Historical Friction

Ekon

“Now remember, Alpha, she can’t hurt you at all,” Granny Mabel Poe nervously assured me as I stepped into the dank prison cell that housed the evil witch, Tyler.

“Those bindings keep her from any spell-casting. So you don’t need to be afraid of her now.”

“Thanks, Granny,” I nodded at the old woman as the large steel door to the cell slowly shut behind me.

Now it was just the witch and me.

I had requested no guards present in the hope of keeping our conversation as uninhibited as possible.

It wasn’t an easy request to make. But if I was going to do this thing, I was sure as hell going to do it right.

I slowly approached the witch. The sound of my footsteps resounded ominously off of the concrete walls.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” the raven-haired witch said.

Her voice was soft, airy and young. It was almost delicate but clearly tinged with torment. Not at all what you’d expect from an evil sorceress.

Then again, Tyler wasn’t old at all.

During the Great War, she was scarcely more than a teenager. It was a hard fact to believe, given the amount of slaughter and bloodshed she had on her résumé.

Devina must have sunk her charms into her when she was really young to turn her into such a consummate mechanism of destruction by such a tender age.

She must be around twenty-four or twenty-five now. Her teenage years had passed her by while she’d spent nearly a decade rotting in solitary confinement.

I might have felt some pity were her crimes not so utterly despicable.

“Why shouldn’t I have come here?” I asked.

“Because I’m a monster!” Tyler yelled.

The atmosphere in the vacuous room all at once became thick and palpable.

I could feel her famously luminous green eyes staring at me.

Even as a blind man, it made my blood run cold. But I tried to maintain my composure and avoid getting militant. To get Granny’s consent to take control of the prisoner, I had to prove myself as capable.

“Yes. You are a monster,” I replied, “Anyone who massacres innocents with such ruthless wrath as yours has certainly earned that distinction. But I don’t see why that still bothers you. It’s just a well-established fact at this point.”

She sighed somberly, “You’re right about that. Everybody knows what I am. Hell, they’re more certain of it than I am, so what good would it be to disagree.”

This was a strange comment to make. She couldn’t possibly still deny her actions.

“There’s nothing to disagree with, Tyler. I witnessed your mayhem first-hand. I tried to put a stop to it. You can’t possibly still deny the terrible crimes you’ve perpetrated against supernatural-kind.”

She chose to ignore my response, “What is it you’ve come for, Alpha Ekon? There’s no value I could possibly have for you.”

“As a matter of fact, Tyler, you are of considerable value to me at this moment in time. I’ve come to take you away.”

“Take me away,” she scoffed. “Why? Getting tired of waiting for me to rot? I’m quite a bit younger than you, Alpha. Want to exact your revenge while you still have the chance?”

“You’re one to talk to me of revenge!” I snapped. “What about all the lives you eradicated? The orphaned children, the fractured families? Would you blame me if that’s what I had come for?!”

“No,” Tyler grew quiet.

The cruel mistress of magic began to cry.

“I wouldn’t blame you, Alpha,” she continued, “As a matter of fact… I would welcome it.”

Her voice lightened with a twinge of dark optimism, “Is that why you’re here, Alpha Ekon? To take me away and kill me? Please… I hope to hell that it is.”

I was stunned.

I was touched.

The candor in her voice made it clear.

She really did want to die.

Bambi

Ela and I had been scouring the Leopold House Library, Archives, and Hall of Records for nearly five hours in search of information on the evil witch Tyler.

With literally millions of books, journals, tomes, and periodicals lining its stately labyrinth of oaken shelves, you would’ve thought we’d have come across something.

While we had found several mentions of her and her arsonist attacks on unsuspecting towns, there was little information about her background prior to her affiliation with Devina.

“How much longer are we going to keep this up? We’ve pored over the library database, checked with every librarian on staff, checked every Rolodex. What the hell else can we do?”

Ela groaned as she lackadaisically leafed through a large compendium of the last battles of the Great War.

“We’ve got to keep trying, Ela. If there’s something important that we’re missing, we risk putting everything we love in jeopardy.”

She sighed and rubbed her temples, “Dammit Bambi, I hate it when you’re right.”

“Hey! Wait a minute!” Ela leaped from her seat, suddenly electrified. Her outburst elicited a chorus of “shhhhhh” from neighboring bookworms.

“What? What is it?” I whispered.

“Follow me!”

I trailed closely behind her as we searched the maze of bookshelves.

“I remember Hunter made some snide comment about a book Alpha Leonardo wrote once. Said it had to do with infamous figures of the Great War.”

“Really? From Alpha Leonardo? You think it’ll have what we need?” I asked dubiously.

“It’s worth a shot,” Ela responded.

After consulting one of the monolithic old desktop computers for the reference number, we managed to find Alpha Leonardo’s book entitled, “Rogue’s Gallery: The Wolves and Witches Behind the War to End all Wars.”

Even though the book had been published nearly ten years ago, the pages were crisp, and the book jacket was in good shape. Clearly not too many parliamentarians were interested in a werewolf’s account of the Great War.

As we thumbed through the index, we saw mention of every great enemy of the packs. Finally, we came across the witch simply known as Tyler.

Turning to the specified page, we found that an entire chapter of the book was dedicated to her.

Underneath the chapter heading was a picture of a pretty preteen with vibrant green eyes, shimmering black hair, and an appealing smattering of freckles.

~This was the face of evil everyone was talking about?~

Ela read the first few lines of the chapter aloud.

“The evil mistress of magic, Tyler (alias ‘Dame of Flames’) was born Thalia Luhrman, near Cape Town, South Africa. The orphaned daughter of two allegedly human parents, her strong magical talents were sought out by Devina.”

Further reading revealed that Devina took as much advantage of Tyler’s ignorance of the supernatural world as she did her raw talents. The young witch became a pawn in the evil sorceress’s schemes from as young as six years old.

Her advanced talents earned her early matriculation into Mojica Universidade de Feitiçaria, where she remained the school’s youngest ever graduate at age ten.

When the Great War broke out, Tyler became a central figure in a series of arsons that reduced the villages of many supernatural beings to ash.

A fourteen-year-old Tyler was admitted to the court of King Dmitri posing as a courtesan. Then, a fire broke out, all but destroying the castle and its inhabitants.

When the smoke cleared, Tyler was the only witch around. She had been abandoned by Devina.

According to the book, a massive debate about whether Tyler should be tried as an adult or a child divided the Supernatural Parliament.

Even more surprising, Alpha Vladimir had led the campaign to arraign the young witch as a child, to give her access to greater rehabilitation resources.

This apparently sparked additional outrage, as other supernatural MPs who had been victimized by her attacks were eager to have her tried as an adult and swiftly executed.

Alpha Vladimir’s staunch advocacy for Tyler had raised suspicion that more wolves than just Matthias might be in league with Devina.

However, Vladimir’s arguments were strong enough to deflect the death penalty at the Vienna Trials. Instead, she was sentenced to a lifetime of “reflection” in the Supernatural Penitentiary.

Ela and I looked slack-jawed at one another as we finished the chapter.

While the book had answered a lot of questions, it gave rise to even more.

Was Tyler really evil or just a pawn in Devina’s scheme?

How did Devina feel about her young ward’s incarceration?

And how did Alpha Leonardo come to know so much about Tyler?

Ekon

The towering, armored door to Tyler’s cell slammed shut as I stepped back out into the hallway.

Granny Mabel Poe stood with a solicitous look on her face.

“Well, Alpha. What do you think? You ready to unleash that on somebody else?”

Tyler’s heartrending deathwish haunted my thoughts as I responded.

“She seems… normal. I mean, obviously very disturbed. But she hardly seems anywhere near evil. In fact, she’s downright penitent for what she did in the war.”

Granny Mabel placed her calloused hand on my shoulder, “Alpha, I’ve been on this world a darn sight longer than you. I ain’t never met a witch I could trust. They’re all great actors. And young, pretty ones like that are all the more beguiling.”

“What good does beauty do to the blind man, Granny?” I asked.

She paused and sighed.

“Look, Alpha, I don’t like it one bit. But if you think she’s kosher, I’ll turn her over to you.”

I took a deep sigh.

I never thought I would say the words I was about to say.

But if there’s one thing being a military man taught me, it was always to trust your gut.

And my growling stomach was telling me just one thing…

“Let’s let her out.”