Another Curse of Acadia

The old witch Pegoryx died in her sleep, and so began her story. We are taught that many parts of the realm of Acadia are beautiful, beautiful and strange, and it was in one such place that Pegoryx found herself after awaking from the first death. In a new body, no less. The enchantments that govern a soul's journey between Serin and Acadia are esoteric at best, so Pegoryx thrilled to discover she had not transformed into a tadpole or mushroom in the becoming of her next self. The bones she cast had held. Soon, memories of her former life would fade, taking with them the hedge magic she had cultivated over decades in exile. She must work quickly then. She tested her new wings, gossamer and gauze-like, sprinkling motes of iridescent powder as they flexed. She ran her fingers through the stream and saw a map of the stars to guide her. Perhaps she was born under a lucky one to receive such gifts. Pegoryx knew who she must find; they called to her as if attached to her heart by hooks. Where she traveled now was not so beautiful, a dark place that touched Serin even as it blackened the spirits of any who lingered there. The Cavern of the Witch Sisters. Painstaking divination had guided Pegoryx to this conclusion in life, and, in this first death, some sense memory propelled her. She readied her patchwork incantations, all certainties dwindling save one: her first chance would be her only. "They must not see the augury," she thought to herself grimly as she sailed on minute wings. But time, space, magic--all worked differently in Acadia. Twisted hands snatched her from the air and delivered her to the desecrated earth. Pegoryx would conjure no magic here. The grinning faces of the Sisters regarded her from their familiars: Aude, Hela, Gertrude, vile creatures corrupted by their own cantrips and thirst for power. They had seen Pegoryx coming in their cauldrons, as they saw many things. Now they would stop her. "Feeble hedge witch," Aude cackled, "Did you really think you could defeat such as us?" "Little pixie," Gertrude cooed, "Perhaps we shall have you for supper." Hela said nothing, but her face grinned wickedly before dissolving from the golem she had sent to capture Pegoryx. The bewitched familiars stretched the tiny pixie on their rack. So frightened were they of her magical words, her curses, that first they scorched out her tongue with a heated iron. Then they carved her face with wicked runes, runnels of disfigurement that would not heal. But, afraid that the slaying of even a silenced witch would bring a scourge upon them, the familiars defied the will of their masters at the last: they placed Pegoryx's fragile body on a raft and towed her out to the open sea, where she was set adrift. Pegoryx would not waken for many turns of the moon, and, when she finally did, the pain of loss consumed her. Quivering hands reached upward toward her mouth, the throbbing absence she found there nearly driving her over the edge of the raft to her final death. Remnants of thought cycled through her mind. She stilled her hands to rest. The Sisters had not seen the augury, the shining portent in the night sky she had been so desperate to conceal from them that she'd nearly lost her soul a second time. What was a tongue in the bargain? Pegoryx shivered. She knew of worse curses than this.