Work Text:
As “Auntie” Whispers looked upon the sleeping child, her face looked almost pious in the candlelight. It began to flicker and sputter, bringing her out of her reverie. Had she always looked so… skeletal? A sickly child, that was something she could understand.
The hours she had spent caring for a bedridden Adelaide as a girl had carved their family’s remedies into the front of her skull deep enough to call up in a minute, even after so long alone. It was just as well. With no one remaining to remember and the book itself burnt up long ago, she was the only hope of passing on the generations-old knowledge. It’s not as though she could put them into pen and paper. Every biting winter morning stiffened the joints and filled the eyes with tears, now. When Lorna came of age, that would total two with the knowledge to cure ills in the old ways.
Oh, she thought. Is it ghastly to say, if? If Lorna came of age?
She’d do her best to make sure that wouldn’t happen.And a child that would rip into a hen with such ferocity certainly wasn’t in danger of going hungry, she remembered with a shudder. No, it wouldn’t be hunger that gnawed on Lorna’s insides. It would be wickedness.
Whispers knew wickedness when she saw it. It was not her, strange in ways and level of head. Turned loose, the girl had the potential to slaughter five of her prized chickens, at least. No, when she recalled this morning- her pail splashing onto the ground, freezing instantly when she saw it- the gore spread along the bare dirt path to the henhouse- had a fox came in the night? No, a fox would leave no trace, a raccoon, then- and at last, Lorna, little Lorna in it all. Feathers strewn all around, her chubby fingers covered in the same blood that drenched her shapeless gown. That was wickedness.
The evil slumbering inside her had awoken, bloodthirsty and ravenous. Auntie Whispers understood it no more this morning than now, vigorously scrubbing the rusty brown stains from the garments by a single lamp. How had the child come to be taken by this... thing? What was its intent for her tiny mortal vessel, so weakened by its power? Such things cannot be of this earthly plain.
But perhaps, she pondered, they could be overcome by forces of her own.
Whispers was of the belief that few issues could not be cured by common sense and a proper upbringing. But this was clearly beyond either. And such matters she allowed herself to take into her own... gifted hands.
Under any other circumstances she might have let the child be. Some kind soul would hear her cries and come bravely to the rescue, and then it would be their problem when she grew up black-hearted and carnivorous. But the morals instilled in her tugged at her conscience. When one sees another in need, they must do what they can to provide for them, their resources and abilities being able and abundant. So. If a roughly-hewn crib and a bit of magically induced obedience were abundance, then it was her solemn duty to provide them. Besides, there wasn’t a town around for miles…