The Church, the Mage, and the Snarky AI

Chapter 7: Annie's Demise

Annie often wondered how she would meet her end.

Strangely enough, she never pictured it being a peaceful passing. She dreamed of being torn limb from limb, her broken body a gruesome sight, yet she felt no fear or unease. Once, she dreamed of dying quietly in a sickbed, the people holding a lovely funeral in her honor. Michelle stood silently before her grave, laying a bouquet of lilies at its base.

Annie awoke with a start, drenched in cold sweat, unable to find rest for the remainder of the night.

Ever since meeting Michelle, it seemed all of Annie's dreams had come to revolve around her. Being cut to ribbons by Michelle's blade, the two of them burning together at the Church's stake, choking the life from Michelle with her bare hands… there was even one where she and Michelle made frenzied love in a seedy little inn, though in her waking hours she'd never entertained such thoughts.

Not until she resolved to betray Michelle.

The seeds of betrayal had first taken root when Michelle's trust in her began to falter, but that wasn't the start of the rift between them. Before Sally entered the picture, Michelle had been Annie's guiding light, her rock - a goddess in mortal form.

Michelle could strike down any foe. Michelle could have anything she desired.

Just like the first time Annie laid eyes on her. That fateful night at the inn, Michelle descended like an avenging angel, cleaving a patron's head from his shoulders with a single stroke of her sword.

The scene was seared into Annie's mind like a brand: the headless corpse still pinning her to the bed, twitching and jerking like a marionette with its strings cut. The severed head rolling across the floor, its slack features almost comical. Blood, blood everywhere, painting the dingy sheets a vivid crimson, overwhelming even the most stubborn stench of mildew.

God, how she'd hated that cloying reek.

Every time she serviced a client, she'd fix her gaze on the water-stained ceiling, trying to block out the nauseating odor. No matter how repulsive the john, she could detach herself, ignore the greasy pawing and grunting rutting. But that pervasive stink of rot and decay… there was no escaping it.

It smelled just like the mattress from her childhood, the bedding forever sour with sweat and despair. A constant reminder of just how far she'd fallen.

To flee the stench, she'd breathe through her mouth, sucking down great lungfuls of air. Some of the men mistook this for enthusiasm, redoubling their efforts, but she paid them no mind.

Looking back, in all her five years walking the streets, the only things that stuck out were the cracked ceiling she'd lose herself in and that hateful mildewed stink that clung to her like a shroud.

So when Michelle butchered that patron, Annie felt no horror, no revulsion. If anything, she was grateful for the coppery tang of blood drowning out the mold and damp.

Michelle sheathed her blade and regarded Annie's expressionless face.

"Come with me," she said. "I'll make you a witch."

At the time, Annie didn't even know what the word 'witch' meant.

But she nodded all the same, etching Michelle's words into her very soul. To this day, she could recite them verbatim. That moment was frozen in time like a painting, every detail captured in perfect clarity - the drape of Michelle's cloak, the angle of the door, the trajectory of the severed head, the pattern of stains on the walls… it all might as well have happened mere seconds ago, the images as visceral and immediate as a still-beating heart ripped from a chest.

Such was the nature of Michelle's existence - singular, unforgettable, larger than life.

Perhaps that was why, when Annie realized Michelle's faith in her was wavering, her fury burned twice as hot.

The turning point came three months into her magical training.

Michelle returned that evening with another woman in tow, a bony slip of a thing with sharp elbows and sharper cheekbones. They arrived just as Annie was laying out supper. The stranger breezed in on Michelle's heels, not waiting for an introduction before plopping herself down at the table like she owned the place. Bold as brass, she reached out and snatched up the lone sausage on the serving plate.

Annie had been saving that sausage for Michelle.

She gaped at the interloper, at her razor-thin smile and haughty demeanor. Annie was dumbstruck, unsure whether her ire was justified. She didn't even know this brazen hussy's name.

The woman caught Annie's eye, her grin widening to a smirk.

"Name's Sally. Charmed, I'm sure."

Sally. What a low, common sort of name. The kind a dull-witted scrubber might settle on, three sheets to the wind and smelling of the gutter.

But Annie bit her tongue, quashing the urge to knock the supercilious sneer off the woman's horsey face with a well-placed slap. Instead, she cut her gaze to Michelle, a silent plea for support.

Michelle didn't so much as blink. She merely leveled a look at Annie, her words carrying the weight of a divine pronouncement:

"From this day forth, she is our ally."

Annie went cold all over, a lump of ice crystallizing in her gut.

It was an all-too-familiar sensation.

In that instant, she was a little girl again, lost and uncomprehending.

When Annie was five, her mother had approached her just like this, cradling a squalling, ruddy-faced infant.

"From this day forth," she'd declared, "he is your brother."

The parallels were uncanny.

Annie's mother was the village pariah, abandoned by her husband the day Annie was born. Desperate to win back his affections, she'd sold off their few meager possessions - a scraggly plot of land, a handful of scrawny chickens - and set off to find him. Sometimes she'd be gone for three days, sometimes five, leaving Annie to subsist on the pitying charity of neighbors while she waited in their ramshackle hovel for her mother to return, each homecoming more bitter than the last.

That fateful year, her mother vanished for ten days. She returned with a baby boy in tow - Annie's new brother. Word had it the child was Annie's father's bastard, conceived with some faceless doxy, but her mother refused to speak of it. Of Annie's father's whereabouts, there was never any word.

After that, her mother seemed to give up the search. She no longer set out on fruitless attempts to reclaim her feckless husband. Her only solace was the bottle, soused more often than sober. A grim specter, forever rank with cheap spirits.

Sometimes Annie would jolt awake in the small hours to find her mother looming over her, staring down with a look utterly devoid of maternal warmth. Like Annie was something foul and shameful, a canker in need of excising.

But oh, when her mother gazed upon Annie's brother…

Even at her most sotted, she handled the boy with a gentleness she'd never once shown her daughter. Lullabies and kisses, soft swaddling and fresh milk nicked from the neighbors' cows… all lavished on him. The way her mother looked at the child was almost indecent, her eyes fever-bright with a love that owed nothing to the bond between parent and child.

It was all wrong. The boy wasn't truly her mother's son. Not by blood.

Annie despised her brother. Resented him with every fiber of her being. But what could she do? The burden of keeping them alive fell solely on her too-thin shoulders. She scavenged mealy vegetables from untended fields. She took on every scrap of menial drudgery. She hired herself out to the neighbors from sunup to sundown, breaking her back for a few tarnished coins.

Every cent she earned was pissed away on rotgut moonshine or frittered on her brother. The choicest morsels, sturdy new clothes… all to keep a vodka-soaked grin on her mother's blotchy face. Annie told herself she could feel her mother's bitterness thawing by minute degrees when she sat stitching shirts for the brat. That meager approval was all the proof she had that her mother still held some scrap of affection for her.

As the years dragged on, her mother sank deeper into the bottle, her rough edges honed to a cruel point that inevitably found its home in Annie's yielding flesh. Desperate to earn even a crumb of regard, Annie ran herself ragged catering to her every whim.

Until, at last, something fractured.

Annie's descent was the maggots seething in a bloated corpse, the inexorable conclusion to a slow, putrid rot.

At twelve, she sold her virginity to a sweaty, pig-eyed man for a fistful of grimy coins and an hour on her back. As he grunted and shoved atop her, she fixed glassy eyes on the familiar water stains overhead, parceling out the money in her head - how much she could eke out for her brother's meals, how she might stretch the rest to keep her mother's spirits up. Her success filled her with a numb sort of satisfaction.

But when she limped home, dirty money clutched tight, the neighbors met her with devastating news.

Her brother had drowned in the village pond.

Annie would never forget her mother's face when she stumbled over the threshold that night.

Oh, the woman never breathed a word about the boy's death, not really. She sat stony and silent atop her filthy bedding, a near-empty bottle of cheap swill dangling from one bone-thin hand. But her eyes, when they flicked to Annie… oh, her eyes screamed loud enough to shake the heavens.

The unspoken accusation hung in the air, thick as old blood: "It should have been you."

Annie swallowed back her grief, her shame. Mutely, she approached the bed and withdrew the coin purse, heavy with her sins. She laid it within her mother's reach.

Her mother's lip curled, a single cutting word slithering out to flay her to the bone.

"Whore."

When dawn broke, they dragged her mother's body from the depths of the pond. Bloated and misshapen, she bore a grotesque resemblance to her ill-fated son. Gazing upon her waterlogged remains, Annie couldn't suppress a horrid little thought - at least now, features distorted by death and the dark water's embrace, no one could deny her mother's bond with the boy.

At the sparsely attended funeral, Annie wept. Great, racking sobs that felt torn from the very core of her, a lifetime of stifled anguish pouring out in a deluge. After, she was a husk, scraped hollow.

There was nothing tethering her to this hateful village now. No reason to stay.

So she ran. And she never looked back.

Until she met Sally, Annie hadn't truly understood her feelings towards her mother and brother. She'd believed she loved them, convinced herself she'd sacrificed everything for their sake. Their deaths had shattered her, driven her to flee her childhood home and wander the world lost and alone.

But the instant she laid eyes on Sally, the truth hit her like a thunderbolt - she hated her brother. Loathed him with the same white-hot intensity she felt for the interloper standing before her now.

She itched to slap the smug look off Sally's face, to wrap her fingers around the other woman's throat and squeeze until the life drained from her eyes. Just as she'd longed to smother her mewling infant brother in his cradle all those years ago.

But she did nothing. Kept her expression carefully blank as she watched Sally devour the sausage, heard herself stammer out a feeble greeting.

"H-hello… I'm Annie."

She'd stumbled willingly into a new hell of her own making.

Sally was cleverer than her, more naturally gifted in the arcane arts. She wielded her silver tongue and barbed wit like a scalpel, flaying Annie to the bone with every cutting remark. Everything unfolded just as Annie had feared - slowly but inexorably, Michelle's favor began to shift, her attention ensnared by Sally's razor-edged brilliance.

No matter how desperately Annie struggled, how slavishly she devoted herself to Michelle's every whim, she could never measure up. Could never compete with Sally's effortless magnetism.

Night after night, Annie lay awake, her fingers twitching with the urge to draw her blade across Sally's sleeping throat. To watch the other woman's lifeblood gush out in a crimson flood, to see that hateful smirk wiped away forever.

But she lacked the nerve. A coward to her core, just as she'd always been.

The same spinelessness that had stayed her hand all those years ago, the same weakness that had stopped her from ridding herself of her wretched brother once and for all… it shackled her still. She could sooner cut off her own arm than bring herself to hurt Sally.

The knowledge gnawed at her, scouring away the tattered remnants of her self-worth.

This, then, was her true nature laid bare: the more she was ground underfoot, the more ardently she yearned for her abuser's approval. The worse she was treated, the harder she fought to prove her devotion.

She reinvented herself from the ground up, desperate to scourge away the taint of her old, pitiable self. She threw herself into the work with a manic fervor, determined to forge a new identity. Someone harder. Stronger.

She tortured the prisoners Michelle brought her with perverse glee, devising endlessly crueler methods of extracting information. She butchered their enemies without mercy or hesitation, exulting in the naked fear she saw in their eyes. For the first time in her miserable life, Annie held the power. She was feared. Respected.

And yet, in Michelle and Sally's presence, she shrank back into herself, too cowed to do more than bite her tongue and pray for invisibility.

She wasn't the one who killed Sally.

Annie was dumbfounded that Michelle could doubt her loyalty. How could she have brought herself to murder Sally? She, who had spent a lifetime crushed beneath the weight of her mother and brother's deaths, the memory of their bloated corpses forever seared into her psyche. The very idea was absurd. Laughable.

She never confronted Sally about the poisonous whispers, the web of lies she was no doubt spinning to turn Michelle against her. This was hardly the first time the other woman had sought to sow discord between them, and Annie knew in her bones it wouldn't be the last. What would be the point of making a scene? Annie harbored no delusions - she would always be the odd one out, the third wheel. The lesser witch.

It was Sally who approached her that final night.

"Annie, please don't be cross with me. I wasn't trying to get you in trouble earlier, I swear it."

Sally's voice was all wounded innocence, her eyes wide and pleading.

"Don't you think Michelle's been acting strange lately? For all her grand plans and mysterious errands, she never tells us anything. We don't even know what's supposed to be squirreled away in that vault she's so intent on cracking open. Why should she get to call all the shots, hmm? It's not as if she's better than us…"

On and on Sally nattered, airing petty grievances and sowing seeds of dissent.

"Annie, I heard a juicy bit of gossip. Apparently, Michelle has some kind of enchanted trinket that can make a witch ten times more powerful in an instant. What do you say we pilfer it for ourselves? I have a hunch she's not nearly as mighty as she'd have us believe. If we caught her unawares, say, while she was fast asleep…"

Sally's grin turned lupine, sharp and hungry.

"Annie, you mustn't breathe a word of this to Michelle! She'll have my head on a spike if she catches wind of it, you know she will! Promise me, Annie. Promise you won't tell her I've been planning to betray her. Please…"

Sally clutched at Annie's sleeve, fatally misreading her stony silence.

When Annie turned on her, binding her with an arcane working, the truth of it crashed over her like a wave. Somehow, when she hadn't been paying attention, she'd outstripped Sally. The other woman's arrogance and bluster were nothing but a cheap mummer's farce. All flash, no substance.

But even then, Annie had no intention of killing her. She would drag the traitor before Michelle in chains and watch their leader dispense justice. Sally's treachery would be laid bare, her plotting unmasked at last, and Michelle would strike her down for her faithlessness. A fitting end to a miserable tale.

With Sally gone, Michelle would remember who had been loyal from the start. Annie was sure of it.

Too late, she realized she'd underestimated Sally's desperation.

Backed into a corner, stripped of all hope, Sally made one final bid for control. If she was to die, it would be by her own hand. Annie could truss her up like a prize pig, could drag her before Michelle to face the music, but she could not take that from her.

Before Annie could stop her, Sally turned her magic inward, tearing through her body's humors in a self-immolating blaze of agony.

As the life ebbed from her eyes, Sally's lips curled in a bloody rictus of a smile.

"She'll never trust you now, Annie. Never again."

With those words, she slipped beyond the veil, and despair crashed over Annie in a ravaging tide.

Sally had outplayed her to the bitter end, damning her with the manner of her demise. How could she ever hope to convince Michelle of the truth? A witch of Sally's cunning and power, driven to suicide by mere "circumstance?" It beggared belief. Far more likely that Annie herself had killed the other woman, too impatient to maintain the charade any longer.

After all, their mutual loathing was the worst kept secret in the coven. And the signs of magical struggle were unmistakable, scoured into the very earth.

"Sally? Annie? It's time to go!"

Michelle's voice, sharp with impatience, cut through the howling vortex of Annie's thoughts. In a blind panic, she disposed of Sally's corpse with a burst of arcane fire. The stench of charred meat mingled with the loamy reek of the forest floor.

Lies spilled from her lips in a jumbled rush as she scrambled to conjure a plausible excuse for Sally's absence. Misdirection and deceit, tricks within tricks. It was her only hope now.

But it was all for naught.

"Annie… did you kill Sally?"

The accusation hit her like a hammer blow, driving the breath from her lungs.

So. Michelle put more stock in the ravings of a spoiled lordling than the word of her oldest, most faithful companion. She'd sooner believe Annie a murderer than entertain the notion that poor, virtuous Sally might have been a viper in their nest.

In that instant, Annie was a little girl again, staring into her mother's eyes as they blazed with grief and anger over the waterlogged body of her brother. She saw her own death written in the grim set of Michelle's mouth, heard it in the leaden finality of her tone.

For all her talk of trust, for all her honeyed words, Michelle had weighed Annie's years of service and found them wanting. The scales had tipped, and Annie had been judged. Condemned. Her loyalty rewarded with betrayal.

Something shattered inside Annie then, more vital than mere flesh or bone. Something precious beyond reckoning. The last fragile flame of innocence in her guttered out, replaced by a yawning void. Cold and numb and merciless as a winter sea.

If Michelle wanted so badly to paint her a traitor, she would oblige. Give the self-righteous bitch a betrayal worthy of the songs.

Annie would throw herself on the mercy of the Lithers. The Church took a dim view of witchcraft, but certain noble families were known to traffic with sorcerers behind closed doors, their lust for arcane power outweighing their fear of the clergy's wrath. If Annie delivered Michelle to them, trussed up like a Yule goose, they would surely spare her life.

Names and faces flashed through her mind, a rogues' gallery of lechers and crones who'd sought to buy her favor with gold and flattery. Surely one of them would see the value in a pet witch.

All she had to do was sell her soul. Betray everything she'd once held sacred.

The idea filled her with a sudden wild elation, a fierce joy that bordered on madness.

She told herself it was zeal. Rapture at the thought of dragging Michelle down into the filth with her, of watching her burn.

After fleeing through the woods for what felt like an eternity, Annie finally spotted the Lithers' men through the trees. A team of knights, their armor glowing with an ethereal radiance as they rode through the shadowed boughs.

Her heart hammered behind her ribs, a caged bird hurling itself against the bars. This was it. Her last chance at salvation.

She burst from the tree line at a dead sprint, waving her arms over her head and shouting with the last ragged scraps of her voice.

"I mean you no harm! I have information for your-"

The words withered to ash on her tongue as a spear of blinding light pierced her through.

The Church recognized three distinct forms of holy radiance, each imbued with a different sacred purpose.

There was the gentle glow used to anoint paladins, soft and warm as a mother's embrace. The searing glare reserved for heretics and blasphemers, a fire that scoured flesh from bone and devoured sanity like kindling. And then there was the blinding, all-consuming luminance wielded by the Church's Mageslayers, a light that obliterated darkness in all its myriad forms. That seared away corruption and corruptor alike until not even memory remained.

It was this third and final radiance that seized Annie now.

In the space between one breath and the next, her robes crumbled to dust, her pale skin crisping and flaking away like parchment in a flame. The agony defied language, a pain too vast and awful to be borne. It ripped through her wards like gossamer, burned her half-formed incantations to aetheric vapor before they could even take shape.

There was no succor to be found in the shadows. No escape from the Cleansers' holy wrath. The blessed fire blazed from every direction, brighter and more terrible than a thousand suns.

Annie was reduced to less than ash before her betrayal could even pass her lips.

Motes of dust swirled through the ebon boughs, dancing on the night wind like the tattered remnants of a moth's wing. An instant later, the Cleansers' steel-shod hooves churned them into the blood-damp soil.

In the final moments before oblivion claimed her, Annie thought-

No. That was one last perfect lie, an unearned mercy.

There was no time for thought. No chance for epiphany or contrition. She couldn't have said whether such an end was blessing or curse, deliverance or damnation. The tapestry of her life did not unspool before her mind's eye, no eleventh hour clarity or absolution to be found.

There was only the light, scouring and ceaseless.

And then, not even that.