Witch of 1,000 Wreaths
New Fiction by Blake Armstrong
In today’s story, writer and publisher Blake Armstrong (@RobotEatingRobo) gives us a chilling tale of a witch, abandon cathedral, and a mission to slay her. If you dig this piece, then check out PANOPTICON: VOLUME 1, a collection of short stories edited by Mr. Armstrong.
The gristle stubs of the Zygomatic ligaments along the skull’s cheek resisted Adeline’s razor while she scraped the bone clean. Her mind focused on the anatomical drawings of the nervous system laid out before her. Here, behind the altar, was the only place streaked by the sun in the entirety of the dark sanctuary.
“A cripple from the south,” the darkness said. “His arms writhe behind him. Stiff. Feet drag. He’s tumbled to his knees many times from the tree line to the hill.”
The great hall of the church itself was black. As chains rattled, scattered, harsh beams of light crashed through the crumbling ceiling, lighting chunks of broken pews and white cuts of the cracked marble aisle. At the end of the aisle, in the center of the darkness, sat the altar. Adeline rolled up her anatomy diagrams and placed them neatly in the altar’s shelf. White marble bathed in sunlight and adorned with clusters of skulls crowned with wreaths of pine and juniper framing Adeline against the dark.
Places were taken and the stage was set.
Adeline, in her midnight blue robes, stood just a few feet behind the altar in the darkness. Another spot of light shone onto a massive stone slab covering the front door. Any who entered would be blinded; she would be completely concealed until she stepped forward into the sunshine on the altar.
“Open the doors for him, please,” her clear voice echoed into the vast darkness.
Chains rattled and clanked on invisible spools as the stone drew itself up above the door. It locked into place and the dark cathedral went silent. A series of small bells chimed from outside. The iron gate had been opened.
She listened closely for movement outside.
Slow, scuffling boots slopped through the icy mud outside the front door. The steps she heard were not slowed by fear or heavy from armor. They did nothing to conceal themselves. The hobbling person outside presented no threat.
The dense oak door hinged outward and a tall, thin, shaking man fought to control his body through the doorway. His arms splayed away from him, escaping his authority; his head bobbed back and forth as his hips jerked. He turned backward and shuffled along the aisle, inch by inch. No longer was he the ruler of his body, every movement a twitch and a battle against himself. Sweat poured down his brow despite the near-freezing temperatures outside.
“Hello?” he said quietly.
“Turn and face the altar,” Adeline boomed as an unseen voice from the darkness.
One degree at a time, his boots scraped along the floor and brought him about.
“Can you walk to the altar?”
He rocked back and forth, urging his feet forward to no avail.
“What do you seek?”
He pushed his right foot forward against his body’s stubborn denials, and whispered something Adeline couldn’t hear.
She leaned forward. “Do you conspire against me?” She saw his lips moving and leaned over the altar, her dark hood now rimmed with sunlight, covering her face in shadow.
“Help me,” the man whispered. He’d lost control over even the volume of his voice.
“Come to me,” Adeline commanded.
He grimaced and tried, but he couldn’t move.
She saw the disease had frozen him.
Adeline drew back, then extended her slender white arm into the beam of light that illuminated the altar, gesturing him to come forth. From within the darkness, two sets of arms, robed in black, grabbed the shaking man under his elbows and behind his legs, sweeping him off his feet. They floated him to the altar, then disappeared into the dark void from whence they came.
“Hands on the altar, please. Any sudden movements and you will be killed where you stand,” she said to him.
“I can’t control it,” he said.
“Any sudden movements that look like you’re going for a weapon, then.” Adeline reached under the altar and produced a glass vial containing a clear oil. She uncorked it and held the vessel to his lips. “Can you drink?”
The man gave her a small nod and parted his lips.
Her soft hand held the back of his head as she tipped the vial, pouring the contents into his mouth. He swallowed what he could. The rest dribbled from his mouth. She took her sleeve and wiped his chin, then flipped an hourglass on the altar to let the sand trickle into its lower compartment.
“Thank you,” the shaking man said.
She leaned back into the darkness, nearly disappearing from his sight. “For what?” Adeline asked.
“Whether you’ve killed me or cured me, you have my thanks,” the man whispered.
“And if it were a poison to only bring you pain?”
“What’s more suffering?” he asked.
She smiled in the dark’s cover.
A voice from the void echoed in the vaulted space, saying, “A man approaches from the north. He carries a sword.”
“Were you followed?” she asked the shaking man.
“No,” he said. His voice was louder now. His shaking had slowed. He stood up straight and lifted a steady hand, shocked at its obedience.
“Hands on the altar!” Adeline snapped.
The man placed his hand back on the marble. His shaking was gone. His body was his again. Moisture welled in his eyes, and he broke with an overwhelming relief, his tears splattering on the white stone.
“How close?” Adeline asked the darkness.
“Just emerged from the tree line. No horse. Fifteen minutes,” the void responded.
The witch narrowed her eyes. “Can you walk?” she asked the man who stood before her.
“I can try,” he said.
She turned over his hand and gave him a pouch of seeds. “Plant these. Return to me when they sprout buds. Now run.”
The shaking man nodded, turned and made for the exit, his shuffle easing into a walk as he used his newfound legs to carry him from the crumbling church.
Her eyes in the bell tower saw a ragged, robed man with a common sword hanging from his belt. He hunched over a cheap parchment contract to keep it out of the drizzle as best he could. She knew it read, “Any man who brings the severed head of the Witch of the South to King Gregor IV shall be rewarded with gold and high honors. She is suspected to dwell in the abandoned cathedral a day’s ride south of Sutton. At the top of a lone, grassy hill, the building sits alone, consisting of four large towers, a crumbling roof, and red-and-gold-stained glass windows. She would dare to profane this once-holy place with her rank sorcery.”
He was without a horse. Certainly no highborn knight. If he needed help, he should not have brought the blade. All the same, she grabbed her scepter, whose head was a black hemisphere with a polished mirror set on its flat side. When she dipped the scepter into the light pouring in from the ceiling, she turned its mirror and reflected the sun back at the door. The light was hers to direct.
The eyes in the tower saw the robed man approach over the hill. Afternoon sun warmed the robed man’s frozen cheeks and colored his steamy breath a warm gray. His unfamiliar scabbard knocked into his legs and weighed on his hip. Every adjustment he made to his belt made no difference.
He stopped at the top of the hill. The eyes saw the man take in their work -- the ruined stone cathedral, losing ground to nature with every changing season, besieged by thick, unruly bushes and shrubs, the undergrowth parting only at its center for a wide iron gate with a cluster of bells perched above the frame. The four bell towers guarded each corner of the building, a few of their loose stones lying crumbled at their bases, and the stained-glass windows were draped with tattered cloth from within while smothered with vines from without.
His breath hung in the air with each labored step through the frosty mud up the slope. A gust of wind tore at his cloak and flapped its tattered edges in the opposite direction, pulling him away from the church. He pushed against the iron gate, and it swung open, rattling the rusty bells at its top. They chimed across the yard and echoed back off the stone walls of the cathedral. The building creaked and moaned in response.
“Places!” The darkness hissed.
The scuffling of shoes and skittering of pebbles echoed off the stone walls. Adeline stepped back into the darkness behind the altar. “A little higher on the door,” Adeline suggested to the dark above her. The beam of light that blazed on the entrance floor tilted up and adjusted its focal point up the door, centered to the height of a man’s head.
Heavy oak scraped against the marble floor.
The man was greeted by a blinding light from the ceiling before he stepped into the darkness. All the light from outside couldn’t press its reach further than a few yards into the dark. He saw the altar and the skulls, bathed in hard stokes of sun.
The skulls held his attention.
Their empty eye sockets stared him down, arranged to look down the aisle, to watch the door.
He looked to the open door and considered leaving.
As he turned back to face the altar, he saw hundreds of wreathed skulls hanging from the ceiling. Frayed rope pulled through nasal cavities, eye sockets, clenched jaws, and fractured holes tied each skull to the ceiling and directed their blank gazes toward him.
A shot of terror and repugnance ran through him. “Witch!” he called to the darkness. The echo of his voice bounced through the seemingly endless void.
Knowing her role, Adeline and her slender figure, hinted at by her open robe while her beautiful young face was teased by the darkness of the hood, stepped into the light that shone down on the altar. She stood in silence.
The man fought the deepening pit in his stomach.
Whispers of “Run!” and “Hurry!” echoed the dark.
He mustered all of his strength to keep his own voice from trembling. “By royal decree, your head belongs to the king.”
Adeline drew a wreath of juniper from under the altar and held it in the light. “And your head needs one of my wreaths,” a woman’s voice sung from the darkness. Adeline wished she had the voice, too. “What are the charges this time?” the voice sung.
He produced the contract. “Any knight who –”
“Knight?” Adeline laughed. “No mail, no plate, no helmet, no shield. You are no knight. You are a fool with a sword – though, truly, the same could be said of most genuine knights. Tell me, why a spatha instead of a saber, or an axe? At least something useful for chopping.”
He found no reply.
“Because,” she began, “the spatha is cheap. Military surplus from grunts who dug trenches and have more experience swinging it in practice than you’ve ever had since you managed to buy it. Go on then, the charges.”
He looked back to the contract. “Desecrating the dead,” he began, voice cracking. “Communing with the dead. Communing with spirits. Grave robbing. Kidnapping. Invoking evil. Soliciting men and women. Practice as an illegal physician. The use of illicit herbs. The use of –”
“And what is your quarrel with me, sir?”
“The king –”
“Is not the fool who stands before me. Discard your borrowed blade and you shall have my mercy.” The darkness echoed her offer, with its many voices pleading “Leave here!” and “Flee!” She pulled back her hood and revealed her face. Not scarred, not broken, not disfigured. Only a cloth eye patch broke the symmetry of her young face. “Last chance,” she said.
The foolish man pulled aside layers of torn cloak and jacket to draw out a crossbow.
Chains rattled and spun off their reels above. He whipped around to see a wall of stone drop from the ceiling.
It slammed down with a sepulchral boom, covering the doors.
The many voices of the darkness hissed, “Fool! Idiot!”
He darted forward into the darkness. Adeline spun her mirrored scepter and redirected the light from above into the man’s eyes. He squinted, shielding himself with his free hand. Adeline ducked into the darkness behind the altar.
The man squeezed the trigger and sent the crossbow bolt into the black.
It clanked hollow against stone.
The shadows laughed.
He fished through his tattered clothes and wrestled the sword from its scabbard, swung the blade at the shadows and found no purchase.
“Show yourself!” he demanded.
Adeline stepped into a column of light nearer to him, but still out of reach. She held her dagger near her breast. “Your ignorance undoes you,” she hissed.
He drew his sword up to block whatever spell she cast. A sharp, hot pain bit at his inner thigh. He fell to one knee and clutched at the pain. His glove came back dark with blood; only then did he notice the glint of red on her dagger’s blade. Putting his weight on his sword like a cane, he staggered up. Consciousness pumped out of his wound, dizzying him as his legs stumbled beneath him. White fog bloomed from the center of his vision.
He found himself on his back, staring up at a hole of light in the ceiling. Adeline was cradling his head in her lap with her warm hands. She had removed her costume’s eye patch, and her two crystal blue eyes stared down at him.
She pointed up above, and loud, heavy chains thundered inside the ancient church. The black pulled away from the ceiling, the shafts of light following it in sync. The entire roof was set on metal rails, and could shift at her will, allowing light into whatever corners of the building the stagehands, the witches, chose.
She was joined by four others: another young woman, two strong men, and an old crone. The four of them rolled the would-be knight onto a sheet. “One, two, three,” the man on his right said, and they lifted him off the floor. “Lucky he isn’t covered in mail,” one of the women remarked. Hers was the singing voice that whispered to him from the black.
As they carried him to the altar, he could see the ruined building for what it really was – an illusion. The great cathedral was not in disrepair. The only broken pews were those placed in the pools of light. The floors were clean and swept, the grand stone pillars held their shape, and the boarded-up or cloth-draped windows were unbroken. The skulls, however, were in fact the skulls of the dead.
They set him on the white slab, and two more young women rushed forth. His hands and feet were roped off and tied to anchors in the floor. They cut his clothes away from him.
The old crone held out an empty hand. “Numbing oils.” Acting under orders, Adeline opened a cabinet beneath the altar and pulled out a flask. She handed it to the old woman as the two men held the man’s mouth open. The old woman poured the oil into his mouth. “No need for the fool to die in pain,” she remarked. She held the empty vial up and an assistant drew it away. “Unlike the well-fed knights, he won’t have any impeding fat to keep us from diagramming the muscular system. He’s thin enough to begin our maps of the spinal structures.”
“I’ll bring pen and ink,” one of the men said as he turned from the altar.
“And the trough for discarded viscera!” the old crone screeched after him. Lifting her hands to the ceiling, the old crone bowed her head, and the others followed. “To you here on the altar, we thank you for your sacrifice, given against your consent. You will be mourned and honored. If the soul is immortal, may yours find its way peacefully back to the creator. May your skull be seen by others as a warning and by us as a reminder of gratitude.”
Lying naked on the altar with his mind fading, the man saw hundreds of pre-made wreaths hung above him. The smell of pine and juniper flooded his dulling senses. The man could hear the knife puncture his chest and peel his skin away, but he could not move or feel. There was no escaping that each one of those skulls accounted for at least one page of knowledge in their ever-growing tomb of medicinal exploration, and his would soon join them.