Chương 8: Toil and Trouble

They huddled up back-to-back. Talia held her bow low and ready behind them while Tarkin and Asgar faced the forest, weapons bared to the wind. That same wind howled and moaned through the valley, setting the trees to creaking and the bushes to rustling like it was trying its best to obscure the sound of approaching footsteps. The smell that it brought with it was sickening. Old blood and rotting food, like a hearty stew left to spoil in the heat next to an offal house. Double double, toil and trouble.

The nursery rhyme came unbidden to his mind as Asgar scanned the trees. Something was here, something hungry, and all he could think about was a song Ma had sung him as a babe. A flicker of movement there; dark grey against the darker green of the bushes. His hand tightened on the wooden haft of his axe.

"You see anything?" he asked the others, voice low.

"Nothing," Tarkin replied.

"Eyes front, lad." They waited for another minute in silence. Eventually, Asgar heard something beneath the ever-present wind. A voice, drifting from a vast distance, amplified and echoing off the rocky ridges to either side of the valley. He couldn't pinpoint its location, but as the seconds ticked by, he realised it wasn't song, as he'd first thought, but laughter. A high-pitched, keening cackle. Something burst from the treeline, and Asgar swung with a cry.

His axe thudded into matted fur, drawing a plaintive yelp from the creature and knocking it off course. He looked down at the choking, gurgling animal. It was no bigger than a large dog, but malformed; twisted and half-rotting as it wretched and cried. He wrenched his axe free from its chest and buried it in its skull.

"What the fuck is that?" Tarkin asked in disgust. Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog. The rhyme repeated in Asgar's head, his mother's sweet voice rendered sinister by the environment. He felt a flare of anger in his chest at that. There was something wicked in these woods, but for it to turn his own memories against him, to corrupt his memory of Ma? It would die for that alone.

"Double double, toil and trouble, fire burn, and caldron bubble." All three of them whipped around, heads turning to the top of the valley. It hadn't been in his head that time. Realising his mistake too late, Asgar turned to find the second abomination launching itself from the underbrush at Tarkin, but the man was a canny veteran. He had turned away from the voice immediately, recognising it for the trap that it was, and when the beast leapt at him, it was met by two feet of gleaming steel.

It curled pathetically around his sword, guts spilling onto the grass with a mewling cry. Asgar stomped its head in.

"We need to leave," Talia said.

"This is beyond us."

"And go where?" Tarkin retorted.

"The army's a half day's march back, and we'll need to cross these hills anyway. If the others are dead, there's no way out of this without killing that bitch first." At Asgar's shocked look, the veteran spat angrily at the corpse before him.

"I've seen the workings of a witch before, lad, and this fucking reeks of it. You heard the wind—don't try and tell me I'm mad." Talia shivered, fingers white-knuckled on her bow.

"There's been no hint of witchery since the Nitrescan Conclave and the Barrenwoods campaign."

"Then where are your scouts, ranger?" She had no answer for Tarkin's question, but Asgar could see her bow trembling slightly. Witches. The word tasted like ash on his tongue, conjuring tales of fiendish magics, clever curses emptying entire villages. There were enough stories in the kingdom that there must be a common root, and Asgar doubted it was raw superstition. Besides, he trusted Tarkin, as insane as that may be for a man he barely knew. His very suspicion of Asgar proved his insight."

Bubble bubble," came that eerie giggle on the wind, rebounding from everywhere and nowhere." For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth boil and bubble." The wind seemed to sigh, trees settling their grasping branches for a single moment of silence. Then the witch spoke again." Here are your scouts, ranger. Have them back." Asgar saw nothing at first, not until Talia let out a shriek. Outrage, grief, horror and anger all mixed together.

He followed her tortured gaze to find two figures shambling down the path.

They blended with the trees at first, but as they grew closer, he realised that the confusing shapes were the result of horrific limbs and wings and animalistic totems grafted onto them. Dansel and Tresca, two experienced scouts both undergoing the gruelling training to become full rangers themselves under Talia's tutelage, reduced to profane experiments. Eye of newt and hair of dog. Their bodies bulged grotesquely, juices slicking their pale skin.

Tresca had hailed from the Khagan Plains far to the west and his skin had shone bronze like most from that part of the world, and yet now, even he was shivering and pale—almost yellow in the dying light of eve. Sickly. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The ranger's arrow thudded into Tresca's eye, rocking his— its —head back. But the abomination didn't fall. Instead it groaned, reeling around from the impact but soon turning to continue its shamble their way.

The creature that once was Dansel wasted no such time, bounding towards them with a sudden shock of energy. It was fast. Asgar barely had time to react, his axe whistling through the air only for the haft to bounce ineffectually off the creature's shoulder. He dropped the weapon and grabbed it beneath the armpits as weird bat wings, ending in little claws, extended from its skull to try and wrap around his waist.

His chainmail shirt—they'd foregone full armour in favour of speed for this mission, so he lacked the heavy chest plate, greaves and cuisses he normally wore—just about protected him from the scrabbling claws, but its grip was shockingly strong, and Asgar was left wrestling with the creature as it clung to him.

"Shit! Don't move!" Tarkin shouted as he leapt forward, angling his sword to stab down in short little thrusts. As terrifying as the abomination clinging to his legs was, Asgar was definitely glad of the man's caution as he stabbed at his crotch. He'd faced down plenty of monsters already, but there was something disturbing on a primal level about watching someone wave sharp steel near your groin. When the creature's blood first touched Asgar's skin, he realised the real danger.

"Stop!" he cried, but Tarkin had just found the right angle, and the sword plunged down through the creature's upturned face, piercing its throat and mincing its chest-cavity when the veteran started wiggling it around. Asgar panicked, knowing that the blood welling up from those gruesome wounds would spell an equally gruesome injury to himself if he didn't move. Roaring, he kicked the creature free of his legs, knocking back Tarkin in the process but finally gaining some space.

The left leg of his breeches had been eaten through by the acidic blood, the first layer of skin from his knee to his ankle purple and bubbling. It fucking hurt. It hurt worse than the time he'd broken his arm as a child, worse than when he'd been playing around with the cattle brand and accidentally scarred himself on the thigh. It hurt so fucking much that he couldn't even see anymore—everything just a red haze as the skin on his leg was eaten away by sorcerous alchemy.

He screamed, flailing about, but then Talia was there, pressing something into his leg. A new flash of white-hot agony hit him, but it jolted his senses back together and he managed to pierce the haze of pain to see a thick strip of her overcoat pressed against his leg. Even through the material, he could still hear the blood hissing away. Knowing what he had to do, he took a deep breath and then slapped the ranger's hands away, yanking on the cloth.

Like sandpaper, he scraped up and down his raw shin, collecting the corrupted blood—alongside plenty of his own dribbling flesh. He scoured his leg, lances of agony hitting him with every minute movement, but it was over in seconds. He cursed, breath strangled by the pain so that he could hardly make a noise, and stumbled away. He didn't look down, didn't want to see what the monster had wrought of his shin, but he saw Tarkin rolling to his feet and grabbing at his sword.

When the man drew it from the broken mouth of the creature, the blade was pitted and fouled, closer to an ancient weapon that had lain untended in a field for a hundred years rather than the fresh-forged and mirror-bright shine it had previously boasted. Bubble bubble, toil and trouble. Asgar panted, the pain giving way to rage. Father Tandel—and the Church of Ardent Light more broadly—taught that the corruption of the witch must be burned out at the root wherever it reared its ugly head. He saw now why that was.

Corruption. The witch in this valley had wormed her way into his own head through the subversion of a children's nursery rhyme, had tainted his own sacred memories, and now tried to corrupt his very flesh, his very body, just as it had done to Talia's scouts. Asgar wouldn't allow it. He was chosen now. He had a divine class in his enlivened soul and the edict from God above was clear: all those of the faith should burn the witch, redeem the heretic, and cleanse the land of their foul taint.

He snarled as the second creature came sprinting over, its gait made ungainly by its disjointed limbs. A human leg and a deer's did not mix well, but the antlers sprouting from the crown of its human skull were still long, still sharp and deadly, and it came barrelling over with ample momentum to impale any one of them. A single Hallowed Strike tore the creature apart.

He roared as he struck out with a brutish swing of his axe, and the heavens roared with him, a lance of thunder rolling through the valley in a sharp crack. The creature was obliterated, a single deer leg spinning end over end past Asgar, but the rest of the creature that was formerly Tresca was strewn across the clearing in front of them in smoking chunks. He turned to his companions, seeing the mixture of fear and awe in their expressions.

He could only hope the former was directed at the witch's creations more than himself, though at this point he didn't much care. Tarkin, at least, seemed to trust him, giving him a faint nod and hefting his sword.

"A blessing, aye? That explains some things." He had a satisfied set to his features, like he'd guessed a well-hidden secret.

"Don't fret though, your secret's safe with me. Long as you don't go holding out on us while we hunt this evil." That worked for Asgar. He hadn't thought it through when activating his newest skill—hadn't planned on the strike looking like a rare, temporary blessing from Avarron as opposed to a full class skill—he'd just been angry and in pain and had let his emotions get the best of him. He looked Talia's way, but she just nodded tightly.

Given what he'd heard of her order, it was nothing she hadn't seen before anyway.

"Right then," Asgar said with a wince as he put weight on his left leg.

"Now that's out of the bag, I have a suggestion."

"You have a plan?" the gruff man asked.

"I do." The hallowed strike had been more powerful than he'd expected, and he could feel his soul pulsing eagerly. He had plenty of energy for more, especially if it would bring him closer to that fucking witch.

"Let me take the lead. I'll break anything that comes for us. You two just keep up and stop anything snatching us from behind." Asgar picked up his axe and pointed up the track that led to the top of the valley. Hanging branches trailed their mossy beards over the path, thickets of thorns and ivy covered the ground beside the thin trail, and above it all, they heard mad laughter on the wind.

"We have a witch to kill."