The Year of the Witching

by Alexis Henderson

there wasn’t a single soul in that sanctuary she would condemn to the ruin that now lay before them. Resigned to her fate, Immanuelle turned back to face the witches. “If this is the end, then I die with them.”

Immanuelle raised her bloody hands and, with a ragged cry, summoned the power of the plagues. Delilah was the first to fall.

Blood. Immanuelle turned on Mercy next. The

Blight. Jael stepped forward next, and Immanuelle turned to face her. The

Darkness. Immanuelle stepped forward to pick up the gutting blade from where it lay

Immanuelle could almost imagine the kind of leader she might have been in a time, long ago, before the affliction of her vengeance and bloodlust turned her into the monster she had now become.

“Only now do you see the price of sin. Only now do you understand.” Immanuelle raised her head to see the Prophet staggering from behind the ruined altar, where he’d hidden during the height of the massacre. He raised his voice, calling out to the crowd: “Do you see the evil this girl has brought upon us? She summoned this darkness, called the coven here. Even now, I see the shadow of the Mother in her eyes.”

Gazing around the cathedral—at the corpses crowding the aisles, at Glory sobbing on Abram’s chest, at all the suffering and the senselessness—Immanuelle was certain of one thing: There was no divinity in this violence. No justice. No sanctity. All that ruin and pain had been wrought not from the Mother’s darkness or the Father’s light, but from the sins of man. They had brought this fate upon themselves. They were complicit in their own damnation. They did this. Not the Mother. Not the Father.

“The boy is right, Immanuelle.” Vera shouldered to the front of the crowd, limping badly. “Think of your father burning on the pyre. Think of the people in the Outskirts, resigned to a life of squalor and suffering because of the greed of this man, and all of the others that came before him. You have a chance to seek recompense for their suffering. So raise the knife and take it.” Immanuelle’s hand tightened around the hilt. All at once, she knew what she had to do. “The world you want can’t be bought with blood. You build it with the choices you make, with the things you do. Either we can keep purging, keep the pyres burning, keep hoping that our prayers will be enough to save us—or we can build something better. A world without slaughter.” Immanuelle held out the

“Today, we choose mercy.” The flock answered her as one. “Now and forevermore.”