Terror of Age

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Two-score knights stole upon Awazuka’s cottage, their armor and Woyword sigils soot-darkened and muffled with cloth.  Individually, they were too weak to trigger the outer wards; that was the trap into which many of the powerful fell, whether dragon or immortal witch.

Her eyes snapped open when they crossed the threshold.  “What?  WRETCHES!”  She reached for her hat.  A knight struck a spark into a linen-wrapped bundle.  A brilliant flare expanded across her vision.  Her room, and her cottage, vanished.

Awazuka stood beneath a harvest sky amidst ripe, golden fields.  A winding, two-track dirt road, grasses growing thick in the median, rolled over hills before disappearing into chaparral.  Her pointed hat kept her in personal shade from which she peered at the people pilgrimaging along the road.

“Just going to stand and watch?  That’s not like you.”

Awazuka whirled and leapt away from the impossibly familiar voice.  The man at her shoulder wore hunter’s garb four centuries demoded, and he fidgeted with a dagger, catching it by the flat in that way for which she’d always reprimanded him. 

At her reaction, he caught the hilt and adopted a rueful expression.  “Four hundred fifty-one years, and that’s the reaction I get?”

Struggling to calm the snare drum in her chest, Awazuka regarded the facsimile of her dead brother.  “You’re not really him.”  She glanced around without looking towards the people approaching along the road.  “I was asleep, one of my wards alarmed…” the rest slipped away from her.

“I’m me, Zuka.”  He spread his arms.  In dress, mannerisms, attitude, the nickname he used for her when he was too young to pronounce ‘Awazuka,’ he was a perfect seeming of her brother, Nikkarrat.  A man over four hundred years dead.

When she didn’t respond, Nikkarrat dropped his arms.  “It’s a lot.  No doubt you need time to process, and there are so many others who want to speak with you.  I just wanted to say how proud I am of everything you’ve done, and that I love you.”

Squeezing her eyes shut and opening them again did not make Nikkarrat disappear.  He was dead, and Awazuka did not think she was, but a part of her wanted this vision to be real.  “I love you too,” she whispered.

He smiled and stepped aside for the first person from the road.  A pair of people: a sixteen-year-old girl and a gray-haired matron, but they walked hand-in-hand here.  It seemed the younger led the older.

“Healer.”  Tears brimmed in her eyes as the girl embraced Awazuka.  “Thank you, thank you for saving my daughter.”

Awazuka recoiled from the embrace as if struck.  “No, no, not you.  I failed you.”

The girl shook her head.  “You did all you could.  Your father couldn’t have done more.”  She gestured at the older-looking woman beside her.  “And it’s because of you my daughter lived a good life.”

Both were dead, Awazuka knew, longer than Nikkarrat.  She looked along the people parading towards her, patiently awaiting their turn, and she recognized each face.  Each face belonged to someone dead.

Nikkarrat helped the two women step aside, allowing the next person to approach.  Awazuka’s first husband regarded her warily; that, too, was familiar.  He pointed at someone further back in line.  “I know we talked about your remarrying, but him?”  He waited half a beat before a grin spoilt his mock-baleful expression, and he too swept her up in a hug.

Awazuka let it happen.  She should have stepped back, but she didn’t.  She knew he wasn’t, couldn’t, be real, but she returned the embrace.  They all seemed so real.  The situation didn’t, but the people did, and…Awazuka wanted it to be real.

Even when a middle-aged king in a ragged brocade cloak slapped her, looked into her eyes, and broke down sobbing at her feet, she yearned for it to be real.  “I sought to live by your words, Great Witch,” he said when he could speak, still kneeling at her feet with bowed head.  “Ah, but it was terribly hard.  I fear I never fulfilled your vision.”

“Oh, Dolimane, I’m sorry.  Handing you a sword and a charge to carry forth – I did you and yours a grave disservice.  I should have done it differently.”

They were all like that in their own ways.  Family, friends, patients, children, successes, mistakes.  Nigh five centuries’ memories and regrets waited to speak with the Witch of a Thousand Stories.  Though she knew it must be some clever and intricate seeming, she could not ignore them, and she did not call upon her witchcraft to break the trap.

“You see?  A perfect trap for their kind.”  Nesik flicked the brazier directing a streamer of pale smoke into the witch’s nostrils with each shallow breath.  He turned to his spectator.  “It’s a matter of letting them trap themselves, not overcoming their power.”

Archduke Woyward clapped Nesik on the shoulder; the alchemist flinched from the contact, but Woyward didn’t notice.  “With her incapacitated, you’ve fulfilled half your promise, Nesik.  When I am king, I shall fulfill mine.”

“As you say, my lord.”  Nesik produced a sealed packet.  “This is the other half.”

Woyward took the packet.  “You’re certain it won’t be detected?”  He began to break the seal, and Nesik forestalled him.

“Don’t open that here.  And wear gloves.”  Nesik waited while Woyword slipped the packet behind his belt.  “Quite certain.  It will seem vastly accelerated aging.  If anyone suspects something, blame it on that witch’s blade he wields.”

“I like that.”  Woyword clapped Nesik on the shoulder again, then strode for the door.  “The kingdom awaits.”  He stepped into the corridor and marched off; Nesik pulled the door closed.

The alchemist turned back to Awazuka.  “Well, Myth Witch, Dragon’s Whore, I wonder what happens if I dose you with timeweed?”  The alchemist produced a second packet and smirked.

Dizziness struck Awazuka while she spoke with a great-great-great-granddaughter who died of phage while attempting to heal the Camiliks.  She sat down before she fell, but it was a near thing.  Nikkarrat was at her side in a moment; Awazuka passed a hand over her eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure.  I feel weak of a sudden.”  Awazuka frowned.  When she tried to stand, the entire scene flickered.

“Oops.  Heh, should’ve thought of that.”

The flicker was so brief she almost missed it, but the voice…Awazuka cast around at her companions.  “Who said that?”

Nikkarrat, Dolamine, and a witch Awazuka once mentored exchanged glances.  “I didn’t hear anything,” Nikkarrat ventured, and the others concurred.

Awazuka stood, though Nikkarrat and her second husband had to assist her.  The scene wavered again, then snapped back, twice as vivid as life.  For a moment, her hands acquired twice as many wrinkles, the fingers turned crooked, and liver spots marred her skin, before Awazuka reverted to her original aspect.

“Time.”  Her shoulders hunched, but not with age.  “I’ve tarried too long in this dream.”

“Dream?  I am no dream,” Dolamine asserted.  Yet, when Awazuka looked at him, he seemed to shift, evolving through the young prince she’d first met, the gallant, questing knight, and the middle-aged king seeking to make a story real.

Awazuka sighed.  “You are.  You all are, a most pleasant one.  Would that it were real.”  She stepped away as they protested, though she remained unsteady on her feet.  “What is it?  A spell?  A telepath?”  She licked her finger and held it up as if testing the direction of an absent breeze.  “Something else, I think.  Some manner of herbcraft?”

After some thought, Awazuka rummaged in her satchel, which she could not remember having when she appeared.  She popped three fireseeds into her mouth, enough stimulant to induce heart failure if any of this were real.  Her heart began to whine instead of beating, spots filled her vision as she panted, her extremities tingled.  She collapsed.

She was aware both of lying on the grass, surrounded by memories and regrets, and of lying on a table while smoke tickled her nostrils.  The hillside faded, and Awazuka lay in an alchemist’s workshop.

Her memory of the attack on her cottage returned, and she sat upright, sending a reedy, pinched-face man stumbling back from the table.  “WRETCH!”

Nesik caught himself on a counter and recovered with a sneer.  “I should have anticipated that.  No matter.”  He reached behind him and produced Awazuka’s hat.  “Nothing you can do without this.”

“Heh.”  Awazuka coughed, then kicked the brazier, spilling hot coals over wooden floorboards.

Nesik leapt aside.  “Are you mad, woman?  A fire here will kill us both!”  He sought to stamp the fire out and instead spread it further and burnt his feet through his slippers.  “Guards!”

Awazuka ignored the alchemist.  She tore a piece of fabric from her skirt where it lay closest to her skin and tossed with it a feather from her pocket.  “Alike, akin, we fly again.”  It was a poor spell, her magic limited without her hat, but it sufficed.

When Nesik burst from the room, trailing smoke, and sent the guards in, they found no trace of the witch before the room exploded.

King Dolamine VI lay dying.  Dawn found him an energetic thirty-year-old rousing the stables for a hunt with Archduke Woyword.  Midafternoon discovered him abed, wheezing, with more wrinkles on his face than a topographical map.  His hands trembled and his crooked fingers ached as he sipped a ghastly tincture.  Worse, the lump behind his ear swelled by the hour.

Evening divined him too weak to protest beyond a wet cough when the archduke took the witch’s blade from its hook.  Woyword eased enough metal from the sheath to see the inimitable gleam of a nameless color, then hurried from the room.

“The king entrusted this to me until the heir is old enough to wield it,” he explained to the guards outside the royal bedchamber.

Halfway to the stables, an old woman tapped his shoulder.  Woyword backhanded her.  “Of all the insolent…” he broke off when he met her eyes.  Eyes set in a face which showed no mark from his blow.

Awazuka tipped her hat and nodded at the sword.  “That does not belong to you.”

Woyword leapt back as if he’d trod a viper.  His mouth worked on his lie, which failed to pass his lips.  Awazuka loomed, her shadow enlarging and contorting into an inhuman form.  A breeze rustled down the corridor, though they were deep in the castle, and the witch’s shawl eddied about her like membranous wings.  The sword tumbled from Woyword’s fingers as he tried to point and flee.  “D-D-Dragon!”

For a moment, the witch’s draconic shadow eclipsed her, and the remembered scent of soot, metal, and the ozone tang of potent magic filled the space.  Woyword disappeared around the corner, and the shadow faded back into Awazuka, who bent stiffly down to retrieve the sword.

When she entered the royal chamber, unnoticed by the guards, she beheld Dolamine VI: he was as dead as his ancestor to whom she first gave the sword.  Awazuka placed the blade beside him in the bed and closed his eyes.  “Too slow,” she murmured to herself, and bowed her head.

She went out as she’d come, wending away from the castle back to her cottage.  It was largely undamaged from the ambush, and Awazuka reset her wards before sitting down at the stained kitchen table, solid despite the centuries since her second husband built it.  She wished she felt as solid as it with another regret, another memory, settling on her shoulders.  She placed a bundle of herbs from the alchemist’s brazier on the table, but she didn’t light it. 

Thank you for reading Lloyd Earickson’s short story, Terror of Age, an IGC Publishing original story. If you enjoyed the story, please consider leaving a comment or review in the discussion below the story. Be sure to follow IGCPublishing.com for updates, more information, and other freely available stories.

If you want to know more about the writing process for this story and how it came to be, please read the author’s note and release post.

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