I thought I had escaped them forever. Two witches waiting beyond a small border town and nabbing a few people a year didn't seem like the sort of people who desired attention. A high-profile place like Resta's capitol city seemed like the ideal place to hide from such reclusive people. But I never counted on them having family in the city, or my scent. One Black Ames, they found me again so far away from their usual hunting grounds and strung me up by a chain. Before they could lower me into their vat of liquid candy, however, a spellwarrior came along and caused them to flee. He saved me, and I thanked him for hiding from the truth once more. Neither I, nor anyone else, could ever be safe with them alive. This was so obvious in hindsight, but I remained committed to my belief that they weren't interested in me personally. I just needed to get further out of their way. Maybe I'd give life in Heron a try.
It wasn't until the apprentice confectioner came to my door in search of answers that my denial began to chip away. She introduced herself as Camilla Winstrom, and she worked for a master of confections at her shop in town. She told me about her mentor, Deidre Dario, and the magical sweets that they made together. It was hard to trust her, of course, since so much of what she described sounded so much like what the witches got up to. But she had been prepared for my suspicion with a chocolate soldier that she carried around in his pocket. When she pulled off his wrapper, the little person marched around on my table, looking anything but sinister. Whatever I was seeing was far more gentle than anything I had seen in Freedom's Reach and it didn't fill me with the sense of dread that I had come to expect from the witches of Black Ames. The only explanation I have for not being as terrified of Miss Winstrom's magic as I was of theirs was this instinctual difference.
Camilla then explained what she could piece together about the two witches and her mentor, whom they killed in cold blood shortly after coming so close to finishing me off. The spellwarrior who saved me showed up and went through the old woman's belongings afterwards and left with the recommendation that Camilla offer herself for the Hem Order's protection. But she couldn't hold still knowing that these witches were tarnishing the legacy of their own mother, a woman who had taught her so much. So she peeked at the spellwarrior's notes and found my address, then came to my home in order to beg me for my help. She bored through my resistance toward getting involved with the simple logic that I would never sleep properly again until they stopped being a threat to me. She then convinced me that I could help her just by showing her to the witches' home. I tried to tell her that they hadn't been to the place I had seen since I found it, but she was convinced that they'd leave enough behind from all the magic they use to give her an important clue.
So she convinced me to do something I thought was impossible. I returned to Freedom's Reach during Black Ames. I even walked her to the cliff-side cabin where I found the witches turning my friends into candy. The candy statues who were once people no longer decorated the yard, presumably passed into the hands of their families for burial. With them gone, the place looked even more eerie for its complete abandonment. But this didn't deter Camilla, who remained convinced that looking here would allow her to put her mentor's greatest regret to bed. She did some spell that caused her eyes to glow, which I guess enhanced her vision somehow because she seemed to be looking closely at everything in the cabin. She seemed to find something in one of the bookshelves that the spellwarriors and HDL agents who explored the place had apparently missed. She did some spells of her own until a strange glyph appeared on the wall.
Camilla told me that the glyph was a piece of spacial magic that would transport anyone who used it into an alternate space that looked like the cabin, but in which the witches could hide without fear of being discovered by anyone from the outside world. From that point, both of us had been clear on the point that she would go on alone, but fate intervened after she had left. When I was left alone in the cabin, I saw the two witches coming in from the outside. Seeing no other place to hide, I touched the glyph and soon found myself in a curious place. The space I occupied then certainly resembled the place I had come from, but the walls were not made from wood and the windows weren't glass. I was in a room made entirely out of candy. After leading me all of this way, I was disappointed--although not remotely surprised-- to find her scolding me for following her. But when I told her why, she sighed and told me that we would need to hide before the witches entered. We left the room, hoping to find more places to hide outside, but only found ourselves in a great hallway. We were in a castle that could have rivaled the size of the Gilded Keep and it was all made of sugar.
This only seemed to excite Camilla, however. A space so personal could be the only safe place for the witches' secrets, after all. So, while the witches hung their coats and prepared to put their feet up, we were moving from room to room, looking for any information that might have been laying around. It was in a dark, musty storage room that we found a journal which belonged to Camilla Dario, the witch who shared a name with her late mother's apprentice. In it, the witch wrote about how she and her sister had taken to studying magic to save their mother's failing candy shop. But as their skills developed, that concern slowly became trivial to them. It's hard to pinpoint the exact point in which their priorities shifted from saving their mother to obtaining power. They began to experiment with dark magic, which I only know is the worst kind of magic there is. Even Crane condemns it, but they didn't care. They wanted to know how to create an ideal world for their family, but they couldn't accept that there were limits to what they could do.
The witches nearly walked in on us then and there, but luckily walked right past our door. With the witch's journal in hand, we fled this magical place in the direction from which we had come and escaped through the glyph. Once we were outside the seemingly abandoned building, Camilla continued to read the journal while I rushed back to Freedom's Reach to get help. There, I found the spellwarrior who had saved me back in the capitol. He was on the witches' trail, but was close to giving up. The week was nearly over and he had still failed to find their hideout. It was thanks to Camilla's bravery and my willingness to go along with her that I was able to tell him where they could be found so he didn't have to wait another year for the chance to bring them to justice. He was so excited for this opportunity that he didn't even lecture me for endangering myself as I had. Instead, he asked me to lead him to the cabin.
When we returned, the spellwarrior ventured into the glyph space to investigate the first solid lead he had ever been given in this case while Camilla told me more of what she had read of them. It seemed that the witches had followed a similar route to their mother, incorporating magic in their candy-making pursuits until they hit a wall in their ambitions. Their candy was good, but it wasn't the world-changing sweets that their mother had pined for. So, they turned to demons to help them to make their candy irresistible and the demons turned out to be extremely helpful, but at a cost. The demons could only subsist on the candy they created, but craved for mortal flesh. So, they combined magic with these evil creatures in order to turn people into candy so that their new servants could feed.
It was with sadness that Camilla watched the spellwarrior march out the defeated witches. To the very end, they continued to walk the path their mother did. They reached beyond the limits of sanity to become the best at something so important to them. At first, it wasn't about glory, but saving the dream their family shared. Now, with Deidre Dario dead and her daughters destined for a long imprisonment, that dream was left with Camilla Winstrom, the woman who walked into a store one day and discovered magic she had never before imagined. Had the family stayed together, these witches would have been the ones to inherit the legacy of The Spring Confectioner, but they had handed it to a stranger by following the wrong path. I think Camilla had grown to understand them as a sister might, but it was too late for them to be forming any bonds. Thanks to us, they would never hurt anyone again.
And in the end, that was all that mattered to me.
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