The sun had not yet fully risen.
In the half-light, lantern in hand, Brendol Hux made his way to the barn that sat behind his modest home on the fair parcel of land the parish had given him when he arrived up from Maryland. He was a prickly man, somewhat sour in aspect, and recently a widower.
It was a cold day, at the end of the harvest, and past Samhain. But the near dead landscape had an eerie liminal feeling, the icy fingers on the back of one’s neck that made a shiver go through you when you passed the old church cemetery. Hux mounted Charity and pulled his cloak tighter about his shoulders. His breath felt crystallized the moment it left his lungs.
It was on that ice blue day, that he met the witch by chance, hunting pheasants, when his horse twisted her ankle.
He was caught up with fear. He did not wish to put her down. His black cloak whipped in the wind and his hair came undone from its tie. He was so preoccupied trying to unspook his girl that he didn’t notice the forbidding figure in all black approach. And then Charity quieted her desperate whinnies quite suddenly and Hux turned in alarm, his hair rising from terror not freeze, to find the witch of the wood behind him, hood drawn low over its no doubt craggy face, likely pockmarked from disease and hard living.
But then, the creature dropped away its layers of ragged fabric and Hux was stricken. Enraptured. It was the kind of face he had seen only in dreams. Crafted by the devil’s clawed hands as though made just for him, his own terrible downfall given human form. Corporeal and impossible to ignore. This man, in his swathes of black, with his bowed mouth and piercing eyes, was the sin Hux could not name.
Only the wind could give it voice, and that voice spoke of want into the gloom.
(For @hicstreme0, as always, and to those who asked. More to follow soon)
Stardust and Sinew 