The Fickle Winds of Autumn

1. An epilogue

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 forcing 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 grasping 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.