Beyond the Wicked Willow: Chronicles of a Teenage Witchslayer

BEYOND THE WICKED WILLOW

Just steps beyond the Wicked Willow, in the Realm of the Strega, things were not at all as they had been just moments before. On the dark side of the tree, a wretched festering swamp lay strangled in a labyrinth of wandering vines that were as big around as the belly of a full grown python. Streaking down through the thick canopy above, the unsettling red glow from an ominous blood moon dappled Frankie and the others as they stood anxiously waiting for Giacomo to emerge from the Wicked Willow just as they had.

"We should've never let him go last," said Capricia.

"Maybe the pirates got to him before he could make it through," said Bookworm.

"It would appear his cowardice has finally got the better of him," said Ambroggio.

"He'll make it," said Frankie.

"I don't know about that," said Beef, skeptically.

"I'm telling you, he won't let us down," insisted Frankie.

Just then, every branch on the Wicked Willow shuddered at once and began to writhe like the snakes upon Medusa's head. The tree screeched and squealed in agony, as Giacomo burst from the trunk with sword in hand. He was moving with such haste and urgency that he bowled Frankie, Beef, and Bookworm right over before falling on top of them in a heap upon the ground.

His left arm was bound tightly against his body by the long, switch-like end of a severed willow branch girding him below his ribs. The end of the branch—where Giacomo had chopped himself free of the pestilent tree—squirmed like the freshly cloven tail of a lizard. Giacomo grasped the writhing end, as if to strangle it, and angrily tore the branch off his body.

"That vile excuse for a tree attacked me," spouted Giacomo, as he stood up with his sword and began to slash wildly at the branches above his head.

The others drew their swords and began to hack away, as well, but soon realized their efforts to dismember the Wicked Willow were in vain. Their blades slipped through the branches with no resistance whatsoever, and each and every limb remained intact and unmarred. Then, before their very eyes, the tree morphed into black smoke. As they stared, mystified, the smoky Wicked Willow began to distort in the breeze before being completely swept away and dispersed into the darkness of the night.

"Holy crap-a-molee!" said Beef.

"That was our way in," said Frankie, "how are we going to get out of here, now?"

"I'm afraid there is but a single way out of the Realm of the Strega," said Ambroggio, gravely.

"And, how might that be?" asked Bookworm.

"Death," warned Ambroggio, "either the Strega's or ours," he said as he looked to Frankie, suggestively.

Frankie locked eyes with Ambroggio and thought long and hard about the gravity of his words.

Amid the oppressive gloom of her cold bedchamber, lying within the grim embrace of a ponderous wooden canopy bed was Il Strega Diavolo. With her right hand clutching her gut and the back of her left hand resting upon her forehead, she was in a state of agitated trance. Her vacant eyes were transfixed upon the dark canopy pillared overhead, and her rapid shallow breaths were like those of a lioness following a long midday hunt across the sun-scorched savanna. Beside her on a nightstand, held under lock and key behind the glass door of a small wooden case, floated the lucent ghostly essence of an eyeball. Staring out eerily across the bedchamber, it bobbed gently up and down with no sign of perceptivity or awareness of its surroundings. Quite jarringly, the Strega snapped from her trance and sat bolt upright in her bed.

"They have breached the Wicked Willow. The witchslayer comes for me," she said with both fear and fury in her voice.

The Strega rose from beneath the canopy and stormed across the chamber to where an ornately carved stone pedestal stood. Floating above it in a state of suspended animation was the young Gypsy girl Tsura. Her catatonic body was enveloped by a white fluctuating energy field, and she wore the same vibrant silk skirt and beautiful orchid headscarf as the day she had been cursed by the Strega. Even though her clothes and her age remained the same as they had been on that fateful day, her health did not. She was drawn and haggard and deathly pale.