Southern California, Fall 2054
Five-league boots with a water walking enchantment to cross a large ocean and landmass.
Half a dozen other enchantments to shield her from the weather.
More to mask her presence from threats.
A cloak of carrying for her passengers. An innocuous name for an enchantment gleaned from the foulest, evilest of sources.
Some would say one should not take such risks, but what was a true witch if not one that threaded the needle while balancing on the thread itself?
Or some other nonsense the older witches liked to say.
As for her?
She had less melodramatic notions overall, but she wasn’t above bowing to them in service of her class.
Ocean and land.
Great distance.
Just over 300 steps.
A witch of portents took one last to carry her over the distant walls and into the relative safety of ranger territory.
Travel arrangements had been made and she had permission which meant she didn’t have to deal with things like submitting to questioning and inspection with guards and such.
Not that it appeared that they had time judging by the piles of monster corpses and blasted landscape beyond the walls.
A glance skyward showed dark gray-skinned behemoths as ominous as gathering storm clouds, but with none of the comforting charm.
One last five-leagued step carried her to the neighborhood where her auguries had guided her to.
Quiet this time of night, but not as quiet as she had expected.
People walked the streets.
Armed patrols.
Armed civilians… just enjoying a stroll during the witching hour?
They eyed her suspiciously.
Some whispered urgently into smartphones or tiny magic gems.
Her metaphorical papers were in order so nothing ever came of it except for dubious nods which she returned with a tip of her black-as-night hat and a wide smile as bright as the slash of moon above.
She waited in the shadow of gnarled tree for the people to continue on their way before unfurling her cloak to disgorge her passengers.
Two young witches tumbled out.
The elder did so with some semblance of grace for he also had levels in dancer and it wasn’t his first time. He caught the younger before she could slam face first into the sidewalk.
“We are here, apprentices!”
She grinned like the cats did when watching an augury near its end for that meant an imminent filling of their bellies. She wasn’t the sort of which to make use of familiars, but she had to admit that they were useful at times. Cleaning up animal entrails and detritus was always the worst part of the craft. Indeed, cleaning up was usually the worst part of any craft.
“Time check!”
She clapped before pulling at her voluminous sleeve to reveal a wristwatch. It was gold and studded with glittering diamonds. A relic of an earlier age. From her understanding, such watches cost fortunes enough to feed thousands of people for a year or more. To think that men would rather spend it on gaudy, ostentatious mating displays than in helping their fellow human beings.
“8:05 am!” Tifaniel said.
“8:07:35 am,” Lucien said.
“Hmm…” she mused.
All three of them had a different time even though they had synced them before departure.
“Note the differences!”
Out came pens and notepads.
“Convert to local time!”
It had been vital to reach their destination at the right time.
Fortunately, the witching hour gave them plenty of leeway.
“Did we really cross all that in minutes?” Tifaniel said.
“Less,” Lucien grunted.
He was getting to that age of dark clothes and darker poetry. Although, he had mostly become monosyllabic and scowl-y.
“Amazing!”
She agreed with her apprentice.
“I was too young to remember, but I once flew across the same ocean with my family. It took hours.”
She could almost sigh.
Dead and gone.
Barely remembered.
Not at all if not for memory spells and Skills that allowed her to view them even if it was only as a viewer from without rather than a participant from within.
Something, despite its lack of emotional connection, was better than nothing and the unknown.
“Many hours in a camped cabin with recycled air and human odors.”
Her apprentices’ had even less frame of reference for the old world’s modes of travel.
Perhaps, she’d try to prevail upon connections, specifically that of Wytchraven, to give them the opportunity to ride within one of those ugly behemoth daggers in the sky?
Yes.
Strictly for them.
For a witch must fill their hats with as many experiences as possible.
The better for a young one to find their craft.
Definitely, for them.
Not just for her.
Not out of jealousy that she had yet to ride in one when other witches of her level and standing had done so. Sometimes repeatedly.
A sudden boom shook the sky.
An orange and yellow flower bloomed against a dark gray dagger.
Yes.
Danger was good for a young witch.
The better to prepare them.
It would be with great reluctance that she’d part with the boots upon her return. Directly into the armory they’d go until the next time the need would be deemed sufficient to risk them. Though, despite the distance one could cross in a single step there were many things in the world that could easily kill a witch regardless and the boots were one of a kind. A Quest reward that all attempts to replicate, even a lesser copy, had failed.
“Yes, yes,” she nodded sagely. “So, how was the experience inside the cloak?”
“Same,” Lucien grunted.
“It was strange.” Tifaniel closed her eyes, brow furrowing. “Cold, yet warm. Sometimes I felt like I’d freeze forever and I would never experience the warmth of my mom’s hug. Sometimes it got hot, really hot! Like I had been dragged into hell.”
“Hell’s not always just hot. Some parts of it are cold.”
“Yes, Lucien! You’ve done your reading!”
He grunted.
One of acknowledgment.
It hadn’t taken her long to learn the differences in tone and pitch.
She would’ve been a poor teacher otherwise.
Indeed, she felt that she was close to an adequate level of proficiency in the grunt language to hold a decent conversation with her apprentice eschewing actual words.
The Divine Comedy was a good read for brooding young witches.
“Oh!” Tifaniel opened her eyes and grew pale. “I also thought I heard children crying and begging for help.”
Lucien spat, as if to get a foul taste out of his mouth.
She sympathized.
Wearing the cloak was an altogether different experience from being inside of it.
“It is a foul enchantment. Now, tell me why?”
The question was for her younger apprentice.
“Because of where it came from. Foulness breeds foulness. Evil comes from evil. No matter what we do to try to change it something of the origin will always remain. The cloak contains some of the monster’s skin and pieces of its bag. Our enchantment is built on its magic.”
Her apprentice gazed up with eyes longing for approval.
She nodded.
It was a satisfactory answer.
“Now, my apprentices. Shall we proceed?”
An eager nod was followed by a surly one.
She led them down the dark street.
There were lights and they appeared to be in working order, just off.
Likely due to the loud booms and bright flashes overhead.
Lights meant life.
Death hungered for life in war.
It mattered not for she and her apprentices could see well in the dark thanks to the ointment smeared under their eyes.
She stopped in front of a darkened house.
Small like the rest.
Two, perhaps three bedrooms at most.
Single level.
Most had been truly dark.
Only a few leaked dim yellow from the edges of dark curtains and closed blinds.
Bright as beacons in the darkest of nights.
It explained the enchantments cast upon them.
Cheaper to place them on the individual occupied homes that on the entire neighborhood.
“Are you prepared, my apprentices?”
Nods.
“Good. You hold in your hands the most important part of our fell Quest. For this domicile must be handed over of a man’s free will before we can start. And if you fail… then our uncertain doom steps ever closer.”
Melodramatic.
Not entirely accurate.
Her auguries had pointed to this specific house.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
She knew it in her witchy bones now that she stood in front of it.
However, those same auguries had given her a few backup houses to try in case the man inside proved reluctant.
----------------------------------------
Roberto stared in the mirror.
Hunched shoulders pushed his stomach out, making him look like a fatty.
He sighed, straightened and vacuumed it in.
He poked at his midsection.
A grimace marred his slightly above average features.
In truth, he had upped his physique to compensate for the things he couldn’t change. At least not without a visit to the plastic surgeon.
And that was just cheating.
It was why he had remained a full natty even with the availability of performance enhancers that lacked many of the negative side effects that the old guys at the gym always reminisced about.
He never understood why they always sounded nostalgic about those days.
Acne, anxiety, diminished ball size and performance, a simmering rage just boiling underneath the surface ready to explode at any number of tiny, insignificant triggers and an early grave were things that didn’t at all sound appealing.
Nope.
Not for him.
Not even the new, better stuff could tempt him.
Now though?
He poked, pinched and pulled.
He was losing his six-pack.
He had to get back to the grind.
Not enough equipment at home.
Had to go back to the gym.
But then—
His eyes slid up to his head.
Three long strands was all that remained of what was once a full head of thick, dark hair just about two weeks ago.
Oh, he had plenty around the sides and back.
It made him look like one of those monks or samurai in those old movies his brother loved to watch.
If only he could’ve just shaved it all.
That’s what his buddies did and every other balding man at the gym.
Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate.
He could shave it all.
It just always grew back to the same sorry state looking back at him in the mirror.
Gone one moment.
Back the next time he woke up.
Full night’s sleep, a short nap and everything in between.
None of it mattered.
He had tried to find help.
Went to all sorts of people.
Barbers, hairstylists, doctors.
None had been able to help.
Even those that dipped their toes into magic user classes.
The only thing they had been able to tell him that his hair issues were definitely magical and they couldn’t fix it.
One had said that it felt like a curse and to maybe try a witch.
They were rare and they didn’t advertise services.
There was one with a shop down near the beach, but every time he tried to go inside an ugly old tomcat, black as night with a thick, pumpkin-sized head hissed at him and bared claws.
He was a swoll 260 and he could almost deadlift a car, but one look at those big, yellow eyes and he had turned around with his metaphorical tail tucked all the way between his legs.
Tangling with a mini-mountain lion was a step he wasn’t willing to take.
Sure, he could’ve brought his gun and shot it, but he figured the witch, let alone everyone else, wouldn’t be too happy about that.
Thus, he stayed indoors, ordering his food and alcohol, to stew in his misfortune.
One he might’ve been responsible for.
“This is unfair. Stupid bitch. Not like she wasn’t getting her own on the side… probably…”
Truth was he didn’t know that.
Not for sure.
His ex didn’t seem like the type.
He wasn’t blameless.
He could acknowledge that.
It was just that cursing him was too much. Like blasting a fly with a fireball for grazing his steak.
He threw a double bicep pose, flexing all he had just for a hit of that confidence.
Still huge, but definitely losing definition.
The doorbell broke him from his unhappy reverie.
“The fuck?”
He grabbed his shotgun from the rack in his hallway.
He had weapons stashed all over his house so that he wasn’t ever more than a few steps from one.
“Show front door camera on hallway screen.”
The tablet on the wall took a second to go from dark screen to even darker outside.
That was odd and scary.
The outdoor cams all had night vision mode.
He was just about to put a call in to the SCSDF when something tickled the back of his neck.
Soothing, but creepy.
“Who’s out there!”
There was a slight echo from the speakers due to the split-second delay.
“You kids better not be messing around! It’s not yet Halloween! And you know what the SCSDF said about pulling pranks!”
Idiot kids were going to get themselves killed sneaking around in the dark, especially when there was some kind of war thing going on. And that wasn’t even counting the Bountiful Decade crap with more monsters spawning.
“I am armed and dangerous!”
A giggle.
Like a little girl, but echoing.
“Oh… for fuck’s sake,” he muttered.
That was never a good sign.
He peeked around the corner, shotgun braced on his shoulder, but pointed down.
He wasn’t going to risk friendly fire.
Even then it wasn’t like he could shoot through his front door.
That shit was reinforced with several layers, like tank armor and a bank vault door combined.
His heart already beating like he had just completed a heavy set on the bench kicked it up a few notches.
Now, he was at a 400 pound bench for reps and a hundred meter sprint.
Options ran through his head, but it was tough to think through the heat and pounding.
Fight?
Nope.
He was big and strong, but not a real fighter.
Flight?
His house was the safest place he could be aside from one of the emergency shelters.
He had a bike, but he wasn’t willing to bet his life on that against whatever was out there.
“Call SCSDF emergency number,” he whispered.
Five beeps felt like an eternity as he strained to pick something, anything out of the darkness on the screen.
The SCSDF guy on the other end finally picked up.
He gave a quick and calm explanation on the creepy little giggling girl nature of his emergency along with his name and address.
“Hold on.”
Another eternity.
“Yeah, so, this is weird, but I’m connecting you to someone else. Whatever you do, don’t shoot!”
“Wait, what do you mean?”
The call ended.
“What—”
Another call began.
“Listen, Mr. Atkinson. You’re not in danger. Open the door or don’t. The choice is yours. If it’s the latter, just tell them to go away.”
He failed to notice that he hadn’t accepted the call.
The deep voice made him jealous.
He had always wanted a voice like that.
A real man’s voice.
“What the fuck is going on? Who are you?”
“They’ll ask for a trade. Just don’t offer up your soul or firstborn or anything like that. Stay away from conceptual things or ideas. Nothing ephemeral. Physical objects should be fine. Trade an apple, but not the taste of one. That sort of thing. You understand? Unless you don’t care about never knowing the taste of an apple ever again. That might pull in anything apple adjacent.”
He couldn’t help but nod before realizing that the call was audio only.
“Yeah… I… think. Wait! That doesn’t answer my ques—”
“Make a deal or don’t. The witches won’t hold it against you either way.”
With that the call ended.
His heart beat like the ticking of sped up clock.
Wait—
Witches?
“Uh… hello out there? So, um, you guys are witches? And you want to make a deal?”
He wracked his brain for what they could’ve wanted from him and found nothing.
The inverse wasn’t true.
He definitely had a problem he needed fixing.
Go big or go home.
That was the only thing in his mind.
And the deep-voiced man seemed trustworthy.
Roberto believed him when he had said there was no danger.
A trustworthy voice.
Definitely.
He placed his shotgun back in the rack and went to the front door.
A hesitant peek through the peephole revealed a nightmare.
A looming witch, judging by the dark robes and dark, pointy hat with a wide brim, beneath which—
The visage of a nightmarish creature that defied description cackled at him.
His heart spiked.
Terror enough to give his feet wings surged through him, but only for a moment.
It drained out of him suddenly, like air from a stabbed basketball.
The visage grinned like a satisfied cat with yellow feathers scattered around it.
“So… uh…” the fear wasn’t entirely gone. It was more that it felt too far away to reach him. Like someone had taken it out of him and put it in the master bedroom, shut the door and locked it. “You want something from me? Well, I want something in return and I’m not trading my soul, or, uh, first born and, um, apples… it depends on what you want.”
“Dire portents within rats entrails ere we crossed the sea…”
“… to reach this distant land for fell and fair bargain…”
“… worry not for we bring guarantee…”
“… to bring life back to yon bare garden.”
“Oh, Shakespeare shit?”
Had to read that crap during mandatory education when he was younger. Wasn’t that long ago, truth be told, barely 10 years. Already forgot most of the things they had tried to shove into his head.
“Wait! There’s two of you? Holy shit! Wait! How are we talking through the door?”
Which was the more important question?
What was one looming witch was now two.
Decidedly less terrifying on account of one being what appeared to be a little girl and the other much taller, but still a kid.
A teenager if he knew body types. A boy just hitting puberty.
He had been there once.
All long limbs and aching joints.
He could almost hear a bit of breaking in the kid’s voice.
As the taller kid said the last line he removed his pointy hat and point to a full head of blond hair.
“My bare… garden…?”
Roberto’s eyes widened.
“You can fix this? It’s some kind of curse.”
“… first open the door…”
“… and stop being a bore.”
Go big or go home.
Or in this case, live the rest of his life like some fat slob in his 50’s when he was barely entering his prime or get killed by witch kids.
He opened the door.
“I’m not inviting you in… technically.”
He stepped back.
They entered.
The older first, followed by the younger.
He took a moment to scan them.
No obvious weapons.
The latter was dressed full on as a witch. She wouldn’t have looked out of place with the rest of the kids in a few days out and about. Sure there were designated safe zones for Halloween stuff, but it wasn’t something he would’ve done on account of all the war stuff going on overhead.
Safe?
More like safe-ish.
But, whatever, he wasn’t in charge.
He supposed the semblance of normalcy was good for morale.
Black robes, pointy black hat.
Grinning face. Just a bit sinister, but lost some points for the missing tooth.
The former was a skinny kid, growing tall though, probably hit well over 6 feet by the time he was done judging by the size of his hands and feet.
Pointy black hat, but not robes, dressed more like that ‘the one’ character in that old movie.
The second and third movie.
Not the first, which was superior to the rest.
The black coat thing almost looked like a robe, but he could see black pants as the kid walked forward.
“So, uh, what do you want?”
He prayed that it wasn’t going to be something like his soul or a vial of his blood.
There was some leftover brisket in the fridge.
It had been a big hit at his buddy’s birthday party.
“… give us your home…”
“… thrice the betrayer, justly cursed…”
“… three days, three nights you’ll be free to roam…”
“… for being the worst…”
“Yeah, uh, I did terrible in school. Can you speak in normal English? Er… please?”
They exchanged a displeased glance complete with a blatant roll of the eyes.
Damn little punks.
If he wasn’t clenching his cheeks so hard he might’ve done something about it.
“We want your house for three days and nights to do with as we please. You will leave and stay away for the duration,” the boy said.
“In exchange,” the girl presented a small vial of glowing liquid with a flourish, “an end to your curse.” She eyed his bald head with a smirk.
Well, that wasn’t too bad.
“Alright,” he swallowed, “but I want details and a con—”
The boy held out a hand.
Bright glow emerged, coalescing into a single sheet of paper.
“—tract.”
“All official and proper. We do not play unfair tricks, unlike others,” the boy said.
“A real witch is fair,” the girl said.
“You’ll get your house back as it is right now.”
“And you won’t be a bald old man anymore.”
He reached out for the contract.
It was simple.
Written in plain language.
Just as the creepy witch kids had said.
They’d borrow his house.
In exchange he’d get his rightful head of hair back.
Signing was an easy decision.