The potato porridge was every bit the modest fare the exorcist had prepared his palate for. A thin soup of diced tuber and sprinkles of grain slipped from the cavity of his mouth down to the channel of his throat with little impression in the way of taste.

Speedwell, nettle and bilberries...

The garniture he had requested was something of a much more complicated nature, however.

Catnip, pokeweed and pawpaws…

He hurriedly held up his hand and sipped the porridge straight from the bowl, having seemingly forgotten the spoon clutched within his thumb, strutting now outwards from the wooden tableware like the cowlicks in his ruffled hair.

Poppy and hops and willows…

Leaning back at the turning of each page for the interruption that was his meal, the exorcist was becoming more and more absorbed into these casual cures described within the back pages of the chapel’s cookbook. It was already noon now, and the food he had been given had long gone cold. It did not stop him, however, from attaining a sense of warmth and fulfilment, as he sat there motionless and wordless, once again a statued piece.

The click of an opening door. It was the old priest.

‘These are all that we still have on hand’, he said as he unloaded a small stack of notes onto the kitchen table. He had been scouring the library for remnants of the exalted pastor, and happily collapsed upon the wooden chair once the task had surpassed him, unpadded as it was and yet incomparably more comfortable than the one from the mayoral estate. ‘Father Edmund never wrote all that much to begin with.’

The exorcist reached for the stack immediately.

‘There are more?’ he asked, with hard-suppressed anticipation.

The priest picked up his spoon and whirled it around. ‘Mostly reading—textbooks, I think,’ he explained before partaking of his portion of potatoes; ‘the dear Father had donated them to local boys he deemed bright, who had since kept it within their families. I’ve sent word to have them delivered here.’

The exorcist nodded, and returned to perusing his newfound material.

Stag-marrow… and sea-stars… and bog-wood!

When he’d finally resurfaced from the scattered, time-worn pages, he looked pointedly and accusingly at the old priest.

‘You never mentioned your Father Edmund had been a healer.’

The pastor blinked and raised his brow. ‘I thought it sufficed to say he was a saint!’ he answered obviously. ‘Besides, aren’t all priests from the main administration healers?’

The exorcist shook his head. ‘They study a general curriculum, which includes the medical arts, yes, but not all go on to study it at depth.’

He picked up a page of the dated writing again. It was colourfully illustrated in an archaic style that made him think of holier writs. ‘And I highly doubt they’d taught this…’

The old priest still only sat there dumbly, unsure of what to make of this knowledge. As far as he was concerned, the perfect Father had always been an angelic existence.

The exorcist turned around. ‘Will they’, he hesitated seriously, ‘...truly deliver the texts to us?’

Here it was the priest’s turn to pause. ‘...Why?’ he asked gravely. ‘Aren’t you going to return them?’

‘Even so!’ the exorcist straightened. ‘This is valuable knowledge! Wouldn’t they feel inclined to keep it… to themselves?’

At this the old man chuckled. ‘I thought you had meant something’, he said breezily. ‘Nobody tries making sense of them anymore—they’re just kept as holy relics and family heirlooms, to be showed off to anyone willing to listen. Return them unscathed, and you will survive.’

The exorcist froze solemnly. ‘Make sense of them?’

‘They’re as dense as scripture!’ the old priest enthusiastically slapped his knee.

The exorcist silently scowled, as he resolved himself from the excitement that the yellowed pages had conjured within him, once again awoken to the situation in Mystvale.

A distant knocking. It was the front entrance. The priest grumbled, reluctant to part from his porridge.

The exorcist could not hear the exact details, but from the snippets he could, whoever had come to deliver the treasured texts had had passionate complaints and warnings about their handling they had wished to administer directly to the... interloping troublemaker, before the priest managed to persuade them to let it pass, and trust in his word of honor.

When he finally returned with new, antique volumes in hand, the exorcist had already risen to receive them. His eyes brightened in instant recognition.

‘These humourous philosophers’, he said with some familiar self-amusement.

Men from East of the continent who believed that four bodily fluids had determined the entire mechanism of the human form.

These were familiar texts from the curriculum. This had settled it, Father Edmund had not only been a healer, but a doctor of medicine from the Church, and not a mediocre one at that.

Why then appoint such an accomplished young priest to a pagan town in the northern nowhere?

He glanced back at the collection of exotic cures on the table.

There were other texts within the stack, and beside for required reading materials, there were a couple that stood out.

‘Basic... oriental physiognomy?’ he mumbled. ‘Who did Father Edmund hand this one out to?’

The old priest jerked his spoon up with a wrinkled grin. ‘Be extra ginger with that one! That madman of a mayor will gladly rip your guts out!’

‘... And this treatise on the art of sculptures?’

‘Mason’, the priest grunted, then concentrated on his precious victuals again.

The exorcist lost himself in thought as well. Sculpture for the masonry apprentice seemed a natural enough recommendation, but face-reading for what had probably been the youth leader was nothing if not terminally short-sighted. It put a scowl upon his face to simply think of the bigoted leadership it must have produced. The citizens of Mystvale had worshipped the deceased reverend into their personal patron saint, sometimes more akin to a pagan idol, but the more the exorcist learned of him, the more he realized what an extraordinarily complicated character Father Edmund had actually been.

This broadening view into the deceased priest’s background, instead of illuminating his history and involvement within the case at hand, had rather shrouded it in thickening layers of mystery. How had he come into contact with such foreign medical knowledge? And how had he, if he had truly been specialised in medicine, been equipped to subjugate the witch? Then afterwards, suppress her vengeful spirit?

That was the greatest mystery. The key to the very case. The critical question again.

‘What did Father Edmund do?’

•••

The exorcist was seeing things.

He saw Mystvale, as it had supposedly been many years ago, with green and lustre.

A stream trickled within his ears, as his vision wandered the beautiful woodlands.

There were songbirds warbling to the beat of their wings across the leaf-filled branches.

An angelic singing led him to the water’s edge.

There was a maiden sitting there, a slender figure outlined in the reflected light.

Her skin was shining, and warm, as though it had absorbed the morning light, like alabaster.

And her hair was as red as poppies in sunset.

She turned around—

•••

The exorcist realized he had been dreaming, awaking on a hard wooden chair. He roused himself in the darkness, and taking a glance at the tightly barred window, knew that it was night. It was curious how much his eyes had adapted to the lighting conditions in Mystvale.

He was settled in the chapel study, by a desk the priest had assigned for him, swamped in the writings and possessions of Father Edmund, as he had left it. It was a nostalgic arrangement. There were now also a little wax-stick and two flints though, probably prepared within his sleep. It was genuinely more hospitality than he had expected.

He gently lit the candle, in a place where it would be safe from spreading, then quietly leaned back, half-dangling upon the old wooden chair, absently gazing at the glowing ceiling.

He had decided to spend the entire day going through the relics of the unofficial saint, to gain a clearer insight into what had happened—what it was he needed to do, to finish the work. It was a decision that disappointed many hopefuls who had heard the news of his dealing with the mayor, but the fact that he was only asking for potatoes had been a critical point in his favour. There were also those among the townsfolk, the priest had gossiped to him, who were privately relieved they would not have to relive the horrible experience of a direct encounter with the witch so soon. All in all, they were being patient with him, but only for now.

He was not so sure he hadn’t encountered the witch today, even if he hadn’t encountered the ghost.

‘... Fire for hair... and frost for skin, was it now?’

It wasn’t at all the ominous impression that he had seen within his dreaming vision, but in his mind, it was unmistakably her. Was it only a dream, he wondered as he looked around at the belongings of Father Edmund all around him, or was it something more?

He thought back to the spectre he had confronted the other night. The silhouette was certainly similar, a slender, petite figure still present, but her skin… and her hair…

He shook his head with minor regret.

The priest had told him they had buried the head and body separately, to sever her dying curses from the magic of her evil heart—but he was experienced enough to know that such things mattered little to the grave-risen. It was a truth universally observed in the unspoken arts, that those who lose their heads, return first for the purpose of claiming it. And yet… the ghost that he’d seen...

‘...What did Father Edmund do to the head?’

He abruptly settled the chair on all fours again, and quietly stood up.

He decided to go fill himself with more potatoes.

But as he made his way toward the door, the window began creaking.

At first he dismissed it as the wind being simply stronger tonight, then realized the room too chill for mere leaking breezes. He decided to carefully inspect the window again, planting the candle on a nearby shelf.

It was another impressive display of locksmanship, something that might have made a very charming local characteristic, if not for the deadly phantom it was desperately trying to bar out. Aside from the creaking, there was only a tiny gap through which any air could have sensibly entered, and the invisible stream coming from it seemed to be whispering something.

He sat down and tried to listen.

…

……

……...Aai!

The candle blew out beside him.

Aaaiiiieeeaaeeee!

The siren cry startled him, and he knocked over a stool stumbling to his feet.

Within the darkness, a wispy tendril of mist seemed to glow within his eyes, as it wriggled past the tiny crevice, and crawled towards him.

Compelled more by an instinct of self-preservation than any calculated awareness, the exorcist allowed the darkness to bloom from himself, joining with the shadows of the room, into a black grip that squeezed at the unwelcome intruder.

He held his breath within the tense silence that ensued, as he wrestled with the ghastly whiteness.

Until finally, the white mist was smothered, and all was black again.

He heaved a sigh of relief.

Regaining composure then as quick as he could, he reached for the nearest pillar, and ghost-like smog seeped from his hand into the time-hollowed cracks of the material.

A hazy image of the town formed within his head, rising from the ground, in peaceful still, and perfect resolution. No sign of witch activity anywhere.

‘...It can’t be!’ he whispered in terrible disbelief.

When the old priest entered the room, stirred by the sudden noise, he immediately turned toward the panicked old man.

‘Prepare your most devout believers!’ he shouted. ‘As soon as possible—tomorrow!’

The old priest was simply confused. ‘This is Mystvale!’ he objected. ‘We don’t exactly have devout believers!’

The exorcist laid a hand over his face in impatience, bent over the desk full of precious reading materials. ‘Your least criminal will do’, he said at last and came over to the shelf of public reading. ‘And your most impressionable.’

The priest was amazed. ‘What would you even need them for?’

‘Your hall of cheese of a chapel’, the exorcist privately muttered as he examined the contents of the shelf.

‘I beg your pardon…?’ said the priest, not hearing the last statement clearly.

‘I doubt you have a working choir, with songs?’ distinctly asked the exorcist.

‘No’, the priest admitted unabashedly.

‘Then have them recite these among one another.’ The exorcist threw him a volume.

The old priest panicked at the flying object in the dark, but caught it with less fumbling effort than he had imagined. Landing soundly within the palms of his hands, was a book of the holy scriptures.

‘The language in that version should be transparent enough.’

Before the priest could fully raise his brow, the exorcist had already shot him another, shocking request.

‘And prepare as many able-bodied young men as you could spare.’

‘...We go after the witch.’