Chapter 73: Chapter 71: The heavy rains can not wash away the warmth of souls

What is a witch?

Let us refrain from using any dogmatic terminology, brought to us via the conditionings of politics and the religious beliefs of our common cultural narratives. Let us focus solely on the pragmatic nature of the existence of witches.

Every person has the ability to choose a primary class after reaching level five. This may be a crafting class, such as ‘Blacksmith’ or ‘Carpenter’, or it may be a fighting class, used in war and adventuring, such as ‘Fighter’, ‘Priest’ or ‘Wizard’ amongst many other choices.

A person’s core class determines their profession and how they make their living in our world.

What all of these classes share in common is that they are attributed by the cosmic system that governs our world and that they can only ever function strictly within its confines. A ‘fighter’, for example, can never break the physical barriers of reality to do things of a nature unbefitting to his role in life.

Witches, however, are born of a different force. Witches are given their class not by the cosmic-system that was created by the gods, as the Holy-Church will tell you. Instead, witches gain their power and abilities through old, primordial sources of magic that have existed before the intricate confines of modern civilization and the rules that guide us. This goes deeper than a connection to simple, natural spirits, like a shaman or a druid might have.

Witches connect to old, abstract forces that we cannot quite name in coherent words, as the words for these things simply do not exist anymore. But we can simplify and say that they gain their powers from the moonlight. Witches are strongest at night and weakest at day.

Most importantly, witches do not have a need to follow the rules of the system. Such binding things as ‘perks’ and ‘abilities’ are so easily broken via the nature of a witch’s magic that they might as well not apply at all. Witches go beyond what has been defined as being possible for each person.

This is why they are reviled in the doctrine of the Holy-Church. The church holds the cosmic-system to be a purely divine construct, a guide to life, left to us by the gods before they departed from our world. To go against this system, to ignore it, to work outside of it, is, in their eyes, unnatural and dangerous.

The witch-hunts of the recent decade have killed most of all witches on our continent and shattered the Witches’ Sect into a thousand fragments, with all of their followers returning to the shadows.