It is a truth known by all that a woman who lives out on a poisonous, cursed lake and spends a great portion of her time talking to birds is a capital-w Witch, and should, under the Warding Oath, be burned at the stake, or, if you’re feeling more humane, simply beheaded by the nearest executioner.
Of course, every axiom of common knowledge has its exceptions, despite what They say, and Rowan of the Black Lake, as she preferred to be called, thank you very much, was not, in any strict sense, a capital-w Witch. She wasn’t even a lowercase-W witch, for that matter, as much as folks in the surrounding environs would call her such and throw rotten food her way when she came into that godsawful town of Cinder next to the Dreadhold to restock on food, barreled water, and more esoteric supplies.
She was an alchemist, a woman of science and healing lore, who studied the natural world in order to devise from it a treatment, or even perhaps a cure, for the abominable Blight that rotted at the otherwise vital heart of the world. Of course, trying to explain that your shelves stocked with herbs, powdered substances, and vials of brightly colored liquids wasn’t actually heathen, illegal sorcery was very difficult. So far, no-one had come knocking on her door to have her dragged away and beheaded.
That was likely in large part due to the fact that she lived on a houseboat and spent most of her time floating on a lake made of liquid black magic.
Rowan bustled about her houseboat, took samples from the lake, and strained them through various apparatuses of glass and metal in order to suss out a thin layer of pure black powder that she gathered in a small metal pan and brought over to a fire trapped vary carefully inside of a cylinder of iron that vented all the smoke out through the ceiling and allowed the heat of the flames to leak out as a pervading warmth to contrast the chill of the lake air.
She put aside the pan, put on a pair of thick leather gloves, slid open a slot in the steel cylinder, picked up the pan with the black powder in it, and slid the pan through the slot and into the roaring flames.
Staring at the pan intently, she observed how the black powder seemed to writhe of it’s own volition, shifting and trying to combine into a more solid and durable state, but ultimately failing and sitting still. When she withdrew the pan after several minutes, the powder had turned a pale gray color, the Blight within it spent.
Rowan sighed. Fire and sunlight were the only sure ways to harm the Blight Beasts, that was known. But how could you drive out the Blight without burning someone alive? She needed a cure that didn’t leave its receiver a charred husk or sun-mad.
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Still, she had made some headway on her other major project, she consoled herself. She poured the gray powder into a glass jar, sealed it, set it on a high shelf, and walked over to where her collection of fauna samples lay encased in vinegar. There was a fish with eyes that had glowed with eerie magenta light when it had lived, its scales a mix of deep green and the palest pink, with black spikes sticking out from its body in seemingly random locations. It was a lesser blight beast, a creature not six inches long, but nonetheless a victim of the lake’s odious and all-consuming corruption. For her part, Rowan was enthralled by such creatures, and her sample collection had only grown with her years on the lake.
Rowan moved slowly past jars containing everything from crabs with shells of hardened silver ichor, to a possum-like creature that was made entirely of bones and muscle sinew, without any measure of flesh, eyes, teeth, or even working internal organs, yet still it twitched sometimes within it’s sealed glass tomb. She had become inured to the innate horror of the lake she lived upon with the passing of years, having spent much of her childhood on the Lake, and nearly every day of every year since she had turned eighteen. It had been seven long years since she’d reached her majority and taken to the lake full time, and she found herself wondering more and more lately if she would ever find the cure her mother and father had sought so fervently for.
Sometimes, when she lay in bed in the late hours of the night, staring up at the low plank ceiling of her bed chamber on the gently drifting boat, she would think back to those years when she had been much younger. In those days, her parents had still been alive. She had not yet had them torn away from her by the infernal pool of liquid night her family had ever called home. Her fists clenched then, as she made her way to her journals and neatly arranged stacks of notes. She shook herself, her memories fading as rapidly as she could make them. She had no time for melancholy. She had her life’s work ahead of her, after all.
That night, Rowan struggled to get to sleep, as she often did. She dreamed of the dark waters on that fateful day, of how they had churned and spat up giants and serpents as long as trees, great clawed beasts made of pure malice and hatred for every living thing. She remembered crying out in fear. She recalled her hand slipping from her mother’s as the woman who had given birth to her, had raised her and instilled in her so many useful lessons, a bounty of knowledge, affection, encouraging at every turn a boundless curiosity, vanished into the dark waters never to be seen again.
She dreamt of returning to shore on a shattered and broken raft, how her father held his weeping daughter. Her father hadn’t said a word after that day, soon enough drinking himself into oblivion.
Yet still she returned to the lake, and made the study of it, the attempt to best it, her life’s work. Still she tried, for someone must.
She dreamt, too, of lightning arcing down from the heavens and striking the black lake, turning it’s surface to glass. She dreamt of no more great beasts rising from the abyssal depths, of no more blight storms sweeping the world and heralding countless deaths.
She dreamed of better days to come, and at last found some peaceful slumber.