Isolation

I'm coming home before my curiousity gets the better of me - I hope the Host has got a bottle of wine in the fridge! I was going to save this for Hallowe'en but I just had to get it out of my system.

This is the story of the fall of Isolis:


700 years ago, the witch-queen Calys was raped in her sleep. Nine months later she gave birth to a daughter. The child was difficult and distant with a physical... defect, one may say. Her hair grew at a phenomenal rate.

Calys, while not loved or revered by her subjects, was mostly fair and just and commanded a somewhat fearful respect. However, six years after the birth of her daughter, the girl, Sestir, began to manipulate the populace. And everyone who touched, or was touched by her, was mercilessly killed by Calys.

A year after the killings started, the witch-queen was overthrown and driven from her castle. She fled into the forest, dragging her daughter with her. In the depths of the forest, Calys used her magic to enslave nearby villagers, forcing them to build a tower hundreds of feet high. When the tower was finished, Calys imprisoned Sestir at the top, sealing her in with a spell that locked in her living flesh. Sestir was clever, though, and wound her long, dead hair into a long line of tight knots with which to knock her mother off the tower. Calys fell to the forest floor but did not die. She lay paralysed for two days before her enslavement spell wore off the villagers and they found her at the foot of the tower, weak and broken. That evening she was burnt at the stake.

10 years later, Sestir, now a young woman, gave birth to a daughter after being visited by a dark apparition who climbed up her hair to the top of the tower. Before the day was out, she threw the baby to its doom. After a visit by the apparition every year for seven years, seven daughters were born, all thrown to their deaths before they were a day old. From the eighth visit, Sestir gave birth to a son. The boy lived to see his fifth birthday before being strangled by his mother's hair. Sestir screamed and screamed, begging to be set free from her imprisonment but the villagers ignored her for a murderous witch.

After eight days and nights of constant screaming, there was silence. The villagers, eventually becoming curious, sent their strongest, most athletic man to scale the tower to determine Sestir's fate. He climbed her hanging tresses but when he got to the top, he fell. Before he died, he spoke three words: "The boy lives".

Out of his mouth crawled the emaciated boy. And from the child's eyes poured a wave of black disease, plague and pestilence. The plague spread, consuming all in its path. Soon all the surrounding villagers had died horrible, lingering deaths, passing the contagion on to the rest of the planets populace.

After one year, after the vegetation had blackened, after the oceans had poisoned, after the earth had died and after the rotting corpses had decomposed leaving nothing but blackened bones, the boy, standing on a mountain of death and decay, threw back his head and pointed at Sevane, hanging low in the sky and screamed: "I will come for you!" before his body dessicated and was blown away with the wind.