The witch doctor was oftentimes reluctant to leave the breathing, buzzing closeness of the swamp. Certainly there was nothing that she, the chosen of Vespera, could hope to learn from the queer folk that clambered about like ants in the stone tower to the west, and they seemed reluctant at best to set foot in the shadowed holiness of Tinea.

Good.

It belonged to the Ilati. The Ilati would keep it.

Now, though, the air was thick with scheming whispers that fluttered like birds from all corners of Novus, and the sun rose before a blood-red sky each morning, heralding war. She had read the portents as plainly as Turhan. However fervently they isolated themselves, the meddling of outsiders would one day reach them. She did not lust after getting involved, but she would sacrifice every outsider to the appeasement of Vespera before she let their petty politics destroy her people.

The outsiders had gathered in the open fields. She hobbled toward them, head low, vertebrae bristling in her coarse mane like the hackles of an otherworldly dog, and her skull-shrouded head swayed side to side, the ensemble clacking against itself in the clear evening air. Between the bloody paint, the rattling of her bones, and the subtle rasping of each breath, she seemed more predator than prey, an old throwback to times when hunters did not bother to skulk in shadows. Back then, their supremacy was utterly assured.

She singled out a stranger that seemed particularly gaudy with his bright scales and broad antlers, perusing a book by firelight. The orange glow cast her strange silhouette in even deeper shadow, painting a demon into the contours of her toothy visage.

"Dis night red moon risin', swewll," the witch doctor growled, a greeting as dark and portentous as the whispers heard 'round the fen.


The Witch Doctor
The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.

The witch doctor swayed as though to the rhythm a drum she alone could hear, her scowl only transcribed through the pull of her lower lip around her jutting tusks. Who was he to deny her portents, to doubt her connection to Vespera?

The answer to that, perhaps, was obvious. He was no one to the Ilati, as she was no one to him, and if she could not help but surge with a sense of ruffled condescension at his presumptive relaxation she could certainly guess the source of his ignorance. He was an interloper, one of the soft creatures cushioned within castles of wood and stone, who retired to silk sheets and read books and forgot the feeling of night's watchful eye upon him or the taste of mud-gritted grass in his mouth. Of course he could not see the shadows falling, so absorbed was he in his queer hobbies.

With a guttural hiss the dust-spotted mare lurched toward him, rattling with each uneven step as the many bones round her hair and neck clicked against one another. "No blood? One eye see half de worl, miss much." She peered into his eyes - the good and the bad - eyes narrowing in the impenetrable shadows beneath the mask, and licked her lips. The tip of her tongue dragged along the serrated edges of the skull's still-sharp teeth and drew a thin oozing of blood, filling her mouth with copper and the full-bodied awareness of Life in its most sacred, concentrated state.

"Blood dere," the witch doctor said, prodding at the stallion's breast with her snout. "Blood here." She touched her own chest, the eagle skull clacking as though affronted by the intrusion. A flash of reddish saliva coated her teeth; her tongue bled freely, if slowly.

"Mad you make um Vespel. Soon you see." Her words rasped aggressively through an accusatory glare.

Soon they would see indeed. The very bones of the earth groaned for release, stirred like ancient dragon thighs beneath the surface - aching, stiff, ready to burst forth once more.

And he was reading books.

The first records of our young world
were those of tears and blood

***

The witch doctor drew in a hissing breath through her displeased grimace as the kirin spoke, her scowl invisible beneath the mask to all but Vespera herself. He thought to pick her brain? After that display? Her shaggy fur bristled along her back, her tail switched irritably against her rump.

"You idiot god den," she fired back derisively in a tone that said far more clearly than her limiteded vocabularly would allow that she did not believe for a second he had been anything more than a cushion-sitting, tea-drinking Court freeloader growing fat on the bounty of others, in this life or any other. "Swewll ack ver' big an' 'portant. Swewll read big book an' whole brain fall out." She laughed, an ugly jackal sound.

Pacing a rough and aggressive circle around him without consideration for such trifles as personal space, the painted mare continued. "Vespela talk wit Witch Doctor, she talk wit Ilati. Vespela give um sand-girl an strong medicine. Swewll have big book an questions, an when da gods come to punis de courts, doing noting no save swewll from dere wrat."

The witch doctor may well be the most accomplished healer among the Ilati, but she was every bit as sharp as the skull she wore and every bit as wild as the swamp she called home. She had no patience for the games of cityfolk.

***

The Witch Doctor
Its last records will be those of tears and blood also

"You no learn about place from book. You learn from place," she sneered, bone-ridged neck arched with savage imperiousness. She saw not the unruffled patience of an ancient one but the vacant stare of a buffoon who had no idea of even how much he knew nothing about. If he had lived that long, a claim that could hardly be believed in a place where immortality was a rare gift from the gods to their most loyal and deserving followers, then he had lived it in darkness and ignorance.

And, while the witch doctor might have been more than willing to share her expansive knowledge of medicine and herbs with the Ilati, she had approximately zero patience for a basic history lesson with an emotionless fuddy-duddy reading books by firelight. Her bobtail switched metronomically against her rump in her agitation, then abruptly slowed as the corners of her mouth turned up in a half smile empty of compassion.

"Too late for swewll. When judgment come, you see."

They would all see. They would face the gods' wrath and they would turn their eyes to the sky in pious desire for mercy. Perhaps then Relic would see fit to show a shred of mortal emotion about things, lift his eyes, and look at the world through his own eyes rather than the eyes of a possibly-dead author.

With one last jerk of her skull-masked head, the spotted mare stalked out of the firelight in much the same way she entered it, swaying with each step like a battle-scarred lioness.