Prophesy: The Immortal Witch (28)

Part 27 at: https://www.abctales.com/story/marandina/prophesy-immortal-witch-27

Billy had no idea what to do. High above was a witch’s giant face inside a giant moon. It seemed obvious that he was in a steaming dung heap of trouble piled countless feet high. Closing his eyes, he channelled the energy inside him, an attempt at pre-empting what was to come. Consciously, he slowed his breathing until the sound of a heart beating thumped rhythmically inside his ear drums.

Opening them again, he could see the top of a wand had appeared, silhouetted against the pale lunar disc. He assumed that’s what it was, his intuition taking over.

The expression on the visage of his apparent nemesis was one of intensity, ready to unleash some kind of hex that would bring everything to a shuddering climax. Maybe he was in the middle of a nightmare that wouldn’t dissipate.

Billy steeled himself, an inner resolve coursing through his entire body. Even this seemed like a token gesture. He knew that the challenge he faced was the culmination of accumulated power garnered over centuries. How could a thirteen-year-old lad compete against that? This woman was a leviathan.

From the corner of his eye he noticed a blur, a dark smudge in the distance getting bigger. Was this the beginning of the end, the opening gambit of the formidable crone in the sky? But she too was looking puzzled at the shape forming. A noise could be heard, a low hum that was becoming more defined. It was a squawking, a cawing. It was another gathering of corvids approaching the graveyard. Maybe the same corvids that had brought him here across the water. Who were they serving? Whose side were they on? Questions pondered simultaneously by an intrepid schoolboy and an ancient necromancer.

The sorceress composed herself, the arrival of the flock of birds completely unexpected. This was not a part of the ritual. Nevertheless, she would persevere. Her image wedged inside the oversized satellite made of dust and rock was a projection formed from the crystal ball she was peering into. Performing the ceremony from the basement in Burnham, she had the ability to manipulate the alternative universe that existed as an uninhabited island in a sea that was not part of any atlas or map. Here she was both incorporeal and with substance. It was the ultimate indulgence of being in two places at once. A decadence borne of darkness.

Roiling clouds sprouted, blooming outwards on the horizon, bruise coloured as though brutalised into appearing. The ominous sound of thunder echoed. Billy watched the unfolding storm arrive from nowhere, pondering whether it was a natural phenomenon or the witch’s doing. It was hard to make sense of any of this. He would wake up any minute.

As that thought tried to reassure him, the heavens opened, rain cascading in sheets. Drops bounced off his face, washing his transgressions away in a metaphorical sense; he was to remain free from mortal sin.

The lightning came, splintering skies like broken glass. In amongst the chaos, he could just make out a separate pulse of light streaking from the end of the magical rod gripped in the sorceress’s hand.

Zig zagging, the pearlescent scintillation blended in with the rest of the mayhem and was specifically aimed at its target below. A split second before being obliterated by a spite-filled incantation, the teenager instinctively held out both hands. Splayed, they absorbed the impact. To start with, anyway.

The assault was as relentless as it was vicious, forcing the boy to buckle, his knees giving way, his body driven into the earth. Sparks flew from the impact of the flow of charged particles designed to turn an enemy into a singed scorch mark.

Billy was in agony, a grimace etched on his features. If this was to be the end then maybe it was better to simply relent and cease resisting. He was now kneeling on damp grass, battered into a crouched ball about to receive his last rites. He could hear the ebony-coloured critters getting louder. They were surrounding him in a circle, perched on the tombstones all around. Maybe they had come to transport his essence to whatever Hell was waiting for him on the other end of this confrontation.

Jezebel smiled triumphantly. Another sequence completed, another lease of life to be granted. As much as this felt hollow amid the existential reservations she had, at least it was all to be over with once more. She glanced at the avian formation that had gate-crashed her invocation; all gazing at the teen, stares fixed and foreboding. It was then that something even stranger happened.

With Billy down to his last milliseconds of defiance, the feathered entourage nonchalantly hopped down onto grave beds, dancing with reedy legs and talons raking the dirt, displaced pebbles bouncing in the grit. To an observer, it would have seemed the oddest of sights. An impromptu tarantella performed by a murder of crows.

Moments later, bones burst through soil, skeletons in various stages of decomposition dragging themselves to the surface. Decaying flesh was partly hidden by cloth and cotton, the clothes they had been wearing when abducted now festering and worn, faded and torn. Strands of hair stuck to skulls, eyeballs dangled from sockets for those that still possessed them.

Tottering unsteadily at first then righting themselves, each one threw their bony arms out laterally, pointing at the all-but-prone victim of the attack. They were drawing on the boy like a battery, sucking the supernatural essence from him and redirecting upwards in the guise of a counter strike.

They were all there, all twelve: Freddy Bentner, Albert Ware, Ellie Ramsay, Dominic Bates, Helen Flagstaff, John Brewster, Yvie MacDowell, Cameron Downs, Annie Dale, Isiah Kinkaid, Pritesh Patel and Danielle King. Souls detained in Purgatory for varying lengths of time, souls unable to see their mothers and fathers, souls unable to love or hate, souls who were oblivious to the passing of minutes, hours, days and weeks. Souls deprived of their life force in preparation as offerings to the desert demons who would feast on them.

The beam pounding the child stopped. Seconds passed, a no-man’s land formed where all parties to this supernatural showdown took stock wondering what was to come.

And then the beam was reversed.

Now firing upwards in the direction of the moon, the enchantress was aghast at this sudden state of affairs, her blue eyes open wide in horror. It had taken her by surprise, no allowance made for an unforeseen variable. Her oppressive conjuration being used against her, she paused, calculating some kind of evasive action. There were thirteen lots of enchantment crashing into her, thirteen counts of retribution emanating from vengeful entities, twelve of whom had been trapped in a netherworld silently hoping for an opportunity to exact revenge.  

Thoughts poured through her mind like lava spewing from an erupting volcano. She saw the faces of her parents and then the blind winged-creature. She saw all the partners loved from past millennia. She saw the villagers that had ostracised her all those years ago. A parade from centuries past flashing before her, every person she had encountered, every emotion she had felt, every heartbreak, every elation, every notch in the ageless Tree of Life made by her presence on this plane.

It was her final moment, she knew now. She could fight on but she no longer had the conviction. The extension given to her was an abomination, a sleight of hand configured by unnatural forces. With every atom screaming, the withered hag exploded like a sun reaching the end of its burn. Helium and hydrogen coruscating, a nuclear reaction of unimaginable size and scale. A mystical supernova.

Night became day once more, a blinding white flash illuminating the vista.

And then it was done, everything for miles around eviscerated.

Bleached from existence.

Time stopped, darkness suspended.

Part 29 at: https://www.abctales.com/story/marandina/prophesy-immortal-witch-29

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