the grey witch

War-bodies are terrible things, incomprehensibly destructive but no body formed of rage or hunger can stand against the grey witch. Where she goes the sky stretches out flat and grey and the air tastes stale. Breathing itself becomes an unbearable chore.

The origins of her power are greatly disputed. Some think she’s opened a tiny pinhole into gehenna, and brought a bit of the infinite sameness of that afterlife to our world.

Others say that she’s found a black hole so unbelievably massive that its event horizon is as gentle as a wave-smoothed beach, and offered it Gaia-knows-what in exchange for this power.

All I know is what I saw: the sky clouding over like a cataract, the wind dying like a last breath, every hot and horrible thing on that field somehow dimming and collapsing into mundanity and irrelevance as she passed.