They called her Hrathi.
It was once suggested it was a title as much as a name; that in the old tongues that had given way to the new, it represented something powerful and massive, something that the new words had no word for. If asked what exactly that might have been, most only shrugged. Some things simply must be.
They came to the crown every turn of the moon and huddled beneath her presence, young and younger things in shifts and veils. She breathed in stormclouds and exhaled hurricanes and spoke, when she did speak, of magic. There was little that her voice could say that her hands could not and the aether she wove between her long fingers glittered like spiderwebs just big enough to entangle starlight upon their threads.
They called her Hrathi when they did not call her Witch and the crown was her palace and court. Surely she must have a home somewhere among the misty peaks but no one who was not invited would ever find it. Surely there was a way to unlock the path just as a key might unlock the door, but the shape of such keys could only be guessed. There were nobles, priests, monks, and rabble in the city away from the wilder realm beyond the walls. Among them were women in the skins of wives and sisters who guarded and dispensed secrets older than the dustiest of Ala Mhigo’s stone bones. They were sharp-eyed and they were most of all loyal, for though the sisterhood extended to all the women who dwelled upon the world, not everyone believed.
She was as much a part of the mountains as the earth that shaped them; just as there has always be stone and air and fire, there must always be, and always has been, a Witch.
It was once suggested it was a title as much as a name; that in the old tongues that had given way to the new, it represented something powerful and massive, something that the new words had no word for. If asked what exactly that might have been, most only shrugged. Some things simply must be.
They came to the crown every turn of the moon and huddled beneath her presence, young and younger things in shifts and veils. She breathed in stormclouds and exhaled hurricanes and spoke, when she did speak, of magic. There was little that her voice could say that her hands could not and the aether she wove between her long fingers glittered like spiderwebs just big enough to entangle starlight upon their threads.
They called her Hrathi when they did not call her Witch and the crown was her palace and court. Surely she must have a home somewhere among the misty peaks but no one who was not invited would ever find it. Surely there was a way to unlock the path just as a key might unlock the door, but the shape of such keys could only be guessed. There were nobles, priests, monks, and rabble in the city away from the wilder realm beyond the walls. Among them were women in the skins of wives and sisters who guarded and dispensed secrets older than the dustiest of Ala Mhigo’s stone bones. They were sharp-eyed and they were most of all loyal, for though the sisterhood extended to all the women who dwelled upon the world, not everyone believed.
She was as much a part of the mountains as the earth that shaped them; just as there has always be stone and air and fire, there must always be, and always has been, a Witch.
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