The dragon's harem

Chapter 1657: The Mad Witch Fernanda

Yog flew around the area for a while, then looked back at Fernanda. “This world, it has been at death’s door for more than two thousand years. How come you didn’t go insane through all of those centuries? No, I should be asking how you’re hiding that insanity of yours so well.”

Fernanda looked at Yog in silence for a few seconds. “Me? Insane, a bit careless, yes. But I doubt you’ll find a saner person than me in this world, in fact, I bet you I’m the smartest and most reasonable person that has lived here in the past two millennia.”

Yog remained silent, looking around with glowing blue eyes. “Everyone is retreating safely to Plum’s world tree. She’ll retain dominion over this world and slowly let life take hold. In the meantime, you would rather live among people once more, right?”

Fernanda looked at her with a smile. “You’re right, gods know how bored I got looking at my own face… You’re a goddess, so you know how that feels.”

Fernanda spun in place, and a black robe covered her body. “I’m ready to leave… but, I guess you aren’t ready to let me out.”

Yog giggled with a grin. “You’re really the smartest one in this world. I can’t let you integrate among people until I understand the full extent of your madness and if you’re fit or not.” She flew to her, looking closer at her eyes. “Especially since you can just infect everyone with an abominable disease and cause a disaster.”

Yog’s eyes opened wide, and a beam of light flashed out of her pupils and slipped into Fernanda’s brain through her eyes.

Then the world around them shifted, and in the blink of an eye, Yog was pulled deep into Fernanda’s mind, finding herself standing alone in an endless green field.

“Let’s see… a calm place, this is usually a bad sign. Sane people always have something going on in their minds, thinking about their dinner, work, or even a silly thought. If your mind is this clear, a few screws probably got lost somewhere and aren’t just loose.”

She took a few steps, feeling the grass beneath her bare feet. It was strangely warm, even though the air was cold. In the distance, she could see a long, twisting dirt path with two people walking through it.

The two people were a man and a woman, husband and wife, and for once, they looked like normal people. Yog silently followed them from afar as they approached a vast forest, went inside, and soon arrived at a witch’s hut.

The hut looked small, sitting alone in the middle of the swampy land. Pit traps, snares, and magic landmines littered the ground, but none of them harmed the couple approaching the hut.

Yog was the goddess of magic. It was obvious to her that those two were afflicted by some strange spell, and the hut reacted to that spell to allow them inside.

When the two reached the hut, the door slowly opened, and Fernanda looked at them with a smile. “I’ve been waiting; It took you long enough.”

The two looked at her with mad smiles in their eyes, bowed, thanked her, and then walked inside with excited faces.

Inside the hut, Fernanda was stirring a massive black pot; boiling inside it was a bubbly, green soup of human blood, guts, and poison, foaming and reeking with a horrid smell.

The couple stripped, took a quick shower, then jumped into the boiling pot whole. Yog watched as the couple cooked alive, and how Fernanda ate them through the next two weeks, extending her lifespan and power.

The scene then quickly changed, the entire world was on fire, seething and boiling as countless armed soldiers marched across the forest, slaying horrid beasts.

To the soldiers, those monsters looked like deformed and ugly animals and people, but to Yog’s eyes, she could see them as the spreading abominable disease.

The soldiers fought and fell, soon turning into monsters themselves. They screamed and cried, praying to the gods, but their prayers remained unheard. Yog had never heard of Bohhal, Meransu, or Barin as gods, which only meant those were the fake names the abomination used to block the real gods.

There was no cure to the spreading disease; humans, elves, dwarves, dragons, fairies, and even the titans all fell one after another. A single wound was enough to bring the mightiest of them to the ground. What’s worse, they too turned into monsters after getting infected, making the situation even worse.

As the world rapidly fell into depression and despair, one hated person remained unfazed. Out of everyone, Fernanda could resist the abomination’s disease with her witchcraft. Due to eating people for too long, what was impossible for one person to resist couldn’t affect her, who held multiple lives within her body.

People knew her well, especially the locals, and she wasn’t just hated, but hunted because of her horrid habit of eating people. But… none of them could lift a finger against her, because in this god-forsaken world where the gods couldn’t help, only she could fight those monsters, so the area around her forest was extremely safe and peaceful.

People started flocking from across the entire world, all seeking the safety of her forest. Outside her land, millions of man-eating monsters rampaged day and night, so the people were more than happy to tolerate just a single man-eating witch instead of having to fear all of those monsters.

A hundred years later, she had become too powerful and the entire world started living around her hut, praying for her help day and night. It had become a tradition to offer the strongest of men and the most beautiful of women to her as food.

It was cold logic; the monsters would kill and eat tens of thousands of people a day, wiping entire cities off the map in hours. But this witch only eats one person a week, a much better deal. To the people of that time, there was no good situation. Just evil, and they had to pick which one they would side with.

But as more people arrived, Fernanda’s forest became too small to house them all, and she needed to go out of her way to fight the monsters on the outskirts and eat them.

The more active she became, the more sacrifices people needed to feed her. She went from eating a single person a week to one a day.

After a hundred years, people saw that the witch retained her youthful body, was as powerful as she had always been, in fact, she seemed to grow stronger the more sacrifices they offered. It was only a matter of time before they started worshiping her as a goddess.

Another hundred years passed, and now, people started thinking that the land outside her empire’s walls was hell, and that her stomach was their heaven. Getting eaten by their goddess is their path to salvation, and so, people stopped burying each other. Whenever someone died, they would be offered to her as food.

Gods couldn’t access this world, which also meant that death couldn’t harvest souls, causing all of them to start getting piled up inside Fernanda’s body, slowly turning her into an actual divine being.

But since this world was blocked from the gods, she didn’t even become a demi-goddess; her power just grew larger and larger until she held a comparable authority to a god, but while being stuck as an immortal mortal.

A hundred years passed by, and the people had long forgotten the dark age before their witch goddess ruled them. Worshiping her was the norm; she was their one and only goddess, and the abomination outside was their devil, sending his horrid minions to get them.

So while the people had her to rely on, Fernanda herself had no one to cry to, and madness was slowly breaking her mind. People weren’t supposed to live as long as she did. Witches who had a power like hers were usually hunted and killed; none of them lived as long as she did.

Days started slipping by, and she started losing it. She’d walk through the streets, barge into homes, and kill people, cooking them on the spot to eat. But strangely, the people didn’t get alerted, but to them, that was an act of love. Getting eaten by their goddess was their road to heaven, away from this world and the devil outside the walls. So her eating someone like that was seen as her picking favorites and sending them to heaven early.

They fueled her madness. Day by day, she started spiraling out of control.

Fernanda was aware of her rapid descent into madness, even though she had no way of stopping it. She had to keep eating people and fight the abominations infecting the world; she had to stay alive. But staying alive for so long was breaking her mind, drilling holes into her already rotten brain.

It was then that she figured something out. They are worshiping her as a goddess, and thanks to that, they can remain calm and sane in this crazed world, so why doesn’t she do the same? But what should she worship? The gods aren’t real, she is the proof, even though everyone sees her as a goddess, she knows she is just a horrid, man-eating witch.

Looking through her ancient books of myths and legends, she found one speaking about the gods, and how there should’ve been a first god, far too powerful and the one who made the other gods in the first place. It was a fairy tale from the lost age, but she held to it.

Fernanda started worshiping the first god, just trying to keep her sanity. The first god the story spoke of was nothing real, just a children’s story that somewhat mirrors reality, but in her endeavor, she ended worshiping what should be AO.

Without knowing it, her words were knocking on a door she had no business knocking.

Yog smiled; it didn’t matter what sorcery the abomination conjured to seal the world, even if the gods couldn’t hear the people inside, she’ll be damned if that thing could block AO’s influence.

At that time, AO was effectively dead, though, so no one was there to answer her prayers. Except… the universe itself heard someone finally praying to its creator. It was a first in several millennia that the universe shifted, changing its rules in the hope that Fernanda’s prayers would reach AO and wake him up.

Fernanda’s madness didn’t get cured since there was no god answering her prayers, but since the universe willed it, she became able to live with that madness so she could keep praying. Cursed to always remain stuck between sanity and madness, running her lips and tongue in whispers to a long-dead god.

Fernanda’s soul became so vast that it held the souls of everyone she ate, and the world slowly descended into deathly madness. The reality that her people believed became true, and their entire world shifted around it.

Those eaten by her had their souls resting peacefully inside her, and those who went outside the walls got infected and suffered as their souls got chewed by the abomination’s ugly maw.

Another century passed, and the population of the world started dwindling rapidly due to the monsters and Fernanda eating them. Of course, the mad witch didn’t want her food source to disappear, so she started supplementing by eating those abominable monsters to grow her power even more.

When she ate the monsters, the people’s souls trapped by the abomination returned to her, granting her more power and making the people of her empire think that by eating those monsters, she was saving the souls of those who had been eaten by the monsters.

At this time, everyone had long forgotten that she was a human or a witch; to them, she was nothing but a divine goddess walking among mortals.

Eventually, the abomination mounted one massive swarm to take her empire down, and it succeeded in killing all of her people and turning them into monsters. Fernanda wasn’t a goddess, so she couldn’t be everywhere at all times to protect her people. When she defended a place, the abomination would attack the other side thousands of kilometers away.

Since one being controlled all of the monsters, it could employ such tactics with ease, and so Fernanda’s empire fell, but she didn’t.

Fernanda kept fighting for years, decades, and centuries… driven by her madness and an undying will to free her people, cleanse them from that monster, and return their souls to the vastness of her own soul.

Eventually, she won. She could eat the abomination and grow stronger, while the abomination had no more people to infect, so the result was set in stone the moment the abomination made the mistake of killing off all of its food source.

When Fernanda finally killed the abomination and got his power, she found herself as the only living being standing in the world besides plants and trees. She lived alone for several more centuries, until she started talking to herself, slowly succumbing to madness.

Talking to herself alone wasn’t fun, so using the power of the abomination, she created clones of herself to talk and play with… and after several more centuries, that’s how this entire world became the way Plum found it.

Yog smiled from ear to ear. ^Did she cause AO to reincarnate in this age with her prayers, or was it just luck? Did an abomination just happen to slip by in this world and block the god’s power, or did AO himself use this world and its people as an alarm clock to wake up? Is this witch a lucky worshiper of AO to have a chance of meeting him, or is she a victim of his cruelty, a tool to be merely used and discarded later?^

Yog left Fernanda’s world and looked at her with a smile. “You’re mad, but I think you can live among people, as long as you follow a few rules. Don’t eat people, and if you must, have them bring you what to eat, don’t ever go around and kill. You’ll be monitored at all times for a few months or years, and you must follow their every order, no matter how stupid that order sounds.”

Fernanda frowned, “Too much to follow…”