boundwitch: (7)
Sieglinde Sullivan ([personal profile] boundwitch) wrote in [community profile] aftr_ooc 2017-07-26 08:03 pm (UTC)

kuroshitsuji spoilers for the entire green witch arc. this is literally an ic history section.

[Sieglinde listens intently, expression becoming more serious as the story goes on. It's a familiar tale, in that there are many parallels to one she's lived. She doesn't know if it's a story from this man's culture, or one he's lived himself. If he's lived it himself, there's no way to know what role he played.

He probably wasn't the mayor.
]

That wasn't a very good romance story. It certainly wasn't good enough to earn the payment you asked for.

I'll tell you a story now, and see what you think afterwards. [There's a point to his story, and it isn't "love conquers all".]

There was a witch who was lord of a village. Her village was cut off from all the world around it by a vast, cursed forest poisoned by a choking miasma and guarded by werewolves. When anyone made it through the forest, the laws of the village required that they be turned away.

However, one day a group of strangers arrived in the village, late in the day. Had the lord turned them away, they would have been unable to make it out of the forest before night fell. Besides, there were no men allowed in the village except the lord's butler, and one of the strangers was a boy only two years older than the lord's age. [She's a romantic at heart, okay.]

... That very night, the werewolves attacked a villager, as punishment for the lord allowing the strangers to spend the night in her manor. [She looks guilty at that, enough that it's really probably not a secret that she was the lord in this story and still feels the weight of what happened.]

You see, the first Green Witch had run away into the forest during the witch hunts, and had formed a contract with the werewolves. She gave up her legs and began to work on a spell to create the miasma that the werewolves needed to survive, and the werewolves agreed not to attack the villagers. But allowing strangers into the village stretched the bounds of the contract.

Late that night, the boy and one of his companions snuck out of the witch's manor and into the forest on a mission of their own. They had come to the village to try and discover its secrets. They saw a werewolf and were cursed by it. Their skin blistered and their eyes and noses bled and the boy was driven mad. The curse was one that would kill any who were touched by it, unless the witch saved them.

Of course she did. [Of course she did.]

The werewolves kept attacking the villagers, despite every spell and ceremony that the witch employed to protect them. But the outsiders could not leave yet, for the boy was gravely ill, and the witch did not want to see him die. But neither did she wish to see more of her villagers injured or killed by the werewolves.

So she agreed to send the outsiders away, though it gave her great pain. The witch worked with all her might to complete the magic spell that would satisfy the werewolves and calm their anger. Unbeknownst to her, while she labored on her magic, the boy had recovered his mind and had begun to form a plan of his own. He knew that the lord's greatest desire was to see, for just a moment, the outside world, and that night he arrived at her window and offered to carry her away.

It was so romantic. [She adds, as a dreamy aside.

But now, the story gets serious, the magic fades and the history of the entire world changes.
]

The boy led her underground, far below her manor. She was confused, for she had thought he was taking her to the outside world. But below her village were tunnels and pipes and large tanks full of mysterious substances. In one large room, the boy and the witch encountered a gathering of werewolves, and the boy tore off one of the werewolves' faces to reveal that they were simply men wearing masks.

There were no werewolves, no curses, and no witch.

The lord of the village had been deceived her whole life into believing she was creating a magical miasma to protect her village when instead she was developing a deadly gas for the army of the country to use against their enemies. For her whole life, everyone around her had known this, and had lied to her in order to keep her from the truth, in order to keep her in isolation so that she could focus her keen mind towards completing their project.

The boy took her away from that place, running with her into the forest where he offered her a choice. With a gun pressed against her head, he asked her what she wanted to do. Did she want to go to the outside world, where people would use her intellect and curiosity for their own ends, or did she want to simply die right there? [Sieglinde's gaze is distant, fixed on the fire as she remembers that night.]

She wanted to die. She had caused so much suffering in the world, and the gas she had created would cause so much more.

But then the boy spoke again. He said, "I thought that if you were able to create the ultimate poison, maybe you would also be able to create the ultimate medicine. It would be like magic."

Then again he asked her if she wanted to die to run away from the pain she had caused, or if she wanted to live and accept the challenge of helping the world.

[She nods, firm, and looks up at the man before her.]

So she said she wanted to live, and the boy took her by the hand and led her out of the forest to his homeland. [There's a lot more in the middle of that sentence, a lot that happened between a forest in Germany and a house in England, but all the terror and death of that night is irrelevant to the story.]

She went to tea with Queen Victoria, and accepted a job working for the British government, designing inventions that could help people in need and protect the country from invaders. [Another firm nod. There, that's the full story.]

So, there you have it! [She says, deliberately copying the priest's tone and posture as he delivered his final line.] Strangers who shouldn't be in towns save the day, yada yada.

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting