The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1028: Isabell’s Trial (Part One)

In the vision, the village was struggling with everything from failing crops to seasonal floods, sickness in the spring was common, and food spoiled frequently in the oppressively damp autumns. To an engineer like Isabell, each problem could be solved with a well-designed solution, but nature had a way of battering down whatever she built.

She solved the flooding by constructing a series of dams along the river, creating reservoirs that could also irrigate fields in the scorching summers to prevent crops from failing before they had ripened for harvest. The rainy seasons were intense, and most dams would have failed to hold back so much water, but Isabell drew heavily on the power of wood to reinforce them and prevent the flood waters from washing away what she had built.

For a time, that worked, and the village began to prosper with stable harvests and safety from floods. The health of the villagers even improved without the remnants of floods to serve as breeding grounds for sickness in the spring.

And then, in a single storm, the upper dam broke.

Isabell watched from the hillside as the dam of wood and stone that she’d reinforced with clever witchcraft for more than thirty years tore itself apart. The sound she heard would haunt her nightmares for years to come. It was a terrible, grinding roar of stone and timber surrendering to pressure that was nothing like the simple crack of breaking wood or the rumble of collapsing masonry. It was deeper, more primal, like her breaking dam had stolen the crack of lightning and the rumble of thunder from the storm clouds above.

The torrent that followed was fiercer than any natural flood could ever have been, because Isabell had worked so hard to contain it all. Every drop of water she’d captured to prevent spring floods, every reservoir she’d filled to irrigate summer fields, it all came down at once in a wall of churning destruction that devoured everything in its path.

"Noooo!," she cried as she raced to stop it. Even in the vision, even knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that this wasn’t real, her instincts as an engineer screamed at her to do something, anything to prevent the disaster from unfolding it, even as her trained mind calculated the weight of all that water and the impossibility of building anything that could withstand the force of its impact.

But she wasn’t just an engineer anymore; she was a witch now. She was a witch, and she had seen the power of a witch’s desires to reshape the land, so she had to try. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her hands shook as she worked, pouring every ounce of power that she could find into the middle dam. Crops all around her withered and died as she drained away every scrap of life they held in a desperate attempt to reinforce the middle da,m and for a moment, she could feel the wood responding to her desperate commands.

The timber of the dam grew roots anew, weaving themselves together and digging deep into the earth as though the planks and beams had become soldiers preparing to resist the charge of mounted knights with their shields. When the torrent of water struck the dam with the force of an avalanche, the entire dam groaned and shuddered, and the earth itself shook from the force of the blow... but it held! The dam actually held!

The relief that Isabell felt, however, was tragically short-lived as the wave of water brought with it another problem. The reservoir was already filled close to the limit of the dam, but the failure of the upper dam brought so much water that the middle reservoir quickly overflowed. The sudden spill of water was far too much for the middle dam to resist as the earth churned and softened, becoming too weak to hold the dam in place, even with the roots that had just dug into the earth doing their best to cling to the suddenly sodden soil.

Isabell had done her best, but it wasn’t enough. No matter how many crops she sacrificed in an offering to strengthen the dam, it would never have been enough to contain an entire reservoir emptying itself all at once.

The middle dam collapsed, then the lower one quickly followed, and Isabell found herself running down the hillside, her feet slipping in mud as the water rushed past her toward the town that had grown fat and prosperous on her engineering.

Before she’d helped to reshape the village, only a few hundred people had lived there. They were mostly simple farmers who knew how to read the river, who built their homes on high ground and accepted that some years the floods would come and they would lose part of their harvest.

It was a mixture of pride in what they had built through years of struggle and the impossibility of accumulating enough wealth to move somewhere else that kept them here, but despite the difficulty of their struggles, they found ways to make life bearable even in the temperamental river valley where they’d settled.

But by the time the dams failed, the village had grown into a town of thousands. Merchants and craftsmen had moved into the flood plain, building their shops and workshops where the old villagers would never have dared to settle because it was the best way to power the waterwheels of their mills.

Young families raised children in pretty houses with gardens that flooded only in Isabell’s worst nightmares, because the dams would always hold. Everyone knew the dams would hold. The Hemlock Witch herself had built them. The Hemlock Witch had promised to keep them safe, and she’d even taught them how to harness the power of the river to saw their logs, grind their grain, and countless other things. The Hemlock Witch had turned a source of destruction into a font of prosperity.

The flood waters swept all of that away, crushing the people against buildings, the way the water turned millstones to grind wheat into flour, until there was almost nothing left of the prosperous, thriving community she had nurtured over the course of decades...