The door slammed shut and Crona jumped, dropped his broom. It sounded like thunder sprang from the clear night. Another witch had come in for the meeting, lit from below by cheap, orange candles. He didn't recognize her at first; she was wearing a cloak, but lowered the hood to reveal her feline ears.
"Medusa is in the parlor, Blair," Crona said, crouching to pick up the broom. "Eruka's there, too."
"And you're out here, sweeping the entryway? Medusa's so mean, making you work so hard while she plans a vacation," Blair said.
"It isn't really a vacation," Crona began, and was cut off by a voice in the other room.
"Crona, was someone at the door? Don't make our guests wait so long, show them in!"
"You'd better go ahead," Crona said.
Blair nodded, then grabbed his broom. "I think you should come with me- it's important, after all," she said.
"Eh?" He shrank back, "I'm not really supposed to interfere during meetings-"
"Crona, who are you talking to? Hurry up!" Medusa shouted again.
Blair got behind him and pushed Crona to the heavy wooden door, and he opened it with reluctance. 'I don't want to be here' dominated his thoughts as they stepped into the dim stairwell. The 'parlor' was a cellar, dug out so witches could hold meetings without being detected. Crona was banned from the meetings from birth, only let in to clean or fetch a tome for Medusa, and thought of it as 'The Witches' Liar'.
During regular meetings, Medusa had one hundred and eight candles lit; today, she made Crona light three hundred thirty-three. Tonight they were waiting on Blair and Arachne, to plan tomorrow night's activities; it was midnight, April thirtieth, and Walpurgisnacht was nearly come.
"Crona, who said you could interrupt a meeting? Have you become a witch?" Medusa asked. She sat at the head of a table, with Eruka at her left. Crona felt his knuckles whiten over the broom handle.
"I said he could, for a reason," Blair said, and held up a necklace. Its lace pattern was designed like a spider's web, with a scarabesque arachnid at the bottom. Eruka gasped and jumped from her seat, before pulling off her hat.
"Poor Arachne," Eruka muttered, as Medusa rose and glared at Blair.
"Why do you have my sister's necklace, Blair? Was it a mistake to let you join our coven, after all?"
Crona, whose natural posture was to look down, saw snakes begin to coil around Blair's legs, and he stepped back. Blair didn't move a muscle, but kept her eyes on Medusa from across the room. "We were coming here together, Arachne and I. Then the King's Guild attacked us, and I was only able to save this much of her."
"The King's Guild!" Eruka put her hat back on and began grabbing her things. "We can't stay here, with King Death's personal guild bearing down! Medusa!" Despite Eruka's plea, Medusa stayed where she stood.
"The King's Guild has grown beyond its own maintenance, with more rookies and so-called proteges than worthwhile Maestros. If they managed to kill Arachne, it's her own fault for being so weak. We stay."
"But Medusa, if they come here we'll have to move any-" Crona stopped as his mother turned her head towards him. Crona felt the snakes wrap around his legs, felt himself shaking, and nothing more needed to be said. After a few tense moments, the snakes uncoiled from him and Blair, and Medusa sat down.
"Sit down. Both of you... No, all three of you. Your blood magic studies and practice are coming along well, aren't they Crona? Let's see how you deal with filling Arachne's seat."
Crona lifted some books from the chair onto the table, and sat down, on edge.
"If they killed Arachne, we'll have to take revenge."
Eruka stood up again, and this time backed away from the table. "We can't fight the King's Guild! Hiding from them like we've been doing is one thing, but trying to take revenge-"
"Are you implying my sister's murder should go unanswered? And on the eve of Walpurga's feast, when we are at our peak?" Medusa asked, and Eruka left it unanswered and sat down. "I don't want to spend our holyday, or night, fighting, so we'll have to take care of it immediately. Blair, where did they go after killing my sister?"
"Towards Brocken dungeon," Blair replied.
"Then we'll leave now," Medusa said, and stood up again. "Crona, be sure to make use of your training. Don't let me find I've wasted all those hours tracking down books on blood magic just so you could do something half equivalent to witchcraft."
"I'll try to," Crona said, staring anxiously at the foot of the table. A place up the table, Eruka had taken up the same pastime.
The entrance to the Brocken dungeon has more in common with a mineshaft than anything; this is because it used to be a mine. When it ran dry, the intricate series of tunnels in and beneath the mountain the miners dug into was overrun by criminals, monsters, and demons. Wooden beams support the roof of the tunnel, keeping it from falling on adventurers seeking rumored treasures or known bounties. Had it not been for an order of King Death's, it would be impossible to reach the entrance of the dungeon without passing through merchants selling weapons, armor, potions, and charms. As it is, they're restricted to the nearest town, two miles away.
"The King's Guild came here?" Medusa asked, looking around. "Usually they're gaudy enough to leave some signs behind; a loose cloak, or some stray Death Groschen."
"I listened to them after they thought I ran," Blair boasted, unaware she was lowering their opinion of her, "and the one leading them said it was a good omen to run into a witch on the way to the Brocken, and they were sure to advance 'in riches and skill' before the night was through." Blair nodded her head in affirmation of herself a few moments before adding, "There was about four or five of them."
"Only five?" Medusa smiled, and Crona walked a bit quicker as they passed under the support beams. "They underestimate witches."
Past the entrance, torches were lit every forty or fifty steps. Medusa, in the lead, stepped over a sleeping adventurer, before Crona walked around them, Eruka jumped over them, and Blair grabbed a few Death Groschen from their pockets. The sleeping adventurer was not wearing the King's Guild's patch on the breast of his shirt, and so he lived.
"Crona, there's some manner of monster ahead," Medusa called back, stopping. "Take it out."
'I can do this,' battled in Crona's mind with 'I don't want to do this,' and 'Can I do this?' Yet he stepped forward and pulled a glass vial of blood from beneath his fitted and cuffed cassock, still unable to prick his finger at a moment's notice. Crona walked ahead of the others as he pulled the cork gently from the vial, and whispered a few words.
"Schütze deinen Meister im Brocken, Blut meiner Seele."*1
A needlepoint of flowing red liquid arose from the vial, supported by an ever thinning base pillar. The sound of a footstep rang quiet from the darkness ahead, at a perfect midpoint between two torches. Like a starting flag, it sent the blood from the bottle through the air towards it, moving in loose, curved patterns to sustain its height. The four heard a cry like a dog's, but deeper and more ranged, then a thud. Behind them, the adventurer woke and, seeing the scene as it was, ran out toward the entrance.
"Der Mond ist voll und grinst dich an,"*2 Crona said, and the blood pulled back within itself to fit inside the vial, which he sealed and returned beneath his cassock. Eruka wondered what the dead language he spoke was, while Medusa made a mental note regarding his mediocre pronunciation and amateur grammar. 'But then, I only started teaching him a year ago; his progress isn't bad.'
Crona fell against the wall, and leaned there for a moment as the others caught up. The seemingly simple ritual had strained his mind and body, and risked their stability, but it was already over.
"Good job, Crona," Medusa said, clapping lightly as a jest. "You even kept conscious this time. Can you keep that up?"
Crona nodded with blurred vision as he heard Blair telling Medusa to go easy on him, and it sounded like pity. His vision clearing, Crona began walking and caught up to them before Medusa could call for him. He disobeyed his natural inclination and kept his gaze up until they passed the next torch, not wanting to see what he had killed.
The only other obstacle they came across was a mimic; a demonic treasure chest, which follows a natural cycle of eating adventurers for their loot, allowing some of the loot to be taken over time until adventurers cease to be wary, and the cycle repeats. Medusa wrapped it with two snakes and constricted it until it was a pile of splinters and treasure, which she left with the snakes as her own trap.
The Brocken dungeon is known throughout Death's Kingdom as being a labyrinthal dungeon, to an uncommon degree. Having lived nearby for so long, Medusa knew the entire layout, and the four had no difficulty navigating. By halfway through Blair complained her feet hurt, and transformed into a cat.
The quartet reached the Pit. Despite its name, the Pit is not a hole in the ground, but the lowest level cavern in the Brocken; a single room, with a descending ramp of dirt and stone being the only passage in or out, and thus an easy to defend locale where adventurers set up a regular camp, to rest some hours before making the near equally perilous return to the surface.
The torches stopped halfway down the ramp, yet Medusa kept a steady pace. If the King's Guild was still there, or had been there at all, they would find signs of it, or more, in the Pit of the Brocken. None of the four spoke after they passed the final torch, nervous of what the Pit might hold.
Medusa stopped, turned her head. Then the sharp whistle of her vector arrows struck Crona's ears, followed by the crashing-glass sound of the arrows being shattered in the middle. From the back of the room, around the walls, down tables and even on the ground itself, four million, two hundred forty-two thousand, five hundred sixty-four candles were lit. Standing in the middle of the Pit, which is round with a diameter of ten Cronas, if he stretched, a man stood holding a scythe, shards of the snake vectors scattered at his feet.
The man was tall, seeming to tower over Crona even from half the room away while keeping his stance low. The fear and adrenaline the Blutmeister*3 felt, and the low candle lighting, did not help this perception. The Maestro's clothing was far from standard; his cassock was patchwork, the base being beige but more colors than there are in a rainbow were used for patches. He wore a tabbed collar, and the stole around his neck was white with violet trim and fringe, and hung nearly to the ground in his current stance. Beneath the stole was a cincture, and Crona realized he was wearing abnormally small cinctures on his arms and legs as well. Most glaring was the crude but clean steel bolt interrupting his cranial cavity.
The scythe he held was not a metal blade; Crona knew it couldn't be, to cut Medusa's vector snakes. It was a Disciple, a demi-man that can transform into a weapon. The years of training the Maestro had put into his fighting was evident from his stance and grip alone.
The witches and Crona turned at the sound of metal on rock. A metal grate fell from above the ramp's doorway, trapping them with no escape. When Crona turned around, Blair wasn't standing at his feet anymore, but strolled contemptuously behind the Maestro.
"Are witches truly foolish enough to accept an outsider into their coven in just two months?" the Maestro asked. "I'm surprised Blair convinced you of her 'witchcraft' that easily."
"Does the King's Guild truly underestimate witches by so far as to think we'd believe such simple lies?" Medusa asked back. "It has been nearly two hundred years since Death invaded our country, yet you continue to think the same traps of yesteryears will defeat us. I'll admit we fell for it the first time, eighty years ago. Your five repeat attempts since then have bored us, this included."
The Maestro smiled, "I assure you the King thinks higher of you than that; your coven is the only one to survive this long. Which is why he sent me, along with his personal Disciple."
"Ho? When we kill Death's weapon, does witchdom win a prize? Will you go back to your motherland?"
"Humans don't have such monstrous lifespans as your kind," the Maestro said. "This Domain of Death is where I was born, where I've lived, where I've killed, and where I'll die- in thirty or forty years."
"Lucky me! Your decades seem to last about two minutes to us." As she spoke Medusa summoned more snakes, which writhed across the floor in a swarming black mass, whispering promises of agony.
The Maestro drew an arc across the ground with the tip of his scythe, and the flood of serpents was forced up and back, as though they had met with the expanding wall of an explosion. Crona stepped aside so one wouldn't land on him, and another did because of that, and he scrambled to brush it off his shoulder, distracting him from the battle.
The bolt-headed Maestro had come near and swung. Eruka felt a gentle push on her back as Medusa moved out of the way, before looking down to see what caused her pinching sensation, to see the curved blade half through her abdomen. Eruka looked up again in shock, her vision fading, and saw the unmoved expression of the King's highest Maestro. He pulled the scythe backwards, both to regain its use and to lift the handle against a new attack by Medusa. Eruka fell to the floor, the black spots in her eyes taking up more area, framing Crona's panicked face as he knelt by her cooling body in the puddle of blood and asked if she could hear him, several times over. That is what Eruka saw until the spots took up her entire vision a few brief moments later, and what Eruka heard until she stopped hearing. It had happened so fast, she forgot to be scared.
Crona reached under his cassock for the vial of blood, felt a prick on his finger and pulled his hand out. The vial had shattered under the weight of the snake the Maestro sent at him, by pure and poor chance. Crona looked up at the fight again, as the Maestro and witch knocked over candles and sent melting wax and metal holders onto the ground. The flickering light was not steady, but by it he could easily see Medusa was matched for the Maestro, and that she was not visibly bothered by her part in Eruka's death.
'After Arachne and Eruka, if what that Maestro said about ours being the last coven in the country is true, then Medusa is the only witch alive,' Crona thought, and pulled off the glove on his left hand. 'The culture of a country from centuries lost, lives entirely in her hands. The only country I've ever known, despite its destruction ten generations ago, will be gone forever if I don't do something!'
Crona placed his bleeding, naked hand on the puddle of blood, and faced the battle again. "Blut meiner Seele und Blut einer verlorenen Seele, schütze deine Geschichte heute Nacht unter-"*4
His words, from a language missing as long as the rest of his heritage, were cut off as Crona was pulled up from behind, his hand lifting from the puddle. Blair's arms were beneath his, keeping him from reaching the ground to complete the incantation.
"Silly Crona, you aren't a witch!" Blair said as she restrained him, "You're just a human, so don't try and protect them. Besides, isn't blood magic verboten nowadays? Just leave it with everything else from the past, where it belongs."
Crona's head swam, but he realized the partial incantation was enough to bond his blood to Eruka's, and a steady line of it rose crimson from the ground to his finger, like an inverted marionette. "Unter dem Brocken! Unter dem Brocken! Blut meiner Seele! Schütze deine Geschichte! Jetzt- Eile!"*5
The Maestro had noticed his outburst, and ran to Crona and Blair after knocking away Medusa. The combined blood of two souls swirled up as a thick, violent cyclone. It grew and moved rapid and erratic, until it filled Crona's vision before being replaced for an instant by the metal scythe, and the cyclone dissipated into a heavy cloud, which fell and faded alongside Crona's hope.
Medusa saw the distraction and took the time it gave her as a gift, forming of her black snakes a hilt, which expanded in an instant to an arrow and shot out into the stone and dirt wall, up at a diagonal angle. Instead of stabbing the Maestro in the back with her window of time, she decided to take a flashier approach, and bury him completely by bringing the whole mass and volume of the Brocken down on its Pit. Most nights this would be a fantasy, but with Walpurgisnacht so near, Medusa knew it was possible.
She sneered and turned the hilt in her hands, to more comfortably spin around with the arrow's weight and anchorage in the earth acting as a balance so she could put her entire weight into it. With the time that small motion took, her sneer fell intact from her body with the rest of her head, and the arrow turned into a meek line of snakes, as Medusa's body remained standing a moment from inertia before crumbling to the ground. The Maestro did not deign to watch it fall.
"Die letzte Hexe ist tot,"*6 the Maestro said reverently, and his Disciple returned to the state of man.
"Die let's huh?" the Disciple asked. He had red hair, and wore a black coat above brown trousers. "I don't get it. What'd you say?"
"It's from a dead language this country's predecessor used. I found that phrase last night," the Maestro explained. "In a sense, it means 'We've won.'"
"What do we do about Crona, Stein?" Blair asked, struggling to keep him restrained as Crona tried to pull away and go to Medusa's corpse's side. He muttered, "Medusa, Medusa! I can't even begin to carry a whole country's past on my shoulders alone. Alone, alone- Why did you have to push Eruka?"
"He has studied blood magic, hasn't he?" Stein said, "That kid might not be a witch himself, but he's the closest thing left. He'll probably be a prisoner in the King's dungeons for the rest of his life, else exiled outside His Domain."
Exiled. Crona stopped squirming and thought clearly for the first time since the candles were lit, and looked up. 'If I'm exiled, or put in prison, there really won't be anything left of the witches, forever.'
"We're done here," Stein said, and picked up one of the candles. "Spirit, carry the kid."
Giving an annoyed glance at Stein, the Disciple Spirit went to Blair to grab Crona. When Blair let go of him, Crona ducked and stumbled forward, beneath Spirit's arm. "Hey, stop!" Crona ignored them, unsure even of who spoke, and ran to the hole Medusa's final attack had created. Snakes poured out, and through the straight but narrow tunnel the half moon shone.
Stein turned at the noise, and grabbed Spirit's arm- his Disciple followed his lead and transformed. The Maestro swung, but only managed to slice the back of Crona's leg before the young Blutmeister was entirely within the tunnel. A second offensive proved no use, the blade of the scythe too wide to fit in. Stein reached with his hand, barely missing Crona's shoe with his fingers, and pulled back as a snake bit him.
"Should we chase him?" Spirit asked, unsure what Stein was thinking.
"No, he isn't that large a threat on his own. I'll send one of my protégées to finish him off; it should make good training."
The tunnel up to the surface of the world was long and claustrophobic. Bleeding, battered, and bitten, Crona pushed everything out of his mind so far as he could, and watched the moon as he crawled up. Time seemed to stop, rewind, and start over from the bottom of his escape. More than once Crona's weak grip missed a rock and he would slip several times his height, before continuing to crawl upwards. Finally, the light of the moon left him, as it continued to circle the world in orbit, leaving his snake riddled tunnel in darkness. Then, miraculous to Crona's mind, the next reach of his arm felt dew covered grass, and the ground leveled off, as the moon came back into view. He was free.
Far above yet below the clouds, the moon laughed blood. Below it, the lights of a town two miles away were dim through the night fog of midspring. Crona used the stone face of the Brocken to pull himself up, and began to limp towards those lights.
'Survive, Crona.'
Each step felt like fire licking his left leg at the calf, yet he continued.
'Don't die here, alone.'
The lights in the distance slowly grew larger as he neared them, and Crona began to stumble and fall down every few dozen steps.
'Die letzte Hexe ist tot.'
Crona reached the side of a dirt road, pounded down by decades of horses and carriages, and fell.
His eyes were dry, and hurt to open. But Crona did it anyway, laying down. 'I don't recognize this ceiling.'
He made an effort to lift his arm, and sighed when it refused to move. Turning his neck, Crona saw he was under a heavy blanket, and managed to free his arm from beneath it, and sighed again, this time with relief.
"You are awake, Brother?"
Crona's body reacted without consulting his mind, shifting in a moment to the far edge of the bed. "Where am I? Who are you?"
"Relax, Brother. You are safe here, in our home." The man sitting at his bedside was wearing a cassock similar to his, but not fitted. The largest difference in their attire was his lack of gloves, and that he wore a short, tabbed collar. "They found you on the side of the road, a wound in your leg, covered in blood and snake bites. Who dared to attack a priest of Death, Brother?"
'He thinks I'm a priest,' Crona realized, 'and in his sect, too.' He closed his eyes and laid down, relaxed. "Am I going to die tonight, um, brother?"
"The King would not reap such as you are, no- You shall not meet him tonight. I can not promise the same of those who harmed you, though." Crona felt awkward at hearing honest concern for his safety, and turn his face away. "Were they adventurers, Brother? Rogues or bandits, or discharged soldiers? Who did this?"
"I, I," 'I can't tell him,' Crona thought, and said "I can't remember. I walked a long way though, after it happened. I feel so tired," he said, and winced at blinking, "and thirsty."
"I shall bring you something to drink, and a doctor besides," the priest said, and stood to go, before hesitating. "But, I can not. The townsfolk are gathered, the whole congregation at once; they are praying for a quiet and uneventful Walpurgisnacht, and await my sermon. Brother, you are in no condition for me to ask this of you, but can you wait while I relay my orders to a nun, and have our Sister quench you thirst and summon the physician? Your body has lost blood, yet shall live- but will your mind hold out as well?"
Crona gave a weak nod, but couldn't fake a smile, and the priest went. Crona closed his eyes, and wondered how things would play out. 'Maybe I'll become a priest here, and write what I know of the old country's history of witches and language, or study blood magic while I...' His mind wandering with no guide, Crona fell back to sleeping.
His eyes were still dry, and his tongue felt worse. Crona sat up, uncomfortable, and looked around. No nun, no doctor, no pitcher of water or wine. Through the walls, he could hear pieces of the priest's sermon, to calm the citizenry.
"And no witch shall escape the long reach of King Death, for as many times older than us they are, so as He is to them. That we may see in our brief lifespans the joyful anticlimax of such a war is a blessing no blind luck alone can we 'lay blame to' or say to 'take credit' for this convergence of our times and their's-"
Crona stopped listening and dropped his legs to the floor. If they would not bring the water, he would find it. Crona found his leg was wrapped tight with a short, thin blanket, and that he wore a nightshirt with a small rope at the front; looking around, he spotted his bloodied cassock folded on a chair. Uneasy without it, he stripped and put it on, before covering it with the nightshirt so as not to scare anyone he passed with the blood. Then he grabbed the room's lone candlestick and went out.
He was in a narrow hallway between the outer wall of the church and the sanctuary. At one end was the room he just left, and now realized must be the priest's sleeping quarters. Unwilling to burst into the sanctuary in the middle of a sermon, Crona continued across the hallway to a door at the other end. It was a double door, and was kept shut with a rope which had broken and been retied. The rope itself was coated with dust.
Had he been thinking normally, Crona would have realized this was not a room where drinks were kept. But blood loss, physical and mental exhaustion, and confusion all clouded his judgment. Crona put down the candlestick and fumbled with the knot, his hands shaking, weak, and uncoordinated. He got a grip on a loose end, and teased it out; the knot followed, and the rope dropped to the ground. Behind him the sermon went on, "That the King's Guild will protect us from any outbursts of witchcraft as we saw last year, I hold no doubt, only faith! Faith that Death will shield us from danger, and keep us safe in our humble town."
"He didn't do us any favors," Crona mumbled as he pushed open one of the doors, falling into it halfway through the swing. It caught him, and he stood on his legs again, and realized his mind and body were both tired beyond what he had learned under Medusa's tutelage. 'I'm not going to recover, will I?'
His balance was off, but he walked in, leaving the candle at the door. Around him were dozens of boxes and crates. Each was labeled with a decaying piece of vellum, to identical degrees as the labels were replaced en masse every fifty years. The storage room did not provide any sort of clear path or route through itself, and its function was made clear through that; this was a place to store, not to be. Crona was too lost in himself to pick up those signs, however. His thoughts were growing more simple, more disjointed, less coherent. 'Where's the water? There should be a fountain in here, for the congregation. Oh, is this a meeting place for a coven? But Blair dragged me in, so I can't be blamed or take credit for any time that happens-'
He fell and knocked down a short marble column, a stand for a metal jar. Crona and the jar both fell to the floor, neither landing well. Laying on the ground, the ringing it put in his ear was more than unpleasant, but droned out the pain momentarily. Then, a new sound hit his ear from the jar; sloshing.
Through the open door the sermon continued, as a Maestro took the pulpit and promised to protect the town through the witches' night.
'Ah, am I like this because of the snakes?' Crona thought. 'The priest couldn't have known. I guess Medusa pushed me forward, too.'
Crona rolled onto his side and used the momentum to swing his arm onto the metal jar. It looked like a large urn, with small and intricate designs made of more common metals than the heavy platinum base. The lid was kept on by five slips of paper with red calligraphy on them he could not decipher. Crona ran his fingers along the bumps, and pulled it closer; from inside was the definite sound of liquid rolling along the sides of the jar.
On the fallen marble stand, the vellum label read 'Fettered Malevolence - Protect from Witches at All Costs. Retrieved by Disciple and Priest Justin Law, Purchased by his Father's Father from a Foreign Merchant in the Year Fifty prior to said Priest's Birth, for the Sum of...' The vellum was too decayed to read further. In the poor lighting, Crona saw 'Costs' and 'Sum', 'Purchased' and 'Foreign Merchant', and thought it a receipt.
'If I'm dying, they won't mind if I take some of their wine, even if it was so expensive they kept the receipt,' Crona thought, and began peeling the solemn talismans from the jar. If it weren't for his fingernails, he would never have been able to do so in his condition. The first, then the second, followed by the third. His hand slipped, and Crona realized he couldn't move his legs. Straining himself, he got a nail beneath the fourth talisman and ripped it off.
The fifth he never touched, as it acted like a hinge. The lid fell open, and the liquid he had worked so hard for seeped out, stale after so many centuries, millennia. It had been sealed when the witches' country was overrun two hundred years ago, and it had been sealed when the witches first settled that country a thousand years before that. It was a black, viscous fluid, and formed a puddle around Crona which expanded at a steady rate.
Crona tried to lift the jar to drink, but found he couldn't. He tried to smile at his luck, but all went dark.
The nun brought his pitcher but found the room empty, and turned to bring the priest, when she saw the storage room door open across the hallway. A candle had fallen over and gone out on the floor outside, and she stepped over it to get in, holding her own candle close to keep a stray draft from putting it out.
Whether anything had been upset would normally be difficult to tell in that room; it was so full, something fallen over might appear as if it had been put there for lack of space. But sprawled on the only open stretch of floor was a boy's body, in a pool of liquid far larger than himself, which reflected bright red as the candle was brought near.
"Brother! Brother! Are you alive?" She gently shook his shoulder, kneeling in his blood; there was no way to be within arms reach of him but to step there. Even as she asked, the nun knew the answer. The amount of blood was more than the physician had ever let from an ill patient, many times over. There could not be any more left within his body; that his heart remained beating until each drop was excised seemed a horrific miracle. She brought her hand back and began to pray for his soul.
"King Death, take him gentle to your first and final kingdom, where I pray to meet you and him again some day. We know not his congregation, but he was a wounded traveler and a man of your cloth in our house of refuge, so treat him well, until the day comes he might meet his family and friends beneath your ever blue skies, and... Beneath your ever blue skies," she repeated, searching for the rest of the words. 'Ever green fields?'
At the moment of her hesitation, the nightshirt Crona wore began to swell over his back, bubbling in grotesque manner before bursting. Two black wings which reflected no light, both feathered and scaled, with the skeletal outlines by which one recognizes a bat's wing, tore through and flexed. The nightshirt, in tatters, fell from him, revealing the bloodied cassock, as the body rose from the ground, suspended from the wings.
The nun fell backwards and gaped, raising her hand to point at him. "Brother, what- what!?"
"Shut up already," Crona mumbled, not fully conscious. His mind swam as though he were in the ocean, floating in rough saltwater. "I'm alone. Leave me alone. Where's Medusa and Eruka? I'm going home."
"No witch can possibly win against the elite of the King's Guild!" The priest's voice echoed through the chancel, into the nave and sanctuary. "Thank you, Maestro, for reassuring our town tonight."
In the congregation, a young girl was returning to her seat, and embarrassed, bowed briefly for the applause, before going back to her pew.
'Though, I'm not a full Maestro yet,' she thought, but decided their peace of mind was worth keeping quiet. She wore a long button-up coat which came down to her shins, the back flowing farther with a split tail. Around her neck hung a pectoral necklace, with a carved icon of King Death's skull at the bottom. Not yet a full fledged Maestro, she wasn't required to dress as clergy, and chose not to, announcing this with a green cravat tucked into her jacket over her blouse. 'I wonder how Soul is doing.' Her former partner Soul, a talented Disciple, had split from the Guild and went off on his own only a week ago to adventure; selfishly, the pupil thought. For the time being, her training was halted while her mentor tried to find a suitable replacement for Soul. 'If the Guild really wanted to reassure these people,' she thought, 'I wish they had sent someone with a Disciple.'
The sermon droned on, and she wondered what it was that made some pastors capable of monopolizing attention, while others wasted time with repetition.
She was shaken out of meditation by a boom behind the pulpit, in the sanctuary. The priest paused, and turned to look back; the church was silent. The pupil leaned her head back, trying to see what had happened. A pair of large black wings appeared over the pulpit, and the congregation gasped in unison, as the priest fell to his knees. Maka stood up, but without a Disciple, was empty handed and unable to defend the crowd. 'Could someone in here be a Disciple I can use?' She glanced around, but no quick answer was found.
But the wings didn't attack the crowd. They flew, and seemed to hover, above the aisle between the pews, and as it passed she saw they were coming up from a young priest, bloodied and disorientated, mumbling under his breath as he went by. The doors opened in advance of him, and the demon was gone into the night.
With danger past, the church erupted into fear and panic. Shouts of 'It's the work of a witch!' and 'A witch has killed a priest, possessed him with madness!' rang out, and the girl sat back down. She clasped her hands and prayed to King Death, that her mentor Stein would find a Disciple and choose her to settle the matter and prove herself a Maestro.
*1 - "Protect your master in the Brocken, blood of my soul."
*2 - "The moon is full and grinning at you."
*3 - Blood Master / Blood Meister
*4 - "Blood of my soul and blood of a lost soul, protect your history tonight under-"
*5 - "Under the Brocken! Under the Brocken! Blood of my soul! Protect your history! Now- hurry!"
*6 - "The last witch is dead."