Haunted Woods: Wisp Whisperer: The War of the Ashes

Note: This Haunted Woods series is written from the first person perspective of Chi.

The next time you come across what many today call a 'place of great memory', stop a moment, sit down, and take a few minutes to listen.

Wisps are echoes of a living being's experiences. This is universal knowledge. They are shed during events of great emotional trauma, much like one would shed hair or feathers without a second thought. They linger in the area for years, even centuries later, until some enterprising fosmith comes along and bottles them to make wisplights. They are not ghosts. They are not even alive. They are simply memories made corporeal.

No one knows which events create wisps and which don't. The events worthy of being recounted in the history books, however, tend to produce stronger and more numerous wisps. So here we are today, in the place once called Viltvangr, but which the Taura-Naji now call the Edge of the World, to listen to a story over two hundred years old.

“They're coming!”

“Leave the cart. Take the children!”

This is an event of great pain. You can hear the tears held back, the sheer desperation for these faceless peasants to abandon their entire lives to flee into the hills. The aggressors? Their wisps trail close behind.

“Fan out. Make sure none escape.”

Two hundred years ago, an upstart king of a long-gone fiefdom decided that the greatest threat to his power was magic. Never mind that magic was almost always used to better lives and improve upon existing sciences, even in his time. But his spat had never been with magic itself. A curia of cantatrices had risen in the east, using their magics to improve life for their willing subjects. He feared that their promises of fair wage and social equality would breed dissent among his own serfs. A chance at a better life? Preposterous. Such is the way with all wars: the true cause is almost always political.

And so he declared his war on magic. He raised an army to purge all cantatrices, the so-called ‘mages of the voice’, from the surrounding villages. Once led by hired mercenaries, his cause soon attracted a growing roster of volunteers, all those whom magic had wronged or shunned or simply offended. His banner gave them cause, for there is nothing more attractive to the simple mind than a simple slogan. And so they swept across the land, marching ever eastward, until they came here, to the hamlet now buried beneath the ashes.

I follow the procession of wisps as they trail across the broken landscape; in their time, it would’ve been gentle slopes and flower-filled prairie. They are indistinct phantoms of blue light, but I could see where this one had stumbled over its footing, that one was being carried over a shoulder, and that the trio on their heels was slowly, inevitably, catching up to them.

A wisp stands at the top of the tallest hill. It is not unheard of for beings of significant magical power to leave more distinct wisps, but this one is particularly defined, with sharp limbs and a clear head. It is a dragon, one of the most powerful forms for its ilk to take.

I sweep my wing over it, and in my mind’s eye, a vision springs forth. A lone mage stands tall and proud against three soldiers clad in white uniforms-- he cannot be older than thirty. A couple and their infant children cower behind him, and somewhere behind them, a pack of rhakos stand crouched and ready to attack.

“Turn around now. Take one more step, and it will be your doom.”

Had he known what force of nature lay dormant beneath his feet, he would doubtless have revised his choice of words.

The soldiers, ever the cocksure fools, lower their halberds and rush him. Eideann raises his staff and slams it into the ground.

A burst of molten lava breaches the earth. Collective screams of terror. Silence.

The scene fades from my mind. Before me lies not a verdant hill, but the largest crater of many in the Edge, still bubbling with caustic green water. So this was the event that marred the entire eastern coastline and darkened the sky for a decade.

All for a man whose name the history books have long since forgotten.