The Witch's Simple Truth

The witch came on a night thick with thunder.

The feast had been grand. A celebration of the king’s fiftieth year upon the throne. Wine spilled like blood across the white tablecloths, and laughter shook the rafters of the great hall. Outside, rain swept the torches to smoke and a great wind tore through the halls. Candles were snuffed, banners ripped from the rafters, and laughter fell to frightened whispers. By morning, the kingdom of Caldryn would speak of only one thing. The witch in the throne room.

She came through the open doors with mud dripping from her cloak and eyes like coals burning through mist. Soldiers drew blades, but the wind itself seemed to bend around her; no one dared step closer.

King Aldric rose from his gilded seat, one hand steadying his crown, the other gripping his sword. “Who dares enter my hall unbidden?” he demanded.

The witch’s voice was dry and old, like leaves scraping stone. “One who has watched your line for a long time, King of Caldryn.”

The courtiers fell silent, heads ducked low. The prince, young Rowan, barely fifteen, stood behind his father’s throne. His heart thudded like a hammer.

“What do you want?” the king said. “Gold? Favor? Speak before I order your tongue cut out.”

The witch smiled — a terrible, patient thing. “No gold. No favor. Only a truth.”

Her hand lifted, crooked and trembling, and the firelight dimmed as though pulled into her palm. “Hear me, Aldric of Caldryn. Your son will take your crown and throne.”

A gasp rippled through the hall. The witch’s eyes flared brighter. “You will fight it. You will curse my name. But the boy, your son, will take it all.”

Then, before anyone could move, she was gone. The torches guttered back to life, revealing only a single black feather where she had stood.

That night, King Aldric barred the doors of his chambers and called only for his most trusted advisor to heed his mania.

“Witches are tricksters, sowing dissent,” the old counselor said cautiously, though his voice shook. “Perchance the hag-”

“What would you suggest?” Aldric snapped. “That I disregard a hag’s words for a bout of ennui? She said take. She said he would take my throne. There is treachery in that word. A thief takes. A traitor takes. A murderer takes.”

“But Sire-”

“She spoke death over me,” the king spat. “Over my house.”

His son, Prince Rowan, stood near the doors, silent and pale. Only a boy. He was still soft-faced, uncertain. But that night had carved something into him. A despair that becomes a hollow behind the eyes, the knowledge that his father now looked at him as if he were the edge of a blade.

At first it was subtle. Rowan noticed the guards outside his chamber doubled, the tone of his tutors sharpened, questions weighted strange and probing, as though testing for a crack in armor that was never there.

Then came the new rules, small at first, then suffocating. He was not to leave the castle grounds. He was not to attend council. He was not to touch a blade.

When he asked why, his father said only, “Because I said so.”

His council met without the prince present. Rowan’s tutors were dismissed one by one.

Where once his father had embraced him after each hunt, now he barely nodded in acknowledgement or greeting. Servants watched him nervously, as if expecting him to draw a dagger at any moment.

Once, late at night, Rowan gathered his courage. He went to his father’s study, where the king sat hunched over a map, marking borders with a shaking hand.

“Father,” Rowan said. “I am no danger to you.”

The king’s gaze flicked up, bloodshot and hollow. “Every danger begins by saying so.”

Rowan swallowed. “You don’t believe her words, do you? You taught me yourself that witches lie.”

“Did she?” The king’s voice dropped low. “Or did she see what you will become?”

“I am your son!”

“This day you are my son,” said the king, “but one day you may be kinslayer.”

The king turned his mad eyes back to the map.

Years passed, and the shadow of the witch’s words stretched long across Caldryn.

Rowan grew tall and solemn, his laughter silenced by the weight of unspoken fear. The king, once beloved for his generosity, became a man of endless suspicion and paranoia — a ruler who saw threats in every whisper, every shadow.

By the time Rowan turned eighteen, the guards followed him everywhere.

He was forbidden to ride beyond the castle gates. Forbidden from carrying a blade. Forbidden from speaking with the knights.

He began to dream of the witch, her voice whispering in the dark: You will take it. You will take it all.

In the dream, his father lay dying. And when Rowan tried to help, his hands were covered in blood.

He awoke shaking, drenched in sweat.

That morning, he decided to leave.

He stole a horse from the royal stables and slipped out through the servants’ gate before dawn.

If he could not convince his father of his loyalty, he would prove it by absence. If the curse was real, he would break it by distance.

Wrapped in a plain cloak and carrying only a dagger and a single pouch of coin. He crossed the river by the old stone bridge, pausing. He pulls out the dagger, and drops it into the river and he swore; never will his palm touch a blade, and did not look back.

The forest swallowed him whole.

The world beyond Caldryn's walls was vast and strange. He met farmers, hunters, and weary travelers who knew nothing of kings and curses. He worked where he could and never spoke his name.

He traveled far, far enough that the language bent and the coins bore unfamiliar faces. He worked for food, carried letters between lonely towns, tended to horses, plowed the farmland. Sometimes, when he looked into a puddle or the bottom of a polished tankard, he thought he saw his father’s face there. Older, wearier, accusing.

For a time, peace came. The ache of the castle’s silence faded; the fear that had once caged him began to loosen.

But the past, like a wolf, has a way of following the scent of guilt.

Rumors reached even the far villages: the king had grown cruel and suspicious. Lords accused one another of plotting with the vanished prince. The dungeons filled. Taxes rose.

And always the same whisper: The curse eats the king alive.

Rowan’s hands shook so badly he could not hold his cup. He saddled his own horse before dawn and rode north through snow and storm,

He tried to ignore it. He told himself that his leaving had spared his father’s life, that the witch’s curse could not touch what was already far from home.

But one night, as he sat by the fire in a quiet inn, a soldier stumbled in from the storm, shouting for ale and news.

“The king’s dying,” the soldier said to anyone who would listen. “His son’s fled — vanished years ago. No heir sits beside him. The court fights over who’ll take the crown.”

The room erupted with talk, but Rowan heard nothing more. The soldier’s words were like iron chains dragging him back toward home.

The curse had twisted itself in another way, not through murder or rebellion, but through his own absence.

And so, after four long years away, the prince turned his horse toward Caldryn once more. Toward the father who had feared him into exile.

The castle was quiet when he arrived, haunted with echoes of memories turned bitter.

Servants stared as he passed, faces pale with disbelief. The corridors smelled of smoke and fever.

He found his father in the royal bedchamber, the once-mighty king now a wasted shadow beneath a mountain of furs. His crown sat crooked on his head. His beard had gone white; his eyes, once sharp with command, were now clouded with fever.

The old man’s eyes flickered open. “You.”

“I came as soon as I heard,” Rowan said softly.

“You shouldn’t have.” The king’s voice was barely a whisper. “The witch’s words… they follow me still. You’ve come to take it.”

“No, Father.” Rowan fell to his knees. “I came to say goodbye.”

The king’s hand trembled toward the crown. “She said you would take my throne. And here you are.”

“I don’t want it.”

“All sons say that,” the king muttered, a feverish smile twisting his lips. “Until they do.”

He tried to rise, but the effort broke him. The crown slid from his brow. Rowan reached to catch it, but his father’s hand darted out, clutching his wrist.

The king’s eyes flared with terror. “You reach for it already!”

“I- no, I only meant to-”

But the king’s strength failed him. He fell back, still gripping Rowan’s arm. The weight of his body pulled the boy forward, and in the struggle, the old man’s head struck the edge of the bedpost.

The sound was small. The silence after it immense.

Rowan froze.

His father lay still, eyes open and empty.

The crown lay between them.

They buried King Rowan beneath the great oak that marked the line of Caldryn's kings. The people wept, and the bells tolled for three days and nights— though few could name whether they grieved the man, or the peace that had died long before him.

Rowan stood apart from the mourners, the crown heavy in his hands.

It was all he had tried to escape, and yet it had come to him anyway.

By the laws of the realm, he was now King Rowan of Caldryn.

But he did not sit on the throne for seven days. He walked the castle halls like a ghost, haunted by the memory of his father’s eyes — full of fear, even at the end.

He thought of the witch. Her words had shaped his life, shaped his father’s death. Was she laughing still, somewhere in the dark beyond the hills?

He swore he would find her.

The path to the eastern marsh was half-swallowed by bramble and mist. Rowan rode alone, wearing no crown and no armor, only a plain gray cloak. He found her where he had always known she would be — in a small hut leaning against a crooked willow, smoke curling lazily from its chimney.

When Rowan entered, she did not turn. She was older now, or perhaps he was older and only saw her differently.

“So,” she said. “The boy has become a man. And the crown sits heavy, does it not?”

Rowan stared at her back. “You killed him.”

“I never touched him.”

“You cursed us.”

“I spoke truth.”

His voice broke. “You said I would take his throne. You made him fear me- made me fear myself!”

The witch turned at last, her eyes still burning faintly red. “Did I? Or did I simply name what would always be?”

Rowan stepped closer. “If it was only truth, why speak it at all?”

“Because kings forget,” she said. “They think themselves immortal. They think the world turns for them alone. I told your father that his time would pass, that his son would rule after him, as sons always do. But his mind, so lost in his megalomania, would rather believe you would become kinslayer, instead of becoming king after his eventual passing.”

She poked at the fire with a crooked stick. Sparks leapt like startled birds.

“The curse was not in my words, boy. It was in his heart.”

She smiled at the embers before turning to him, not cruelly this time, but with something akin to a motherly understanding. “I never spoke prophecy. I spoke a fact. A son takes his father’s throne, as night takes day, as winter takes autumn. Such is the turning of all things.”

“But-” His throat was dry. “Why say it like that? Why frighten him?”

“Because truth, when wrapped in mystery, reveals what lies beneath a man’s heart. Fear makes its own prophecy. You ran to save him from it, and that running fulfilled it. He died clutching the shadow of his own dread.”

He turns his eyes to the fire, trying to find solace in the glow, “Then what am I left with?”

“Truth,” she said. “And the chance to do better.”

She turned back to her fire, stirring the pot that hung above it. “Now go, King of Caldryn. Rule better than he did. Fear not the truth.”

Rowan returned to Caldryn in silence. When he entered the throne room, the courtiers bowed, hesitant and uncertain. The crown waited for him upon the dais, gleaming faintly in the morning light.

He lifted it, feeling its weight.

His father had feared it as a burden; the witch had used it as a mirror; and he, at last, understood it for what it was: not a prize to be taken, nor a curse to be feared, but a duty to be borne.

As he placed the crown upon his head, he whispered into the stillness of the hall:

“I did not take this from you, Father. You gave it to me, as every king must.”

And in that moment, the curse unraveled — not because of magic, but because he saw it for the simple truth it had always been.

Years later, when King Rowan’s own son was born, a wise woman came to the castle gates bearing gifts for the child.

The guards hesitated, murmuring of witches and old tales.

But Rowan himself met her at the steps. He took the gift — a small wooden crown — and smiled.

“My son will take my throne,” he said lightly.

The woman smiled back. “So it is, and so it ever shall be.”