Chapter 1

The earth was sour and wretched where we stood and the scent pooled in the back of my throat, weighing on my tongue challenging both my resolve and my gag reflex, just as nauseating and unpleasant as the reason behind tonight's gathering. 

The air chilled, the mood grave, for tonight we did not gather to dance or rejoice, there was no ceremony to be had beneath the shadow of the vacant moon tonight nor any night that would follow soon thereafter. Instead, we met in darkness with only the weak dwindling flame of our hearth to guide us as we broke our bread, no better than hardtack, just as dry and unyielding as the wine we drank, passing the bottle from hand to hand with hardly a pause all need for cup or decorum abandoned in our desolate melancholy. It may as well have been ash on our tongues, as it weighed on our stomachs only adding to the unpleasantness of it all. Our souls and spirits weighed as heavily as our feet, now bogged and caked with sodden clay. We were far from the circle of our usual gathering on this night, the usually strong and hearty trees now replaced by ancient and cobbled oaks that shifted and twisted under their own weight like ancient gnarled gods of long-forgotten souls and practice. 

What had started as a tense desire for subtlety had quickly turned into a desperate need for secrecy as the recent, but all too familiar, hysteria began once again forcing us deeper into the thicket of trees and forest where the leaves rotted upon a bed of mud unaccustomed to the passage and travelings of human feet. Where even the moss of the trees shrank and grew stunted with their desperation for light. 

Our forest sanctuary had become a mourning shroud, a hollowed prison guarding us against prying eyes and funeral pyres. We knew to meet so soon amongst the rise of hysteria was a dangerous risk but in our hearts, we knew it was unavoidable something had to be done. For too long we had allowed these atrocities to pass before us as slight upon slight was piled like the corpses of the damned at our feet till it towered far above the moon itself, we could be idle no more. Our path of cowardice and sense of self-preservation had been too deeply tainted with the blood of the innocent for centuries and we would abide it no longer.

  I looked about me taking in the silhouettes that formed the members of our brood, many finding respites on fallen logs and jagged rocks their backs hunched with the weight of judgment that rested on our shoulder, their frames trembling with a dangerous mixture of anger, fear, and the chill of the damp night air. How many times had I seen this before in my years now? How many times had we fled into the arms of hope only to watch fear and suspicion follow and settle in the hearts of mortal men and women? With age, my vision grew clearer as I became less enamored with the world around me and more accustomed to the horrors of the world. It seemed as if with every passing year our hours of relief had grown shorter and shorter until it inevitably became more of a desperate gasp of salvation in a world where we were being left to drown in a vast ocean of ignorance and hatred. 

Normally, as was the way of our mothers, our kind would hide and remain quiet until the opportunity to flee once more would arise. We, however, were not our mothers and we were tired of running leaving the corpses of innocents in our wake, allowing the church to hunt and kill those it perceived as witches as it wished in the pursuit of ridding the world of Satan and his worshippers. No, we were not our mothers and this time we would stake our claim from the shadows no longer content to cower and flee in the wake of their holy wrath.

The threat, though a bloodthirsty and volatile thing, was simple and one we had faced many times before, as all of our kind must, the hunt for witches was afoot once more for the hysteria never truly fled the mind of the holy it merely lulled as the fear and panic slumbered, satisfied with its pound of flesh and river of blood, until the time came for it to rear its head once more in a never-ending attempt to devour us. When hard winters set in, when crops withered, and sickness spread from house to house it was far easier to blame and burn a supposed witch than it was to look in at themselves for the cause. But mortals have always been frantic and panicky things prone to mob mentality and unbridled brutality, and due to this fatal flaw they harbored we were doomed to suffer, forced to flee from one crusade to the next. With every home came new threats and unspoken terrors that echoed heavily in the passage of time. Our world of secrets, a never-ending masquerade performed on a stage of eggshells and whispers with only the faintest of candlelight to guide us less the light turned their eyes to our subtle secrets and set the shepherds upon us. 

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The new world in all its wonder had been our newest hope of salvation with promises of untamed forests and plains that stretched like oceans of grass and flowers where pious hands had yet to tarnish them with righteous fury and blood. Led to believe there we would find the promise of religious freedom, of hope that we would never need to fear a pyre or noose again, we had gathered ourselves ready to embark filled with the hope and folly of a young brood too green to the world. We boarded the ship, our hearts and minds turned towards the promise of life without fear of persecution, a world our kind had never dared to even dream of, so too did the devout and unyielding puritans that had long since plagued us so.

Our vessels of freedom in the span of a single night had been transformed into a prison vessel destined for a life where I feared we would be doomed to perform upon eggshells forever. Once or twice in my weaker moments where I lied upon my cot near delusional with grief and sick with fear had the idea of conversion crossed my mind as we sailed across the rough and tortuous sea, but the thoughts were banished as quickly as they came for to do so would have been an insult not only to all those who had come before me but to all who had yet to be born from our brood. 

So in accordance with the ways of our mothers' we kept to our candlelight and our world of whispers playing the part of the pilgrimage, our eyes never leaving the horizon of hope. 

Hope, however, was something we would not grasp long as scant a single winter in our settlement had come to pass before the beast raised its head once more, somehow more ravenous than before in this land that had never before tasted the blood of inquisition. When the crops began to wither and the children of the town began to fall ill we knew it would not be long before the cry of “Witch!” would echo through the town, and echo it did. From every doorway and bedside came the scream of “Witch!'' As women and men alike, many of whom were guilty of no crime other than that of being less than neighborly, were dragged from their homes to the pyres and gallows, sometimes within the same day when a trial was deemed unnecessary and forgotten in the wake of their hysteria. 

Far too often we would watch from the crowd silent and horrified as they were burned before us and surely as the sunset the shock and horror of their brutality began to dull under the weight of fear for our kin and kind. So it went day in and day out from accusation to trial to death that we lowered our head in acceptance of what we believed to be part of the natural order of man. it was however upon the accusation and execution of a child, no older than eight, that the fire within us raged at the realization that not only had things gone much too far but that we had allowed it without opposition to persist.  

It was then that we came to gather, deep in the forest, safe from the prying eyes of the pious where it was decided that to burn a witch was indeed a crime but to murder an innocent, a child, was a sin that could no longer go unpunished.

 For far too long they had been allowed to run rampant at the bidding of their mortal idols and we would suffer it in silence not a moment more. We came to gather around the fire drawing close to one another, the dwindling fire casting ghastly shadows upon grim faces making them all the more desolate and haunting. In that moment a blade was presented from beneath my cloak, mishaped and discolored with age and use.. We took it in turns passing the ancient metal from palm to palm parting the flesh of our hands without hesitation or remorse. Together we presented our palms above the flames, the blood dripping freely over the glowing embers and ash causing it to brighten and flicker with the life of the silent vow now struck. These so-called pious Christians would soon learn the price of blood and body and the lesson would come by our hands. Their god may forgive them but we would not.