Jon followed the little fairy through twist and turn in the forest, trying to keep up with the darting little figure. The fact that Aria was somewhat luminescent helped, but the main problem was that she was much smaller and able to flit effortlessly in between obstacles that Jon had to watch out for. This part of the forest wasn't quite choked up with underbrush, but there was still an ample supply of things to run into if she didn't watch where she was going. Jon found herself wishing she could just fly after the fairy, but her wingspan was easily large enough to prevent her from going between a lot of these trees.
At least visibility was good. It was nighttime now (dammit, she'd wasted an entire day on this stupid little twit's pranks!?) but the moon was bright and even through the heavy canopy overhead it kept things light enough for her. She supposed that her keener vision as a harpy might also be helping, but she didn't really know for sure.
She found herself wondering exactly what she was even supposed to do about this witch, anyway. She hadn't really thought about it much beyond the simple necessity of getting her supplies back. Was it really a good idea to try and cajole a witch into giving her her things back, to say nothing of trying to get one to transform her back into a human? She wasn't really comfortable with the idea, but there just didn't seem to be a better option at this point. Even if she could get along without the tunic, she needed the food, and almost certainly the money as well. As for trying to get changed back...well, maybe it was inviting trouble to ask for a transformation from a witch, but probably no more so than from a bunch of wizards who might possibly be kinda suspiciously mad-sciencey. Anyway, from what Aria said, the witch didn't sound exactly malicious...she hoped...
Karyn was breathing a bit heavily by the time they reached the crest of the far ridge. The trench left by the moonchilders' passing was absolutely enormous; Karyn wondered if this world regularly saw its surface rearranged in such a manner, or if it was just that they were walking on a desert made up of deep sand that made it so malleable. Could those creatures burrow through earth the way they did through sand, or did they only live in deserts like this? Actually, speaking of burrowing... "Fazalune?" she asked. "What happens if we do run into...into sandworms? Are they...as dangerous as they sound?"
The older scorpion-woman nodded. "Depending on how you look at it," she said. "Even a grub is large enough to swallow you whole, and once you're inside one, there's very little chance of getting out alive; even if you tore out of its stomach, you'd be hundreds of feet below the surface by that time. But they're not particularly cunning, and there's no mistaking it when they're coming. The main thing is to remember the right way to handle it if one does come for you."
In spite of herself, Karyn couldn't suppress a smirk. "'Walk without rhythm?'" she asked. Fazalune shook her head. "We can hardly do that this entire way," she said. "The best thing to do is to wait until they're only a couple hundred yards off, then stop dead. They're huge; they can't stop nearly that quick when they're up to speed, so they'll still be aimed at where they think you'll be. Do it right and the beast will break the surface gulping down nothing but sand and air."
Karyn frowned. "Don't they just come back?"
"Not usually. They're ambush predators, in their way; they move slowly underground until they sense something moving, make a quick rush to catch it, then plunge back underground to digest it. If they miss, it's a lot of energy to waste turning themselves all the way around and then making another rush at prey that's already spooked."
Karyn nodded quietly as they walked on. They'd gotten started early, almost as soon as the night chill had left the air, but it had taken so long pacing themselves going down into the trench and then clambering back up out that the disc of the sun was already threatening to break over the horizon. Yesterday they'd managed another hour or two of travel once the sun was up, before it got hot enough that they had to stop and take shelter in the tent; in the evening, once it had cooled off, they'd made a second trek until it got too cold and they turned in for the night. It was a strange schedule to keep, having two stretches of activity punctuated by a long siesta, but it felt surprisingly natural to her.
She was very glad she'd met Fazalune; having someone who understood how to survive in this environment and where it was she could go for answers was awfully reassuring. She thought about the sandworms, and suppressed a shudder; semi-subconsciously, she gently bobbed her stinger back and forth, taking a little comfort in feeling its heft. Not that she seriously thought it would avail her against one of the worms, if they were anything like they sounded, but it was instinctually reassuring to know that she had a weapon of some kind.
Still...she wondered. What else would they face along the way...and what was the Lady really like?
It was midnight by the time they finally got to wherever it was they were going. They came to the top of a little incline, and Jon pushed through some loose shrubbery into a quiet glade to find that Aria had flittered to a stop. She looked down to where the fairy was pointing; at the bottom of the slope was something of a pit or low area, in the middle of which there was a house. From high overhead, the moon shone down through a break in the canopy, casting the whole scene in a silver light. The centaurs' house had been a bit primitive but fundamentally familiar to her, but this was barely more than a hut. It looked for all the world like it was made out of dirt; looking at the roof, Jon realized that it was built out of slabs of sod that had been cut from the ground and piled into walls and a roof. A little stone chimney poked out of the back of the roof, and smoke was wafting up from it.
"This is where she lives," Aria said. "Come on, let's go in and I'll introduce you!"
Hesitantly, Jon followed the fairy down the embankment and up to the house. "Ramshackle" would probably have been an unfair description, but it was clear that whoever lived here didn't much care what the neighbors thought of their house. There was one tiny window in the front, consisting of a hole where a chunk had been taken out of the sod wall, plus a curtain of dried grass that presumably was meant to keep the bugs out. The door was made of thick branches lashed together, but none of the branches were entirely straight and light filtered through a number of little gaps between them. Still, it didn't look like the place was in any danger of collapsing or anything.
Jon raised her hand to knock, then remembered that it wasn't actually a hand anymore. She probably could've knocked with the "wrist" of her wing anyway, but she wasn't sure if the feathers would muffle it. Standing on one leg and spreading her wings a little for balance, she brought the other talon up, balled it into something approximating a fist, and rapped on the door. There was a brief pause, in which Jon wondered again if she really wanted to be doing this, before a quiet voice responded, "Come in." Somewhat nervous, Jon pushed the door open and went inside.
The interior of the hut was dark even with the fire burning on the little stone hearth, but it was a warm kind of darkness. The earthen walls were lined with shelves full of all manner of oddities, only half-visible in the low light. The fire burned red and gold and cast the entire room in sharply contrasting, constantly shifting patches of light and shadow. Above the fire hung a large-ish cauldron; somewhat to Jon's surprise, it appeared to be ceramic instead of cast iron like every stereotypical depiction of a witch's cauldron she'd ever seen.
But then, none of the stereotypical witches she'd seen were much like this one, either. Jon really wasn't sure what she'd been expecting - Margaret Hamilton? One of the hags from Clash of the Titans? - but it wasn't this. Crouched in front of the hearth in an almost animal fashion, legs bowed out to either side and hands planted on the floor, was a human figure. She appeared to be tending the fire; this was confirmed when she took a nearby stick and poked at the coals underneath the cauldron, stirring them up here and there. Once it was to her satisfaction, she rose languidly and turned to face Jon.
The witch was not a young woman, but she wasn't a hag either. She looked like she might be fifty, but something about her gave Jon the impression that she might actually be much older. She was tall for a woman, or at least it seemed that way to Jon, who had, first with the centaurs and now here, been feeling awfully short since her transformation. Her skin was lightly wrinkled, but firm muscles showed underneath in places. Her hair was oddly silvery-green, and it took Jon a minute to realize that this was because it had moss growing on it - in it? - and her eyes were a piercing, icy blue. They were the most arresting thing about her, even given the fact that she was completely naked.
For whatever reason, Jon didn't find herself distracted by that as much as she had been when she first met Aria. Which wasn't to say that it wasn't weird as hell, but she didn't find herself having to work to avoid staring here. Maybe it was down to the woman's visible age, or maybe it was the way she carried herself - not the mischievous playfulness of the fairy, but a sort of casual seriousness. In any case, the primary things Jon noticed about the rest of her were that the green color (and the moss) extended to the rest of the hair on her body, and her skin below the neck was streaked with artful curls of body paint. She also noticed that there were twigs and leaves braided into the woman's hair in a seemingly random fashion.
"And who might you be?" the witch said, in the same warm, quiet voice. Aria flitted forward. "This is the harpy I told you about, ma'am," she said. "The one who had all the human stuff for some reason. Turns out she was a human 'til she got turned into a harpy!" She tittered. Jon grimaced.
The witch regarded Jon with curiousity. "Really?" she said. "It's been a long time since I've heard tell of anything like that." She walked up to the harpy and stood looking down at her somewhat imposingly, her bare breasts sagging just a little. "Is this true, child?"
A bit intimidated (though there was nothing particularly hostile in the woman's manner,) Jon nodded. "I...I was a human...then I woke up as this, up in the mountains..."
The witch stared at her, visibly concentrating. "Yet there's no spell on you...how fascinating." She smirked slightly; it was the first recognizable emotion Jon had seen from her. "You were a man, too, weren't you?"
Jon blushed beet red. Somewhere off in the shadows, Aria's tittering turned into a full-fledged riot of giggles. Cringing, Jon nodded. The witch smiled a catlike smile. "You still carry yourself very much like a man."
Wanting at this point just to get her things and then go crawl into a hole and die, Jon stared at the floor. "U-um, listen, I just came to get my things...I don't know why she took them, but I need them back..."
"She took them because someone like you should have no need of them," the witch said. "But if you insist..." She gestured over to a mass of fabric in the corner of the room, which Jon recognized as her tunic, apparently tossed over her satchel. "You're fortunate," the witch said. "I was going to return your cloth to the sheep after dinner. Though you really have no need of it."
Jon flushed again. "What are you talking about?" she stammered. "What am I supposed to do, just run around naked everywhere? I've got to go to the city, if I go there like this..."
The witch laughed. "Of course...humans and their obsession with order and rules. Though it's always more relaxed in the port cities, of course."
Jon frowned. "Eh? I mean, aren't you human?"
The woman said nothing, but smiled enigmatically. "Dinner is ready. Won't you join us?"
Jon wanted to make some objection about how that didn't follow at all from anything either of them had said, but as soon as dinner was mentioned, her stomach interrupted to let her know that it had been a solid day and a half since her last proper meal, and a good twelve hours since she'd eaten anything at all, and it'd gotten word from the brain that there was a meaty, stewy kind of smell in the room, and she nearly fell to her knees as a wave of hunger hit her full-force. Nodding weakly, she stumbled over to where her tunic was, slipping it on as quickly as she could with her wings and talons while the witch moved over to the cauldron and began to ladle some of whatever it was that had been cooking into a bowl.
She could hardly focus on anything else for the first ten minutes. Just to actually have food in her stomach again after so long without it was a blessed relief. It wasn't bad, either - thick stew with meat and vegetables and strange foreign spices. The witch didn't give her a spoon, but she didn't care at this point; slurping it out of the bowl was good enough. It was food, that was the main thing. She had several bowls before she was finally able to slow down and pay attention to what was going on around her.
"You eat so desperately," the witch remarked. "You must be very hungry."
Jon nodded. "I haven't eaten pretty much since lunch yesterday," she said. "Thanks to your little friend there stealing all my things. What's she even get out of it anyway?"
Aria put on an innocent look and gazed pointedly off away from Jon. The witch smiled. "Sugar," she said. "She helps me keep the forest clean of human trash, and I give her what she craves."
"It wasn't trash!"
The woman chuckled softly, the firelight flickering on her bare skin as she sat opposite Jon. "To her way of thinking, it was. What should a harpy need with human things? You wear coverings you don't need and rely on a bag to feed you when you could have easily caught and killed twice your own weight in game in the time it took you to get here."
Jon frowned. "What, and eat it raw? I'm not a freakin' wild animal! I'm a hu...I'm a person!"
The witch gave that enigmatic smile again, and Jon found herself a bit unsettled by it. "But you are a creature of the wilderness, child. You've only forgotten it. And even humans were wild creatures long ago. No matter how they scheme to overcome Nature, somewhere deep inside every man, woman, and child is that last little vestige of wildness that yearns to break free."
There was a long pause as Jon tried to figure out what she could even say to that. It was more than a little uncomfortable, and she was beginning to have some serious second thoughts about coming here. Finally she decided to try changing the subject. "Um, anyway," she said, "Aria mentioned that you might know something about, uh, 'transmutation magic.' Do you know if it's possible for me to be turned back to normal?" She paused a moment, wondering exactly what this woman would consider normal. "Back to the way I was before, I mean? Is...is that something you could do?"
The witch laughed. "Is it possible?" she said. "Child, very nearly anything is possible. But as to whether I can do it...whatever happened to you, it's not a curse or spell that can be dispelled by conventional means. There's no magic on you; you simply are what you are. So if you wanted to return to something like your original form, you would have to fall under such a spell to transmute your body into the one you want. And as for that...well, it's probably possible, but I don't know offhand of any witch, wizard, or sorceror that can do it - at least, none that would be safe for you to go asking for favors from."
"Though I'm flattered that you think I'm that good," she added, setting down her bowl on the floor. "But I wouldn't if I could. What does the world need with one more ordinary human being? You're much more delightful the way you are now, something wild and wonderful but still so unsure of yourself, so awkward in your own skin. I'm sure you'll turn out fascinating in time."
At first, Jon was crestfallen - it was apparently some huge ordeal to change her back to normal, so much so that the witch didn't even know of anyone who could do it, aside from scary evil warlocks and suchlike? Then she began to get hot under the no-longer-notional collar when the woman admitted outright that she enjoyed Jon's predicament and wouldn't help her out of it anyway. As she thought about that, she wondered if she was even telling the truth about not knowing anybody who could help. One thing was for certain: it was high time she was getting out of here.
Jon got to her feet as non-abruptly as she could manage and stepped over to the corner where her satchel lay. "A-anyway," she said, "I guess I'd better be going...um, thanks for dinner." She picked it up with one talon and slung it over her shoulder; she could worry about getting it properly situated for flight after she was out of this nuthouse. She was just about to spring for the door when a wave of absolute exhaustion crashed over her; it was all she could do to keep from collapsing right there.
"Oh, so soon?" the witch asked. "It's very late, and you really ought to get some rest."
Jon began to sink to her knees - or at least, whatever it was that you sank to when you had weird bird legs that bent the wrong way. "N...no," she said, "nno, 'm 'kay...gotta g' t' th' ci...cit...th' c-" She slumped down onto the little bed of dried grass that took up most of that half of the room.
"There now, dear, shush and rest," the witch said in a soothing voice. But the world was beginning to muffle and fade around Jon as she lay there trying to collect her thoughts. Had...had they put something in the stew? But they'd eaten it themselves! Could she really be just that tired? Everything was dark now as she heard Aria, distant, saying "Aww, but I never got to give her her new name!"
The witch said something too muffled for Jon to make out, then followed up with "...yway, I...ow someone...an send t...mind her..." After that, there was nothing.
