Locket's Lover

The aged witch held the fist sized golden sphere in one hand, and the heavy tuning-fork shaped rod of rough silver and polished quartz in the other, and hesitated.

Between outliving most of her companions and the others moving on to lives that had vast and crucial responsibilities, she had ended alone.  It was a fitting end, an end that was not unexpected.  It was how she had begun, for the safety of others; that it would end with those others and many, many more being safe was a good thing.  A hard thing, but a good thing nonetheless.

She sat on the dusty plateau swaddled in thick wool, staring at the golden sphere with rheumy eyes still the color of rich burgundy and bright crimson.  The left had paled as she had withered in her age.  Her kind did not age as humans did, nor as any other race did, save perhaps elvenkind.  While she was not stoop shouldered or bowed by age, and her hair remained glossy and black, her skin had weathered, parchment thin and delicate in appearance, and she had become pale, so pale.  Her black nails were still thick, but longer now than ever before.  They had become so hard she could not cut them.  It took a strong file to pare them down, and great effort even then.

The fingernails were a lost cause, but she at least kept her toenails manageable.

Her wiry body still had immense strength.  If anything she had become even stronger as she aged:  she could crack stone or crumple good steel in her bare hands.  Her flesh was as as tough, perhaps even tougher than most armors.  Her will was as cruel and powerful as ever, though she had never used it cruelly.  At least, she liked to believe that she had not done so.

Even her familiar spirit, the beautiful golden cobra that had traveled from home with her, was gone now.  Subsumed in the magics she had taken for her own when she had dedicated her life to watching over the city she had lived in, that her dear friends still watched over in their strange ways.  They had become as much myth as real, near to gods made flesh.  The witch did not regret that she could not travel that path, and she had appreciated and loved them all, in her distant way.  They had made the city free, a true City State on the riverside, controlling a portion of the river and remaining independent from the empires that had clashed around them.

They had defeated arch-devils and demons, ruined the plots of monstrous tormentors, broken the slavers, and even slain avatars and minions of greater evils than those.  She had helped, in her small ways.  Healing, guiding, granting her magics and protecting them as best she could.  She was not a shining creature of myth or legend, merely a witch with enough foresight to guide those who could save the city.  They had done so much more than save it, though.  Her dry lips curled into a smile, and she felt the pull against her hard, weathered, withered skin.

Her reward, if it could be called such a thing, lay in the palm of one hand.  The tuning rod was something she had made herself, a tool to transmit her bodily across the boundaries of reality to other places.  The orb, though….

The golden orb had been made by a sorceress, a lovely, half-elven girl of delicate features and twisted magics.  Her powers stemmed from strange, alien places, weird creatures far from the world’s natural state.  She had been beautiful, and terrifying.  They might have been lovers, at one time, if the witch had dared such a thing.  The witch had not - her mother had still lived at the time, and opening her heart was asking to have her loved ones and friends skinned alive and devoured by the ancient hag.  The changeling witch had admired the sorceress from a distance.

Her friends and allies had noticed, and they had tried their best to make something, anything happen, but she had resisted.  Only after the terror of the final battles had passed did the witch dare pursue anything resembling a relationship, but by that time the sorceress had long left the city to return to her homelands.  Still, they had spoken - and more, much more! - in dreams crafted through witch’s power over them.  Their love had bloomed and grown, but time had stolen away with youth, if not power.

The sorceress had become a power in her own right, creating a legacy for those like herself - born of human and elf, or elf and human - and their small country had been well protected, well loved.  The witch had never left the city, but she had explored the small country of the half-elven in dream and in vision, both her own and those sent by her far away lover.  They had shared hopes and dreams, and eventually the sorceress had moved on, becoming part of a greater, grander universe.

The witch had taught a trio of apprentices, both youthful and not, who had hearkened from backgrounds as diverse as could be imagined.  They had shared a love for her city, one and all, and they protected it as she had, served the city-folk and the powers that had once been allies and friends alike.  She had delved as deep as she dared in fortunes and prophecies, and was satisfied that the guardians of her city - supernal and her own coven alike - would be up to the tasks and duties before them.

Now, at the end of her years, she held a golden orb, a gift delivered by a dark creature from the realms beyond the pale, yet a servant of her sorceress lover.  She had not been able to contact her in many years, almost two decades, but the messenger had brought this, and a simple letter written in the smooth, flowing script of the elvenkind.  A gift, she was told, to be used at the end of her time upon the world, with the promise that she would pass painlessly and freely from this world to the next.

It had been a concern of hers, and an understandable one at that.  Her mother might not have been a night hag or a dreamthief, but she was a powerful hag nonetheless, and her hold on the soul of her daughter had been terribly strong at first.  Even after the death of her mother the witch had been afraid she might be condemned by that ancient, malignant spirit, and as much as she feared the eyes of the gods, the eyes of her mother’s spirit had been even more fearsome.

Still, she trusted her lover, and there was little else she could do.  She wouldn’t dare to taint the city with her death - hence her lonely ride to the desert plateaus and rocky wastes where her beloved city and the good people that protected it would be safe.  Her life was fading, her body withering like a too-used husk or the shell of a molting caterpillar.  With makeup or clever illusion she could appear as delicate and waiflike as she had always appeared.  To become an adult. To gain the body of an imago, she would have needed to consume the flesh of people, and then she would have been a hag herself, rather than the delicate, fragile looking waif she remained even after sixty and some years.

There was a distinct pride in never having fallen victim to that curse, that hunger.

She lifted the tuning fork-like rod, and the litany of powers and spells that tumbled from her lips in a rush of ancient faerie language did so with no less strength and power than they had decades ago.  They were a little more complex, a little more lilting, a little more strange, but not at all were they stilted or stuttered or hesitant.  Her will-working had never been second rate, and her spells contained as much power and were spoken with as much skill as ever.  She struck the golden sphere with the tuning fork, and vibrant tones erupted from both, rather than one or the other.

It hurt the ears, shook the teeth, and shivered the bones, that clash of sounds, and she was caught between them.  The spell to shift from one existence to another she was familiar with, she had visited heavens  - and hells! - on her own, in the name of duty.  This was something else, the magic of the orb changing her spell, twisting the passage from real world to conceptual reality.  It drew her in , crushed her, flung her far afield, beyond the pale, tore her flesh and reformed it, molded her body and opened her mind.

The witch screamed in exquisite agony and beautiful pain, much as those creatures that had hidden themselves beneath the city had once claimed to do, before her friends had slaughtered them mercilessly for their blasphemous cult’s ways.  The sounds tore her open, pulled her apart, then put her back together, soothed her hurts and cleansed her body, mind, and whatever might pass for her soul, she supposed.

Breathing harshly, she blinked in the bright, shining light of the realm she had arrived in.  It was like no heaven or hell she had heard of, no realm of the beyond that she’d read or had visions of.  The crystalline towers and arches, the strange, lovely gardens, the bright and flowing waters….they contrasted with strange shadows, polished black walkways and dark, venomous looking flower beds, pools of stagnant water and ancient, macabre sculptures.

She looked around in awe, and was looked upon with amusement and gentle forbearance.  Those who were around her - some few nearby, though the strange, beautiful, terrifying landscape was populous in general - ran the gamut of humanlike kinds.  Angel-blooded, demon-blooded, even a few with faint features of beast.  But not so limited as the world in which she left - each and every person had some measure of strangeness to them, some tell-tale oddity that marked them as other.  Much as she herself was marked….

She took a slow, deep breath and looked at the golden bloom that lay in her hand, tiny pearls on glistening pistils of silver and delicate inner petals of glass.  The flower was held in her hand….but her hand was not so much hers any longer.

Rather, it was her hand as it had been when she was younger, before the withering of the last decade.  In her prime, she had been more pleasing to the eye, a stripling youth, though barely nubile (a fact she had lamented often in those days of her youth).  Her nails with sleek and glossy, more like obsidian than the horny talons she’d possessed, and her eyes reflected a rich, true wine color once again.  The withering had been taken from her, replaced with youthful vigor; her strength, her supple yet impenetrable flesh, those were still hers.  She rose, the dust of her travels falling away from her cloak and clothing alike.

“Welcome to the Foundation of All Realms, Liu Khet,” a soft, slightly sibilant voice purred from behind her.  She turned and blinked at the slender elfin beauty that rose from the marble bench behind her.  Eyes of blue with several pupils too many - in mismatched numbers between eyes no less - gazed at her fondly from under long, dark hair.

“Tea,” the witch breathed softly, her elf-blooded lover smiling in return.  “Teahuaca….”  The half-elven beauty moved close and Liu Khet caught her in an embrace, kissing her deeply and with great enthusiasm, as they had done in many a dream.  Tears - the only natural tears she had ever shed - formed along her lashes, and Liu Khet did not regret or fear them, for once in her long life.

“I am glad you have come to join me….I have so much to show you….to share with you.”  Tea’s voice was husky with emotion, and she let Liu Khet put her down once more, and ran her hand through the short, dark curls fondly.  “My love,” she whispered softly.  Liu Khet embraced the elfin woman once again, and whispered beautiful things in the languages of faerie….both dark and light.  “Welcome home.”

~XS