The Fickle Winds of Autumn

The exhausted priest groaned in agony as the writhing vines squeezed tighter around his limbs and chest, burning deep into the red of his flesh, pinning him helplessly to the huge gnarled trunk of the ancient oak tree.

His weakened body strained against the shocking waves of pain that coursed through his vulnerable frame; terror forced the frozen blood in his veins to respond to the desperate tremble of his quaking heart.

He could no longer hold his weeping head up; it slumped forward under the weight of his despair and fatigue.

“Please! Mercy!” he managed to sob.

Against the evening gloom of the deep forest, a dark, shimmering figure loomed up before him with a predatory menace. Its head snaked towards him and seemed to peer hard into his stupefied eyes, sniffing at the horror etched across his face.

He struggled to recoil from its leering presence, and drew on his final reserves of willpower, straining with the effort to pull his aching head away; but the burning vines held him fast.

He looked down, desperate to avoid the gaze of the harrowing figure before him; but he could not bear the awful trauma of staring at the lifeless bodies of his guards and former companions as they lay scattered on the forest floor around him; the recent horrors of their fate still fresh in his shattered mind; their bright ceremonial robes now mingled and mixed with the bronzed decaying harvest of Autumn’s first fallen leaves.

His startled eyes caught a glimpse of his own once-proud garments; now shabby and tattered; torn with the damp of his fearful tears. But this fevered twitch of his terrified eyes only brought his bewildered senses back into contact with the living desecration which lingered threateningly before him.

He was barely able to focus on the shifting, animated form, which seemed little more than a rough entanglement of sinuous roots and vines, coiled together into the rude, agitated, pulsing outline of a woman.

The air was still thick with the nightmare residue of her violent magik; its stench scrambled with the moist, earthy compost of the dense woodland.

Fresh waves of unnatural pain crashed through his body, assaulting and shredding his fraying nerves and mind, as a further surging jolt of intense malevolent energy violated his wretched frame.

He ground his teeth in tormented anguish and thrashed his head against the stinging affliction; scouring the scene of his torture, desperate to flee this excruciating despair; but the secluded hollow of the forest, where the dark-green velvet moss had trapped everything beneath the dense web of its lush carpet, offered no hope of escape.

An unexpected fog had closed in and blanked out the surroundings, its wet fingers grasped at the encompassing trees; smothering them in a constricting cloak of silence, before the low early moon even had the chance to arrive and Autumn silently gathered the world into its creeping embrace.

But even the twilight chill of the evening air had not been able to prevent the sense of ominous dread from perspiring out onto his clammy skin and trickling down his convulsing body as the spasms of tortuous pain had shocked through him.

He had heard that witches were foul, rank creatures, but his own experience had been limited to the books and scrolls in the monastery library. But the scrolls had not prepared him for the full horror of this apparition, nor the incessant pain which twisted its way down his fragile spine. And his brain was saturated in the trembling knowledge that his first encounter with one of these dire creatures was almost certain to be his last.

If he could but muster the strength, he could cry out for help; but he knew that no-one would ever hear him in the sifting depths of the forest - especially not at that time of the evening, so far away from the walked paths of man. And all the loudness of his voice was already exhausted; haemorrhaged away by the anguish of his screams and swallowed up by the bitter taste of dread which lingered on his tongue.

“Please!” he sobbed. “I have told you everything I know. Show mercy, I beg you!”

“Mercy?” hissed the creature before him, her voice crackling with scornful derision.

Her body ceased its constant shimmering, worming vibrations and focused all its stilled attention on the near paralysed victim, pinioned to the tree.

It appeared to stare deep into his pallid face, with its cataract blinded eyes. Deep into his very soul. He feared he had angered his tormentor further as the withered blood drained from his numbed cheeks. He hardly dared open his mouth to draw in a breath.

“When has the world of men ever shown mercy to my sisters and I?” the creature finally continued. “When have our forests been left in peace? You take our trees for your houses and fires; what mercy is ever shown to us in your bottomless greed?”

She snaked her flattened face towards him; closer still, invading and intimidating; her deep inquisitiveness peering and threatening his shattered sanity; trying to smell the truth of any reply he could make.

The priest winced and tried to pull his face away as her embittered breath burned into his nostrils; his fingers scratched at the rough bark of the tree behind him; pawing, desperate to escape the ordeal. But the solid tree held him fast.

A rising surge of fear welled up within him as the foetid odour from the desecrated flesh of his companions rose once more to remind him of their appalling fate.

The thick serpent web of vines which bound him grew more violent, sharing the witch’s indignant anger. It gripped him tighter, pining him with the bitter strength of all its memories at the losses the forest had suffered.

The priest had hoped that his faith would lend him succour against this iniquitous agony, that the Great Surrounder would respond to his prayer and ease this miserable torment; but his bones and flesh sang out to a different tune, and he realised that his love for the written word of the Venerated Opus would not bring salvation.

His breath came shallow and laboured; he struggled to reply; to offer up a feeble bargaining for his life; but his voice failed him now, like the rest of his shattered body, cracked and broken from the despair of his screams, which had fractured the grim twilight and the abandoned silence of the darkening forest.

“Pp..please!” he gasped, as the stinging torture crushed the last hope from his forlorn lungs.

But the feeble sound of his voice was swallowed up by the thick abundance of moss and the mist-mired stillness of the evening.

“Yes,” said the witch at length in a hollow tone: “I will show you mercy - the only mercy your kind deserve!”

His fearful eyes widened with bulging horror as she reached out both her sinuous arms towards his head. He tried with one last desperate effort to pull away from her grasp, to save his life, to save his very soul from her damnation; but was powerless to prevent the acid touch of her fingers worming into his skull as she calmly gripped him by his temples and clasped his quaking head between her hands.

He watched transfixed as her cataract-blinded eyes suddenly cleared to a bright burning yellow; they shone out, luminous against the dimming half-light. Her arms began to shift in a deep golden glow, swirling with strange signs and symbols, buried deep within her shimmering limbs, gathering in their fervent intensity until they too flared out through the low evening mist which had entwined itself around them.

The priest cried out in unutterable, unending pain, his tears and sweat and mucus choking the last of his horrified breath; overwhelmed by the excruciating void of dark suffering, as his legs and body crumbled away from beneath him, dissolving into a million tiny sparks and embers; screaming out in tortured agony, endlessly, as his incinerated remains were blown away in a swirling mist of ash and fiery particles, disbursed by the breath of the all-consuming forest, leaving only his disembodied head, held aloft momentarily by the triumphant witch; until that too fragmented and collapsed into a cascade of glowing shards, so that nothing remained of the unfortunate cleric but the scent of his insidious terror.

The agitated vines around the oak slowly released the bitter anger of their tendrils and sank back into the gnarled bark of the ancient tree.

The burning, wrathful brightness of the witches’ eyes diminished, and a sightless, cloudy mist descended across them once more.

The symbols in her arms still glowing, she reached out towards the other bodies which were strewn across the ground. Their remains flared and flickered briefly against the reclusive evening and the shadows of the woodlands, then disintegrated.

“Feed my precious ones,” she said quietly.

The earth around her began to twist and contort; rumbling from deep beneath the litter of the forest floor, as the roots of the surrounding trees rustled and writhed into life; worming their way up through the damp soil, twitching hungrily towards the remains of the priest and the scattered ashes of his companions.

High in the branches above, a solitary rook took flight, his twilight roost disturbed by the noises and movement of the scene below. Its sombre wings rattled out a plaintive clap; the mournful rasping of its sad lament delivered a eulogy to the chill evening air.

The witch observed as the residue of the humans was consumed; lost to the world of men, absorbed beneath the soil; and seemed satisfied with her work.

“My sisters will soon learn of everything that has passed here,” she hissed softly to herself; then languidly extended the coils of her serpentine body and disappeared into the dark folds of the forest night.