Curse of Ash

Prologue

A witch was roaming the streets of Freyhaven.

Midday sun glowed freely in the sky, a bright and beautiful warmth against their skin. The morning breeze had long since sputtered into the warming air of spring. It was only a few weeks until summer would be upon the continent in full effect. The stickiness in the air was only the beginning of what is to come. Just a mere taste.

The witch clutched the basket they carried tighter to their chest, moving past other shoppers and workers in the street. Noon was always the busiest time at the market. Cobbled streets crowded with people pushing from shop to shop, browsing different items before they finally settled on things to buy like starved animals. Some would say it was the wrong time to be venturing through, if you knew of the nature some of these shoppers took on. But the witch thought it to be the best. It was always easier to blend in with a crowd than it was in barren streets.

And today was a special occasion to go unnoticed and buy the loot they had been waiting weeks for.

Aladona had called in a favor to retrieve more stock of white leafed clovers, only found in the forests of Elysande on Prewyth, the continent to the right of their own. And when the witch got the message that morning that the newest shipment had finally arrived, they were quickly out the door before anyone could truly question it.

The stand was busier than usual today, probably with the recent stock of fresh ingredients, not just the witch's promised ones. Aladona plastered a forced smile on her lips as she hurried from one customer to the next, her daughter trying to keep up on her tail like a miniature shadow. The witch always told the woman to find more help, but she refused, claiming it was a sacred family business for her, and the only family she had was her small daughter.

The witch stood off to the side, absently browsing the fabrics from the shop next to Aladona's. One eye on the material in their hand, the other on the door to the back of the foreign ingredients' shop. They kept their features relaxed, completely at ease even though their heart screamed in their chest. This was the only item they needed left before they could move forward with the plan.

They dropped the fabric back on the table and stepped away, back onto the bustling street dividing the shops down the middle.

A shoulder collided with the witch's in the next breath, wind knocking from their lungs. The heat of the day was sucked back in as they turned.

"Excuse me, sir," the young witch muttered, keeping their chin lowered in subservience. They knew what could happen when making eye contact with pompous people on the streets of the city. Especially when dealing with trades and materials of wealth to the individual. Manners sometimes escaped people in those moments. Or several dozen moments thereafter.

"Do I know you?" A deep voice rumbled from in front of them. The voice sent a shudder down their spine, and not for the reasons one might hope when running into a tall and handsome man in any situation.

The witch looked up, meeting the man's foreign golden eyes that paired finely with his heavy accent. While they hadn't heard that shadowy lilt before, there was a familiar sense of reading fables as they stared up at the man's face. Decades and millennia written in the blink of his shimmering eyes. It was a breath of fresh air, and a perfect sign that the right events were moving in the right direction. No one would see such a thing. Not any by the naked human eye. But a witch trained? For this precisely? Now that—

"No. No, I suppose not." The witch smirked, lips crooked along their face and eyes swirling with mischief. "You know where you're going then?" They gestured to the busy street around them. The buildings stacked behind and in front, each housing a different shop, and a different home a floor above.

"Yes. These streets aren't unfamiliar to me."

The witch hummed, clutching the basket closer to their body, shielding against people pushing past. The man cocked his head, eyes glancing down to the items in the wicker.

To anyone, the things the young witch had bought were completely random, harmless even. But to the one who knew what to look for, it was danger in the making.

"And what, say you, of these streets?"

The witch smiled. "These streets are all I've known, sir. Like the back of my own hand by now."

And the witch lifted that slim hand, fingers long under the sun, even darker compared to the man's own scarred knuckles. But the veins that lay beneath their skin shifted and melted and the bones turned and groaned, lines forming beneath the brown of their skin, matching the very streets they stood on, walked on.

The witch could hear the grit of the man's jaw as he stared down at those shifting, breathing veins.

"I see," he pushed out. His own hands curled into fists at his sides.

When his eyes lifted to their own, the gold was ablaze. "Stay away from them."

The witch smiled again, this time, more predator than human. They made sure their eyes were blazing back. "I don't know what you mean, sir. I believe you must be mistaken."

They both could taste the lie in the air, but it didn't matter. The witch had already turned away, off to fetch the last piece to the beginning of a long journey ahead.