Exile's End

A witch's efforts to end her exile are almost at an end. A flawed little story I wrote for a competition, where the subject matter was alien witches. Not, I found, the easiest subject matter. I didn't really do it justice, but this story is not all bad. 1,000 words Writing time : 1/2 day Finished : 20th November 2006 Download as Word file

The witch’s spirits were tracking another offering. The regularity of the small but welcome gifts delighted her; it made it much easier for her familiars to collect them when she could predict to the moment when they would sail out of the void. The small bone-ship her familiars haunted was ready and waiting; the offering would be snared to prevent it completing its plunge toward the star before a handful of the spirits would guide it to her eyrie.

She had been in exile for longer than she was able to remember, forced to survive on an inhospitable world, buried on the sliver between the cauldron that was the star-side and the lifeless chill that was the dark-side. Her bone-ship had been piloted here by the familiars of the Conclave itself, the eternity in their soulless eyes mocking her captivity as they delivered her to her doom. Outcast; heretic; transgressor; her crimes had been legion and her punishment severe.

The bone-ship smashed on landing, pieces scattered across both sides of the lumpen ur-planet. The familiars dissipated into the aether, returning on the wytch-way or not at all; it did not matter, they were gone and she was alone, broken and powerless without her soul-bound spirits, forced to hew her own survival with her bare claws into the shattered rock of the margin between light and dark. She dug her eyrie in a mountain riven a million times from root to crown by fire and frost, burning through the black, porous stone with acid bile and force of will.

She had reached out in the endless night beneath the knife-bladed stone, seeking a soul, something to bind to her as a slave, anything that lived or had once lived, but the Conclave had chosen well. Not only did the planet itself mirror her treachery with its twin faces, but there was not a soul to be had within the reach of her weakling web. In frustration and fury her claws scored the rock until they were nothing but weeping stumps, but for the first time she was truly and utterly alone.

So it had been for countless aeons, time immeasurable beneath the unchanging sky. The first offering had come her way purely, it had seemed to her at the time, by chance. She had sensed its approach to the star, picking up speed as it fell, but it was far too far away. She could smell the souls of the dead through the void, the smell of long-ago fires and old, cold ashes , but could not reach them. Like a sail on the horizon it had toyed with her, only to turn to windward, and away. Then the star itself had come to her aid, reaching out to nudge the offering with blazing fingers of light. Buffeted so, the tiny needle had crashed on her little world and, so doing, changed it beyond recognition.

The metal pod, no larger than her thorax, contained the dead. Hundreds of them in jars the size of her mandibles. Anything that was once alive could be forced to retrieve its own soul from the wytch-way and be bound once again. With a glee she had forgotten she could feel, she drew the souls to her, wailing wraiths that hastened to her bidding. Now she had spirit-slaves once again. Now she had hands that the star could not scorch and the ice could not freeze. Now she could begin gathering up the shards of bone her ship had become, bone that could be knit together. All she would need were more souls.

The first shards of bone her wraiths gathered were shaped into tiny craft, little larger than the needle had been. These she sent out into the void, crewed by her new familiars, to wait for more needles to come. She must have missed many, she knew - her web was pathetically small and weak - but after an agonising wait that made the aeons before seem like a brief summer, another arrived, its many dark spaces filled with the remains of more dead.

Then another came, and another. She rejoiced, and her wraiths sang in her radiance. She had been found. Somewhere in the void her cries had been heard, and offerings were being made. She had been found. More came, and more.

Her army of spirits grew to the thousands and then the tens of thousands, and more and more of the splintered bone-ship was recovered from across the tiny planet. As the pieces came together she forced them back into union, the screams of the souls she sacrificed to the weaving ringing through the airless rock around her.

This offering, now arriving in the vast underground cavern of her eyrie, dominated by the re-built bone-ship, would be the last. Its souls’ agonies would allow her to complete the bone-ship, and to power it out of the gravity-well of the star. She already knew where she would go. There was little point returning to the Conclave; to return from exile would mean soul-binding. No witch had been soul-bound by another since the Conclave had been formed; she had no intention of being the first. There were other paths to pursue in the wytch-way, and the first of them led to the world that had been sending her the offerings.

The last needle lay before her, its once-smooth metal casing pitted and scored by the fury of the naked star. There was alien script on the side, but it had been rasped away.

The metal of the casing peeled away at her request and the tiny, steel jars fell out in the feeble gravity of the planet, some of them spilling open and letting out clouds of ash. She held one in her stubby claws as she reached for the soul it had once held. As ever, it had more alien script written on the side – “Rebecca MacLean, beloved mother and grandmother, 1952-2019. You were our Sun while you lived. Rest In Peace.”

She had no idea what it meant, but she hoped it was something suitably praiseworthy. She was so looking forward to meeting her worshippers on this new, blue-green world. After all this time and all these offerings, they must be dying to meet her.

THE END

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