Warlock

Old Memories, Old Feuds, New Buildings, New Lies

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Isotta. Her name was her mother's, and her mother's name came from a beautiful woman who passed through the town just once to buy the butcher's horse. Just like her mother's namesake, Isotta was beautiful, and just like her mother's namesake, Isotta did not stay in the town long enough for the townspeople to remember anything besides her beauty and her name. However, Isotta had to fight to make them forget her so quickly.

She came from a poor family, where food was few and far in between, so when she stopped eating nobody noticed. The town church was old and smelled like the countless dead buried behind it, so when she stopped going nobody noticed. It was only when Isotta forgot to hide her smile that one boy, no older than her little brother, noticed.

The boy's body greeted the town with the tide when it came in the next day, and one by one more bloated bodies joined his. By the tenth accidental smile, the bony sheriff finally noticed the pale detail; the bodies held no blood. Week by week, the townspeople began braving the stench of the dead to pray for safety. Soon, Isotta's absence in the piers would be noticed. So she left.

The dirt roads did not notice when bloodless bodies joined their ranks, and the towns she passed through only noticed her face and her name. Her smile adapted to her surroundings, hiding the sharp teeth with a pulled up lower lip, and this served her well until she met him. He who changed his name with each town, who changed his coloring with each person, whose beauty and name were falsities to plague the memory of the towns he passed through.

When she met him, his skin was pale like hers, his hair black like hers, his eyes brown like hers, and his name Italian like hers. He introduced himself as Pietro, from 'nowhere important', but this first introduction only lasted a minute. When they each left town in the early hours of the next morning, he acknowledged her as someone he would be honest with.

"Good morning, Isotta. Where are you off to?"

"Where are you off to?"

"I asked first."

His eyes, brown like hers, did not show the light that normal eyes did. "Anywhere but here."

"So Florence." It was as if he could read her mind. Isotta walked her horse on the opposite side of the muddy road, not wanting to deal with witches. For two years straight, the rain had come down with such power and quantity that the crops drowned before they could even escape their seeds. So the muddy roads sucked at the shoes of her horse and kept her unwanted companion's horse at the same laborious pace.

He never answered her question, despite guessing the answer to his. They kept their eyes ahead and their mouths shut until the sound of carriage wheels wallowing in the mud shook them from their bitter feud. He spoke again, "A carriage ride would be a nice reprieve from this rain." Then his face shifted, so that his eyes no longer matched hers, his skin no longer matched hers, and his hair was whiter than the skin of the little boy she buried in the sea.

It was when the carriage slowed to a halt and the door opened that Isotta realized her Pietro had changed to match his next encounter. An old man with white hair waited in the carriage, and he looked at Pietro in delight. "Hello! Hello! I hate to see an old man out in the rain. Join me, at least until my destination or yours. My boy will take your horses and follow behind."

"I'm sure you wouldn't mind if my daughter joined us?" Pietro's accent had shifted from her countryside Italian to the high Italian their old companion spoke.

"Not at all."

The carriage ride was long and jolting, but it was dry and comfortable with the company of blood too old to smell delicious and blood too strange to pique her thirst. Partway through the ride, Isotta ran her finger along Pietro's suddenly wrinkled hands, but they felt as smooth as her own, proving the illusion of the wrinkles. Though each sudden encounter with him always brought a new face, in the three hundred years their paths crossed, she could always recognize him by the absence of light in his eyes. Four hundred years ago, their paths crossed for the last time, and it left her with a hole of curiosity in her soul, wondering what his true appearance was, his true eyes, his true hair, the true color of his smooth skin.