User:Captaincarrot/The Hunting Witch Bones Of Salt
Written by Silence of Autumn
This is the first of the Hidden Tales of the Hunting Witch, the illustrious founder of our Order. Although the public story of our history is well known, the truth, that which is detailed within these pages, is not. From lowborn Echmer forester to Mythic Venerant, such is the true tale of Hunting Witch Aisin.
Long had the village been plagued by the nightmares; foul creatures born of long dead grudges and cruel imagination. It had been months since anyone had slept more than a few fitful hours in a night. Aelivaem’s Curse lay heavy over their homes, a weight that threatened to destroy them. The Wizard Kings of Pa’vasaga were too caught up in their wars with Yne and Slea to care for a small fishing village in the western fringes.
Gentekki was born just prior to the placement of the curse, and knew no other life. A charcoal burner by trade, she spent much of her time in the wooded lands that surrounded their village on the shore. She buried herself deep amongst the pines and watched the dancing flames in her furnace for days on end. It was the place she most felt herself, isolated away from her family and neighbours who made her ears ring and burn with their ceaseless cries of anguish and torment. The darkened forest enveloped her softly, like a lover’s embrace.
She rarely slept during these forest trips, for even far away from the village did Aelivaem’s curse claw its way into her mind and soul. Exhaustion was her constant companion, staved off only by the meditative crackle and flicker of the crimson flames within the black-ash oven. It was not, however, a battle she always won.
During one of her periods of solitude within the mountain pines, she fell asleep whilst watching the flames. For days she slumbered, her screams of terror echoing throughout the otherwise soundless trees as her mind was tormented by hideous, burning fiends. She slept but never truly rested, not even awakening when her furnace burst open, a vast gout of flame shattering forth like thunder from the ravaged kiln. She did not wake when the storms came, lightning sparking across the pine tops, the rain stinging and cutting her skin. For thirteen days, she slept, trapped in a tortuous nightmare. She awoke only when she smelt salt.
Finding her clothes charred and covered in moss, her face and fur singed and caked with soot, she wandered the forests in search of a stream in which to bathe, but no such location could be found. Where the stream she had long used as a source of water once lay there was instead a small lake, the water glassy and flat. Towards the shore, the water was a brilliant cerulean, but quickly darkened towards the centre becoming black as ink.
Gentekki brought a handful of the water to her mouth and drank deeply, only to spit it out immediately. The water was salty, far more so than even the seas that surrounded her island. Regardless, she had no other choice than to use this place to cleanse herself before returning to the village with what little charcoal she could salvage. She disrobed, leaving her clothes upon the shore, and walked tentatively into the water.
The strange lake was deep, far deeper than any body of water she had ever seen in her life. “Come deeper, little bat. Come, deeper,” The water called to her, sending vast, gleaming, tendrils up to meet her and pull her in further. As she sank, she saw the bodies of the residents of her village sinking around her. Their faces were covered by twisted, multi-eyed creatures with five tentacles, illuminated by floating spheres of luminescent algae. She fought to grab onto one, but her fingers passed through it as though it was not there. And so she sank even further, until her feet touched the bottom.
The world at the bottom of the lake was dark and empty, and her body was bound tightly by the tentacles that sprouted from the dark, metallic sand. Beneath her, a great eye opened, staring directly at her.
“Raemoh” the woman spat, eyes filled with fury, “How dare you drag me down into your realm! I demand you release me!”
“Your impertinence reeks of your ancestors, little bat.,” The creature responded. “The Dwemer were foolish to spurn us. We hope you will not make the same mistake as they did, especially after we saved your life”
“Saved me? What could you possibly mean? You’ve trapped me, imprisoned me!”
“This is not true, little bat. This world is neither ours nor yours, but it has been subverted by our power. We broke you from your dreams and brought you here. Would you have rather suffered the same fate as the others?”
Raemoh’s tendrils unwound themself from around her body and Gentekki fell to the sandy floor. Slowly, the creature rose out of the sand, its carapace covered in eyes and its two claws snapping wildly.
“You...saved me? But why? You are a being who punishes us for being the scion of Noraken.” The woman stared, unblinking into the being’s many eyes. “And why only me?”
Raemoh laughed, and the tide changed, the weight of the water above becoming more than she could bear.
“We saved you because we wanted to. Because we could. Because we refuse to allow that hag to claim more minds than us.” The creature grinned, a mouth of sharp, jagged blades and writhing tendrils cracking open its shell. “And the others are not dead, not yet. They can still be saved.”
“How? Please, tell me how!”
The creature grinned wider.
“We shall show you, little bat”
Raemoh’s tentacles engulfed her body once again, driving themselves through her flesh and into any orifice they could find - through her nose and ears, behind her eyes, down her mouth and throat. The world went dark, and she knew no more.
When she awoke, she was changed. Her fur was white as snow, and her eyes black as ink. Her mind was awash with secrets and whispers of the Salt. She rose from her bed of pine needles that covered the forest floor, and donned the black, unmarked robes she found beside her, covering up her nude form. She felt around in the pocket and found a mirror. Gazing in, she failed to recognise herself, her birth-form of grey and brown discarded by the side, molted like a Hyu-Ket carapace. It was nothing more than a shell of black glass and salt now.
Head full of whispers and seductions, the woman wandered from the forest, stumbling out onto the sands of the beach on which her home lay. Within every house, the residents were fast asleep, their faces contorted in terror. Guided more by newfound instinct than by reason or logic known to her, she unwound the web that ensnared the villagers, drawing a needle of bone from her arm, a shard that glistened with crystals of Salt, and severed the Dream-Threads that burned away the moment the salt touched them.
“Cut and burn the thread, and Salt the ashes. Cut and burn the thread, and Salt the ashes”She whispered as she cut, her bone needle flashing in the low light of the evening.
One by one, the villagers awoke, until they were all gathered in the centre of the plaza that lay between their homes. All but one. “Where is Gentekki?” one of the villagers cried.
“Where is he? Where is the charcoal boy? Was he lost?”
The woman watched from afar, before walking towards the crowd, shaking her head.
“I saw no charcoal boy, neither here nor within the forest. If he was not among you, then I had no way of saving him from Aelivaem’s curse.”
“Who are you, saviour? Why did you save us?”
The woman laughed, and sat down in front of the villagers, bowing her head. Her grin was hidden by the shadows of the fire. The tendrils left in her mind twisted and burrowed and writhed deeper into her brain, bringing with them the cursed knowledge of the Salt.
“I am known as Aisin, Witch of Salt. I seek out ghosts and horrors and expel them from the isles as best I can”
She rose from her seated position, and gently stroked the fur on the head of one of the villagers.
“I’m truly sorry for your loss” she whispered in the woman’s ear “I am sorry that your son is dead. But…”
She smiled faintly, her eyes growing sharp
“I’m sure that something far greater grew in his place”
The woman known as Aisin turned, and walked away from the village, back into the snow-topped pine forests. It would be two-score-and-ten years before she was heard from again.
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