Wyrd: Book One of the Witch War Trilogy - WATTYS 2018 WINNER!

Sky Prologue Part 2: In which Fate is a Witch

2001, Yggdrasil, Uror Branch

It looked like any old witch finger: the excess ashy skin sagged from an emaciated skeletal rod in curtain flaps of vellum, interrupted by a swollen knob of a joint. Starting at the callused knuckle, florescent blue veins popped out of the translucent skin and twisted their tendrils along the length of the wrinkly finger, reaching tenaciously towards the sharpened tip of a long, jaundiced talon. The slight scent of rotting corpse — her very own fetid cocktail of eau de toilette — emanated from the bone marrow.

Sky had studied her mother's finger, the one so good at delivering punishment, with a curious and horrified wonder. As a young girl, she had learned to avoid her mother at all costs, pitying the object of her fleeting attentions. Even now, hiding in the shadows of her mother's tree house as an adult, Sky wanted to be subsumed into the walls. She feared for the worlds at her mother's fingertips, the ones that would be subject to the same warped sense of justice that had once admonished her.

Sky had scars, both physical and psychological, proving that one flick from the fickle finger of Fate packed one hell of a wallop. No, her mother wasn't any old witch: she was the first and the most powerful witch that ever was or would be. Her mother was the Norn, Uror. Some called her the origin of Fate, others a Wyrd, others still, a Moirai, some a goddess and some a hag. Whatever else she was, Sky's mother was one hell of a witch with a capitol B. Next to her, Sky was nothing more than a fly on the wall, her powers paling in comparison.

Uror's fingerprints were all over every major event that had occurred since the dawn of days. To Sky's embarrassment, her mother used to joke that it took two to Big Bang. She'd also bragged about her involvement in Lucifer's downfall and the devastating war and bloody extermination of the Lepidoptera race at the hands of the violent Unicorns; her doing as well. Mayhem was her favourite past time. The lives of mortals meant nothing to Sky's sociopathic mother.

So, when Sky, on a mission to renegotiate the terms of her curse, observed her mother's abnormally chipper demeanor from her vantage point by the doorway, it chilled her to the bone.

There was a slight straightening of Uror's crippled hunch, a shiny gleam to her generally lacklustre white locks, and a miraculous disappearance of the sallow gullies and deep ravines in her weathered face. It appeared that overnight she had aged backwards – from a woman who looked each and every day of her ninety-eight trillion into a youthful hag with vigour and vim reminiscent of a botoxed billion-and-thirteen-year-old.

Sky noted that her mother was hobbling impatiently around her stone tower, distracted. Her lofty turret room of the treehouse, currently projecting her very own citadel, was usually surrounded by whatever pervaded her mercurial imagination: the Milky Way, rubber ducks, or a cloudy heaven painted by Raphael himself. This day, however, the room was submerged in an inky black void, lit solely by the blue glare from her massive televising screen.

Fate hadn't noticed the presence of her daughter at the doorway, watching her with avid golden eyes. Most of the time, Uror's witchy alarm usually went off by the time Sky reached the roots of the Yggdrisil tree, the tree of life, as if she had some sort of tracking system alerting her to her spawn's whereabouts at all times.

Stranger still, her mother's left eyeball was not in its eye socket. This by itself wasn't unusual - it tended to pop out. But, never before had she been caught twirling her eyeball around by the severed optical nerve and ping-ponging it back and forth as if she were playing paddle-ball.

Her blind eye was her tool for divining all of the possible trajectories and outcomes that could occur after one of her alterations: she could make a volcano erupt or send a bird flying into the propellers of a plane, she could give someone cancer or snuff a life just because. She could not, however, affect free will or how mortals might react to her catastrophes. Fate could only guess what would unfold after her divine intervention.