They had had a plan. It may have even been a good plan, Objo reflected dispassionately, as she stood tenuously before the violent leaping flames of the witches’ massive ceremonial bonfire, one wing limp by her side as her sisters fought on, wrapped in their own dire battles. It was a moot point now. The line between life and death was a knife’s edge thin, and many were teetering on its brink, both friend and foe alike. Lifeblood sprayed around in a gory arc, painting the hungry ground at her feet, wet and hauntingly warm. She did her best not to dwell on that.


    She panted heavily, her lungs aching, breath coppery, as she battled a manifest and capricious goddess. Imita’s headless body was somewhere to her left. The older harpy had been briefly holding her own against Zsa Zsa’s vessel, until she wasn’t. A single vicious swipe from the talons of the witch skeuos containing the old god and suddenly Imita had fallen, a felled marionette with snipped strings, slackening to the ground in a final, fatal heap. A puzzle of limbs that would never again contain the other woman no matter how they were reassembled. Something cracked in Objo’s chest, a deep seated ache forming. Her eyes itched, tears, she thought distantly. Her sister deserved a proper burial. She needed to be laid to rest, not discarded in the middle of a witch city. Who knows what horrible things would happen to her remains here. She couldn’t leave her!


    But no, she couldn’t think about that now. There would be time to grieve for her sister later, she soothed herself, trying to dull the screaming horror inside her so that she could focus on her own life threatening fight. Her ears were ringing, a shrill constant buzzing like a film over all other sounds in her ears. Her tongue was heavy in her mouth, as she tried to swallow back her grief.


    Imita. The corpse. Her sister, her comrade, and just more recently, friend. The woman who wore a skin commemorating her lost son, a woman who played the lyre with such haunting beauty, a music she now recognized as a tribute to her lost kin. The woman whose blood should have been inside her body instead of. No. focus. She couldn’t think of her, of the woman who she had just been beginning to understand.


    Hrae shrieked from somewhere, breaking her distraction. ‘Focus,’ snarled Vaara beside her, drawing her attention back to the fight. Objo didn’t even like the other harpy, resented her, for her role in Bia’s struggle with sobriety, and yet now she needed to act in perfect harmony with the other woman’s combat in order to even stay alive as they together took on what was irrefutable one of the most malicious known gods. Zsa Zsa, the piebald deer, the silent god who speaks in hands, the unholy witchmother. She had many many names, each more ominous than the last.


    Objo eyed the corrupted body of the witch before her. The woman herself was young, her dark hair a thick sheet down to her knees, glossy in the flamelight. Gold jewelry glittered from wrist to elbow, completely covering her forearms, and more still dangled from her neck and ankles, jingled from belts cinched around her waist, trailing tendrils of chain behind. She was otherwise nude, skin painted with the blood of fallen sisters, both her own and Objo’s.


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Despite her human appearance it was easy to tell she had channeled the god. She moved with a jerkiness, as if she were unused to the angles of her own joints, each step taken as if she were reminding herself of how to operate that limb. But when it came time to strike out, to counter or attack, there was no hesitation. All that residual wavering from occupying an unfamiliar conduit fell away and only frenzied violence was left with each swipe of gold nails, individual talons of cast metal tipping each digit. Her face, Objo shuddered, that too was perverted by the witchgod’s influence. Her eyes were eldritch, cold and glittering with malice. But where the god was too clear was her mouth. She could see the god in the witch’s too wide smile, her jaw unhinged to show all of her filed sharp teeth between split carmine lips.


    However, more than the subtle physical distinctions, it was her aura that signaled the presence of something sinister, an unnerving wrongness with the woman that permeated the air around her, prickling Objo’s skin, indicating that she was in the presence of something tainted.


    The woman’s hands flitted about her, forming shapes unfamiliar, speaking to her with Zsa Zsa’s soundless voice. She had never seen someone sign before, but the woman’s meaning appeared in her mind regardless, forced in by the god’s deific power. ‘You dare to challenge me, hatchling?’ she asked, the words invading Objo thoughts, painfully reverberating in her psyche. ‘Have you and your brood inherited Nemia’s vanity? She was always such a sanctimonious little upstart.’ Despite the lack of tone from words, the message was mocking.


    Vaara bristled beside her, ‘Shut up! You are unworthy of having her name on your tongue!’ she hissed. Objo marveled at her audacity in rebuking a god. The witch-vessel threw back her head and laughed, ‘Worthy?! Your mother has the gall to claim me unworthy? She! Who burned away my city with a genocidal flame! Who consumes the souls of my supplicants for her own glorification!’ Her voice raised as she continued, until the final word was a shriek of divine wrath as she jolted forward, charging Vaara. A slash of the witch’s gold plated claws drew a bloody welt and a puff of feathers as Vaara just barely managed to get her wing up in time to block the blow to her throat, weathering the attack rather than dodging.


    ‘But! It’s justice, we are only delivering punishment to those who deserve it for their crime, it is a befitting retribution! Kin killing is despicable.’ Objo objected, darting forward to try and alleviate some of the attention from her sister, baring her own talons. The god turned to her, smile eerie. ‘Is that what you believe? That dear Nemia is simply requiting righteousness? Is that the lie she has concocted for her infractions?’ she snorted, stalling as her hands moved once more, ‘then she should first punish herself! She burned away her own kin along with my children, sacrificed her unwilling worshipers to ascend to stolen godhood! And even then, their deaths weren’t enough to assuage her insatiable appetites. She still pursues my children, still!’


    Visions filled her head, a sudden torrent as if a flood was forced through a needle, the current of the gods thoughts overwhelming and painfully past capacity for her more delicate mortal mind. A bustling city with mudbrick buildings, a skyline of familiar mountains with Nemia’s volcano among them, a strange people with witches intermingled but not the majority. She could sense Zsa Zsa’s fond nostalgia for this past place, her pride in her peoples’ prosperity. And then. Fire spitting from Nemia’s peak, floods of heavy super heated rock crushing the city and its inhabitants in an inescapable deluge. Screams. Many many screams as an entire people perished.