THE WITCH OF THE WORLD’S END

THE WITCH OF THE WORLD’S END by Darrell Schweitzer, art by Andrea Alamanno

 

The Witch of the World’s End dwelt alone in a tower of glass, at the Earth’s uttermost rim. For attendants, she had only spirits, figures of light that flickered like flame. Whirling columns of dust came and went as she bade them; and brilliantly-plumed, metallic birds sang for her, animated by the captive souls of the dead. At night, stone soldiers guarded her battlements; the statues of her garden stirred to life, eyes hollow and darkly gleaming, animated by the strength of her dreams.

She wanted no other company, for all her waking hours she spent at her loom, weaving a tapestry of shadow and starlight and something infinitely finer than spider’s silk; and in that tapestry were depicted all the lives of men, their deeds and their glories, their sins and their sufferings, and, most especially, their manifold, but ultimately monotonous deaths.

All these things she shaped with her delicate hands, and whether they were true because she wove them, or she wove them because they were true, not even the Witch of the World’s End knew for certain.

Once she glanced up, noticing the Moon as it came drifting through her great hall, high up near the ceiling, entering by the east window and leaving by the west, like a pigeon fluttering under the eaves.

Her hand slipped. A thread tangled, distorting the pattern she had intended. She paused to study this new thing, then sighed softly and continued her work, embroidering around the tangled thread, naming the new figure she created Antharic. She wrought him as a splendid knight, astride a black war-steed, his silver armor gleaming in the moonlight, his spearhead like the flash of an enormous jewel suddenly revealed in the dark, the emblem on his shield that of a charging bull.

That same bull which is sacred to Vastorion, who ranks in Hell as Lord of Vengeance.

Antharic was coming to kill the Witch of the World’s End.

She wove the outline of him, humming softly the litanies of Vengeance, and of Satan.

The long hangings in her chamber rippled in some secret draught.

 

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When Antharic was small, he stood ragged and barefoot on a little mound, waving a stick and shouting, “Look! I’m a giant-killer! I am Caesar! I am Alexander! I am braver than all the knights in the world!”

His father laughed bitterly and swatted him with the back of a huge hand, sending the boy tumbling into a puddle.

“You’re just a dirty boy. You’ll grow up to be a dirty man. Now get to work and forget your silly dreams.”

And Antharic labored in the fields beside his father and his brothers, knee-deep in mud. Even his grandfather was there for a time, until the work broke him and the old man died. The sun rose and set, rose and set; the stars turned in their courses and the seasons passed in turn. At each harvest, the King’s men came to collect their share, and everyone went hungry.

That was all anyone knew. In the winter, the family sat in the cold and the dark, telling stories no one believed, or singing songs that had no life in them.

“I will be a great hero one day,” Antharic said. “You will be amazed.”

Often his father was too weary even to laugh.

But Antharic dreamed his dreams, and in them he beheld the witch in her chamber, weaving. She was young and slender, as exquisite as anything she wove. Sometimes she spoke to him in a soft voice, and sometimes the weaving seemed to pass through his own hands. He saw the figure of the knight clearly, its visor raised to reveal a broad face with pale, passionless eyes. He admired the strong form of the hero, the massive shoulders and thighs, like those of Hercules in the old stories.

“Antharic,” the witch said to him. “This knight is named Antharic.”

But Antharic was a dirty boy, famine-thin, with a gaping, round face, like a pumpkin atop a stick, people always said.

In his dreams, too, in the witch’s weaving, Antharic saw a second figure, that of Pestilence, a skeleton in a black shroud, sowing seeds of death like dragon’s teeth, out of a pouch worn at the hip.

When he awoke, his mother and his sisters were already dying, shivering and coughing up blood. Only he and his father survived. They had to burn the house to get the contagion out, then bury their dead, and when these things were done, his father looked very old and very tired.

Soon after the King’s men came for the crops, but there were no crops, because no one had been able to harvest them.

That day, for the first time in his life, Antharic beheld a genuine knight, a mighty man of war in tarnished armor, seated on a war-horse, pointing and giving orders to the others.

“Where is your fee?” asked the knight, leaning down from his saddle.

Antharic’s father could only show his empty hands.

“My lord must be paid,” said the knight.

Without further words, he struck off the old man’s head. His men stuck it on a post, as a warning, then all of them rode away, laughing.

Antharic hated that knight at once, and resolved to slay him, but he knew that first, in madness or guile, he would have to become like him; and his hatred was as for one who had stolen what was rightfully his own.

Antharic ran after them, waving his arms and shouting. “Take me with you! I will be a knight too!”

“The child is crazed,” someone said. The men rode on at their own pace.

When he was still following them on the second day, the knight said, “No, I think he is some demon, sent to hound us into sin.” So the others crossed themselves fearfully, and spread out, to find and slay Antharic. But they couldn’t find him, and told their master so. “He has gone back to Hell then,” said the knight.

The others laughed, uneasily.

Antharic, meanwhile, had fallen down in exhaustion and grief, dreaming fierce dreams. In those dreams, he paced back and forth in the chamber of the Witch of the World’s End, ashamed of the rags he wore and his muddy, bare feet shuffling on the witch’s polished floor. But still she wove. The needle in her hand was like a silver fish, leaping from wave to wave, appearing and reappearing, sparkling as it moved. And she sang her soft song; and once she paused to take his hand in hers, and even to place the needle in his hand, though he didn’t know what to do with it.

“What I have made, will be,” she said. “Therefore be comforted.”

He gave the needle back to her, but as he did, he pricked his finger. A droplet of his blood stained the tapestry, and the witch went on with her work, as he shuffled away from her, then back again, then away, glancing fearfully at her handiwork, as his own tale within it grew and changed.

And once he fell down faint from hunger and seemed to awaken into another, different dream, where a holy anchorite had carried him to his cell deep in a forest. There, in the quiet darkness, the holy man healed him; and Antharic confided all he had experienced in his other dream. He spoke of the Witch of the World’s End.

“These are Satan’s tricks,” said the anchorite. “Snares and devouring mouths. If you let them, they will indeed devour you.”

When Antharic at last rose to leave, his host bade him tarry and pray a while, and turn from the path he had already begun to follow. Antharic prayed, but uncertainly, and finally said, “No, Brother. I must be going. I have to be glorious.”

He described again what he had seen in the witch’s tapestry, and told some of the stories of the hero-knight, Antharic.

“Is this what you really want?” said the anchorite.

“Yes. More than anything.”

“Then I weep for you.”

Antharic walked through the forest a little ways, where ghosts of armored men stirred in the darkness and whispered to him of glory, and of destiny. After a while, he awoke from his second dream, back into his first, and he stood once more in the weaving chamber of the Witch of the World’s End.

She held up a section of her work, showing him the tiny figure of the anchorite, his cell enclosed by a circle of thread, and hundreds of warrior figures swirling around and past it like a stream rushing past a rock.

“Go now,” she told him. “Be what you are to be.”

He bowed low to her, as a knight must to his lady. He kissed her hand, his heart racing, shocked that he should be so bold. But the witch merely smiled, and turned back to her weaving. So he left her, and journeyed for a time in the forest among the ghosts; their armor creaked and clanked faintly in the cold wind.

Once he heard the anchorite’s voice, far away and very faint, like the voice of a dove in the morning, calling out to God. But he kept on walking, and after a while he heard it no longer.

Later, came shouts and screams, the thud of hooves and the clangor of arms.

He began to run, and suddenly the forest around him was filled with rushing figures on horseback, and with fire; and the air filled with arrows rattling through the branches like hail. He leapt over corpses and the writhing wounded, and emerged into a field beneath a wintry evening sky, where a castle burned and ash and snow swirled.

The rout of battle raged around him, mounted knights riding down footmen whose lines had broken, knights clashing with other knights, their horses rearing and shrieking. The dead lay in heaps beneath their shields, snow on their faces.

And suddenly, it seemed to Antharic that his eyes were opened for the first time, and he saw no glory in any of this, only horror. He turned and tried to flee, to find his way back to the anchorite’s cell, or back home, somewhere, anywhere; but he heard the Witch of the World’s End singing her song, and in his mind’s eye he saw her hands working at her loom, faster and faster.

A huge knight with a helmet horned like a charging bull bore down on him. He yelped and tried to duck, but the great sweep of the knight’s sword clipped him on the side of the head and he tumbled head over heels through the air, like a leaf in a whirlwind.

There was no sound at all then, nothing in the world but for the song of the Witch of the World’s End, and no other motion but for the silver flicker of her needle, rising and falling from a sea of thread. Dully, far away, someone else, not Antharic felt the terrible, burning cold, and the dull throb of his wound, and the warmth on one cheek where blood poured over it.

All around him, shadow-men fought and fell in utter silence. He walked among them, and their spears did not touch him.

The drawbridge stretched over the moat of the burning castle. A single armored figure lay there.

“I know you,” said Antharic, kneeling down.

“And I, you,” said the other.

It was that same knight who had killed Antharic’s father.

“I have seen you in my dreams,” this knight said, “and I know you to be some evil spirit, who brings my death.”

“I have seen you in mine, too,” said Antharic, who drew a dagger from the fallen knight’s belt and slit the knight’s throat with it. “My lady must be paid.”

The knight coughed, then wept softly, his eyes wide, as if he were looking far away and he too beheld the Witch of the World’s End and heard her song. But no, Antharic thought, this man was a simple brute, a coarse butcher who defiled the form of a true knight. Such a one could not possibly share his vision.

Therefore he raised the dagger to drive it through the dying man’s heart, but then he saw there was no need, stripped him of his armor and clothes, and rolled the naked corpse into the moat.

He armed himself then, in the manner of a knight, as best he could manage, through his fingers were numb with cold and the armor was far heavier than he had ever imagined it would be. Nothing fit. The metal pinched and cut. Staggering, rattling, he made his way to the end of the drawbridge, only to confront that same huge, bull-horned warrior who had struck him down before.

“Stand and draw your sword,” said the other, in a voice like thunder rumbling behind hills. “Be not a craven.”

“But . . . but . . .” Antharic staggered back, tripped over his own scabbard, and fell in a clanking heap. He struggled desperately to all fours, but could not rise. With sweeping strides, the bull-headed knight crossed the drawbridge. Boards trembled.

“Get up and draw your sword.”

Antharic called out then, to the Witch of the World’s End, and he heard her song. He saw her needle rising, falling, flickering like a silver fish. She worked faster, faster. Antharic knew that his own story could not end here, on this bridge.

Therefore he rose, and dead men whispered in his ears, ghosts gathered around him, thick as smoke, screaming ever so softly how they too had risen and fought and suffered and died for the weaving of the Witch of the World’s End, how she gave them strength when it pleased her to, and all of them, too, had performed great deeds for her, even miracles.

Antharic rose, and though he had no skill at arms, he somehow fought. The battle went on for hours in the darkness, across the frozen field, into the forest, amid the heaps of the slain; for thus the Witch of the World’s End wove the tale of Antharic. He bore the fallen knight’s shield, which was marked with an hourglass and a horn. His foeman’s shield was that of the Lord of Vengeance, but Vengeance drove Antharic now. He lusted after it, hating and sorrowing as he did; his mind filled with remorse and joy together, with a sense of loss and of dawning glory.

This was what it meant to become a knight. Sparks flew. Metal clanged. The bull-man charged again and again, but Antharic turned him away with blows and with his stolen shield. Sometimes it seemed that the two of them fought amid vast armies, that some greater conflict rushed around them like a swollen stream around two rocks. But always they found one another again, cutting their way through the armies like reapers through wheat.

“What are you?” asked the bull-headed knight, gasping, as he paused to rest on his shield.

“I am Antharic, a knight of great worship and renown. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Is it?”

“Yes!”

Their swords contended.

The Witch of the World’s End wove and sang at her weaving.

From far, far away, came the voice of the holy anchorite, mourning for the boy Antharic who had been lost.

“And what are you?” Antharic asked of his foe.

The other, raising his visor, revealed only flames, as if he had opened the door of a furnace. “Don’t you recognize me?”

At that instant, the sun rose; and the flames beneath the visor burst out and became the blinding face of the sun. Antharic fell to his knees, covering his face, and he heard his enemy’s battle-shout of triumph. But Antharic leapt to his feet again, blind as he was, and thrust upward with his sword.

The foeman’s battle-shout became a death-cry.

When his sight returned, Antharic stood alone amid frozen corpses on the battlefield. It was dawn. The ruined castle smoldered. Crows perched on helms, pecking for difficult meat. A heap of empty, charred armor lay at Antharic’s feet. He knelt down, painfully, and exchanged his own shield for the one emblazoned with the sign of the charging bull.

Now came the most terrible part of that dream which was the boy Antharic’s life.

(The Witch of the World’s End wove, hands like fluttering moths.)

He galloped on a mighty steed, through many lands, through many wars, contending with giants, with many knights, all of whom he overthrew and slew without mercy, until the hideous glory of his name spread before him and all men fled at his approach. He rode past crows pecking at corpses. Towns and castles smoldered, ravaged. Deeper, deeper, into the darkness, into forests he plunged; and metal-clad things with the faces of wolves swarmed from beneath the trees, calling him to battle; and he fought with them, and slew them all.

He never paused to rest within this dream, this dream within another dream; but sometimes he didn’t seem to be a knight at all, only the boy Antharic who lay in a ditch, cold, and muddy and weeping. That boy, lying there, dreamed impossible fantasies of vengeance, and his mind was filled with monsters and battles and fiery knights with heads like bulls.

He thought he heard the anchorite calling out once, but could not find him.

(And the Witch of the World’s End wove, her needle leaping like a fish.)

He rode. Fires roared around him. Ghosts screamed amid the burning, and all the pain of the world was his, to cause and to suffer, and he was filled to overflowing with it as he crossed into Hell itself and the damned cursed the Witch of the World’s End; and Satan loomed high amid swirling, blood-red clouds, like a dark mountain, impassive, silent, brooding.

Once more, even there, Antharic heard the voice of the anchorite, calling out to him.

“Turn from this path.”

“But where?”

“Merely turn away.”

“Am I not glorious?”

The anchorite cried out in despair, and was gone.

Devils raced alongside Antharic, and he conversed long with bull-headed Vengeance, and he came to understand that the Witch of the World’s End wove mankind’s sorrows into her tapestry merely to amuse herself, as a child might arrange a course for ants to follow, then smash them all when tired of the game.

Therefore Antharic swore a quest against the Witch of the World’s End, in the name of Vengeance.

(And she wove. She sang. Her needle leapt.)

He rose from out of the low plains of Hell, out of fire and swirling ash, up, across a dead sea’s bottom filled with dust, up, through a forest of white bone, where harpies with needle-claws tried to tear out his eyes. But his sword swept them aside, and the shield of Vengeance protected him.

He galloped toward the purple evening, and saw the Moon emerge from the window of a glass tower; and he knew he had come at last to the Earth’s very rim, where the Witch of the World’s End had always waited for him.

He heard her song in his mind, and he saw her needle flickering in his fevered, waking dreams.

She spoke to him, inside his mind.

“Do you remember Antharic, who was a tangled knot in my weaving?”

“I am Antharic.”

“I think Antharic died long ago. Maybe he froze in a ditch. Behold, I have woven the shape of someone else entirely.”

He shouted his war-cry, screaming his hatred, lusting for glory, as he thundered onto the witch’s drawbridge. The glass bridge shattered, but his steed leapt clear across, trailing gleaming shards, landing with an explosion of sparks in the courtyard. Still mounted, he forced his way into the tower. Stone automatons opposed him, but he broke them to pieces with his sword. Up and up, around and around, spiraling along a glass staircase that splintered as he passed; up, as metal birds came against him in a shrieking mass, but the shield of Vengeance brushed them aside; up he climbed on horseback.

A serpent with a woman’s head wriggled out of a side chamber and called out to him, beseeching him to merely stop, and lie with her forever, for the sake of pleasure.

He shouted and cut the serpent in twain with a single stroke of his sword.

At the top, he paused in just an instant of silence. Already the tower was beginning to crumble, bits of glass tinkling down like ice rattling out of trees in a sudden winter wind.

He dismounted and stood before the witch as she worked at her weaving, very still, his drawn sword like a motionless thunderbolt, waiting.

And he saw that she had come to the end of her tapestry, that there was very little thread left. He noticed the colors of her weaving: black and grey, darkness and smoke; the white of bones; the brown of earth; red for blood and for fire; the silver of swords; and many others. There were only a few golden threads, which stood for hope and happiness; indeed they were the scarcest of all.

“Why didn’t you make it otherwise?” said Antharic in a voice, like the stilled thunderbolt, trembling with barely restrained violence.

The witch merely held up a fold of the cloth, and there was the figure of the monk in his cell, outlined in gold amid the dark colors.

In his rage, Antharic smashed her loom with his sword, tearing the tapestry into a million drifting motes.

Far below, at the base of the tower, a monster shrieked. Glass poured down, rattling. The floor shifted beneath Antharic’s feet.

“You are a vile thing,” he said. “Now has vengeance come.”

The witch held up a handful of loose thread. “I can’t finish. Look what you’ve done.”

She held black strands and red strands, but also, even yet, a single golden one.

Antharic raised his sword to strike once more.

“Monster,” he said.

“You are the dreamer and I am the dream,” she said, “and yet I have seen you in my own dreams and I knew what I must do. Each of us is the mirror held up to the other, and by the other are we defined. You needed me. How else could you have become a hero at the completion of a fantastic quest . . . so why are you angry at me, at this very last? Ask yourself. Does it make any sense?”

Antharic struck off her head, cursing, weeping, unable to make any sense of it at all, out of his dreams, out of the memories of the boy who lay shivering in a ditch raving of impossible revenge.

The Witch of the World’s End disintegrated like her own tapestry, into something like smoke dispersed by a sudden wind.

He couldn’t —

Nothing —

He leapt for a golden strand that floated on the air like spider’s silk —

And in the end he found himself falling forever amid the stars beyond the World’s rim, beyond even the reach of dreams, for there was no one left to dream him. He had lived for this purpose only: to uncreate himself.

He hadn’t entirely succeeded.

It was a cessation of pain, at least.

 

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Later, another hero came to seek the Witch of the World’s End, a plain, broad-shouldered man armed only with a staff. He found her as he had expected her from his dreams, a bent crone stirring her cauldron on the edge of a cliff, while behind her dragons rose up out of the abyss like dark, threatening clouds.

 

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Darrell Schweitzer has been publishing weird and fantastic fiction for a long time. He had a story in the prestigious WHISPERS magazine in 1973. His first novel, THE WHITE ISLE, which is heroic fantasy, was serialized in FANTASTIC in 1980. Recently PS Publications has brought out a 2 volume retrospective of his career, THE MYSTERIES OF THE FACELESS KING and THE LAST HERETIC (2020). A more recent collection is THE CHILDREN OF CHORAZIN (Hippocampus Press, 2023). He co-edited WEIRD TALES between 1988 and 2007.

 

Andrea Alemanno  is a compulsive illustrator  who fills the line spacing, preferably at 300 dpi.
He’s  from Italy and loves to move into a new city searching for inspiration. In every city,  he constantly keeps drawing.  Now, 3 decades later (and a little bit more), he is  still drawing and learning something new everyday.  He loves the traditional touch into a digital tools world so uses pencil, ink and digital colors to give life to his artwork.  Sometimes he shares his knowledge with wannabe illustrators.  His work has been selected for several awards and he’s currently working for Italian and international publishers.