Warhammer Fantasy: A Dynasty of Dynamic Alcoholism

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A few years ago, an old witch hunter sat in a small room that stank of tinctures and pastes for various medicinal uses. Her body had been ravaged by very many decades of wounds and poisons and diseases forced upon her by unnatural forces. Her wooden dentures lay cradled in her one functioning hand, the other having grown so arthritic and stiff that it could not clench or open without extreme effort, force, and pain. Her hair was thinning significantly, where it still grew at all. The entire right half of her head had been splashed with flames and cracked with a falling beam from a ceiling while escaping from a burning warehouse – that she had survived the severe skull fracture and burns was considered a miracle by the physicians that had seen to her. The left half of her face had been dented inward, once long ago in the past and more recently by a blacksmith compelled with sorcery, and yet that yellowed and rheumy orb was the only one remaining in her head. Its peer had not survived the beam, though it had gone blind years ago.

She was not alone, here, though. Her daughter Marlisa sat next to her on a stool, two hands clasped around that frozen left claw, face locked into a grim stoic rictus. Opposite them, leaning with both arms behind them against a cabinet covered in vials and flasks and more, was the physician they had come to consult with. Doctor Ziebermann had been educated in the south, and was widely considered one of the most skilled of his kind in the city, combining herbalism, modern medicine, and even surgical techniques to see to the health of his patients.

"I'm sorry," the doctor said quietly, "But there's nothing I can do."

"But-," Marlisa began immediately, only to quiet as Ziebermann held up a hand.

"If, perhaps, she had started a regimen of my tinctures and tonics ten, no, twenty years ago, we wouldn't be here for some time yet," the balding man said, pinching at the bridge of his nose. "Physical activity and exercise are valuable, but not when that physical activity results in repeated breakages of bone and ligament, stressing of joints, and poisoning of the blood through infected wounds."

Emilia said nothing, she simply stared a hole in the wall, her hat in her lap.

"I have heard in my years here in Ostland that you refer to these effects as 'Narlog's Vapors'," Ziebermann continued, "And yes, the rampant abuse of alcohol to the extent that most Ostlanders fall into is statistically alarming, as is the percentage of deaths relating to it, but it is more than that," he said as he pointed to the yellowing of Emilia's skin. "This extent of jaundice is…terribly thorough. Not to mention the weakness of your body after so much wear and tear. It simply…cannot…fight it off."

The freezing cold of Kislev's oblast, the pouring winter rains of the Empire, she had weathered them all.

But now she simply could not stop trembling, day or night, hot or cold.

It was as if her entire body, ever so slowly, was simply shaking itself apart.

As if all her sinew and bone were unwinding.

"There's surely significant damage in your lungs," Ziebermann said as he picked up some of the papers on a small table next to him. "So much smoke, so many years of breathing it in," he paused and looked at them with naked fear, "From any source, ahem," he coughed and moved on, "And internal damages from your bones being broken in on themselves repeatedly over time."

"Then…something for the pain at least." Marlisa said quietly, her plea touched with a bit of desperate heat.

"Marlisa," Emilia finally spoke as she fit her dentures back in, her voice a wet rasp which terminated in a wheezing cough. "No."

"Yes I…suspect she doesn't require it, do you, ma'am," Ziebermann said cautiously, making Marlisa's head whip around.

"What?"

"Based on the results of my reflex and response tests, I suspect your mother has gone numb in certain areas already," the doctor's voice quavered as Marlisa transformed from tired and grieving daughter to something all together more furious.

"What?!" She cried aloud, standing with such force her stool was flung out from beneath her, eyes narrowed and glaring not at the doctor but at the patient.

"Only in some places," Emilia admitted, ignoring the horrified look on her daughter's face to look at the doctor's. "How did you notice?"

"It was minute, almost imperceptible, you were quite good at forcing twitches in response, but…," Ziebermann shrugged helplessly, "I have been doing this for some time."

"How is this possible," Marlisa growled. "She bears no frostbite, no curse, no plague of the senses!"

Finally, the physician's eyes lit up, his mind leaping to a somewhat more palatable target – knowledge.

"Ah, that is perhaps what it might seem like, but I have noticed, after thirty years of working in medicine and the living body, certain oddities," he said quickly, pleased to speak on his own research, though he quailed slightly as both veterans stared him down. "Ahem. That is, much like the blood flows and ebbs like the tides of the ocean, so too are there reefs within, bedrock vital portions of life itself in hidden form. My lady," he bowed his head with respect to Emilia while also helping him not have to look at their eyes, "You have been struck across the body in so many places, set on fire, blown up, thrown about by…," he gulped, "Thrown about with great force, and have been apparently struck by…by lightning, yes?"

"Thrice," Emilia croaked, "All by witches, one by hand, another by staff, and a third called it out of the sky on a summer's cloudless day."

"Exactly," Ziebermann said, spine bending back as he straightened, the eager gleam in his eyes dimming immediately upon having to match gazes with the witch hunters. "That, is to say, erm, that according to the Aqua Sanguis theories of-,"

"The point, herr doctor," Marlisa interrupted, one hand coming to clench on her mother's shoulder, the other at the saber on her hip.

"The connections of the body, the reefs, I suspect that years of trauma have, that is, have become damaged," he blabbered rapidly, "The tidal flow of her blood through her body is broken by these…I have been referring to them as marrow reefs in my research, and," he cut himself off as Marlisa tilted her head. "I mean to say that while her blood still flows to these extremities and the like, the sensations…don't," he finished lamely before clearing his throat nervously.

No one spoke for a moment, the stretching silence interrupted only once by a distant and muffled booming as some cannons were being tested in the Smokelands to the west.

"Well, not that this isn't all fascinating," Emilia finally said as she slapped her knees and made to stand up. "But this has clearly been a waste of time."

"Captain Liesedotte!" Ziebermann waved his hands about, his eyes wide. "I don't think I have accurately described the magnitude of the issues here! If you maintain your current lifestyle, I cannot guarantee that you will live much longer!"

"And?" Emilia cut him off, her jaundiced eye still managing a powerful glare. "I'm already older than plenty of others."

"B-but-,"

"In your…educated…opinion, herr doctor," she said as she wrenched donned her hat once more, "How long do I have?"

"I-,"

"Answer the question, doctor," Marlisa said, a gulf of deadened exhaustion clear in her voice. "Please, and we shall leave. Your payment is already confirmed, is it not?"

Doctor Zierbermann just looked back and forth between the two and sighed, head slumping in defeat.

"Very well. If you are not…seen off," his voice wavered there, "By outside forces, in my educated opinion you should have but a handful of years left to you. Likely less than more."

Emilia tugged the door of the room open and breathed in the surprisingly clear air of the city, the stink of so many things drowned beneath a cool spring rain.

"Fine. Marlisa. Pay the man," she said over her shoulder as she exited.

Even though she hobbled madly, her pace slowed by any number of her body's issues, the sight of her equipment had the crowds parting before her. The symbols of Sigmar were still finely polished upon her gear, the icon atop her hat brightest of all, even in the rain. Emilia kept moving, and it was not a few minutes before she was rejoined by Marlisa, her daughter melting out of the shadows in a way that Emilia simply couldn't anymore. The faint spatter of blood on Marlisa's face was already almost completely washed away by the rain, her blade surely cleaned before being put back in the sheath.

"Well?" Emilia grunted as the two made their way through the alleys.

"Quick. Clean," Marlisa said just as curtly as they moved.

"Egh, more than he deserved."

"Heart-Taker will know it was us, one way or another, didn't see a need to draw it out," Marlisa shot back.

Emilia raised her arthritically twisted left hand to pause their conversation as they turned the corner. On the ground before them, a man whimpered as he clutched as his stomach. Opposite him, the clear causes of his injury, was a pair of men with wild looks in their eyes and small clubs in their hands. All three paused at the sight of them.

"What's going on here?" Emilia rasped, eye bouncing between them all.

"I-we-," one of the toughs began.

"Ee's a thief, 'ee is, stole from us!"

Emilia was prepared to just walk through them and be on her way before she realized that Marlisa was not preparing to follow her. In fact, her daughter stalked forward with purpose. They'd realized, quite clearly, what and who they were. The fear was blatant on their faces, including them one on the ground. It was to that one that Marlisa stared at harder before leaning down and tearing open his already ruined tunic. Emilia stared, bemused, as her daughter tore the shirt further to examine a surprisingly intricate blue bull's head tattoo on his chest just over his heart.

"Do bulls run free in the river?" Marlisa said nonsensically.

To Emilia's surprise, the man grit his teeth and answered just as nonsensically.

"There's a log jam by Roezfels way," he gasped out.

"Mmm."

Marlisa then swiftly stood up, unsheathed her sword, and decapitate both toughs in the same stroke. Then she helped the man stand up, exchanging a small, whispered conversation that Emilia couldn't hear with the condition of her ears anymore, and then sent him stumbling away. Only then did she rejoin her.

"Are you going to tell me what that was about?"

"He's a Smoggel Riverhead, one of Hagrid's men," Marlisa answered, finally granting Emilia a spot of clarity. "They opened up recruitment to non-halflings a few years ago."

"Ah. From your…other job," Emilia said with a raised eyebrow.

It had been a shock when Marlisa had become one of the Count's advisors, but the Order was happy about it. It let them have a closer eye on the Count, or more importantly, his magic-wielding abominations that he happily called children and wife. More worrying was her connections with Hagrid Baggins, once known as a notorious agent of the Quinsberry Lodge. Generally, the Order did not bother with such secular organizations, as focused as they were on business and pushing secular agendas with nothing to do with Chaos. Except when agents of Chaos co-opted such works for their own purposes. The reign of that particularly 'Cousin' was remembered mostly because for a time the Order had been worried that a devotee of the Blood God had suborned one of the short folk.

"Yes. I have a multitude of responsibilities," Marlisa said with the faintest bit of cheer before it soured. "Such as a daughter's duty to her mother. How could you not tell me?"

"What would it have changed? Portions of me have gone numb," Emilia shrugged, "There is nothing to be done about it."

If Marlisa ground her teeth any harder, they would have broken apart in her mouth.

"There is a way, and you would leave me grieving you rather than accept it," she hissed out, each word a splash of acid.

"Marlisa!"

"No, you listen to me," Marlisa growled, grabbing her mothers by the shoulders, fingers sinking oddly against the leather, chain, and bumpy scar tissue beneath. "They could help you."

Emilia had but one functioning hand and wrapped it around one of Marlisa's wrists.

"Marlisa, daughter," her voice was soft but still audible beneath the rain. "I. Am. Old. Very old. There is nothing that they could do that would somehow miraculously make me live that much longer."

Marlisa slowly closed her eyes and leaned her head forwards until their foreheads were touching beneath their hats.

"I just…,"

"I know."

They stood there in silence with only corpses and the rain as companions for a few minutes more before continuing on their way. It was a while longer until Emilia stumped her way up into the Chapterhouse, then to her office, then past the various traps she'd set up. Only once she'd sat down in her terribly uncomfortable chair did she let herself relax, ever so slightly. Just because it would be harder to attack her in the Chapterhouse than in the streets and alleys didn't mean it wasn't impossible. Marlisa sat in another chair facing the desk. They remained in silence once more after letting out simultaneous gusty sighs as Emilia kicked open her bottom shelf and tugged out a bottle of ostka.

"Really?" Marlisa finally said as she eyed it.

"What?" Emilia looked at her askance, then down at the bottle. "Oh, why not. I'm dying anyhow."

Marlisa blinked very rapidly at that but did not move to stop her mother from tugging the cork loose with her wooden teeth and begin drinking from the bottle directly. Emilia continued drinking until the bottle was half empty, slamming it down onto the desk afterwards but not letting go.

"So," Emilia kicked her feet up on the desk, displaying the greatest amount of disregard for her station that Marlisa had ever seen. "How soon do you think that Heart-Taker will respond?"

"Well, considering we've been going to one of her agents for a few weeks now, I have no doubt she's…aware…of your condition," Marlisa said as she rubbed at her temples. "She'll likely make more and more aggressive moves."

"Cause I'm dying!" Emilia crowed loudly, gesturing with the bottle wildly.

Marlisa hunched; her head hung low.

"So…," she finally said, the woman who'd burned villages down and hung three generations of households at once reduced to a slight quaver. "What happens next?"

"We hunt. We interrogate. We collect information. We hunt her down," Emilia said as she drank a bit more from the bottle. "And that's all we can do."

And she very pointedly ignored the tears falling down Marlisa's face, just as Marlisa ignored the ones coming down her's.
 
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torroar said:
"Quick. Clean," Marlisa said just as curtly as they moved.

"Egh, more than he deserved."

"Heart-Taker will know it was us, one way or another, didn't see a need to draw it out," Marlisa shot back.
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Huh, was there meant to be any particular tell in the bit you posted, or were they aware he was Heart-taker's from something else?
 
torroar said:
"So…," she finally said, the woman who'd burned villages down and hung three generations of households at once reduced to a slight quaver. "What happens next?"

"We hunt. We interrogate. We collect information. We hunt her down," Emilia said as she drank a bit more from the bottle. "And that's all we can do."

And she very pointedly ignored the tears falling down Marlisa's face, just as Marlisa ignored the ones coming down her's.
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It's sad in that final sort of way. Knowing it's all going to end. Sad, slightly bitter, with this pulling sensation, in fearful anticipation.
Honestly, it's still better that they had each other for this long. Emilia or Marlisa alone feel just... sad in a worse way.

I wonder if Marlisa will survive this. I know Emilia won't, as she's essentially living, armed bait right now, with enough death flags to decorate half of Wulfenburg!
 
Emilia is one tough old bitch.

Between her and Heart-Taker, I wonder who has had a greater impact since she first was set on this path. I wonder if Emilia has done more for Order than Heart-Seeker has for Chaos in the last 50 years or so.
 
They told him they hunted the cult that did it down to the last man. This is technically true, because they did do that.

They did not tell him that said cult was pushed into it by Heart-Taker attempting to raise her profile in anticipation of an incoming Everchosen. I feel vaguely sure that I've noted that she has done this repeatedly, co-opting others for her purposes, in the temp sections.
 
torroar said:
They told him they hunted the cult that did it down to the last man. This is technically true, because they did do that.

They did not tell him that said cult was pushed into it by Heart-Taker attempting to raise her profile in anticipation of an incoming Everchosen. I feel vaguely sure that I've noted that she has done this repeatedly, co-opting others for her purposes, in the temp sections.
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You have.
 
torroar said:
They told him they hunted the cult that did it down to the last man. This is technically true, because they did do that.

They did not tell him that said cult was pushed into it by Heart-Taker attempting to raise her profile in anticipation of an incoming Everchosen. I feel vaguely sure that I've noted that she has done this repeatedly, co-opting others for her purposes, in the temp sections.
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I get the feeling that if they ever tell Freddy the truth about Heart-Taker and her role in his family's deaths, he's going to be furious. It's like Hagrid and the Lodge, except the Lodge wasn't responsible for murdering literally almost all of his brothers and sisters. Oh his rage would be apoplectic. Which might be part of the reason Marlisa hasn't told us. A second would be the personal feelings of both Marlisa and Emilia not wanting someone to intrude on 'their' hunt. A third might be Emilia's distrust and dislike Freddy since day 1.
 
Zedman7054 said:
I get the feeling that if they ever tell Freddy the truth about Heart-Taker and her role in his family's deaths, he's going to be furious. It's like Hagrid and the Lodge, except the Lodge wasn't responsible for murdering literally almost all of his brothers and sisters. Oh his rage would be apoplectic. Which might be part of the reason Marlisa hasn't told us. A second would be the personal feelings of both Marlisa and Emilia not wanting someone to intrude on 'their' hunt. A third might be Emilia's distrust and dislike Freddy since day 1.
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He does have this tendency to drop what he's doing and kill the shit out of whatever's wronged him, yes.
 
I'm rereading the story and just reread our sons death scene.... it still hurts. But man so many good scenes, I forgot how much stuff happened so relatively early on , and how lucky and unlucky we were at times
 
torroar said:
They did not tell him that said cult was pushed into it by Heart-Taker attempting to raise her profile in anticipation of an incoming Everchosen.
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Not faulting you man. Just noting a figure like that is one I'm sure he would like to be aware of, and it's part of a fuller picture of his own ascendance. The fact that they've been holding onto this without telling him is something he probably wouldn't like.

The response would probably to delegate it to the witch hunters anyway, but yeah. A noteworthy thing not to mention.
 
Turn 36 Final Interlude: The Death of Captain Emilia Liesedotte
  • Threadmarks
    • GM Note: And...Goodnight.

    Turn 36 Final Interlude: The Death of Captain Emilia Liesedotte​

    Many years ago, there was a young woman. The daughter of a baker and native of Wulfenburg, she had spent her entire life in the city and had thought that she would die there, after hopefully living a somewhat fulfilling life as a baker herself alongside the rest of her siblings. She was determined to be the best baker she could be and was possessed of a strong will that her parents both were proud of and dreaded at the same time. Her frame was willowy, her hair russet and long. Though she was not particularly beautiful, her prospects for marriage were not too bad considering the comparative wealth of her family. Imagine her parent's discontent when she fell in love with none of the suitors provided for her, but instead with an outsider. His name was Gustav, but he had no last name and was of no notable local family, but was rather a travelling woodsman from far away, come to help deliver his village's lumber to market. They met on a spur of chance, as Gustav was exhausted after a long day and wished to partake of something hearty to eat. The others of his village headed out to spend some of their earnings at a local bar, but Gustav ended up purchasing a hefty meat pie from the bakery. He found himself entranced by the young woman with flour-dusted cheeks and a stern look when he attempted to haggle price.

    Her name, when he begged her for it, would lodge into his brain and heart, remaining there even as he returned home to his village. It would drive him to return, again and again, volunteering repeatedly for his village to make the long journey to Wulfenburg, all so he could meet the baker's daughter again.

    Emilia Liesedotte.

    In turn, the baker's daughter found little impressive in the grimy woodcutter, at least at first. Yet as time went on, she found herself appreciating his earnest manner and bawdy jokes, even if her parents did not much approve. All she'd known was the city, and so she became intrigued by his tales of the outside world. A life away from the city, both more dangerous and yet more exciting. Unforeseen dissatisfaction began to bubble up as she examined her life's trajectory, as well as the startling realization that she'd never even ventured beyond the city gates, much less the other half of Wulfenburg. Talks over bread became walks at night became whispers and fluttering kisses in alleyways. In time, after one more pox-scarred lad, this time the son of an unpleasant but wealthy butcher was pushed in front of her, she made a decision that would change her life forever. The next time Gustav came to town, she declared that if he truly did hold an overflow of affection for her in his heart, he would make an honest woman of her.

    They eloped the next day, with only a letter of apology left behind.

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    "Well…here we are. Zamsau," Gustav gestured proudly with one hand while the other kept on the reigns of the trusty pair of donkeys that pulled the cart forwards.

    The first thing that Emilia noticed was the singing.

    Emilia blinked, her mind whirring as she examined the buildings. In the afternoon sun, Zamsau almost seemed to shimmer before the eyes as the early morning rain began to finish drying up. It was a remarkably large village, all told, at least compared to what she'd originally thought of them. Of course, it was nothing on the size of Wulfenburg, nothing at all, but still. Dozens of folk passed this way and that, singing various songs to themselves as they went about their day. The buildings were painted almost garishly, but it was pleasing to the eye all the same, bright splashes of color amidst the comparatively dull greens and browns of their surroundings. She felt nervousness bubble up in her chest as the rest of the villagers glanced their way, but all that was required was that they see Gustav sitting next to her to welcome her warmly. There were cries, calls, amiable and kind.

    They shortly arrived at Gustav's home nestled along the perimeter. It was a far cry from where she had lived with her parents, but it was altogether more freeing for that. There were no stinking sewers or close-pressed buildings crushing in from all directions.

    It was perfect.

    For a time, at least.

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    A year passed in Zamsau. A year of hard work, sure, but one of joy as well. She grew to know the people of Zamsau, and they her. Old knowledge of baking that remained in her skull allowed her to make many a greeting gift for her neighbors, and for the most part she integrated quite well. Emilia waved to and was waved at as she passed through the village, her body already gaining a bit of hardiness as the softness of city living melted off. Marrying a lumber worker would do that, especially towards the winter months when she had to help him. It was in the course of that year that she met the wife of the headman, an astonishingly beautiful woman named Emeline. She was, undoubtably, the most dominant force in the entire village, easily overriding her husband despite his position in any matter she chose – though of course she only rarely exercised that level of power. It was Emeline who had befriended Emilia the closest, helping introduce her to the rest of the village, inviting and instructing her in the frankly bewilderingly diverse festivals and dances and customs of Zamsau. In all honesty, it felt a bit excessive to Emilia, at least compared to Wulfenburg, but she allowed herself to be swept away out of politeness.

    She participated in the dances and the songs, even if she could not carry close to as clear a tune as her good friend Emeline. She was a bit wary of the times when the men of the village, Gustav included, left for their own 'manly times' in the woods, worried quite reasonably she felt considering the dangers of the Forest of Shadows. At the same time, she felt oddly out of place amidst the gatherings of only the women of the village, her different origins and childhood setting her apart from these people who had lived and acted as they had for generations. She could sew, and gossip, but it was Emeline who led the proceedings and thankfully helped her join in without it being forced. The parties were lavish by the standards of Zamsau, at least, a near enough touch of near-Wulfenburg to be a welcome comfort. She couldn't help but be swept up in the joy and laughter, the smiles and hugs. A bit familiar at first, for her tastes, but thankfully Emilia adapted quickly.

    Then, of course, came the natural result of things for a passionate couple.

    Emilia bore Gustav a child, a beautiful daughter, one that was proudly paraded throughout the rest of the town. Tiny gifts were given, little bows and dresses offered from parents whose daughters had grown too old for them. Emeline organized an outright festival to celebrate. She promised that it was going to be special, the grandest ever, and Emilia felt her heart nearly burst with gratitude. Her daughter would be celebrated by everyone, and already she was thinking of other small boys who might perhaps make a good match. She even began thinking about writing to her parents, if only to let them know of their grandchild, despite how it caused the ever-present smiles around her to flicker. It had taken much, after all, on Gustav and Emeline's part to ease Emilia's passage into the village. They were, as most rural folk were, rightly suspicious of outsiders.

    But, for now at least, life was good.

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    When the witch hunters arrived at the burning ruins of Zamsau, their coming heralded by a driving freezing rain which plainly failed to douse the fires, they found only two survivors. A hollow-eyed woman who held a woodsman's axe in one hand – the axe coated in blood – and held her daughter close in the other. She was near catatonic, shivering in the cold of the rain and staring unblinking with bloodshot eyes. As the multi-colored flames burned, clearly unnatural in their resilience to the rain, the hunters found them in a small ruined cottage just on the edge of the town. The source of the fires was the enormous blast zone etched into the earth, centered around what was likely the former headman's house. There had been rumors, whispers, and quiet investigations aplenty, but that they had come ready to kill only to find the village practically wiped from the map shortly beforehand was mightily suspicious. The woman had dared to try and lift the axe once more, but exposure had seen to her strength enough that it was a simple matter to tug it away.

    Thus, their leader, a witch hunter named Poldi Beriech, calmly placed his crossbow to the woman's still open eyes and ordered her to confess her sins – the rain and wind making usage of anything involving black powder utterly pointless.

    What came out of her mouth was hoarse in the extreme, the throat having suffered from smoke inhalation and screaming aplenty. Yet speak she did. In a dull voice, she poured out her life story into the smoke and rain-choked air. Of her life before. Of Zamsau. Everyone, she noted emotionlessly, was happy in Zamsau. Always. No matter what. Men would lose a hand while logging and laugh it off, women would be cheerful days after a miscarriage at the latest party held at the headman's house. The many festivals, the parties, the life she'd led. Of her husband, though she could not bring herself to say his name, a mote of flickering anger briefly reappearing in her otherwise hollow gaze. She finally spoke of the one named Emeline, of their friendship, and for that she nearly took a crossbow through the eye socket.

    For, as the witch hunters declared, the one named Emeline was no mere rural wife. She was a known entity, one hunted for quite some time, spinning webs of influence, depravity, and control wherever she went. At least until the witch hunters found her again and burned those webs down. She had escaped many times in the past, and her list of crimes were many. To this, the shivering woman who had been offered no coat, no comfort from the wind and rain and smoke, let loose a cold noise of fatally drained amusement. She had learned Emeline's true nature well enough, at the end. How the woman, the witch, the hunters insisted, had known they were coming, none knew. But she had prepared for her leaving, well enough at least. One final party, it had been. There, the cold woman trailed off. Her memories, she confessed, were confused. A haze tinged by blood, fear, and gruesome horror.

    They had been laughter. Wine. Beer. The smiles had grown wide, too wide, teeth flashing in the light of the braziers as much as the knives. The colored powders clogged the lungs as much as the mind, cast as they were freely this way and that. Numbers were beyond her recollection. The details escaped her in the madness of it all, which was not technically uncommon given past encounters in the recollections of the witch hunters. Betrayal featured heavily, as the unfortunate woman had somehow thought that she was anything more than living shield and sanguine resource to the witch, had been a friend. The death of her lover, her husband, the father of her child, rushing out and away from the den of insanity to her home to defend herself.

    There were no corpses on the ground, the tracks and trails already drowned in soot and mud, washing away from the rain even as they spoke. But enough gristle and bone remained caked onto the axe to give credence to her words. Unless it was just one more clever ruse. Feigned innocence was not uncommon as a shield. The question, of course, remained. Even if she had once been innocent and untouched by the darkness of the world, her experience had broken something inside. Broken enough to twist about, mind and soul? Possibly. It would not be the first time, exposure alone corrupting as well as anything else might.

    Better to burn a hundred innocent souls than let one guilty one escape, when they lived in a world where that guilty soul might go on to corrupt or kill a thousand.

    The bodies of the slain were, eventually, located in the burnt-out ruins of the headman's house. A great many skeletons lay below the earth, some yellow and frail with age, others much more recent. Old ritual circle remnants, ruined by flame and rain alike, that had no doubt seen much use beforehand. The bodies of other fallen were left by the wayside, exsanguinated with haste and little care for disposal. The rib cages were blown out from within, as was only expected by the Heart-Taker, of whom had taken many names over the years – Emeline only being the latest. It was a terse discussion of this which broke the woman's fugue, her realization that the Witch Hunters knew who had ruined her, ruined her family, and so much more. When it was confirmed, she let her death grip on the axe fall, only to beg of them to let her help them.

    Her.

    A bedraggled daughter of bakers who had spent just under a year as a wife and was still clutching her newly born child.

    What help could she offer, they asked? Another body in the hunt, she responded, that single ember of anger which they had seen before in her eyes flaring just a bit brighter. The hunters discussed amongst themselves. It could still be a ploy. An act that could be years in the making to ensure a perfectly timed betrayal. On the other hand, the hunters had been a bit lower in numbers recently, and another recruit who had witnessed the true darkness they strove against could be beneficial. If it wasn't a trick, of course. Another debate was had. The woman would be tested by implements holy and painful, her purity tested fully, and if she survived the ordeal, she could possibly join their ranks. The child, however, would have to be taken care of. That it could be delivered to possible relatives in Wulfenburg was another test that could be performed, to see if they truly were parents or others who could confirm that the woman was who she said she was.

    In the end, she agreed, for a hatred and pained need for vengeance had blossomed anew amidst the blood and mud.

    =================================================
    ​
    Many years ago, there was a young witch hunter recruit, who direly began to question her decision to join the ranks of the Silver Hammer after only a few days of her training beginning. Her body had been semi-hardened by living in the outskirts of a rural village for a short amount of time, softening again with pregnancy. Beforehand she had been but a mere baker's daughter. But the Witch Hunters cared little for such excuses. She, among with a small handful of others, screamed and struggled in the forests and fields, pushing their bodies beyond the limits that they had once believed in. Rain. Sleet. Snow. Storm. It did not matter. If their bodies broke, they were allowed some time to heal, at least depending on the severity of the injury. Those that foolishly outright crippled themselves were discarded, though watched, lest their bitterness over their failure fester improperly.

    Sleep became a treasured thing, a hoarded resource whenever possible, for in truth a hunter might need to track for days and nights both. They needed to be relentless in body and spirit in manners that most simple minded and naive folk would find fearsome and strange. And as they ran, they leapt, they sparred, they listened to the stories of horror told by the veterans. Knowledge was pounded into their minds, pounding out less important things as they did so. Knowledge of the enemy, and its many forms. How they had, did, and would act. Personal encounters and more infamous encounters. Reciting scripture of the Gods, though Sigmar obviously held primacy. Failure meant more exercise, lashes, or both. For an entire year, she persevered, as numerous others disappeared from the training fields. Some due to their success, having started with better foundations than her, and others…simply disappeared entirely. The veterans disappeared one by one as well, towards other duties as the 'class' reduced in number.

    Until, finally, she stood alone. Facing her was the Witch Hunter known named Garmund Bregarach. Tall, thin, his nose hooked and bent after being struck, he cut an almost stereotypical figure when most imagined the Witch Hunters. His tall leather hat was well stained by rain and blood, leaving marks that would not come out no matter who well washed. A heavy crossbow on his back, a combat rapier at his side, and over a pound of jangling charms and trinkets to Sigmar and other Gods of the Empire. His eyes were a burning hazel that glared down at her from beneath the brim of his hat, his face cleanshaven and head bald. Scars aplenty covered his body, as they did for all witch hunters that survived long enough.

    It was he that beat her to the ground after ordering her to try and kill him, who presented her with her tokens of office, and dragged her up by the lapels to inform her that she was now his apprentice, and that they were deploying immediately to the Middle Mountains to go hunting for a witch that had ensorcelled their way north from Reikland. The Cult of Sigmar might have been scattered within the dominions of the three Emperors, but the Order of the Silver Hammer had ever had one mission, one guiding – and binding – purpose. To hunt the mutant, the heretic, and the witch.

    And so, they went.

    The stories told, the lore learned, it could not ever compare to the real thing. The horrors and darkness that the apprenticed witch hunter faced eclipsed such things by the second mission.

    ==================================================================​

    "Sir…!"

    "Oh?" Garmund leaned up and away, his yellow and cracked teeth open to the air as he turned about to face her.

    The rest of the village burned around them, each house judged to be a den of heresy and abomination or too close to others that were, each put to the flame. By now, the bodies lashed to the pyres had stopped screaming, the bodies in the gallows did not twitch. Less than a fourth of the population had been judged pure enough to give a chance, to be remanded to the custody of the Cult to watch over following that point. The rest, obviously, had to be purged. And yet, despite this, Emilia had called out in horror as she watched her mentor menace a gaggle of children, none older than ten. The body of their mutant mother lay on the ground where she'd been struck down, the various eyes on her shoulders glassy and the vestigial twitching limbs on her stomach stilled.

    "Something to say, recruit?" He sneered at her, a small salt and pepper goatee having grown on his chin after so long hunting without a chance to shave.

    "They…they're children," she said, her voice growing quiet and uncertain.

    The last she'd seen of her daughter was when she'd foisted her, unannounced, upon her parents. Parents who had been jubilant and outraged to see her again, to hear of what had happened. It had been under the threat of the witch hunters that they had acceded to hosting their granddaughter. Though Garmund cared little, like a stone dial in her mind she could not mistake the anniversary of the day when she'd given her daughter up for her own safety. And, despite what she knew, had been taught, too many of the children that Garmund had been prepared to execute had cried normal tears, their mutations comparatively minor to their mother.

    "And?" Garmund's tone was arch. "They are tainted by darkness, they can only give way to more. Tell me, recruit," he angled himself so that he could keep both the gaggle of children and her in front of him. "I would make it quick. But you…what, you wish to give them mercy?"

    "I…," her voice faltered, her threadbare maternal instincts bumping against good sense and reason.

    However, instead of executing her for heresy or madness, Garmund only laughed, a note of unashamed cruelty in it.

    "Very well!" He shoved one of the mutant children to the ground. "Go," he gestured towards the forest with his sword, and received many uncomprehending stares in return. "GO!" He roared, whirling his blade above them, getting new screams of fear as some of them scramble to their feet. "If I see any of you in sixty seconds, you're dead!"

    None remained in sight after twenty, the last of them the eldest of the boys, one with a single horn growing out of the top of his head staring back at them with bestial eyes before fleeing as well.

    "Sir, I-,"

    "Where else should they have gone, recruit," Garmund snarled as he loomed over her, eyes bloodshot and spots of froth on his lips. "Mmm? No village would take them in, any patrol would see them executed. But perhaps, perhaps," he gestured to the forest, "They will live fulfilling lives rather than being ended quickly and cleanly, just as you wished!"

    Shame burned on her cheeks as the rest of the pure villagers stared at her in confusion and anger. Why had she spoken up? Why had she defended them? Every hunt thus far had involved an adult of some kind, ones who performed terrible depravity or monstrous destruction, but children had for some reason seemed an inviolable subject to her. But she would never forget the look in Garmund's eye as he stared her down, though it would take her many, many years to understand that it was not dark amusement but pity that glinted at her in the firelight.

    =====================================================​

    The fires always seemed to follow her.

    Fire cleansed the body, the soul, and the soil as well. Or at least, that was what everyone hoped.

    Here, now, she could barely remember her name, head still ringing from where it had been banged against the rocks. She saw Garmund thrust the stump of his arm into a fire to cauterize it, the other hand still wielding his heavy crossbow. The twang of its firing was muted, as was the rest of the world. Still, amazingly, it struck its target. The witch-child's laughter cut off abruptly as the bolt tore out its throat and pinned it to the wall of its burning home. The bones of its devoured parents lay within as well, the bones of the priest who had failed to exorcise the non-existent daemon still wet with clinging chunks of meat on the ground nearby.

    "Remember this," Garmund had told her flatly as he kicked the flailing creature further into the flames, "The enemy comes in all forms, in all guises, with all manner of words."

    She hadn't had the strength to respond, not as he stood before her, backlit by the flames of the burning house and the flesh of his left arm still smoking.

    "Sometimes, faith is enough," he continued, gesturing with the crossbow towards the corpse of the priest, "Sometimes, it is not. Fire helps, recruit, as does weaponry, skill, and thoughtfulness."

    The rest of the village did not thank them for freeing them of the abomination's control. Suddenly, they remembered their hunger, their tiredness, their sicknesses, and all the health and joy that they had thought would be eternal was gone. Their memories reasserted themselves, and more than a dozen killed themselves when they realized what they had done under the creature's influence. Most terrible was how unassuming it had been. There was no visible mutation, at least outwardly. Garmund had dragged the blackened skeleton out afterwards, and there it was revealed, the altered skeletal structure, strands of ropey inhuman ligament and joints within the ribcage. Mutant and witch both. For their good deed, they received only fear, and rejection.

    Such was the life of a witch hunter.

    ===============================================​

    "Just go away! It's all you do anyway!"

    Marlisa did not want to see her, her words cutting Emilia through the bone, the slam of the door nearly knocking her off her feet.

    "Daughter…,"

    Emilia tugged the hat from her head and let it fall against the table. Her parents looked to have aged twice as many years as it had been. Their faces were so much more pinched and wrinkled, a shake in their limbs that shouldn't have been there this early. Yet they let her sit, fall, really, into the chair opposite them as she tried to work through the stunted pile of rubble that was her emotions. She had only been granted a short time to visit while Garmund received a silver-coated prosthetic.

    "Must you…," her mother tried before her words failed.

    "I can't…," Emilia muttered, hand going to her forehead. "You don't…you don't understand. What she did, what Gustav did…all I've seen…,"

    "We can't because you won't talk about it," her father placed a calloused and flour-dusted hand atop hers. "Sweetheart…,"

    She couldn't. She wouldn't. They were too…soft. Like she had been. They couldn't comprehend what she'd seen, what she'd done, in only a few short years. They either wouldn't believe it, or wouldn't understand enough, and either way it could lead to too dark a road to think on.

    "I…I have to go," she finally said, standing abruptly. "I…,"

    "Emilia-,"

    "Just…please take care of her," she interrupted, shaking her head as she tugged her hat back on. "Please?"

    "…we'll do our best, dear. But please…,"

    "I have to go," she shook her head and left again.

    =========================================================​

    Hochland, Ostland, Talabecland, and then finally back into Kislev. Her first solo mission, to prove herself, truly. What a hellacious hunt it had been. The witch was good. Very good. Skilled not just in manipulation of the mind but of the world itself, a broken headed 'elementalist' from the small cadres of magic users that dared exist semi-openly in the Empire. Able to manipulate flame, wind, water, and the ground itself as desired. Who also dabbled in necromancy. Which, presumably, was why they'd gone north, into Kislev. Far less protections there, the legacy of Sylvania not penetrating the icy north nearly as well. Which wasn't to say that there was nothing of the unliving there, either.

    "This…would have been easier…if you'd just let me in," she howled to the sky, her lips chapped, head ringing, and skin tinged slightly blue as she stood before the pyre. "But now you are all past redemption in anything but death, in Sigmar's name!"

    The Gospodars had been willing to let her through, the Ungols herding her away from their tainted 'wise women' at arrow-point. But once she'd gotten into Troll Country, it had become a slog. Mutants. Beasts both obvious and expected as well as some that defied expectation and description. The village was made up of exiles, expatriates, open worshippers of darker things than they should have. Of course they hadn't wanted to let her in, nor had they been willing to give up 'someone oppressed and persecuted unlawfully'. She was but one woman, yes, against an entire village, but their walls were made of wood, and their wattle and daubed houses had woven roofs. Tanned leather hide and canvas tents were not the best of kindling, but they would suffice.

    Now the villagers were dead or fled, save for one. The harbinger of their doom, their unthinking and idiotic tolerance bringing her to them.

    "Wait! Spare me, hunter!" The witch cried aloud, nursing the hole that had been shot into their gut.

    "Spare you…?" Emilia laughed, just a bit hysterically, "Do you know what mercy brought me in the past, wretch? Nothing but death."

    She stalked closer, forcibly reloading the crossbow in jerky motions that her numbing fingers struggled with.

    "They were but children, I thought," she continued while slowly shaking her head. "And then not a handful of years later do I find them feasting upon the dead of a merchant caravan! Laughing," she hissed, bloodshot eyes twitching. "And of course, Garmund dragged them before me, and named them before forcing me to confront and kill what I had spared."

    A slight wavering in the air had her dodge to the side and shoot another bolt, this time pinning the witch's hand to the icy ground as a wave of flame briefly bloomed into existence.

    "MERCY!" She yelled aloud as she rolled to her feet and reloaded the crossbow. "TOLERANCE! KINDNESS! Eight dead then, dozens more added to the tally once their movements were mapped!"

    Shame had burned in her that day, shame and anger. That those digusting creatures had looked up at her with those same eyes, mouths still painted red by the flesh they'd partaken in. Garmund's cruel laughter as he bade her to 'inhale the sweet scent of the fruits of mercy when given to the mutant, the heretic, and the witch'. It had smelled of piss, shit, fear, burnt wood, and burning flesh. He'd refused to touch them other than to bind them, saying that it was her responsibility, her choice. Garmund had even gestured to the woods with an expectant look on his face, reciting her earlier objections from years ago in high pitched mockery.

    "I do not beg without something to give in return," they protested as they struggled to pull the bolt free and scrabbled a bit further away. "I…I have information! On others, far worthier targets than I!"

    Finally, Emilia paused, only to then rush forward and straddle the witch, jabbing the bolt of the crossbow a scant inch away from an eye.

    "Then talk, witch, and perhaps you may win yourself a reprieve."

    "I…," the witch's eyes bobbled about.

    "Or I can slay you here and now," Emilia growled.

    They talked, wretched creature that they were. A coward, which was why they had fled so far and so long. Grasping at just one more chance for life. It was the one that there was information on, however, that made Emilia forget the cold entirely. A name. An entity. One who had guided their fumbling steps into heresy in the first place. Amidst the swirling snow and ash of Troll Country, she remembered. She remembered a town where no one was sad, ever, where joy was paramount no matter what. Of parties and scented smoke. Of screams and knives and parties.

    Of an axe meant for wood splitting meat and bone instead.

    "You…you'll let me go now, right? I swear, that's all-," the coward died without knowing it.

    The broadhead penetrated and tore apart their brain instantly.

    Emilia stood, alone now, and immediately began stalking back south to the Empire.

    The Heart-Taker had almost begun to disappear from her mind, so thoroughly did each individual hunt consume her. This was a reminder from Sigmar, surely, to never forget. To never forgive. The cold of Kislev could touch her no longer, for the fire of hate within her burned brighter than ever.

    ===================================================================
    ​
    Many years ago, a witch hunter stood at attention within the courtyard of Wulfenburg Castle, the ancestral seat of the Hohenzollern family. She was not alone. A few of her brothers and sisters stood nearby, some older than her, some younger. No Captains, no recruits, only a scattershot of those in between such ranks. All bore scars, but more importantly, all of them were not particularly well equipped. Much wear and tear was obvious on their gear, and such was true for all Witch Hunters, but there were quite a few who had been forced to work with patched jobs compared to the fresh or more finely polished weaponry that others of their kind could bear. Old nicks and marks on their blades and buckles, old tears in leather and chainmail that were unfixed due to lack of time, expertise, money, or any combination of the three.

    At the same time, the Elector Count didn't look like much either, on a cursory glance.

    But then, Joseph von Hohenzollern didn't need to do much when he had a legendary Runefang on his waist. An enormous mustache waggled on his face as he looked them all up and down. He held himself with an easy confidence, and all knew of the regular raids he led on the beastmen and greenskins that infested the woods. His heavy fur coat concealed a frame no doubt hefty with muscle, his own general hairiness and broadness of shoulder obvious even with it. Ostland might have been a bedraggled backwater, but the Hohenzollerns had at least largely kept them out of the total anarchy of the Era of Three Emperors. He analyzed the ones in front of him with a cool aloofness, which was fair considering he was the one offering his aid to them and not the other way around. Sometimes, the Silver Hammer worked closely with the nominal rulers of the city where they had been founded. Sometimes…not so much.

    "Yes, I suppose you shall all have to suffice," he nodded, rubbing at his chin. "My sponsorship is not something to be taken lightly, witch hunters, but I am a pious man," he puffed his chest out slightly as he said it. "And it benefits us all if Sigmar's own are well-funded in their holy duties."

    Emilia barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes. Faith was best displayed with action, not self-aggrandizing proclamations of it. But she wasn't going to fault someone so long as they backed up those words with actions. By all accounts, Count Hohenzollern was a devout Sigmarite, something that had not necessarily won him much favor with his Ulrican province, the man himself butting up against the Cult of the Wolf God due to their ability to exercise favor just about everywhere but Wulfenburg. That had always been the case, the north subordinate to Middenheim, but Wulfenburg managed to remain somewhat independent.

    Somewhat.

    In any case, she needed the money. The Order wasn't funding her nearly enough to hunt down the Heart-Taker, and many of them seemed to think that she had to have died by that point from age if nothing else. Or they just didn't want to keep spending money for her to come up with dead ends or dead villagers again. Cowards, all of them. Garmund had still believed, but he was dead now, torn apart by beastmen and his corpse used as a flayed banner, his own ribcage forced into the accursed symbol in the dark tongue of the abominations to proclaim the name of the warherd that had run him down. At the least she'd been able to reclaim the body and purify it into ash with flame.

    A sponsorship from the Elector Count, any of them really, even if it was one of the more impoverished provinces, was a lot more than she'd been able to scrounge together before.

    And…perhaps…it would let her remain in Wulfenburg more than the usual. For a time, at least. Maybe she could even see her daughter more than once a year?

    =================================================================​

    "What do you mean she's gone?" Emilia said quietly, the rain slowly washing away the blood on her long leather coat.

    She didn't even take a step through the doorway, into the warmth within. The freezing cold should have been making her shiver near uncontrollably, but she was as still as a statue.

    "She left," her mother said, voice quavering. "She just…disappeared."

    "I'm sorry, Emilia, but…," father shook his head, "It wasn't our…she wasn't happy here, you know that."

    "She was safe!" Emilia hissed, a hand clamping on the edge of the doorway. "In the city, there aren't…," she trailed off.

    It was a lie, one so clear that her body refused to finish the sentence. Witches and heretics were happy to hide amongst the teeming masses, it made it easier to disguise themselves. When she'd accepted the news that there were strange agitations at the temples from Count Hohenzollern, she hadn't questioned it. Yes, it had turned out to just be Ulricans stirring things up with uncharacteristic indirect cunning, but they were dead now and the Count had paid just the same. It could just as easily have been cultists of the Dark Gods, or mutants, or witches disguising their idolatry and accursed natures as priests. It had happened before. It would happen again.

    "It's safer than out there," she said instead, shaking her head slowly. "She's just a little girl!"

    "She's only a year younger than you were when you left!" Mother shouted.

    Emilia paused as she heard the unmistakable note of fear in that voice, the wide eyes, the way both had pulled further and further away from her. She looked down at the blood on her boots as it washed into the street and gutter, and then back up at the homely couple. When had their hair gone white like that? Her father's beard had become a wispy, almost ephemeral thing. They were afraid, but not for her daughter, not like they should have been. No. They were afraid of her. Of the Witch Hunter. The baker's daughter had died in ash and blood and the laughter of a witch. She was as much a stranger to them as she was to her disappeared daughter.

    Where had the time gone?

    "I…I see," she managed and stepped backwards, noting how they unconsciously breathed sighs of relief. "Then…I suppose this is goodbye."

    "Emilia…,"

    "Goodbye mother. Father."

    She never visited them again. There were too many hunts, too much chaos and anarchy throughout the Empire with it split three ways. At least, that was what she told herself. Never before had she thrown herself into her holy work so thoroughly, so completely. Time itself ceased to be counted, day and night congruent in their dismissal as pertinent information aside from marking times for the hunt. By the time she came back around to the city, years later to deliver a report to the Chapterhouse only due to a lack of any nearby trusted messengers, the bakery was gone, turned into a ramshackle and unowned hovel after its owners had died without any successors available. Unowned save for the small group of mutant beggars that had taken for their own. An hour after that discovery, it was a burnt ruin, a year afterwards an empty soot-stained plot. It should have made her weep, but it was getting harder and harder to muster the capacity for such things, as the years went on.

    Besides.

    She had hunting to do.

    ====================================================================​

    "I can't believe it," a woman's voice rang through the air.

    Emilia turned about, her rapier already unsheathed and loaded crossbow resting against her side. To her surprise, it hadn't been one of the citizens of the village of Salkalten. They had learned to stop protesting and to stop being so stubborn and obstinate after she'd hung the first three of them to refuse to give her information. Now the witch was dead, no longer able to work her magics on her herbs and potions that she gave out. Oh, they'd all sworn that it was okay, that she'd been doing it for years, simply using her magic to grow her special plants, but that only made it worse. They'd willingly imbibed potions and utilized tinctures and poultices tainted by magic of all things! Of course she'd had to burn them, to hang and shoot those that had fought back.

    But no.

    It was a witch hunter, of all things. They wore the usual gear, with a few knives along the chest and a heavier broad blade at their side rather than a rapier. Also a handful of pistols, though Emilia didn't much truck with such things. The matches were too finicky in the wind and rain, the guns prone to unreliable explosions.

    "Excuse me?" She sniffed, glaring the woman down before hocking a wad of blood and phlegm to the ground.

    "This…you've killed a fourth of Salkalten," the woman shook her head in disbelief. "All for one woods witch who sold potions to get old folk's rocks off?"

    "That's dangerous talk, hunter," Emilia sneered, tilting her head to the side. "To partake of magic is to partake of corruption."

    "Of course, but you've killed more than just the corrupted," the younger hunter shook their head again. "I had to see the infamous brutality of Emilia Liesedotte myself. The stories don't do you justice."

    "And who are you then, youngling, to protest the salvation of these guilty souls?"

    The interloper snorted and put her hands on her hips, tilting her head enough to reveal her previously shadowed face beneath her wide brimmed hat.

    "Really? You don't recognize your own daughter, mother?"

    Ever so briefly, the world fell away as Emilia stared. The firelight from the pyres behind her were more than enough illumination, even with the sun hidden away by dark grey clouds.

    "What?"

    "Why are you so surprised? It wasn't like I was going to be a baker," the walking impossibility spat to the side.

    "No that's…impossible," Emilia's shake of the head was a jerky thing.

    "My name is Marlisa Liesedotte -,"

    "No-,"

    "My mother is Emilia Liesedotte, veteran templar of the Order of the Silver Hammer,"

    "No-,"

    "Who apprenticed under Garmund Bregarach-,"

    "Stop!" Emilia shouted, her rapier nearly falling out of her fingers as its tip planted itself into the dirt. "You…cannot be her. She…this is a trick," she rallied, mind working as her heart froze, "You think this is the first time that your kind have sought to warp my mind, to-,"

    "My name, position, and deployments have been noted in the Wulfenburg Chapterhouse," the other interrupted as they walked closer, "You can investigate them at your leisure. One would think you would have, at some point, were it not for the fact that you've not step foot there in years."

    Up close, with the light of the fire, Emilia could see it. The face, though it was less scarred and wrinkled, the hair, though it had not become speckled with grey, all of it was of her. All of it. There was not a trace of the heretical wretch that had impregnated her either.

    "I am your daughter."

    Still Emilia was silent.

    "What, nothing to say, mother?"

    "…you need to get out of the Order. Now."

    Marlisa's eyebrows shot up.

    "Excuse me?"

    "This is too dangerous for-,"

    "Too dangerous?!" Marlisa sputtered. "Do you…what…I've been doing this for years already, you madwoman?!"

    "Why?!" Emilia shouted back. "Why in Sigmar's name would you-,"

    "Because you did!"

    Her head was splitting with a newfound migraine while her heart felt like it was stuttering to a halt.

    "That's…,"

    Marlisa gestured towards first herself, and then towards Emilia.

    "You left. You always left. Always doing something, to 'protect us all'. I had to know," Marlisa said through grit teeth, one hand around the hilt of her sword and the other squeezing into a tight fist that caused the leather of her gloves to creak. "I had to know what could possibly keep drawing a mother away from her own child!" The chuckles that bubbled out of her were ugly, pained things. "And oh, yes, I found the answers to my questions."

    "Marlisa…," the name felt odd, made unfamiliar by time and distance on Emilia's tongue. "I…,"

    "Don't," Marlisa huffed, hands going to her hips as she shook her head again. "I don't know what I expected coming here. I've read your records. The only reason you weren't made Captain years ago is because you haven't given up the hunt for Heart-Taker. You know that, right?"

    A piece of driftwood was as good as dry land to a woman who was drowning.

    "Heart-Taker is the reason I-," she snarled, the anger somehow helping her focus through the storm of emotions that raged through her.

    "I know exactly why you became a Witch Hunter!" Marlisa yelled back, eyes flashing in the lights that still burned behind Emilia. "Hell, if anything, she's why I became a Witch Hunter!"

    "If you know what we face, you shouldn't-,"

    "You have no right to tell me anything, old woman, I spent more years with my grandparents than with you!"

    She had felt the talons of daemons punch through her body, had spent half a year laid up after being struck by a minotaur's club, and needed to daily re-wrap the old burn scars on her legs when a cultist of Tzeentch had manipulated a village into thinking she was the witch in need of burning, yet the pain in her chest felt worse than any of them.

    "Then why are you even here," Emilia finally cried aloud, a stinging heat to her tears as they tracked down her face. "To remind me of my failures? To mock me?!"

    "No! I…," Marlisa bite the words off before they could emerge. "I don't know! I just…this was a mistake," she put her hand to her face. "I shouldn't have come here, should have left the job for someone else."

    With that said, her own daughter turned about and began to walk away, shoving her way through the confused and watching crowd. The suddenness of it all caused Emilia to hesitate, confusion piercing through the well-worn wall of surety required by their kind.

    "Wait," Emilia called out as she stumbled after her, "Marlisa!"

    She found her daughter digging through a pack hung on the horse she'd clearly ridden to get here.

    "M-,"

    "Don't," Marlisa responded with an upraised hand, palm forward. She looked terribly pained, as if suffering from a particularly painful poison. "Just…don't. This…wasn't the right time."

    "But-,"

    "Later, I think. Besides," Marlisa sighed as she pulled a water-resistant leather case, "I volunteered for messenger duties. I…have other Chapter Houses to hit before the year is out."

    Emilia just blinked dully at her, the burning emotions in her finally beginning to gutter out as Marlisa also pulled out an amulet with a flat silver disc upon which a hammer was engraved.

    "What?"

    "Templar Emilia Liesedotte, I have the honor of presenting you with your Captain's mark," Marlisa said, her words clipped and forcibly stoic. "With the death of Captain Hector, you've been selected by the Order of the Silver Hammer to take up his position as Captain of the Ostland Witch Hunters."

    Now her world was spinning out from under her all over again.

    "This is…I don't," Emilia's words felt like molasses as they pulled out of her mouth, instinct making her take the mark and message at the same time. "Daughter-,"

    "Another time," Marlisa repeated as she clambered up onto her horse.

    "No, you listen to me," Emilia growled, a bit of heat working its way back in. "This is…this isn't how I wanted us to meet again. This isn't how you were supposed to…,"

    "Grow up?" Marlisa chuckled bitterly. "But I have, mother. I had to, with you jumping in and out of my life as a blood-soaked specter. I followed you into the darkness. And now I'm as bound to the hunt as you."

    It was a hot summer's day, she had spent half of it burning buildings down and setting pyres alight, yet for some reason as Marlisa rode away, Emilia felt like she'd been thrown into the depths of the Sea of Claws. She tried, hard, to reconcile what had just happened with what her mind asserted should have happened. It had been a fully-grown woman who had confronted her, nothing like the child she barely remembered. In truth, what did she know? Scattershot memories, tinted darkly by years of pain and horror, washed out by alcohol and sheer distance and time. What occasions did she remember? A first word? No. A first love? No. None of it. Any of it.

    It might well have been a stranger confronting her, had it not been for her face.

    =====================================================================​

    It was not the smoothest possible process to take command of a province's chapter of hunters. For one thing, ensuring the information was passed securely was paramount, lest the multitude of threats they faced take advantage through one measure or another. Face-stealers, mind control, forgeries of orders and commands, these were just a few of such threats. As such, the entire chapter had to be pulled together into one place to ensure knowledge and authority, which carried its own risks. All of them together were a target, but then they were a target everywhere, at any time. Taking them away from their hunts and duties was also not just a risk, but a surety of some targets getting away. And yet, for all of that, it had to be done.

    This is what Emilia told had herself as she grit her teeth and accepted the testing brands that pressed against her naked body as dozens of men and women stared unflinching as she was tested. It had to be done, for more than once in the past had a witch or a possessed abomination tried to slip their way into their ranks. Only by testing the flesh and soul simultaneously to the highest standard could she be confirmed pure. Every test that had been devised over two thousand years to ensure no witchery, possession, mutation, or taint in any other form was not present was performed one after another. No doubt some would balk at shedding all coverings save for faith. Such protestations on behalf of modesty was but a shield for the guilty and the corrupt to hide behind. She could not, would not attempt to use it. Tattoos could be hidden, marks disguised, and that could not be allowed for one who would be commanding them all to fight, to hunt, and if need be, to die.

    In the back stood Marlisa, just as unblinking as the rest of them, eyes shining in the shadows of the interrogation chamber where only a handful of torches were ever lit.

    Finally, the chains were loosened, and she slumped forward, knees pressing against the cool stone.

    One day down.

    "This one's flesh is pure," the Arch Lector boomed, holding his hammer high. "Her marks and wounds are clear signs of combat against the darkness, and each is a mark of holy honor!"

    "Yet…what of her mind?" He continued, murmuring a prayer that flooded the room with suffocating power, his hand and the brand of a hammer in the palm beginning to glow. "Darkness may lie within a flawless vessel, poison in a faultless chalice!"

    He placed his hand upon her forehead, and Emilia felt herself begin to scream as the light began to scour her.

    Two days to go.

    ===========================================================​

    Her status confirmed, Emilia set to her work with relentless fervor. Her ties to Joseph von Hohenzollern tied into his financial backers in Altdorf and Nuln, which in turn let her drive greater funds towards the poorer Ostland chapter. It was ironic, perhaps, that the founding city of the Order of the Silver Hammer received less attention than the clear heart of the Cult of Sigmar elsewhere in the Empire. Such had been true even before the Era of Three Emperors had begun but trying to muddle one's way past the Cult of Ulric or the Ottilan territories was no simple matter. Her subordinates hunted, burned, and purged, as they always had, just with some better equipment and supplies than before. It wasn't enough, it never would be, but she wasn't about to simply stop just because of that.

    She was reminded of a story that Garmund had once told her in her earlier days of his own earlier days:

    Millions of people inhabited the Empire. Millions of souls, all of them sacred and worth preservation. Yet wherever there was light, there was shadow. Corruption. Heresy. Mutation. Once upon a time, Garmund had questioned his master at their latest pyre, throwing a few more adolescent cultists into the flames. They had only followed their parents into their heresy, after all, they hadn't known the depravity of what it meant to worship Tzeentch, hadn't been old enough to even learn its worst aspects. A few minor animal sacrifices and daubed symbols here and there, but it had been enough to be 'blessed' with some few admittedly beneficial mutations for farming work. Garmund wondered why they did it at all, for it had been a particularly trying hunt. His master had only laughed and gestured at the burning cultists. They were saving them, he reminded Garmund. The fires were cleansing their corrupted bodies and their fouled souls, so that they might pass on redeemed in death. They were delivering to them salvation. Every single one was important. Garmund had, then, asked why it should matter if they were saving them, after all they were evil things that needed to be destroyed. Furthermore, there were always more of them, the Empire, the world itself, was full of such dark creatures.

    Garmund's master had only smiled warmly at him and pointed at the now still bodies as they burned.

    'It mattered to those souls,' his master had said. "It mattered to them."

    It mattered. What they did mattered. It might not save the souls of everyone, but that wasn't the point.

    Furthermore, now that she was the Captain of the Ostland Chapterhouse, she could actively set more resources to hunting down the Heart-Taker. The bitch wasn't necessarily within Ostland anymore, she'd gone up and down the Empire based on Emilia's investigations and own independent hunting missions after all. But now Emilia was a Captain and had far greater resources to channel into the hunt. Before, despite her list of accomplishments, she had been a relative outcast amongst the rest of the Order, her singular obsession pulling her away from other duties and missions, her drive straining the patience and leash of authority of her predecessor. No longer.

    More positively, by virtue of her position, Marlisa quite simply couldn't avoid her forever. Her daughter might have spent much time traveling the north and middle areas of the Empire where the Cult of Ulric did not hold sway enough to hunt down open worshippers of Sigmar, but she was on the rolls as being of the Ostland Chapterhouse. And as such, she had to report in. Time, and necessity, ensured they talked. They had to. It was unavoidable. Which was not to say, however, that it was easy. More than once they had descended into shouting matches. Twice into outright brawls, both particularly frothed up after drinking especially heavily. Even amongst Ostlanders, no one could match witch hunters for brooding and maudlin drinking binges.

    They did not connect easily, well, or often. Their link as parent and child was tenuous at best, further strained by their respective duties. They were master and subordinate, peers within the Order of the Silver Hammer, far more and emphatically than common family. Despite that, Emilia thought Marlisa should have picked a different, better, safer life, and often told her so. Marlisa had eventually told Emilia that she was being a pathetic hypocritical bitch about it, and that she had as much a right as anyone to hunt the dark wretches that writhed in their hidden filth amongst the rest of the Empire's lands.

    That…had not been a pleasant evening. It had landed both in the care of the Shallyans, kept in separate wings so that they could not argue with word and fist alike again too soon. For all of that, however, it was far more than they'd had in the past, when Emilia Liesedotte was little more than a blood-spattered wraith of leather and rustling metal that passed through for but a day once a year and then was gone again. It was that distance and constant departure which had, inexorably, drawn the daughter into the same unfortunate course. At first, out of a confused sense of attempted connection with the only living parent. Then, remarkably, out of an actual sense of duty after witnessing and facing the darkness. Raised not by her own mother but by simple common folk, it turned out that the stubborn streak and sense of duty had passed down along with the same hair and eyes.

    There were too many years apart to fix it all. Too many milestones had been missed, too many birthdays passed by.

    But, by Sigmar, it was something.

    =========================================================================
    ​
    Many years ago, a weathered Witch Hunter Captain slammed a dagger down onto the map of the Empire atop the desk of her office in Wulfenburg. A healthy blanket of silence spread throughout the rest of the room.

    "These past few years have been disastrous," Emilia promptly began.

    That was an understatement. Farm animals screaming in human voices while stumbling about on their hind legs, wells overflowing with clotted blood, plagues of insects with leering humanoid faces had continually devastated crop yields, when those crops didn't simply shrivel away in moments. To the common citizen it was obvious a terrible curse had befallen the Empire. To the Order of the Silver Hammer, it was obvious that they had failed. Filthy magic users had been growing in number for years, some even getting more organized. More than a few Witch Hunters had been forced to coordinate with their lesser counterparts in Sylvania and elsewhere, necromancy growing to be even worse of an issue than usual. Others were plainly just joining the forces of Chaos outright, stepping past the point of redemption entirely. When they died, there would be no salvation for their souls, only the endless hunger of daemons and the laughter of dark thirsting Gods.

    "I'm guessing there's more than that, else you wouldn't have called us all in on such short notice," Marlisa said aloud, getting some grim chuckles from the others.

    Emilia narrowed her eyes at her daughter, but let it pass. It would have been impossible to deny their relations, and so long as Marlisa kept up her hunts with consummate professionalism, accusations of nepotism died as quickly as all mutants, heretics, and witches could only hope to. Besides. It was preferable to the past, and Marlisa was certainly capable of straightening up and falling in line when required.

    "For one thing, I've only called those not actively pursuing certain long-term targets in. Secondly, it's getting worse," Emilia nodded. "There are rumors of a new Everchosen."

    That quite cleanly and rapidly killed whatever little amusement there was in the room.

    "Impossible-,"

    "That's-,"

    Even saying the word seemed to make the shadows in the room grow longer. Morkar. Vangel. Kharduun. An Everchosen was a terrible thing to conceive of, let alone comprehend on any appreciable level. Someone capable of binding together the normally fractious denizens of Chaos, whose lack of long-term unity was one of the sole things preventing the Empire from sliding outright into ruin.

    "I'm not finished!" She said loudly, waiting until they'd quieted again. "Hordes of Chaos worshippers are trickling out of the Wastes in greater numbers than in generations, we've got massive movements of mutants and cultists heading north to Kislev to join them, but more importantly," she slid her finger down on the map to Nuln, "We have rumors that there's some idiot noble named Magnus von Bildhofen who is trying to rally the whole of the Empire behind him."

    "…and?" One, a Gunther, asked.

    "He wouldn't be the first," another veteran hunter scoffed. "One of the Three will put him down soon enough."

    The last Emperor who'd ruled over a unified Empire was several centuries dead. The Era of Three Emperors was a bloody one, marked by warfare between the divided nation like never before. It was, fairly said, that the idea that someone, anyone, could simply come along and bring them all together was patently ridiculous. If anything, the last person to come close was the abominable Vlad von Carstein and his ilk, which only soured her further on the entire thing.

    "Except he's got Wissenland behind him, and people are saying he's been blessed by Sigmar," she cut in, cutting them all off again.

    It was enough. She could practically smell the abrupt, seething anger. False messiahs were a dime and a dozen, and there were few things than falsely claimed divine favor that could set them off.

    "The Lord Protector himself has called upon all of the Chapterhouses to join him in the south, at Nuln, to ascertain the purity or lack thereof of this…Magnus," she nearly spat the name before sighing. "That will leave Count Hohenzollern without our support, however, and he'd been asking us to join him in Kislev."

    "He aims to try and face this Everchosen alone?" Marlisa said, eyes wide.

    "No, but he does aim to aid Kislev. He's been marshalling his strength for some time, but if there were ever a time to use it…" Emilia shrugged.

    "If would be if there is an Everchosen coming south," Marlisa finished, to grumbling agreement from the others present. "Makes sense."

    "Aye," Emilia nodded before leaning against the table with both arms. "The Lord Protector has called, and we are headed south. All of us."

    "All of us?" Gunther said, eyebrow raised. "What if something happens in the city while we're gone?"

    "Would you like to tell the Lord Protector-," she began, only for Gunther to wave his arms about.

    "No, no, I get it."

    "Then it's settled. We go south," Emilia grunted as she pulled up her crossbow onto the table and loaded a pure silver-headed bolt into it. "Get your gear and get moving."

    =====================================================​

    "I can't believe it," Emilia burped as she slammed her tenth tankard of beer down.

    "He's real," Marlisa said, naked awe in her voice. "He's real."

    The two of them drank amongst their peers and kin in the tents, the chilling winds of Kislev practically blowing them down.

    When the Lord Protector had gathered together the largest single assemblage of Witch Hunters in the entire Empire together to possibly have to put down a massive heretical uprising deep in the heartlands, they had been prepared for the worst. To have to, perhaps, even burn down Nuln entirely. Or more. But due to the speed of their travel south, they bore witness to it all. In Altdorf, Emilia herself had joined the other Captains of the Chapterhouses and lashing the man to the stake, only for the fires to gutter out even as the oil was splashed upon him in the gallons. In Middenheim, he walked through the Flame. In Talabheim, the wolves had deafened them with howls as loud as a storm's thunder, a white hammer marked Stag appearing before them all. Even in Marienburg, where faithless money-worshipping fools held power, the seas had tossed themselves about angrily when the merchants had at first denounced him. Triton, it was said, was said to have swum between the islands by many, and Emilia swore she had seen a tossing tail the width of a cathedral in the dark waters.

    The Gods were with him. Were with the man that some were whispering would be the new Emperor, a true Emperor.

    Magnus the Pious, some were already calling him. The man hadn't even taken up Ghal Maraz, instead favoring his family's sword in battle thus far.

    "And then he ruined it," Emilia growled.

    Marlisa grunted in agreement. The rest of the Ostland Witch Hunters did the same, many of them too drunk to manage much more. The others of their kind would have agreed if they hadn't already passed out or had refused entirely. Far too many of the southern Witch Hunters swore off imbibing anything that might 'alter their minds and compromise their judgement'. Just as many smoked holes through personal funds with tobacco instead. Some didn't even do that much, relying on flogging themselves or refusing most all possible earthly pleasures to polish their souls through suffering that they might prove that much more inviolable to the eternal enemy. Or at least, that was what they said.

    "Witches," she hissed, gaining another round of agreeing noises.

    It had all been going so well. A truly holy man. And then he brought forth the witches from all over the Empire, tutored by a foreign inhuman witch, an elf of all things! Elves had raided the shores of Ostland practically since the founding of the Empire, and then he brought forth one? Asur, Druchii, these were just names, and surely ones they appended or discarded as befitted their purposes. But no, Magnus had summoned her, had summoned all the Captains and even the Lord Protector, and had spoken to them in person. Of necessity. Of stringent protections and protocols, of lessons. The Grand Theogonist, three Arch-Lectors, and more had been convinced, and so the man who might become Emperor had sought to convince them as well. To Emilia's shock, she had been convinced. At first, at least.

    But as the weeks went on, her own zealous outrage billowed forth once more, and she sought out another meeting. She was joined by other Captains in this, as they marched across the Empire, and then north. Every time, she walked away convinced, every time, she struggled to come up with arguments enough that she could convince him otherwise. That he was their leader was undeniable. Chosen by the Gods, or at the very least accepted by them, of course! But magic?! Witches?! Or, to use the parlance that he continually yet gently insisted to her, 'wizards'. Only the Lord Protector had not seemed so conflicted, had not met with Magnus once after the initial proclamation and meeting.

    "Is there any news of the Count?" Marlisa abruptly asked.

    "He's dead," Emilia sighed. "Last we heard he was still recovering from his wounds but was riding out to Salkalten. We'll have to negotiate with Victor, then."

    Victor von Hohenzollern was not nearly as devout as his father, though that was not as much of an insult as it might have seemed. If anything, Victor was simply less inclined to solely support the Cult and its Templars as much as the others. The other siblings had varying levels of worthiness in terms of succession, but really the only major difficulty would be if something happened to the Ostland Runefang when the current Count went and got himself killed out of sheer stupid stubbornness. Then again, it was that same Ostlander stubbornness that had seen Emilia and her Chapterhouse outright exhaust their targets with how doggedly they pursued them.

    A shame that Hohenzollerns rushed into danger so easily.

    "If we survive what comes next," Marlisa noted cynically. "The city of Kislev awaits."

    "Should we live or should we die, it will be Sigmar's will," Emilia shot back.

    ===============================================================​

    The snows billowed, the winds howled, and the war raged on.

    "Die!" Emilia snarled as she stabbed her rapier into the Chaos Warrior's eyes, that single vulnerable spot proving to be the divide between life and death for the both of them.

    Their armor was far too strong, blessed by infernal creation, for even the deadliest of her weaponry unless applied correctly. She'd watched plenty of men and women uselessly pound their swords, their spears, their pikes against that armor, only to be slaughtered in turn. But this one, this seven-foot juggernaut of death and fell blessings, had fortunately not yet gained any mutations to provide them with eyes elsewhere on their body. As such, the slit to allow them to see the world outside allowed her to plunge her rapier right in. The push, the give of it, was not quite human, the organic matter within hardier than it should have been, but it was enough to kill them. A daemonic scream and shaking impact knocked her off her feet and nearly snapped her rapier from her death grip on it.

    "Bloody Hellcannons!" She snarled beneath her breath.

    Then the Chaos Warrior's body fell atop her, the sheer weight of all that bulk certainly bruising her and cracking at least one rib.

    "Shit!" She spat, struggling against the weight futilely until another Imperial in battered armor appeared out of the snows.

    "Hold on!" They cried before sheathing their sword and crouching down.

    The two of them grunted and sweat to heft the corpse aside.

    "My thanks," Emilia coughed a bit of blood as she was helped back up to a standing position, stooping momentarily to reclaim her rapier.

    "Of course," the other woman nodded, her blue eyes cool but fierce in her helmet.

    Ah. Young Ortrud Hertwig, one of the most high-profile members of the northern provinces to join in with Magnus from near on the very beginning.

    "We have to keep moving, come on!"

    Then they moved on, joining with others and fighting off the enemy here and there. Marlisa reappeared, as did others, gathering a rag-tag band of fighters from shattered formations. It was a rough and tumble affair. The snowstorm obscured most vision, but there were more than a few guiding lights. The magics of the wizards and the sorcerers both. The booms of fire from Imperial cannons and the infernal machines of the forces of Chaos that cracked the earth with each blast. But more important than them all was the city of Kislev itself, its massive dark stone walls providing the most visible guide than anything else even with so many holes blown through it. They were surrounded, cut off, but damn if they were not going to make a fight of it.

    But then they saw it. Him. Them.

    The duel.

    Emilia would never forget the sight of it. Magnus the Pious stood alone against the Everchosen, locked into mortal combat. His armor bore many tears and rents, the skin revealed blistered and burnt. He was clearly on the retreat as the Everchosen advanced with fury – for the blessed of the Dark Gods was not without his own wounds. The sword that Asavar Kul wielded burned with hellish flames, yet it could not yet find more purchase against his foe. For Magnus wielded a sword that burned as well, but it was with a righteous blue and gold fire, something that Emilia had never seen once before throughout the entire campaign. The thought of intervening in their contest was paramount, but none of them seemed able to move anything but their eyes. It was a phenomenon that seemed shared, for opposite them, on the other side, were Chaos Warriors, daemons, spawn, mutants, and more.

    Both sides were equally enraptured, and so they all watched as what felt like the fate of the entire Old World was decided in front of them.

    Each clash of the blades let loose eruptions of sound equal to the boom of a storm's thunder. The flames of their weapons seared their flesh so quickly that barely a drop of blood could be spilt. The boundless fury of the tribes met the tireless conviction of the Empire, and Emilia could scarcely have said who she thought would win at the time. The world had become so terribly focused on that instant, and she knew then and there that should Magnus fall, should he fail, then all would follow him into the grave. There would never be a leader like him again in time, if ever.

    Until it finally happened. A final clash, the blades somehow moving faster than before, a powerful upwards cleave that transitioned into a downward pommel strike that cracked Magnus' helm and the skull beneath. The Imperials and what few dwarfs that had accompanied them let out groans and gasps of horror, while the forces of Chaos cheered with glee and anticipation at the bloodshed to come. Magnus stumbled backwards, the strange but surely holy light of his blade guttering out as he fell to one knee, blood seeping from his head. Kul stood over him in silence, the nimbus of dark power around him growing stronger in that instant. A dead Imperial was uncovered from the snow by the violence of his fall, a young man not even past his second laying there, hands still clutched around his spear's upper half, eyes staring unblinking at the sky and skin already tinged blue. Magnus visible grimaced at the sight.

    Emilia could see it, then, in a curious but horrifying effect that followed. Behind him, as if the Everchosen had become the lens in an eyeglass, the world stretched out behind him in detail changing before her very eyes. Behind Kul she saw the world as it would be, blasted and burnt, a hellscape of insanity that would forever be in chaotic flux. It was the world he and his Dark Gods would leave behind. It altered everything, left nothing untouched, nothing untainted. And their last chance to stop him had fallen to his knees before him, blood pouring across that bald pate, coating his entire face in a crimson sheen. And yet Emilia couldn't seem to move. As if the world itself wasn't letting her.

    "You have failed, stripling. A worthy effort, but a futile one. None can stop the coming darkness," Asavar spoke, his words a vicious icy hand gripping and tearing at Emilia's soul. "When I strike you down, your paltry army shall die with you, and soon your weakling Empire. They shall break, they shall flee, and they shall die like the cattle they are."

    It was true. It wasn't a proclamation; it was an undeniable fact. The tears that fell from Emilia's eyes were frozen solid, and yet she continued to shed them.

    "Your Gods cannot save you, they are too weak. Your soldiers cannot save you, they are too weak," the Everchosen continued, taking heavy steps forward as he spoke. "Your allies cannot save you, they are too weak. Your rotting, pathetic husk of a nation shall burn, because you are too weak. For I am Asavar the Annointed...and you…? You are nothing, mortal. Nothing."

    Emilia slumped to her knees, as many of the others around them did as well. Each word was a hammer blow to their spirit, to their already flagging energies, practically a physical blow to their bodies. A thin curving line of pure darkness illuminated by hellfire burned into existence behind the Everchosen, haloing him. Magnus gasped for breath, one hand on the ground, the other on his midsection where he'd taken too many blows which had cracked armor and bone in the same strikes. Asavar Kul bore strength beyond mortal men, mutated and warped, daemonically empowered. A casual blow could rend whole knights apart, or so the rumors had gone. Emilia knew them to be truths, not rumors at all, the sight of it all outright forcing her gaze away. Her own body rejected her intent, and out of uncontrolled impulses of self-preservation turned her slightly until all she could see was Asavar's victim.

    But then Magnus spoke, his voice breathless and pinched by pain yet somehow clear despite the snowstorm and the sounds of fighting elsewhere.

    "Even if you strike me down, another shall take my place. And another after that," he said, gritting his teeth as he looked up defiantly, his voice somehow growing stronger and stronger. "You think that the people of the Empire will simply shatter like glass? I think not. They will defy you even if the world itself was breaking."

    The hand that clutched at his broken ribs reached out and clasped around the hilt of his sword, and yet no holy flames enveloped it once more. The Everchosen let loose a sound of amusement that rumbled like a distant avalanche.

    "You put too much faith in them, fool. They are far weaker than you think," Asavar declared as he raised his sword high, the flames around it writhing as if alive.

    It fell like a guillotine, that Bretonnian execution device which had become slightly more popular amongst the southern Chapterhouses, only to pause midflight.

    "-hkk!"

    "Or maybe," Magnus said with a growl that carried through the air effortlessly as he plunged the tip of his sword into the Everchosen's throat and twisted it out and to the side, sending Asavar stumbling back. "We're stronger than you think."

    The holy blue and gold burned brighter than they ever had before, seemingly leaping from the blade into the wound of the Everchosen outright. In an instant, his sword became a simple, mundane thing. The family blade of the Bildhofens seemed to age a hundred years as it fell to the ground, all wonder and splendor gone from it as if spent as fuel. Asavar Kul the Annointed, High Zar of the Kurgan tribes, let loose a monstrous pained scream as the fires hungrily burned in his throat, his sword flung from his hand by some unseen force to disappear in the snows. The nimbus of dark power around him wavered and flickered away, the dark halo of power dissipating entirely.

    "Because sometimes!" Magnus continued, reaching into the snows and pulling forth the upper half of the spear from the corpse he'd fallen over. "OUR FAITH IS ENOUGH!"

    And he plunged that half of a spear – its point still sharp – directly into Asavar's throat, up into his head with such force that it tore head from neck entirely.

    At once, the omnipresent pressure, the painful dread, was gone. Emilia stood as if fired out of a cannon, as did everyone else. The hordes of Chaos reared back, hundreds of daemons disappearing instantly. They milled, perhaps for a second or two before Magnus the Pious coughed out some blood and stood up once more. His sword remained transformed into that dull and unimpressive sight as it had become, yet he grasped it firmly nonetheless as he glared defiance at the assembled hordes of Chaos. Behind them, the Gates of Kislev screeched and roared as they were forced open faster than they should have been. Screaming shouts and howled battle cries erupted from the city as they charged out in their hundreds, their thousands. Emilia swore she could see a young blonde in royal garb thundering out on a blue horse made of ice at the head of them all.

    Magnus, for once, did not use his words, nor the voice that had caused the Gods themselves to respond, that had reforged an Empire.

    He simply pointed his sword at the enemy…and took a step forward.

    Chaos Warriors, mutants, cultists, beastmen, daemons, near numberless and mighty enough to raze the entire Old World to the ground…faltered.

    Turned.

    And ran.

    It was one of the most glorious days of Emilia's life as she screamed and charged alongside everyone else.

    =========================================================================​

    "WHAT! THE HELL! DO YOU MEAN! THEY'RE ALL DEAD?!"

    Emilia shrieked at the top of her lungs at the rest of her depleted Chapterhouse.

    "The Everchosen is dead. The Old World is saved, the Empire has an Emperor again, a true one, the best since Sigmar himself!" She ranted, eyes bloodshot. "And you can't find me one fucking living Hohenzollern?!"

    Their return to Wulfenburg had been confusing, then horrifying, then horrifyingly bloody. The Hohenzollerns, the ruling family of Ostland since the founding of the Empire, had been wiped out. There was no branch family hiding somewhere, only a cult that had somehow gone under their noses this entire time. Worse, she knew exactly who had helped them. The signs were there, now that she'd interrogated and flayed who she'd needed to from amongst their ranks. This had the hand of Heart-Taker in it, either as a backer or a founder to the cult. When? Why? She didn't know, she didn't care to know. Never before in her time as Captain had her Chapterhouse failed so completely. Never had Heart-Taker acted so brazenly, but no doubt the coming of an Everchosen would force boldness, it had for so many other cults in the Empire that the Templars of Sigmar were still working to put down as Magnus made his way south to be crowned Emperor properly.

    "If the Lord Protector hadn't summoned the whole of our Chapterhouse south-," one began.

    "I don't want excuses, I want results! I want this cult dead! All other operations and hunts are suspended until further notice until this cult is gone!"

    "But-,"

    "GO!" Emilia bellowed, outright throwing her snapped rapier's hilt at their head until they all fled her office, leaving her to slump back in her seat.

    Alone, save for Marlisa, at least.

    "…FUCK!" Emilia shouted at the top of her lungs before slumping again in her chair, the violence of her screaming straining her ribs. "Agh, damn it," she winced.

    "You know, you could have accepted healing, mother," Marlisa began what was already becoming their newest recurring argument. "The Jade-,"

    "You might have let those filthy witches touch you, but I won't," Emilia grunted.

    "Mother-,"

    "This is not the time, daughter," Emilia glared at her. "We either need a Hohenzollern or the Raukovs and Freuds are going to start jockeying for the position. Everyone else failed, and we've been gone from Ostland for a year, but you said you had information?"

    "Well," Marlisa shrugged, "I found a Hohenzollern."

    Emilia's entire body twitched.

    "Excuse me?"

    She'd waited until now to tell her? Why? That alone made Emilia suspicious.

    "It's…well," Marlisa sighed, a hand going to her face. "It's their youngest."

    "Well how-,"

    "It's Frederick von Hohenzollern. The one that got exiled for impiety by his father and questioning the existence of the Gods as a child. By all reports he took up the commoner's job of a blacksmith for lack of anything better to do. No major accomplishments, scholarly or militarily, no Knightly Orders joined, and his impiety is brazenly open."

    Emilia blinked, slowly, as Marlisa did not immediately recant her awful joke.

    "Sigmar's…fucking…I…-,"

    The litany of curses that followed took five minutes to complete.

    "Fine…," Emilia snarled as she finished, rubbing her face vigorously. "Go get him. Now."

    "Me? Why can't-,"

    "Marlisa?" Emilia looked at her daughter through her fingers. "Go. Get. Him."

    Only after Marlisa did so did Emilia angrily rip the lower drawer of her desk out and pull out her bottle of Bretonnian brandy and start drinking from the bottle directly.

    An impious Hohenzollern who'd been out of the court and high society for the majority of his life.

    Wonderful.

    Just.

    Wonderful.

    ====================================================================
    ​
    Many years ago, an aging Witch Hunter sighed to herself as she watched a young boy escorted out of Wulfenburg from her window. A blue and silver robed wizard had come to take them away. The hunt had been the same, right up until the part that a call was put down south rather than immediate execution. It screamed against all her sensibilities to let it happen, to let even one of those freaks enter the city at all, but there was nothing for it. The Emperor had made his wishes clear, as had the Grand Theogonist. As such, to deny the words of the duly elected Emperor and the highest of Sigmar's mortal attendants could be itself practically considered heresy. A wonder how the Lord Protector had managed to make it work in his head to do what he had.

    At least the madman had died as all heretics hopefully would one day. And Otto, Maud, and Magnus too, the wretched cowards. When Marlisa had brought the Count's concerns to her, Emilia had mostly dismissed them, right up until a cursory internal investigation brought to light several unfortunate thing. It had infuriated her and embarrassed her simultaneously, that her Chapterhouse be so unclean and insubordinate. The sanctioning of the entire Order of the Silver Hammer had not come as much of a surprise when it did, but that didn't mean she was happy about it. Fools and madmen. There was nothing wrong with zealotry, so long as it was pointed the right damn way.

    Worse, Marlisa was the one who had brought the child to the Magic College's attention.

    Her own daughter, sympathetic to witches? Once, Emilia would have literally killed anyone making such a supposition, such a damning accusation. Except they were not witches now, were they? They were wizards, or wizards-to-be. Those that resisted such things were still to be executed, and those Emilia enjoyed more than she used to simply by virtue of the fact that more than one smarmy bastard should-be-a-witch had mouthed off to her until the wizards had come to take them away. Smug reality-warping bastards. It had grown her fury every damn time to new heights until one of the regular 'Magisters' had informed her rather politely that the majority of such individuals had been executed once their inability to follow the rules of the Colleges had reared their inevitable heads. So that had been a balm…until she remembered it was a bloody witch saying so, meaning it was just as likely to be lies.

    The Count wasn't much better than Marlisa. He'd married a feckless tainted wretch from Kislev, not even a proper Imperial marriage, and had subsequently tainted his bloodline irreversibly. Except she wintery tart wasn't a witch, she was a priestess, yet neither she nor her husband showed any sense of true piety. They could dress it up in makeup and build temples and donate their funds, but it wouldn't change their souls. This long in the hunting, Emilia had grown a well-earned and well-tested sense for such matters. It was only that their false piety was to further the cause of the Cults rather than themselves that had kept Emilia from rallying up her Chapterhouse to put them to task. Well, that and the fact that she'd already had to put a few of her own damn hunters down for trying to get ready to do just that. Idiots.

    "You seem a bit maudlin, mother," Marlisa said as she entered the office, lugging a small keg behind her with two mugs.

    "Just thinking," Emilia huffed. "They're calling it a miracle, what he did in Nordland. Consorting with more magic, with elves even, plus…facing a daemon in such close measure? I don't know if I can believe it."

    A Daemon Prince? It seemed preposterous. More-so that he escaped untainted, though many were attributing the new Count's recent acquisition of aid from the Cult of Shallya to that. Which, perhaps, was fair. Possibly. More likely he'd relied upon the magic of the elves to help protect him somehow, which wasn't particularly heartening either. Or some sort of vampiric magic-crafted blade which had been delivered unto the battle by none other than Ortrud Hertwig, a name that Emilia had not thought to hear again after the Great War. That was just foolishness on her part, a young woman such as her, willing to fight at the Gates themselves, would never simply fade away into the background. And then there was the Count, bumbling his way through life. He had challenged seven different people to duels the literal first day of court he'd had utilizing the archaic laws of challenge that had never been taken off of the books. It was a hell of a way to quite literally cut through bureaucracy, but still. Eight more were told to duel each other rather than keep talking in circles. It was almost refreshing, before she forget just who he was and how he acted.

    "Mmm, fair enough," Marlisa nodded as she set up the keg and began pulling from it. "Anyhow, I have your reports for you to look over. We got another one of Heart-Taker's apprentices near one of the Middle Mountain hamlets, but the hunters didn't manage to take them alive."

    Emilia hissed in discontent even as she took the offered beer.

    "Damn it. Better dead than free to run amok, but that leaves us without any more immediate leads."

    She'd only discovered it in the last handful of years after the Emperor had come to power. Heart-Taker had relied upon the Empire's disunity to move about with impunity. For once in that miserable bitch's life she had to be a bit more cautious. Using her influence to aid the damned cult which had nearly uprooted the entire family tree of the Hohenzollerns had cost her as well. No doubt she'd figured, as many mutants and cults had, that it was best to pump up their profile as much as possible when the Everchosen came south. The Ruinous Powers had no use for useless servants other than as chaff and sacrificial patsies. Unfortunately for Heart-Taker, the Everchosen was dead, and her boldness had cost her severely. Three drug operations had been shut down, the product being laced with unnatural ingredients meant to taint the innards of those who partook, a minor group of Chaos-aligned bandits who gave tribute to Heart-Taker, but more importantly was the discover of the apprentices. Ringleaders, those in charge of groups that at first seemed disconnected until now.

    "Any hot ones," Marlisa corrected as she plopped the reports on the desk. "We still have some cold trails that might heat up again."

    Emilia glanced over them and then toasted her daughter and downing her entire mug.

    "Fine. Let's get to work."

    ===================================================================​

    "Have you heard about what's happened in Nuln? The Emperor and the Count both fought-,"

    "They say the Count only survived because of the elf's magic-,"

    Oscar von Berswin had to duck as a hatchets flew his way and embedded itself in the door. The other Witch Hunters around him looked slowly to the origin point as their Captain quivered with anger from within her office.

    "If you have time to gossip like children, you have time to GET HUNTING!" She ended with a shout before stomping over to them and shoving target sheets in their hands.

    More than one hunter literally got a boot to the ass as they were pushed out of the Chapterhouse.

    ===============================================================​

    The Vampire War was the largest and longest continual conflict that Emilia had ever been involved in save for the Great War. It had come upon her and her hunters as they'd been on the road, undead of all shapes and sizes pouring out of the forests, pursuing anything that still had a beating heart. Even now, she could remember the desperate run to the next village, sleepless nights fending of endless waves of moaning zombies, shooting at Necrarchs and necromancers from afar. Sometimes she hit, sometimes she didn't. There were rumors of the Count doing something in the south, of the rest of the Empire coming to help, but to be frank she and many of her hunters hadn't seen much of any of that. In fact, many of her hunters would never see anything again, not because of starvation or exhaustion by the tireless effort of fighting the undead like so many others had, but of something far more insidious.

    Betrayal.

    "Heart-Taker sends her regard-hgrk!" The mutant's sneer became a confused groan as the saber pierced out of his chest from behind.

    "Get. Away. From. My. Mother," Marlisa snarled as she flung the body aside.

    The last few weeks had been a never-ending effort to keep moving. They had sworn to protect the peoples of the Empire and protect them they would. Especially against magic users such as necromancers and the fewer and fewer Necrarch vampires they had been seeing. Let the Count and the armies have their grand battles, there were villages and hamlets less than a dozen houses strong that needed protecting. They would ride out to one, gather the people up, and return them to one of the more fortified settlements. Or a castle or two, of minor noble families that had opened their doors to refugees after some pointed negotiation. Or being executed for cowardice and treason for trying to get Imperial citizens and Templars of the Silver Hammer killed by undead. It had been working, at least when they found settlements that hadn't been razed to the ground by the undead.

    Until now.

    All around them, the village was aflame. It's hidden mutant population had revealed themselves after Emilia and her hunters had helped see off yet another undead horde, and now all were depleted and vulnerable for it. An attack of pure opportunity, apparently. For years now Emilia had been hunting, tearing apart lesser operations and attacking lieutenants and apprentices, potential successors. Successfully, she would add, save for the fact that every time Heart-Taker seemed to slip away somehow. By now, Emilia was convinced that her foe had unnaturally extended her life with her allegiance to the Dark Powers, possibly far longer than even the records of the Chapterhouse would suggest. It was the only way to explain the resources, the planted agents, all of it.

    "Fuck," Emilia hissed as Marlisa dragged her to her feet. "This is my fault, Sigmar has blighted me for my arrogance-,"

    "Arrogance?" Marlisa interrupted, looking at her askance with tear tracks cutting through the grime on her face. "This is my fault. I convinced you we should aid the lesser villages rather than join the Count in going after Zacharias."

    The two of them limped away from the burning house, joined by several other clearly injured Witch Hunters. Many lay upon the ground unmoving, while others had died in the beds offered by their killers or had been poisoned by seemingly grateful villagers. Exhaustion had worn away at their usual paranoia, and now their enemy had forced them to pay a grisly price for their lack of foresight. Emilia grimaced at the sight of all the dead. The force of the mutants, of these cultists, would have been more than enough to take on the group of ghouls and zombies that had come for them. Several of the mutants that had come bursting from the basements with the heads of toddlers but the bodies of lumberjacks and fish-scaled lions mashed together had been the size of knights. Knights on horses.

    "But I chose this village to go to next," Emilia shook her head as Marlisa helped her sit upon a fallen tree.

    "Mother, these wounds are getting infected," Marlisa said instead of continuing the argument, conceding the loss nonverbally, "You should get some help for it."

    "Slap a poultice on that will hold until we can get to a Priestess of Shallya or a Priest of Sigmar," Emilia waved at her and tugged a flask of alcohol free from her thigh bandolier. "I'll be fine."

    "And your broken arm?"

    Emilia paused in her drinking and glared at her daughter with her left eye, the other having swollen shut and turned black and purple from the beating she'd taken.

    "Will heal."

    "If you just went to one of the Jade Wizards-,"

    "We're not having this conversation again," Emilia interrupted. "There's nothing wrong with me that a priest and some rest won't fix, I'm not going to one of those…those…one of them," she spat on the ground.

    The two of them cut a noticeable contrast, at this point. Emilia did not trust gunpowder weaponry, while Marlisa almost seemed to revel in it, customizing her multiple matchlocks to ensure as rapid firing as possible. She made allowance for a crossbow, sure, but it was a dinky little thing that she kept on her thigh, unlike the much larger and much more effective heavy cranked device that Emilia made use of. Emilia had gotten her silver-tipped rapier repaired and reforged again and again, while her daughter hacked and slashed about with that saber of hers. Nor had Emilia been ignorant to Marlisa adding a few symbols of Morr to her person as they had fought against the undead. It was almost understandable, considering what they were fighting, but it still itched at something deep in Emilia's heart to see it. But that she would willingly visit the wizards was a step too far for even Emilia to accept.

    "Then you'll accept bedrest for the next few months when you can't lift your crossbow or load it, or throw one of your hatchets properly?" Marlisa pressed.

    The two of them glared at one another from beneath the wide brims of their hats.

    "Yes. Like a normal person, with normal and trusted means," Emilia almost bit each word individually as they came out of her mouth. "Not with something that has no possible long-term side effects that are wholly unknown due to a complete lack of history or study-,"

    "Human study," Marlisa interrupted, "Whereas elven studies have stretched back thousands of years-,"

    The other Witch Hunters just watched tiredly as the two argued back and forth, the village continuing to merrily burn down as it went. It would be another long few minutes before the corpses could be gathered, the pure for proper burial at in Wurzen, the closest fortified settlement with a Garden of Morr, the impure to be set upon a pyre. In the end, just as expected, Emilia's wounds grew infected enough that she was forced for even longer bedrest than she'd expected, her body simply no longer as spry as it used to be regardless of her spiritual vigor. There would be no more rescues, no more riding out to aid those in need. Instead, they hunkered down in Wurzen for the rest of the Vampire War, something that would be just one more burr amongst many for the living Witch Hunters that made it through.

    ===================================================================================
    ​
    Some years ago, an old Witch Hunter Captain grunted loudly as she slowly and carefully lowered herself into her chair, her joints popping noisily as she did so. She sucked some air through her gums as her ass tasted leather, her wooden dentures left on the table after she had popped them out still dripping with a bit of saliva. The years had slowly seen her original teeth disappear in number until none had remained, from one measure or another. Getting struck in the face so often was a notable contributor, though others had been torn free while mid-torture when momentarily captured by cultists. That it had happened more than once was the most unusual part about it, though. She had considered getting a metal set made, but that veered a bit too close to the small sect of 'fashion' that Count Hohenzollern had inspired with his own works after the Vampire War.

    "Ugh," she said to herself, her office empty of other personages to hear her complain. "Sigmar, where did the time go?" The last was directed to the large statue of Sigmar which stood over the doorframe, his steely eyes always upon her, watching for the slightest hint of heresy or weakness.

    Also, to potentially be triggered to fall upon an unwelcome intruder as almost literal divine wrath falling from the heavens. OR doorframe, as the case might have been. There were four new floor traps put into place, ready to snap shut over legs or cut them off as the need might have been. That joined the previous ones, those which were ready for just the right moment to fire their broad-headed crossbow bolts right into whoever stepped too close. Which would soon be joined by the two loaded crossbows by her desk, ready to be hefted up and fired immediately. And the three unlit Hohenzollern cocktails in her lower left drawer. In the past, she would have scoffed at needing so many things simply to protect herself. But then, in the past, she'd been that much younger and healthy. Or, at least when not at the pinnacle of health, able to bounce back better.

    Emilia Leisdotte did not often spend time near any fancy mirrors, but she'd stared at her own face in the puddles left behind by the rain to know what she looked like. Any beauty she might have once possessed was long gone, by this point. Scars crisscrossed her face, and thick patches of scar tissue hung in others from where she'd been struck hard enough that bone had protruded outwards. Her face was that of a barely healed leper, she'd heard one of the newer recruits remark when she'd doffed her hat for some reason or another, the full light of the sun fully illuminating her face. The left side of her brow was badly dented inwards, the bone there simply misshapen after a beastmen had stomped on her head but misjudged the angle after he'd taken her legs out from beneath her during an ambush. Both of her ears had gone the cauliflower route, or at least had until the right one had gotten bitten off by a cannibal mutant witch decades old but in the body of a child that had been wandering from orphanage to orphanage feeding. By now, it felt like just about every joint, every large bone in her body clicked with every single movement. And a lot of the small ones too, she noted as she spread the fingers of her left hand wide with palm facing the wall, her eyes tracing how all four of them were bent one way and then the next from being broken in different ways. That she could close that hand around her sword or a crossbow stock at all was a miracle these days. A Sigmar-granted one, surely, to keep her in the fight. No such miracle had been provided for her right eye, left a cloudy ruin by a bolt of lightning fired by the gaping maw that had come into being on a mutated witch's back. The left had gone a bit yellow recently, while her sunken cheeks had reddened permanently. It would likely be the same for her nose, if it hadn't been mostly bitten off by a struggling witch she'd hogtied to a pyre for refusing the Colleges. Her hair had gone an ever-whitening grey, and was thinning besides.

    "Best get back to work then," she said as she leaned forward to look over the papers all over her desk.

    The hunt waited for no one, even women like her who had to light a lot more candles than she used to in order to even see the bloody ink. Which was not to say it hadn't changed too much. There were a lot more hunters than there used to be who were less than half her age now. After a certain threshold of years, hunters simply dropped off the face of the earth or were forced by their injuries into retirement. There was a third sort, of course, the cowards and the broken. Those whose souls and minds were too weak to sustain the hunt any longer, who fell by the wayside. More than one rambling beggar on the street had once been a flinty-eyed agent of righteousness, their lives reducing them again and again into the gutter. But these days, Marlisa was the one training them, not her. Emilia simply couldn't keep up the pace anymore. It didn't mean she didn't lead, that she wasn't the Captain of the Chapterhouse, that she didn't still do her drills, her practices at the range, her rapier work.

    "Burnt cult, burnt cult, target escaped…," she sighed and put that report aside for reassignment to more experienced hunters.

    The war continued. When Heart-Taker hit a caravan for sacrifices? Emilia sent her hunters out to slaughter the cat's paws and rescue the hostages or execute them if they were already too tainted by their experience. If a neophyte priest was subverted through their dreams or simply from being corrupted early on, they were dragged into the dungeons for interrogation before being thrown onto the pyre. At the same time, training compounds for new hunters were attacked, individuals on the road never arrived, and so on and so forth. It had taken Marlisa looking over a web of records and reports to realize it, Emilia thought ruefully. They were attacking each other through proxies now, with more and more of Emilia's time being consumed by that single fight while Marlisa slowly took on more and more of their Chapterhouse's other responsibilities. Costly victories or vicious losses. There didn't seem to be much of a middle ground between the two outcomes.

    "…I need a drink," she groaned as she rose slightly out of the chair and pulled a bottle of ostka out.

    Alone as she was, Marlisa on assignment, she didn't bother with cups or even decorum before drinking it. At her age, she shouldn't have been drinking like this, she knew. Her gout was not going to be happy with her for partaking so liberally, but at this moment she didn't particularly care. The calendar was one of those things that was almost impossible to mess up, and according to that, today was the anniversary of her life completely falling apart and her near death. Even now, her memories were cloudy, that hadn't changed no matter how long she lived. But only now did she realize she was forgetting other things as well about the past. She couldn't remember the faces of her parents, she only remembered they had been afraid of her in their last meeting. She remembered leaving Wulfenburg for Zamsau, and Zamsau itself, but it was a blurry multicolored thing. Hell, she couldn't even remember her own face, not entirely, but she liked to imagine it was somewhat like Marlisa's. Or at least, like Marlisa when they'd first met as adults. Was her hair fair and flaxen, or had it always been wispy like it was now?

    She couldn't remember.

    What she did remember was the heat of the flames. The solid, almost shocking reverberations in her arm when the axe had sunk deep into a cultist. The wailing of her child as she'd run for the only sanctuary she'd known.

    By the time Emilia came out of her own fog, the bottle was empty and she was a lot woozier than when she started. The sound of uproarious laughter made her blink blearily as the windows themselves almost seemed to vibrate. Almost not of her own volition, she stood up and wobbled her way over to the dirty window to glance down in the street. There, Urgdug Greatbellow held to his wobbling belly to some joke or another told by his wife. It was, in fact, the entire damn Hohenzollern Herd, plus or minus only a handful of members. To this day, she could scarcely believe the changes wrought to Frederick von Hohenzollern. Blessed by Sigmar Himself, the magic-loving irritating bastard. But she could see it, the lightening of his hair and eyes, the newfound broadness of shoulder and thew. She'd been so…angry, when he'd returned after a year underground helping the dwarfs. With how mercenary and passionless he'd treated the Gods, treated Sigmar, only to be rewarded for it? Yes, he hadn't set alight when he'd been put to pyre by that idiot from Talabheim. But she blamed that purely on the oil. She flatly refused to allow the miraculous act of Sigmar in aiding Magnus the Pious to be the same as what had happened with that lout, especially with how asinine he'd been at the time.

    She watched as the Count continued with his jokes, to another round of laughter from his family as they ambled aimlessly through the streets below. Children, young adults, witches. She'd known his bloodline would be tainted, and it had been. But had the man cared? No. He'd gone flying down to Altdorf to visit his misbegotten daughters, and celebrated the existence of his tainted older twins. She spat on the rug as she glared at them. The vibrant red hair of Sabine Nassau stuck out amongst them easily, and wasn't that just another failing of the Hohenzollerns. Dedicated merchants, heartless and twisted mercantile, possibly heretically worshipping a God that had yet to be admitted to the wider Cults as established or worth holy recognition. But did anyone care? No. They only saw the gold that came in, or that pretty face.

    Emilia wheeled away from the window, but not before her eye caught that damning gleaming necklace that the Count wore. Pure, concentrated, and strong magic just bouncing there. In the open!

    "Sigmar preserve me from fools and madmen," she muttered as she practically threw herself back into her chair, only to let out a pained wince as her body protested the violent motion as well as the sudden impact.

    Then she was back to her paperwork, she could probably manage another hour or so before the effects of consuming an entire bottle of ostka brought her low for a few hours. Not everyone had access to a bloody cadre of Jade Wizards able to heal them up daily, preventing them from even beginning to show any of the effects of Narlog's Vapors, despite being widely known as one of the biggest drinkers in the entire damned Empire. Some people had to take their lumps from drinking as Ostlanders were wont to do. Still, if her gout kept getting worse, she'd have to cut back even more than she'd thought she would. By Sigmar, she wouldn't go down from the bottle, not yet, not while she could help it.

    "Where are you, you bitch," Emilia muttered to herself as she kept going through the reports and setting them into different piles. "You can't run forever."

    Heart-Taker hadn't openly taken the field in years. She couldn't, not with how Emilia had been hounding her for literally decades. She'd grown quieter, not necessarily more subtle, but simply less active overall. Unless she had managed to get more subtle and quiet. Perhaps she'd taken over another cult, that was a favored tactic of hers. For all that Heart-Taker enjoyed her perfumes and fancy dinners, her excesses obscene and depraved, she was not blinded by it. She flitted from pleasure and joy like an indecisive spider. The warpstone dust and tainted goods for the wedding were just one more example, and to this day Emilia wasn't sure just how much that had cost Heart-Taker to pull off. A lot? Some? Almost nothing? Perfectly gauging her foes resources was impossible, it nearly drove her mad to contemplate for long, and she still couldn't stop herself from trying.

    A knock at the door made Emilia look up in confusion that quickly flipped to suspicion.

    "Password!" She barked.

    "Sigmar's Fist and Solkan's Arrow, the hunger for justice lies in our marrow," a familiar voice rhymed from outside the door.

    "Enter, then purify," Emilia called as she pulled one of the heavy crossbows at her side into her lap.

    What might have been her daughter entered dutifully before turning to the pure silver basin next to the door, cutting her palms on its jagged edges and dousing her face in its bowl of holy water. Only after a few more moments as the water dripped to the ground did Emilia slowly relax.

    "Marlisa," Emilia sighed as her daughter walked forward, swiftly stepping around the traps. "What are you doing here? Don't you have a daughter to see to?"

    The revelation that there was a third living Liesedotte had been quite a surprise. That the husband was not around was not. Unlike Emilia, however, Marlisa had ensured she could spend more than a day out of the year at her daughters' side. Taking a position as part of the Count's council meant she was forced to usually remain within the city, and so was able to spend much of her time when not hunting with her daughter. But this was technically one of Marlisa's days 'off' from council work, which meant that by all rights she should have been at home. If anything Emilia encouraged it, if only to avoid making the mistakes that had nearly ensured the two of them never met again, let alone reconciled.

    But then Emilia saw her daughter's black eye better in the light and the blood trickling down her nose.

    "What happened?"

    "They came…to my home," Marlisa said slowly, her seething fury a sight to behold. "They were branded with her sigil."

    There was no questioning as to who 'she' was.

    "What?!" Emilia was up and nearly vomited as the bottle of ostka sloshed in her stomach, then thought better of it and stuck a finger in her throat so she could do exactly that. "Something so blatant?"

    "Just another poke, to remind us she's around. The arrogance," Marlisa shook her head.

    "Is-,"

    "My daughter is fine. I gave her to Hagrid," Marlisa grunted and wiped the blood coming from her nose. "He'll keep her safe. But some of them got away. I've got hunters on the city gates, Hagrid's put his agents into the tunnels, but they've gone to ground in the city."

    The two women looked into each other's eyes, or eye, as the case might have been.

    "Mother, would you like to go hunting?" Marlisa held out her hand.

    Emilia eyed it for a moment, then her daughter.

    "I haven't been on a good hunt in years."

    Their hands clasped together with a squeak of calluses and leather.

    "Let's see if I remember the steps," Emilia growled as she grabbed her dentures and hefted her crossbow onto her back while grabbing another. A kick and her rapier flew up into her hand from where it had laid on the floor hidden by the desk.

    ============================================================================
    ​
    A few years ago, an old witch hunter sat in a small room that stank of tinctures and pastes for various medicinal uses. Her body had been ravaged by very many decades of wounds and poisons and diseases forced upon her by unnatural forces. Her wooden dentures lay cradled in her one functioning hand, the other having grown so arthritic and stiff that it could not clench or open without extreme effort, force, and pain. Her hair was thinning significantly, where it still grew at all. The entire right half of her head had been splashed with flames and cracked with a falling beam from a ceiling while escaping from a burning warehouse – that she had survived the severe skull fracture and burns was considered a miracle by the physicians that had seen to her. The left half of her face had been dented inward, once long ago in the past and more recently by a blacksmith compelled with sorcery, and yet that yellowed and rheumy orb was the only one remaining in her head. Its peer had not survived the beam, though it had gone blind years ago.

    She was not alone, here, though. Her daughter Marlisa sat next to her on a stool, two hands clasped around that frozen left claw, face locked into a grim stoic rictus. Opposite them, leaning with both arms behind them against a cabinet covered in vials and flasks and more, was the physician they had come to consult with. Doctor Ziebermann had been educated in the south, and was widely considered one of the most skilled of his kind in the city, combining herbalism, modern medicine, and even surgical techniques to see to the health of his patients.

    "I'm sorry," the doctor said quietly, "But there's nothing I can do."

    "But-," Marlisa began immediately, only to quiet as Ziebermann held up a hand.

    "If, perhaps, she had started a regimen of my tinctures and tonics ten, no, twenty years ago, we wouldn't be here for some time yet," the balding man said, pinching at the bridge of his nose. "Physical activity and exercise are valuable, but not when that physical activity results in repeated breakages of bone and ligament, stressing of joints, and poisoning of the blood through infected wounds."

    Emilia said nothing, she simply stared a hole in the wall, her hat in her lap.

    "I have heard in my years here in Ostland that you refer to these effects as 'Narlog's Vapors'," Ziebermann continued, "And yes, the rampant abuse of alcohol to the extent that most Ostlanders fall into is statistically alarming, as is the percentage of deaths relating to it, but it is more than that," he said as he pointed to the yellowing of Emilia's skin. "This extent of jaundice is…terribly thorough. Not to mention the weakness of your body after so much wear and tear. It simply…cannot…fight it off."

    The freezing cold of Kislev's oblast, the pouring winter rains of the Empire, she had weathered them all.

    But now she simply could not stop trembling, day or night, hot or cold.

    It was as if her entire body, ever so slowly, was simply shaking itself apart.

    As if all her sinew and bone were unwinding.

    "There's surely significant damage in your lungs," Ziebermann said as he picked up some of the papers on a small table next to him. "So much smoke, so many years of breathing it in," he paused and looked at them with naked fear, "From any source, ahem," he coughed and moved on, "And internal damages from your bones being broken in on themselves repeatedly over time."

    "Then…something for the pain at least." Marlisa said quietly, her plea touched with a bit of desperate heat.

    "Marlisa," Emilia finally spoke as she fit her dentures back in, her voice a wet rasp which terminated in a wheezing cough. "No."

    "Yes I…suspect she doesn't require it, do you, ma'am," Ziebermann said cautiously, making Marlisa's head whip around.

    "What?"

    "Based on the results of my reflex and response tests, I suspect your mother has gone numb in certain areas already," the doctor's voice quavered as Marlisa transformed from tired and grieving daughter to something all together more furious.

    "What?!" She cried aloud, standing with such force her stool was flung out from beneath her, eyes narrowed and glaring not at the doctor but at the patient.

    "Only in some places," Emilia admitted, ignoring the horrified look on her daughter's face to look at the doctor's. "How did you notice?"

    "It was minute, almost imperceptible, you were quite good at forcing twitches in response, but…," Ziebermann shrugged helplessly, "I have been doing this for some time."

    "How is this possible," Marlisa growled. "She bears no frostbite, no curse, no plague of the senses!"

    Finally, the physician's eyes lit up, his mind leaping to a somewhat more palatable target – knowledge.

    "Ah, that is perhaps what it might seem like, but I have noticed, after thirty years of working in medicine and the living body, certain oddities," he said quickly, pleased to speak on his own research, though he quailed slightly as both veterans stared him down. "Ahem. That is, much like the blood flows and ebbs like the tides of the ocean, so too are there reefs within, bedrock vital portions of life itself in hidden form. My lady," he bowed his head with respect to Emilia while also helping him not have to look at their eyes, "You have been struck across the body in so many places, set on fire, blown up, thrown about by…," he gulped, "Thrown about with great force, and have been apparently struck by…by lightning, yes?"

    "Thrice," Emilia croaked, "All by witches, one by hand, another by staff, and a third called it out of the sky on a summer's cloudless day."

    "Exactly," Ziebermann said, spine bending back as he straightened, the eager gleam in his eyes dimming immediately upon having to match gazes with the witch hunters. "That, is to say, erm, that according to the Aqua Sanguis theories of-,"

    "The point, herr doctor," Marlisa interrupted, one hand coming to clench on her mother's shoulder, the other at the saber on her hip.

    "The connections of the body, the reefs, I suspect that years of trauma have, that is, have become damaged," he blabbered rapidly, "The tidal flow of her blood through her body is broken by these…I have been referring to them as marrow reefs in my research, and," he cut himself off as Marlisa tilted her head. "I mean to say that while her blood still flows to these extremities and the like, the sensations…don't," he finished lamely before clearing his throat nervously.

    No one spoke for a moment, the stretching silence interrupted only once by a distant and muffled booming as some cannons were being tested in the Smokelands to the west.

    "Well, not that this isn't all fascinating," Emilia finally said as she slapped her knees and made to stand up. "But this has clearly been a waste of time."

    "Captain Liesedotte!" Ziebermann waved his hands about, his eyes wide. "I don't think I have accurately described the magnitude of the issues here! If you maintain your current lifestyle, I cannot guarantee that you will live much longer!"

    "And?" Emilia cut him off, her jaundiced eye still managing a powerful glare. "I'm already older than plenty of others."

    "B-but-,"

    "In your…educated…opinion, herr doctor," she said as she wrenched donned her hat once more, "How long do I have?"

    "I-,"

    "Answer the question, doctor," Marlisa said, a gulf of deadened exhaustion clear in her voice. "Please, and we shall leave. Your payment is already confirmed, is it not?"

    Doctor Zierbermann just looked back and forth between the two and sighed, head slumping in defeat.

    "Very well. If you are not…seen off," his voice wavered there, "By outside forces, in my educated opinion you should have but a handful of years left to you. Likely less than more."

    Emilia tugged the door of the room open and breathed in the surprisingly clear air of the city, the stink of so many things drowned beneath a cool spring rain.

    "Fine. Marlisa. Pay the man," she said over her shoulder as she exited.

    Even though she hobbled madly, her pace slowed by any number of her body's issues, the sight of her equipment had the crowds parting before her. The symbols of Sigmar were still finely polished upon her gear, the icon atop her hat brightest of all, even in the rain. Emilia kept moving, and it was not a few minutes before she was rejoined by Marlisa, her daughter melting out of the shadows in a way that Emilia simply couldn't anymore. The faint spatter of blood on Marlisa's face was already almost completely washed away by the rain, her blade surely cleaned before being put back in the sheath.

    "Well?" Emilia grunted as the two made their way through the alleys.

    "Quick. Clean," Marlisa said just as curtly as they moved.

    "Egh, more than he deserved."

    "Heart-Taker will know it was us, one way or another, didn't see a need to draw it out," Marlisa shot back.

    Emilia raised her arthritically twisted left hand to pause their conversation as they turned the corner. On the ground before them, a man whimpered as he clutched as his stomach. Opposite him, the clear causes of his injury, was a pair of men with wild looks in their eyes and small clubs in their hands. All three paused at the sight of them.

    "What's going on here?" Emilia rasped, eye bouncing between them all.

    "I-we-," one of the toughs began.

    "Ee's a thief, 'ee is, stole from us!"

    Emilia was prepared to just walk through them and be on her way before she realized that Marlisa was not preparing to follow her. In fact, her daughter stalked forward with purpose. They'd realized, quite clearly, what and who they were. The fear was blatant on their faces, including them one on the ground. It was to that one that Marlisa stared at harder before leaning down and tearing open his already ruined tunic. Emilia stared, bemused, as her daughter tore the shirt further to examine a surprisingly intricate blue bull's head tattoo on his chest just over his heart.

    "Do bulls run free in the river?" Marlisa said nonsensically.

    To Emilia's surprise, the man grit his teeth and answered just as nonsensically.

    "There's a log jam by Roezfels way," he gasped out.

    "Mmm."

    Marlisa then swiftly stood up, unsheathed her sword, and decapitate both toughs in the same stroke. Then she helped the man stand up, exchanging a small, whispered conversation that Emilia couldn't hear with the condition of her ears anymore, and then sent him stumbling away. Only then did she rejoin her.

    "Are you going to tell me what that was about?"

    "He's a Smoggel Riverhead, one of Hagrid's men," Marlisa answered, finally granting Emilia a spot of clarity. "They opened up recruitment to non-halflings a few years ago."

    "Ah. From your…other job," Emilia said with a raised eyebrow.

    It had been a shock when Marlisa had become one of the Count's advisors, but the Order was happy about it. It let them have a closer eye on the Count, or more importantly, his magic-wielding abominations that he happily called children and wife. More worrying was her connections with Hagrid Baggins, once known as a notorious agent of the Quinsberry Lodge. Generally, the Order did not bother with such secular organizations, as focused as they were on business and pushing secular agendas with nothing to do with Chaos. Except when agents of Chaos co-opted such works for their own purposes. The reign of that particularly 'Cousin' was remembered mostly because for a time the Order had been worried that a devotee of the Blood God had suborned one of the short folk.

    "Yes. I have a multitude of responsibilities," Marlisa said with the faintest bit of cheer before it soured. "Such as a daughter's duty to her mother. How could you not tell me?"

    "What would it have changed? Portions of me have gone numb," Emilia shrugged, "There is nothing to be done about it."

    If Marlisa ground her teeth any harder, they would have broken apart in her mouth.

    "There is a way, and you would leave me grieving you rather than accept it," she hissed out, each word a splash of acid.

    "Marlisa!"

    "No, you listen to me," Marlisa growled, grabbing her mothers by the shoulders, fingers sinking oddly against the leather, chain, and bumpy scar tissue beneath. "They could help you."

    Emilia had but one functioning hand and wrapped it around one of Marlisa's wrists.

    "Marlisa, daughter," her voice was soft but still audible beneath the rain. "I. Am. Old. Very old. There is nothing that they could do that would somehow miraculously make me live that much longer."

    Marlisa slowly closed her eyes and leaned her head forwards until their foreheads were touching beneath their hats.

    "I just…,"

    "I know."

    They stood there in silence with only corpses and the rain as companions for a few minutes more before continuing on their way. It was a while longer until Emilia stumped her way up into the Chapterhouse, then to her office, then past the various traps she'd set up. Only once she'd sat down in her terribly uncomfortable chair did she let herself relax, ever so slightly. Just because it would be harder to attack her in the Chapterhouse than in the streets and alleys didn't mean it wasn't impossible. Marlisa sat in another chair facing the desk. They remained in silence once more after letting out simultaneous gusty sighs as Emilia kicked open her bottom shelf and tugged out a bottle of ostka.

    "Really?" Marlisa finally said as she eyed it.

    "What?" Emilia looked at her askance, then down at the bottle. "Oh, why not. I'm dying anyhow."

    Marlisa blinked very rapidly at that but did not move to stop her mother from tugging the cork loose with her wooden teeth and begin drinking from the bottle directly. Emilia continued drinking until the bottle was half empty, slamming it down onto the desk afterwards but not letting go.

    "So," Emilia kicked her feet up on the desk, displaying the greatest amount of disregard for her station that Marlisa had ever seen. "How soon do you think that Heart-Taker will respond?"

    "Well, considering we've been going to one of her agents for a few weeks now, I have no doubt she's…aware…of your condition," Marlisa said as she rubbed at her temples. "She'll likely make more and more aggressive moves."

    "Cause I'm dying!" Emilia crowed loudly, gesturing with the bottle wildly.

    Marlisa hunched; her head hung low.

    "So…," she finally said, the woman who'd burned villages down and hung three generations of households at once reduced to a slight quaver. "What happens next?"

    "We hunt. We interrogate. We collect information. We hunt her down," Emilia said as she drank a bit more from the bottle. "And that's all we can do."

    And she very pointedly ignored the tears falling down Marlisa's face, just as Marlisa ignored the ones coming down her's.

    ======================================================================================
    ​
    A few weeks ago, an ancient witch hunter, by regular and Silver Hammer standards, coughed into her fist. She examined the red staining the leather and quirked an eyebrow at the sight of it before returning to the papers scattered across her desk. The pain in what parts of her body she could still feel, 'marrow reef' damage notwithstanding, was especially far from her today. Because today it had finally happened. Minor thefts of blackpowder sent out on regular caravans to the militia groups with access to handguns. The shifting of cult movements this way and that, hunts progressing and interrogations proceeding apace, information all flowing back towards the Chapterhouse in Wulfenburg. It was disarming the militia after they'd grown to rely on the stuff and neglecting the crossbow for times of extreme weather. At least plenty of villagers still had generational experience with longbows. But the militia, while not the Armies, were the first line of defense for a vast number of minor settlements throughout the entire province. Sometimes the Silver Hammer had crashed down on subverted militia groups, but just as many times did they come to the aid of militia forces struggling to put down uprisings or witch sightings.

    But here? Now? It all crystallized before her.

    "There. You. Are," she whispered, coughing again and frowning at the red splatter on some of the papers. "Shit. Damn," she said as she began shuffling through them all.

    A split. Two directions.

    Emilia thumped over to the door of the Chapterhouse and slammed it open with her shoulder. Below her, thirty Witch Hunters glanced up where they sat in the common room. They were all bunched up at their tables, some of them scarfing down hearty meals before proceeding elsewhere, others resting after a hunt, and still others simply speaking with a degree of freedom that they could not with others not of the Silver Hammer. More importantly, was Marlisa, busy speaking to a handful of hunters with her arms folded under her chest, one hand pointing at them as she gave them marching orders.

    "Marlisa!" Emilia barked, her increasingly wet and faint rasp disappearing for that single word.

    For the first time in almost two decades, Emilia Liesedotte's voice filled an entire room like the clear ringing of a Grand Cathedral's bell. Thirty spines straightened as one. Standing hunters snapped to attention, while those sitting nearly flew out of their chairs to do the same. Marlisa did not even pause, her body already automatically pulling her up the stairs to the upper office and in without a single moment of hesitation or the slightest pause. In fact, the veteran Witch Hunter barely seemed to realize what had happened until she blinked and realized that Emilia had closed the office door behind her.

    "…mother?" Marlisa said cautiously, still blinking at what had happened.

    "She's made her move," Emilia said simply, slapping a hand onto the papers.

    "She – oh!"

    "Exactly," Emilia nodded eagerly, moving about with a disturbing amount of lightness. "Two groups. One's heading north, one's heading east. That's where she's taking the gunpowder. Years of building up supply, subverting militia, stealing small bits and pieces, leading to this."

    "Kislev I understand," Marlisa tilted her head. "She's trying to put a match to their own powderkeg, but what's going on in the east?"

    Emilia shrugged, or rather, moved the arm still capable of that.

    "I don't know, and that's the problem. It's a clear attempt to divide our resources."

    "We should get the Count to help," Marlisa said immediately, only for Emilia to wave her off.

    "That's not needed, we can handle this," she sniffed.

    "Mother-,"

    "I want you to take half of the hunters in the city and head north, all right? Stop that northern caravan from hitting the border, kill them all if you have to. And if the Heart-Taker is there…," Emilia finally trailed off, "If she's there, kill her. I don't care who puts her down," she lied.

    "And you're just going to go after the eastern group alone? With almost no information?"

    Emilia coughed again into her fist, and this time Marlisa saw it, her eyes wide.

    "Yes," she finally said, making her daughter's eyes flick up to look into her own. "But not alone. I'll be bringing along Witch Hunters with me, and I aim to kill me a witch," she said with finality.

    Marlisa pleaded. She cajoled. She outright threatened. But none of it worked.

    "Marlisa," Emilia called out after her daughter as she exited her office. "Sigmar keep you."

    Marlisa's eyes shimmered with something before her expression firmed, her voice filled with exhausted acceptance.

    "And you, mother."

    Emilia did not initially follow her out, even as she heard Marlisa begin separating the hunters. Instead, she glanced around the office that had been hers for so long. She eyed the statue of Sigmar, the traps placed everywhere, the blessed basin, and all the various holy trinkets she'd acquired over the years, the few satisfactory and untainted trophies. Then she hobbled over to the desk and tugged open the secret compartment behind the chair and lugged out a small keg of Bugman's Best, straining to thump it atop the desk. A letter on finest vellum and wrapped in a small silver ribbon was placed atop it. Then she tugged the leather glove on her right hand free and ran her calloused fingers over the wood of the desk, feeling its grain one last time. Then she thumped out of the office, taking her key and pocketing it as she went. Below, exactly fifteen hunters remained, staring up at her with determined looks.

    "Well, what are you waiting for!?" She barked, "Get mounted and get ready, assemble by the easternmost gate in a few minutes!"

    A flurry of activity had them disappearing within half a minute, though Emilia took it slower as she descended the steps, running her hand along the bannister as she went. She paused by the fire, and picked up an abandoned mug of beer, finished it off, and took a thick bite of an untouched turkey leg. She proceeded quite quickly out of the emptied Chapterhouse, hearing the thundering of horses galloping away, and turned about so she could see it. From the outside, it was a dreary thing, half-home, half-temple to Sigmar, deliberately shadowed and outwardly ramshackle to bely the sturdy architecture within. Then she turned around again and thumped her way across the street and down an alleyway, popping out on another street. Here, a distantly familiar smell caught her nose, as it had every time she passed this way. Here, for the first time ever, she steered towards it, a small voice calling out to the crowds.

    "Fresh bread for sale! Fresh – oh," the small girl with flour dusting her cheeks and apron cut herself off as she approached, fear in her suddenly very wide eyes.

    She'd stood atop a barrel just outside the doorway, and now the shaking in her knees might very well make her fall off.

    "Hello," Emilia said, something making her voice thick and slow. "Fresh bread, huh?"

    "Uh…uh…," the girl stammered.

    "Emmy," a man's voice echoed out from within before revealing a round-cheeked baker with remarkably bushy eyebrows. "Are you all right? You – oh! Master Witch Hunter," he stammered. "I…I…,"

    "How much for a loaf," Emilia interrupted him.

    "O-oh, for a, a fine servant of Sigmar, we wouldn't darest-,"

    "How much," she cut him off calmly. "For a loaf of black rye?"

    "I…," the man swallowed. "Well, for-,"

    "Forget it," she shook her head as she dug into her pocket and pulled out a coinpurse and tossed it at him. "That should be enough."

    His eyes bugged out of his head as he opened it and looked inside. After all. The average peasant could expect often only a few crown's worth of wealth to come into their possession over the course of an entire year. A hundred was enough to sustain their family for years.

    "Ma'am!"

    "I'm on a tight schedule, get the loaf."

    Thankfully, he went, disappearing inside and reappearing in a flash, holding the tightly wrapped loaf in his hands.

    "I am…so grateful-,"

    "Show it by keeping your daughter safe," she said roughly before thumping away.

    It was only as she was riding her horse down to the gate that she took a bite from the still hot bread. She made it a single bite in before something got in her eye as she rode. Probably just some dirt or dust.

    =========================================================================​

    Today, an old, angry woman rode out on her final hunt.

    The sunlight shined down through a scattered bunch of fluffy white clouds, all with an almost too-vibrant blue sky. Which was odd, considering this was the depths of winter and the last remaining few days of the year.

    The caravan was just up ahead, pushing their stolen horses as quickly as they could along the road. Nearby was a small copse. No doubt, before their pursuit had appeared, they had acted as just any other sort of merchant caravan. But they hadn't particularly made an effort to be quiet or subtle. Which, rather predictably, had caused their targets to panic. As they'd hunted down the agents left behind, the contacts who were abandoned, they came closer and closer as their pursuit ground on. Nearby other hunters had responded to her messages, and their numbers had grown as they had traveled east and south away from Wulfenburg. And now she had them. Either that, or the guards that surrounded this caravan were all violently paranoid given that more than one of them had begun screaming and shouting at their approach. Some of them actually popped out of the wagons and began shooting at them with crossbows.

    "SIGMAAAAAAAR!" Emilia cried, her voice loud and clear.

    "SIGMAAAAAAAAAR!" The rest of her hunters cried out from around her.

    A flurry of pistol shots, crossbows, and even a loudly booming handgun cracked and whistled from all around her. Unsurprisingly, one of the wagons exploded, its stolen gunpowder contents set alight.

    "Come on," she leaned against her horse. "Come on!"

    It wasn't a proper cavalry charge, but the explosion had utterly panicked the horses of the caravan, and now anarchy reigned. The moment they got amongst the caravan, mutants and abominations began leaping out of the wagons. Emilia was forced off of her horse as a bolt of sorcerous energies struck her steed across the head, turning it inside out starting at the head at rapid speed. The rippling wave of transformation got to the saddle before the horse exploded into a mist of meat and bone. When Emilia struck the earth, something in her body crunched, but that wasn't particularly unusual. She rolled to her feet regardless, tugging her rapier free as she went. Her heart was pounding, her lungs were heaving, and yet for some reason she wasn't straining to exist, to functionally live, as she had for so long.

    Especially because she saw who had killed her horse.

    It was as if she'd traveled back to the past. There she was, dressed in a low-cut dress, jewelry jangling around her neck and ears. Her face was unmarred and untouched by time, her hair just as glossy and shining as it had been the day they'd met. But then she immediately began noticing the differences. Her shining teeth were bared, her gleaming eyes wide and bloodshot, her hair frazzled. And the glowing aura of dark power which surrounded her, though that felt familiar for some reason in her muddled memories of the very distant past at this point. It was mostly a haze, that fateful night when her world had changed forever, but that aura she could still remember. A thin blade, a rapier of all things, ironically sat on her wide hips.

    "EMELINE!!!!!!" Emilia howled, her voice guttural and strained.

    The battle raged all around them, Witch Hunters grappling with mutants, acolytes, creations, mind-enslaved servants, but the two of them just stared at one another.

    "It's you," Emeline snarled.

    "It's me!" Emilia shouted as she began thumping forward.

    A small ball of energy flew out of the witch's hand, to which Emilia twisted at the waist to let pass by her. Then a man with that magical energy filling his empty eye sockets came wailing out from behind a fallen wagon, cleavers in his hands. She had to pause and pull back from his initial wild swinging before she skewered him through the chest and knocked him down, stabbing him in the eyes to finish him off. By the time she looked up again, she saw the backside of her foe disappearing around another wagon.

    "Oh no you don't," she growled beneath her breath as she kept moving, tugging a vial free from her chest bandolier and downing it.

    For the first time in years, she felt her left hand twitch and flex. Ziebermann had been good for something, at least.

    "GET BACK HERE!"

    Wagons exploded as gunpowder ignited. Hunters grappled, hunters fought, hunters fell. But their enemies fell around them as well. Decades of hunting, corralling, interrogating, knocking out targets and knocking down doors. Pruning and pruning and pruning of the thorny tangle that was Heart-Taker and her organization. All of it culminating in the here and now. Years of loss, of pain, of suffering. She'd lost too many hunters to this, over the years, pursuing the investigation. Too much of her body had fallen by the wayside, and now it was just completely falling apart. Her will was strong, but any longer and she would be totally invalid, and that was quite simply unacceptable.

    "EMELINE-HURGH!" Her cry ended abruptly as she was slammed against a burning and broken wagon.

    She thrust her rapier down through their foot and withdrew a dagger from her belt, shoving it through the throat and into the brain of her attacker before she'd even properly begun to process what they looked like. Nor was she able to spend the time to look at them, as she was already moving on.

    "All these years, and you won't even face me yourself!?"

    Mutant. Ensorcelled guard. Another exploding wagon that could have killed her if she hadn't ducked low to the ground. Smoke was clogging the air, her lungs, her eye. But she kept pushing forward.

    "EMELINE!"

    This time, she saw the bolt coming, and was able to drag a screaming mutant off of a dying hunter in front of her. This time, the energy rippled over them and caused their flesh to simply melt off of their bones, leaving the organs within functioning within the open air. At least until they immediately began to fail. Emeline stared at her through the smoke, almost shocked. The caravan was dead in the water, this was undeniable, and both knew it. Even if they managed to kill every single Witch Hunter present, they would have no chance of getting moving again. Too many wagons were already destroyed, and more were going down the whole time. This time, when they locked eyes, Emeline turned and ran before Emilia could begin chasing after her. Out of the wagons, towards the trees.

    "Coward, won't die with your slaves, huh?" Emilia muttered as she chased after.

    The copse was good for one thing, it blocked out the fighting still going on remarkably well. The trees of Ostland did so love to crush together tightly.

    "I almost didn't recognize you, sweet Emilia," Emeline's voice echoed out from the shadows of the trees, her tone breathless yet absurd in its friendliness. "My, you have become wretched."

    "I should say the same to you," Emilia huffed as she kept moving, eye darting around as she kept her rapier at the ready. "Your soul must be as clean as an outhouse by now, if there's even anything left and not just a filth-stuffed hollow."

    She heard it coming, despite her broken and disformed ears, and so ducked out of the way as a blade of purple and pink energies came slashing through the air. She spun about on her heel and managed a piercing strike upon Emeline's torso, the woman herself having revealed her true nature as a scaled beast with only vaguely feminine characteristics. The mutated witch howled and twisted mid-air, nearly snapping the rapier with it as she forced it out of herself and landed upon the leaf-strewn ground. A vomited blast of glowing sputum splashed against Emilia's leather coat and began dissolving it immediately. The old woman shed it in a single smooth movement, striking out like a viper with her rapier and scoring another hit. Emeline hissed, not merely the normal verbal descriptor but actually like the serpent she was before leaping backwards on all fours and into the shadows once more.

    "Look at you!" Emeline's voice bounced about without a source. "You're disgusting! A shattered, burnt, broken carcass of a woman! Shambling about like a zombie! Are you sure you aren't animated by dark magics, all a hallucination meant to keep your revenant docile?!"

    Emilia let a burbling laugh come out of her, a breezy thing, even if it was flecked with her own blood.

    "Maybe I am. Maybe this is all a dream. But if it is?" She chuckled and then whirled about, her left hand moving to draw a smaller crossbow on her leg up to fire it at Emeline as she perched on a branch. "I'm going to make it a good one."

    The bolt, tipped with silver, struck the witch directly in the shoulder as she was waving her hands about to cast some spell or another. While she screamed in pain, it didn't stop her, and Emilia had to throw herself to the side to avoid a sheet of black flame that made her head pound as it passed by. The tree behind her was struck instead, and was instantly engulfed, the smoke acrid and biting to the senses.

    "Because I am tired of this, Heart-Taker! I have spent eight fucking decades on this miserable world," Emilia snarled, dropping the crossbow to the side and tugging free the one on her right leg, "And six of them have been spent hunting you!"

    Emeline flickered, and then there were five of her leaping at Emilia. It wasn't a fight that she could have won even if she was at her best, in her prime, and she was far past that by now. She still made a good of it, stabbing and kicking, punching and even biting before a hit fractured something in her left jawbone and knocked her wooden dentures loose. At the end of it, she was left upon the ground vomiting blood as clawed feet kicked her this way and that.

    "You sour…stubborn…bitch!" Emeline hissed down at her. "You've ruined everything! A century building my network, and then you!"

    One clawed foot came in towards Emilia's head, but she tucked in just in time to avoid it, one hand reaching for another knife and plunging it into the bottom of said foot. Her reward was a howl of pain and a resounded set of kicking.

    "Do you know how long it takes to truly cultivate a mind, a tool? Not just with magic, either!"

    Emilia accepted the beating, her hands trembling as they pulled something free from her belt pouches.

    "And you-raggh!"

    All of the voices leapt away frantically as Emilia raised a lit blackpowder bomb in one hand, a firestarter in the other. Only for her to press her index finger and thumb around the wick. She was bleeding, and she'd broken some bones, but that was old hat for her. She kicked up her rapier and before one of the Emeline's could react she'd stabbed them through the head. And given the earlier fighting, suddenly five was but two. Far better odds.

    "It sure must be nice to plan things for the long-term," Emilia spat through her bleeding and toothless gums and smiled, "Such a shame I've been uprooting it all for too long. You're not that good in a fight. Makes sense though, given how fat you are."

    That, more than anything else, seemed to set Emeline off further as she charged.

    But this time, Emilia was ready, slamming her left hand with its punch dagger into one throat and her silver-tipped rapier through the chest of the other. The last of the clones shrieked as it dissipated into discolored semi-solid puddles. Emeline, the true Emeline, Heart-Taker herself, just stared uncomprehending as Emilia pushed her further and further and then into a tree. The rapier plunged through the wood with impossible ease, pinning Emeline there against it, the sword straight through the center of her chest, clanging against her spine. Something tore in Emilia's legs and shoulders as she did it.

    "This….,"

    "Sixty years unbalancing you. Ruining you. Chasing you," Emilia rasped in her ear.

    "This isn't fair," Emeline said slowly, petulantly. "You're…you're nothing. Just a stupid peasant girl with…with a grudge. I've…," she placed both hands against the rapier and tugged at it, to no avail. "I've killed hundreds like you before."

    "Ynggngh," Emilia made to say, only to pause as her words came out a slurred mess.

    She realized, only then, that her right leg was spasming, that her right arm seemed so tightly bent and locked into position that it almost felt like it was on fire. Emeline stared at her and then laughed, a bloody, hacking sound.

    "Hahaha! Oh…you poor deluded…do you feel that," the dying witch said, the fires she'd spread throughout the trees earlier still hungrily consuming. The tree that she'd been impaled upon was catching now, but she didn't seem to notice or care. "That's your overworked peasant brain seizing up!"

    Emilia tried to pull herself backwards, but the internal fire was racing through what felt like her entire right side. Her body, grown number from damage, suddenly seemed to flare to life again. Nothing was responding correctly.

    "All those years are finally catching up to you. Why, I'm…," Emeline coughed out a spray of blood as she continued to struggle with the rapier impaling her. "I'm surprised you made it this far, that your brain didn't j-just rot out of your head and out of your ears."

    "Mother!"

    A new voice intruded upon the clearing, and then came Marlisa Liesdotte, dressed in full regalia. Immediately she was by Emilia's side, tugging her mother free as she began to twitch and froth in her arms.

    "Gngng-," Emilia choked out.

    "I know, I know," Marlisa said, her voice cracking. "The Count sent his troops north, so I came after you, I told him, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

    Emilia could only gurgle.

    "Oh…how sweet. And so the prodigal daughter comes to see her mother die from her own stupidity," Emeline taunted even as blood began to dribble freely from her mouth. She glanced up at the fires starting to burn their way down the tree and began tugging harder at the rapier.

    Emilia's next spasm was violent, but she was half-way upright and pointing at Emeline before starting to collapse back into Marlisa's grip. Her remaining eye bulged in its socket. This time, however, she let Marlisa wrap her hands around hers, and place a pistol in it. Though her right side was still spasming, though she was still frothing, Emilia's left hand formed a death grip on that pistol, Marlisa's hands clasped around it. With three hands, they pointed it at Emeline, the witch's face finally began to pale, while Marlisa lit the match.

    "Just…shut…up," Marlisa growled, keeping her mother's hands steady as she pulled the trigger.

    ======================================================​

    Kragg the Grim entered the clearing slowly, his personal guard of hammerers and quarrelers suspiciously looking about. They found only two living individuals, and one was clearly not long for the world. The third was an umgi wretch, mutated and twisted by magic. But that one was dead, quite clearly, the smoking hole in her head being the cause. If that wasn't enough, fires were consuming a good number of the trees around. Including the tree the umgi was impaled on. Well, that wouldn't do, even if none of the trees around him were wutroth. The Runelord clapped his hands together, and banished the paltry manipulations of the Winds around him. The battle back on the road was over by now, but he knew that the umgi had been heavily depleted. It had only been the arrival of his small party on one side and the Ostlander umgi on the other that had won the fight.

    "Mother, no, please, not like this," he heard one saying, and he closed his eyes as he heard the pain there.

    Grief, he'd learned well over his many years, was almost universal. For a child losing a parent, certainly. To one such as he, who had lived so long, and lost so much, it was barely a grain of dirt to the mountain of regrets and pain he'd suffered, but he felt it nonetheless.

    "Please…," the younger umgi woman whispered fiercely.

    He could see the effects killing the elder, her body seizing up and dying, froth spattering from her lips. He'd seen it before, and it was an unhappy, painful death every time for all who suffered it.

    "Did…," the dying woman finally managed, "Ddng,"

    "She's dead, she's dead," the younger said fiercely, "You killed her. You got her. It was you."

    A weight lifted from the elder umgi, one that had kept her low for quite some time. He could quite literally see one of the Winds of Magic beginning to swirl in. As it came closer, he watched as the umgi gasped out, one in her death throes, the other in grief, and so waved his hand through the air dismissively. The purple waves blew backwards a good distance, and the woman managed another hard-fought lungful of air. He had enough context. Vengeance had been won here, he could smell it in the air. That deserved a certain level of respect from all, the world itself included.

    "Y…y...yggn," the elder said, reaching up with her left hand to clutch at her daughter's face. "You. Cpng,"

    "I don't want it," the daughter said, "And the Count won't have it. He was…angry, about Heart-Taker."

    "Just…," the dying woman finally said, her words slurring terribly but clear enough to understand this one last time. "Love you. Sorry."

    And this time, the purple flew in, almost snootily as it did so with greater force than before. This time, Kragg did not stop it. Instead, he bowed his head slightly in respect as a shriek of grief filled the air. When he raised his gaze, he found the last living umgi in the copse looking up at him.

    "L-Lord," she sniffed and shook her head. "Lord Kragg. I am…sorry we could not provide you a better escort."

    "I meant to travel in secret," he shook his head. "But I think it's best if we start heading towards the capital now. Frankly, I'm uncertain how you knew we were coming in the first place."

    If a beardling had talked...

    "We...we didn't," she shook her head, tears falling down her face. "We were hunting her," she tilted her head to dead witch. "We knew she was coming somewhere with a lot of gunpowder. We didn't...didn't know why."

    At that, Kragg blinked.

    He'd seen the wagons. If each one was full of black powder, even if it was inferior umgi black powder, if all had detonated at once while his party was traveling past?

    His heart just about dropped into his boots as he imagined dying in such an ignoble way.

    "Then it appears I owe you lot a debt," he said seriously as he now scrutinized the dead witch further.

    Magic still clung to her. Possibly enough to reanimate with time. Well, no sense leaving that about. A thump of his staff tore the magic away, a grunt sent his hammerers forward to get the corpse for proper total disposal.

    "What was her name?" He said with a nod towards the dead woman.

    "Emilia Liesedotte," the daughter said quietly, still holding her in her arms. "Witch Hunter Captain of the Ostland Chapterhouse. My mother."

    Witch Hunters of Ostland Succeed In Diverting Significant Chaos Intrigue Actions! Destablization of Kislev Prevented! Assassination of Kragg the Grim Prevented!
    Witch Hunter Captain Emilia Liesedotte Dead!
    Major Cultist Leader Heart-Taker Dead!
     
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