“Will a sorcerer visit Karasar in the next month?” Gushkabel asks routinely.
‘Doom,’ say the bones.
She frowns and tosses them again. “Will Karasar be in danger?”
‘Doom’
“Will I be in danger?” she mutters frantically.
‘Doom’
“What is happening?” she asks panicked, forgetting not to ask open ended questions.
‘Doom’
She scoops up the bones and thinks desperately what to do. She has always known they can spell ‘doom’ but she has never seen it before.
“What should I do?” she asks silently, she does not toss the bones.
Mother Magda stirred her potion with a teaspoon, watching it swirl in its little bottle. She took out the teaspoon and looked at it with her huge eyes, it was riddled with holes that were still steaming and bubbling. They didn’t make teaspoons like they used to, she thought.
There was a knock at the door and she spun around in surprise, knocking her potion to the ground where it immediately began to burn a hole in the floor. She ignored it and rushed to the door where Gushkabel was waiting.
The two witches looked at each other, Gushkabel lined and wizened and severe, Magda small with watery eyes and a quivering lip. Magda’s lip quivered more at the sight of her visitor.
“Gushkabel?” she asked in shock. “What brings you here? I haven’t seen you in months.”
“You haven’t seen me in years Magda,” Gushkabel corrected.
“Right, but also months, months change with the seasons so I count with them, one year is much the same as another.”
Gushkabel sighed. “May I come in?”
“Well, you could, but you’d have to push past me and I might fall onto a sharp piece of glass adding further guilt to your conscience.”
Gushkabel sighed. “I apologise for how I have treated you in the past Magda, I need your help now.”
Magda’s quivering lip broke out in a shaky grin. “The great Gushkabel, toppler of tyrants, slayer of sorcerers, reader of bones, needs my help. Needs the help of poor old Mother Magda, who never had a nice set of bones to make herself feel more important than everyone else.”
“Yes, well, I apologise for-”
“You apologise for nothing Gushkabel!” Magda’s eyes were growing more watery by the second. “Your mouth moves in the way your brain moves it but the words it speaks it doesn’t mean. You say what you think you have to say to get my help not because you actually believe any of it. You think you’re oh so much better than me and you’re doing a poor job of pretending otherwise.” She rubbed her eyes and calmed herself before continuing. Gushkabel was lost for words. “But all that said I will help you,” Magda continued. “Not because of some useless apology but because I help people who ask for it.” She turned around and walked inside, beckoning her guest after her.
Gushkabel stood on the doorstep and blinked. Then she followed Magda inside and shut the door. They sat on armchairs in front of a dead fireplace while a newt licked spilled potion off the floor. Magda sipped something out of a teacup that did not look like tea. She didn’t offer Gushkabel any which she was glad for.
“So what can I help you with?”
“It’s the bones,” she replied quietly, always wary of discussing them with others.
Magda sniffed in annoyance and sipped her drink. “What’s happened, did you lose them?”
“No, they only read doom now. Every question I ask, ‘doom’ is the answer.”
Magda sipped her drink some more. “Sounds pretty clear to me. You might be doomed.”
Gushkabel leaned back and sighed. “Maybe I am, but I’d like to know what manner of doom awaits me so I might be prepared for it. If I’m to die there I things I need to take care of first.”
“So you want me to tell you what will happen?”
Gushkabel hesitated. It hurt to rely on Magda’s methods, so much less reliable than her own, but she had no other choice. “Yes,” she said curtly. “What can you tell me?”
Magda leaned back and set her drink aside. “I know nothing directly involving you, if I did I’d have sent word to you as soon as I heard of it. From what I do know neither Ahken nor its enemies care about you and your business.”
“What of Karasar? There was a sorcerer warlord there not long ago?”
“Of sorcerers I cannot tell you, they are not easy to see unless they are close by. And Karasar...” she trailed off and looked off into the distance with her big watery eyes. Gushkabel shuffled nervously in her chair, Magda’s methods never gave clear answers like hers, and most of the time they gave no answers at all.
Magda shrugged. “Nothing has its eye on Karasar that I’m aware of.”
“So you cannot help me?”
“No, but that is what you expected, is it not?”
Gushkabel sighed again. “I suppose I had better be going, I am sorry to have bothered you.”
Magda nodded and watched her walk out of the cottage. As she left she called out. “Oh Gushkabel, on the off chance you do survive, there is something else brewing. Something far to the west, very far to the west. Something old Ahken is quite interested in.”
Gushkabel grunted in acknowledgement. “I’ll keep it in mind.” Then she left and Magda was alone again. She cleaned up the spilled potion and began making it again.
The night was cold and so the street urchins were clustered around an old brazier that they’d filled with trash to burn. They didn’t talk, they rarely did on cold nights. Much better to focus that energy on huddling under rotting blankets, trying to keep warm.
They were on a back street, far from being in anyone’s way, but the guard that saw them didn’t care, he just wanted to hurt some people any way he could.
“Alright you lot! Break it up! Break it up!” he shouted as he moved in, holding a club in his hands and kicking at them. Forcing them to scatter into the frigid night. They hung back in the dark, waiting to regroup once he’d gone. He was having none of it.
“Burning trash like this,” he scowled. “Disgusting.” He kicked it over and the fire tumbled across the cobblestones and onto the wooden houses beyond. The guard ignored it and turned to shout at the street urchins. Shouting words of hate with no meaning behind them. The urchins ignored him and watched in fascination as the fire licked up the side of the building. They knew somewhere that they should do something, call for help or turn the guard around. But they’d all been on the streets for so long it was difficult for them to care.
Eventually the guard noticed something and turned around. He screamed in alarm and the street urchins scattered. The guard rushed to get help, or maybe just to escape, he wasn’t sure. Meanwhile the fire burned and burned, inside the house, people screamed.
It was dry that season in Karasar and the fire spread quickly. People ran and screamed and feeble attempts with bucket chains were made to quell the flames. Warning bells rang and the smoke billowed all above the city. In one of the bell towers a man frantically yanked at the bell rope, holding his other hand over his mouth and coughing and crying in the smoke. The fire was getting closer to him so he gave the bell one more ring and then scrabbled down the stairs, smoke filling the stairwell, his eyes, his lungs.
He staggered out onto the street and felt the heat of the flames all around him, he ran toward his home and as he ran he saw other people running all about him. Some people were doubled over, coughing and crying, children were screaming. Ahead of him he saw a figure covered in blood and ash crawling from a building that was well ablaze by now. He staggered over to them and tried to pick them up, get them onto his shoulder and carry them to safety.
But their blood was like acid and it burned into his skin. He fell backward and stared at his hands as the flesh of his palms burned away. In front of him the figure slowly got to their feet, their movements only jerks and spasms. He saw now it was a woman and he watched in amazement as she stood upright, her naked body covered in burns that went all the way to her bones. He watched as the burns healed.
She was beautiful and she looked down at him with furious golden eyes, the fires blazing behind her. He whimpered in pain for that was all he could think to say.
Then he heard hacking, pained laughter from behind her. She spun around to see a man climbing from the ruins, his horrific burns also healing, his eyes also golden in the firelight. The bell ringer recognised the man. He was who they made statues of to skewer every year for the harvest festival. He was the bogeyman who was in all the art to scare children or the paintings to reflect on the nature of evil. He was Ceros, Sorcerer King of Karasar, slain by Randolph Thar nigh on fifty years ago. He looked at the burning city with his golden eyes, reared his head back and laughed.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
There were some in the city who could still remember the time of Ceros. There were those who remembered his horrific experiments involving swathes of sacrifices, his abductions of young men and women who took his fancy, his army of walking dead soldiers patrolling the streets night and day. They recognised his laugh and it chilled them to their bones. Those that weren’t battling the fire were drawn with morbid curiosity toward the ruins of Gushkabel’s house, to see if it were really him.
The laugh was cut short by a flash from the sky and then a boom of thunder rolled across the city. Slowly it began to rain. The sorceress stood in the rain and watched Ceros stagger from her bolt of lightning. He collapsed into the fiery ruins of Gushkabel’s house.
She walked forward cautiously, watching the flickering flames. Then the flames exploded and tore across the ground, burning up the blood trail she’d left as a raging inferno to wrap around her and sear into her flesh.
Ceros stood up from the wreckage and glared at the burning sorceress. “I am king here! You are-”
Wind howled through the city, flattening the flames and brushing embers onto the streets. It hurled from behind the sorceress and quenched the fire on her skin. Then it slammed into Ceros and sent him staggering back. Water from the rain pooled beneath his foot and he slipped, crashing into the burning basement of the house. Then the rain began to pelt down in fury, stinging the bell ringer with its force. But the water didn’t stay there, it slid across the ground, propelled by the wind, to gather in the basement where Ceros was now floundering.
By the time he stood up it was up to his neck, he swam for the ruined stairs, grabbing at the edges of the ruined house. The sorceress stood over him, her new burns already healing.
“I am a sorceress bitch,” she said and lightning fell down from the smoke filled sky, striking the pool of water Ceros was in. The flash lit up the entire street and the boom of thunder swept the sorceress’s hair back from her and whipped the water off her naked skin. When the flash faded Ceros had disappeared into the dark water below. The sorceress peered over the side, waiting for him to emerge. He didn’t.
The earth began to rumble and she staggered backward to avoid falling into the water. The ground tipped and heaved and crumbled in with a splash. Around her buildings and people shook and fell and thin cracks began to open up in the ground. Then it stopped and all was calm.
From a hidden alleyway Gushkabel watched, clutching a cane with white knuckles. She had arrived back as the fire had been starting and had rushed to her house but she’d been too late. The bones were in there, now gone up in flames, and even worse the sorcerers were in there. Ceros and the sorceress, now battling in the middle of the city. It was seeming it was a time for being wrong. First her meeting with Magda, now her imprisoned sorcerers escaping, all her mistakes were beginning to catch up with her. And she was nothing more than a feeble old woman. There was nothing she could do.
The sorceress had gotten up and was looking at the pile of rubble that had once been Guhskabel’s basement. Ceros was gone, using his earthquake to clear out a path to one of his secret tunnels Gushkabel didn’t doubt. She had no idea what he might have stored down there, she’d found a few but she’d always known there were many more. She stood in her alleyway and felt hopelessness settle in.
Ceros ran through the tunnel, his bare feet slapping wetly against the floor. He was in excruciating pain from the lightning bolt and his many burns still hadn’t healed. He hadn’t learned much about others like him but it was well known that a sorceress had greater power than a sorcerer. They could birth monsters that could put any he could make to shame, they could control the minds of men and women and even their command over the elements was greater. He knew in another fair fight he would likely come off even worse than he had that time. But he wasn’t going to make it a fair fight.
The sorceress found a dying woman with burns all over her face and put her out of her misery. She took her clothes and wrapped herself up in them, feeling safer somehow despite how little practical difference it made. She was still in the middle of the street while much of the city looked on her, she wasn’t sure what to do about that. Her rains had extinguished most of the fires although her winds had likely done more harm than good and Ceros’s earthquake had destroyed most of the houses in the immediate area.
Her head still hurt, like her brain was swelling explosively against the inside of her skull. She assumed it was the acid she’d been dissolving in for who knew how long, her memories of that were fuzzy and almost entirely pain. She just wanted to curl up and let the pain go away but everyone was watching her. She felt she should do something but there was so much pain she couldn’t think long enough to come up with something. So she leaned against a wall and felt her body heal as it always did as everyone watched in fear.
Then he came back, he wasn’t naked this time but clad in golden armour decorated with sigils of rats and skulls and he was laughing his fearless laugh. In one hand he held a great axe, the axehead coated in glowing blue sigils, that couldn’t be good. In his other hand he held a shield which he pushed in front of himself, then charged.
The sorceress stood to meet him, she had no weapon and she hadn’t had time to mind control anyone or birth any monsters. She had just herself. And all the elements of the earth and the heavens. She struck him with lightning and she staggered but as she was moving back out of his way his own lightning bolt came down and she crumpled before it, almost collapsing to the ground herself.
Then he was upon her and she had to conjure a great wind to blast herself along the ground and out of the way of the deadly axe. As it swung she heard it laugh, a tiny musical laugh echoing from the glowing sigils. A laugh that sounded just like Ceros.
He pulled the axe from the building it had bit into and rounded on her, holding the shield up to protect against lightning. She scrabbled along the ground, she wasn’t used to feeling fear, it had only truly happened once before in her life and that time she wasn’t in danger of actual death. Her mind went numb at the thought.
Her scrabbling hand landed on something hot and she threw it at him, causing the embers to flare up in his face. As he staggered she leapt to her feet and ran, searching desperately for a way out of this. She reached the crumbled ruin of Gushkabel’s house and jumped over the broken hole in the ground. She didn’t make it and crashed into the side of the pit, hunched up over the other side, desperately trying to pull herself up.
She heard the laugh behind her and looked to see Ceros walking calmly toward her, laughing. The burns on his face already healed.
“I told you didn’t I, whore. I am Ceros, the King of Karasar. You think you can fight me here? You are nothing here, not next to me!”
The sorceress scrabbled onto solid ground on the other side and slowly stood up to face him. It was a strange experience, being insulted like that. She’d been called monster and demon and all those sorts of things before. But no one had ever called her nothing, no one had dared. Because she was very far from nothing, she was a sorceress. Bitch.
All the smoke and ash and dust in the sky that had been left there by the fire suddenly plunged down into the city again. Everything went black and gray and shadowy and all the mortals began coughing and choking in order to breathe. The sorcerers didn’t though, they didn’t need to breathe. So they made no sound or sight to give away their position. Except for a glowing, faintly laughing, blue axe.
The sorceress flew around the pit in the ground, silently padding on the places she’d scouted out before she brought the smoke down. She could see the axe dangling as Ceros stood there in confusion.
“What did you-?” he began but by then she was already there. She grabbed the axe with one hand and pressed the other into his back. Then she conjured up a great wind which she was prepared for but he wasn’t. He tumbled forward into the hole and she took the axe from him and swung it. The wind blew away most of the smoke and she could see what she had done.
Ceros fell crashing into the pit and collapsed onto the rubble at the bottom, his leg remained on the street where it bounced once then lay still.
The smoke rose at her command and she stood above him, holding the axe in one hand. He ditched his shield and crawled out of the pit, trailing his acidic sorcerer blood behind him. She knew he was dead, a magic weapon and a magic creature, that was all it took to kill a sorcerer, so why was he laughing.
“You dumb whore,” he said through laughter as he hauled himself back onto the street next to his leg. “That axe is only magical in my hands.” She looked down at the axe, it had stopped glowing. “You think I’d craft something that could actually kill me.” He burst out laughing and pulled his severed leg back onto the stump. “You can’t win, no matter what stupid tricks you-”
She chopped off his leg again before he could heal. He screamed in pain and fell backward. “What are you doing?! Just give up! You can’t-”
She picked up the leg and tossed away the axe. It was worth a shot. He held up his hands weakly but he was in pain and lying on the ground, she batted them aside. Then she beat his head in with the piece of bone protruding from the top of his leg. He stopped laughing after that.
She threw away the bloody leg and stood there, looking down at the dead sorcerer, covered in blood. Her face was expressionless but inside she was happy. She’d killed an evil sorcerer, she’d shown... someone... That had seemed important at some point. Her memories were all messed up by the acid.
Someone spoke to her and she looked up to see a huge crowd looking at her submissively. They were all tired and wet and huddling together, some had burns, some had limps, some had horrible scars. The man speaking to her was the one with the burned hands. What he was saying was “Are you going to rule over us now instead?”
She looked at him, she looked at all of them. That would be nice, to rule a whole city instead of having to live in the woods all the time, hunted like a monster by the people she tried to help. There would be plenty of men to bed so she could birth all the monsters she could ever want. She had earned it hadn’t she, she’d defeated the last sorcerer king.
She looked out across the crowd and saw an old woman in an alleyway clutching a cane. She saw the woman and recognised her and became filled with anger and hate. Memories came back, memories of a knife and a chest and an argument. An argument about whether she was truly using her powers for good.
The old woman shook her head slowly and all the rage and hate and passion slowly bled out of the sorceress. She was right of course, she always had to be right.
“No,” she said to the man, to the crowd. “You are better off ruling yourselves.” Then she walked through them and out of the city into the wilds.
Gushkabel stood in her alley and trembled in residual fear. She had been wrong, she had been wrong about everything. The sorceress wasn’t the monster she’d thought she was, she had spared Karasar even though it had been completely within her power. Gushkabel had lost everything, all her power, all her influence, and she’d assumed that with her loss her city would fall to either Ceros or the sorceress. But it hadn’t, things had turned out okay without her help. She shuddered, things had turned out okay.
Mother Magda was searching desperately for another teaspoon when there was another knock on the door. She abandoned her search and opened the door to see Gushkabel.
She frowned, seeing her once in a month was a fantastical occurrence, seeing her twice was getting ridiculous. “Did you bring a teaspoon?” she asked curiously.
Gushkabel looked confused, that was surprising, she never looked confused. “No, why would I bring a teaspoon?”
“Because I can’t find one, really what good are those bones if they can’t predict the useful things you’ll need in the future?”
Gushkabel smiled a thin smile. “The bones are gone, burned in a fire. That was what the doom was all about. They were doomed, not me.”
“Oh... well congratulations. You are not doomed, although now I suppose you don’t have much in the way of magic do you.”
“No... no I don’t.”
Magda beamed. “It’s okay, you don’t need powerful magic to be happy.”
“No you don’t, that’s what I came here about. I owe you an apology, a real one this time. I’m sorry for looking down on you for all those years, and I want to ask you something.”
“Is this more doom stuff? I already told you everything I know about it.”
“No, it’s... I want you to teach me to do what you do... Please...”
Magda beamed even wider. “Well well well, I couldn’t say no to that. Come in come in.”
They sat back down in the same chairs as last time with Magda sipping the same mysterious drink, this time she made two though, and offered one to Gushkabel.
“Do I really have to drink this?” she asked and Magda nodded. She tried a sip, it was unsurprisingly, disgusting.
Magda sipped her drink and looked off into the distance with her watery eyes. “Well Gushkabel, tell me, what do you know of gods and demons?”