The Kingdom of Oakhaven didn't fall to an army. It didn't fall to a plague or a natural disaster. It fell because a woman in a tattered black dress wandered outside the spirit realm.
To a commoner, a Witch is a myth. To a scholar, she is a concentrated anomaly of divine residual energy. But to the soldiers of Oakhaven's 4th Infantry, she was simply the end.
The sky over the capital hadn't just turned dark; it had turned bruised, a deep, swirling violet that pulsed with the rhythm of a dying heart. Rain didn't fall. Instead, droplets of liquefied mana descended from the clouds, searing through plate armor like hot oil through parchment. thousands of soldiers fell their screams filling the air, a witch had come, she had descended upon them like a rolling thunder storm.
"Hold the line!" a commander shouted, though there was no line left to hold.
At the center of the devastation stood the Witch of the Pale Moon. she wasn't chanting incantations or waving a wand. She was simply weeping. Every sob sent a shockwave of kinetic force through the cobblestone streets, liquefying stone and shattering the stained glass of the Grand Cathedral three miles away. She raised a hand, a gesture as light as shooing a fly, and the palace's north tower—a marvel of engineering that had stood for four centuries—simply ceased to exist. It didn't crumble; it vanished into a cloud of glittering, iridescent dust.
This was the power of a Spirit fueled by the rawest human emotions. This was why the world trembled.
Ten miles away, on a grassy ridge overlooking the doomed valley, a ten-year-old Chase sat on a fence post. He should have been terrified. He should have been running toward the bunkers with the rest of the village.
Instead, he was squinting.
"Whoa," he whispered, his eyes wide as the horizon glowed with a terrifying, beautiful violet light.
For what chase saw was a being of unimaginable beauty, a myth. something other worldly, a Witch
In the chaos of the Witch's retreat—after she had finished unmaking the kingdom and decided to vanish back into the Spirit Realm—she passed over the ridge. It was only for a second. The air grew cold enough to crack the trees.
She drifted just a few feet above the grass, her silver hair trailing behind her like a comet's tail. For a heartbeat, she stopped and looked down. Her eyes weren't human; they were swirling galaxies of gold and spite. She looked at the scruffy boy with the dirt-smudged face and the hole in his left boot.
Chase didn't flinch. He didn't scream. He looked at the woman who had just deleted a monarchy and thought one very specific, very life-altering thing:
"She's the coolest thing I've ever seen."
The Witch tilted her head, perhaps confused by the lack of abject terror in the child's gaze, before dissolving into a burst of light that leveled the nearby barn.
Nine Years Later
The barn was never rebuilt, and neither was Oakhaven. But the image of that silver-haired catastrophe remained burned into Chase's retinas.
Most people saw a Witch and saw death. Chase saw a Witch and saw The Goal. He didn't just want to be a Hunter for the paycheck or the shiny Rune of Light. He wanted to get back to that "otherworldly beauty" and, if at all possible, convince one of them to not blow him up.
He stood at the edge of the woods, patting his nearly empty coin purse and gripping a sword that was more "heavy iron bar" than "legendary blade."
"Don't worry, my lady," Chase muttered to the empty air, adjusting his belt. "I'm coming for you.