Chapter 27: One Becomes Threes with the Cycle Anew

Lines of them marched yet again.

Koolah waited.

Once-dead, those whose physical bodies had failed them, experiencing the first death that many beings of Kigan encounter in their existence.

Koolah yet waited.

They were dead long before they were trapped here.

No flesh remained between their bones and their mail hauberks, nothing to stop the metal plates of their armour from clattering. No hair escaped between the angular plates of their helmets which jutted out past their unending grins, no lips remaining but thanks to the helmets, they still had rusted jaws of metal.

Koolah, still living, unbound by the magic that bound the defenders and the besiegers, waited.

The foot soldiers were armed with spear and shield, the heraldry of the shield worn away, leaving a ghostly indistinct beast on each shield. Their side arms were maces once shaped in the form of a beast’s head, long eroded into something that looked like a clenched fist.

For a brew witch, time is very important. Each brew cannot be boiled over its time, lest it be ruined. The time for Koolah to act had not yet come.

To the sides of these soldiers were more of their fellows but these once-dead were mounted on great skeletal lizards, though for all the rotted cloth and armour, you would have not known that only bones remained.

The flow of magic began to stir, and Koolah gently urged it, but she still waited.

Thrashing behind them were crevice kraken. These were fall smaller than their nightmarishly huge water dwelling cousins, but the octopus-like monsters were still massive. These however, were but spirits, their heads caged in crumbling metal towers, their eight limbs bound in rings that skeletal mages and archers were affixed into. The physical and the ethereal, one binding the other in place.

Normally the magic of the loop would claim the spirits of those who die within its boundaries, and with the start of a new cycle it would destroy the old physical and create anew, binding the ethereal once more! Koolah and her sisters had defied that through the charms they bore.

The towers once had proudly displayed the craftsmanship of their owners. Long had been the day when those owners had lived to feel pride, to create wonders and see their wonders crush nations around them.

This army of the dead marched again to siege again the sparkling city that lay crushed before them.

The charms held both spirit and flesh! Pattern and form! With them, Koolah would direct the remaking of the loop magic!

This city was what they opposed, what they fought against over and over and over. A bastion that looked as if some deity had hammered the night sky into castles, manors and spiralling maze-like walls, all arranged as the petals of a flower of people.

The charm, one that became three that became one floated above Koolah, and the flows of magic seethed.

The city had not been taken, not once.

“One remains, three there where, three there shall be again, by the law of this realm, by the hold of the magic, let that which was sundered be knit whole again, spirits unblemished, in reflection of that which remains unwounded, untainted, unbroken” Koolah chanted, her hat shimmering with emerald light.

The city had long since fallen.

For a moment, there was the flickering image of a green cauldron around the charm, and the flows of magic crashed within! The cauldron swelled and Koolah nearly fainted from the forces at play, but she stirred the flows onwards, her hands developing blisters as if she was stirring boiling water.

The lowing dirge of horns called out, announcing morning and the continuation of the once-dead’s siege.

As sudden as it started, the push of the flows stopped, and the green cauldron was covered in cracks. White and red light beamed through these cracks along with the thunderous sounds of the cauldron crumbling.

Yet the light of morning, in all the frozen cycles, did not once reach this place, far beneath ice, deep in shattered stone.

The cauldron shattered! Not into pieces, but into two smaller cauldrons.

Lines of them marched again, and would march again, for this is not our story, not their story.

Not the end, not the freedom from the loop that these soldiers were trapped in.

Our story is in this place, that so long ago fell.

Hovering between these cauldrons was the part of the charm that Koolah had held, one had become three once more!

It was a morning like any other.

The magic inside the cauldrons boiled, and steam emitted from Koolah as she fought to maintain them.

Distant from the battle, amid trees long changed by the warping of the loop, the ice and darkness.

The charms within the cauldrons began to shine brightly!

In this gnarled grove, where the leaves of the trees were frozen crows, there was a house.

Inside the cauldrons the dim silhouette of a cat’s skeleton could be seen in each.

A cottage in fact.

Then came flesh, organ, all the forms that are part of that form.

This cottage was made from the shattered soil, from the ominous trees.

It was however quite a homely little home, and smoke of varied unnaturally shifting colours flapped its way from it’s chimney, splitting apart and roosting in the trees, in time finding bodies in the frozen crow leaves.

Then there was clothes, artefacts of power, the hats of course were first to be returned to full form.

This cottage had not been around when the land fell.

Though it was many years old, in this place, that counted as new.

Finally, the spirits of Qusheab and Jadah returned to their bodies, as if they had never experienced death.

Quite naturally living within this cottage were witches.

The cauldrons crumbled away into scales that were washed away by the flow of magic.

Three witches, sisters all.

Jadah and Qusheab floated down to the bed, gently landing.

With the sad call of the horns they began their day.

They opened their eyes, and Koolah’s relieved face was what they first saw.

 

[I’m working through some stuff, but I refuse to give up. There is only one existence that I’ll submit to. The true failure would be if I gave up and walked away, never to put finger to key on this website again. It will not happen.]