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Penned Cattle of the Blood Witches
Tomes of Amaxathroth > Ink, Blood and Parchment |
The blood witches of the penisula Sef Asisca are of a beauty fit to ensnare men - but only when seen from afar in lascivious embraces with one another, fair and beckoning as lushly wooded hills upon the Passac coast of Emreca. But the witches are sharp-toothed and black of heart beneath lithe woman-flesh; they feed well upon the blood of slack-faced men kept as cattle in hidden, stinking pens.
The waters about Sef Asisca flow with an oleaginous and subtle poison, such that the great bay beneath the hills is calm and of a green taint, even when great winds blow fog and cloud from the Passac. Drink not from the streams of this land lest you burn with the desire to be meat for the witches table, or blood to paint their skins and slake their thirst. When the winds blow strong, the witches dance naked about their low, strange-shaped dwellings of stone and fitted wood, and consort with one another, with passion and sighing, beneath rows of dripping, fresh-slaughtered men.
It is upon a night of winds that a traveler - or thief, or foolish scholar - might journey the pensinula unnoticed, to enter within certain fallen temples and slumped fanes of a past age. These edifices are shunned by the blood witches, but the final, confirming sigil to many a potent charm might be found etched in worn stone within. Of those who seek such, few return. A sorcerous wealth lies within the darkened places of Sef Asisca, and its lure is the death of thieves and scholars, kept in their greed past the dawn and the dying of the winds.
Of the sorceries and secrets of the blood witches, I will say but this: they are not for men to know lest the blood of their very life already stains smiling lips and sharpened teeth. This will stand as truth until a coven of sorcerors and army of of sigil-marked shields razes all the woods and dwellings of Sef Asisca, and murders every last witch, uncaring of what is learned and what is consigned to flames and destruction.
But Emreca is not as the Meddin lands; the wilds empty of men are deep indeed. There is naught about the woods and poison bay of the blood witches but serpents of the Passac and tall, angry demons, nameless and spine-limbed, that stalk the inland wilds. No waiting army of barbarous men lies scattered and sleeping; no ancient sorceror of ill renown plots within his spire to enslave these witches. So has it has been for an age, for tales of the blood witches of Sef Asisca are told even so far as atop smoking Rania, amongst the Komo of the frozen wastes, and, enviously, by maimed mistresses of the court of the Beast Uvea.
[ Posted by Reason on December 16, 2006 ]
