Prologue:

Inella was in a room with gray and flat surfaces- chipped textures. She sat in a rocking chair remembering the events of this story and thinking about its characters. She whispered to herself:

“Oh yes, Lyndross had a temper that matched her red hair.”

“And Nehaynosh was my closest friend. Her back had a hump. Hee-hee.” Inella laughed

in a fractured way. Rocking. Waiting. She was old now. Much older than she was when the events of this story took place. Her memory had been edited away into bits. Was it done by her close friends? Was it done by one of her various enemies? Did she do it to herself by accident? She couldn’t remember. She remembered the revolution.

Her dream. All of her work. The culmination of female power that toppled the patriarchy. Witches. Most of whom lived with Inella in the Caves at Leired. Together they did what had never been done before (or had they?).

It’s hard to tell, perhaps you’ll find out along the way. The beginning is loading in, data wired through static-attracting copper wires with frayed ends. Inella remembers what she used to look like. She thought she was pale back then. After being shut up in solitary confinement for years, she thought differently. After not having sunshine on her skin, she was more pale in her old age than she’d been in her youth. She remembered how her blue eyes had scared the indigenous people of various lands. She was always traveling to embassies with her father, King Eric. Meeting with princes and kings (Oh how she hated it all). The bureaucracy bored and disgusted her. And more than that, she hated her father. He was never present, even when Inella was with him.

Inella always felt like her father loved his sons and regretted his daughters. He let his sons get away with murder. They only got in trouble for bullying Inella. She remembered the dream spell, and how much pain it had caused her. Tried to count how many times she’d been taken by it. 2? 3? ‘I don’t know.’ A puzzled finger stroking down the chin. Long finger nails. Grey hair knotted.

“Oh how I miss them.” Inella sighed. And then she drifted off to sleep in the rocking chair. Bugs crawled in between the slits of the walls.

The First Chapter

Inella had cheated death before, this time she would try to cheat it in the worst of ways. A fresh corpse lay at her bare feet, a long slash across its neck. Inella’s feet were covered in the corpse’s blood, a former student of hers named Blair. Blair hadn’t agreed to being the corpse in the reanimation ritual, but Inella is not known to be idle in conjunction with certainty. First, Inella stitched back together the wound that she had created just moments earlier. Dull grey knife. Then she leaned the limp body against a stationary pole. Using a telekinetic spell, Inella drew the blood up from the ground and forced it back into Blair. Inella accomplished this with poise, the same as the last fifteen times. The harsh blue of Inella’s eyes were not tinged with doubt in the slightest as she graduated from one step in the ritual to the next. As Nehaynosh looked on at the scene with her tranquil wisdom her brown eyes tilted in a downcast of nervous worry. Nehaynosh was an indigenous woman who had befriended Inella after her native land of Zoboru had been conquered and all living Zoboruans suffered diaspora. The wind smelled foul in Nehaynosh’s nose as it whipped about suddenly. The caves at Leired. The ocean beat against the slick black rocks. Destroying them… slowly.

After the wind had pushed the shriveled tome several pages off of the reanimation spell, Inella’s blood stained fingers flipped back to the page she needed with poise. She would go on to labor through five hours of the night until she gave up, accepting the spell as a failure. The rat heads, pig ash, and silver-lace all went to waste. Inella had long fingernails, all of which were painted black. Using her long fingernails she gouged out the eyes of the dead apprentice, the first step in embalming all the organs that were worth saving for rituals and potions.

“How did you do, mother?” A short, humpbacked, grey haired woman asked Inella. The woman was named Nehaynosh, and she was much older than Inella. Nehaynosh, and the rest of Inella’s disciples called her “mother.” Inella was the ambitious leader of a group of witches on the Koruvan coast, at Leired.

“I do not wish to speak on the subject.” Inella said coldly. She didn't even glance at Nehaynosh, rather she walked into the cave and straight to her chambers without stopping.

“Well, I take it we won’t be seeing Blair again.” A younger girl named Lyndross said under her breath. She had fiery red hair and veiny eyelids, and she knew, like the rest of the women knew, not to speak ill of Inella loud enough to hear. Unfortunately for Lyndross, Nehaynosh had heard her and subsequently latched her black painted fingers onto Lyndross’s ear and scolded her.

“You shall keep comments like that to yourself, brat.” Nehaynosh said scornfully.

“Of course I will, sister.” Lyndross replied, bowing her head. Her voice was a mixture of fear and indifference.

The cave was deep and spacious, altered by magic to host the band of witches. Outside the cave, there were woven baskets and carts outside the cave with produce and materials for menial things. The girls who weren’t proficient in magic were given tasks like weaving the baskets, or picking food from the gardens in the forest. The forest was old growth. Thick Douglas firs stood over a hundred feet tall, and the forest went on for miles and miles East. The witches lived right on the coast. You could see the ocean spraying water up onto the closed backside of the caves. Dangerous rocks outlined the entire Western coast, so no boats could get close to the cliffs. The caves were made of slick, black, jagged, rock. Bedrooms and kitchens had been magically carved into the rock. Inella was the one to weave the spell, some five years ago. Nehaynosh was there to watch, along with seven other girls, who had run away from the kingdom of Celith. Inella was considered a princess in the kingdom of Celith, but she refuted/refused that title when she became estranged from her home and family. Inella was a nasty, dirty witch now. Granted her skin was without blemish, and she had deep black hair, the jealousy of ravens. Her thin fingers and small, rounded nose were desirable. Her icy blue eyes held a witch's stare since birth, no matter how much beauty she retained from her upbringing in a palace, her eyes had always seemed apathetic and dangerous. They were the eyes of a liberated woman trapped in a patriarchal society. She had a privileged upbringing that she chose to toss aside in order to fight, in order to topple a system, a structure. There was still privilege, being a white woman in the West. The caves were no privilege; even though they were cleaned, furnished, and made comfortable by magic spells. As more women found their haven in the caves, Inella had expanded the spacious inside- both creating more sleeping spaces, and making the place more comfortable. While the interior was nice and soft, the exterior still looked wicked; it looked like the spiked gauntlet of an ambitious warlord the way the sharp rock stuck out its jagged daggers. The canvas of Inella’s pale skin was permanently stained with dirt as she lived in the cave (no matter how dirty her skin was it never blemished), a sharp contrast from the routine of cleaning herself each night at the palace to look presentable as a child. The thing that had changed the most was the smell about her. A princess smells like flowers and innocence. Inella smelled like the brine of the coast, the mulch of the forest- those being the two most pleasant aspects of her smell.

There were now a few hundred witches amongst her ranks at the Caves at Leired, just five years later. Five years away from the palace had felt like an eternity, as much as it had felt like the blink of an eye to Inella. Few of them knew more than the most basic of spells and enchantments, but all of them supported Inella fervently. Inella, or one of her lieutenant witches, had saved each and every girl that stayed in the caves of Leired; saved them from lives of silence, from lives of servitude and oppression in uncaring governments. You can only imagine. Survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse, brainwashing, sex rings, enslavement, toxic relationships. So much more. The thing is, every story is valid. Take any category! Each woman ascribed to the prior(!) is a valid story. Inella created an environment where women were always believed. And to have hundreds of women supporting each other? It was a healing unknown to any patriarchy. In isolation they weren’t a patriarchy, they were a matriarchy. Inella was a beloved dictator.

Out of the nine great cities only two were matriarchal: Luzan and Baz. Luzan and Baz also happened to be considered the seventh and least spectacular of the kingdoms; Luzan was famous for its poultry and spices, notorious for its swamps, crime, and voodoo. The only thing famous about Baz was that it was one half of the world’s largest bridge, which connected from Baz to the city of Fa’tal. The most influential city in the world, Milynine, oversaw the ban on women practising magic. Few men were permitted to learn the arts of wizardry, sorcery, necromancy, or that which was arcane, but no women were allowed to practice magic in any form. The only time in history that women had practiced magic was in The Sandor War in which the island nation of Sandor invaded the North of Panatea, the continent which hosted all nine great kingdoms. In the war, women practised healing magic on wounded soldiers, but at the end of the war magic was banned once again, and the women who served in the war were arrested.