Legion's Arc

Chapter 18 of 22

Diana reached the pub with her hands still shaking. The town was silent behind her. Every soul in the church was dead. She shoved through the door and lit a lamp. Margaret's words came back to her. There was a book here. A book that could unmake the beast. Diana pulled open cabinets and tore through shelves until found a door in the back of the pub. The room was full of boxes and chests so much so that there was a narrow aisle that had been created to get in and out. And on a table in the back of the room sat what she was looking for. The cover felt like tree bark under her fingers. Dark cracks ran across it, threaded with faded red and green. Iron chains bound one edge. Diana set it on the bar and forced the stiff pages open. The first drawings showed a preacher. Long dirty hair. Small round glasses. A black suit. Ezekiel Blackwood. The text named him. He had called hundreds of people witches. Men, women, and children dragged from the woods and the villages nearby. Diana read how he locked them all in a barn cellar. He sealed the door and left them there. He wanted their bodies to bless the ground. Diana's stomach turned. She turned the page. The cellar filled with rats. The trapped people starved in the dark while the rats gnawed at them. One woman did not die. The book called her the Mother. She was a witch, and she used the rats. She pulled them to her and made them one thing. A single beast built from teeth and hunger. But the beast turned on her own child first. Diana read the line twice. The Mother lost her grip on the swarm, and it killed her daughter before she could stop it. The girl died in the same dark that killed the others. Diana's hand pressed to her mouth. She saw it now. The Mother had not only wanted a monster to punish Ezekiel. She wanted revenge for a daughter she killed by accident. So she bled onto the book and joined the swarm. She made herself the beast. And she set a rule into it. Kill every person of the bloodline that put her there. Never stop until the last one is gone. Diana sat down hard on a stool. Margaret. Her three sons. The whole town. All descended from the men who followed Ezekiel. That was why Legion came here. That was why it would not stop. She reached to close the book. A loose page slid out and dropped to the floor. Diana picked it up and held it near the lamp. It was a drawing of the Mother's daughter. A sad young woman in an old dress. Diana studied the face. The eyes. The set of the mouth. The small mark on the left cheek. It was her own face. The lamp shook in her grip. She touched the scar on her cheek. She always called it a scar but never really knew where it came from. She always thought something had happened when she was too young to remember. But now she knows what the mark is. It was the mark of her ancestors. The mark of a witch. The girl in the drawing had it too. Diana was of the bloodline. And something older than Mark looked out at her from the page. She folded the drawing into her pocket and stood. She understood it all now and knew there was one thing left to do.