All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 35: Witchy-Poo ~ Carrie Cutforth

David’s POV

Even in my bed, I feel her stirring miles across the plain and deep underground. Her lithe leg crossing over the other one, the metal cot groaning under her delicate frame. We are tethered, the two of us. I don’t understand how or why, just that I need to get the hell out of Dodge or the thread will never break between us. Distance, I need distance, I say to myself as Pappy snores softly beside me. I close my eyes, begging for sleep, silently begging for Pappy’s forgiveness…

A high-pitched whistle cuts across the night sky outside my shack. I grimace from my sorely needed bed rest: Gabriel and his armies have arrived.

And then…

A rush of novocaine swells the brain before my soul detaches from my spine as I'm sucked away from the body through a vacuum to another dimension …

So the Seer was right.

My spectre drops into his body like a cat twisting and landing on its feet. I straighten and face the Auspex of this world, my wife and mother of my child in the other. This body feels so weak, so fragile. Lacking all discipline. It is easy to command.

“Pepper, David needs your help,” I say to the woman with flashing emerald eyes and wearing a white coat in this lab of mistaken creation. A strange snowflake of sound vibrates lightning all around us.

There is too much to explain—where do I even start?  How can I convince this woman of what she needs to do when I don’t even understand myself?

Start with the Witch, I tell myself. And so I begin.

***

The Witch bade me to see her only a few hours ago. I was surprised by the – invite is the wrong word. Obligation. You don’t deny the Volva.

But my world is in chaos. The resistance is broken. There are so few of us left. How could I make Hocus Pocus a priority while my men needed me? But going to see her might strengthen the resolve of the superstitious. Not going would signal defiance to Fate and surely bring bad omens – or so the few left would think. At least that is what Pappy advised. She is usually right in such matters.

I had been barely reunited with my wife and child in what can only be called a hovel hidden from those who seek us, the final enclave of guerrilla fighters. I was surprised to know the old woman still managed to cling to life. To hear of any survivors brought both joy and bitterness to my heart.

So I went, all the while being fed of the reports of the army’s advancement towards us by Joachim, our third. It was all bad news and more. I began to feel cursed like Job as we trudged through the encampment bustling with activity fighting fatigue: that buzz full of weariness and prone to mistakes. The final skirmish would only be hours away. We would not survive it.

I was led through the mud caked fields of the refugee camp, and felt ashamed this is where our Matron was housed: in a flimsy canvas covered tent, soaked through from rain, later in the night to be most assuredly drowned in blood.

I have failed everyone, I said to myself as I entered the tent and into the clouds of incense the old woman was burning in ceramic pots arranged to form a sacred mandala on a rolled out tarp floor. The Volva sat hooded, cross-legged in the eye of flickering candle lights, casting her shadow in multiple refractions on the canvas walls. Gone were the bundles of herbs, the stones, the chalices, the majesty of the magic woman’s show & tell. Instead, she sat swaddled cloth, a frail feathered bird with a beak as sharp as ever.  Even stripped of all theatrics, she knew how to loom larger than life, her hair spun red gold spilling down over her shoulders whence she finally pulled the hood back.