Page 12 of The Women of Wild Hill

In my time, men believed all witches served Satan. They couldn’t imagine women were capable of wreaking mayhem on our own. So they claimed we were following the devil’s orders when we made the butcher’s pecker stop working or the farmer’s heifer birth a two-headed calf.

Now when faced with misfortune, most men turn to science for answers. They don’t burn women anymore, which I reckon is progress. They search for a rational explanation instead. They usually find one, but sometimes, to be honest, a witch is to blame. We all know which herbs will make dicks go soft.

I have been around for a very long time, and I’ve eavesdropped on many a learned man.

The truth is, women will always confuse them.

Witches or not, they’re not sure how we work.

Women are clearly in league with nature.

Even our cycles follow those of the moon.

We create life out of little and intuit things that men don’t.

We terrify them because we possess powers they aren’t able to plunder.

Because they’ll never be able to do what we can, they decided long ago to declare us inferior.

So fearful were men that they needed their god to grant them dominion.

Women would be ruled, though their desires run contrary.

And all those fishes and fowls were theirs to do with as they pleased.

If you take men’s word for it, everything on earth was created for either their sustenance or their pleasure.

The big bearded god in the sky put it all here for them to eat, smoke, and fuck.

Men have told themselves these stories for so long, they’ve become convinced of their truth.

But that will end soon enough, and they will be made to regret their arrogance.

For the Old One moves slowly, but when she chooses to smite, her aim is unerring.

These men tremble at the power of their terrible god.

But no human has ever dreamed of the swarms she can summon.

The four centuries I’ve witnessed have been a blink of her eye.

The Old One’s time is closer to that of the trees she created to act as her sentries.

Now, at last, they’ve had a chance to report what they’ve seen.

The beings the Old One expected to steward her garden have destroyed it instead.

There is not an inch of the earth nor a drop of ocean that they haven’t befouled.

They have murdered whole species—some for food, others for sport, and most simply by negligence.

They’ve yoked other creatures and enslaved their own kind.

When humans first huddled around the fires they’d built, they honored the Great Mother who fed and sheltered them.

They carved her voluptuous image into stone and painted her creations on the sides of their caves.

Then, while the Old One toiled elsewhere, they began building cities and worshipping muscles and spears.

They claimed nature was meant to be conquered by masculine power.

Women existed to satisfy urges and deliver them sons.

The Old One, in her wisdom, had foreseen this might happen.

So she gave women a touch of her magic, and she chose a handful of bloodlines to endow with great gifts.

As time passed, these families grew more powerful—the way fruits become sweeter and poisons more potent.

She wanted these women to be close to the earth.

She taught them how to harvest her medicines and read her signs.

A chosen few learned to summon storms, channel energy, and speak to the dead.

These skills did not go unnoticed by the men, who lacked them.

Over the ages, kings, popes, and priests tried their best to rid the world of such rivals.

Untold thousands of us were tortured, burned, or hanged by the neck.

Yet the killings couldn’t end the threat.

Wherever a witch perished, the soil soaked up her power and passed it along to the next worthy candidate.

When the witch hunters realized they wouldn’t be able to murder every powerful woman, they endeavored to convince the world that we didn’t exist.

But we did. And we do. I’ve haunted Wild Hill for four hundred years, but I don’t belong to this place. Wild Hill is inside the Duncan blood. No witch has done what their family will do.

Only The Three can balance the scales.