Imprecate | ✓

| 14 | blood of the witches

We are the blood of the witches you thought were dead. We carry witchcraft in our bones whilst the magic still sings inside our heads. When the witch hunters imprisoned our ancestors, when they tried to burn the magic away, someone should have warned them that magic cannot be tarned. Because you cannot burn away what has always been aflame.
- Nikita Gill

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- Nicolas -

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The bars in front of me dissolved into thin air as if by magic. Testing, I took a small step forward. I was indeed free, while all chaos broke out in front of me. A single sentence had caused complete panic.

"He wants the heart of the mountains."

He wants the heart of the mountains? Not to the heart of the mountains?

"We'll all keep calm for now. Arm yourselves. Then we'll meet at the entrance and be on our way," ordered the apparent leader of the witches. She was called Vindicta earlier.

All the witches poured out of the dungeon. The leader turned to Victorine and me. "Follow me," she said, whereupon Victorine gathered her helmet and weapons and we ran after her with quick steps.

My head ached, but I was glad to be out of this dungeon at last.

"Are you all right?", Victorine asked me from the side as we walked through a narrow, barely lit corridor.

"Yes, I am," I answered her, "Now would you please explain to me what is going on here?"

We entered a huge room with two floors and several corridors. In my haste, I recognized tables, shelves, and canning jars with body parts.

It was hard to believe. I was a man and yet I found myself alive in a witch's nest.

I had little time to realize this fact because witch leader Vindicta suddenly turned off, even though all the other witches were hurrying in another direction.

"My mother used to tell me legends," Victorine now told me in a voice filled with pain. "About an object that could be used to create life. No one knew where it was hidden or who possessed it."

"Except it's not just an object," the witch replied in a dark voice, and all at once she turned to face us, making us slow down abruptly to avoid running into her. "But rather a heart. The heart of the mountains."

Victorine turned to me. "Back when you ordered me to enter the mind of the spy, that's when I saw it. The spy heard rumors he should never have heard. That Cephas was apparently going to the Heart of the Mountains. I remembered this legend from my mother, so of course I was alarmed, but I never really believed it completely. But then there were more and more signs. The horde of Wendigos, which actually do not exist in nature in this size. The mermaids, in whose souls I saw that they fled from Tenebris. You just had to put one and one together. Cephas tried to create beings in Tenebris. Transformed humans into Wendigos, did experiments on mermaids. And that's just what we know."