Witch Hunt

Sonya Jade allowed the calming effect of stirring pie-filling to wash over her like warm beach water. There she was sitting cross-legged with her chin propped up on her fist and her eyes closed while she hummed a gentle tune. She couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was about baking pies that made her so relaxed. Maybe it was a hobby. Maybe it was a future career choice. Maybe it was an escape from the daily grind of religious school. Whatever it was, she licked her lips in anticipation of the resulting gooey strawberry pie. The tart flavor, the moist texture, the crunchy crust, they would all come together to create a symphony of heaven on her tongue. The thought of it made her mouth water so much that she wiped some spittle from the corner of her lips.

Her baking-induced hypnosis was rudely interrupted by a rapid-fire knock on her cottage door. Sonya gasped heavy and scrambled to move the pie filling away from the heat. She dumped a tiny portion of it on the straw floor and stifled a storm of curse words when a tiny droplet burned her toe. She ruffled her baker’s dress and straightened her long purple hair as the knocking grew intense. “I’m coming!” she yelled impatiently while power walking to the door.

She messed with her hair one last time before opening the door and nearly getting bowled over by her best friend Devon Cross. Her own black dress and messy black hair suggested she had been in a struggle of some kind, not to mention her erratic pacing and nervous shaking. Devon grabbed Sonya’s arms and begged her, “Please! You’ve got to help me! They’re after me! They think I’m a witch!”

Sonya cupped her hands over Devon’s face and said, “Settle down. Who’s after you?”

“The Order of Light! They’re going to burn me alive! Hide me somewhere!” Devon shouted frantically, to which Sonya shushed her and motioned her to hide under her straw bed.

There was another knock on Sonya’s door and this time it sounded like boxing punches. “Open the door, harlot!” a male voice shouted. “We know you’re in there! God has no place for you in this world! Come out here so we can send you straight to hell with the rest of the demons!” The knocking grew so violent that splinters breezed off the cottage door. Sonya once again scrambled to fix her dress and hair before frantically answering the door.

At her doorstep stood a small, white-robed militia carrying poleaxes and torches, their leader as hefty as a pumpkin and scraggly as a yeti. “Where is she?” asked the leader in a gruff and furious voice.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, good sir,” said Sonya with a modicum of innocence as she leaned against her doorway.

“Don’t lie to me, young lady. Lying is a sin. We know you’re harboring a witch in that cottage of yours and if you don’t surrender her to us, we’ll have you crucified as well!”

“There’s nobody here but me, sir,” said Sonya. “I’m just baking pies and getting ready for a wonderful meal.”

“Baking pies, huh?” asked the lead witch hunter, who sniffed the air with his piggish snout and gagged with his tongue hanging out. “Smells like ogre dung if you ask me! Your husband should be ashamed of such perverse cooking methods!” The chubby man peeked down at her fingers and noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding band of any kind. “You don’t have a husband, do you?”

“Unfortunately, no, sir, I don’t. It’s just me here,” said Sonya with a sullen expression.

“Well then,” said the leader as he smacked his horse lips. “We’ll see if that pie of yours is any good after all.”

“I thought you said it smelled like ogre shi, I mean, ogre dung,” said Sonya while sheepishly covering her mouth after that accidental swear words.

“I wasn’t talking about that abomination you were baking,” said the witch hunter while gazing down at Sonya’s crotch with drooling lips and wild eyes. The single lady slowly backed away, but the witch hunters swarmed on her, grabbing her arms and legs while she struggled and yelled to be let go. “Come on, everyone! Who wants to get married to this fine young piece of ass?!”

The cheers of the witch hunters sent shivers down Sonya’s spine and numbness throughout her brain while she was being pinned to the floor by these heavy men. She had experienced sexism all the time at her religious school, but never once had this many men tried to gang up on her at once. The brushing of their skin against hers, the whips of their tongues, and their ale-stench breath made her want to vomit inside out.

Sonya’s dress was flipped over her head and her crotch was exposed to these piggish beasts who dared hide behind religion to justify their actions. Any minute now, she would feel a disgusting piece of meat driven into her repeatedly again and again. And then…the witch hunters backed off toward the doorway.

After catching her breath and flipping her dress back down, Sonya gazed with weary eyes at the floating pot of pie filling, which glided across the air and toward the jittery witch hunters. The still piping hot filling bubbled and shot in the air like a geyser before splashing down on each of the witch hunters’ faces. They screamed like little girls and scrambled around clutching their burned flesh.

Sonya took this opportunity to leap to her feet and kick the lead witch hunter in the balls, which made him scream at an even higher pitch. He plopped to the ground while crawling away on his hands and knees. One of the other witch hunters tried to “grab that bitch”, but the pot of pie filling slammed him square in the stomach and doubled him over. Taking a hint from each other’s misery, the witch hunters scrambled in retreat and disappeared behind the dense foliage of the forest, shouting like they were being gutted alive with an olive fork.

Sonya shivered in both anger and traumatic fear. Somehow kicking that man in the balls wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to rip him limb from limb and use his body parts to beat the holy hell out of his disgusting friends. She wanted to rip their skins off and wear them like a winter coat. She wanted to use their innards as filling for her strawberry pie and wolf it down like…well…a starving wolf.

“Are you at all considering dropping out of religious school?” said Devon Cross, who stood in Sonya’s doorway with a green aura surrounding her hands and a wicked smile on her face.

Sonya wanted to thank her for the obvious witchcraft that saved her from a gang rape, but instead she slapped the smile right off of her friend’s face. “How dare you lead those men to my house?! If your witchcraft is so great, why didn’t you just take them down beforehand?! I actually believed that you were anything but a witch! You lied to me, Devon! You lied to me and almost got me killed!”

“Settle down, sweetheart,” mocked Devon. “I came over to your house because I didn’t know if my magic would work or not. I’d only been studying it for a couple of months now and, really, how much can you learn in a couple of months?”

“You shouldn’t be studying that crap at all, Devon!” belted Sonya. “You could have gotten the two of us killed! You know the Order of Light despises that kind of magic!”

“So you’re just going to do what the Order of Light tells you to do for the rest of your life?” asked Devon with arms folded. “You’re a fucking drone, Sonya Jade. You really are.”

“Watch your mouth, Devon! He could be watching us!” whispered Sonya angrily.

“Who could be watching us?!” roared Devon. “The man upstairs? The man downstairs? The man in the middle level? Who?! Who the fuck is listening to the conversation about witchcraft?! And while I’m at it…” Devon stepped out in the middle of Sonya’s hard and did a kick dance while singing “Goddamn it!” repeatedly in a joyful tone. Sonya tried to shush her, but the dancing and singing continued even louder.

“For fuck’s sake, Devon, knock that fucking shit off!” shouted Sonya, which prompted her to cover her dirty mouth and Devon to stop dancing like a fool.

“You hear that, babe?” asked the witch while cupping Sonya’s face in her hands. “That’s what I like to see. You don’t really give a shit about that stupid religion. You’re just scared. You’re scared of what those men will do to you when they recover. You’re scared of what the entire Order of Light will do. You’re scared of the afterlife that follows. Or maybe what really scares you…is that they’ll eventually find out your little secret.”

Sonya’s eyes widened and her lips quivered while she stuttered, “W..what secret?”

“The secret that involves one of these,” said Devon with lust dripping off of her words like the pie filling that never was. She planted a passionate kiss on her friend’s lips and Sonya did nothing to reject it or even show the slightest amount of disgust. The tongues swirling sent butterflies flapping in Sonya’s stomach and a sparkle of wetness in her nether regions.

Once their kiss was over, Devon fondled Sonya’s hair and wiped the resulting tears from her eyes. “How did you know?” asked Miss Jade.

“Never mind how I know, Sonya. You’re asking the wrong question. The real question is…why are you so afraid? You’ve crossed the point of no return with that kiss. The Order of Light has nothing over you anymore. If you learned witchcraft with me, the two of us can be unstoppable. Catch my drift, sweetie? Or am I about to get you killed again?”

This time, it was Sonya’s turn to plant a sexy kiss on Devon Cross’s mouth. Her lips tasted sweeter than any strawberry pie she could have baked. Wrestling with her tongue eased the demons in her mind of what almost happened with the witch hunters. Men were disgusting to her, but Devon was easy to fall in love with. Her silky black hair, her creamy dark skin, and her curvy figure made her feel alive with every kiss. Fuck the Order of Light and everything that they stood for.

Raggyd

***RAGGYD***

What do you get when you combine minimal reading experience, a massive ego, and four fantasy characters who have no earthly business being together? The answer is Raggyd, a medieval fantasy novel idea I had in 2004 when I took a creative writing class at Olympic College. As horrible as it ended up being, it was also the launching pad for my poetry skills. Ergo, if it wasn’t for Raggyd in 2004, I wouldn’t have published Confessions of a Schizophrenic Savage in 2013 nor Necrograph in 2016. I’m halfway through another book of poetry called Prophecy, so that’s in my near future.

With an underdeveloped plot, Raggyd was little more than an excuse to use four characters I really had an affinity for. There was the pit fighting barbarian Graf Lunge, the gothic samurai Eron Putris, the acrobatic thief Baby, and the witch hunter zealot Futez Mysida. Somehow these four characters were going to come together to fight a super powerful enemy named…are you ready for this…Vine Wielders. That’s his name, folks. Vine fucking Wielders. Sounds threatening, doesn’t it?

The first chapter I wrote for Raggyd was an interaction between Baby and Futez. Futez wanted Baby to join his religious organization and Baby declined by making a smart-ass remark about how the only thing Futez plans on stealing is the altar boy’s virginity. Naturally, the witch hunter was less than pleased and sicked an entire squadron of ball and chain-wielding soldiers upon his would-be charge.

As much as the class enjoyed Baby’s dig about fucking altar boys, Raggyd was a critical flop among the students. They had all criticisms for me and no compliments. Other students had compliments for their stories, but I didn’t and that put a huge dent in my massive ego. What really set me off was when a fellow student named Patrick flat out said the story sucked. You know you have a hair trigger temper when the words “it sucked” causes you to blow a major gasket. Of course, I didn’t actually explode in the classroom, but I was boiling over on the inside. I needed some kind of revenge on Patrick in the worst way. Beating the piss out of him would land me in jail, so I needed something a little more…legal.

Around this time in my life, I was watching a lot of WWE (surprise, surprise). Since this was the autumn of 2004, John Cena was still over with the crowd during his white rapper gimmick. I’ll always tell people that hip-hop was the catalyst for my poetry career, but what a lot of people don’t know is that John Cena’s battle raps were the biggest source of inspiration for me. From those TV-14 insults, my revenge poem against Patrick was formulated. I would go on a lengthy diatribe about how I would impregnate Patrick’s mother, sodomize him, and give him up to the orcish horde (because he looked like Frodo Baggins). I would have read this out loud during creative writing class, but Patrick made a face turn and started being nicer to the class, so I pulled back at the last minute.

As far as Raggyd goes, just for the sake of spiting my critics, I wrote a 130-page movie script detailing the exploits of Graf Lunge and Baby. Had I continued this series, there would have been a script dedicated to Eron and Futez and there would have been another one after that dedicated to the final battle with Vine Wielders. For the time being, Graf Lunge’s story was about him getting kidnapped at an early age and forced to train as a pit fighter under drill instructor-style conditions. Baby’s story was about him being sick of his religious upbringing and joining the thieves’ guild, where his training was much nicer by comparison.

Raggyd had a lot of potential to be something big, but I eventually lost interest in continuing it due to the silence of my critics and a growing interest in other movie scripts. That means Graf Lunge, Baby, Futez Mysida, and Eron Putris are all orphaned characters. They’ll be used in other stories, no doubt, but what stories and when? I particularly grew fond of Graf Lunge because of his name (believe it or not) and his barbarian gimmick (naturally). And now that I think about it, Baby and Eron have different incarnations in other published stories. Over a decade later, Baby would become a child’s doll come to life in “Nail Bomb” and Eron would take the role of Floyd the sparring android from “The New Trainer”. Both of those stories will be published in Poison Tongue Tales. That leaves Graf and Futez without a home.

When I look back on the origins of Raggyd and the hurtful environment from which it came, a part of me wishes Olympic College wouldn’t have allowed that format to go on for any creative writing class. Apparently, this is a common occurrence for a lot of schools, not just OC. You read your story or poem out loud to the class and stay silent while the other students judge your piece. The other students can be as harsh or as nasty as they want with no consequence. It’s always been my understanding that school was supposed to be a place where students could grow and mature, not be taken down. But hey, I’ve watched Pink Floyd the Wall millions of times before, so I should have known better.

If I didn’t attend that class, I wouldn’t have written that battle rap about Patrick and therefore, I would have no poetry career. While I admit that my angry poetry got me in trouble more than once, I have no regrets about any of it, because I’d like to think I’ve improved since then. Maybe that’s why “Confessions of a Schizophrenic Savage” holds a four-star rating on Good Reads and Necrograph holds a five-star rating on the same website.

The lesson of this blog entry is to live your life with no regrets, because if you change just one part of your personal history, the rest of your life will be completely different. Without the negative experiences of your past, you wouldn’t appreciate the positive ones you have now. Raggyd will see the light of day again sometime in the near future. When that is, I have no idea. Until then, adios, amigos! Thanks for reading!

***JOKE OF THE DAY***

Q: What do you call someone who masturbates to Maid Marian while watching through her window?

A: Rubbin’ Hood.

Clair Deus

NAME: Clair Deus

AGE: 24

OCCUPATION: Witch Hunter

CANON: None

Back in the years 2007 and 2008, whenever I was strapped for fantasy movie script ideas, I would come up with multiple lists of 100 original characters and randomly select from those lists to determine which ones would be in the same story. The list items would have a name, a race, and a class. That’s it. No back story, no psychology, no flaws, just the basics. The good stuff would be developed as I wrote the script. Unfortunately, Clair Deus, Human Witch Hunter, was never randomly chosen for a script, so she stayed on the list she was a part of indefinitely.

But the more I thought about the potential Clair Deus had, the more I began to develop her for no real reason inside my own head. I always envisioned her as a medieval dark fantasy version of Kate Beckinsale’s character from the Underworld saga. The few differences were, Clair had gothic makeup on her face and used crossbows and magic wands instead of guns and knives. Not much original thought put into Clair’s character, I agree.

It was the characters closest to her on the list that allowed me to develop her even further. Many of those extra characters had “mancer” in their class title. “Mancer” is a Greek suffix that signifies the person has magical powers in the prefix of his choosing. For example, a pyromancer works with fire, because pyro is a prefix for fire. A cryomancer uses ice, a hydromancer uses water, an electromancer uses lightning, and of course, we all know after playing Diablo II for half of our lives that necromancers deal in death. With so many people surrounding Clair Deus’ spot on the list with “mancer” in their job titles, you’d think she would have plenty of “witches” to choose from when she goes hunting for evil bastards.

All of these possibilities flowing through my head made me wonder why I couldn’t just cherry pick characters from these lists and do whatever the hell I goddamn want. I favor random selection for a number of reasons. One, it’s an exercise in discipline. If I force myself to conform my story to the selections I’ve made, I will have established myself as a disciplined writer who didn’t let his only form of controlled chaos get too overwhelming. Two, if I randomly select from whatever list I’m working with, I’m giving every list item an equal chance of being chosen. When everything has an equal chance and there’s no favoritism of any kind, that would be the equivalent of parents raising multiple children. I treat list items like I would treat my own children if I wanted any: with justice and fairness.

Although I use randomness every day whenever I’m working creatively (in fact, I use it to choose blog topics as well), Clair Deus will have to settle for being an unemployed character on Garrison’s Library. But if she stayed there indefinitely, it would defeat the purpose of having old characters’ biographies on my blog in the first place. I want to use Clair in a dark fantasy story someday. The question is, how big of a role will she play (if any at all) and will she have enough flaws to make her a believable character rather than a Mary-Sue badass? That’s the problem I’ve faced in the past with a lot of my dark fantasy characters: they were too perfect for their own good. Nobody likes perfection, because life is far from perfect. Although we should all strive to be better people, we will never be perfect, which is what makes real life such an interesting story. Shouldn’t Clair Deus’ story reflect that kind of creativity? And before you ask, no, Clair’s last name isn’t a recycling of Deus Shadowheart’s first name. The two characters are unrelated.