It wasn’t until the final body splashed into the water that I spotted movement just to my left. It was subtle at first, making only the same sounds that any animal could make, but then there were three distinct footsteps… one… two… three.
I could hear the leaves crumpling into the mud, and the mud squishing beneath the weight of someone’s boot. Without a doubt, I knew, my eyes were not the only eyes watching all of this. Someone else was just as curious as I, and that made me even more curious about them. I wanted to know who it was that had sat silent by my side that entire time, and why they were so curious about all of this. So I slowly turned my attention to the direction that the noises had just come from, scanning through the trees for any movement.
I saw none.
But then, as I peered through the over-hanging moss of a tree only ten yards away, I saw a very familiar face, one which covered up, with a disguise of beauty, one of the finest minds to ever walk the Earth. Her dark orange hair was hung softly upon her cheeks, its tips tickling the peaks of her breasts, her eyes sunken from years within the harsh confines of the swamp.
Her name was Heather, her origin one of mystery, and I could only wonder what the years had done to her. It had been over four-thousand years since I’d last seen her, upon some mountaintop that they called Peace Peak, trying to finish some ancient spell. But then, just as suddenly as I’d found her, and just as suddenly as she’d disappeared all that time ago, she disappeared before my eyes. In a bright flash of light, hardly even noticeable to the untrained eye, she was gone. It was an ability normally confined to the Wizard bloodline, self-teleportation, but it didn’t surprise me at all that its difficulty was within her grasp. There was something special about her, and I was sure that I would see her again, but the question still remained… she wasn’t here by accident… so why was she here?
What did she want?
I knew that there was only one thing that I could do, and that was to wait and find out. She would show her intentions in time, as would every other witch hidden within this swamp, and I would make sure that there would always be eyes upon them for when each one of them finally did.