Sixteen
It was nine o’clock in the evening, outside it was dark and miserable. Inside the building, the empty corridors were dimly lit by the glowing exit signs. The Council staff that were on night-shift were tucked away in little rooms, with no idea anything out of the ordinary would occur.
The light flickered and the shadows began to move, sliding across the plastic floors and twisting up into a physical being. The female figure was dressed entirely in black, a heavy hood pulled up, completely shadowing the face from view. The witch walked through every defence and protection as though they did not exist, and the guards were not alerted to her presence. She let herself into an empty office with a gloved hand. On the glass door, bold letters spelt out ‘Bound Witch Office’. The witch swept past the empty desks to a door at the back of the room. It was locked, but the witch had taken the pains of procuring the key, there was a faint click as it unlocked.
Beyond the doorway, a short series of steps led to the floor of a long dark room, with the faint gleam of metal shelves that stretched into the darkness. The witch knelt down and pressed her hand to the concrete floor, a crack of pale light appeared, then ran the distance of the room, criss-crossing and lighting the bottom rows of a hundred shelves.
Everywhere there were amulets and stones, each containing the essence of power from every bound witch of the past 150 years. All irretrievable, irreversible - unless you had the key.
The witch-hunters had been greedy and naïve in keeping these amulets - did they think they could use the stolen magic of witches somehow? Or had they never found a way to truly destroy them? It didn’t matter either way.
The witch took out a bronze dagger. The security of this place was pathetic. The MMC had thought themselves safe, they had thought themselves very clever indeed. There was only one key in the world and they’d given its secret location to one trusted member of the Council.
Did they really think this was protection enough against the Shadow Witch and her followers? It had taken a while to track down, but the key, the bronze dagger, was hers.
The witch knelt down again and drove the dagger on the throbbing light of the crack with all her strength. For a moment nothing happened, then the light flashed red and flared up from the floor, sparking and spitting. The light touched one amulet, then another, they all cracked with a piercing scream until the room vibrated with the sound of a thousand broken vessels.
Beneath the shadow of her hood, the witch smiled. All of her bound kin were free - let’s see how the MMC would handle the mass uprising of all the quiet little witches locked up together in prisons in their hundreds.
The witch retrieved the dagger, her trophy, and turned to leave, her job was done. The only thing left was to leave her signature.
The Shadow Witch held her arms out, and felt a familiar rumble as her magic built up. With an almighty blast it was released, throwing aside concrete, brick and metal. The entire wing of the building was rubble, and the Shadow Witch was nowhere to be found.