The Witch of Algan Bog

Bones and Charms

It was a wet summer. I left my village in disgust, walking through the rain with Lori at my side. The swamp waters were rising and it was hard to find a dry path. I knew a site where I often made camp, where the swamp met the forest, far away from any paths taken by reasonable folk. It took days to pile up enough dirt and rocks to raise a foundation high enough so the walls would not be threatend by the rising water below. 

A trunkbeast had passed through the swamps, separated from his pack. Hairless as a worm it was, having shed its fur for the summer season. It must have been the luck of Death itself that I found that mightiest of beasts helpless as a newborn. I took my knife and moved close. So small and thin was I that I did not sink into the muck below, as I slit his throat and watched his blood pool beneath. 

His meat sustained me for months, his bones became the beams that held up the roof of my new home.

In a month, I had a home. Clumsily put together from what I had gathered in the bogs, wood, bone and iron. I thought back to all the countless hours I had spent in the smith's house with little better to do than stare at the ceiling, the walls. Trying my best to capture the imagine in my mind. When I had finished, it was hut really, more than anything. But it was warm, and it was isolated. It was safe. 

At first I was mad at myself for not building it sooner. I could store and dry mushrooms and meat. I always had a warm place to come back to. I never had to fear for wolves or bears and I could sleep peacefully with Lori by my side every night. Things became routine. Simple. A form of happiness for the first time since the death of my parents. 

But when happiness comes from safety alone, it tends to lead to boredom. Without fear to keep me company at night, other thoughts took its place. Thoughts of my place in the world. Memories of the soldiers burning down my village, and fantasies of Lori ripping their throats out. Of me plunging my dagger through their hearts. 

More than that, I thought of Lori. I was so young when she was brought back, and so happy to have her that I never questioned how exactly she had come to be. When you're a child, the world is still full of magic, wonder and mystery. But I was but a few years from adulthood now. I knew that the dead did not just come back to life. My parents. Every animal we had killed for food and bones and fur. The poor travellers that Lori had torn apart to protect me...

They all died and stayed dead. But not Lori. And I could not stop myself from wondering why.

And so, when my home had become comfortable and warm and I no longer had to spend every day worrying about my own survival, I began to pass the time by studying the corpses of animals. I could not read nor write, but I sketched what I could on the walls and carved the wooden table I had built specifically to hold their bodies to my eye level. 

Sometimes I could catch them alive. Frogs, rats and the like, studying what I could remove and still keep them alive, what I could fix, what I could not. I began to learn the secrets of life and death. Or at least, the mechanics that bind a soul to a functioning body of meat and bone.

I learned the functions of their bones, their muscles, their organs. At least, as best I could with no books or the gathered knowledge of closed-minded old fools. I learned that the heart pumped blood through a creature's veins, and a creature could certainly not live without blood.

But the blood in Lori's vein had long since dried and all that was left of her veins were a few dried up old lines decorating her bones like tattoos on skin.

I learned of the four humors of the body and the way the liver served to produce them, long before I ever read Lazarus or Al-Omar. 

I developed my own names for every bone in the body of a deer, I figured out that frogs breathe through their skin underwater and with their lungs on land. 

But Lori did not need to breathe. 

And none of it brought me closer to understanding how Lori was still alive. I was frustrated. Confused. Angry. And I became obsessed with finding the answer. If I am honest, the thirst for knowledge came long before I ever thought of what I could actually do with it once I had reached the answers I so feverishly sought for. 

But when the dreams of power finally came, they pushed me forward when I might have otherwise given up. What could this knowledge win for me? The return of my parents? And army of dead animals to keep our home safe from the Conglomerate? Or to wreak havoc on their homes, burn them from the land like a blight? Take back our home from the strangers that had claimed it as their own and now defiled the land for the sake of feeding yet more strangers in far away places? Immortality, like my dear Lori?

What secrets was He privy to that allowed him to bring back the dead in such a way? Even back then, I could never accept the answers of "magic" or "divinity" at face value.

I had, however, managed to put my abilities to use in one way: I had made Lori stronger than ever. I strengthed her bones with flesh and skin taken from the animals I studied. I kept her new limbs fresh as best as I could, I even stitched new fur onto her frame so it would feel more comfortable clinging to her at night. 

But it was not until I tried to give her a new heart that I finally made my greatest breakthrough. I put the fresh, bloody heart of a bear into her chest, doing my best to wire it to her new muscles with straw. And to my surprise, as I connected the heart to her frame, it began to beat, pumping blood to her muscles once more.

And I realized that even if I could not remake the magic that allowed Lori to walk amongst the living once more, perhaps I could harvest the magic from her very bones. 

It took many tries and many failures. But all that changed when I pumped water of the swamps through Lori's new heart and extracted it from her wooden veins a week later. It was warm, and its color had changed to a dry red. 

 My eyes widened and I quickly hugged Lori tight, then immediately ran to my table, siphoning the "blood" into the veins of a dead frog. 

Nothing happened. I must have stared at the frog for a good ten minutes, slowly losing hope. It might have well been the final straw in my experiments, so frustrated had I been with my constant failures. But then, I saw its leg twitch...