Let us make something quite clear: we positively adore witches. Any occult practitioner, really, regardless of tradition, lineage, or method, walks a path worthy of dignity. It is delightfully audacious when mortals attempt to harness the powers of the beyond.
But those are human practitioners, my darling killers. Today, we are discussing something far less seemly.
Make no mistake, Seers are not witches. They are not human at all, though they will try to convince you otherwise. From a distance, you might say they are a distortion of your kind, though one left far too long in the dark. Step closer, and you may notice the costume is their flesh.
Spawn of a severed god, born from rot, root, and shadow, they wear humanity like a mask and feed upon suffering. Each “individual” Seer is merely part of a greater whole—a vast, conscious mass of Gloom that spreads beneath the soil like a black roots. Kill one, and its body merely liquifies into the ground to rejoin the rest. Charmingly economical, isn’t it?
They hunt in every human population, sowing misery from the shadows. But the real trouble begins when their Gloom rises from beneath. When that happens, it means hiding is no longer necessary. They have thoroughly claimed their territory.
So next time you meet a stranger, do watch for the signs. Eerily smooth movements and hungry smiles. A shadow that does not quite obey. And of course, those strange eyes, each one watching you twice.
All the better to see you with, my dear.
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Bitter Fruit
When the old man said the mines were cursed, I nearly laughed. I rarely hear such things spoken with conviction these days. Curses went out with buckled shoes.
I had misplaced my scarf within an hour of arriving, however. That small absurdity inclined me to hear him out.
Nightmares, he told me, plagued the town. Men brought them home with the coal dust to fester in the cracks between floorboards. Every night, the village dreamed of its dead. Knocking at windows and crying in the dark, they cut open the old grief and made it fresh.
And what else? I pressed. Children gone missing? Blighted wells or strange lesions? He shook his head. The town was healthy and prosperous. Its only death was in dreams.
By morning, my suitcase was packed. I supposed, in the modern age, that a provincial community could still find the supernatural in the psychological. A missing scarf notwithstanding, I saw no curse.
Then daylight exposed the town’s true condition. The place was a living gallows, populated by ghosts and hollow-eyed mourners. No one smiled there, not even the children. Most barely spoke.
So I stayed. I found no fang marks, no opened graves, no ordinary madness. Whatever fed upon these people did it with patience. Rather than slaughter and gorge, it cultivated.
The mines, the old man had said. That was the root of it. He did not know why he knew. Those touched by the outer dark rarely know.
It took me three days to find the closed shaft and the tunnel beyond. I followed the stench of wet rot and wormwood deep into the exhausted galleries, where the mine’s dead veins widened. There I found a cavernous orchard.
Like moldering apple trees, black Gloom twisted from the rock, each branch heavy with dripping bulbs. Their roots cradled little jars sealed with twine and black wax, each jar filled with hair and teeth and scribbled grocery lists. Keepsakes from the village above, brought below for some foul ritual.
A shape moved amongst the Gloom, hunched low and digging at the earth. From a distance, she nearly looked human. An old woman in an abandoned mineshaft.
I watched what she buried there. My scarf. Another grief, planted with the rest of them.
Above me, the Gloom dripped, salivating, and a bulb split open to reveal one yellow eye with two pupils. It fixed me in its gaze. Which meant she had too.
She turned with that too-wide facsimile of a human smile. When I struck my lighter, she began to laugh.
I felt my dead burn with that orchard. Above us, the town screamed in its sleep.
She watched me through the smoke with a thousand hungry eyes. The All-Coven is fed by pain. Even its own.
She was still laughing when I took her apart.
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Stay vigilant, Grimrunners,
— Studio Ellipsis Team