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A witch doctor came to town a fortnight ago. Strange occurrences have been going on. Corpses coming back to life, people losing their minds and blindly attacking their loved ones, and things, dark things, lurking the farmfields. I fear the world is on the verge of something catastrophic, and these unfortunate times are simply symptoms of something more malignant.
The witch doctor, however, is unrelated to these incidents.
No, I forget myself.
She is related, but she is not the cause of these foreboding happenings. Her faith is of a different kind than ours, and she speaks of death as simply a journey to the Unformed Lands, but her ability to commune with the spirits is a godsend in these troubling times. I've noticed her going out of her way to comfort the survivors of the attacks on our town. The moaning dead have dealt a good deal of damage, especially emotionally, on our townspeople, but we are hardy folk. The blacksmith especially, who lost his wife to the bite of the dead, has hung a pouch of his wife's on the fence next to his workplace, possibly with the intention of readying himself to read the letter she left him. He's a gruff man, as blacksmiths usually are, a kind of withdrawn man. I expected it to take a bit longer for him to recover from the incident, but the witch doctor has been seen whispering to him often, urging him, I suppose, to reconcile himself with his grief.
Little by little, our town is looking a town again. People readily call out to newcomers, and are more inclined to talking about the events plaguing our town, searching for an explanation.
I can see the spirit of recovery, twinkling in everyone's wide eyes and brightening up the rare smiles on the faces of our children.
This is good.
This is...very grand news.
I expect great things to come of this, really.
Except...
I fear that the witch doctor will end up causing more physical destruction than all of the forces of darkness combined ever will.
She roams the fields in her search for the fallen star, and the shards that the fallen star has left behind. The rumors from her first trek coming back to me...I could not bring myself to believe them, hoping that they were simply exaggerating. However, news assails me almost immediately every time she comes back to town.
I've gone down to the cemetery myself to check.
They were right.
Everything, and I am not exaggerating for the sake of entertainment when I say everything down there was entirely in pieces. There were thousands of darts stuck in the walls of our mausoleums, the gravestones, the ground. I could barely walk without stepping on one.
I'm entirely baffled by how many there were. I've seen the blow dart she carries on her person, but those darts...where did they come from?
When I ventured down into the catacombs, all the furniture was...it looked as if they had shattered. Pieces of wood everywhere, and littered among them were the shriveled up bodies of spiders and shards of glass. Even our most valued pieces of furniture, put together with wood of the finest grain and craftsmen of the highest reputation, could not escape her. The wood we used for some of the tables could withstand blows from strongmen with cudgels.
Toothpicks now. All toothpicks.
I shake my head as I write this, for it seems utter nonsense even to me, the one who surveyed the damage himself. Millions of coins went into the construction of those catacombs. I saw some columns collapsed, and some hallways ended in cave-ins.
Even the dead could not be so destructive.
Of course, as I saw all this, while I was shocked by the degree of destruction caused, I sought not to judge so quickly. Two nights ago, I requested to go with her myself.
She smiled that same mysterious smile of hers, thin lips quirking up at the corners, and nodded her consent. Her voice is very pleasant to listen to: husky, but not grating. She told me that if she judged things too dangerous for me, she would teleport me back to town immediately.
She's recently gained a templar companion, a man with a stiff posture and a haunted look in his eyes, no doubt a result of the notoriously trying templar initiation. He seems to be more talkative around the witch doctor though, and obviously holds her in high esteem. No matter what the occasion, he's always ready to jump into a conversation with a couple of quick compliments in her honor.
The initiation must really be an unfortunate thing, if all templars are as...stuffy as he is.
On her latest trek with me, I confirmed all of the rumors. They're all true, I'm sure of it, with no exaggerations at all.
She threw a jar of spiders at a chicken coop. The little house exploded in a rain of feathers and splinters, and when I turned to her demanding an explanation for why this had to happen, she simply shrugged and said that she thought it was empty, and that to test her hypothesis, it's always safer, as she's learned on her travels, to throw things from afar.
A farmer asked us for help getting rid of the carrion nests plaguing his fields. Of course, living up to her noble nature, she was all too ready to accept his request. She did get rid of the carrion nests.
She also got rid of all of the farmer's pumpkin crops. I glanced back as we left, and the poor farmer was left standing there, staring forlornly at the eviscerated remains of his pumpkins, strewn everywhere like morbid decorations among the corpses of the carrion bats. It was painful to turn away, but alas, we had to move on with our quest.
If the forces of darkness do not destroy us all, it will be due to this little witch doctor, but I fear it will be because she has destroyed us first.