Chapter 77: Graveyard of Sins (2)

The girl awoke in a daze, her right eye throbbing.

Sitting up, she tentatively touched her cheek and traced a thick scab running from her chin to her temple.

Tears immediately filled her eyes as the memories returned in bloody fragments: soldiers cutting through the town, bodies strewn across the ground, and people falling all around her.

Hearing her sobs, her mother rushed in, pulled her into a tight embrace, and whispered:

“Shh, shh… it’s okay, honey. We got rid of the witches.”

Through choked sobs, the girl managed to ask what she meant.

Only then did her mother reveal that the three witches had been burned and left to rot in the forest.

That night, when her parents went to sleep, the girl snuck out and picked her way through the corpses yet to be dealt with. The rancid smell of decaying flesh washed over her like death’s perfume.

The townspeople were digging a pit, but before disposing of the bodies, they were stripping them of anything valuable.

Eventually, the girl reached the forest and followed a smell distinct from the rest, one far more putrid than mere decay.

At its source, she found three charred corpses. They were unrecognizable, but she knew exactly who they were: the women who had revealed themselves as witches to save both her and the town.

As she looked upon their melted faces, tears welled up in her eyes.

She was young, but she wasn’t foolish. The woman who had attacked her had only done so to keep her from sharing their fate.

None of the three had wronged the townspeople. Their only crime had been that they existed.

And condemning them for that?

That was a transgression the girl couldn’t forgive.

Anyone who had scorned their saviors had forfeited the right to the salvation those women had died providing.

She vowed to bring ruin upon every person who had cast a stone. No mercy. Not even for her parents.

Still choking back tears, the girl turned to leave but stopped when she noticed something beneath the tallest ‘witch’s’ corpse.

A book.

She picked it up and opened it, quickly realizing it was the diary of the woman who had wielded the wind.

Sitting beneath the moonlight with her back against the trunk of a tree, she began reading.

She was too young to understand every word, especially having been self-taught, but she understood enough to know that the woman who had owned the diary was a good person.

The woman, Adsagsona, hadn’t been flawless, but she had been doing the best she could.

The diary chronicled her search for something called the Larzac Tablet, an object said to be capable of answering any question. Of all the questions she could have asked, she had desperately sought the answers to two:

“Why do humans hate each other?” and “How can peace be made?”

Much of the diary focused on her struggle to understand why humans fought and killed one another. She admitted she was no different, having taken lives to protect the secret of her sorceric abilities. She wrote of those she hated and those she loved, never pretending herself above either feeling.

Alongside her goals and accounts of her daily life, the diary also detailed her relationship with what she called ‘Aether.’ She even explained the principles behind Aether and how anyone could awaken their connection to it.

In short: how to awaken as a ‘witch.’

The explanation wasn’t particularly straightforward. It had been written for the woman’s own recollection, not as a guide. Still, that wouldn’t deter the girl.

Tucking the book under her arm, she ran back home.

The next day, she stopped speaking.

She refused to offer another word to the people who had answered salvation with fire, not even her parents.

The townspeople simply concluded she was cursed by the ‘witches.’ They began to pity her and dote on her, something that disgusted her to no end. Eventually, though, they began to distance themselves from her, afraid her ‘curse’ might spread.

She welcomed their distance. It gave her more time to study the diary, which she did during nearly every waking moment, except for the nights she spent digging graves for the three witches.

A year passed, and the girl succeeded in awakening Aether. In that time, she also reached the end of the diary.

She had intended to turn her new powers against the townspeople and avenge the women they’d murdered. However, the latter half of the diary forced her to question what that vengeance would accomplish.

It turned out that Adsagsona had abandoned her search for the Larzac Tablet after discovering an answer of her own during her travels.

There was no single answer. There never had been.

Peace, hate, love… all three were subjective.

Each person understood them differently, and forcing any one upon others would inevitably breed its opposite.

Adsagsona’s answer had been simple: live and let go.

The girl decided to follow in her savior’s footsteps, though she couldn’t yet bring herself to forgive just yet.

She continued training in Aether and resolved to one day search for the Larzac Tablet herself. She had no question she wished to ask. She only wanted to carry on the legacy of the three ‘witches.’

Until then, she remained silent.

Even if she had abandoned her vengeance, she had not forgotten what the townspeople had done.

Over the next few years, her powers grew enough that she began to weave her own spells. She had little to compare herself against aside from her memories, but she felt she might have even surpassed the three women.

Eventually, she became confident enough to begin her journey.

And a journey it was. Guided by only a handful of notes left in the diary, the girl crossed cities and valleys, explored forgotten caves, and climbed mountains in search of the Tablet.

Nearly thirty years passed before her quest finally ended.

She had found the Larzac Tablet at the bottom of a river.

On the day she turned forty-six, with her journey complete, curiosity led her back toward the village she had left behind so many years ago. Or perhaps a part of her still wished for revenge.

Aether had slowed her aging, leaving her almost identical to the girl who had departed, perhaps only a year or two older in appearance. There was little chance anyone would recognize the town mute from three decades earlier, especially now that she concealed her scar and carried a different name.

She had taken the name of the woman who had saved her, a name written in the diary: Adsagsona.

Posing as a traveler, Adsagsona was quickly welcomed into the town. Quickly, she learned many of those she’d known had passed and all the inhabitants were new, people she had no right to judge for their parents’ actions.

As she came to know its people, she uncovered a truth more complicated than the hatred she had carried for so long. Their cruelty toward the ‘witches’ had not been born from hatred alone. They had been terrified of something they could neither understand nor control.

Their fear did not absolve them, but for the first time, she understood it.

In time, she even took a lover and settled among them.

But one day…

They returned.

The knights of the same kingdom whose soldiers had descended upon the town during her childhood.

Remembering the witches who had once defended it, the kingdom sent only an envoy at first. He declared their intent to march upon the town and claimed its sole hope was to surrender any ‘witches’ living among them, then submit themselves to the kingdom’s rule.

Three decades had passed, yet the townspeople were still stuck in their obstinate ways. They refused.

The army returned, nearly a thousand strong.

They made their demands once again, giving the townspeople three days to decide.

Still, they refused to surrender despite having no chance of victory.

With time running low, Adsagsona had to make a decision.

She could flee, or she could follow the path of the woman whose name she had taken and defend the people whose ancestors had once murdered their protectors.

Even after decades of training, she doubted she could face an army that large alone. Even if she did, she would exhaust her Aether in doing so and likely meet the same fate as the original Adsagsona.

Remembering the Larzac Tablet, she brought it out. Hesitant, she asked it a simple question:

“How do I save the town?”

It answered simply, the words etching themselves onto the stone:

‘Only a witch can protect the town.’

A part of the Tablet crumbled, and Adsagsona cursed…

But then, she had an epiphany.

‘What if everyone… was a “witch”?’

Adsagsona sat at her desk and opened an empty tome. She began inscribing into its pages, weaving countless invisible spells that held little power on their own and imbuing them with her Aether.

If her theory was correct, tearing out a page would force a person’s dormant ‘Heart of Aether’ to awaken.

It took an entire day without rest to complete the tome.

The spellwork was crude, but there was no time to perfect it.

By the time she finished, darkness had fallen over the second day.

With no time to ask for trust and even less to explain, the once-upon-a-time town mute carried the tome from house to house, beginning with the descendants of those who had never cast stones at the ‘witches.’

She broke through their doors and forced each person inside to tear a page from the tome.

Whenever a page came free, Aether flooded the person’s body and knocked them unconscious. Adsagsona never waited to see whether the awakening truly succeeded. She simply hurried to the next house, then the next, until the only people left were the children of those who’d thrown stones.

She chose to offer them a chance at repentance.

Their parents, most of whom were dead, had feared what they couldn’t understand. Now, she would force that understanding upon them and judge what they did with it.

If they scorned her afterward, she would fulfill her original vow.

One household after another, she repeated the process.

Then, she waited.

Hours later, as the sun began climbing over the horizon, Adsagsona sat perched atop the highest building in town, feet dangling off its edge.

One after another, those knocked out by the Aether infusions came to and rushed into the streets looking for her.