It was not a long and drawn out war.

There was no back and forth series of strikes and maneuvers.

In truth, the war had ended before it had ever really begun.

Mother Gwyn smashed her shoulder into the middle of the still blinded Azza.

It was too dark and she was too fast for me to be able to see how she did it, but the very next moment, she had slithered up the tall woman and locked her legs around her neck. She coiled her arms around her sisters and pulled it to her chest, throwing both of them to the ground in a plume of red dust and white ash.

“Let me go!” Azza shouted, kicking her legs out and throwing more and more dust into the air.

“I’m gonna break it if you don’t calm down.” Mother Gwyn warned, squeezing Azza’s forearm tighter to her chest and pushing her hips upwards.

The look in Mother Gwyn’s eyes told me that she meant what she said and it would cost her little to do it.

A small part of me found pleasure in seeing Azza being unable to do anything but struggle futility against the pressure and weight of her sister.

Their relation was not by blood, but by being two of The Mothers. There were supposed to be nine of them, but I had seen multiple versions of the two that were rolling around in the dust.

Azza had essentially been three different people. The version of her that wanted me to die, the one that had healed me, and the one that would kill me if she broke free.

Is this how it is for Anna?

“Release me! We must end this madness!” Azza shouted, arching her back and throwing her free arm up in a wild strike.

“Girl,” Mother Gwyn ignored her sister and spoke to me. “Come here.”

I did as I was told, walking in a wide curve to avoid getting too close to Azza.

When I reached her, she nodded her head at one of the swirls I had made in the dust beside her. “Reach straight down to the bottom, there is an old branch. I need you to pull it out.”

How could the fearsome woman that was restraining The Mother in Brown like she was a child having a tantrum be the same soul that was wide eyed and screaming at every little thing not very long before?

She let out a sharp whistle that snatched my attention back to her. “Hey, keep standing there and I’ll let her go.”

Just like when she had threatened to break Azza’s arm, I knew that she meant what she said. I dropped to my knees and buried my hand into the swirl up to my elbow.

“Child. Look at me. Look into my eyes,” Azza yelled. “The scales must be balanced. Surely you must see this!”

I did not do as I was told. I kept my eyes on the dusty ground and tried to ignore the feeling of the golden choker around my throat. My bandaged hand, the hand that she had healed, brushed against something hard.

I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled.

It snapped in my hand and I fell back on my ass, dragging up a broken off piece of charred wood.

Mother Gwyn kept Azza’s arm pinned to her chest with one arm and reached out to the wood with the other. She snapped her fingers against the charred branch once, twice, three times. A thin curl of smoke rose from the calloused tips of her fingers and dissipated into the darkness above. Without hesitation, she snapped three more times and a small ember jumped from her fingers to the branch. She sucked in a big breath and puffed out her chest, the ridges of her ribs visible against the fabric of her tight black garment. In a slow stream, she blew the air towards the ember through pursed lips and brought it to brighter life.

It spread over the blackened surface of the broken limb and turned to orange flame.

“Tell me a story.” Mother Gwyn commanded, resettling herself around a silent Azza.

“What do you mean?” I said, confused.

“Tell me a story. That’s what you do after a hunt. You sit around a fire and swap stories.” She insisted.

How the fuck am I supposed to know that? I thought, feeling like she somehow expected me to be well versed in the rituals that surrounded hunting.

Azza threw her legs suddenly, rolling her lower half onto her hip. “Release me! Gwyn! I am myself again!”

“Liar,” Gwyn grunted, pressing her hips up and pinning Azza’s arm back once again. “Be still.”

The small pleasure I had felt at The Mother in Brown’s plight was gone.

If Mother Gwyn let her go, Azza would come and kill me. Her afterglow, whatever dark feeling it had brought to her, would see to that. I knew that to be true, but seeing her struggle against the hold of her sister, it made my stomach turn.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It wasn’t her fault. She felt the way she did because of the loss she had taken from saving myself and Mother Gwyn.

I turned my eyes from them and looked out over the barren desert of red dust to try and distract myself. Why was there blackened and burnt wood buried underneath it all? Had there once been a forest around Vowkeeper’s Anguish?

Vowkeeper. . .

The name felt the same in my mind as Goldluster and Silkshifter did. The name of the volcano that the shift had dropped us above, was it literal? Vowkeeper was either a Mother or a sorceress. In her anguish, with the same transformative power that I had now seen Azza and Gwyn use, she had manifested a working large enough to cover all that I could see with the remnants of her power.

How?

“Girl,” Mother Gwyn whistled again, bringing my attention back to her. “Hurry up, I don’t want to be tied up like this all night.”

“Yes, Mother.” I answered, staring at the small flame that she had lit.

“Once upon a time, there was a little fox kit named Delpha-” I began, choosing the story I knew like the back of my hand.

“No. Not that kind of story,” Mother Gwyn interrupted me. “Tell me about a journey you’ve been on or a battle you’ve fought. Something real.”

The ridiculousness of her request struck me immediately. “Being locked in a room or held behind walls my entire life hasn’t given me many opportunities to go on journeys or fight battles,” I said, unable to keep the sudden heat of anger from lacing my words. Almost too long after I finished speaking, I made a vain attempt at making my words more respectful. “Mother Gwyn.”

“Make something up then,” She answered, her green eyes narrowing at me. “I just have to believe it happened.”

If I did not count playing points or the times I had assaulted the guards, I’d only ever been in one battle. The lich had sent two hands of horror to steal me away from the boarding house I had holed myself up in.

The Mothers did not know about the lich. If they did, they would have known that I had found a way past their walls and had gained access to all of The Well. With their history of binding, sealing, and punishing me, I knew that they would not allow me to go without consequences.

I would not tell her about my battle with the wicked hands. All I would do was make something up that never happened.

“A long time ago, I found myself in a cold dark wood,”I began. It had only been a handful of months ago in truth, but that was a long time to me. Most of my meaningful memories had happened in the same span of time. “My familiar, Cat, had run off and I was searching high and low for him.”

Mother Gwyn’s eyes settled back in a calm expression. She took one of her arms away from Azza’s and propped her head up with it.

I continued with the sound of Azza’s labored breathing underpinning my made up story. “I did not know the woods very well and in my pursuit, I fell into a deep gully that was surrounded by a thicket of trees. Before I could climb back out, something started to move within the branches.”

I thought about the faceless creature, how it had dropped to the ground like a corpse and unfurled its long black nailed fingers.

A shiver ran through me at the memory, but I continued with my story regardless.

“With nothing but a pale fleshed torso, head, and massive hands, the monster started hunting me just like you did.”

“You ran?” Mother Gwyn asked.

“I ran.” I nodded. If she was following along enough to ask a question, I felt safe in the feeling that she was believing my story.

“Why did you not fight?” She asked, confusion evident in her voice.

Anger brought heat to my cheeks. I pulled my night shirt up and pointed at the seal over my navel, having to literally bite my tongue to keep myself from speaking. To her, I was telling a story, not recounting my memories. There was no reason for me to grow angry if none of it had ever happened.

“Right,” She nodded, looking back down at Azza who had begun to stir again. “Keep going.”

I left out any mention of Auden or Sorcerer Eames. The Laos and the boarding house were left in my mind as well. I did not know how much she knew about my time as a fugitive. If I gave too much detail, she might begin to ask questions I did not want to answer.

“I ran as long as I could, but I was weak and terrified. So, when I tripped and fell into a clearing, all I could do was watch as the monster fingered its way towards me,” I swallowed and snuck a glance at Mother Gwyn. Her green eyes were entirely focused on me. “Even if had been taught and allowed to learn about my power, it had been sealed away. I was a helpless maiden and there was nothing I could do but scream.”

I did not have to fake the fear in my voice. The altered version of what I was telling her was not far off from the truth.

I had stolen The Well and I had run away, but it was The Mothers fault that I had been so fucking helpless.

“I found a rock, a little bigger than my hand on the ground beside me. I picked it up and threw it straight at the monster's featureless face.” I lied and took a much needed breath.

“Come on, girl. What happened next?” Mother Gwyn demanded, the flickering light of her small fire casting a dim orange glow on her face.

I made her wait, pausing like my mother would to build suspense.

“I threw the rock,” I took another breath. “I missed.”

Mother Gwyn’s jaw dropped. Then, she began to laugh.

That was not the emotion I had hoped to provoke with my story.

“Very good, girl. That did it,” She laughed. The light of her eerie green power began to shine against Azza’s bronze skin. The Mother in Brown's angry golden eyes fluttered closed and her whole body relaxed against her sisters. “That’s it. Take a nice long nap.” Gwyn said, patting her sleeping sister on the cheek and pushing herself out from around her. She hopped to her feet and stretched her arms to the sky, extending her lithe body until she rose onto the tips of her toes.

“You charmed her?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Azza.

“That’s what the story was for,” Mother Gwyn said, walking away from where I sat and reaching her hand down into the dust. “It gave me just enough to put her to sleep for a while.”

From the moment I had woken up in the dead forest, nothing had made sense. I had just watched one of The Mothers best another in hand to hand combat and charmed her to sleep. With no hesitation she had gotten up and acted like nothing had happened at all.

“Are you sure she will stay asleep?” I asked, feeling like the long legged woman would spring up from the dusty ground and leap for me at any moment.

“She’s easy,” Mother Gwyn said, walking away from the fire and pulling more pieces of blackened wood from underneath the dust. “We’re both lucky it wasn’t one of the old Mo- We’re both lucky it wasn’t The Mother in Red.”

Old Mothers. She had almost let the words come out of her mouth.

Mother Gwyn placed the branches she had unearthed gently around her small flame and dropped to the ground on the other side of it from me. “We would have wound up just like these branches.”

I spoke before I considered if it was wise or not. “The Mother in Red is Vowkeeper?”

Mother Gwyn pressed her forehead into her hands. “Shit. I’m not supposed to tell you anything.”