[https://i.imgur.com/VGCFMQy.png]

Old mother Hecate sat calmly on her stool, watching the flames of the fire as they slowly consumed the wood. The wood, in turn, let out the occasional distressed crackle and pop as it gave into its inevitable fate, leaving only bitter grey ash behind.

Memories of days long past drifted through her mind. Many were sad, but even the happy moments were now turned bittersweet by time's unstoppable tide.

A sound began to gently intrude on her ruminations as she sat there, and it quickly grew louder, disrupting her thoughts entirely. She listened; it was the sound of worried people running and shouting at and to one another. One pair of footsteps ran to her house, followed by a loud panicky pounding on her door.

"Come in!" she called out as she banished the last thoughts of the past from her mind.

Alton burst through the door, his face pale and sweaty. "Old Mother, you must help! The children have been attacked in the forest! Most of the children are back, but Refenial and my son are still missing. The children say it killed Maxit in one blow!" He blurted the words out so fast it took a moment for her brain to process the jumbled mess of words.

"Please, old mother, I can't lose Obit. I can't lose another son." He begged, his eyes starting to tear up.

Hecate sat silent and unmoving. She had so little power left. She couldn't waste it, couldn't hasten her death. She wanted to refuse him, on any other day she might have, but with Refenial out there, she had to commit. Her instincts told her he was too valuable to lose to bad luck.

Alton looked ready to explode with nervous, fearful energy as she sat statue-still.

"Fine," She said tersely.

She half closed her eyes as she slowed the speed at which the enchantment that kept her alive drew mana. For a brief moment, she would once again have a sliver of power.

Alton jerked back in response as the already ancient-looking crone seemed to age years in less than a second.

Old mother Hecate began to rise from her stool. Her usually slow, shaky movements were now reminiscent of a marionette guided by a graceful puppet master. Slowly and unnaturally, she rose beyond even her height until she floated above the ground save the tips of her wooden clogs that slid gently over the floor's surface as she began to drift forwards.

Alton was so enraptured by the sight he almost forgot to move out of her way as she slid past him with unnerving silence. Old Mother Hecate flew out her door towards the village gate, the tips of her shoes leaving two winding trails in the mud as she went.

A group of village men were by the gate readying to leave, their faces solemn and determinedly grim. The faces of hard men who lived hard lives and knew what it was like to face tragedy. They carried a motley assortment of spears and tools pressed into service as makeshift weapons. They looked to Old Mother Hecate as she passed, hope and a little fear in their eyes as they saw her unnatural movement. She paid them no mind, never one to care for the opinions of others.

She flew out past the village into the cool, dim air of the forest. Its usually deathly silence was defiled by a distant and unnatural roar. She quickly flew towards the sound, weaving through the forest's many obstacles.

[https://i.imgur.com/oMrGBK6.png]

She saw Maxit first. The boy was slumped against a tree. She half closed her eyes momentarily, tilting her head to the side as she opened the eyes of her soul and looked at the boy. His soul still remained but showed signs of being close to leaving. He was close to death but not yet there.

There was another roar, much nearer this time, and she flew towards it.

There stood on two legs, an enormous wolf monster chewing happily on something. It snapped its jaws gleefully, the blood of whatever it was eating staining its lower jaw and chest a shiny crimson.

She looked at the creature that would have once been beneath her notice yet now cost so high a price to fight with mild distaste.

Across from the savage beast, lying on the ground, was Refenial. The lanky boy's black hair was dishevelled. His body was coated in a mixture of dirt from the forest floor and blood that poured from a ruined hand, and numerous minor scratches.

The wolf began to advance with a confident pace towards the downed boy but stopped after only a step and a half to cough awkwardly once, then again. It paused in its coughing, but then its throaty coughing began again as a long ragged burst. It wined piteously between coughs and spoke, "What, what, you taste wrong little one." The wolf coughed more and more as it began clawing at its own mouth, trying to remove any trace of Refenial's flesh.

Old Mother Hecate watched with cold interest, still unnoticed by the wolf.

"Disgusting, disgusting, vile! What are you? What are you?" the wolf's voice raised to a choking scream as it ranted at Refenial. Refenial lay still, too bloodied and beaten to respond.

"Unnatural, vile thing, abomination! Abomination! It burns, it wriggles and writhes! What are you? What are you?" As the wolf finished speaking, it began walking again towards Refenial.

"Stop," Hecate said softly.

The wolf halted in its tracks, held tightly in the invisible bindings of the magic she effortlessly wove upon it. The wolf's raised foot hovered midstep, unable to reach the ground.

The wolf turned his head and noticed the Old Mother for the first time. It whined again as it met her eyes and saw a monster more terrible than itself look back.

"Please, please, old one, kill me if you must, but that thing is wrong, wrong, wrong, unnatural, kill it, kill it, kill it but don't taste, don't devour it. I tried to savour it, but now it burns, it wriggles and writhes, it might devour me." The wolf babbled, whispering the last few words.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Hecate carefully kept her expression neutral. She had suspicions about the boy, but they were much more guesses than certainties. She'd never seen a monster react like this before, and there were few things in this world that she hadn't seen before. "What are you talking about?" she asked, her tone sharp.

"That little one, he's not a little one, but he is a little one. He tricked me. He tricked me, deceived me, he's wrong, vile, vile, kill it, kill it." The wolf's eyes opened wide in fear. "It's started. It's devouring me! It's devouring me!" The wolf's voice started in a low whisper but quickly became a deranged scream.

The wolf started fighting against the spell that held it bound with its full strength. While it moved not even one iota, its muscles twisted and bulged under its pelt. The wolf abruptly stopped struggling in the spell's grasp, seemingly unconscious.

Hecate half closed her eyes and opened those of her soul, focusing on sensing deeper into the wolf than any non-magical means could.

She caught sight of the monster's twisted and half-built soul, exactly as she'd expect from a beast like this. Then she sensed something else. A pinprick of darkness latched onto the monster's soul. The tiny speck began to grow as it ate away at the monster's soul-consuming it faster and faster as it went.

As it grew, it became like an abyss of absolute darkness, a wrent of perfect null in the beast's soul.

Suddenly it stopped, and as Hecate stared into the abyss, she realised it was staring back with an alien intelligence that made her feel like a small child compared to the crushing feeling of age it exuded.

She no longer felt safe in this interrogation. Her instincts, honed by a lifetime of not dying when most would have, screamed at her to kill this dark horror now. With a fluid motion, she conjured a rough-forged and functional single-edged copper sword into her hand and sliced the monster's head from its body with a single swing.

As she released the spell holding the wolf, and it fell to the ground dead, she watched it with cold, unyielding focus until she was certain that both the soul of the wolf and the abyss had fizzled away.

She couldn't ignore what she had seen. She turned to Refenial, her sword held loosely at her side as it dripped lupin blood onto the forest floor.

She focused in on him again like she had when first meeting him, like she had just with the wolf moments ago.

Deep inside him, she saw his soul, it wasn't the soul of a child, but it was an ordinary soul, the soul of a human, most likely. That wasn't what unsettled her, though. What troubled her about it was the subtle signs of tooling and crafting upon its surface. It had been skillfully reforged, warped and rebuilt. Someone had forged the soul into a perfect sphere, an armoured ball of soul. It was impenetrable and egg-like in its secrets.

She could have smashed the soul and forced her way in, but that would Destroy it and remove all hope the boy may be of use to her. She'd try avoiding that if she could.

As she looked at the soul, she noticed a tiny crack, an imperfection left from the wolf's attack, and for the briefest of moments, she felt the abyss once more before the break sealed itself.

She sighed, feeling deathly tired and sent the blade away to the magic space it usually resided in before lowering herself to the ground and pulling her walking cane from the same space.

She walked to Refenial, who was lying there bloodied with tears silently welling in his eyes as he held his ruined hand.

With her cane she gently poked his side, where his top had torn, in one of the few spots of his skin left unbloodied and unbruised. "I go to all that effort of repairing that top for you, boy, and you can't even go two full days without ripping it to ribbons."

The boy sobbed as tears began to flow freely down his cheeks. Old Mother Hecate slowly and awkwardly bent down to bring herself closer to him. She reached forwards and gently placed her pale bony hand on his forehead. "I will stop the bleeding, and I have ways of mending your hand, but now isn't the time."

She gently released a healing spell into Refenial. She was as frugal as her skills would allow, focusing on what was required and little more. She had spent so much, too much. She wouldn't risk an ounce more than was absolutely needed.

As the soothing healing energy finished washing over him, Refenial asked her, "Please, Maxit was hurt real bad. Obit was hurt too."

Hecate nodded. "Lay still and recover. I'll see what I can do."

She looked around and saw Obit sitting on the ground. He was carefully looking at a swollen ankle, but other than that and a few bruises seemed fine, so she instead headed over to the silent form of Maxit.

The boy was still slumped against the tree where she had first seen him.

She gently touched his forehead, using a spell to assess the damage. It was catastrophic. Almost every bone in his body was fractured, if not broken, and his organs ranged from merely damaged to almost wholly destroyed. His spine primarily had borne the brunt of the damage as he had hit the tree back first, and it was now smashed beyond repair to all but the most powerful of magic.

It would take more mana than she could afford to heal these injuries, to make the boy walk again and live a normal life. She could heal him enough to live, but life was harsh in the village. Perhaps his family would be happy today to know the boy lived. What would happen to the boy's dignity as he saw his kin sweat and toil to care for him, feed him, and wipe his arse.

Winters were always harsh, but what would happen when the crops failed as they always did. Feeding every mouth was a struggle; death wasn't unheard of. His family would be forced to choose between taking food from their healthy children's hungry mouths to feed Maxit or taking on the burden of putting him out of his misery themselves.

She'd done so many things, and so many had died at her hands. What was one more if it brought some small mercy to the world?

His heart beat weakly in his chest. It took only the tiniest tendril of magic, and the boy was to never wake.

She lifted her hand away and saw a crow settle in a nearby tree. As she turned to face it, she heard the footsteps and shouts of the village men rushing towards them.

She turned to face the men as they approached. They paled when they saw the corpse of the wolf and noticed Old Mother Hecate, her clothes stained with its blood.

"The monster is dead, and so is Maxit. Obit has a twisted ankle. Refenial is more injured but safe to move to the village." She told them.

The men gawked at her, still trying to catch up with her words.

She recognised a man at the back as Maxit's father. He dropped to his knees, his axe falling from his hand as he released great heaving sobs of grief.

"Take the children back to the village. I still have something to do here." Hecate commanded, walking away from the group.

[https://i.imgur.com/oMrGBK6.png]

Once she got out of sight and earshot of the villagers, she stopped waiting in the murky twilight of the forest. One after another crows silently flew in and landed on the branches of surrounding trees.

Soon the trees were heavy with them as they sat in every branch and bough like dark fruit of the dark forest.

"I see," Hecate said to the murder of crows.

The murder squawked back; their sharp cries sounded like merry laughter.

"Why did you let him come to me, though? You know I'd kill you if I had the strength left in me."

Every crow shrugged in perfectly choreographed unison.

"Why don't you come here and speak to me directly instead of hiding behind your birds?" She taunted up at them.

The crows stayed still and unresponsive to her questions.

"When the wolf tried to eat him, it managed to get some of his soul. I saw what was underneath."

The murder turned its collective heads in curious unison.

"You don't know. You don't know what he is, either. Do you?" She said, smiling in satisfaction at the revelation.

K-Kaw, the birds squawked angrily.

Old Mother Hecate looked up at the birds, smiling with malice. "Well, he's mine now. I'll not let you use him as a tool in your machinations, and I saw what he can do to your kind. Now begone, or I'll sic him on you after I'm done training him."

The crows cried angrily as they all took to the sky in their numbers, turning the twilight forest into midnight darkness.

[https://i.imgur.com/3vZaHAB.png]