure on stage itself, of deep amber tone and scintillating facets.

Vera bit her lip to stifle a gasp. West had a moment of bewilderment himself. He hadn’t thought that the rumor of the gemstone could be true. For once, he’d actually managed to be more cynical than reality. But his memory circuits were firing now, full-speed and frantic. It was the way the light moved that revealed it for certain.

The illumination caught what seemed like a blurred shadow among the amber facets, and crystallized it into a sensical form captured within. He’d seen something like this before, something very important--

Wasn’t it something like this that had–

That was so many years ago, but–

Pale, terribly skinny, even for a Mani. She had a tumble of tangled waves falling to her shoulders. A dress stained with unnervingly dark blotches. Clutching a small white creature in both arms. Most arresting was the feathery halo framing the body on either side: A set of white-and-gray dappled wings. They lay ragged with lack of care, marred by stains old and fresh, steeped by shadow and amber through the crystal facets.

Everything froze. Just– everything. Thoughts, time, all of it. West’s body felt like a lump of clay, useless and unbudging. He couldn’t move a muscle if his life depended on it, but in that moment, the tempest in his mind swirled too wild for him to recognize any need to, anyway. The pendant around his neck felt heavy, like a lodestone remembering its burdensome nature. Shock overwhelmed all other feelings, numbing him from the inside out. The first thought he could pull together was we have to get out of here– followed shortly by, what the muck is Vera doing?!

Vera moved quickly, trusting the shadows and her silent footfalls to conceal her. She clutched the jagged spike as she maneuvered for the right angle. West realized her intentions and threw himself out of hiding. “Nae, Vera!”

Vera ignored him. She stood, lining up her shot to catch both the creature and the unknown threat within the gem in a single shot. Still several meters away and several rows above, West leapt. Damn it, why cannae she listen–

West tackled her. She hit the corpse of a hulking Feral woman painfully; impacted again as she scraped against the stone bench; and a third time, struck the floor with a sharp smack. The wand had fallen somewhere– she was probably going to be more pissed about that than the actual blow, but damn it! There’d just been no time.

The creature’s attention was certainly on them now, and West wrestled to put himself between Vera and the thing. But the scholar was snarling, shoving him, scrambling for the wand (of course she’d seen where it had gone.) West thought, there’s no way she’d be dumb enough to try for the same shot twice, but she had the wand in hand and she was standing, so maybe she was–

Laughter broke over the room. The creature on the stage, delighted by the antics, chuckled freely. “Ohh, we do have a lively cast tonight. All for the better, but please kindly wait for your cue.” The creature traced a few faceted lines over the gemlike surface, unconcerned with the furious Glamori. “If you’re going to ruin the show before the curtains draw, you’ll be pulled from the play altogether.”

Vera pointed the wand. West caught her under her shoulders and yanked her back to the ground. “Keep. Down,” he hissed, gritting his teeth. “There’s more goin’ on here than ye realize. We’re nae goin’ to get through this by bein’ rash, so keep down and stop actin’ like a damned fool!”

“Could have ended it then and there,” Vera whispered fiercely. “Still might have a shot, if you’d just–“

“Try it again and I’m goin’ to snap that wand in half,” West said. Vera’s blanching face registered shock, like he’d just promised to eat her firstborn in a single bite. “Ye understand?”

Glaring, fearful, she finally nodded. West loosened his grip and let her pull away.

“First positions, opening act. Cut lights.” The shadows thickened throughout the auditorium. Only the dim lights sunken into the stagefront held their intensity. In them, only the faint gleam of the figure’s silver cane suggested the rising motion of his hands. Tiny shadows moving within the darkness latched on the amber edges surrounding the winged Mani. “And… begin.”

The shadows around the amber disappeared, taking every trace of hard stone with them, save for a rigid coil of amber about the neck of the Mani that had been caught within it.

“-PLEASE DON’T!” The scream ripped through the auditorium, amplified and echoing in the several seconds that followed as the woman, eyes wide with horror, drew back from the edge of the platform. In the bare light, dots and splashes of fresh red violence stood out over her arms and face. “Oh, no. Nonono.” She didn’t look out at the room; her eyes snapped down to her bloodied front, fighting against tears. “No, no no, no….”

She didn’t realize the presence of a figure on the platform until it leaned over, nearly touching her ear, and stage-whispered, “It’s showtime, dearie.” With a start of sheer terror, she whipped around, only just in time to see the billow of a coat melding seamlessly with the shadows backstage.