The witches of Wyrmeridge were certainly not your decrepit, wrinkly, hunchback sort of women; they were by and large young, wore frilly dresses and bangles, with little bells hanging at their ankles which rang constantly as they frolicked around the yard. They danced around a central wooden pole, hands woven together, singing hymns before taking breaks to garden, pick berries, or stew something inside.

How cute, Momo thought. Well, as cute as a cult can be.

Momo approached them cautiously. Unfortunately, one of the witches spotted her immediately, pointing a finger at her with wide, awed eyes. She broke from the dancing group and bounded towards Momo.

“An angel,” were the first words out of her mouth, her umber brown skin shining under the sunlight. She leaned close, and caressed Momo’s black wing feathers. “Tribeca, it’s an angel.”

Momo laughed nervously. “I promise you, I’m not an angel. My name’s Momo—”

Another woman, presumably Tribeca, approached her as a zookeeper might an animal; she held a sharpened scythe towards Momo. The curved blade clashed hard with the frilly, floral aesthetic of her robes. It was like running into an armed kindergarten teacher.

“That’s not an angel, Zie. It’s a tourist,” Tribeca said, evidently aggravated that their group dance got interrupted. Several of the women had fallen in the grass when the rhythm broke. “If you’ve got money to spend, stop mucking about in our yard and talk to Laura. She’s inside.”

Zie put her hands on her hips, defiant. “No way. I know an angel when I see one. She’s got that pure, doughy looking face. Like you could bake bread with those cheeks.”

Momo blushed.

“Thank you,” she said quickly. “I’ll just be inside.”

Zie tried to prolong her visit in the garden, but Momo was—even in her damaged state—quicker than most. She slipped in through the massive wooden doors as another witch was slipping out, and smiled unconsciously as the natural fragrance filled her nostrils.

Back on Earth, her dad had a habit of bringing in things from the garden to decorate the living room. Small twigs. Stones. Pressed flowers. Her mom thought it made the house look like a campsite, but Momo loved it. She felt like a faerie.

The cabin opened to a wide, open-plan chamber. It looked a bit like the lobby at a gimmick-hotel, where all the female staff were forced to wear flower crowns and aprons and summer dresses. One witch worked the main desk, inking and stamping parchment. Many more filtered quickly in and out of the main chamber and into adjacent storage rooms, carrying baskets full of potions; potions which, once arranged, were deposited into sealed packages, and piled high behind the front desk witch.

All of that was to say, it was a real operation.

Aside from the witches in charge of parcels, there were two more in the back who were sat by cauldrons. They looked more like scientists than witches, really; they held delicate measuring instruments to their noses, peering down over spectacles as liquid dribbled up and down their tubes. Sometimes they’d drop in a new ingredient into the cauldron, and there’d be a brief flash of blinding light, and a sound like a radioactive explosion, but this didn’t seem to interrupt anything—the witches simply kept their routine going, nonetheless.

“Wyrmeridge Witches, can I help you?”

The witch at the front desk eyed her lazily. Despite the cacophony of chaos surrounding her, it seemed that Momo’s silent awe was the most disruptive thing present.

“Oh, hi, yes, hello. You must be Laura,” Momo said, uttering a bunch of nonsense as she approached the desk. There was a chair there made of ivy and vines, and the witch gestured for her to sit, so she did. “I was wondering if I could purchase some poison?”

“Poison?” Laura repeated. She didn’t sound surprised, but she did seem mildly offended. Not that her face showed it—she was half looking at Momo, half pressing stamps to paper. “This is an elixir shop. Not a poison emporium. We sell fully finished potions, not ingredients.”

“Oh,” Momo frowned. “But you do have poison?”

“Of course we have poison. Half of our elixirs use it as a main ingredient,” Laura laughed, but it was so lifeless that it was more like a cough. “But it's a proprietary poison. Older than you and your mother and your grandmother. We don’t sell it to System-theists.”

“...Right,” Momo swallowed.

Maybe one of the potions will do?

“Do you have any potions that would have the same effect as poison if I spilled them on something?” she said. “Say, a piece of paper?”

Laura looked up from the page, and gave her a look of true revulsion.

“Why would you spill a potion on something intentionally?”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

She looked back down at the parchment, and stamped with greater emphasis now, as if the page was somehow a personification of Momo’s face.

“Potions are for consumption,” she said coldly, and Momo felt it like a bee sting. “They have always been for consumption. I don’t know what you System-users think they’re for, but I’m not interested in selling to someone who doesn’t even respect the basic principles.”

Momo grimaced.

This is not going remotely well.

She dug into her pocket, hoping to find some candy for a [Sweet Deal] attempt, but no such luck. She had stolen a bunch from the carriage dinner buffet initially, but she ended up feeding it all to Dusk by mid-afternoon.

Greedy cat.

Luckily, she still had [Charmer]; the spell that allowed her, for sixty seconds, to increase the target’s disposition by as many Charisma points as Momo possessed. And it could be casted silently.

Just as Momo was about to think it, she froze—

I–I can’t.

She had totally forgotten. For a moment, her body had felt so normal, so perfectly pain free, that the events of the last few months had completely fallen to the wayside. She had been moments away from potentially cooking her mana pathways to dust, all over a potion, and it hadn’t even occurred to her.

“Did you see a ghost or something?” Laura pried, not looking up from her parchment. “You look as white as a sheet of parchment. Please, if you’re going to faint, do it elsewhere. That seat is reserved for customers only, and I don’t give out free samples.”

The witch stood as something arrived—no, flew—through one of their open windows. It was a tiny dragon. A small, thin, scaled beast, no bigger than Dusk, with a letter in its jowls. Laura scratched the creature once under the mouth, trying to get it to drop the letter, but it refused. It began snarling, and jumping up and down on the desk.

Her audio courier introduced the beast.

Type: Wyrm. Level 7.

“What’s got you so riled up?” Laura said, annoyed. The creature continued puffing white smoke out of its nostrils. “What is it?”

A noise like an atom bomb detonated outside. The entire cabin shook, planks falling from the ceiling, the wyrm squealing, Laura shrieking.

Momo fell from her chair, and the doors to the cabin swung open. It was Zie and Tribeca, hair mussed, faces matted with sweat, eyes brimming with alarm.

“What’s happened?” Laura said, shooting from her chair. All of the witches, previously sputtering around in perfect harmony, were now huddled around her, terrified.

Groaning, Momo raised herself, and peered through the wide open doors. In the sliver of space between the two women, she saw snow. It was laying on the ground in large clumps.

The grass was perfectly green just a minute ago. When did that snow get there?

“It’s one of the Great Wyrms,” Zie said quickly, nerves spilling from her lips. “The one borne of winter. It should have been hibernating, but—”

“It’s attacking!” shouted Tribeca. “Get down!”

A torrent of icicles rained onto the cabin from above, giant, white spikes piercing through the ceiling. The witches screamed as pieces of the roof began to collapse, wood falling into cauldrons, crashing into storage rooms. They evacuated en masse, a mob of women folding themselves through what was previously a large door, but now a miniscule tunnel.

Now, with [Effortless Flight] to aid her, Momo bypassed the clogged doorway and flew straight through one of the holes in the ceiling. She felt a foreign chill in the air that hadn’t been there hours previous, as if she had blinked and entered a tundra.

The village’s surroundings reflected this temperature change: all of the houses were now covered in thick layers of snow, and the waterfalls, once gushing, were frozen solid. The lawn that the witches were huddling in was covered in icicles; the garden was a graveyard of ice-pierced tomatoes.

And in the sky, was a dragon, or, at least, that had been Momo’s first impression. On closer look, it didn’t look like Radu’s uncle. It was unnaturally thin, and its wings were miniscule, more for show than for use. It seemed to levitate more with magic than anything else. It was truly a flying worm, a serpent, with shining, light blue scales, and menacing fangs protruding from an open maw of a mouth.

More noticeable than anything were its eyes; they were completely white, pupil-less, as if possessed.

Type: Great Guardian Wyrm of Winter. Level 45.

HP: 540 / 540

“Shit,” Momo said, as she watched it circle madly in the sky. She then looked down at the ground frantically, hoping to find some magical savior laying in wait. But there was no one. They were utterly removed from civilization, and the highest level person on Momo’s carriage had been the chef, who by no means had the training to take on a flying sky worm.

A level forty-five monster. That’s the same level as those cloud grunts I faced back in Morganium. This would be doable for me with my spells, but without them…

The wyrm screeched, and dove at her. She dodged to the right, and the creature smashed into the side of the mountain, whining in pain.

“Watch out!” Momo screamed down at the witches. Rocks from the injured mountainside began to shower them, but luckily, her warning gave them the time to react.

Momo inhaled sharply, her lungs struggling. She was still as nimble as before, but split-second dodging cost her a lot more Stamina than it should have. It took her several seconds to recover her breath.

As the dragon recuperated, Momo swooped down to where the witches were, and breathily interrogated them for more information.

“Is there anyone else here who can deal with that—that thing? Maybe the one with the scythe-sword thing?” she said urgently. “I—I’m not exactly in the best shape.”

“We’re forbidden from attacking the Great Wyrms,” Tribeca said, her voice a mix of fearful and angry. “We live here under their protection. If we violate that pact, all of them will awaken, and then we’ll be done for. It must be someone else.”

“You must have been sent here to protect us, angel,” Zie mumbled; she was covering her head with a wooden bowl and trembling at the knees. “I sensed it when I saw you.”

Momo grimaced. She was in no physical shape to be anyone’s savior, no less an angel.

“It’s recovered!” Laura shouted, pointing toward the sky. “You, stupid tourist, you want some poison, then do something!”

Momo looked toward the sky, and the wyrm stared back. A swirl of white and blue was forming inside its open jaw, primed to send another—likely bigger—torrent of deadly ice at the defenseless witches.

And from the looks of it, there was truly no one coming to save them.

Oh, screw it all.

She shrunk her wings down, gripped the handles of her rapiers, and catapulted into the sky.