The Witch Wars

Once the precedent was set, Hell moved with the quiet precision of a plague.   Across continents, through crumbling shrines and midnight crossroads, countless demons and bound spirits slipped into the mortal world. They did not come as conquerors. They came as opportunities—the kind desperate witches were too frightened or too isolated to refuse.   Where old gods had fallen silent and fae pacts had crumbled, Hell’s emissaries appeared with smiling lips and open hands.   They offered young witches what no one else would: power, knowledge, and—most intoxicating of all—certainty.   Pacts blossomed like bruises across Europe, Africa, the Near East, the Americas. Spirits that once remained leashed deep in the Infernal Realms now walked freely in mortal sleep, in shadowed barns, in forest clearings where covens whispered for guidance that never came from anyone else.   Meanwhile, mortal writers—some corrupted, some merely curious, some outright bribed—began reprinting forgotten grimoires. Hell encouraged the circulation of ritual texts far older and far darker than the cultures now handling them. New tomes appeared as well, carefully crafted works that blended truth and distortion, instruction and trap, all designed to make infernal summoning seem:   Accessible. Powerful. Inevitable.   Across Europe, broadsheets whispered of black sabbaths. Across the Baltic, nobles bought demonological manuals printed in shaky Latin. Across the Mediterranean, sailors traded sigil-bound charms for good winds and bad bargains.   And in the forests and lonely moors, the incubus and succubus courts began their dances— the infamous sabbaths that flickered like wildfire across the mortal night.   They called to the lost and the cornered. They offered warmth in the cold. They promised that if all other doors had closed, Hell would always leave a window open.   Every witch who embraced the pact became another ember in Hell’s growing blaze. Each bargain widened the realm’s metaphysical reach. With every soulbound apprentice, the balance tipped further.   This was not conquest in the martial sense. It was infiltration. Accretion. A slow, velvet tightening.   Hell did not need to overwhelm humanity. It needed only to become the last refuge of magic, the one remaining font of consistent power, the only voice still whispering in a world where silence was spreading like rot.   And so, step by step, pact by pact, manuscript by manuscript, Hell’s grasp widened across the world— not as an invading army, but as the inevitable destination for every witch left with nowhere else to turn.

The battlefields of the Witch Wars were rarely fields at all.   They were villages, monasteries, crossroads, bogs, graveyards, and crumbling pagan altars. They were cramped city streets where whispers traveled faster than truth, and lonely rural townships where a single accusation could detonate an entire community.   Most clashes were not fought with blades or spells, but with belief. With rumor. With fear sharpened into scripture.   Yet there were battles—real ones—hidden beneath the veneer of mundane history.   Some were fought between old monsters and the last pagan faithful, each one resisting Hell’s narrative with tooth, claw, and dwindling ritual. Others erupted when infernal spirits preyed on vulnerable covens, only to be met by champions whose names never reached the chronicles of men.   The Church, contrary to later myth, was not always Hell’s puppet. Not every priest was deceived. Not every inquisitor was corrupt.   Several times, genuine heroes arose—blessed knights, visionary mystics, monks bearing relics of terrible purity—who confronted real demons and disrupted mortal sorcery twisted by infernal pacts. But even this resistance served Hell’s agenda. Every victory against true evil made the populace more eager to burn the innocent.   Each monster slain was another excuse for more trials. Each saved village was another justification for hysteria. Each righteous act tightened the noose around the world’s unaligned witches.   Across Sweden, the werewolf Thiess of Kaltenbrun and his pack stood defiant—a rare force openly dedicated to hunting and tearing apart demons and their warlocks. Their battles were bloody, moonlit affairs, fought in forests where the snow ran red and infernal agents learned to fear the howl of a true natural-born lycanthrope.   Elsewhere, Hermetic magi, alchemists, Kabbalists, cunning folk, and lone practitioners refused to surrender their craft to Hell’s encroaching monopoly. They drew lines in the sand—circles of salt, sigils of old faith, oaths sworn to fading gods—and met the infernal tide with grit, discipline, and desperation.   To the mundane world, none of this existed. They saw only trials, gossip, and executions.   They never witnessed the shadow-wars between demons and adepts, the duels fought under new moons, or the nights when summoned horrors burned in alchemical fire while the world slept unaware.   Magic users and monsters alike spilled blood beneath starless skies— and every drop, whether won in heroism or spilled in terror, fed the momentum of the Witch Wars.   For the true battlefield was always belief. And Hell was winning it every time a candle guttered out in fear.

In the immediate aftermath of the Witch Wars, the result was unmistakable and catastrophic:   the bulk of the world’s magical power—and those capable of wielding it—fell under Hell’s purview.   For the first time in human history, infernal influence outweighed every other metaphysical force combined. Gods had lost their worshippers. Fae courts had lost their mortal anchors. Hermetic and alchemical orders were shattered, fragmented into frightened pockets barely able to protect themselves. Centuries-old grimoires were ash. Coven lines were thinned or broken entirely. Bloodlines that once carried the spark of Otherworld now survived only through secrecy or pact.   Hell became the only predictable, consistent source of magic left.   If a young witch wanted power, if a hedge-worker wanted protection, if a scholar wanted arcane knowledge that still worked—   they were forced to look downward.   Fear had done what armies never could: it had cleared the field of competitors.   Across Europe and beyond, surviving witches whispered that the world had gone dark. Not magically barren—Hell made sure of that—but spiritually hollow. Infernal pacts surged. Demonic intermediaries became the de facto tutors of a generation. Even those who refused were shaped by the consequences of refusal: ostracism, isolation, threats from both Church and demon.   The short-term effect was not simply Hell’s dominance. It was Hell as inevitability.   Even the magical traditions that resisted—wolves of Kaltenbrun, Kabbalists in hidden rooms, Hermetic mages fortified behind collapsing wards—found themselves pushed to the margins while infernal influence seeped into every gap left behind by the dying leylines.   Within a single human lifetime, the metaphysical landscape had changed utterly:   Infernal magic was widespread.   Non-infernal magic was rare, weakened, or persecuted.   The cultural narrative equated sorcery with Hell.   Most nations believed the witch hunts were about evil—never realizing they were about scarcity.   Hell achieved the monopoly Emperor Morningstar envisioned.   For the mortal world, it meant centuries of suspicion, superstition, and ignorance.   For the magical world, it meant something far worse:   Hell now held the keys to Earth’s remaining arcane potential… and no one else had the strength to challenge them.

In the years that followed, the magical world was unrecognizable.   The leylines—once rivers of incandescent power—had guttered to faint embers by the dawn of the Age of Reason. What remained of Earth’s natural magic could no longer sustain most spellcraft. Ancient rites faltered. Fae pacts withered. Elemental callings went unanswered. The gods of old heard prayers as if from underwater.   But the witches bound to Hell? They still wielded power. Real, tangible, terrifying power—because their magic no longer relied on the dying world, but on the roaring furnaces of the Infernal Realm.   Through pacts forged in desperation, fear, or ambition, they retained spells and strength that no unaffiliated mage could match. Their rituals were fueled by infernal reservoirs untouched by mortal decline. Their curses still bit. Their charms still sparked. Their sabbaths still flared with heat and hunger.   And from these sabbaths came another legacy: the cambions.   Born of orgiastic rites beneath moonless skies—half-fiendish children of incubus and succubus courts—cambions entered the world as living conduits of magic. Hellspawn in blood, but sorcerers by birthright, they carried an arcane spark that no leyline collapse could smother. Entire bloodlines arose from these unions, families whose magic would outlast kingdoms.   Outside Hell’s purview, the landscape was desolate.   Only a handful of masters—stubborn, brilliant, and unbroken—remained to pass on non-infernal traditions. Hermetic recluses. Kabbalist scholars hidden in cramped attics. Hedge-witches who preserved scraps of ancient rites remembered only by animals and ghosts. They taught small circles of apprentices in secret, praying the lines of knowledge would not die with them.   But their numbers dwindled. And Hell’s did not.   By the time Enlightenment thinkers were dissecting superstition and declaring demons mere metaphors, Lucifer had already secured his legacy.   He had won.   The Lord of Pride stood uncontested. Demons and devils had become universal shorthand for evil—proof that their branding had succeeded even better than their warfare. The world no longer thought of spells as divine or fey in origin. They thought of deals. Of souls. Of devils who could grant power at a price.   Within the occult underground, infernal lords became the default patrons. Outside it, Lucifer himself evolved into something more than an emperor of Hell. He became a cultural archetype, a symbolic god of rebellion, temptation, ambition, and damnation.   The Witch Wars had reshaped metaphysics, religion, folklore, and even language.   Hell had not merely claimed the last strongholds of magic.   It had rewritten the story of magic itself.   And the rest of the world—mundane and magical alike—would spend centuries living in the shadow of that victory.

Pride is a crown that blinds its wearer, and none were more sightless than Hell’s grand emperor in the centuries that followed his victory. Lucifer mistook dominance for permanence. He believed the scraps of magic left to the world were beneath concern, that the myths buried in human culture were mere embers, and that curiosity—fragile, fleeting human curiosity—could never threaten the infernal monopoly he had forged in blood and fear.   He was wrong.   As the leylines began to stir in what occult historians now call the Pulp Era, the first tremors of resurgence rippled through the hidden corners of Earth. Faeries whispered awake in forgotten groves. Pagan gods—emaciated but furious—felt the first trickles of worship return. Slumbering magical traditions, not entirely extinguished, rose from dormancy like predators scenting prey.   And every one of them remembered the Witch Wars.   They remembered Hell’s opportunism. They remembered the shattered covens, the burned priests, the lost rites. They remembered the betrayal of a world once rich with magic.   Hell expected gratitude. What it received was rage.   Worse still, the geopolitical world had changed. Lands previously beyond infernal reach—distant continents, indigenous faiths, cultures unfazed by European demonology—had grown in power and voice. The Age of Reason had eroded belief in witchcraft’s inherent evil, leaving Hell’s propaganda hollow in many regions. The skepticism that once weakened Earth’s magic now weakened Hell’s image.   The stage was set for the backlash.   And when the resurgence came, it struck with a fervor and force Lucifer had not imagined. The fae returned. The old gods demanded their tithes. Shamans, mystics, occultists, and witches emerged from bloodlines Hell thought extinct. The world divided into distinct magical camps:   Those who still served Hell, out of loyalty, fear, or inherited pacts.   Those who used Hell as a tool, but offered no allegiance—canny, defiant, and unbound.   And those who rejected Hell entirely, walking roads paved by gods, spirits, leylines, or their own awakened gifts.   By the 1970s, the explosion of Spiritualism, New Age movements, and the pagan revival had undone centuries of Hell’s narrative dominance. Once again witches called to the moon, not the Pit. Once again mortals summoned fae for favors instead of demons for deals. Once again magic lived in the hands of the rebellious, the curious, the hopeful—not just the desperate.   The magical community—fractured for generations—finally reached a bitter consensus:   Never again.   Never again would they allow Hell to monopolize their fate. Never again would they let propaganda become spellcraft. Never again would fear dictate the shape of their world.   Hell’s victory, once absolute, had become a cautionary tale. A warning etched into every grimoire, whispered in every initiation, carried in the blood of every witch who survived the resurgence.   The Witch Wars ended long ago. But their legacy remains a shadow cast across all magical paths— a reminder that even the strongest dynasty can crumble when pride blinds the emperor and the world remembers how to dream.

Though the Witch Wars have long since ended, their shadow lingers—subtle, uneasy, and impossible to fully dispel. The magical world today is not openly divided, yet the peace it maintains feels more like a stitched wound than true healing. Hell-bound spellcasters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with fae-touched witches, shamanic lineages, Kabbalist scholars, Hermetic adepts, and modern pagans, all ostensibly united under the banner of a shared arcane future.   But unity is not the same as amity.   Every few years, something cracks.   A coven devoted to Hecate dismantles a cult of Mephistopheles, claiming the Prince’s followers endangered the veiled cities. A cambion warlock, swollen with inherited arrogance, preys upon peaceful Wiccans he deems magically defenseless. A Hermetic lodge retaliates against a demonic patron who violated ancient accords. A faerie envoy vanishes in a region where infernal magic is strong.   The community debates, wrings its hands, and ultimately dismisses these clashes as aberrations—rogue elements, criminals, extremists. But beneath the polite veneer, whispers persist.   Some voices—quiet, cautious—warn that history’s wounds run deep. Others speak more loudly, refusing to trust those whose ancestors once benefited from Hell’s monopoly. Still others aim their suspicion not at Hell, but at the pagan gods who remain as capable of cruelty as any demon.   For the uncomfortable truth is this:   not all who serve Hell are wicked, and not all who reject Hell are pure.   Among Hell’s nobility exist scholars, diplomats, and benign instructors who have no interest in corrupting humanity. Some became teachers during the Arcane Winter, preserving what scraps of magic they could. Others have come to value mortal creativity in ways that surprise even themselves.   Conversely, many pagan gods still seethe with ancient grudges. Some encourage their followers toward acts as vicious and unbalanced as anything committed by Hell’s cruelest fiends. The fae Courts are no more innocent; they remember the Witch Wars, yes—but their vengeance is often indiscriminate.   And so the modern age is one of fractured détente. Open conflict is rare. Direct hostilities are unwelcome. But scars remain—etched into history, into bloodlines, into grimoires rewritten after too many coffins were lowered into unmarked graves.   The Witch Wars are over. Their battles ended centuries ago. But the soul of Earth’s magical community still bears the wounds.   Even now, when two witches disagree, or a spirit looks at a warlock with measured distance, or an old god stares too long at a cambion’s shadow— the echoes of that ancient infernal gambit whisper through the air.   A reminder of an age when fear was a weapon, magic was a commodity, and the fate of every spellcaster hung between the pyre and the Pact.