The Witch's Bounty (Part 3/3)
A Play Report Turned Short Story
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Embark on The (Side) Quest: a journey into storytelling from fantasy and sci-fi tales to tabletop roleplaying games and beyond.
“The Witch’s Bounty” evolved from a tabletop roleplaying game solo play-report into the short work of fantasy fiction you find here.
PART THREE
Maybe It Was Time to Bite
You’re Gonna Regret That
Knocking on the Black Door
An Emerald Transformation
Nathander’s Hunt Begins
Nathander was no fighter. But there he was. Blade in hand. Fingers throbbing with the cold.
An Eastern wind wandered through the forest with a hush, swaying the slender pines like drunken dancers. It set the harts tongue to bristling, carried the scent of fallen needles swirling in his nose.
Even with Balor’s Eye perched high overhead now, the glade was dark.
In his mind Nathander recalled the scarlet robes in Market Square, the music of coins spilling on the cobblestones. A witch’s bounty! And his plan to catch Hadwin? It was all like a half-remembered dream. One that dissipates as soon as the eyes open.
Besides a beating, maybe death, there wasn’t much here for him.
Just Two killers. Full of ire.
There was Tankred, nursing the gash in his shoulder. Blood stained the sleeve of his doublet. Lips screwed up in annoyance.
There was Olga, crouched in the bracken, fingers fumbling in the moonlight as she reloaded her crossbow. Irritation radiated from her.
And Hadwin.
He glanced at the old apothecary. Surprised to find his eyes fixed on him. The frail man was at ease. A hint of joy on his face despite the fact that two murderous thugs aimed to turn him in for heresy. Dead or alive.
Hadwin? A witch? How did that bolt miss?
No time for puzzles, he turned his attention back to Tankred.
The brute was rolling his shoulders, his neck. His lips formed a knowing grin as he turned his stare on Nathander. A wolf catching the scent of prey.
I should be running for those trees.
It’s true. Nathander was no fighter. But that weariness had taken root within him. He was suddenly filled with the voices of all who had ignored him. Laughed at him. Ripped scraps of bread from him, leaving naught but boot marks on his neck. Like ghosts they encircled him. A discordant chorus waiting with hands out. Demanding.
Was he just a stray dog?
Maybe it was time to bite?
His grip tightened on the knife and squared up on Tankred. It seemed easy enough.
Stick ‘em with the sharp end. Right?
In an instant, Tankred was upon him.
The brute lunged, his blade driving straight for Nathander’s gut.
Nathander wheeled, half-falling, half-swiveling away. The weapon’s edge whistled past and the two collided, stumbled apart.
But Tankred had overreached in his confidence. Boots slipped in the muddy earth as he struggled to find balance.
No time to breathe. No time to think. Nathander shifted his weight. Swung his blade wildly. The dagger arched backward and opened a deep cut across Tankred’s ribs.
“Gods damnit all!” A gravely snarled. Tankred staggered back, clutching at his side. Blood slicked his fingers.
Nathander drank in a few deep, frigid gulps of air. Exhaled them steaming into the sky.
Maybe he’s had enough?
He had ceased the man’s laughter at least.
Then Tankred’s eyes turned up, shaking with wild fury.
That familiar feeling bubbled up in Nathander’s gut. That churning spark of uneasy warmth.
Shit.
The brute roared as he charged.
Nathander tried to sidestep, but Tankred was already on him with the sour stench of his sweat. Scarred knuckles hammered Nathander off his feet. As he hurtled to the earth, the breath leapt from his lungs.
Then Tankred was pinning him beneath the crush of seething muscle and bone.
A knife appeared beneath Nathander’s throat, cold and cruel. Tankred’s face loomed inches away, his toothy grin wide and savage.
“Oh, you’re gonna regret that, boyo.”
Tankred loomed over him, eyes filled with gleeful victory. Every muscle in his massive frame coiled to drive the knife downward.
They say Yaldis, the god of death, is a trickster. He only wants us all to laugh at the Black Door. But as Nathander struggled under Tankred’s bulk, waiting for the brute’s blade arm to strike, he had to wonder what was so funny.
The clearing was suddenly flooded with light. Not the cold blue of Baylor’s Eye or the warm orange of a flame, it was the color of wild heather. Haunting. Otherworldly. And Nathander could hear someone singing, flooding the space with grumbling words, beautiful in their incoherence.
Hadwin?
Yes. Somehow, he knew it.
Tankred grimaced as the light erupted, a thick forearm shot up instinctively to shield his eyes from the brilliant radiance. He twisted his head away, muttering a curse.
After less than half-a-breath the flare dimmed. It was enough.
Blade arm freed, near blind himself, Nathander squeezed the hilt of his dagger. With what little strength remained, he thrust it at Tankred.
The brute rolled his hips, aiming to pivot from the attack. But the afterimages of lavender light still danced in his vision.
He was just as surprised as Nathander to feel the dagger bursting into his rib cage.
Both men froze, staring at the protruding hilt.
Then, mouth aghast, Tankred let loose a gurgle from his throat. His body suddenly filled with tremors as the damage registered. Above the hilt his fingers formed a claw. And it seemed to all there that he might rip the thing out. Instead he dropped his hand away and slumped to the ground. Knees touched first. Then Hands. Shoulder. Finally he collapsed on his back. The foliage around him now trampled and muddy.
He stared upward with unseeing eyes.
Eyes still locked on the brute, Nathander heard the solid “click” of the crossbow’s spring.
Shit.
He whipped around to see Olga raising the loaded weapon back to her shoulder, finger trembling on the trigger, eye sliding down the stock to him.
Using hands, knees, and elbows, Nathander finally dragged himself upright. He noticed Olga glance towards Tankred’s motionless form. Flinched at the heartbreak rising in her face.
When those sharp eyes returned to her target, they burned with vengeance.
Nathander licked a split lip. Ran a hand across aching ribs, cracked or broken for sure. He slowly lifted a surrendering palm and began to back away.
Glaring cautiously through the dark, Olga placed the crossbow on the ground, and clambered across to Tankred. To see about the dead.
A weight settled on Nathander, forced out a deep sigh. It was his blade, after all, that sent a man through the Black Door.
The bastard was gonna kill me. Had to.
It’s true. Nathander was no fighter.
If Yaldis was laughing now, it was not at Tankred’s death but at the man who killed him.
Only one thing left to do. Back to Havensgard.
Turning on his heel, Nathander is stopped by the old apothecary. Plucking petals from that damn flower.
Nathander was close enough now to see it was a fragile sprout. Violet oval petals orbited a dainty stem with velvet leaves.
He looked the old apothecary in the eye. “I know you’re a witch, Hadwin Fiegler.”
The frail man shuffled uncomfortably close, face-to-face, raising the wispy hairs of his chin to look Nathander in the eye.
“Hmm,” he grunts. Like he spots something interesting.
Then Hadwin moves back a pace, closes his eyes. He starts singing.
It grew to a resonance Nathander could feel in his bones as the grumbling, incoherent words wandered throughout the clearing.
Small flickering pulses surrounded Hadwin. Like fireflies the sparks rose from his body, tiny bursts of emerald winking into existence one by one, fizzing away with faint pops, smearing blurry trails of shimmering afterglow, stark and bright against the backdrop of the sleeping pines.
The flickers multiplied. Cascaded from hunched shoulders, building into a swirling current.
Nathander took a step back, more curious than afraid.
How? What is this?
The emerald glow wrapped around Hadwin in ribbons of light. Then, with a rush, the light collapsed. For an instant, Hadwin’s figure was replaced by a radiant burst of purple.
When the light cleared, Nathander shook his head, as if to wake from a dream.
Standing in Hadwin’s place was an enormous stag, shaking remnant streamers of magic from its glistening coat.
Its eyes, two luminous almonds, turned to connect with Nathander.
The stag bounded silently toward the tree line, the sound of its hooves muffled by the soft earth. Then it melted into the depths of the forest.
Nathander drifted in a stupor of disbelief towards the tree line. Where two neighboring pine trunks formed a frame of red, flaky bark. Where the stag had leapt into the black depths of the forest.
He stood there balancing on wobbly legs, struggling to reconcile what he’d just witnessed with all that was known to him.
How? How did he do that?
Havensgard was behind him. Soon it would be shaking off its slumber, sending smoke curling in the graying twilight as hearths were stoked.
I should head back.
But those menacing words from the woman in scarlet robes. The jingling bounty of gold spilling from a gilded chest. These sounds, Nathander noticed, had fallen silent.
What he heard now was that song. Hadwin’s song. Reverberating in his ears, both disturbing and wondrous.
The witch’s eyes had searched in Nathander’s own. What did he see?
What did he see?
A familiar feeling churned in his gut, a spark of uneasy warmth. Nathander knew it well.
This is gonna bring trouble.
But if he could find the courage to ask the questions, maybe Hadwin had the answers.
Leaving the glade behind, he stepped into the shadows of the forest. A mist clung to the earth.
He was on the hunt for a witch.
And as he pressed on, every trembling branch, every waking leaf he brushed, everything, everything washed Nathander with dew.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
“The Witch’s Bounty” started out as a solo play report for Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and translating this thing into a short story has proven an… engaging challenge.
The end result? Well. “The Witch’s Bounty” is certainly not perfect.
Every time I dive in to the doc I see bits I want to change. I probably should have split the story into more posts as lower word counts would have made revision way more manageable. While writing this last part, in fact, I kept saying to myself, “You’ve bitten off more than you can chew.”
It is what it is.
The best advice I’ve heard so far about being a writer/designer comes from a friend who has published twenty-plus novels.
Finish something. Take all the steps, move all the way through the process: idea, outline, first draft, final draft, publishing. Now do it again.
This, he claims, is how you start producing quality work. It makes sense to me, so I’m calling “The Witch’s Bounty” “finished.”
I’m walking away a stronger writer.
I decided early on to make the project an experiment in narrative pacing. How does an author pull the reader from one scene to the next? From one line to the next?
This past summer I noticed McCarthy creating this effect as I re-read The Road. There’s the constant loop of hook, driving action, imagery, and/or dialogue, then a twist or a mic-drop moment… and repeat. The Prince of Nothing by R. Scott Bakker does this as well, building a cadence in each chapter, each sub-section of the novels (just finished that series). The other night, even, while reading Sarah Mlynowski’s Whatever After series to my seven-year-old daughter, I could hear it.
“The Witch’s Bounty” provided an opportunity to try this out. It’s not perfect, but the project has, at least, helped strengthen my grasp of narrative pacing.
That’s a win, if you ask me.
What aspect of the writer’s craft are you exploring?
Who’s the Artist?
Leon Earl is the artist behind all the images for “The Witch’s Hunt.” It has been a great experience working with him, and I’ve also enjoyed getting to know this creative guy a little better.
Check out Leon’s Instagram and/or his newsletter: Dystopian Meditations.
What’s Next?
More collaboration. For sure.
Probably the greatest takeaway from “The Witch’s Bounty” is a refinement of The (Side) Quest itself. I’m realizing now that the newsletter should stayed focused on tabletop roleplaying games. I’m sure I’ll write more fiction, but in the TTRPG space (and with smaller word counts). I enjoy sharing my own stories, discussing the writer’s craft. In working with artist Leon Earl, However, I’m reminded of the “collaborative storytelling” magic of roleplaying games. This is what I love about them. This is what got me designing, what got me started on Substack in the first place. So, I’d like to lean into that word, “collaboration,” as we continue this big experiment called The (Side) Quest.
Got an idea for a Substack collaboration? Share in the Comments!