Byron: The Dark Witch

Prompt the Seventh - What's in a Name?

It was a question of imagination. What he was able to see. Before he knew of him, he had never even conceived of someone like him. A brilliant witch, of his age, part of the world vernacular. No mere caricature, no face in a jar by the door, no petty pleasantries swapped over obsequious smiled; he was a larger entity, willing to speak and act outside the guarded sphere of the lore. He didn’t fit exactly, he displayed an ambition quite unrecognisable to the councils and covens , something plenty of witches considered too risky or not worthy of their energy and devotion. He didn’t seem afraid like so many of them. Unwary of those who shamed, trialled and mistreated the godless children of magick. Sure, he had disappeared. He was no longer the boy whose photos had been in school newspapers, whose name sat beneath headlines, whose voice had been heard in London squares – righteous, strident, advocate of the underdog. Yet, if a name could bear a curse, he supposed his name was it: Byron Bathory. The forename of the inspiration behind Polidori’s ‘The Vampyr’, no doubt a result of having a professor of romantic literature for a mother, and the surname of a sadistic female serial killer inherited from his misfortunately named Scot, he was never going to live a peaceful life with that sort of history. He could imagine the young man, teased as a child for being ‘positively vampiric’ what with the familial gaelic pallor and his nocturnal nature. But people didn’t laugh at him now. The sweet child wrapped up in dreams and portents, the vociferous youth who had protested across cities, he had grown up. He had unfolded into an elegant young man, a powerful blood witch. Jack Almerder didn’t understand how his life existed before the effervescent Byron had transformed from a paper soul to a man of flesh and bone.

Jack’s necessary invention was Byron Bathory. A strange thought, yes. Existing in his own right before and after Jack ever knew him. But the auburn haired creature unfurled possibilities, mutated the familiar and banal interactions of office work and passionless lovers into a vessel of shadowy strangers. When he arrived, he lit up the room, drew you close like gravity, magick in constant motion about him, unhindered, unashamed. In him, Jack saw the greyhound, a wispy thing, gentler and more tender of step than the rushing river men around him. He loped more than walked. He bore himself a primed athlete. He fixed a gaze upon his audience, the everyman who passed him by, and it seemed he bestowed some crucial part of himself. And yet he was distant and aloof and a riddle Jack never hoped to solve. Or hoped never to solve. He wasn’t sure how his life would be if Byron’s mystery was answered, his enigma usurped.

It was with a tentative knock that he rapped upon the door of the little, white abode. It was a peculiar build. Above was the main house, high above on stilts so that below, by the front door, was a wide ferny space. It made him think that of a grown up child who still loved his treehouse. But it was more complex than that – a sprawling tumble of rooms and windows, it also resembled a ship from Jules Verne, completely like Byron, completely indescribable. With a smile, he knocked again. Byron was definitely expecting him. They had written and he’d sent back his agreement. And then when this sudden event of the cursed magus emerged, they had agreed the appointment take place at Byron’s home. Not only for the sake of Byron’s safety but because there was some chance that two skilled witches might be able to relieve more of the magus’ pain than just one. Though Jack doubted if anything he could do would aid his friend magickly. He was ash to that fire.

And then there he was, standing in the doorway, cautious in his appraisal of the older man on his doorstep. “Ah. Almerder.” He stepped aside, his voice was unlikely, melodic, “I hope you were not waiting long. I wasn’t quite in time.”

“No, not long. It is sometimes trickier to step back into time than to leave it. I quite understand.”

To Byron, Jack Almerder was a quirky man, a poor sort of historian figure. Another half-blood, he was some part Korean but with a lot of Greek and French thrown in. It made him quite striking. Skin looking tanned rather than yellow, eyes just slightly tilted the shade of lion’s gold, hair lustrous and dark with salt just threading through as he passed from his early to late fourties. He was strange though, often afflicted by highs and lows of varying intensity. But he wore the least affectations and was the last new person before Byron to join their coven.

“I know you’re here to check on me, but would you first help me with something. I have a theory.”

“A theory! How wonderful!” Jack thought again of how clever Byron could be, enthusiasm already buoying him up the stairs.

“It has to do with the magus.”

Jack paused, turned, flicked his eyes over Byron’s face, “Well that makes it all the more interesting. Let’s get to it.”

*

With a gasp, Jack’s hand snatched itself back and away from the black stain that seemed to stir beneath his touch. Mouth an o-gape of horror, “That!” He burst out.

“It’s still there. It’s almost growing... stronger.” Byron over-enunciated the last word, watching the older witch with an expression that might have scowled if schooling his features wasn’t so second nature. Instead, his mouth pinched a little thinner, thoughtful.

“It’s the magick. There’s nothing you can do about it.” Mctaggart sighed and sank back into the embrace of the sofa, seeming to emerge from beneath a wave only to sink again. “It’ll pass.”

Byron doubted it. Raising an eyebrow in question, he otherwise gave no strong indication of opinion.

Jack did not hold the same restraint, “That will not pass. It’s... it’s...”

“It’s alive.” That was the short answer, “It’s caused by Word magick. He scryed a woman’s death. A witch’s death. She was captured, trialled, bound for days in dark confinement, brutalised by a local priest, and finally destroyed. Her soul was destroyed.”

“But that’s –”

“Barbaric.” McTaggart offered with a weak smile at the conversing witches. They barely noticed.

“- a crime against every lore and commandment.” Jack finished.

Byron nodded. His green eyes were distant, obviously turning round the conundrum in his mind, “The wounds the magus arrived with were the equivalent of psychosomatic injuries. He bore witness and he felt each crime occur on his own body.” He noted how Jack winced, “But her death was not wrought by natural means, I believe he’s suffering a soul sickness – the origins of whatever ritual this priest used against the witch.”

“Have you... investigated the priest?”

“Aoife went to find out what she could.” Because she still hadn’t left, not entirely. Gone during the days, she returned each night. McTaggart found her quite arresting. She found him less tolerable by the moment.

Jack pulled a face. He’d never met the half-fae Byron called sister but she added to his mythology. From a family trusted enough by the Daoine Sidhe to care for one of their own. A man unspelled by fae allures. And then the girl herself, a fearsome thing from what he’d heard from all accounts. Privy to many of his secrets in lieu of his recovery from magick abuse, their coven wondered about the realism of Byron’s sister. Could she even exist? Byron’s eyes flashed, a breeze eddied through the room. Tapped along Jack’s spine with icy fingers. Fearsome thing himself, Jack supposed with a little tremble. He smiled, “Will I meet her?”

“Perhaps. She might be back later.”

“Brilliant.”

McTaggart sighed between them, forlornly awaiting any form of recognition beyond his ailment. Neither witch was particularly worried about doing so, however. They knew what the magi had done to their kind. Given the chance, they were sure that the crumpled McTaggart would hand them over to the first Templar in sight, would stand by and pray whilst they too were violated, their soul ruptured and rent.

Templars were beasts. Men made into armour. Bloodless. Soulless. Driven by duty and decree. They broke the backs of witches on stones. They crushed them. Stoned them. They offered respite if they would forfeit their magick. But to do so was to forfeit their soul. No brute of the church could comprehend the sacrilege of a broken bond between soul and magick. It contravened nature. Violated it. Raped it. Like the magi and their insipid pandering, their foolish bravado in the face of a magick greater than them or their cognate Words, the templar were a brand of desecration. They were the bogeyman to the witches, nightmarish as the sandman lurking in the crescent moon and feeding the eyes of children to its young. Even if neither man would admit it, their opinions fixed the repute of the Church. They were the persecuted and yet here they were, unravelling the darkest of dark magicks for the sake of their abusers. Byron shook his head of the thoughts, though Jack stayed fixed in them.

“There’s more I should tell you...” Byron murmured, “There’s something brewing. It might be to do with the Church –”

“When it comes to these things, it is always the Church.” Jack muttered, eyes coming to rest on the black stain on McTaggart’s partially exposed chest.

“Not always. We have our own monsters.” Byron reminded him. He was the one that hunted them after all. A living, breathing recovery story, he sought out the black magick and tried to help, in his own way. He tracked stories, myths, legends, reputations and headlines – discovering the worst in humanity and in the Otherkin. Ill-equipped as a fighter in his early days, he taught himself to track, to become the person people needed, or the antihero that banished the demon from bedevilled minds long enough for them to work out their own defence of their bodies. As he grew, the number of Crone worshippers increased, most often the worst offenders – the curse dealers, the hex-bag weavers, the petty and vain braggarts who lead the weak into addiction. Witches deserved at least some of their reputation too. If only because the weakest were so often drawn to the black arts, “And it is our monsters that appear in this equation. There is an uncanny union, according to McTaggart,” Saying even his surname seemed awkward to Byron, “Between the Church powers and a group of witches.”

Jack blinked, caught off guard.

A hasty set of steps disrupted their chat. Aoife, burning with glorious fervour, swept her gaze over the scene before she met her brother’s eyes.

“A templar is here.” She said.

Word Count: 1,825