The witch of Glenmoril Hill at first seems a strange creature.

She wears an elegant gown of black lace, yet lives in the most roofless wing of a decaying estate. She speaks of other realms as I would of home, and of our homes like a passing dream. She receives me into her home with a warm smile, a stark contrast to the dust, grime, and cobwebs clustered around the foyer door.

Though scars make lattices like a wicker basket across her face, she has to choke back bile to bind my hand when I tear it open on an unseen nail. That's the second day of my stay. She put her eyes out years ago for an unspeakable ritual. Some say it was the price she paid to breed with a monstrosity from the far stars, that the ecstasy of its perverse graspers and other-flesh tendrils probing her mortal form meant more to her than sight itself.

Some claim that she sacrificed the sight of flesh for the power to see the dead walking among us. And some? Some claim she tore her eyes out simply because she was sick of feeling them ache after long nights of reading. Yet in light and in dark, she sees far more clearly than I. Then, of course, there's her insistence. Delighted as she appears to receive a guest, the witch tells me that she'll only offer me guidance after I complete tasks.

"Trials?" I suggest.

"No, dear," she laughs. "Tasks."

Every demand seems trivial at first: fetch a favorite tome from a room to which she's long since lost the key. Call a spindly many-eyed creature from the deep ways to clear the rodents from her cellar. Drive away the moths that come by night to nibble at her gowns.

Search as I may, I can find no key. It's only after a week of scrabbling that it occurs me to ask the Witch for a tome of metallurgy. I spend another week maneuvering molten blobs of bronze back and forth inside the lock. It takes ten minutes to seal heat each with slow arcanothermal pulses from my fingers, bringing it to a glow, then five to fit inside an envelope of warding to stop it from bleeding heat into the tumblers.

Six attempts. Six times I push a  glowing inward, trying to map the lock's internal geometry while I wiggle the proto-key about on kinetic threads. Six times, and I finally produce a key that--after it cools--squeaks and scrapes into the lock, and makes the tumblers turn. By now I am thoroughly piqued.

I stamp around a fallen circular table to a rickety bookshelf, seize the tome--Shards of a Shattered Mirror, which is the only book on the damned thing!--and thump my way back to the reading room where the Witch takes tea, waited upon by a trio of empty frilled linens with a strange cut, with too many openings for limbs in places where no human limbs would be. I'm taken aback enough that, rather than pushing past the things with bodies beyond my sight, I clear my throat, wait politely for them to move, then present the tome.

"You must regard an unknown being as you do a locked door," the witch says. "If you possess the key, you may pass through. If not... you must go to great lengths to wriggle you were way through." She reaches into her sleeve and flashes the original key.

The urge to groan stiffens my shoulders. But I overcome myself, bow graciously, and thank the Witch of Glenmoril Hill for her insight. The next day I turn to the next task.

The lesson given by the spindly, many-eyed creature proves far more direct. I watch, eyes and lips twisting further in speechless horror, while the purplish mass of limbs clatters and scrabbles through the darkness of the cellar. It seizes upon every rat it can catch. And then? Deliberately, it squeezes tails between its many-clawed graspers. It tears, slowly, slowly enough that the gradual tearing of tiny flesh fades into the continuous ear-piercing squeals of animals in the last terror.

I watch it kill over, and over, and over again until I can bear no more. "Stop this!" I scream at the thing, brandishing my magic. "Stop this, don't you see how evil it is?"

Ten eyes flick to me, beady, shining. Thirty more stay fixed on the latest rat. Slowly ripping it in half, one end from the other. The snap comes as a shriek of hatred, trembling limbs, a silver cord of slicing magic that whips back and forth in the grasp of a quaking hand. Slashing, slashing, slashing the creature from the deep until it's nothing but lifeless splatters of steaming, copper-stinking flesh all over the walls.

When I return to the Witch and babble about the disaster, telling her that I refuse to comply with the death of another rat as long as I live, she only nods and tells me that she regards my task as complete.

"And if I told you from the first that I refused to kill other living beings just to curry favor with you?" I ask, already know the answer.

"In truth, I..." the Witch clears her throat, averting her eye sockets. "I thought that at any moment, you would come rushing back and tell me just that." She catches my hand, squeezing. "I will accept some responsibility for this. I have underestimated the impact my power would have on your judgment."

I feel unworthy to meet her gaze. "I thank you, ma'am, but I refuse to accept that. I chose, I... the favor I would ask you... few others would try it in the first place."

She bows. "As you will."

After that I wait a week before continuing. As for the moths... in a sudden flash of anger, I contemplate burning them all away. After that I flee the linen closet and stand heaving against a wall. I try to convince myself that they're only insects, but still, they're alive, I... I slump down and hug my knees. What's wrong with me? Seven days pass and all my compassion has bled away? Is that all I am, a brute force destroying any little life that stands in my way?

Then I think back to the key. I felt my only choice was a deft approach. For myriad reasons, I wanted to avoid damaging the door, so I looked to change myself instead--to learn until I could devise a solution I was unable to imagine before. My perspective shifts, and it occurs to me to ask: what lures moths to eat clothing in the first place?

A little study reveals it's as simple as their desire to reach the natural fibers inside clothing. More reading tells me that moths will drink the juices of rotting fruit. And that? Oh, there's no shortage of ungathered apples and berries lying outside. It takes me no time at all to gather enough to fill a pitcher, enchant it to amplify its essence, and lure the moths from the linen-closet. I return to the Witch and inform of her of my solution.

"My favorite also." She inclines her head. "In most cases, even with alien entities, it does far more good to encourage those of their instincts which are safe for you, than to attempt to stifle those of their instincts that bring harm. Your next tasks are as follows."

I'm familiar enough with the Witch that I let my annoyance show. But in the end, after another day to rest and contemplate, I apply myself to the next round. Months pass. I'm thankful that my task has no urgency, since I have all the time in forever. As much loneliness as my heart can withstand.

By the time I finish struggling through my esoteric studies with her, I begin to see she's a keener witch than I. And at last the day comes that I sit down across from her. Creaking chairs, collapsing mosaics on the walls, a dining hall beneath a disemboweled roof. The wind whistles, tearing itself apart on the splintered, jagged teeth of exposed rafters.

"I know what you're doing." I sip the tea, rich and floral, as clear in taste as the state is filthy from age. "You're teaching me how to understand, to survive, realms and beings that express themselves in things other than words. There's no amount of teaching you can give that will foster that skill in me, is there, if I'm unwilling to cultivate it for myself?"

The Witch nods. "And by now you understand that I feared if I simply told you that, you would throw up your hands in frustration and seek a charlatan's teachings. Quicker. Easier. Useless, meant to puff up your pride, to win your admiration, even if it cost your life."

"Thank you." I clutch my teacup, savoring the warmth while it lasts. "Though, I wonder... why go to all that trouble to keep me around, if I had been such an ungrateful student as all that?"

The Witch, just this once, grows smaller. "I receive very few visitors. I turn my eyes to astral realms, mostly. I commune with wraiths of the ether in my sleep. I... I was afraid that if I drove you away, no one else would come for a long, long time, or... or ever."

No words come to me for an answer, so I let silence stand in their stead.

A decisive sip. I set the teacup down. "Five years ago, my childhood friend died. We drifted apart in adolescence. I could no longer say I knew him well. Yet when he died I felt a terrible grief in my heart, and... and I want to tear him away from death."

"A favor no god or forest sprite will bestow," the Witch mutters, running beads of bone and lacquered flesh beneath her fingers. "There's one you might seek. Walk in the deepest ravine of the furthest forest late at night, and think."

"They will be summoned?" I ask.

She scoffs. "As if you or I or any could summon such a one as she. No. That is how she might see you if you keep her name and nature in your mind. She may let you find the gate--an Ashenvein Gate to Machrae Diir, whose only Lady is she."

"So she's a being like that creature from the deep?" I pour myself more tea. "So... the tasks you set me... you knew. You knew I would ask you to set me on the path to meet a horror. You've been teaching me how to think when I'm dealing with the Lady."

The Witch shakes her head. "No. I let my whims guide me in this. A witch's sense for the occult lives in her impulses, in desires that seem frivolous, not her rational mind. I sensed, I hoped, that the tasks I set would turn out to teach you what you needed."

A gust through the skeletal rafters of the fallen roof snuffs the only candle.

"It is said she may remember her compassion," she says at last, "if you carry the shards of a broken dream." She grasps my shoulder. "Be wary. The Lady's compassion can be murderous." The evening passes in relative silence.

The day comes. I choose the ravine I once visited, many leagues north of my old hometown, back when I journeyed north to the capital to study at the arcane college.

I walk, shivering in the cold cutting air, casting clouds of my breath before me, while the trees and the darkness grow deeper. I think of the images the Witch gave to me: six horns silhouetted against a boiling star of otherworld power. A throne shaped as though from many blades, all interlocking, shining, curving and somehow creating smooth surfaces through impossible twists to each razor edge.

I walk until I begin muttering to myself, casting angry glances at the starry sky above. I'm so beside myself with fury at the vagueness of this ritual that it takes me a while to notice how the trees seem to bend together, how the stones in the ravine sides are growing longer. Spiraling inward as the ravine grows narrower over head. I could almost be walking in a tunnel but for the faint stars shining through the sliver-rift above.

The sound of my footsteps shifts, no longer padding on dirt and crunching old twigs or leaves, but scuffing on stone. Yet for all that the air feels unnaturally still. Every noise I create fades far too swiftly. And then, from the darkness ahead, shifting blue glows emerge.

I arrive at the threshold of a titanic gateway wrought from black volcanic stone, from glimmering metal, from ice-blue chitin and dark blue flesh quivering in the fissures marring its surface. Within every fissure churns blue radiance. This is the source of the glows. A slow crackling draws my eyes to the molten stone and ash dripping from the gate.

The threshold's other side opens on a bladed throne beneath enormous, fluted columns.  Chitinous worm-beings and enormous, bulbous creatures of jaws and fangs and pores clumped together by the hundreds , soar slowly in the starry infinity unfolding behind the throne. Eerie energies wind around the pillars and stream along the floor. And, silhouetted against the blinding sunny radiance burning behind the throne, I see a six-horned figure brooding.

One steadying breath. That's all I allow myself before I lunge to the other side.

I cross the threshold and am brought to my knees in an instant. My paltry wards disintegrate, streaming away behind me and evaporating like a phantom snowdrift. The weight of the demon's presence clamps to my mind like a vibe. I expected that, but the ache in every muscle, the way I must fight for every breath, fight to keep my eyes open.

I open my mouth to demand that she stop. I recognize two things: firstly, she won't, and secondly, I feel no intention. This exhaustion, this burning collapse--this is the weight she inflicts simply by being. If she wanted me humbled, my mind would be ripped asunder.

"And what brings you, my dear," purrs the Lady, "to my lambent halls?"

Handmaidens attend her, tiny blue-robed figures clustering about the titanic demon's form. Through slits in the throne room all around us I see star-centipedes and fractal blooms of discolored otherworld flesh, skeletal beings with many spines springing off.

The old iron charm on my neck kisses my fingers, cool, a tiny promise of succor against the radiating waves of the demon's power. I take a bold step forward. "I want you to tell me how to reclaim a soul from the afterlife."

The Lady laughs. "So you do!" Then she falls silent. Her eyes, two pinpoints of cobalt nova shining from the jet black abyss of her silhouette, regard me with amusement.

"If I try to press you, you'll kill me where I stand, won't you?" I ask.

"Perhaps." The Lady shifts. Coronal glows stream from her claws like sunrays spilling from the periphery of an eclipse. Blue, cyan, and silver spokes of radiance. She raises them until they meet the hazy shapes of her face. She rests her chin there. Her great tail frisks to and fro above the metallic floor, stirring the auroras that shine upward.

The Witch told me I might hope for compassion if I carry the shards of a broken dream.

"My childhood friend, I..." I swallow my nerves. "Lady, I would tell you that I loved him dearly and I meant to make a life with him, but I would be lying and I suspect you would know that. I feel only this strange, aching conviction that we could've been more, that I failed him somehow by losing touch."

Again, she laughs. "What a peculiar drive! Hm..." Her tail taps the floor. "Was he a good man, this friend of yours? Would plucking him from his hereafter be better for your world?"

Steadying breaths, now. Commit to this course. I doubt that the Lady would be impressed if I retreated, now that I've begun. "How am I to answer that, Lady? I scarcely knew the man he became. I know only that I want him back, I..." I nod. "As mad as it sounds, I feel that he belongs to me."

"And he needs your permission to die?" The mouth within the Lady's shadow-mass splits wide, revealing rows of silvery fangs with a blue maelstrom swirling behind. I tear my thoughts back to my goal before I can think too much about how her innards look, if she has a storm like that filling her throat. "Hm..." she straightens. Rattles her talons on her throne. Each impact sends bursts of scalding-hot vapor.

"Very well!" the demon speaks brightly. "Here's the first need: you must be arrogant. Arrogant as only one who dares the impossible can be. Couple that bloated pride with power, dear seeker." She slams one bladed arm of the throne with a triumphant fist. "Fill yourself with your idea of this childhood friend. If your instincts run true, your ideas about him will carry some trace of the real thing. Little hooks into his soul."

"And... and if I'm misleading myself?" I squeeze the iron charm.

The Lady shrugs. "Then you undertook a great journey. That still means something, does it not?" A nod. "You must be swift as a bolt of lightning, as soft and sudden as an unbidden dream. Send your psyche into the afterlife where your friend abides, feeling in your heart that you are irresistible. If you can achieve this, that feeling will ensure that you do. If you cannot, it will at least soften your defeat's sting."

"An unbidden dream?" I venture dangerous words. "Lady, if I may... that sounds like something a succubus would suggest."

The Lady subsides into silence. "I already dislike explaining myself," she says at last. "So if I choose a word to describe what I am, I desire to know it will transcend misinterpretation. 'Succubus' already meant too many things to too many beings when I first heard it. I am sure five hundred years have only made matters worse."

"What does that matter?" I gesture to her surroundings. "Your domain scarcely resembles those of most demons I've read about. Do you like the word?"

The Lady absorbs that. "I am willing to help you unseal the inner power you'll need for this quest," she says. Blue nova builds on one raised claw. An answering brilliance unfolds from the floor. It coalesces to a chalice bubbling with radiant fluid. "Drink this. It will open you to yourself, and to becoming, which is the font of all the most absolute powers."

This far outstrips anything I plan to do. But I've come too far and at this point, I simply wish to have it all done. So I stride forward, seize the chalice, and pour the scorching substance down my throat before I can begin to fear the pain it will cause.

I ignite instantly. The agony screams across every nerve, sending me again to my knees, making my flesh boil and slough away. The Lady and her handmaidens watch without a sound, a stir, or a hint of sympathy. And still the heat rises, hotter and hotter, filling my melting nose with the inconstant reek of boiling flesh. Something explodes out from my ears and my temples, and with it, the pain ends.

I raise my collapsing hands before my eyes. Flooded now by a strange curiosity. Flames condense into stony crags on my joints, changing curves, shapely shifts all over my body. The sprouting of horns, wings, and tail, and a final ache of melting ardor the pools in my belly. I contemplate my horned reflection in the sides of the chalice: sculpted, now. Elegant, slit-eyed, and never again human.

"A lust-demon?" I ask.

"What else," the Lady says with a sly smile, "could tempt someone out of paradise?" She dismisses me with an imperious wave of her talons. "This concludes our business, fledgling. I wish you all luck, and will watch your progress with interest. But from this point, the story has no meaning unless you find your own way."

I bow to the outer queen of Machrae Diir. As I rise, I can't help but mention one thing. "Lady, with all due respect... you surprise me. You say you dislike explaining yourself, yet you rush to do it. Do you fear something?"

Her eyes flare. "Certainly not you. Be on your way, kindred, before you undo the fondness I've begun to feel for you."

I bow again, turn, and am gone from Machrae Diir.