The Devil and Granny Weatherwax

In the mountainous nation of Lancre one mountain stands out, a fist of black and brown rock, bristling with pine trees. From it, out of the wind, out of the way, a cottage looks out onto the valley below. Its thatch is browning but still fresh, its oaken water butt darkened by age but without a single leak, and its stone walls hold firm though their mortar has long since crumbled away. It is a cottage that is kept just new enough to be very, very old.

The only way to reach this cottage is a single path up from the valley and up it climbs a girl. It's a hard climb, but she isn't breathing hard. She isn't sweating, either, although she occasionally dabs her forehead for the look of the thing.

An hour's walk takes her halfway to her destination and she stops to look further up the path, sweeping long dark hair away from amythst eyes that narrow against the sun. She frowns at her lack of progress and something flickers into motion behind her back; a sudden darkness far deeper than the green shadow on the path. A click of her tongue dismisses it. On again, step by step, up the stony path.

When she reaches it, she finds the cottage door closed. She cocks her head as though she expects it to open for her of its own accord; when it doesn't, she opens it without knocking and steps inside.

The cottage has only one room and few furnishings. A hearth, a table, a rocking chair, and a hard pine bed in the corner, covered with a thick patchwork quilt. On the bed lies an old woman. Her hair is grey and thin and the skin of her face is stretched taut with age; the lines on it are those of someone who smirks more than they smile, and frowns more than they do either. Somebody cruel, perhaps. Somebody proud, certainly.

A card in her hands asserts: I aten't dead. She lies so still that it's hard to agree.

The dark-haired girl raises her hand over the old lady, palm down, and for a moment the back of it flares with violet light. The girl contemplates this light for a moment before letting it fade away with a sigh. Closing her eyes, she resigns herself to waiting.

Silence gathers in the cottage. The sun slides across the sky, which becomes lemon and then pink and then colourless. The mountains are overtaken by darkness. Neither the girl nor the old woman move a muscle.

Late at night, the old woman stirs. Her voice is hoarse but strong.

'Still there, I see.'

'Yes.'

'Waiting all this time for an old lady. It's good to see consideration in the young.'

'I'm older than you are.'

'And young all the same,' the old lady snaps. 'Matches are up by the door.'

There's a shuffling noise in the dark, and then the scratch and fizz of a match struck against stone. It illuminates the dark-haired girl's face: a beautiful porcelain thing, lines and planes, soft in the way of a child but not enough to disguise the hardness beneath.

'Good,' says the old woman. She rises somewhat stiffly from the bed and crosses the room to a small alcove. 'Match, please.' The girl passes it over, still flaming. A crumpled page of the Almanack catches with a reluctant hiss, and then the logs burst into flame. A string of turnips hang above a cauldron, and the old woman dices them with a wickedly sharp knife and drops them into the boiling water.

The girl watches in silence as the turnip soup boils and is ladled onto a single plate. The woman drinks primly, slices the last of a loaf and uses the bread to soak up the last of the soup; she masticates the result thoroughly and with a grim satisfaction.

'Well?' says the girl eventually.

'Well what? If you came here to ask for something, gel, ask it or you'll get nothing. Common sense, that is.'

'Then I will show you.'

The girl raises her hand, in the same way that she has before. It is outlined in purple light, and from that light rises a gem that throbs and pulses with the same actinic colour. Enclosed in a black metal unknown to metallurgists, the orb floats in the air like a hornet, drifting with lazy menace and dripping toxic smoke. The girl stares at it, mesmerised, and its light bleaches the remaining colour from her pale face.

And then in a sudden movement the girl seizes the orb and dashes it against the flagstones, shattering it into a thousand glistening pieces. The shards scatter around her feet, glowing with a light that immediately begins to wane; the girl watches them fade, panting, and makes a soft sound. A plea.

Just as the light fades to nothing, a gentle rattling fills the air. One of the pieces, squarish and rough-edged, has begun to vibrate against the slate floor. Flickers of violet lightning play around it and then arc across to a long crystal needle, which begins to rattle in its turn and then rolls across the floor toward the first fragment, tugged by an invisible force. The acitvity spreads; the fragments make a sound like a thousand chattering teeth and the air fills with the smell of ozone as they rattle toward each other. An accretion disk forms in an instant, a galaxy of swirling violet dust that spirals together into a single point until the Orb is reformed and hovers in the air once more, intact.

'I can't make it stop,' the girl says. 'No matter what I do.'

'Why come to me?' the old woman asks.

'You're old.'

'Even witches only die once, gel.'

The girl looks into the old woman's eyes.

'That's not what I heard… Esmerelda Weatherwax.'

The light of the fire seems to dim. The cottage grows darker. Granny Weatherwax creaks back and forth in her old rocking chair.

Without warning the dark orb spills a flood of black ooze onto the floor, pouring it into an invisible mould until an identical rocking chair sits opposite her, made of the same black metal as the orb's casing. The back is decorated with a stylised rose, its thorns sharp and placed so that they'll slice into anyone who sits in it. Akemi Homura sits anyway.

'You want me to make an end,' Granny says.

'More than anything.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm tired. Because I'm unstable. Because I fought so hard for so long that I forgot how to stop. I won't make her kill me.'

'Liar.'

The girl's lips thin.

'Why would I lie to you?'

Granny chuckles unpleasantly. 'To me? No. Tell me, girl who wants to die: who are you?'

'I am Akemi Homura.'

'Nice name. It mean anything?'

'It translates as The Fire that Burns at Daybreak.'

'The morning star.'

Homura glances at her, suddenly sly. The corner of her mouth twitches. 'If you like.'

'Well, I knows how it is. Called myself Endemonidia for a while. Didn't stick.'

'You haven't answered me,' Homura says flatly. 'Can you make an end?'

'Can. Won't. I'm not obligated to do nowt, not for a fool of a girl who calls herself silly names.'

The orb flashes, and the light is sharper this time, harder.

'Who are you to judge me?' Homura asks, her voice deathly soft. 'An old woman, dying, wrapped in nothing but pride and a thin cloth. You spent your life surrounded by village idiots and never once met anyone you could bear to call an equal. Who are you to call me a fool?'

'You came to me.'

'I came to Esmerelda Weatherwax.'

'Well Granny's the only Weatherwax you're getting,' Granny snaps. 'And she's been a fool all her life. But you stay a fool long enough, you realise there's two kinds: the types as get less foolish with age, and the types that get more so. Pride, is it? Well, I'm proud. I'll admit it to anyone as asks. But if I'm proud of anything, it's that I sees myself clearly. Why don't we have this conversation as you really are, Miss Morningstar?'

Homura's lips thin as though she'd been slapped.

The orb hums angrily, and shoots back to its maker. It pulses once more, long and rippling, and an avalanche of black power shoots forth, coiling and twisting round the cottage. Voices twitter in broken German, too high and too low to be human, and it smells of blood and wine and feathers and burning rubber. Granny stares into the maelstrom without flinching.

The girl it leaves behind isn't fundamentally different from one before. Same face, same height, same weight. But there's a twinkle in her eyes, a lazy spark, a predatory aspect. Behind her, enormous wings fill most of the cottage. Her bare-legged costume is indecent even in her home country and doubly so in the mountains of Lancre, where stockings are an inch of armoured wool set 'twixt thorns and tender flesh. A broken heart is emblazoned above her own and covers a chest that is suddenly no longer that of a child. Long slim arms wear dark elbow-length gloves.

'Better?' Akuma Homura breathes. Her tone seems to promise many things, not all of them pleasant.

'You tell me.'

'Then, no.'

'Honesty hurts, gel.' Granny returns to her bed and pulls the covers up without relaxing an inch. She looks like a waxwork, laid there by a practical joker. 'Mirror's above the water butt. Blow out the candle when you leave.'

'What?'

Granny snorts. 'Take a good hard look at yourself in that mirror, girl. What you sees there is your business.'

'That isn't enough.'

'Then you listen, and you listen well. If you're good, do good. If you're bad… then spit in the eye of your God and never regret a single thing. Right's right, and Wrong's wrong. Pick a side, and stick to it. And know that if you pick Wrong we'll be seeing each other again, and on that day there'll be a reckoning. Understand that, girl.'

Granny shut her eyes, and watched through the lids as purple light pulsed and swelled, so hot she could feel the prickle of it. Akemi Homura screamed in rage, and the light went out.

The silence became an empty silence. Slowly, it was filled by the sound of an old, old woman going to sleep.