The corpses of thirteen-thousand amarids drifted along the war-tainted swamp.

Bodies sat half-sunken into the shallow. They rotted in piles and swathes, and the water they slept on was so thick with gore that it congealed into bloody slime. The scent of it choked the air. It smelled like an abandoned butcher’s warehouse, the meat inside unattended until it swarmed with maggots and flies. If a person were there to breathe the air, they would taste death in the wind—the sour swipe of copper, coating the tongue with every breath.

Above, the clouds were thick and grey. Looming. A legion of dark dots circled beneath them, and their echoing squawks filled the stifling air. They were everywhere. Crows, each colored a haunting black. They perched on the burnt trees and pecked along the corpses, ripping flesh from skin where the armor did not reach.

Among them, striding over the bodies, was Vivian.

The crows ignored her, but only because she was like them. With her hooked nose and wretched features, her long arms and blister-bloated back; she wasn’t here to hunt birds and the clever little things knew that. No, they did not need to run. Because Vivian wasn’t a predator. She was a scavenger.

And like them, she was here for the scraps.

The Hag hummed as she stabbed her long fingers into the corpses, digging through the rot-blackened blood. She plucked at the insects feasting on the flesh and the worms nesting in the guts. She collected them. Placed them in little glass globes that were larger on the inside. Vivian peeled away the armors and checked for the things beneath. She found them; little black roots that pulsed into the skin. The veins of the earth, rising from the water and digging into abandoned flesh.

Creepvine. They only ever grew where death thrived.

She collected them, too. Vivian gathered the spider leg roots and stored them away, but she wasn’t done. She still hadn’t found everything that she'd come for.

“Bloodworm burrows in flesh where the bloodrose nests,” she muttered, frowning. Her voice was crumbling, dry; like twigs charred black by fire. Her fingers left the corpse as her feet carried her to another. “Deathpetal blossoms after sunset’s light and the gazerstalk shies away from mortal sight. Copperbell spawns many at a time; learn to find her by her silent chime.”

Vivian muttered the cursed text under her breath. It was from a tome she’d uncovered, dwelling inside a necromancer’s lair. A collection of alchemical reagents, banned by the standard circles. They grew in battlefields and places of death.

In her search for a cure, she’d memorized it. Everything she could find.

It was only her lack of skill that truly held her back.

But now she had hope. It came in the form of a tiny bluebird—a servant of the Fae. A little creature, somehow smarter than its instinct-driven brethren. It knew things she didn’t. Tricks and shortcuts to alchemy that she didn’t even know were possible seemed like common knowledge to it.

Where the bird found the knowledge, she did not know.

Perhaps it was like her. A person of skill, cursed and downtrodden by the world’s invisible tyrants. The Hag spat a thick glob of spit into the swamp, sneering at the memory of their self-righteous backs. She’d never forget those wretches. How they ruined her. Turned her into… this. A monster in the night, a nightmare given form.

Once she found her cure, she would hunt them down. Every single one, until their courts were emptied and their thrones smeared with blood. But that was the end of her plan. There were a million little steps to take before she could begin her revenge.

This was one of them.

The Hag’s eyes scanned the battlefield, and her twig-like legs carried her over entire patches of the dead. The battle was days old, so signs of life among the corpses were close to nonexistent. But still, she found one. A man with a spear through his side, cheeks gaunt and breaths shallow beneath his leather armor. Vivian felt herself sigh in relief as the final passage came to mind.

Among the flowers and the blooms, there is a treasure above all. The mark of doom, the purple parasol, the parasite that calls when the end is soon.

It is called the Reaper’s Cap—the suffering shroom.

The last message. Torn out and destroyed. It had taken her years to put the journal whole—to decipher the words in the final page. The Reaper’s Cap wasn’t a natural fungus. It was a curse. One left ages past by an immortal like her. Passed down through countless generations, it waited in the blood to prolong the suffering of a dying host, feeding the holder life even as it fed on their death. And when the end finally claimed its holder, it would only spread. It would scatter its spores to all that drew near.

Vivian found one such man, dying alone in the swamp. Surrounded by the corpses of his brothers-in-arms.

She stood over him, but he did not see her. Not without a Weave.

So Vivian splayed her fingers, reaching into the fabric of the air. The cloth of mortal reality. Like a spider’s legs, her long fingers hooked onto the stray strands, pulling them close. She wove them together into a picture. An identity, both temporary and eternal. The existential tapestry finished, and she draped the Weave over herself.

The world shifted its eyes to her. The half-step existence of Vivian Velanna stepped out of the twilight and into the burning noon sun.

Suddenly, the Hag was no more. And in her place stood the Lady of Crows.

She walked forward with her whitewood mask and her raven-feather cape. It trailed behind her, untouched by the blood and the muck. Whispers followed where she passed. Her pale feet landed on the water as if it were solid earth, and the corpses beneath failed to stain her toes. Under this Name, she was pristine. As the Lady, she was no Hag. No abomination.

The Lady of Crows was the shadow of death. The ashen collector of final breaths.

She walked to stand over the man, peering at him from above. His shriveled eyes shifted ever so slightly to find the dark slits of her pale mask. His voice came out. Weak. Dry and cracked and barren like desert soil.

“I didn’t think you were real,” he whispered, then coughed. “I thought you were a myth.”

The Lady tilted her head, and voice as soft as the sound of willows in the wind emerged, “What do you think now?”

“I think I’m going crazy from the pain.”

“Reality is not so kind.”

He released a dry, shuddering breath. As if the air in his lungs were scraping past gravel. The Lady realized that it was supposed to be a laugh. Bitter and miserable. “I know that, lady,” he said. “Can’t you see me?”

“I see you plenty. You want to die.”

“Will you help me?”

“You know me, so you know my price.”

The man closed his eyes, “Then leave me to suffer. You won’t have my daughter’s name.”

Very good. The Lady of Crows smiled underneath her mask. She kneeled down over the corpses and her pale hand emerged from her cloak of black feathers. The Lady pressed it down against the man’s chest. Immediately, the spores inside of him drained out of his skin like smoke, coalescing into a writhing mass of blackness. She stored it inside a glass globe, which disappeared under her cloak.

The dying soldier stared at her with surprise on his withered face, and the Lady of Crows shook her head.

“Death does not enjoy the taste of kind hearts. Your children will live, and so will you.”

She snapped her fingers, and the crows around her fell from the sky. They landed in the ground as dry husks, feathers clinging to withered flesh. Beneath them, the plants died, and the flowers soaking up life from the death wilted to ash. The Lady gathered the positive energy into her hand and shot it into the man’s chest.

The effect was immediate. His sunken cheeks filled up, and his withered eyes healed. His atrophied muscles restored themselves as wounds on his body knitted themselves closed. Within seconds, he was whole. Healed without a single scar marring his skin. The Lady of Crows stood, and the man’s eyes widened.

Slowly, he rose. The man turned to face her, to thank her—

And he found nothing but a single raven feather, drifting down from the empty air. Now the Hag stood in front of him, invisible again. Her Weave unraveled around her and the world looked away. Silent, she towered over him with her wretched, ruined form. But he saw none of it. Still, the amarid soldier bowed to the empty air. To her.

“Thank you!”

An invisible force fell over Vivian, and she felt her Weave over the Lady of Crows strengthen. It was but a drop in the pond of reputation that she’d gathered for that Name, but it was one she dearly needed.

Even immortals had times where they had to stand among men, after all.

Vivian watched the man she saved look around and sigh. He glanced over the sea of corpses as if looking for a glimpse her shadow, only to shake his head when he found none. Wordlessly, he turned to the trees and headed north. Into the swamp, out of the battlefield. To the direction of his garrison miles away. Vivian turned and her face elongated into a beak. Feathers sprouted from her flesh. Her arms turned to wings and her toes morphed into talons.

She let out a raven’s screech, and with a single beat of her wings, Vivian took to the sky. The miles blurred past her. The Ancestor Tree approached. Within hours, she would land on its base, where her cottage waited for her. Where her hopes and dreams lay.

There was a trove of knowledge waiting for her back home. It took the shape of a little bird. Venti, she was called. With its cooperation, Vivian was confident. Just a few more years. Just a bit more time. After that, she would cure herself. Get rid of her curse and the strange magics affixed to it.

And all she needed was a potion with the right mix of ingredients to do it.

Venti would help her find it. Vivian just knew it.

So it came as more than a little surprise to her when she came home to find the bluebird unwilling to cooperate.

Venti watched the Hag come into the house.

As the crone entered the field over her home, the curse began to fade. Her skin shrunk. Shriveled up. Her bones snapped into smaller shapes, folding and bending until her size reached that of a normal person her age. From her original height of sixteen feet, she shrunk down to less than five. Her skin turned a lighter shade of green. Her monstrous features faded away.

She turned into an inconspicuous old woman, and that old woman sat in front of Venti now, glaring back.

Vivian Velanna, she was called. An amarid granny with a hunched back and withered yellowgrass for hair. Her liver-spotted face slumped under layers of wrinkles—almost like a bulldog in the way that her skin seemed to sag over her eyes. Her shaky hands put a pair of thick spectacles onto her face, enlarging the beady-looking eyes beneath her looming brows. She looked harmless, but she was anything but.

She wasn’t just a Hag and an immortal, but a generalist mage as well. By the looks of her tomes, she dabbled in all fields. Only, there was a strange section of her shelves devoted purely to necromancy.

It only served to make her more suspicious in Venti’s eyes.

And it certainly didn’t help that the wrinkly bitch was keeping her captive, either.

Venti had tried to leave days ago, only to discover a barrier around the cottage. One that kept her trapped inside. She’d tried all she could to break it, but nothing worked. Nothing so much as cracked it. Eventually, Venti realized a harsh truth: there was no getting out of this place without the Hag’s permission.

It was the only reason the old crone had dared to let her out of her cage in the first place.

The little sunbird glared again, flying down from atop the bookshelves to a table in front of the Hag. There, an empty piece of paper sat next to a bowl of ink. Their only way of communication.

“Tell me why you won’t cooperate now, of all times,” Vivian said, and Venti found her voice ugly. She could practically feel the age in her tone, withered, bitter, and old. Tombstone ash-cold.

Strange, for an immortal to look so old. And ugly.

Venti would have sneered at her, if she could. Instead, she gave the Hag a disgusted look. That would do for now. Then, taking her foot, Venti dipped it into the ink and began chicken-scratching text onto the paper.

[Let me out,] she wrote. [Remove the barrier.]

The Hag shook her head, “No. I need you, bird. Just for a short time. Why can’t you cooperate for just that much? All I ask is for a few years.”

Years? The audacity! And she wondered why Venti wanted to leave.

[Years are too long. Bring me back to Rowan.]

“The young one? Why?”

[He’s not as ugly as you.]

Vivian glowered at the text in front of her. She looked up at the bird who wrote it and shook her head, “It doesn’t matter if you don’t like me. You stay. You help. And the sooner you finish helping me with this, the sooner you get out of here. Did I not promise to let you go after we were done?”

Venti chirped angrily at the woman and stomped letters onto the paper.

[You did not! Tell me that! It would be! This long!]

The crone seemed confused, “Long, short. Do they really matter? You talk about time as if you were a mortal. What’s a few years to a nature spirit?”

Everything. That’s what a few years were. But she didn't understand, and nor could Venti tell her. Venti scowled at Vivian and slowly scratched words onto paper. One word at a time. Firm and uncompromising.

[Let. Me. Go.]

And Vivian only shook her head. The old amarid stood, “No. I would be sorry, child, if you weren’t spawned by the things I hate the most. No—I am only regretful that you’re the only option I have,” she said, taking a walking stick from beside her chair and using it to support herself. Vivian hobbled towards the stairs leading down and spoke without looking back, “Let us return to work, Venti. Will you follow, or would you rather I put you back in a cage first?”

Venti stared at the Hag’s back, her eyes dark with cold rage. Soundlessly, she flew to the wench’s shoulder and perched. The Hag took her down the stairs. Down below, under the cottage, where she did her alchemy. Where her ingredients waited.

Vivian hobbled up to the table surrounded by rows of shelves and hanging glass globes.

“We make a stimulant today. One that affects ingested brew. Do you know of one?”

Venti nodded silently.

“Good. Temperature?”

Venti hopped to the paper and wrote. [Blue-white hot. Thirty evercoals.]

The Hag obeyed. She asked for ingredients, and Venti provided. She asked for measurements, and Venti gave them to her. But Venti was not helping. No. Far from it. Over the next hour, the liquid in the witch’s cauldron changed colors a dozen times. It turned darker over time. Dark enough to look black under the dim light.

Venti made sure to throw in ingredients with the properties that the Hag asked for, so as not to arouse suspicion. Magical ones. The expensive, powerful kind. Some enchanted, some natural. But unlike the Hag, who only knew of their base properties, Venti knew all of their effects. Every single combination. Every single little disastrous result, beaten both into Rowan’s brain and hers by his mother.

This combination was one such disaster.

Put enough of the right ingredients together, and the effects began to fight. But their effects, although potentially violent, were benign unless triggered by a specific group of stimulative material.

Biological material.

There was a reason why Rowan hated using them so much. Venti was going to teach the Hag that lesson now.

Venti hated for things to come to this, but she had no choice. The Hag turned to fetch a bottle, and Venti kicked a jar of violent reactants into the cauldron. One that she’d subtly gathered behind the other jars over the past week. It toppled and sunk into the murk with a wet plop. She flew up to the shelves as the reaction she wanted to create began.

The liquid in the cauldron began to reduce. Quickly, evaporating into black smoke that pooled over the water like oil.

It was only then that the Hag returned. She frowned down at the cauldron.

“…That wasn’t supposed to create smoke,” she said. “What is this?”

Light started to shine inside the smoke. Growing brighter.

Brighter.

The Hag slowly backed away from the cauldron. Her eyes moved to Venti in quiet rage, “What did you do?”

Venti only watched her panic. The result was obvious now, as the light built inside of the cauldron. As the room began to shake and distort from the heat—as the light began spilling over the pot like sunshine spears. One such spear hit the ceiling, and the stone of the cellar began to melt.

Molten rock fell to the floor and the Hag turned—ran for the stairs.

But she was already too late.

That was the wonder in knowing things that other people didn’t. They didn’t know how badly they were tricked until they couldn’t do anything about it anymore. She'd pushed Venti. Pushed her too far. Upstairs, the Hag began casting a protective spell. Learned magic. Venti did no such thing. She only watched as the light intensified until it was blinding—

Then it disappeared into the cauldron as if sucked in. Instant. Noiseless.

A moment of silence passed.

Venti closed her eyes.

And an explosion shattered the hut.