Witch Doctors Inc: SEASON TWO (Ongoing)

Part 1.1

1500 YEARS IN THE PAST
PHAEDRA

"It wasn't my fault, mummy." The child's lips stretch into an ugly smile. "I found him that way."

Andromeda's thin lilac hand flutters over her lips like a trembling butterfly. The leaf creature is young, not yet fifty years of age. There's a smile resting on its face, as if it's suspended in a dream. The child watches it impassively.

In the distance, the lights of Prometheus glint like drops of amber glass.

On and off.

On and off.

Andromeda peels her gaze from her daughter's face. She's afraid of what she'll see there if she looks too long.

It could not have been Pandora. She was barely past the stage of infancy. She could not have done...this.

This was the third leaf creature Andromeda had found this week. They were common in this part of Phaedra - glushnil, they were called, light green bulbs with stalks for legs and arms, and bodies swirling with wrinkled leaves. The glushnil were harmless, plodding into gardens only to rest in flowerbeds. They would sleep for days among the glowing petals of Andromeda's garden, drawing energy from the moons to nourish themselves.

When Andromeda found them this week, they were not sleeping. She knew it as soon as she touched their frostbitten fingertips. Cold scars tore through their leaves, leaving bits of ice clinging to the green.

Magic.

Pandora has lost interest in the fallen leaf creature. She caresses a frozen marble in her palm, seemingly lost in its glassy depths. Andromeda knows that Pandora created these marbles herself. It's her first, and currently only, magical ability. Yet, as she stares at the glushnil's frozen corpse, she wonders if her daughter has discovered other, more frightening powers.

"Do you want to say the rites with me?" she asks her.

Phaedreans performed funeral rites for those creatures who succumbed to mortality. A Phaedrean would always reform, become something new, something the same but different. But where did these poor creatures go? Where did they go when they were no more?

Pandora giggles. "Goodbye, leafy," she says, waving at the dead creature.

Surely she did not understand. At her young age, she could not know the meaning of gone.

But she does know the meaning of pain.

The thought snakes into Andromeda's consciousness, dripping poison into its depths. Phaedreans felt pain. Phaedreans knew pain.

Andromeda loosens her particles, dissolving into a cloud of lilac mist, and floats away from her daughter, who is thoroughly engrossed in the marbles. Her energy caresses the glushnil, wrapping it in a blanket of comforting cold.

She performs the rites herself. Her husband need not know about this. Mortals are fragile. They were here one minute, gone the next. Andromeda wonders what the point of it is, why they must blink in and out of existence, like lights in a void.

She buries the creature, knowing that its physical body will become one with Phaedra again. She imagines the earth weeping as it closes over its fallen child.

Then she notices something that isn't right. Something in the flowerbed, lit by an ethereal twilight glow. Something with hands and legs, and eyes.

Horrified, Andromeda inches towards the second glushnil. She coalesces into her physical form, and touches its cheek with a wrinkled lilac finger. The skin is frozen, frosted over with a powdering of ice. The eyes stare back at her, frozen too, frozen and too big, like glass marbles set into the glushnil's bulbous face.

For a moment, the world is still, and Andromeda watches, watches death as it tries to speak, tries to tell her what she will not know. Then her legs buckle and she falls, falls into the darkness that has always been there.

Against the shadow of her eyelids, the lights of Prometheus keep blinking.

On and off.

On and off.