Eileen Inkheart and the cursed village (Entry 93)

Dear diary,
 
After Gael’s… adventure, we decided it was time to return to Rosebloom and uncover the truth behind the thorns choking the valley. Whatever was happening there would not resolve itself, and ignoring it any longer felt dangerously close to complicity.
 
The journey itself was mercifully uneventful. Too merciful, perhaps. Before long, the valley opened before us — or rather, should have. Instead, we were met by a towering wall of thorns, dense and twisted, bristling with unnatural life. The air around it hummed faintly with magic.
 
I wove a spell to commune with the rosebush. Commune is perhaps too generous a word — plants do not converse as people do. One listens, gathers impressions, follows the echo of intent rather than words. What I learned was enough to chill me. The rampant growth was not natural, nor wild in the true sense of the word. It was being driven. Sustained by magic radiating outward from a single source.
 
Sir Fynn’s castle.
 
We cut our way through the thorn wall and pressed onward into the valley. The village beyond was… wrong. Horribly so. The villagers were still alive — technically — but their bodies were wrapped, pierced, and infiltrated by thorny vines. Flesh and plant interwoven, roots threading through skin and bone. The magic sustained them, holding them in a suspended state between life and death, their minds mercifully unconscious.
 
A living grave.
 
As we examined the villagers, Luke suddenly stiffened. He’d noticed movement — fast, deliberate — weaving through the surrounding thorns. Liliana called out, her voice steady but sharp.
The answer came as a chorus of howls.
 
Moments later, the thorns parted violently as Sir Fynn burst forth. Or what remained of him. He was no longer fully man — his body warped into a grotesque hybrid of knight and beast, armor fused to flesh, eyes burning with feral fury. At his side stalked four wolves: two dire wolves and two winter wolves, their breath frosting the air.
 
“I told you to stay away!” he roared as he charged.
 
The battle was brutal. The thorns clawed at us, tangled our limbs, obscured our sight — yet they parted effortlessly for Sir Fynn and his pack, as though recognizing their master. Every step was a struggle, every movement punished, but we held our ground.
 
In the end, battered and bloodied, we managed to drive the cursed knight back into the thorn wall from which he had come.
 
Time was clearly not on our side. Without hesitation, Luke opened a magical portal that deposited us atop the castle tower — the only visible point we could reliably reach from where we stood. From there, a narrow stone staircase spiraled downward, winding its way toward the courtyard below, where entry into the main keep would be possible.
 
The interior of the tower was lined with rooms at regular intervals, most of them once serving as guard posts. Inside, we found the guards still present — though not truly alive in any meaningful sense. They were bound in the same cruel manner as the villagers below, bodies wrapped tight in thorny vines. From each of their mouths grew a single rose, blooming obscenely where breath should have been.
 
We descended until we reached the level of the courtyard. Rather than expose ourselves in the open space beyond, we chose the quieter — and likely safer — route downward into the cellars. The underground halls were dark, abandoned, and heavy with the scent of damp stone and rot. Cells lined the corridor, their doors rusted, hinges stiff with age. All were empty, clearly unused for years.
 
All but one.
 
Halfway down the corridor, we heard crying — soft, broken, echoing from behind a closed door. When we called out and peered inside, the cell was empty. Still, we entered. The door was unlocked.
 
The floor was strewn with books. Romantic novels, all of them. Tragic love stories between mortals and fey, their pages worn, spines cracked from repeated reading. It was a deeply unsettling sight, though I could not yet say why.
 
We pressed onward to the guard station at the far end of the hall. Inside, more guards stood frozen in the same thornbound state. From here, stairs would lead us up into the keep proper.
 
Before moving on, I attempted to glean information from the roses themselves. Normally, even magically altered plants whisper something — intention, hunger, pain. This time, there was nothing. No response at all.
That silence troubled me.
 
It prompted Luke to examine the area more closely, and what he uncovered explained everything. The entire lower level was shrouded in illusion — layered, subtle, meant not to hide presence, but truth.
 
A debate followed. Should we shatter it? Whatever lay beneath might be far worse than what we could see.
 
To aid my judgment, I turned to the spirit board given to me by Sister Willow and cast an augury. The answer was clear enough.
 
Favorable.
 
Luke drew upon his magic, and with a sharp crack in the air, the illusion was broken.
 
My stomach turned.
 
With the illusion torn away, the truth of the place revealed itself in full, merciless clarity. The unconscious guards were still there, wrapped in vines as before, but the rest of the room had become a charnel house. Bodies lay scattered across the stone floor, torn apart with savage force — limbs separated from torsos, armor bent and broken, flesh blackened with rot. The stench hit me like a physical blow, thick and cloying, forcing bile up my throat.
 
I covered my mouth and nose with a cloth to block out the worst of it, blinking back tears as my eyes burned. Luke did the same, and together we moved carefully through the carnage, forcing ourselves to focus. Now that the illusion was gone, the roses were exposed — no longer shielded, no longer silent.
 
Luke quickly identified the magic woven through them. Hag magic. Old, cruel, and deliberate. The roses fed on fear and anguish, drawing sustenance from their victims while keeping them alive just long enough to suffer. When I reached out to them, they finally answered — not in words, but in a shared, whispering certainty.
 
They had been summoned by the Dark Mother.
 
She resided above us.
 
That was all I needed to know.
 
We did not linger. Without another word, we left the charnel house behind and climbed the stairs into the keep proper. The courtyard we passed through offered no relief — it was a continuation of the nightmare below. Bodies and body parts lay strewn across the stone, trampled and torn, as though violence itself had been given free rein here. I kept my eyes forward, eager to put it behind us.
 
At the entrance to the main hall, we slowed. Caution reasserted itself. I sent a magical probe ahead of us, letting it drift silently through the space beyond the doors.
 
What it revealed made my breath catch.
 
The hall was choked with roses and thorns, creeping up the walls and across the ceiling like grasping fingers. At the far end stood a throne — massive, ornate, far too large for any human to sit comfortably upon. And at its base sat a young girl, legs folded beneath her, calmly reading a book as though she were in a sunlit garden rather than a slaughterhouse.
 
When Gael pushed the doors open, the sound echoed through the hall. The girl startled, gasped, and scrambled to her feet before climbing up onto the throne, clutching her book to her chest. Her eyes were wide, fearful, but sharp.
 
Luke stepped forward slowly, hands open, his voice gentle as he spoke. He told her we were there to help Rosebloom, that we meant no harm.
 
She did not seem convinced.
 
“I’ve heard stories about you,” she said cautiously, her gaze flicking between us. “From Keralon.”
 
The way she said it — not accusing, but wary — sent a chill down my spine.
 
Ellie — because that was the name she gave us — told her story in a small, careful voice.
 
She had been sent here from Keralon a year ago, she said, to wed Sir Fynn. A political match. A kindness dressed up as duty. Then, a few months past, an old woman had arrived at the castle gates. Sir Fynn, ever the courteous host, had invited her in. Dinner had been served. Words had been exchanged.
 
Harsh ones.
 
The woman had revealed herself as a hag, cursed Sir Fynn at the table, and left before the plates were cleared.
 
As the others spoke softly with Ellie, asking questions, offering reassurance, my mind kept turning the pieces over and over. They began to slide into place with a quiet, awful inevitability. There were still gaps — shadows where answers should have been — but one truth pressed insistently at the back of my thoughts.
 
Something was wrong.
 
Ellie was too eager. Too quick to urge us to not kill Sir Fynn. Too insistent that the curse should remain unbroken. Every suggestion we made that didn’t align with her wishes earned a flash of irritation she was too young, too frightened, to show so cleanly. And when we refused to simply take her and leave, when Luke announced he was going to examine both her and the throne for magic…
 
She bristled.
 
Luke’s spellwork was precise, controlled. He confirmed what we had already begun to suspect: the throne was the source of the hag magic, the wellspring feeding on the suffering of the guards below. When he turned his attention to Ellie, his expression shifted.
 
“There’s a transformation aura on you,” he said carefully.
 
That was it. The final click of the lock.
 
Ellie wasn’t Ellie at all.
 
Ellie was Eileen Inkheart — the hag Lady Rootskewer had warned me about. The one hunting me. The one who needed me dead.
 
I didn’t say it aloud. Not yet. There was more here, something still hidden beneath the lies, and I wanted to see where she would take us next. But my pulse had quickened, my body already coiling toward action.
Ellie — Inkheart — backed away, anger flaring across her borrowed face. “Stop using magic on me,” she snapped, fear and fury tangled together.
 
Somehow, impossibly, Gael managed to talk her down. His voice was calm, earnest, disarmingly gentle. After a tense moment, she allowed Luke to cast another spell.
Polymorph.
 
When Luke named it, her shoulders sagged. Cornered at last, she changed her tune.
 
She admitted to being fey. Claimed she had been imprisoned here, with Sir Fynn as her guardian. Said she had hidden her true form because she’d heard stories about us — about our hatred of the fey. According to her, Lady Rootskewer herself had trapped her here after a personal dispute.
 
The story fit neatly. Too neatly.
 
It almost made sense. Almost.
 
And yet, I wondered why Lady Rootskewer hadn’t mentioned a thing.
 
Gael pressed her again, gently but firmly, urging her to show us the truth. She sneered at us then, called us hypocrites. Bigots. Said we only pretended at mercy while sharpening our knives for her kind.
Then she let the spell fall.
 
Her body twisted and stretched, shadows pouring out of her like ink in water. She grew taller, broader, her features warping into something ancient and cruel. The girl vanished entirely, replaced by a night hag — tall, dreadful, unmistakable.
 
Eileen Inkheart stood before us.
 
I had been right.
And yet… something was wrong.
 
Lady Rootskewer had warned me that Inkheart wanted me dead — that I was a threat she couldn’t ignore. But now, standing face to face with her, I might as well have been another piece of furniture. When I stepped forward and asked my questions, she looked at me no differently than she looked at the others.
 
Not with hatred.
Not with fear.
Just calculation.
 
And that unsettled me more than anything else.
 
I pressed her then, asked her plainly why she had left the coven.
 
She did not deny it. In fact, she seemed almost pleased to finally stop pretending.
 
She told us she had found other powers to ally with — forces older, deeper, unconcerned with the petty balance between humans and fey. She said she was done obeying rules that bound her kind, done pretending that restraint was anything but weakness. When I asked her if she understood what breaking the coven meant — the spirits that would be loosed, the damage that would follow — she laughed.
 
Not a nervous laugh. Not defensive.
A genuine, careless laugh.
 
She did not care.
 
That, she said, was why Lady Rootskewer had imprisoned her here. Punishment. Containment. A leash disguised as mercy.
 
Then she smiled — slow, knowing — and offered us another temptation. She could tell us where her master resided. We would only have to promise to go and speak with him. A few days’ travel, she said. A simple ritual. Nothing dangerous. Nothing binding.
 
All very harmless.
 
By then my head was spinning with contradictions. Rootskewer’s warning. Inkheart’s indifference. The truth somewhere between, or perhaps somewhere entirely else. I needed clarity, and I needed it now. So I reached out again, weaving a sending to Lady Rootskewer.
 
“Found Inkheart’s prison. She offered to let us speak to her new master. Will not free her, but we need to save the villagers. Advice?”
 
The reply came almost immediately.
 
“Do what you will, but do not free or kill her. Leave her something to feed on so she doesn’t starve.”
 
That answer settled some questions and made others unbearable.
 
We could not free her.
We could not kill her — and even if we did, it would only delay her, not end her.
And if we left her with nothing, she would starve to death here, slowly, which apparently was also unacceptable.
Which meant she had to be fed.
 
It also meant we could not simply break Sir Fynn’s curse. The throne, the roses, the magic binding the villagers — all of it was part of her prison. Undoing it would undo her confinement.
 
Inkheart, of course, already had a solution.
 
A deal.
 
She would release the villagers. She would let the guards and the people of Rosebloom wake, free of vines and thorns. In return, two of us would bear roses implanted into our bodies. Living conduits. Constant anguish. A steady source of suffering she could feed on, enough to sustain her imprisonment.
 
I did not even have time to speak.
 
Liliana stepped forward first.
Then Luke.
No hesitation. No bargaining. Just acceptance.
 
My heart lurched into my throat as they offered themselves, and for a moment I hated Inkheart with a clarity so sharp it hurt. But worse than that — worse even than my fury — was the knowledge that I understood their choice.
 
With the bargain struck and its terrible price paid, there was nothing left to argue. Only things left to endure.
 
Inkheart laid out the ritual with the air of someone reciting a nursery rhyme. Casual. Precise. Cruel in its simplicity.
 
We were to find a tree so vast it would take three people, hand in hand, to circle its trunk. Beneath its roots we would bury the eye of a sentient creature — the phrasing deliberate, pointed — along with a personal object from each of us who would take part in the journey. Then we were to sleep at the foot of the tree. By morning, a gate would be waiting.
 
A tunnel.
 
At its far end, we were to call out a name: Nidhogg.
Her master.
 
She promised us the path there and back would be safe. That much, she said, she could guarantee. But she warned us not to stray, not to explore, not to be curious. Beyond the path lay a place that did not forgive mistakes, nor did it care about intent.
When we were done speaking with him, we were to return the way we came.
 
Nothing more. Nothing less.
 
And then, as if sealing a transaction no different from any other, she acted.
 
The roses took root in Luke and Liliana with a quiet cruelty that made my stomach churn. There was no scream, no spectacle — only a sharp intake of breath, a brief tremor, and then the slow, awful realization settling behind their eyes. Pain that did not fade. Pain that would not be allowed to.
 
Inkheart seemed satisfied.
 
True to her word, the magic unraveled. The vines withdrew from flesh, thorns receded, and one by one the people of Rosebloom collapsed into exhausted, terrified wakefulness. Guards slumped where they stood. Villagers wept, clung to one another, or stared in hollow disbelief at what had been done to their home.
 
We did not linger.
 
We gathered them as quickly and gently as we could, shepherding them out of the valley before the magic could decide to change its mind. No one argued. No one questioned. They followed us with the blind trust of people who had already lost everything once.
 
As we left Rosebloom behind, swallowed again by walls of thorns and silence, I looked at Luke and Liliana walking ahead of me. Their steps were steady. Their faces composed. But I could feel it — the wrongness of it, the weight they now carried so that others could live.
 
The valley was saved.
Inkheart was fed.
And somewhere beyond the paths of this world, something ancient had just been invited to speak with us.
 
We led the survivors onward, toward Tarn, toward safety and shelter and familiar ground. But my thoughts lingered behind us, coiled around roots and tunnels and names best left unspoken.
 
The road ahead was clear.
 
The cost, however, was only beginning to make itself known.