Sin
Her name was Imogen. She was of our Coven, one of the most skilled necromancers we ever had.
Far and wide people would try to find her house in the woods to resurrect a party member or create an ensemble of lost souls entirely. She never asked questions. She would simply take her employers and do as asked. This was her life, and she was happy with it.
I am going to tell you what happened to her now.
She walked between the hall that shared with her kitchen and her shelves of books and herbs. She was going over her inventory of plants, mumbling to herself as she analyzed the leaves, the severed stems, the wilting heads of yarrow and rose. Her thick braid swung like a pendulum as she turned her head this way and that, a pointer finger held in the air as she noted where she needed to refill her supplies.
The sun was beginning to set, padding past the stained glass window in her kitchen, casting the yellows and reds of the window across her skin, making her a walking flame in a dimming room.
“Bumbler,” Imogen said to her shelves.
A hum rose in the air. Imogen turned her head to a bumble bee hovering over her right shoulder. Its black eyes stared at her. Its translucent wings flashed in the sunlight. Imogen chuckled. She held out an index finger for her familiar to perch on.
“There you are, sweet man,” she said.
Bumbler hung off her finger. His antennae ticked toward her. Imogen smiled, studying her little creature. Witches are rewarded for their kindness by the loyalty of familiars after being mended by them. Some have ravens. Some have cats. Other wolves. Siobhan had a sabertooth tiger. She had the bee, Bumbler.
“If you are not too busy, could you grab me two marigolds? It would be much appreciated,” she said.
Bumbler tilted his head. His antennae brushed across her skin.
Imogen chuckled, “Of course, I will let you enjoy some pollen while you are out. Don’t I always?
Bumbler pushed off from her finger. He hovered in front of her face, spun around her head twice like a halo, and rested on her head. Imogen chuckled.
“Sweet man,” she hummed, brushing her hands down the front of her dress. Fragments of inventory caught on the fabric, the shrapnel of past forages.
A floorboard creaked, Imogen stilled. She raised her eyes slightly, fixated on the bottom shelf, her nails hooked into her dress.
“Ah, so you are the one I want to see,” a voice rose.
Imogen snapped her head toward the window. A shadow blotted out the stained glass.
The man exhaled a rasp. He sputtered. Blood spashed across the glass.
A gasp caught in Imogen’s throat.
A wheeze escaped the man’s lips. He fell back, showing the arrow in his chest as he plummeted, a thud onto the earth.
“Oh no. Bumbler, yarrow, now.”
Imogen tore toward the door, Her heels dug into the mud as she trudged toward the man, lying still under the window.
The sunlight canvased his body, etching out the arrow shaft, the claw marks on his sides from a beast, and the glittering blood on his face.
“Heaven help me.”
Imogen dropped down beside him.
She looked around the woods. Silence looked back. Through the weavery of the canopy, she could see sky diluting to dusk. The man shook, sputtering out more dark blood.
She looked down at the man. His chest rose, then collapsed. Blood bubbled from his mouth. Imogen’s eyes scanned the body. He had worn armor at one point, but was only left with his shirt of chain mail, and pieces of metal that stuck to him like petals around the clawmarks on his sides.
She raised her ringed hands over him, one of his fingers twitched, and she mumbled.
“Can’t cauterize these cuts. They are too deep,” she sighed.
A rasp slipped from the man’s red lips, making Imogen’s stomach twist. She fretted as he peeked his eyes up to her, a shocking silver against his tan skin.
A weak grin twitched on his face. He closed his eyes saying, “You’re beauti….”
Metal hissed as he laid his head back in the thick grass, exposing his neck to the witch.
Imogen pressed her index and ring finger against the artery. His pulse butted against her touch faintly.
She rubbed his blood away from her fingers on his tattered shirt. She inspected her fingertips, now cleansed. She looked around the woods. Dark seeped in between the trunks of trees.
She muttered “What did you do?”
“Be-,” whispered the man.
His head rolled across the grass. Imogen studied his face, now relaxed. She imagined his silver eyes looking up at her, looking through her.
Vibrations washed over her arm. She turned to Bumbler flying by her. His thorax was bowed as he gripped three pieces of yarrow in his mandibles. Imogen held a palm out to collect them. Bumbler tilted his head to her.
“I know we shouldn’t be out here at night. Let me try to fix him. If he doesn’t pull through,I will take him in and try to bring him back there,” Imogen said. She noted a plate of shredded armor still strapped to a shoulder.
“He’s strong,” she muttered, “Might make for a good possessive for a party that may need one.”
She took the fingers of her right hand and pressed past the claw marks in his ribs into the cavity. She could feel his muscles contract under her hand. Blood ribboned through her fingers.
“I can’t imagine the pain you are in,” Imogen whispered. She pressed harder, swallowing as she felt her brushing against the curvature of ribs. *
Imogen closed her eyes. She imagined being in a meadow, lit with sunlight and wreathed with woods, foraging for berries, the fat blue bodies of berries breaking under her thumb, dying her fingers purple, She picked on them, letting them break. A sparrow flies overhead, catching copper in the light.
Red.
Red drips from a clot-colored berry and down her wrist in scarlet strands, cloying to get back into her veins. She shreds the bleeding berry with her fingers until a triangular piece of metal is shining in her hands. Imogen looks down. There is more shrapnel at her toes, winking in the sun. More are in the twists of undergrowth. She bows over and plucks them, mowing through stalks of bushes.
“Purify,” she whispers as she plucks. “Purify, purify, purify.”
Imogen could move to a field and manipulate the fabric of bodies, earth, and time without leaving her territory. With the shrapnel so deep in the man’s body, and so small in his tendons, she could retrieve them by making them shards in a meadow, easier to clear than a deep wound could ever be. Imogen was a shifter, a type of witch who couldn’t stay in her own body and could move without it.
Imogen gritted her teeth, as her nails struggled keeping grip of the metal deep in his blood. Breath brushed against her fingers. Imogen opened her eyes to see the man’s silver eyes staring at her. His mouth hung open.
She gasped, “No.”
She hurried the hand out, pulling out a claw shaped piece of metal dripping with blood.
The man’s eyes fluttered at it.
He whispered, “Was that in me?”
“Yes,” Imogen said, analyzing the weapon in the thinning light.
The man grinned, he raised his eyebrows, asking, “Were you in me?”
Imogen blinked at him, fretting her eyebrows at his smirk, “Yes,” she said warily.
White teeth flashed at her, “Well, you’re very gentle,” he said.
Imogen shook her head.
“You want that to be your last words?”
The man chuckled, his laugh weathered down from weakness. Imogen sat back on her knees, putting the claw in her pocket as she studied him.
“What I wanted it to be would have been, ‘you’re beautiful.’”
Imogen froze, struck by his eyes. They settled on her. Imogen grinned at him. The corners of the man’s lips twitched, then his skin washed to pale. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. His body stilled on the ground.
Bumbler drifted from her side and circled the man.
“Well then,” Imogen said. She looked down at the gash, “Let’s get back to it.”
****
The fire popped and crackled in its den. Imogen stared it down as if in warning before focusing on the man, now asleep in her cot.
His chest rose and fell in even breaths. His face was calm. Clusters of broken yarrow were now plastered in his wounds. The scent of blood was now faint from the headiness of the flower.
She inhaled, and felt her stomach buckle. She swallowed as a chill swept down her body. In the corner of her eye a shadow passed.
“Good evening, Siobhan,” Imogen said to the quiet man.
“A Paladin,” growled Siobhan, she disregarded her subordinate as she prowled out from the dark to stand over the sleeping man.
Imogen swallowed, her voice unbalanced as she replied, “Yes.”
She could feel her body tense as she watched Siobhan glare at the man, her fingers were clenched, her rings beaming in the firelight.
“I had to, Siobhan,” Imogen offered.
The paladin’s mouth shifted. He furrowed his eyebrows, deep in dream. A finger twitched.
“I know,” Siobhan growled, “It’s your nature, which is a good one.”
Imogen tensed. She investigated the fire. How it spat. How it snarled at the stone that embroidered it.
“He fell in my territory. What was I -”
“My territory, Imogen,” Siobhan corrected, her golden eyes burned into her subordinate. “He’s been in these woods for months now.”
Imogen looked away. To the left of the paladin was the table where she broke bread. It was dimmed in the shadow of the fire, but there it was. Silent, just a moment ago she had eaten as she tried to talk to the paladin in her cot, a broken conversation as he faded in and out of sleep.
“There was no way that he would survive out here,” Imogen said to the table.
“I know that you know that that isn’t true,” Siobhan said.
Imogen met Siobhan’s gaze, stern but warm, her mouth pulled into a small sneer.
Imogen clenched her jaw. Her chest tightened. She flexed her hands and placed them into fists.
Imogen said, “Am I weak then, Siobhan?”
Siobhan stepped forward, etched between fire and shadow. She looked Imogen over, and sighed, lowering her shoulders. She looked into the fire, her gaze distant.
“You know his kind is a danger to us. If he leaves, what do you think will come next? We have already lost so many to them. They think we are demons. They have forgotten our ties, the sacrifices we have made in this war,” Siobhan said.
Imogen looked to the hearth. The blue fangs of the fire hissed against the stone, grinding against the rock, leaving no mark upon it.
Siobhan said, “Remember Hani?”
Imogen looked at the paladin and said flatly, “Yes. He tricked her.”
“He tricked her,” Siobhan agreed, Imogen looked up at her leader. “He was dressed as a commoner. He asked for services, she provided him with a potion, and they seized her that night,” Siobhan said.
Imogen shifted in her stance. Hani had been taken into the Coven at the same time as Imogen. Both had been abandoned by their families after showing their crafts. Hani could control metal. Imogen remembered how she could make a knife into a sword, into a morning star, into a quicksilver whip, without needing a hammer. Hani served as security for the Coven. She would rove in the woods, checking in on her sisters encampments. She would share stories and leave knives in her visits.
Imogen thought of her knife on the table by the bread.
She heard that they had kept Hani in a cave, deep in the dark, away from her home, sisters, swords.
“Imogen,” Siobhan’s voice coaxed Imogen to see her tears. Imogen tensed. Siobhan nodded whispering, “they killed her tonight.”
Imogen numbed. Her body was suspended by shock. She stared at the floor, watching the light ripple over the floor as she listened over and over to the words; they killed her tonight.
Siobhan padded past her, back into the shadows of the house, the heels of her boots clacked around the room until they stopped at the door.
Words dragged out of Imogen’s lips, “What do you want me to do?”
A heat pressed in the back of Imogen’s neck as Siobhan glared through her and to the paladin.
“Kill him.”
Imogen looked at the man, framed by the amber light of the fire. His hands folded onto his chest. She could make out the boy he used to be sleeping there.
“Imogen,” Siobhan called.
Imogen found her golden eyes in the dark, they squinted, the pupils changed to those of a hunting cats.
“Do it for us,” she said.
Imogen carved her out of the shadow with an incantation. She looked at the armor Siobhan wore. It was silver, like the paladin’s eyes, and etched by brief battles. On the breastplate was a depiction of her familiar, the sabretooth, Saqiba. Her canines rounded around the plate, and her gray pitted eyes glared at Imogen. She wondered how many had seen the eyes of Saqiba’s visage before they died. Imogen’s eyes drifted to the sword sheathed at Siobhan’s side.
“It will be done,” Imogen said, her voice distant.
Siobhan offered her a closed-mouth smile.
Imogen didn’t mirror the gesture.
Siobhan nodded, saying, “Throw your mark if you need anything,”
Siobhan padded deep into the dark in a smooth, measured gait. The wind picked up. Imogen stilled as the gale whipped around them. The fire lashed at it. The paladin’s hair rippled. Pages of Imogen’s books hissed. Then, silence.
Siobhan was gone.
Imogen looked to the paladin, the man she had found just hours ago, whose pulse she had felt against her veins, who she had saved, just to kill.
She collapsed under the weight of it all, and wept. Her fingers cloyed at her dress’s fabric, her face burning as she grated the skirt to dry her tears.
Imogen was starting to come undone.
***
Imogen’s eyes shifted to the paladin. He arched his back and shifted. The canvas of the cot creaked under his weight.
Bumbler churned in her ear.
“I know, Bum’,” Imogen said.
She lowered the knife to her side and padded to him, light on the balls of her feet. Allowing only the sound of his breath to fill the stilled room.
Her fingers flexed around the hilt of the knife. She came to his side. She looked down upon him. A sleeping man. A paladin who dreamed under her shadow. She exhaled. She closed her eyes. She could feel Siobhan’s eyes on her, searing into her skin.
Imogen exhaled through her nose. She looked down at the paladin. His eyes shifted this way and that under the velarium of his eyelids, searching and searching through his illusions of war, wanderings, cliffsides, for a lover, for a family member, for the enemy, who stood before him, hollowed out by the ember’s glow, glaring down at him, with knife in hand.
She gripped the blade. She gritted her teeth. With an exhale, she threw her arms above her head, both hands gripped the hilt now, the shadow of death slashed across the wall. She looked at him, at his hair, at his skin.
She thought of Hani, whose dead body burned far away from her coven.
“Look at me,” Imogen hissed. She shifted on her feet.
Those eyes, so silver, would they open when he died? Would she see them, or would they be diminished from this world forever, never to be known again?
“Look at me,” she whispered.
Tears ran down her face and spilled onto his.
The man shifted.
“Look at me, please.” Imogen whimpered.
The paladin hummed as he began to surface from sleep. She shifted in her stance. Siobhan’s eyes burned into her back. Imogen shifted. Salt stung her skin. Tears beaded the paladin’s lips.
“I am sorry,” Imogen said. She lifted the knife higher. The shadow grew bigger. She threw her hands down, with all of her might, and her wind, and her meadows, and her gravity, and the moonlight. She threw it all down to him, the man draped in her window a few hours ago.
Silver eyes flashed onto Imogen.
Imogen stared at them. Her body heaved as she panted. Blood foamed at his chest. The paladin gargled. Imogen pushed farther in, feeling the blade grind against bone.
“I love you,” Imogen whimpered.
The paladin looked her over. His face settled. Imogen settled onto him. Her knuckles turned white as she held the blade. She swallowed. The scents of blood and fire, and metal filled her lungs.
“I love you,” Imogen said, “I’m -I’m so sorry, Arne,”
Arne blinked at Imogen. Soft. Gentle. He rolled his head to the side. He smiled; his lips etched with red. He sighed. She rode the exhale. She wilted over him. Her body shuddered. Arne didn’t move as her tears fell on him. He just looked at her, with his silver eyes.
“Imogen,” he said, his voice so small. His hands plated hers and enveloped the hilt of the knife.
Imogen met Arne’s gaze. She bit her lip. She shook her head. Arne raised his chin, his gaze steady.
“We knew,” he said. He fretted as he exhaled. His skin chilled under Imogen’s hands. She inched forward. Her shoulders pinched together.
“I forgot the Coven,” Imogen confessed. “I forgot about everything-,”
“Imogen.”
Arne’s eyes were icy. His skin was cold under her. Imogen breathed through her nose. She straightened and then wilted, linking her fingers with his.
“It’s okay.” Arne said, his voice a ghost, translucent.
Imogen pulled the fabric of his shirt into her palms.
“No, no, Arne, don’t do it,” Imogen said. Her voice crackled. She leaned into him, spreading over his chest. Arne’s eyes drifted. They looked around the room as if taking it all in; the mornings, the nights, the seasons, waking in hiding with Imogen.
His chest quaked, his mouth gaping for a word to grasp with air. Imogen looked into him. Arne settled and smiled. His eyes shone onto her, the Moon to the earth.
“I’ll bring you back,” Imogen said. “I can do it. I can bring you back.”
She pulled at his shirt, his body hanging from the fabric.
Arne shook his head, “My Imogen,” he said.
He winced as he raised a hand and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
He smiled. His eyes glossed over with tears.
“Let me go,” he whispered.
“No. No,” whimpered Imogen.
Arne’s eyes drifted, untethered from her to the fire. A tear ribboned down his face, framing a small smile.
His eyes faded to dullness.
Imogen stilled.
Arne didn’t check in on her, his eyes reflecting the flame.
“Arne?”
Imogen shook him.
“Arne?”
“ARNE!”
Her voice shredded through the air. Her body gave up control. She filled the home with her crying and she pounded and pounded against Arne’s cavernous chest, screaming after his soul.
“ARNE!”
******
Kill Sin, and Imogen can finally be put to rest.
She haunts the woods. Her cackle is the first thing the townspeople hear, before she plucks their husbands from their beds and kills them in her cave.
One of my sisters has shared that she has them stored in the chasms of her dwelling, paralyzed by her herbs, and bleeds them out by her poisoned sword, Severance, as they wait to be eaten by her.
We have tried, but she is too strong. I will not sacrifice any more of our Coven.
I will pay you handsomely, and if you wish, I can volunteer my armory to you. I’m sorry that you must do this. In a way, I feel as if I am punishing myself for creating her.
*
Artwork by Sara Kipin.
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