: The Witch of the Forest
The Boy and the Black Circle
The light in the forest was failing, not fading, but being pushed back. Long, cold shadows stretched across the moss like black fingers reaching for the last warmth of the day.
Agnivrat moved first, catching Nakul as the boy's legs gave out. He was a husk—skin clinging to bone, eyes too large in a face that had lost all its roundness. His hair wasn't white; it was colorless, like cobwebs.
"Water," Agni grunted, lowering the boy against a tree.
Neer was already there, not with a waterskin, but with his cupped hands. A sphere of clear water condensed from the damp air, hovering above his palm. He guided it to Nakul's lips. The boy drank reflexively, a faint shudder passing through him.
"Look at me," Neer said, his voice stripped of all its usual playful melody. It was flat, calm, a clean surface to reflect truth. "Where is the pain?"
Nakul's eyes focused with immense effort. "Not… pain. Cold. Empty." His hand fluttered to his chest. "Like… winter inside."
"What did you see?" Agni pressed, his voice low but intense. Heat radiated from him, a small, desperate furnace against the growing chill.
"A circle," Nakul whispered. "Drawn in the dirt. Black powder. It… sang to me. A woman's voice. From the trees. I stepped in… and the song… it went inside me. And pulled something out." A tear, cold as the dew, tracked down his cheek. "I think it took… my summers. All the warm days I had left."
Neer and Agni exchanged a look over the boy's head. This wasn't a curse of sudden aging. It was a theft. A surgical removal of potential, of future time.
"Can you walk?" Agni asked.
Nakul shook his head, a feeble motion. "Tired. So tired."
Agni nodded once, a decision made. He scooped the boy up with surprising gentleness. "Then we carry you to the edge. To the sun."
"We're leaving?" Neer hissed, following as Agni began striding back the way they came.
"He is a clue, not a compass," Agni said, not breaking his pace. "His life is the evidence. We secure the evidence. The witch knows we are here. Let her wonder why we are retreating."
It was a tactical move. Cold. Logical. Neer understood, but the part of him that wanted to charge into the mystery chafed. He fell in step, his senses stretching out into the darkening woods, listening for the song.
The Crone at the Edge
The hut wasn't hidden. It was forgotten. The forest had begun to reclaim it—vines snaking through the thatch, moss eating the walls. But the thread of smoke from its chimney was straight and deliberate in the windless air.
The woman who emerged was a collection of angles and sharp edges wrapped in a faded shawl. Her eyes were the color of flint, and they held no welcome, only a deep, ingrained suspicion.
"Turn back," she croaked. "The dark is not for children to play in."
Agni stopped, setting Nakul down carefully against a sun-warmed rock. He faced the woman, offering a short, respectful bow from the waist. "We are seekers, Mother. Not players. A blight steals life in this wood. We would understand it."
"Understand?" Her laugh was a dry rattle. "You understand nothing. You have years to burn. She covets them. Turn back."
Neer stepped forward then, not with Agni's rigid respect, but with an open, disarming ease. He held up his hands, empty. "We mean no harm. We only wish to help." His voice changed, softening, layering with a warmth that had nothing to do with element. "You must be lonely out here. The woods are quiet. Too quiet."
The woman's flinty gaze fixed on him. A flicker of something—memory, pain—crossed her face. "Quiet," she echoed, the word tasting bitter. "Since she took them. All the laughter. All the life."
"Who took them?" Neer asked, taking a small step closer. He didn't move like a warrior. He moved like a grandson coming home.
"My boys," she whispered, the defiance leaching from her. "My strong, foolish boys. They heard the song too. One by one. They went into the trees and came back… like that." She pointed a trembling finger at Nakul. "Empty. Old before their time. Then they faded away to dust within a season. She doesn't just take years… she takes the will to live them."
Agni absorbed this, his mind working. "A Daayan. But not one who kills. One who farms."
The crone's eyes snapped to him, a spark of her old fire returning. "You know the name. Then you know you cannot fight her with swords. She is a breath in the night. A regret in the morning. You fight her with… with something she cannot steal."
"What?" Neer asked.
The old woman looked at him, really looked, and for a moment, her gaze was terrifyingly clear. "With a memory that has no sorrow in it. With a joy that is not tied to years. She is hunger. You must be… fullness."
She turned and shuffled back into her hut, closing the door with a final, hollow thud.
The Plan in the Gloom
Back in the deep woods, with Nakul safely dispatched toward the village with a royal guard, they made camp in a small, defensible clearing. Agni lit no fire. His own glow, carefully banked, provided a faint, heatless light.
"I will be the lure," Neer said, breaking the long silence. He was sharpening a dagger with a smooth stone, the scritch-scritch the only sound.
"No." Agni's refusal was immediate.
Neer looked up, eyebrows raised. "Why not? I'm the 'fullness,' aren't I? According to the old woman. All this boundless joy." He said it with a mocking twist, but it fell flat.
"Because she will want you most," Agni said, his voice low. "Your energy… it's not just life. It's vitality. Water is flow, memory, potential. She is a void. You would be a feast." He met Neer's gaze. "I have discipline. Control. My fire is a closed system. I burn what I choose. She will find me… unsatisfying. A bitter taste. She will reveal herself to get to you."
Neer stared at him. The logic was sound. Cold. It saw him as a strategic liability. It should have angered him. Instead, he felt a strange, cold knot in his stomach. "So you're the bait. And I'm… what? The ambush?"
"You are the consequence," Agni said. The words hung in the cold air. "When she focuses on me, when she tries to siphon the heat, the time from my flame… you will be the wave that drowns her circle. You will be the memory of what she has stolen, given back as a flood."
Neer's usual smirk was nowhere to be found. "That's a lot of poetry, Agni. What if her song works on you? What if she finds a regret in that stone heart of yours and pulls on it?"
Agni was silent for a long moment. The faint glow from his skin pulsed once, like a heartbeat. "Then you will have to be the one who catches me," he said finally, the words so quiet they were almost lost. "Before I burn out for her."
The air between them tightened. The unspoken thing—the bond, the rivalry, the unbearable closeness—thrummed in the space.
Neer sheathed his dagger. "Fine. But if you get yourself drained into a wrinkled old man, I'm never letting you forget it. I'll tease you about your aching back and your failing eyesight every single day."
A ghost of something—not a smile, but an acknowledgment—flickered across Agni's face. "I would expect nothing less."
The Song in the Dark
They didn't have to wait long.
It started as a vibration in the roots beneath them. Then a hum, low and melodic, weaving through the trees. It was beautiful in the way a deep, cold well is beautiful—alluring and full of drowning dark.
It spoke of rest. Of laying down burdens. Of cool, endless silence where no pain could reach.
Agni stood up, deliberately turning his back to Neer, presenting himself to the forest. He closed his eyes, not in meditation, but in focus. The song wrapped around him, tendrils of psychic cold seeking the heat of his spirit, the fuel of his years.
He felt it—a pulling, a draining chill at the very core of his flame. It was searching for a memory to hook onto, a sorrow to amplify.
It found one.
Not a person. A feeling. The profound, cellular loneliness of fire that consumes but is never consumed with. The isolation of the hearth that warms others but is itself untouchable.
The song seized it, and the draining intensified. Agni's inner light dimmed. A strand of hair at his temple turned frost-white.
Now. He thought the word with every ounce of his will.
From the shadows, Neer moved.
He didn't attack the song. He attacked the silence around it. He summoned not a wave, but a torrent of sound—the crash of a waterfall, the roar of a river in flood, the laughter of children playing in the rain, the joyous, chaotic noise of life lived. He poured every memory of connection, of fluidity, of shared existence into the clearing.
The beautiful, draining song screeched into dissonance. It couldn't exist in that space of fullness.
A figure shimmered into existence at the edge of the clearing—a woman of impossible, frozen beauty, her eyes black pools of hunger, her mouth open in a silent scream of rage. The black circle, the source of her power, glowed at her feet.
Agni's eyes snapped open. They were no longer dim. They were twin suns.
"You," he said, his voice the crackle of a wildfire finding fuel, "are a thief."
He didn't throw a bolt of flame. He unleashed the heat that the song had tried to steal, amplified it with his own fury, and directed it in a single, blinding lance of white-hot fire at the black circle on the ground.
The witch shrieked, a sound of tearing reality.
The circle shattered.
And in the blinding light of Agni's fire and the deafening rush of Neer's living water, the forest witch learned a final, terrible truth:
Some fires cannot be drained.
Some waters cannot be stilled.
And together, they are the end of all hunger.
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End of Chapter 10