
Ch. 1 - Page of Swords
Do you know why your blood sings in the night, witchling?
It's because there is magic in the moonlight. Our heavenly guardians. We are born under them. We die under them. We fall in love under them. And on those rare, starry nights when Deus’s two moons dance in an eclipse, that, my child, is when soulmates come together.
“Koi and Dei - the Two Moons of Deus”
A Hexen myth passed down from mothers to daughters for generations
Present Day - 32nd Day in the Month of Fire 1877 A.P. - Aventu Post
“Nocturne… Wren Nocturne…”
A voice calls her name, several voices… but the sound is muted, like she’s underwater. Cradled by the ocean, she has been drifting here for a while. In the calm. In the quiet. How long has she been here, a buoy in the sea?
The voices drag her up, out of a pool of warm, comforting darkness to look into a searing sun.
“Songstress, please...”
“We have suffered.”
“Make them pay...Make them all pay!”
The world is a portrait of black and gray, blurry at the edges, then sharpening into high definition, as though experienced through a camera lens. Then red. So much red. Red like blood. Blood red. And people, people standing around her in a circle—it’s so loud here—girls and boys, mostly girls in dirty hospital gowns.
A thick shard of glass, a mirror, clenched in a fist at the other end of her consciousness.
Too much stimuli.
A face not her own stares back at her—dark eyes, darker skin, dirty golden hair. This body is not her own. Its movements not her own. She is not in control.
“We found your ashes.”
Another soul screams, trapped with her.
“We call you back!”
No, not trapped. In control.
Glass opens her veins, pushing into the tender flesh in which she resides.
What are you doing?
Three lines carved into each forearm—
Stop!
Blood pulses, hot and viscous, as archaic words echo back at her.
It hurts.
Sharp, ghostly pain felt intensely and yet dulled. Pain inflicted on someone else, but also her, but someone else, but still her.
The room vibrates, dark and angry.
Stop it!
And there’s screaming. Deafening—too much—anguished wails...
Too much after nothing.
“They deserve to die.”
Dark energy leeches off the bodies around her in waves as the flesh of each corpse sizzles.
“I demand...you ...you take... re-revenge for ussssss!”
A death rattle.
Let me out!
The energies collecting in the room collapse on her. The intention of each sacrifice forces its way into her subconscious, slicing through her psyche—stop it—and cries of pain slam into her. She writhes, agony coursing through her already mangled soul. For an eternity, their suffering is her own.
Enough!
Every abuse, every defilement, every humiliation. Their torment becomes a cage around her spirit, and with her trapped inside, the body dies.
She’s been in a dying body before.
Let me out of here!
She screams and screams and screams and screams, but the souls of the dead are mute creatures and cannot be heard by the living. She reaches, grasping for the other soul housed in this body with her to save it to no avail. The contract is signed. The body of the dark-skinned girl is destroyed. Recycled. And redesigned. Bone, flesh, nerve-endings, skin, hair, nails, thoughts, her insides pulled to her outside. Her skin stretches and contracts, the hair ripped from her scalp and regrown, the body’s limbs lengthen and shorten, the spine creaks and breaks, and her blood boils. Dying muscles seize and reanimate, and the convulsions begin. White hot and burning, her spirit is yanked out of the soothing waters of eternity, condensed to a fixed point, and shoved into a body too small and too large at once.
A body ripping itself apart. Changing itself to suit the needs of the new soul being jammed inside of it. Its new soul hooking into it like a parasite. The consciousness beside her own dissipates into the ether, and then...
...she’s alone.
The seconds of rejection dissolve into whole-hearted acceptance, and her soul settles into the new skin. Awareness hits her like a hammer on an anvil. Real and kinesthetic in the worst possible way. Her pulse pounds erratically in her chest, and air forces its way into her lungs cold and unspeakably real. It’s the first breath she’s taken in a very long time, and she screams. Audibly, physically, screams.
She turns her head, and the acids of her stomach spill from her mouth.
She’s naked, dressed in blood, bile thick in her throat and her head spinning. Her back aches against the cold of the floor, the stone hard and unyielding, like she has been lying on her back for hours, sticky and wet.
Her eyes flutter and then open.
She winces.
A single lightbulb flickers on and off above her. It sways gently. Her limbs feel heavy, but they are hers. She’s in control. She moves gingerly onto her hands and knees.
The mirror shard lies on the floor beside her covered in gore. Her hand shakes as she picks up the piece of glass, but this time when she spies the reflection, Wren Nocturne stares back at her.
Wren’s own face—sea-green irises, angular cheekbones, and dusty-pink lips with too much of a cupid’s bow—stares back at her. Wren’s hair—thick, blue-black tresses long enough to cascade over her breasts—falls in tangled waves around her face. Wren’s fingertips come to her cheek to touch skin the color of sun-soaked wheat. The faint scar on her chin, earned from a nasty fall when she was a toddler, is missing, the skin smooth and untouched like a newborn babe’s. This new skin is her old skin remade.
The bodies of those who resurrected her (Other witches? Or just desperate people?) are gone, dust in the wind. Runic sigils on the floor pulse with red luminesce. The symbols are familiar to her.
“Wren Nocturne… Please…Avenge us…”
The last whispered request echoes more in her head than in the room, and the blood-painted array quiets, turning black as the magic diminishes.
They have performed the Ultimata Offret Kallar.
A sacrificial resurrection: blood to make blood, flesh to make flesh, souls to call back a soul. A price to be paid in blood and life. A price she in turn will have to repay to those who brought her back whether she wants to or not. In the centuries since its creation, no one has ever performed it successfully. Wren researched it herself a long time ago. She vaguely remembers writing the array in her Book of Shadows, but goddess knows where that tattered thing ended up after she died. What could have made them so desperate to attempt such an unreliable means? How did they even manage it?
She notices with a hiss the lingering wounds on her arms, open and angry but no longer weeping blood. Three diagonal slashes on each forearm mark their dying wishes. Six total. Six souls upon which she’s been asked to seek vengeance. She has no choice in the matter. It’s part of the contract, and if she fails to fulfill the contract, a second death will be the least of her worries. Her very soul will be ripped to shreds, and there won’t even be an afterlife for her to sleep through.
Merde! She didn’t ask for this!
She didn’t ask for this, but they did. They gave everything they had for it.
She doesn’t even know their names…
Wren curls into herself and mourns the lost souls of the newly dead, and they are lost—souls torn asunder for the crime of pulling a soul back from the veil, their spirits destroyed as soundly as their bodies.
There should be sad music playing. Something like Mozart’s Lacrimosa. Something in a minor key that makes you want to cry or scream or both. Something Monet would have painted lily pads to or something that could have been the overture for a tragic ballet where the fairy princess loses her wings, and the willies have to keep her from opening her wrists. That would be mournful enough. The notes drift around her, a slow adagio, beautiful and graceful accented by the chiming of ascending and descending notes and sets of notes. Hopeless but lovely. Like something she herself might once have sang. Wren shivers, chilled to the bone on the cold floor, and the music suddenly stops.
Oh, she was the one singing…
When she opens her eyes, the wild script on her hands greets her, swirling patterns of leaves and runes in a vibrant neon green. Geometric shapes and spirals trail along her skin, familiar but strange at once. Has her wild script grown? It didn’t use to trail all the way to her hands before, and oh… she has two of them. Wow! Wren hasn’t had a left hand since she was ten years old. Not a flesh one anyway.
Odin’s eyepatch y la máscara de Tlaloc!
She feels like she’s just woken up as the main character of a video game. Welcome back! Here’s a mysterious quest for you to deal with, and it’s an open world RPG with no navigation pins. Good luck! Oh, and by the way, the punishment for failing is total and complete obliteration.
She sighs, frustrated and sad, angry and destitute.
At least she still has her magic. It echoes around the room, glittery cascades of viridian magic brought to life by the call of her voice. Her own brand of chaos, necrotic in nature and achingly beautiful. A spell meant to calm the dead, even if the dead in this room will never hear it. It’s strange, this pulchritude of the kinder aspect of her magic. It dances in her elegy’s notes, in sweet sparkling swirls of emerald and viridian. The sight reminds her of watching thousands of tiny fairies flitting about like children, innocent and carefree, as they light up the forest.
“Repose en paz, lamentable muertos,” she prays, knowing there is no peace for lost souls, but at least they won’t be trapped here. Wherever ‘here’ is, of course?
She pulls on one of the dirty hospital gowns while she investigates her surroundings.
The room appears to be a hospital room. The walls are decorated with cheap striped wallpaper, yellowing and torn in places, molding in others. There are scratch marks and bloodstains everywhere, evidence that pain and death are not newcomers here. Lining the edges of the room are four small cots. The meager number wouldn’t be able to sleep all of the innocents who had been involved in the ritual, the remains of which lie scattered about the floor.
Various knickknacks lay around the circle as part of the resurrection: an old pocket watch, a locket, the torn-up photograph of a small child, a very dirty piece of jewelry, a weathered deck of tarot cards—much loved, well read, old and wise—at least that’s what her empathy reads off of it. An exploratory shuffle and she draws the Ten of Pentacles. A coming of…
Interesting…
On the periphery of the array, charred remnants mark each unfortunate’s passing. These remnants are the synthetic materials left behind after the rest of the participants’ bodies have disintegrated in the heat of æther flame. Eight tarnished and bloodstained hospital gowns (similar to what she is wearing, more nylon than cotton and uncomfortable against the skin) remain where each person had been standing, all of them coated with the emotional residue of hatred and despair. There is not much more left beside this.
Wren finds this odd.
Why is there not a scrap of tech lying about the floor? Whatever this place is, it’s clearly housing a multitude of patients/inmates. There should have been microchips and cybernetic implants—at least the mandatory, state-issued ID chips should have been left behind, one for each body. If these patients were indeed witches, they would most assuredly have had suppression technology affixed to them, yet there isn’t a scrap of charred metal, plastic, or microtechnology anywhere to be found.
Additionally, if they weren’t witches or hexen, then at least a few of them should have been augmented. There should be clockwork tech and prosthetics, muscular and neural enhancements, birth control implants and visual aids, computational devices, and maybe even electrical nodes for full-system implants. Surely, one of them had to have some sort of transplant either internally or externally. Limb replacements had been all the rage in many parts of the world before her first death for both practical and aesthetic purposes. Wren herself had a mechanical left hand in her past life. The device was knit and graphed to her arm as a permanent fixture after losing her hand to a sea monster as a child, the clockwork prosthetics a trademark of her family. Looking at the limb now, it’s surreal to see unmarred flesh and skin staring back at her.
After becoming a technomancer, she had undergone integration, the surgical graphing of total-body technomancer specific augmentations designed to hone her already superior physical abilities. Of course, the tech had all been ripped from her body in the process that made her a witch however many years ago. The scarring left behind that once marred her arms, legs, and torso is gone as well. No evidence anywhere on her body that she had once been a technomancer.
Wren picks the locket up off the floor and opens it. Inside are two small photos of a pair of women. They don’t have any familial resemblances, and on the back of the square panel, an endearment is written in calligraphy.
“To my dearest Lulu. Forever yours, Desiree.”
Wren feels the adoration seeping from the necklace. It hums with shared feelings and experiences between two souls. It reminds her achingly of someone she used to know.
Jessabelle…
Wren closes her eyes and concentrates within. She can feel it still, the hum of chaos in her blood. It takes some concentration, but as the seconds stretch, an old arcane muscle flexes. Three interlocking spirals at her brow alight with a faint blue-green glow.
Clearing her throat, she begins to hum, looking for a melody to match the locket’s ethereal signature. The locket starts to shimmer as the first notes resonate with a mere ripple of Wren’s magic. She urges a bit more of her power into it, and the locket progresses in its song. She follows its tune until a crisp melody in A minor takes shape, and its secrets are laid bare. Her magic draws the tiniest of arrays on the back.
The other scattered objects about the room rise from the floor at her will. Still humming the sad, sweet tune of the locket, she places it open on the floor. Carefully maintaining the rhythm, she ushers each prize into the locket’s new dimensional pocket until each item is safely stowed away. The locket continues to glow as she brings the melody to a close. She floats it up to settle around her neck, and the light fades. The wild script on her hands glows a soothing viridian in the dim light of the room.
Well, that worked nicely. What else her shiny new body do?
She walks over to the steel door. Hn, there’s no doorknob. Must be system-operated. Okay, well this might take a little more magic than toying with a locket, but she’ll manage.
She takes a deep breath and digs deep.
Her indicia—the interlocking spirals at her brow that form the triskelion—blazes to life, a full emerald luminescence, and she pushes.
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