What know you of hell?

*scoffs*

You talk of ‘Hell’, and ‘damnation’. What know you of either of those things? I see more, far more than you want me to see. Maybe the powers of observation are what make a Wytch that much more threatening than any other woman. What is a Wytch? A lowly old hag with green skin, missing teath, scarred, tattered and threadbare. No, she is merely a woman who does what another would not dare to. She obeserves, she listens, she thinks, and by the Goddess, she knows.

You want the end so badly, it would seem. Well….do you? Come closer – if you do truly desire it, I would be happy to oblige and tip you headlong into the abyss that you desperately seek. I can, you know. And as your body lay spilling out it’s life’s blood at my feet, I would step over you with nary a thought. You would have asked, after all. Yes?

Oh, I know that look. How can a woman do that? How can she be as cold as a man when she kills?

Shall I tell you?

Why not. It’s the least I can do. What difference does the sex make when a person takes the life of another? None, really. When I was seventeen, and a young priestess, I was set to perform the most serious ritual of our People on the Fortunate Isle. I was to take a young man, give him my maiden’s blood and at the end of it all, slit his throat. After that was done, I was to open his chest, cut out his heart and take it back to the High Priestess of the Isle. He was to give up his life, normally it would have been a willing sacrifice. But instead, I spared him, and substituted the heart of a stag for his. Do you think I went soft? No. He was worth far more alive to me than he was dead. Dead, through his blood he would have propped up a regime on the Isle that I wanted to topple myself. Alive, he would live to see another day, and in time it would be a blood favour that I could recall. And so I did recall it when the proper time arrived. It was a real bargain considering that I grabbed the very power that I sought, even though I left the Fortunate Isle and got much more out of the accord.

Does any of this make me evil, or as one man once called me, “Machiavellian” ? I don’t know, and find myself not worrying too overmuch on the opinions of others. Judge me if ye will, but please excuse me if I do not sigh nor wring my hands over what you might be thinking.