The Witch and The Dead

The Workshop Her Father Closed

They followed the worn footpath through the village. Their feet scuffled atop the sand. A small team was pouring some in buckets onto a hovel still glowing with hot embers. They paused and stared at the large procession as they passed. In the dark, Anna could not tell if their eyes were wide with hope or fear. She told herself not to be afraid, but her father's voice was now far and quiet. With all their expectant gazes, she was alone.

They trekked beyond the huts. Sand turned to gravel, and the air cooled in the absence of the village fires. Anna's stomach squeezed painfully. She had studied instead of eating.

But as they approached the ruins of the old workshop, the pain brought her some comfort. It was easier to suffer than to be afraid.

They gathered at the crumbling, wooden fence that cordoned off the decaying building. The old machines still stood dormant outside. Valves and pipes that made fire and shaped metal in ways no one from the village understood. They shone an eerie green in the moonlight, haunting the building behind them. They shone like something out of this world.

They were from out of this world.

A circle of salt, blood, and quartz still ran beneath the fence. Laid first by her father, it was renewed faithfully by the village year after year.

"This is it," the alderman announced, as if no one knew this place. Its history. The anvil sat bare of its tools. They had been moved like everything else one could carry inside. All of it had been forged by the man from afar, who took with him a generation of the village down to the depths, their souls all taken by the moon.

And now, his workshop sheltered a demon.

The night strummed with the pattering of a gentle rain. Anna blinked at the strange sound and looked skyward, toward the mountains. Their white peaks glowed along the skyline. No cracks broke their form, no streams wove down their slopes, but the sound was unmistakable.

"It's the birds," noted an older woman behind her. She scratched the white hairs on her chin and gestured to the old shack. Two dark silhouettes with smooth heads and sharp beaks stood on the roof. "They sing like a running stream."

"Birds do not roost here in this season," the alderman pronounced gravely. "Another omen, I think."

"We don't need to think," replied the old woman. She pointed to Anna. "We've got a reader right here."

The alderman threw her a stern look. The matron grimaced but bit her tongue.

A small group patrolling the perimeter of the fence approached, armed with sharpened stones. One approached the alderman and whispered, "Nothing since she went in. Not even to poke out her head."

The alderman frowned. "A demon need not see us to know we are here."

Anna clenched the fence by its top rail. The workshop was as dead as the desert hoodoos. She watched her knuckles turn white and asked, "How do you know she's a she?"

"The scream," he replied. Those behind him shivered. "A woman's for sure. Shrill... and petrifying."

Anna swallowed. Demons have no bodies, they say, save those they reap from the living. She watched the door, hanging by one hinge. It swung gently in the wind.

"You know what draws a demon, don't you?" whispered one of the villagers behind her. "Guilt."

The others stirred and gossiped. After all, wasn't it just three rains past that Helena from the south told the tale of a woman taken? A woman who, for years, had pretended her baby was healthy. Hid its sickness from the village because she couldn't let go. People died, her own child included. Everyone knew, yet she said nothing. Hid instead of facing their eyes, night after night, alone with her shame till she knew nothing but the comfort of darkness. They found her hearth silent one night, her hovel bare, its fire drowned in tears of shame that wet the dirt like the darkest rain.

Their victims were always given a choice, but what the demon offers, they say, the guilty can never refuse.

The dry wood creaked beneath Anna's grip.

"Nothing to fear in our community," declared the alderman. "No one has any reason to hide in our village."

The rail cracked. The weight of all their gazes fell on Anna's back.

Daughter of a great man.

"She'll protect us", whispered one.

Then another, "The Telderellmo never leaves empty handed."

She breathed in anxious, ragged breaths, her throat sore from a night by the fire.

Daughter of a great man. The only one who can save us.

Then. It knows.

"I will go," she said suddenly. She folded one hand into the other and barely registered how much both were shaking.

Behind her, the wind moaned over the villagers' silence, rustling that limp barrier of crystal and blood.

"Is that wise?" asked the alderman quietly.

She bowed her head slowly, and let her hands grow still and numb in her grip. "My father is wise," she replied.

None could argue.

The gate groaned as it opened. The quartz crackled beneath her feet.