Forged by Encounters

Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The Witch of Seldom-Wind

Long before the Gronn, before the watcher on the ridge, there was the witch.

Her name, if she ever had one besides curse and taunt, was lost. The village called her Greta, but they said it like spitting a pit. She lived where the stream bent away from the path, in a hut that was more hole than home, patched with moss and madness.

To the others, she was a lesson in misfortune. A woman touched by the capricious Seldom-Wind spirit, her mind unmoored. Children, Eirik’s age and younger, would dare each other to creep close to her bend in the stream. They’d throw clumps of mud at her sagging door, or stones into the water to splash her as she crouched, washing rags that never got clean.

“Wind-wife! Wind-wife! Where’s your wits gone?” they’d chant, bolting when she lurched up, her hair a wild nest of grey, shrieking sounds at them that were not quite words.

The elders tolerated her like a persistent, ugly weed. They’d shoo her from the meeting hall steps with a flick of a hand, muttering about bad luck. She was the village’s living ghost, a reflection of the chaos they feared, and so they made her small, made her harmless, made her a game.

Eirik never joined the taunts. It wasn’t bravery. It was a quieter feeling, a knot in his stomach that felt too much like the one he carried now, the feeling of being profoundly, irreparably different. He’d seen her once in late autumn, dancing alone in the first flurry of snow. It wasn’t a joyful dance. It was a slow, swaying, bone-tired motion, her hands carving patterns in the falling white, her face tilted up to the blank sky as if listening to a cruel and beautiful song only she could hear. At that moment, she didn’t look mad. She looked like the only real thing in a world of pretending.

So, he practiced a small, secret kindness. When he went for water, if the way was clear, he would leave a wedge of hard cheese on a flat stone by her path. Or he would secretly re-tie a section of her collapsing fence that the boys had kicked loose. He never spoke to her. He never looked her in the eye. It was a transaction with the unseen, a gentle nod to the strange.

One afternoon, a week before the dreams began in earnest, his stealth failed him.

He was placing two apples from their dwindling store on the stone when a shadow fell over him. He froze. The smell hit him first not foul, but wild: crushed yarrow, damp earth, unwashed wool, and beneath it, something sharp like ozone.

“You.”

The voice was a dry rustle, like leaves skittering on stone. He looked up slowly.

Greta stood over him. Her eyes were not the milky, vacant things of stories. They were a fierce, clear grey, the color of the winter sky before a storm, and they saw him. They saw into him, down to the secret place where the strange heat was just beginning to k****e.

He tried to stand, to mutter an excuse, but her hand shot out. Her fingers, cold and surprisingly strong, clamped around his wrist. Her touch was a bolt of ice that somehow sparked the ember in his gut to life. He gasped.

“Eirik! What are you doing?”

The voice, loud and mocking, came from the path. It was Dag, son of the tanner, with two other boys behind him. They’d been setting snares and had seen everything. Dag’s face was split in a wide, incredulous grin.

“Look at this!” Dag crowed. “He’s touching her! Giving food to the Wind-wife! You finally lost your own wits, Eirik?”

The other boys snickered, shifting nervously but enjoying the spectacle.

Eirik’s face burned. He tried to pull his wrist back, but Greta’s grip was iron. Her storm-grey eyes remained locked on his, ignoring the boys completely. The world narrowed to her terrifying gaze and their mocking laughter.

“Shut up, Dag,” Eirik managed, his voice thin.

“Or what?” Dag took a step closer, emboldened. “Will you and your mad wife curse me? You’re as touched as she is. My dad said your family was always a bit off. Now we see it!”

Greta leaned in then, her lips almost brushing Eirik’s ear. She spoke, and each word was a stone dropped into the still pool of his future, meant for him alone over the boys’ noise.

“The kind boy,” she hissed. “The one with quiet hands. I see you. The others… their cruelty is a simple song. It buys them simple lives. Full bellies. Warm beds. A peaceful death.”

She pulled his hand closer, turning it over as if reading lines of fire on his palm. Her voice was a whisper that vibrated in his very bones, a secret in the sunlight.

“But you… Your kindness is a debt. The world collects. It will take from you what you love most. It will give you pain where others find ease. Hardship will be your shadow, boy. Not for your evil, but for your good. You will walk a path of splinters while they walk on grass. Remember.”

She released him as suddenly as she’d grabbed him. The connection broke. The world rushed back in—Dag’s mocking laugh, the jeers of the others, the sound of the stream.

Greta’s fierce clarity vanished. Her eyes filled over, returning to their distant, “mad” gaze. She mumbled something about the wind stealing her socks and shuffled away towards her hut.

Dag whooped. “She called you her good boy! You’re her special little madman!” He threw a last, rotten acorn that bounced off Eirik’s shoulder. “Come on. He stinks of crazy now.”

The boys left, their laughter fading down the path.

Eirik stood alone, clutching his wrist where her cold fingers had branded him, the taunts and the prophecy tangled together in his head. He told no one. The words were a curse he didn’t understand, a riddle wrapped in a threat and sealed with public shame. Hardship will be your shadow. It festered in him, a poison alongside the growing heat. Was his fate already written? Was the dread he felt not a premonition, but an invoice for the crime of being kind?

In the days that followed, he tried to dismiss her. She was mad. Dag was a fool. But then the dreams came. Then the watcher. Then the gate splintered. Then his father’s kneeling silhouette. Then the scavenging in the ashes.

Now, standing with the other human scraps in the ruin of everything, Torsten’s declaration is hanging in the air. To where the dream leads, Greta’s prophecy returned with the force of a hammer blow.

You will walk a path of splinters while they walk on grass.

They were leaving the grass. They were seeking the mountain, the source of all splinters. The witch hadn’t been cursing him.

She had been reading the map of his life. And Dag, with his simple cruelty, had walked away into a life that was now ash, proving her right most terribly.

As Eirik looked at the haunted, hungry faces of the survivors, a new and terrible understanding settled over him.

His kindness, witnessed and ridiculed, had been the first link in the chain. His small, secret mercy had marked him. Not for a good life.

But as the one who would lead them all down the darkest path of all.