Demon Eyes

It is still dark and it is still humid, but here, instead of the ghastly growling of the forest, Ygne cannot hear anything. There’s just her own breathing and her own heart, loud in her ears and hopefully nowhere else. She steps in a pool of water and it gets into her shoes. It’s ice cold, but she can only move forward. There is no other choice, nothing she can really do because her only option is to go on – on her left and right, there are walls, stone and thick and rigid, surely not ready to budge beneath her hands. She doesn’t dare to look behind her again.

Even looking in front of herself reveals nothing. She cannot see a thing, but she supposes she’ll know she’s reached the end once she collides with something solid.

That doesn’t happen.

She walks on and on in small, frightened and careful steps, paying close attention to not slipping as her main goal. Occasionally, she looks downwards, to her feet, just to make sure there is nothing on the floor, be it wines or animals, that could make her journey harder. There’s nothing. There’s no life in here, none but her.

On one such occasion she glances down, but when her head goes up again, the darkness has cleared. She’s standing in a cave-like earthly prison, with almost no light at all. There is nothing to illuminate the darkness, it just seems like the thread of dark have split on their own, creating space for the Lady leaning on one of the earthen walls. It seems like there is stone behind her. Stone and her dress, the only two bright things that Ygne can see.

Before the Lady, Ygne feels smaller, lesser. The woman is, truly, fit for a noble rather than the witch, dressed in finest white robes and with the darkest red jewels women through her stands. Her hair is curly, but not naturally so; these curls are not like those of her fellow witch that Ygne’s just passed.

There’s something that draws away from the splendour of her clothing and jewellery. Even though her skin is smooth and her lips full, her face is grotesque – the right side is burnt entirely, skin melting away from the face until pale bone is seen. The right eye, it is glassy too, and thus Ygne cannot look her in the eyes – the left one is black and searching, demonic in its human-like quality.

“I need your help.” In the silence of the crypt, Ygne’s voice sounds too loud, too foreign. The Lady’s been looking at her already, but witch inclines her head nonetheless, questioning.

“I know.” Ygne’s skin crawls with the sound of her, half earthly and half otherworldly, coming from the death and decay. Witch’s right hand, covered to wrist in lace and silk, moves slowly upwards, until she adjusts her high collar. There’s a jewel on her neck too, dark red, but they seem to be sucking in the light instead of emitting it. Even her hand is burned. “You were able to get in here because you’re of the prophecy, right? The child with the cut right hand.”

Ygne looks down, to her hand – to the pale scar marring the skin. She’s gotten it a long time ago, when she was very little. She could only vaguely remember it was something trivial; a child of a maid putting hands where they didn’t belong. It was common, ordinary. There was no lost magic within it.

“A child grown into the pretty woman.” The otherworldly voice pulls her out from her thoughts and she looks at the woman, soaking in more detail than she had before.

“Thank you, my lady.” She doesn’t know what else to say. This is how you receive compliments. The witch is surely no different than any other aristocrat. She is, Ygne knows, as dangerous as any of them. For a maid, they’re all danger in their own right. Her life hangs by a thread, always, and now it’s been finally forsaken. She should have nothing to fear in front of this being, but she fears.

She fears for the tattered body in the tattered scraps, she fears for the small traces of life still left in her.

“But.” She’s not sure how to start, and she turns a word into a sentence without her meaning to. “I need your help. I need to kill the Witch Queen.” She cannot do this on her own. She needs—she needs a miracle.

“What help can I give you?” The voice is calm, but it resonates and it sounds violent. It’s a strange combination. Being calm and being violent. Being calm and sounding threatening. Being calm and sounding exasperated. “What is it that you seek from me?”

Ygne needs to choose her words carefully. She didn’t think she would get to this point. She meant to, she just didn’t think she would get here. She thought, surely, that she would die and become a martyr, another story as the evidence of the Witch Queen’s cruelty.

“I need a name. Or—I need to know if she has a face. Or if she has a name. At all.” She’s getting lost in her own words, unsure of her goal and her cause, and she grips the sides of her skirt. There are pockets sewn closed on the inner sides of it, pockets filled with salts and iron, to ward her and to keep her safe. They kept spilling as she walked deeper and deeper into the cursed forest, but she survived.

She’s not sure her dress will survive to aid her on her way back, but perhaps the witches are supposed to have something to help her along. She doesn’t really know how the tale is supposed to go. The knight never has to fight for his right. She has to.

“A name? Why would I give you a name?!” She sounds enraged now, the seeing eye focused on her. Demon eyes, people call them – the black sclera and the red blaze, a thing out of stories, a thing that nannies claimed were imagination of lazy peasants and a thing that peasants claimed was true. Demons come for your children, one curse said, and one man told it to Ygne’s mother when she was but a girl.

Mother was all to careful with her for days after that, superstition getting the better out of her. A fear for self is nothing compared to a fear for a child, she would always claim.

“Then I need at least—at least a way to see her face. If she has one!” Or get to her body. How do you physically kill a witch? How do you get close enough to her at all?

The Lady laughs. It echoes through hallways that are not there and the crypt seems to be shaking with her. It sounds like she’s seen the court jester compete for words with nobles. It sounds like she’s seen a small, dusty, carpenter’s child try to become a princess. It sounds like Ygne has asked her something painfully obvious.

“Do you not have a face, child?” She’s not a child. She’s—she’s a woman grown. She’s been a woman grown for years now. When you first feel the love of a man, her mother always said, or when you feel the cruelty of the world. Unfortunately, the cruelty came first, although it was so often mangled with love, later on. “Everybody has a face, but I cannot help you.”

It’s what the child said, too—I cannot help you.

“You can!” She sounds more pushy than she wants to sound. “You can, but you won’t!”

“I cannot!” The witch is shouting back at her now, the magic clear in the air. Ygne’s not sure how she would describe what is magic, but she just knows. There is something dizzying and sweet about it, like inhaling foreign spices and feeling their scent days after they’re gone.

The Lady starts moving towards her, good half of the face contorted in anger and when she moves, there are red lines where the white dress stood. It’s not as ethereal now that she’s moving – the white seems more grey in colour, more worn, and the shine is dimming out. Only then does Ygne notice the wet spots on the dress and the corrosion of it in the folds.

“Does it not seem a little suspicious to you, girl, that the Great Tomb of the great witches would be here, in the Kingswood? Here, where the Witch Queen has a firm grasp?” Panic surges through Ygne, hot and gripping, and she feels her heart beating wildly.

She knows Ygne is here.

“Of course she does.” As if though reading her mind, the Lady clarifies. “What are we, after all, but a figment of her she keeps so that the superstitions can be supported?” Now that she’s moving around, she circles around Ygne, fixes her curls and her dress. Her hands are cold and Ygne shies away from them.

“Besides.” The witch is speaking as if though this is normal. As if people come by every day, asking for a saviour. “I am her and she is me. I cannot help you. Perhaps the Crone will know what to do.”

“You all love to say that, don’t you? Drag me from one to the other?” There is something cold and sharp on her ribs, then she notices those are the gaunt hands of the Witch. She wants to get away, but she cannot – she takes in several sharp breaths and when she tries to lean back, her feet are taken off the ground and she’s floating.

What are you doing? She wants to scream it, but she can’t get her words. Then again, there’s apparently no need, so she gathers her wits and tries to say something that is not a disoriented cry.

“Your powers could be used for so much good. Why use them for torturing people?” She’s talking to the Queen more than she’s talking to the Witch, but she figures she is going to die either way. Her dress is heavy with salt and iron and water that she’s passed through on its edges and it’s hanging down, clinging to her legs as she climbs further and further.

The witch doesn’t answer. Ygne moves upwards slowly until both the Witch and the only dimmed light are gone, and she’s covered in the darkness again.

There is a voice somewhere, she is sure, chanting: the crone, the crone, the crone.