How can they not see it? Hear it?
False prophet. Soul Serpent.
This insult comes quite often, and I have taken a liking to it. She hisses both as they roll through her thoughts with such fever that even I feel the sting of her vehemence. Judgment pours off her in waves, yet none but me seems privy to it. Her internal meanderings carry her voice in a distinct way. Her words were somehow strangely old and foreign, yet familiar to me, as if she came from a different time. One that still lives in my heart and mind.
If her words were not filled with such vitriol, I could almost claim that it’s a lovely voice—sultry, lyrical and pleasing.
All lies.
They are lost.
None of them is worthy of being saved.
Like Lucifer, he beguiles them with his charm and feeds them everything they desire to hear. Nothing but false promises. He’s feeding on their hope and desperation.
How can they not see he isn’t here to save us?
He is a wolf, leading sheep to the slaughter.
This last thought catches me by surprise, and I speak aloud. “A wolf?”
I like this comparison very much. Though I could not quite pinpoint why, pride fills my chest at the thought.
But as before, she doesn’t respond to my question.
Why I wish to converse with her, I don’t know. Only that she intrigues me. Who this woman is—and why she continues to seek me out when she clearly doesn’t wish to hear my message to the people—is a riddle I work to unravel.
Where are they… the others?
This last question stirs my own curiosity. Is she speaking of my brothers? Does she know what we are?
Not possible.
Yet as her mind becomes more familiar to me during her brief visits to the city, I begin to suspect she somehow knows exactly who and what I am—and what I came here to do.
Can she see beyond the facade I wear, or has she acquired divine knowledge through other means? And though it shouldn’t trouble me, one question plagues me more than the rest.
Where does she go when she vanishes for months at a time?
The difficulty lay in the distance she always maintains. She’s kept herself well beyond my reach, never lingering long enough for me to gather more than fragments. And since I can not lure her with the same influence I wield over the multitudes, I’m forced to consider other means of drawing her out.
As time trickles by, I begin to wonder whether she is more like me than like the others—an immortal bound to this plane of existence. Her voice within my mind doesn’t age, and her ability to move unseen only sharpens with time.
A single glimpse of her during her last visit only fueled my desire to know more.
The moment was fleeting, but I gathered what details I could in those passing seconds. A slender figure hidden beneath a heavy cloak. Alabaster skin, nearly translucent, visible where her hand clutched the edge of her hood to keep her face hidden. A silver mask covers the bottom portion of her face. A wisp of long white hair that spilled forward, trailing down her chest like a pale ribbon.
She is a ghost that haunts my thoughts in her absence.
Tonight, something is different.
I sense anticipation and determination from the White Witch. She’s restless—driven—and nearer than she’s ever dared come before. The hour is late as she creeps toward Sovereign Tuath Hall, her presence a faint but undeniably pulling at the edges of my awareness.
Then an impression brushes across my mind—honeysuckle, morning dew, wheat fields stirred by gentle wind—followed by the brief flash in my mind of a young dark-haired girl in a long white dress skipping through a field of gold.
Who is this? Is it her? I can’t be certain. The hair I had glimpsed before had been as white as my own.
At last, her feminine voice filters clearly into my thoughts.
