The Hushed Valley

In the throat of Dunmire Valley, where shadows breathed and forgotten whispers clung to the mist like lost souls, there lay a village that time had forsaken. It huddled beneath a perpetual pale fog, its cottages hunched against the encroaching woods as if trying to hide from the ancient eyes that watched from between gnarled trunks.

At the very edge of this nameless hamlet, where the last echoes of humanity faded into primal silence, squatted the witch Eveline's hovel. It was a thing of twisted timbers and moldering thatch, its bones wrought from the cursed black wood of Salem's sorrow. The roof sagged beneath the weight of countless tears shed by a weeping sky, each raindrop a memory of pain long past.

There was a time, in the golden yesteryears of memory, when this cottage had been a place of life and light. Herbs had once danced in the warm embrace of firelight, their fragrances—thyme and meadowsweet, rosemary and rue—twirling up to kiss rafters that rang with laughter. But now, in the gelid pre-dawn of this dread night, the air hung thick with the sour miasma of decay, the drowned lamentations of innocents long cast into eternity's well.

As the moon, that bloated, jaundiced eye of night, hauled itself above the sentinels of pitch pine, the villagers retreated behind doors sealed with fear and nailed shut with desperate prayers. Trembling lips mouthed warding sigils against the coming reign of the Witch of Dunmire. They spoke her name in hushed tones, if at all, for Eveline's moniker was a curse that could leech the very marrow of joy from any who dared utter it.

Within her lair, the crone's taloned fingers convulsed around a tarnished spoon, joints creaking like ancient timbers in a storm. The contents of her cauldron burbled and hissed, a noxious brew that cast capering shadows upon walls hung with the soot of a thousand dark nights. Firelight, sickly and wan, gilded the deep canyons that time and malice had carved into a face once as fair as summer's first violet. Now it was a devil's mask, a canvas upon which hatred had painted its masterpiece in shades of spite and bitterness.

Then... a sound. A tremor against the dank silence, so faint it might have been the last gasp of a dying dream. Frost-rimed knuckles clenched, for none save Death's own errand-runners dared breach this unholy ground once day's tide had ebbed. "Enter," croaked a voice dry as the rustling pages of a cremated tome.

The door creaked open, a maw of blackness yawning wide to reveal a slip of a girl, pale as moonlight on fresh-fallen snow. She trembled like the last autumn leaf clinging to a winter-stripped branch, her arms clutched tight around a burden swathed in threadbare cloth.

"P-Please," the child stuttered, her breath pluming white in the chill air, a rabbit's last exhalation as the wolf's jaws close.

From the rictus grin that strained Eveline's lips, it was clear that mercy had long ago withered and died in the blighted briar patch of her heart. "And why, little mouse," she hissed, each word dripping venom, "should a witch's blood-bought favors grace the likes of your mewling get?"

The girl's gaze, heavy with sorrow beyond her years, fell to the bundle in her arms. With reverent care, she peeled back the fraying cloth to reveal a relic box fashioned from bone so old it had fossilized to stone. Intricate glyphs, pulsing with eldritch energy, adorned its surface. A sound emanated from within, a hum that spoke of blacksmith's anvils and the forging of fates.

"This token," the child whispered, her voice almost lost beneath the witch's miasmic glower. "An heirloom... Grannam said 'twould grant one wish to whosoever possessed it."

The artifact seemed to whisper of silent Sabbaths and Black Masses, of witch-kings sacrificed beneath moons blacker than sin. Eveline's dead eyes blazed with a hunger that could devour worlds, her claws snatching greedily for the blasphemous prize.

"Very well, doe-whelp," she panted, euphoria dripping from her poison-laced breath. "I shall breathe life's cold spark back through your wasting get's lungs. But mark well: All spells birth an equivocal price."

The child, pearled with the sweat of terror, could only nod, a whispered "Anything" escaping lips bloodless with fear.

Eveline's rime-thorned fingers wove fugues of moldering radiance through the air, her voice intoning syllables whose withered cadences predated the forest's most ancient oak. An icebound rime glazed the beams and thatch, as if the very essence of the grave seeped inward from realms of nightmare. Far away, the child's doomed kin would soon writhe in the throes of the crone's vile healing.

But the cost... oh, the cost...

As the spell's foul chorion burst, viridian fulgor smelted in Everlong hells shone from within the relic's cunning lathes and spirals. It bathed the witch's death mask in a pyre of sickly luminescence. Her cackle, dry as dust and twice as bitter, held no warmth—only a frigid rapture that could freeze the marrow in living bone.

The girl, at last sensing the void behind those eyes, the inferno those lips had loosed, recoiled in primal terror as the veil of life's grand illusion was rent asunder.

"Thy witling lies cozened in dreamstuff's rose-warm embrace, spawn of filth," Eveline keened, her voice the sound of hope's death rattle. "But thou... thou art unchurched, unblest, and unmourned!"

The scream that lanced out shattered every shard of glass to glittering tears. In their shuttered lairs, the villagers convulsed as one, another heart stilled by Dunmire's dragonhag.

Outside, beneath the lamentation of a lymphatic moon, the witch stood alone, omnipotent, omnivorous. Her claws caressed the relic, its droned essence a promise of powers yet untapped...

She had not always been cruel and wicked. But in the hushed valley where shadows lived and whispers killed, cruelty was the only language left unsilenced.