The Song of the Malificae

18 Years (1)

After that decisive moment six years ago, when she set her mind, her heart, her soul upon avenging her mother's death, upon fighting for the malificae's place in the world, Liridona had returned to her family's house, walking slowly, seeming to float across the ground. To anyone who saw they would've thought she was calm, tranquil, peaceful, as opposed to the roiling beast trapped within her limbs. 

She had entered through the door still hanging ajar from the forceful entrance weeks earlier. Their belongings had been scattered all around from a house search, a search for any tools of witchcraft. But they hadn't found the books and scrolls her mother had hidden in the rafters of the loft. Liridona dropped them in the centre of a blanket, tying up the corners into a sack. Leaving it by the back door, she had gone to collect her sisters. 

They woke in the darkness to her violent shakes, her urgent hisses. "Come on, up. We've got to go." It was only when they were finally up on their feet, swaying with fatigue and blinking their swollen eyes, that their minds cleared enough to understand what she was saying. "We can't, schwöschter," they had said.

Liridona wakes with tears in her eyes, sits up slow and breaths in deep once, twice. Her tears are blinked away and she recalls with a kindling of anger the words that had come after.

"Magic will only bring us trouble."

"Misery."

"Let's be normal," they pleaded.

"We don't need magic," they said.

Liridona steps out of her cabin, stretching her arms over her head. Morning sunlight filters into the clearing with a warm yellow glow, dappling the ground with patches of light. A gentle wind whispers through the leaves. The anger stoked from old memories fades, becomes a small ember held close to her heart. 

Liridona, now a young woman of eighteen years, seats herself beneath the arms of a tree at the edge of her clearing. A thick book of shrivelled parchment is opened in her lap and she spends the morning staring intently into the grimoire's secrets, deciphering the ancient words scrawled across the pages in chicken scratch. After having learned the written language of the malificae—a language made up of odd symbols with hard corners and twisting loops—from her mother's books, she translates quickly. Flips pages madly, paper crackling and scraping, absorbing the information into her pores. Occasionally, she looks up from the grimoire, tucks her long curling hair behind her ears, looks into the sky and recites a new spell softly under her breath. Strengthening her powers, for the war she will wage against the humans, for revenge for her mother that she has yet to complete. 

Last year, she had staged an accident for the lumberjack who had killed her mother so brutally the day of her burning. An accident that could be mistaken as nothing but. A tree had toppled down on him as he chopped away at its thick trunk. It crushed his chest, shattering his ribs and forcing the shards of bones deep into his lungs so that he died gasping like a fish. Like her mother.

The man who had first accused her mother of witchcraft, who had started the whole mess, died another year before that, fallen down the side of the mountain to the floor of the Lauterbrunnen Valley, when his drunken legs carried him too far from the village and too close to the cliff. He wasn't found until a fortnight later, limbs tangled and twisted, eye sockets already picked clean.

Majority of the 'witnesses' who had testified against her mother had all met their end, one way or another. Many of the men who had tortured her mother had been killed, swept away by a roiling avalanche, or torn apart by a pack of wolves on the road to the city to report that year's executions of criminals and witches.

Almost all, but for the magistrate. Ulrich Batz.

She wants him to suffer. To see who is killing him, to see what is killing him: the thing he despises so much. She wants to see fear in his eyes, hear the tremble in his voice as he screams, pleads for mercy that will not come...