From the travel accounts of Antal Farkas, chronicler and cartographer commissioned by House Kóvács, recorded during his survey of the Carpathian Mountains in the years 1512 through 1514.

  Compiled in the year 1520.

  Excerptum IV

  By the twentieth day of Maius, Anno Matris Sanctae 1512, the run-off that had swelled the waters of the Béga River receded, along with the bitterly cold spring rains. After enduring several days on its southern banks, anxious at the prospect of further flooding, I was at last able to venture a crossing under clear skies. Following along due west, I came to a section narrower than the rest, and after testing its depth with several large branches, determined that it must be shallow enough for me to lead the mule across.

  Still, the animal balked, as such beasts are wont to do; the water was as cold as the winter snows that yet lingered and fed it high up in the Rusc? Peaks, and the riverbed soft and muddy after being worn away by the torrents of the past days—treacherous footing. Still, we alighted on the northern bank in one piece, to find it much the same as the wilderness through which we had trudged since departing Curtea a fortnight ago.

  The foothills at the base of the Rusc? sloped ever upward, a gradual but relentless climb toward the harsher terrain nearer the peaks. Thick, untouched forest blankets much of the land; beech, oak, and spruce, each taller than the last, and only now budding as I passed through. In the valleys between hills, I found meadows—still asleep from winter’s touch—and clear, clean meltwater streams. The ground itself is remarkably rocky, firm beneath the tree cover, but rather slippery without.

  It was here, upon this slick ground, that I sustained my first mishap of the journey. It is rather easy to grow complacent with one’s thoughts in the tranquility of this wilderness; birdsong, the scurrying of small creatures, the breath and march of the mule beside you, and your own steady labor meld into a fine lullaby. Indeed, it was in something of a stupor that I found myself amiss of some protrusion or other, perhaps a stone or a root, and squarely then upon my face.

  Already, I had been heading in the direction of a small village, one C?uva, described to me by the locals of Curtea; supposedly an ancient but now dwindling community nestled right at Rusc?’s mighty feet. Settlements would grow fewer and farther between, I’d been told, and this would be one of the last until I reached the mountain plateaus. Those were perhaps a moon away or more depending on the conditions, but this last village might be within a day’s reach after crossing the Béga.

  I had planned to make my way there rather more leisurely than that, sketching and drafting, and making camp where I could. But now, dazed from my fall and with not a little blood upon my brow, it seemed prudent to make my way to the village as soon as possible. There is little in the way of observation to be done when one is seeing double of everything before him.

  Thusly, I leaned upon the beast, who was already burdened with my supplies, and slowly we made our way in the direction I hoped would take us to the village. Well into the afternoon, I happened upon the semblance of a dirt road, snaking its way between two hills and, upon following it, came to the first of the village’s fields; patches of flattened earth, yet untilled, and rudimentarily enclosed by wooden fencing. Small sheds and the odd barn followed, of well-maintained timber and thatch, and finally a single cluster of cottages, stone-bottomed with wattle and daub tops, and none larger than a room or two in my estimation.

  One got the sense of walking into a place breathing its last, but breathing nonetheless. Despite its diminutive size, folk were about—few of them younger than forty springs with perhaps two lonely children’s laughter. There was little suspicion of strangers, which I myself found strange. Still, because of this I was immediately taken into the healer’s hut, for there was no inn in this village. They laid me upon a bed of woven rushes, itself on a packed earth floor, leaving my supplies not far from my side, and taking the animal to be cared for.

  By the time the healer arrived, I had begun to drowse pleasantly, lulled by the cool afternoon breeze through the open door and the throbbing of my own head and face. I will admit I gave a start upon seeing her, stooped and so wrinkled that she appeared to have lost all distinctiveness about the face. I was unsure for a moment, in my disorientation, whether she was a woman or, in fact, a walking fold of skin.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  That first day in C?uva, I attributed this misinterpretation to my head injury, which had rendered my vision blurry and my mind somewhat unsure. I would come to understand that my initial perception of her was rather more accurate than I had given myself credit for.

  Excerptum V

  The villagers called her a bone witch. This was revealed to me not long after I arrived in a passing comment by one of the local matrons, one Mistress Dalma, who had been assigned to bring me my meals. It was a term I could recall semiconsciously, like a distant memory from childhood or perhaps something mentioned by an elder in a village I had passed through during my youth. Certainly not something that had any place in civilized society, but that endured yet in these remote parts.

  The days following my convalescence saw low, wet mists rolling down Rusc?’s side. It covered the dirt road like a carpet of clouds, clinging to the sides of buildings, and making it almost impossible to see beyond one’s own hand. I was told to remain in the village a while longer until it passed and, given that I had neglected much of my surveying on the way here, I opted to accept the offer. But conducting such work given the fog proved pointless, and so I spent much of my time in the healer’s hut, which had become my temporary abode, poring over my notes and maps. I was checked on regularly by the healer, who always seemed to come in the dark of night, and by Mistress Dalma when it was light out.

  I never heard the healer speak, but Mistress Dalma served as a kind of translator between us. She articulated with much the same dialect as heard in Curtea, augmented by a slight rural lilt, and informed me that hers was indeed the common tongue here; so it was not that the healer did not understand my speech, or that I would not understand hers. Rather, I would learn that the old woman had eschewed the ability to speak entirely.

  And so, it seemed, had most of the people in the village.

  This puzzled me, at first, but I supposed that such is not beyond the realm of tightknit communities. Indeed, I had heard stories of the families of deaf and mute children anticipating their needs quite exactly, of aged grandparents too weak to form an utterance communicating with but gestures. But this seemed to go beyond even that, and the more time I spent in the village, the more unsettled I grew by it.

  The day I had arrived, I had noted the laughter of children. Indeed, I heard them still during those foggy days, their loud giggles rather frightening unaccompanied by any chatter. C?uva was a village of silence, and yet its people moved about with all the purpose of regular folk, sightlessly within the mists. I wondered if they even spoke amongst themselves in their own homes, but I dared not leave the hut after dark to find out. It felt as though I were on the periphery of a rolling wheel, each turning spoke held together, somehow, by the woman they called a bone witch. I did not know how I knew this; perhaps it was an intuition that came to me amidst my nighttime encounters with the woman, which had taken on a dreamlike quality.

  Indeed, in these dreams, the bone witch gazed at me with eyes buried within a folded and drooping face; the skin sagging as though there were nothing beneath it at all.

  I became so unnerved, in fact, that even before the mists had risen, I thought to leave the village. I would not do something so cowardly as sneak away, however, after the hospitality they had showed me—this, and the fact that I knew not where my mule had been kept—and so I floated the idea to Mistress Dalma, with whom I had developed some rapport. She was a plump lady with a smiling face, and she simply agreed to my proposal without any attempt to convince me otherwise. It should have relieved me, but somehow it did not.

  I made haste to depart the next day, well before the sun had risen; my supplies replenished in exchange for a few silver—quite generous of me, but such was my desire to leave this place. C?uva was just as silent in these early morning hours as it was during the day’s height, and the eeriness of this fact was not lost upon me. My mule had been brought to the hut and tied upon a post at some point before I set foot outside, and I loaded her up swiftly, eager to be out of the place even if it meant a return to complete solitude. In my hand, I carried my horn lantern, and its glow barely permeated the fog that had already begun to gather in the morning chill.

  As I turned to leave C?uva behind, some noise behind me, some rustle, stopped me in my tracks. I stole a glance over my shoulder. The old bone witch stood in the doorway of the hut I had just left, her own lantern in hand. Well, not so much in hand as hung over the stump of her wrist. Like melted wax, the skin dripped from her arm, dangling, as though the limb were entirely boneless.

  I consider myself a brave man, indeed, but I did not pause again on my way out of C?uva, and I did not look back either.

  Addendum, Anno Matris Sanctae 1520: This would not be the last of my strange experiences in the villages of the Carpathian Mountains. It would not be the last of my encounters with bone witches, either, of whom I would come to learn a great deal, indeed.