20. Chapter 20:
Chapter 20
Once I got to the bottom of the staircase, I ran as fast as I could towards the ladder, which I could see just poking out from under the clouds, th blood stain was still there and I was strangely thankful for it allowing me to wayfind in this otherwise featureless void of ice and cold.
I strapped both of the children onto my back, and began to climb down the ladder as quickly as I could. Soon, I began to see Foxglove, and I felt a wave of relief. The ground spelled safety, and we would try to get to somewhere safe as soon as I arrived. I had decided that I would ask Foxglove to take the children, while I would wait to get answers. The witches had to answer - I would try and make sure they did. I could not be left with no answers after I had spent so much time and so much effort trying to find out. They were the ones that took me, and they would need to have the answers.
I hopped off of the last rung, and began unwrapping the children from my back. "Stuvlok! are you all right? What did you see." Foxglove said, coming over to help release the children. "Terrible things." I said, my face in a grimace I had not been quite able ot get rid of ever since I had gotten to the second floor. "Are they safe?" She asked, getting the children out. They looked out with that same blank stare, the stump of the otter pup still looking as grisly as it had when I first picked it up. The otter pup soon began to look around and show some sort of emotion (in his case sheer relief undercut bya sadness of some kind) while Wea still looked blankly.
"You need to leave with them, get to somewhere safe. We can meet afterwards." I told her, gathering my pack for a longer journey up to meet with the witches. "Stuvlok, are you crazy? you look terrible, and your eye is bloodshot. You've just told me that you saw terrible things. Lets get out of here. There is nothing to investigate up there but death." She said, pleading with me to get away from here. I stood my ground, determined to get my answers. "If it is death I must seek for my answers, it is death I will greet." I said, shielding my plainly obvious terror using bravado that I did not have.
"Stuvlok, I can't leave you. Look at these Children. Something is wrong with both of them. The baby looks frankly inhuman, and the pup doesn't have a leg. Think about them, Stuvlok." she told me, imploring me to come with her. She even tried dragging me away from the ladder, but I resisted her.
A cackling sounded throughout the island again. This time, it sounded lime a thousand cackles superimposed onto one, from every conceivable direction and in every conceivable tone, register and voice. To call it loud would be to ignore its innateness, it was as if it was part of the world, like thunder or the crash of a large wave against a cliff. it was all-encompassing, and ignited a fearful courage inside of me.
I needed to Know.
Foxglove ran over to a nearby bush and hid the children in it, covering them with a bit of tarp that we had in our supplies. She brought out her shortsword, more like a dagger and stood quietly, looking around for any danger.
I did not even try. I knew that weapons would have no effect against witches, that knives and arrows could not even dare hope to injure whatever the witches were. Swords can never kill ideas, and that is what the witches were, sheer thought, immortal and infinitely complex. Searching endlessly for the youth that the young brought with them, consuming them in order to transfer their existence into themselves, I saw the witches suddenly as they truly were, not a thing, but an absence in the universe. Their existence was defined by an intellectual absence of anything at all. They were the moments of the stars, the darkening of the night sky, codified and taken away until they formed the mental construct that the witches were, believing themselves into existence.
Slowly, a large dark shape began to materialise around and above us. It was a deep crimson, and seemingly covered in feathers that seemed to dissapear and reapear in different places, the colour shifting constantly. It surrounded the entire island, and began to slowly descend. There was nowhere to run, and we were forced to wait for whatever fate awaited us. I was strangely calm, and I could not really explain it. My mind knew it should be afraid, and I felt physically afraid, but I did not feel afraid.
Near me, Foxglove slowly sobbed, stroking both Wea and the Pup slowly on their heads. I had never seen Foxglove so vulnerable, and it almost made me cry.
I wanted to cry. but something stopped me. It was something distinctly inhuman, some force from inside of me that pinned me down right as I was nearing the precipice, preventing me from giving in.
I tried to run in one direction and the other, but the cackles ran out, unholy abominations of what I can only describe as sounds. I could barely think, the cackles crowding into my mind, forcefully pushing other thoughts out like a cuckoo chick in a sparrow's nest. Parasitic. That is what the Witches were. Parasites off of the living.
Suddenly, i felt a deep pain inside of my chest, something so instant and burning I forgot how to breath for a second. I fell to the ground, clutching where my heart was, rolling around on the floor just trying to forget the stab I had just felt there The stab had left behind a slower pain. A throbbing, slow, viscous pain that spread slowly from the heart, racking my entire chest and then my legs and then my head. It was cold, unlike every other pain I had ever experienced, all of which felt 'hot' even though I cannot describe why. I felt this pain to be distinctly lifeless, and the fact this is what was enveloping me scared me more than the pain itself. Then, my chest began to vibrate.
Lying on the ground, face up, My thorax began to oscillate. The air around it began shaking too. It was like being thrown down from a great hight contently, many times a second. I heard the sudden cracking of bones over my groans of pain. Soon, however, I realised that the vibrations were a voice of some sort. The way it spoke used things that were less words, but more like ideas, the vibrations painting pictures in my mind that told me everything whatever was speaking through me wanted to know.
"COME." "WE WILL TELL YOU" "LEAVE THEM BEHIND."
I felt the vibrations slow down, and soon I was left dazed and confused, lying on the ground. The large black amorphous shape around us was still there, but I felt a glimmer of hope I could not explain. Foxglove looked on at me in abject despair. He she was hugging the children close to her chest, trying in vain to shield them from whatever horrors lurked above us.
I stood up, and began walking towards the ladder, almost as if in a daze. "Where are you going?" Foxglove asked through tears. "Up." I said, grabbing my pack.
"What will happen to us?" she said "what did that thing tell you?" She was backing away from me, as if I was some sort of volatile creature ready to expel venom at great speed towards her. It destroyed me to see ehr afraid of me, but i did not know what was happening with me, it was as if I was only a passenger in the carriage of my mind, and something else was driving it. I could not say anything, and so I walked on.
"I don't need your help." I retorted. "Yes you do. Just come with us, we can come back another day." She essentially screamed at me, her desperation getting unbearable. "I don't want to leave behind any chance of getting to know about my past." I said, trying to stay calm. "You won't have a future of you go up there." She was strangely quiet, almost as if she had given up. "I don't want to rely on you, I will not be betrayed another time." She began to cry again, quiet, gentle crying - she was hiding nothing, For a second, I felt bad about making her cry, but my mind was soon cleared, and I began grabbing the ladder.
Foxglove stood for a while, doing nothing, taken aback, trying to think about what she could do next. She pulled off her belt-pouch, and shoved it into my hands. "Take these." she said, I recoiled, throwing the bag down onto the ground.
Seeing this, she limbed onto my back and shoved them inside of my pack. I tried to get them out, but soon gave up, and began making my way up the ladder.
Each footstep seemed easier as I ascended, my mind clearer and I slowly began to feel more hopeful than I ever had at anytime during the journey. It seemed strangely artificial, but I grabbed onto whatever hope or joy I was given, not wanting to let it go, lest it was the last time i would ever experience such emotions. Death was still on my mind, but shrouded by a thousand other thoughts of what questions I would ask.
I did not think about what would happen to Foxglove and the children once. Every time I risked navigating too close to that thought, my mind would divert away, thinking up another question or another version of the future. For some reason, I wholeheartedly trusted the Witches to give me an answer, reveal my past to me, tell my why they did what they did, tell me who they were, where they came from. I never once doubted anything about their promise. As I climbed, It almost seemed as if I was slowly getting further and further from the cloud. I tried to climb faster, but only receded at a greater pace.
The sky around me soon began to crumble into small shards of celestial brilliance, giving way to a dark emptiness that had no colour, but had distinct ridges and folds, like what you can see when you close your eyes. My eye still burned, but I had come to terms with the pain. Suddenly, the ladder from beneath me crumble away, leaving me suspended in a void of directionlessness and pure emotion. The place I was soon also began folding in on itself, first in half, then in quarters then in eights, It was remarkable irregular, and I did not know how I could tell, iot was sort of like some sort of innate feeling that the world around me was being folded. I soon got another one of my headaches, though It seemed to me as if I did not have a head but I was instead a singular point in an infinite space with no senses nor a sense of existence. Yet, the pain was there.
I saw a black so pure that all the other colours seemed to emanate from it.
In the distance, or all around me or inside of me - I could not tell - there was a large amorphous shape.
It was a distillation of all the emotions i had ever felt in my life. It was too Dark. I began to cry, and found myself unable to. I tried to walk but I found i had no legs.
I was at the complete mercy of the Witch, I was in a world of its creation, with rules that It had thought up, helpless.
I thought about what Fa Raven had said about what it means to be a god...