507 days after a wizard cursed the REALM…
Current Version:
“Don’t panic, Bikaw. Slow your hearts, Bikaw. Keep your feathers unruffled, Bikaw.”
The Crowhead repeats these affirmations as a mantra, hoping her breathy subvocalizations remain with her behind the tree. “That’s it. Now remember your training.”
Bikaw casts her mind back to the one-room rookery where Mrs. Treedle had indoctrinated at least a dozen generations of witches. “When you encounter a danger, the first thing to do is…”
Bikaw’s memory of the classroom veers sideways from the blackboard to the window. Her memory of Mrs. Treedle’s words becomes an indistinct drone in the background.
Chirping birds, floating clouds, they’d seemed so much more interesting than magical instruction. She remembers cramming spells into her head before test after test, but then, proudly forgetting her learning after receiving a grade.
“I blame Mrs. Treedle for not being a floating cloud,” the Crowhead tells herself.
She peers around the fat-bottomed oak. The portal remains, but of course it does, beckoning her, taunting her, shimmering in its great stone archway. It wasn’t called the Enduring Portal for nothing.
With the end of Samhain, when all other portals in the REALM grew thick and unpassable, this one singular portal had always provided laggards with a passage home.
Except that this year, it was being guarded by an Apocalypse Beast.
“Away, Bikaw,” she counsels herself. “Away, away, to regroup and plan.”
For the rest of the night, the Crowhead gathers spell components. Overgrown weeds, water from a yellow spring, a variety of eyeballs and internal organs from a variety of creatures, and a pickled kidney she’d been saving in her cloak pocket for a special occasion. All of these she tosses into a washtub that would have to serve as her cauldron.
For the final ingredient, with just the right words and gestures, Bikaw sings the moonlight down from the sky and stirs it into the boiling concoction.
In the surrounding forest, nocturnal creatures scream and scamper in confusion as the full moon drains from white into a bloody, earthy shade of reddish brown. Even Mrs. Treedle would have been proud.
“No,” Bikaw realizes, “my real teacher has always been desperation.”
The steam above the cauldron displays a puzzling sequence of images. A tiny horse sleeping under a leaf. A Faery with an oddly shaped lantern. An Elf on a mechanical squirrel. And one or two others whose forms remain indistinct.
Bikaw scoffs. “These are the foot soldiers with which to battle an Apocalypse Beast? I’d be lucky to sneak by while the beast picks this lot out of his teeth! And what is this now?”
She leans closer to peer at whatever the indistinct mist was forming into next. Closer. Closer. Clos—
A skeleton lunges out of the water, reaching its boney hands within inches of Bikaw’s beak. The Crowhead jumps backward, overturning the washtub cauldron, spilling the potion to the ground.
As the liquid seeps into the thirsty earth, the skeleton dissipates into a glowing green mist.
Web3 Draft:
- Listed on OpenSea
- Listed on Rarible
Revision Notes:
To be added.
