PROLOGUE: THE EVIL ONE
Sitting on the dirt floor, with her tattered skirts billowing out underneath her frame, was the witch Mary Van Tessel. Her former blonde hair was almost pale white and it hung limply down her ghostly ashen shoulders and back. It's been three years since her imprisonment.
Three long and unforgiving years...
There had been a time when she had been praised for her beauty- but now her fair looks had all but completely withered away. She was a ghost of her former self; condemned and damned to spend an eternity with the same hell she had once thought she could control. Fate has a way with irony, she supposed.
Staring at the small fire before her, Mary eyed the dancing flames and the unidentifiable objects that surrounded it with hilarity.
Fortune, however, won't be getting the last laugh...
With practiced hands, she picked up every little item only to swiftly toss it into the smoldering orange flames, all the while muttering soft chants under her breath. Pausing for but a moment, Mary reached a hand down to one of the pockets in her skirts and pulled out a small black vial. After pulling the cork out of its top, she poured the contents into her hand.
To the human eye, it'd look like sand, but the sick truth was that it was actually ash….human ash.
And it wasn't just from any human either. Oh no, the ash use to be a bone that came from the very skeleton of the dead Headless Horseman. Turns out that it wasn't just his skull that she took from his grave. A smile of triumph came to her cracked, bluish lips as she tossed the final ingredient into the fire. The flames jumped and leapt high into the air before turning a piercing blue shade. At her success, Mary Van Tessel threw back her head, laughing like a madwoman before she brought her attention back onto the blue flames. Waving her hands tauntingly before the inferno, her lips parted and her voice, so hoarse yet strong came forth as she recited a powerful spell of her own creation.
"Three years I have been trapped inside this tree, but by the blood of an Innocent will I be set free. I call upon the forces of Hell to find me She. Then let her be bound to the Horseman instead of me!"
With her final words, Mary turned her head up to the sky before she let out a hysterical screeching noise. It resounded off the walls and would have turned even the hottest blood cold should it had been heard.
The fire raged once more into the air at its command. And from the flames came a thin, black mist that slowly took the form of a human body before rising up and escaping out of the tree. Unseen, it crept all the way into the resting town of Sleepy Hollow, searching for the key its Mistress needed to complete her spell. It didn't take long however for the black mist to find its mark. The girl lived in a tiny cottage by the bridge- the only issue that now stood in the Witch's way was how to get that girl.
But Mary, one step ahead already, seemed to have a plan for that too...