The first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
When the gods spoke, the witch doctor listened.
It came as an ominous drop in the stomach, the whisper of a primal fear understood but rarely felt, and she in her swampy grotto read the portents with anxious fascination. Birds on the wing flew southwest as one; even the beasts that inhabited Tinea's marshes and peat bogs fell silent. The world itself drew in a tremulous breath. The sun lingered long overhead, a scorching eye of divine judgment.
The tension broke loose with a sundering of the world. The weight in her gut bloomed into an unearthly rumbling that shook far greater things than the moorings of her nerves. Swamp waters shivered their affright as silversides flashed like shiny bullets out of the shallows and serpents, rats, and worms alike fled their earthy abodes in a sprawling, writhing mass. The witch doctor hobbled out to her clearing and peered northeast as the quake rolled on like an endless peal of distant thunder. She saw nothing, but understood all the same.
The gods were restless and wrathful; their rage smote the mighty Veneror Peak as a reminder of their great and terrible power.
This was doubtless a problem for the heathens beyond the swamp, with their scheming and their meddling. The Ilati were above such petty trifles, and surely Vespera would not smite her chosen children on the day the Elder went to pay his respects. She turned back toward her hovel, the vertebrae woven into her mane rattling against one another, and paused as a pall of realization swept over her mind.
Turhan.
---
Seldom had a horse with 3 good legs and a questionable pair of lungs made such short work of the distance between Tinea Swamp and the vaunted Veneror Peak. Nothing could be done to romanticize the journey: the witch doctor maintained a pace that, while inexhaustible, looked to the outside observer to be about as smooth as the earthquake that had motivated her hence.
Nevertheless, sweat slicked her shaggy coat with salty foam by the time she arrived, and little cuts had opened up along her lips and cheeks where the serrated teeth protruding from her skull-mask had jarred against flesh while running, dampening her face with thin smears of blood..
The thunder she'd felt in the swamp had not prepared her for what she found upon arrival. Great swaths of land had been pushed aside and reordered at the gods' selfish whim, and great furrows had been thrown up along the slopes of the great peak like tilled earth in a colossus' garden. Lush greenery even sprouted from the furrows with an unnatural sort of fecundity, greedily rooted into the sacred soils
Breathing deeply of the thick wrongness on the air through her mask's slitted nostrils, she tracked her Elder's overpoweringly familiar scent through the wreckage until she glimpsed a tangled, hairy carpet peeping out from a loosely-stacked pile of rubble.
"Kenkéknem!" she barked between shallow, exhausted breaths, telekinetically flinging the smaller stones away even as she shuffled awkwardly to the old stallion's aid. "You no die now, old man." Grunting against her own fatigue and the weight of the stones entrapping him, the shaggy mare bent to with a will, time passing only by the mantra breathed from bloody and tooth-caged lips.
"Vespela, safe you keep um...safe you keep you chile..."
The Witch Doctor there are no grotesques in nature
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 was nothing if not savage, nothing if not the embodiment of all that crawleth upon the earth. She healed out of a desire to understand and dressed out of a desire to emulate, and she had not survived her second birth by being weak. Her body may falter, but her will knew few equals. Fuck the rocks - they would move if she willed it, or Vespera help whatever stood in her way.
I want to go home. Atatu. We go now.
She might have bent to the relief she felt at hearing his voice, but such did not reach so far as to break the feral intensity of her concentration. She fussed over the swarthy old bear like a mother hen, blocking him with her shaggy body even as he made to rise. "Sit," she huffed, nosing him with the toothy end of her snout and hardly flinching as he spattered her skull with a spray of bloody snot.
The witch doctor did not balk at blood.
The witch doctor was blood.
She eyed his oozing hip with a disapproving growl, grinding her tusks against the teeth of her mask. It would do him fewer favors than a club foot did her, and a proper poultice needed proper mud. All she saw here was rock and stone and business-formal trees eyeing her through the mask like judgmental herons. Her shaggy coat bristled impatiently.
She drew a sprig of dried yarrow from her herb satchel, pausing for a moment to weigh her options before grabbing the herb in her mouth and pulverizing it between her teeth. After a moment of vigorous chewing, the spotted mare spat the majority of the contents directly into Turhan's gaping hip wound and pressed it deeper with her chin before doing the same with the remainder to his nose. It was no match for a poultice prepared properly with hot water, but it should staunch the blood and keep his wounds from festering on the return journey. "You stand now." The bitter taste lingered in her mouth, far more offensive than the old-metal of his viscous blood, and the comical wags of her tongue were completely lost on both the diligent healer and her blind patient as she saw to the remainder of his mainly superficial wounds.
"Kenkéknem much strong, break um mountain. Mountain hit back." Whether that was meant as praise or rebuke was not entirely clear. Certainly the witch doctor would have preferred not to run pell-mell across all of Novus to exhume her mentor, but his persistence seemed as sure as sunrise, and the blessings of Vespera upon him must have been immense indeed to deliver him thusly conformed after such a calamity. "Right me fix um hip at home, no worry."
The dusty mare tilted her skull-masked head at him, squinting as though trying to place the wrongness of his appearance beyond the mash of herbs and saliva caked into his muzzle. The silence threatened to stretch, then -
"Ah! You drop cow horn."
And of cours they could go nowhere without it, for the witch doctor of all horses knew how fond he was of his garb. With somewhat less energetic effort than before, she turned her attention again to the rubble that had entrapped him.
The Witch Doctor there are no grotesques in nature
Without his coo mask, the elder looked somehow smaller, drained of a bit of his mystique - but the witch doctor would never say as much. It humanized him, made him more accessible to her, as she imagined she might be if she ever decided to doff her own attire.
Which she wouldn't. Turhan needn't look beneath the mask to see her for who she was, and her eyes were for Vespera alone.
An aftershock shuddered through the roots of the mountain, shifting the rubble further as the elder cursed his nakedness to anyone and anything that would listen. The witch doctor only half-heard him, behind more sharply inclined to action than epithets and too tired anyway to squander energy that she wasn't planning on using toward nobler ventures.
Vespera, awake you tink?
This caught her attention, in part for the mention of her goddess and in part because it was the first conversational thing that Turhan had said since discovering his face was gone. The mouse-colored mare paused for a moment to consider a reply and kept digging as she spoke.
"Vespel been wake," she replied portentously, knowing that the elder would understand. For the Ilati, Vespera had never fallen silent at all. Her voice seeped through the growth of new bark over a wounded tree, nestled in the sigh of daylight sinking down into night. She whispered for those attentive enough to hear in the change of the seasons and on the wings of newly-fledged birds. Perhaps the Interlopers in their stone towers playing their queer political games and throwing their gilded parties could not hear her speak, but one could not lay that at the goddess's feet. "Now she jus be mad."
A large, flat stone that the spotted mare had been forcing gave way after a final mighty shove, clattering down the rubble-strewn slope. Beneath it, protected from the slide by the stone's shielding presence, lay the lost mask, dusty but intact. "Ho!" She hefted the article, her raspy voice almost aggressively self-congratulatory. "Me find. Here." Not quite waiting for the elder to fully look her way, she put the mask back over his face and automatically set to with the task of braiding it back into place. It was something she'd done a hundred times; she could probably have done it in her sleep.
As she worked, her voice softened - as much as it could, anyway. "What do if Vespela be mad, Kenkéknem?"
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 first records of our young world were those of tears and blood;
its last records will be those of tears and blood also.
Turhan had nothing to say. Somehow, that made everything worse.
The Ilati were Vespera's chosen people, but what hope had they of navigating this new and perilous landscape? The witch doctor was not Nahane; she had spent most of her recent life speaking to Vespera and interpreting in the world around her what her silent mother ofefred in response, but at times the dusk goddess' guidance seemed like perhaps it might just be herself, her own whims.
And now even Turhan had no answer.
The spotted mare finished fastening the coo mask to the old stallion's face, her grating sigh deep enough to upset the beaded bag at her shoulder.
She needed to regroup, to see this happening from a more impersonal perspective and read the portents with an unbiased eye. With Turhan here, bloodied and coated with stone dust, she could do neither of these things. "Come," the witch doctor said, brushing him lightly with her masked muzzle before turning back toward Terrastella, "we go now."
With that, the witch doctor picked her way carefully down the mountainside, trusting that Turhan would follow.
The Witch Doctor there are no grotesques in nature
