The crimson witch

single word. She had cursed him to fall into the ravine, fall into the steam to a fiery death on the hot boulders below. But there he sat. Cocksure. Damn him! She spat into the liquid and tried again. This time, she tried to ash him, to burn him with searing fire of the sun, to crumple him into dry, gray useless dust. But that didn't work either. He leaned against the horny hump of the dragon's back, oblivious to her efforts, unaware that she was using her powerful magics on him.
        She let the picture cloud, turned away from the cauldron.
        Wasn't she Cheryn the Daughter of Mulgai?
        And wasn't she the Witch of Eye Mountain?
        “And aren't I the Crimson Witch, feared by all the Commoners?” she asked the walls of the room, the tapestries that covered the dirt and rock beneath.
        But the walls did not answer.
        “Well, aren't I?”
        Still-silence.
        In anger, she struck life into two rocks and repeated to them the question that the walls had chosen not to answer. The rocks quickly agreed that she was, indeed, all of these things that she claimed to be: Cheryn the Daughter of Mulgai (and, yes, Mulgai had been the greatest Witch of Eye Mountain that any Commoner had ever shuddered beneath, though she was a gentle woman and kindly disposed to the Untalented as well as the Talented), the Witch of Eye Mountain, and the Crimson Witch (as some of the more romantic Commoners had taken to calling her chiefly because of her red robes that she always wore). A sight: darkness all about except for the shimmering cinnabar form of the shapely witch cruising between the mountain peaks, sliding along the air stream into the eye that was a cave. Yes, a sight to stir the heart of many a Common Untalented boy, though he never might taste of her breasts, never might know the pleasure of her thighs.
        She struck the rocks dumb as they requested, life being too much of a burden for creatures accustomed to the inactivity of inorganic existence.
        She turned to the storm that had pushed back into the valley in an effort to run the mountains at the far end where it had failed to run these. Questioning it like an inquisitor, she threatened to torture its nonsentient soul if it did not respond.
        Thunder cracked.
        Lightning exploded in fireworks of yellow and white.
        The night reacted to her whims.
        The air was electrified.
        She crossed to the rough-hewn entrance and passed through the Death Screen, feeling its hundreds of testing prickles as it determined her nature and name. She stood on the lip of rock outside, watching the thunderstorm boom about her, watching the storm clouds swarm around her, dipping their dark bellies against the peaks of the lower mountains. She raised her hands, clapped them thrice. Three cannon volleys of thunder answered her summons, booming about in the stone, moaning and echoing, threatening to shatter the lesser stones with their voices. She winked her eyes, and another flash of lightning leaped up and down the dark sky, lighting the world from horizon to horizon.
        There was but one course of action to follow now that her Talents had failed, now that her magics had been tried and found wanting. She would follow them, keeping always out of sight, always in the background until the perfect opportunity presented itself. She would wait until they were teetering on the brink of some impossible chasm, and she would send a great wind to blow upon their flank and toss them over. Or she would wait until a snake lay in their path, and she would lift it with the invisible fingers of her magics and toss it upon them so that it might bite the bastards with its death-cored fangs.
        Lightning…
        Thunder…
        A gull screeched, coming in toward its nesting place in the cliffs.
        She lifted a finger.
        She burned it out of the sky.
        She lifted from the ledge and floated into the darkening storm. The winds rose and fell about her, fluted her red robes and sent them shimmering with brilliant pulsations of crimson and rouge and red the color of blood… Rain lashed her but did not leave her wet. It stung her cheeks but did not leave a blush. Once, lightning struck full upon her, but she was neither burned nor shocked. She Lifted arms to the storm and held it against her finely formed breasts, suckling its fury on her marble nipples. She moved on, in pursuit of the man named Jake