Chapter One: A Beginning
whoosh~
A cold wind blew by as the sun began to rise, cutting through the air with a whisper that sent goosebumps on the skin. The chill had seeped into my bones, deep, penetrating, the kind of cold that makes you wonder if you'll ever be warm again. Morning light fell across my face in pale, watery streaks, but it brought no comfort, no warmth. I felt weak and freezing, as if I had fallen asleep in the snow and been left there for hours, my body temperature dropping degree by degree until hypothermia set in. My mind was fogged up, thoughts moving like molasses, sluggish and incomplete. No coherent ideas were forming except for one primal, desperate need: I had to get inside. Somewhere. Anywhere.
But where was inside? Scratch that, where even am I?
As I tried to sit up and open my eyes, God, why were my eyelids so heavy? I couldn't move an inch. Something was pressing down on me, a weight I couldn't identify. My eyes finally cracked open, lashes crusted with something I didn't want to think about, and what greeted my vision was the sight that would follow me the rest of my days, burned into my retinas like a cattle brand: a pale girl's face, inches from my own. Her skin had the waxy, translucent quality of a candle, blue veins visible beneath the surface. Her eyes were blank and dead, filmed over with a milky white coating, yet somehow they held a thousand-yard stare that seemed to look directly into my soul, through it, past it, into nothing all at the same time.
Then the smell hit me.
A foul stench reminiscent of a sewage tank mixed with something far worse, a revolting odor I had only ever encountered around dead animals left to rot in the summer heat. It shot into my nostrils when I took a breath, so thick I could taste it. The most egregious, vile taste I had ever experienced assaulted my tongue as I breathed through my mouth, trying desperately to avoid the smell but only making it worse. Sweet and putrid and wrong, so fundamentally wrong that my body knew on an instinctive level that this was the taste of death itself.
And then I saw them. Bugs. Weevils, grubs, flies, and beetles crawled over her face in a living carpet of writhing bodies. They emerged from her mouth, her nostrils, the corners of her eyes. They moved with an eerie clicking of the legs and squishing of liquids that sent a shiver through me. And now that I was aware of them, I could feel them, all over my own skin. Crawling up my arms, across my chest, in my hair. The sensation of dozens, maybe hundreds of tiny legs skittering across my flesh made my skin want to crawl right off my body.
Budump~ Budump~
My heart hammered against my ribs, each beat so hard I thought it might crack a bone. The sound filled my ears, drowning out everything else for one eternal moment.
"Ahhhhhhhhh!"
"What the FUCK!!!"
The scream tore from my throat, raw and primal, the sound of a mind breaking.
The sight before me struck my mind with such force that every rational thought fled, leaving only a raw, unfiltered terror. This was not some fleeting fright, but a reality so dreadful that my body reacted with a violence I could not control. I bit my tongue, the taste of blood sharp in my mouth, and every muscle seized in a single, overwhelming spasm of fear. To summarize, it was enough to faint, defecate, urinate, and induce seizure: the greatest jump scare I never asked for.
In the instant it registered in my mind, corpse, that's a corpse, a dead child's corpse right in my face.
As horror shot through me, a loud bang rang through my ears as some force launched dozens of them into the air, freeing me from their hold. The bodies, blown skyward in a high parabola, started to rain back down around me, tumbling through the air in slow motion. Some part of my mind, numb with shock, took in the sheer absurdity of it all, even as I wished I could forget it.
Thump, thump, thump...
They landed with sounds that would haunt me forever. Not the hollow thud of movie props, but the wet, heavy impact of meat and bone hitting earth. Some landed face-down, others on their backs, limbs at impossible angles. One small body landed close enough that I felt the vibration through the ground.
What I could now see was what had been keeping me from sitting up, pinning me down with their collective weight: bodies. Human bodies. I was in a pit of naked corpses, most of them children, small and pale and wrong, but some adults were mixed in, their larger forms creating mounds, draping along the edges of the pit.
The urge to vomit surged into my throat, my gag reflex triggering so hard that my whole body convulsed. But there was nothing to bring up. I dry-heaved, my stomach clenching and unclenching, producing only bile and strings of saliva that hung from my lips. My diaphragm spasmed painfully with each heave, but still nothing came. I stumbled up a steep slope of bodies, my hands and feet sinking into cold flesh, finding purchase on a shoulder here, a hip there, trying desperately not to think about what I was touching, what I was climbing over. Every surface was slick with fluids I didn't want to identify. I was eager, no, desperate, frantic, losing my mind with the need, to get out of the pit I had woken in.
With weak arms that seemed too small, far smaller than I remembered them being, I grabbed onto the grass at the edge of the pit. The blades were wet with morning dew and slipped through my fingers on the first attempt. I tried again, digging my fingers into the earth itself, feeling dirt pack under my nails as I heaved myself up with strength I didn't know I had. I rolled over the edge and onto solid ground, looking up into the clouded morning sky, gasping for air that didn't taste like death.
My chest heaved. In, out. In, out. Each breath shallow and light, barely enough to keep oxygen flowing to my brain. The sky above was gray and overcast, clouds moving slowly across my field of vision. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
After what felt like an eternity of just breathing, just laying there and mind blank, I sat up slowly, my body protesting every movement. That's when I realized several things in quick succession, each realization hitting like a physical blow.
First: I was naked. Completely, utterly naked. The morning air raised goosebumps across every inch of my exposed skin.
Second: my limbs were wrong. My arms were thin, the muscles underdeveloped, the proportions all off. My hands looked like a child's hands. My legs, when I looked down at them, were short and skinny (though the skinny part is the most normal for me), with knobby knees prominent. These were the limbs and appendages that befit a child, not the young adult body I should have had, that I remembered having just... when? Yesterday? This morning?
And lastly, perhaps most terrifying of all: I had no idea where I was. No memory of how I'd gotten here, no recognition of the landscape, nothing. Just a blank space where recent memory should have been.
"Seriously, if this is a prank, I'm shooting the culprit!" My voice came out higher than it should have, younger, and it cracked with emotion. "And it had better be a prank, nightmare, or some.... thing...."
The words died in my throat.
My mind full-stopped for the third time this morning, because to my right, how had I not noticed this before?, was a smattering of houses. Not modern houses, not suburban homes or apartment buildings, but something out of a history book. What appeared to be a medieval town spread out before me, all thatched roofs, made of straw, timber frames, and stone walls. Smoke rose from chimneys in lazy spirals. And there were people, actual people, running my way in apparel I had only ever seen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Renaissance faire photos. Rough-spun tunics, long skirts, leather boots, and head coverings.
I guessed they'd probably seen the bodies flying through the air earlier. The absurdity of it flickered through my mind, but I shoved the thought away, overwhelmed by everything else.
I could hear them shouting, their voices carrying across the distance. It was some mangled version of English, the words twisted and strange, the accent so thick I could barely parse it. I could only make out a few words: wicca and something that sounded like demon or daemon, though, is there really a difference between the two, except for the spelling? They were pointing at me, gesturing wildly, their faces twisted in expressions I couldn't quite read from this distance. Fear? Anger? Horror? Toothless? Huh, weird. Way too many missing teeth. Huh, must be British.
Then, all of a sudden, they stopped. Just froze mid-stride, mid-shout. The silence was deafening.
They turned as one, like a flock of birds changing direction, and sprinted like the devil himself was upon them. They dropped their hoes and rakes, the tools clattering to the ground. They pushed others out of the way, shoving children and elderly people aside in their desperation to get as far away from me as possible. The panic was contagious, spreading through the crowd like wildfire. Within seconds, the street was chaos, people trampling over each other, screaming, fleeing.
What the hell had spooked them so badly?
I turned my head to the left, slowly, so slowly, because some part of me didn't want to know, and the answer became immediately, horrifyingly clear. That's what had caused their violent reaction. Was it a bird? A plane? No!
It was a group of what I presumed to be people was in the sky. Not in a plane, not in a helicopter, not on anything technological that made sense. They were flying. Actually flying. Not on wings or jetpacks, but on... sticks? No, not sticks. Brooms. They were riding on brooms.
"Ah, shit."
As what I could only assume were actual witches, because what else could they be?, descended toward me, I could make out more details. They wore pointy, crooked hats straight out of a children's storybook, but there was nothing whimsical about them. Their robes billowed behind them in the wind, dark and tattered. Even from this distance, I could see their faces were grim, determined. They were making a beeline straight toward me, moving with purpose and speed.
The lead witch raised something in her hand, a wand? A stick?, and I saw a flash of light.
My brain, which had been running on pure adrenaline and shock for the past several minutes, finally reached its breaking point. My body, which had been trembling with cold and fear and the aftershocks of trauma, decided it had had enough. My soul, if such a thing existed, simply gave up trying to process any of this.
They could no longer take this uber-realistic dream, this nightmare, this impossible reality. The system shut down.
I fell back, my legs giving out beneath me. I hit the ground hard, the impact jarring my spine, but I barely felt it. The faint touch of grass itched against my bare skin, each blade a tiny pinprick of sensation. My vision began to narrow, darkness creeping in from the edges. The last things I saw were the surrounding stalks of grass, swaying gently in the breeze, the peaceful gray sky above, and the encroaching darkness of unconsciousness swallowing everything like a tide.
The witches were getting closer. I could hear the sound of their brooms cutting through the air, a strange whistling noise that grew louder with each passing second.
But I was already gone, falling into the black, my consciousness fleeing from a reality it couldn't be bothered to deal with. Only the echo of a prayer in my mind was left as I fainted, words I didn't remember learning, in a language I didn't recognize, but somehow understood meant please, God, let me wake up from this.