Long grasses swayed in the breeze: a pale and weak reflection of the gale that must have been racing on the bellies of the clouds overhead, that which birthed ripples and waves to propagate across the sky.
"Looking at it from this far away, you'd think it was pretty calm up there."
A well-dressed elderly gentleman sat next to an obviously more youthful man, both overlooking the rolling field that ran away from the small house in which they had found themselves residing these past few weeks. The elder man wore the typical signs of a priest: white collar, sash, and holy symbol; though not one of a typical faith or doctrine. The younger of the pair possessed very ordinary attire, slacks and a white buttoned shirt, though made remarkable by his physique and general air of calm assurance. It was the latter who had broken the peaceful silence as their last companion busied herself within the country home.
"Looks are deceiving though," he continued, "from here it looks like a peaceful rocking. Gentle and inviting, like you could fall asleep on those clouds. If you get in the middle of it though, get close, you realize that it's just unlivable. Howling wind, bone chilling cold, and wet."
The younger man shifted in his chair, reclining so as to rest his shaven head onto the soft cushion there. The older stayed silent for many moments, watching the ripples pass along the ground: the only visible signs that there was a breeze to be felt. Eventually he looked to his friend of many years; not shifting his attention, just his gaze.
"I've never known you in fifty years to be poetic, Kaulder. I've never heard you try to dance around a subject. What's on your mind?"
Kaulder kept his eyes fixed on some far away point but replied, "I'm just wondering how much of the world is actually as I know it. Wondering how much I just took at face value instead of asking questions."
"Questions such as?"
"Such as where witches come from." At this, the seeming elder of the two appeared caught off guard.
"The world has a few tendencies, Dolan. It tends to make things as they are needed, it tends to make things better at what they do over time, but it never, and I do mean never, makes unique things." Kaulder's eyes flicked over to his longtime confidant before returning to the distance.
"Witches use magic. It's something they're born with: intrinsic. Like your or my ability to see. But other things besides people see. Where are the other things that can use magic?"
Dolan took a few moments to respond: "We can use some magic; runic inscriptions, basic alchemical principals, even ignore some enchantments by using our willpower. So it's there, they just access it better."
Kaulder shook his head at this, chuckling with the sound of gravel rolling over itself. "A dog can open a door, Dolan. A monkey can use a mouse. But it's different. We only touch magic through gloves, only incidentally. Like a cat learning what a dolphin knows instinctively only when something goes very wrong for the cat: hold your breath. They," and he nodded toward the door that stood to their side and to their companion beyond, "live magic. They breathe it, they smell it, they can almost taste it. It's like trying to describe a color to a blind person, like a blind person trying to paint a copy of a Rembrandt, only more so."
Dolan looked back out to the overcast sky; silently listening as he had done since he had taken the title of Dolan. "We don't use magic, we just arrange for some things to happen naturally. We don't control it like they do. But nature hates unique things, hates singularities. A person is unique, but nothing about a person is. So I'm starting to wonder where they all are. All of the other things that must be able to use it like they can."
"What's brought this on? I've read your history, you never expressed any such questions before now. What changed?" Kaulder sighed then.
"A few things. The memory of killing the Queen the first time. Do you know what she said to me?" Dolan shook his head.
"She said that we humans were invaders in their world. That they were far older than us, and they had seen us develop; that we huddled around fires and hid in caves out of fear. I never thought about it again, not until she killed the traitor." Dolan's face darkened with distaste at the mention of his temporary successor.
"She told him that she couldn't 'turn clay to gold,' and that as he was born human, human he would always be, and thus was worthless. He was human, Dolan. Born to witches." The elder of the pair frowned, uncomprehending.
"Nature hates unique things, Dolan. It also hates things that are similar for no reason. Witches came first. We were born to them, without magic; probably. Basically lepers. But why are witches the only things that can use magic?" Kaulder never shifted his eyes from the distance, toward the beginnings of a curtain of rain at the foot of the nearest mountainsides.
"I think they did something. If you think about it, witches rely on an awful lot of complex constructs to do the impressive stuff. Rune stones to control the weather. Large concerts to manipulate or crush large objects, or to create the plague curse. Potions to do a multitude of things. They need time, they need planning, and they need magical tools to do the impressive stuff. Just like we need tools to do our impressive things." The thirty-sixth Dolan to Kaulder, now aged a paltry seventy-six years to his charge's eight hundred, sat in continued silence as understanding slowly began to take root, though yet unnoticed.
"Now look at what they can do without those tools, what the Queen could do. They can hide behind illusions and they take on the traits of their homes. They hit hardest in your dreams, where they have the advantage of surprise and strength beyond what they have out here. They can shapeshift, if they're strong enough. They're flighty, Dolan. They were made to run from things, not fight them. They were made to hide." Dolan began to shake his head in dawning distress.
"No, Kaulder. I don't, I don't like what you're implying. It's beyond even my nightmares."
"But not beyond theirs, I'd bet. Dolan, I think that they got rid of the other things that could use magic somehow. I think that they were the least impressive thing around before we were even thought of. I think that they might have done something to starve the other things out. Have you noticed, through my chronicles, that the witches seem to have gotten weaker as time has gone by? Not much, not drastically, but noticeably? I have. I think they limited magic somehow, bound it like they bind lightning or fire to stones. And if my hunch is right, I think they did it because they only needed a little and their predators needed a lot."
Dolan's eyes had grown wide, his skin pale, at the thought that the foe his entire order had been created to fight was, by this horrifying new supposition, the weakling remnant of a far darker past than he had presumed the world to have. That all of humanity lived after the truly impressive things, and only by the grace of their absence. This had not all sunk in before Kaulder continued with his ever more horrible line of deduction.
"I've also noticed that, in nature, when something comes under massive danger or stress it usually disappears. It goes away. But a lot of the time it comes back after the danger has passed, the thing was just in hiding or sleeping away the wait." And then Kaulder looked down from the mountains toward the darkened tree line, separating their field of grasses from the forest; the forest now deeply shadowed by the ever darker rain clouds overhead.
"I can't help now but remember the old stories my parents used to tell me and my siblings; stories about more than just witches to scare us into behaving. I can't help but remember that nothing is unique, that everything gets reused, everything is remembered by nature. And that humans aren't really all that inventive."
The wind began to pick up, now laying the grasses almost flat in gusts, the hissing and rustling of ten thousand-thousand blades reaching the two in the gaps between the wind.
"Tell me Dolan, in the months since Her resurrection, have you noticed something about the witches we've been hunting for using dark magic?"
A deafening roar lashed out from the darkness overhead, chasing the heels of a lance of jagged light that burst into existence between clouds; loud enough to shake the bones of the dead, Dolan was sure. And in that brief illumination, that brief but potent light, Kaulder's nearly supernatural sight did some small kindness to his efforts to convince himself that the odd shadow in the forest that he had been tracking was just a shadow.
"Have you noticed them getting stronger?"