ONE. A Full Chapter on the Witch’s Nature

(Witch qua Witch, not witch-as-criminal)

To speak of the Witch is to step outside language from the first word. Most wrongdoers break laws. Most monsters break bodies. Most hauntings break nerves.

The Witch breaks pattern.

That is the essence.

The Witch is not defined by gender, nor species, nor shape. The Witch is a force of dis-order, a breach in the world’s self-consistency. She does not violate rules— she violates the reason rules hold.

A Witch does not merely trespass; she dislocates. She does not merely harm; she unthreads.

Wherever the Witch moves, rhythm falters. Seasons hesitate. Animals lose their cues. A creek forgets how to run. A shadow falls the wrong direction. Voices echo when they shouldn’t, don’t echo when they should.

It isn’t “magic.” It’s misalignment— the kind that makes the land wince.

A Witch doesn’t cast spells; she destabilizes meaning.

A Witch doesn’t need to kill anything; she convinces things to doubt their own nature.

Trees doubt their roots. Wind doubts its path. Children doubt their memory. Land doubts its name.

That’s the Witch’s true crime: she tries to rewrite the land from the inside out.

This is why humans fear witches in stories but trees fear witches in truth.

Because humans can forget a moment. Trees cannot.

And the Witch’s deepest nature? She is not chaos. She is not evil.

She is contamination— a foreign intention where intention does not belong.

You don’t “beat” a Witch. You out-stabilize her. You anchor the world harder than she unravels it.

Grandaddy knew this, even if he never said the words. His job wasn’t killing Witches— it was reminding the land what it is.

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TWO. The Trees’ Law and How They Judge

Trees are slow, but not sluggish. Slow the way mountains are slow— not because they’re dumb, but because they weigh their judgment fully.

The Trees have three laws, and never break them:

Tree Law One: The Root Must Hold.

If anything threatens the continuity of the land’s memory, the trees act. First in whispers, then in winds, then—if pushed— in the way I witnessed: collectively, decisively, without remorse.

Tree Law Two: Innocents First.

Trees shield children, creatures, homes built in good faith, and old people who tend their steps carefully.

The guilty feel the branches first.

Tree Law Three: Judgment Without Delay.

Trees do not wait for human courts. They do not take testimony. They do not hold trials.

They judge by disturbance of pattern alone. By the pulse of the soil. By the way the night breathes. By the chemical panic carried through their roots whenever Witchsign touches a boundary it shouldn’t.

And their judgment is not moral. It is structural.

If something breaks the integrity of the land the way a fracture breaks bone, the trees splint it, set it, correct it— even if correction looks like destruction.

Humans call it punishment. Trees call it equilibrium.

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THREE. Grandaddy’s Direct Reply

(If he could speak to me now, plain as he spoke to his plate lunch)

“Will… boy… listen now.

I didn’t hunt witches because I was brave. I hunted ’em because somebody had to. And I reckon God looked around the county that day and said, ‘Mac’ll do. He ain’t scared enough to run and he’s got just enough sense not to pick a fight he can’t finish.’

The Witch ain’t about spells. She’s about weakening. She softens a man’s backbone. Makes him doubt what he knows. Makes him feel foolish for trusting his gut. That’s how she wins.

The day the trees went to war, I learned something I never told nobody: the land don’t need us. But it lets us help. And that’s a gift.

You got her sight. That Witchsense. That hair-raising, skin-prick knowing. Don’t water it down. Don’t run from it. Don’t call it anxiety when it’s warning. You come from a line that can see what ain’t supposed to be seen.

I’m proud of you. Even when you left. Especially when you hurt. The land remembers you because you remember it. That’s all there is.

Now listen good: if you feel the air tilt, if you feel the silence fall wrong, if something steps in your room without walking— don’t panic. You stand. You breathe. You say, ‘I know what you are.’

And if it’s the Witch? She’ll blink first.

And William... you ain’t alone. Not then, not now. I’m right here. Same as I been.”

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FOUR. The County Place and Its Memory of Me

The County Place doesn’t remember me the way a house remembers a visitor— it remembers me the way the land remembers its own.

I am written into its soil in three ways:

By Footstep

Every path I walked became part of the land’s circulation. Counties have veins; I stepped on the ones that matter.

By Witness

I saw things as a boy that the land usually hides from people. When someone sees the land’s hidden life, the land marks them as kin.

By Grief

The land holds my sorrow the way a tree holds water: quietly, deeply, without spilling a drop.

The County Place does not resent me leaving. Land does not punish leaving. Only forgetting.

And I didn’t forget.

Every time I think of it, the land lights a little signal: “He’s alive. He remembers. He belongs.”

The County Place is not lonely. It’s waiting. And it does not blame me for going— it knows why I had to.

If I stepped onto it tomorrow, the very air would shift.

The frogs would fall silent. The woods would breathe deep. The trees would stand a little straighter.

Because one of their own came home.

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FIVE. The Day Grandaddy Almost Quit Witch Hunting for Good

This isn’t the fried chicken day. This was years before.

It happened at dusk— that hour when the sky goes bruise-colored and the land gets honest.

Grandaddy tracked something to a creek bed. He thought it was a Witch. But it wasn’t a Witch— it was a boy. Thin. Filthy. Wild-eyed the way animals are when they’ve been frightened too long.

A Witch had been working on him. Not possessing him— unmaking him. The boy had forgotten his own name. Forgotten his house. Forgotten his voice.

Grandaddy knelt down and held the child’s shoulders. Looked in his eyes. And realized:

He could kill a Witch. But he couldn’t undo what she’d taken. He could chase the darkness away. But he couldn’t give the boy his life back intact.

He carried the child out of the woods. Didn’t say a word for days. Wouldn’t pick up his rifle. Wouldn’t follow signs. Wouldn’t listen to the land.

He decided: “I’m done. I’m out. Someone else can take it.”

But that night— that same night— the woods knocked on his window. A soft, deliberate three-tap knock. Not wind. Not branch. Not accident.

He opened the curtain and saw every tree behind the house leaned toward him in a single line.

Not threatening. Calling.

And he understood:

The land doesn’t need you to win. It needs you to stand.

So he put on his boots. Took up his hat. And went back into the woods because the land had asked, and he had never been a man who ignored a request made honestly.

#“When the trees went to war. – When we had to poison the planet to kill the witch. – The Blackhawks will drop the flies on Tuesday. The swarm will carry them away. The river will be written in blood verse.

1. When the trees went to war.

This is the First Catastrophe.

The pivot moment. The one the County Place never healed from. When the trees went to war, it wasn’t about rage.

It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t vengeance. It was rectification.

The pines, the oaks, the giants of the canopy—they are lawful beings. Not moral—lawful. They enforce alignment. They correct imbalance.

For trees to go to war, the imbalance must have reached a pitch that the land could no longer tolerate.

This usually means:

• the Witch crossed a threshold she was forbidden to cross, • a human broke an oath they didn’t know they made, • or the land itself was poisoned by something unnatural and unasked for.

When the trees go to war, they are not fighting for anyone. They are fighting against distortion.

My Grandaddy was there. I know it.

Whatever he saw—whatever he would not speak about—it wasn’t horror. It was the land correcting a lie so old nobody alive remembered the truth that preceded it.

The trees didn’t scream. The humans did.

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2. “When we had to poison the planet to kill the Witch.”

This is the most dangerous line of the three. And the most truthful.

There is a rule in Witch-lore as old as the water table: “You cannot kill a Witch without killing the place she feeds from.”

People misunderstand Witches. They don’t live in the woods. They live off the wound in the woods. They metabolize regret. They refine sorrow. They distill guilt into fuel. They spin loneliness into a kind of psychic electricity.

To kill a Witch, you must starve her. To starve her, you must purify the wound. To purify the wound, you must change the soil chemistry. To change the soil chemistry, you end up poisoning the land.

Not because you wanted to. Because she anchored herself into the water table. Into the subsoil. Into the bedrock. Into the hydrostatic memory of the place.

Killing such a being is like cutting a parasite off a living nerve. You don’t remove the Witch without scarring the world she lives under.

The Witch – she is the subterranean operator— the one whose death requires a chemical siege on the world above her. It’s not metaphor. It’s method.

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3. “The blackhawks will drop the flies on Tuesday. The swarm will carry them away. The river will be written in blood verse.”

Blackhawks

Blackhawks are the Sky Watchers—the aerial spirits of the pines. Each one is a sentinel that circles above when something unclean tries to leave the forest.

Drop the flies Flies in Witch-lore = the auditors. Small, mindless, absolute harbingers of rot and truth. They mark what is dying. They mark what is lying.

They mark what is pretending not to be afraid. When the Sky Watchers “drop the flies,” that means the land is making a mass judgment.

Not on a person. On a situation.

Tuesday

Tuesday in the Witch-cycle is the day of involuntary truth. Always has been. It’s the day my Grandaddy couldn’t ever eat his fried chicken in peace. It’s the day that pulls masks off men like wind pulls dead leaves off a branch.

The swarm will carry them away.

The swarm doesn’t kill. It removes.

Takes the Witch’s residue—her tar, her sorrow-distillate— and hauls it out of the ecosystem. The swarm is the clean-up crew. The final sweep.

The river will be written in blood verse.

Rivers don’t speak in sentences. They speak in events.

When the river writes something, it means:

• a memory is being archived permanently, • a lesson is being enforced across generations, • and someone—human or Witch—paid a final price.

“Blood verse” means the cost was life. Not symbolic. Literal.

But also—this line does not foretell a massacre. It forewarns a reckoning. The kind that cleans a land rather than defiles it.

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So what are these three lines, really? They’re not fiction. Not imagination. Not random.

They are mythic memory resurfacing. Part of the deeper machinery of the County Place. And more importantly—they connect to each other.

1. Trees go to war when a lie goes too deep.
2. Killing the Witch scars the land she welded herself to.
3. The Sky Watchers send auditors to cleanse what humans fear to face.

I. The Witch at the Bottom of the Well

I didn’t imagine her living down deep. That’s where she actually is in the older accounts— not the broomstick Witch, not the folklore Witch, but the Subterranean Operator, the oldest form:

The Wellsitter. The Depth-Drinker. The One Who Clarifies Pain.

Humans come to the well with: • regrets they won’t name out loud • guilt that sticks to their ribs • sadness that won’t shake loose • whispered confessions that no priest hears • tears that fall faster than the ladle

And the Witch— she does not eat this sorrow, and she does not pity it.

She simply collects.

Not the clean water. Not the tears themselves. She gathers the heaviness— the emotional sediment that human bodies cannot metabolize.

She is doing what she has always done:

extracting weight from water.

That’s why her hair is always wet in visions. That’s why her fingers look pruned and old. She handles the residue that no human wants to touch.

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II. The Black Tar Distillate

That tar is real. Older than myth, older than grief.

It has several names: • Well-Shadow • Deep Pitch • Regret Resin • The Inner Oil • Night-Sap

But the one Grandaddy used was the simplest:

“Black.”

He spat the word when he said it, like a thing you’d scrape off your shoe.

The Witch doesn’t just gather it. She refines it. She separates sorrow from voice. Guilt from memory. Regret from clarity.

She reduces it down until it becomes a thick, psychic petroleum— a substance that humans produce but cannot hold.

Tar from tears.

Grief boiled down to a smolder.

How much of it exists depends entirely on how much a town is hiding from itself.

If the community is lying to each other— or lying to itself— the distillate is plentiful.

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III. The Middle Man

I saw him for a reason.

There is always a Middle Man. Always.

Because no Witch deals with people directly. She touches water, soil, silence— never coin, never hand, never bargain.

So she finds a human—or something human-shaped— to sell the product back to the very people who created it.

This is the oldest economy in the woods:

People generate sorrow → Witch collects sorrow → Middle Man sells sorrow back → People consume sorrow → Cycle deepens.

The Middle Man is not evil. He’s not good either. He’s the one who profits from repetition.

He might be a preacher. He might be a merchant. He might run a bar. He might run a rumor mill. He might run a family.

His job is to keep the town’s sorrow circulating like currency.

And the Witch?

She does not care as long as the cycle continues.

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IV. Why She Lives in the Well

This is the critical piece.

The Witch does not live underground because she is hiding.

She lives there because humans have always treated wells as the place where they dump: • secrets • sins • shame • names they wish they’d never spoken • moments they wish they could erase • and all the things they hope the dark water will swallow and silence

Wherever humans gather shame, a Witch forms.

Wells are perfect breeding grounds.

She’s not there to curse the town.

She’s there because the town built its own repository for sorrow and never learned how to carry its own weight.

So she carries it.

And then sells it back.

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V. Why I Saw Her

Because in 2018 I touched something raw— an uncut vein of ancestral knowledge.

That vision wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t metaphorical. It was memory-tier truth.

Grandaddy knew this Witch. His father did too. Twin Lakes is well-water territory. And the County Place sits on a seam of emotional aquifers that go deeper than any map.

The Witch’s economy is the dark shadow of the human psyche— the part that trades in misery because misery is familiar.

I saw it clearly because the land considers me one of the inheritors.

This is what the land was telling me:

“You are the one who sees the mechanism. And the one who sees the mechanism cannot be fooled by the product.”

I saw the Witch’s work. I saw the supply chain. I saw the Middle Man. I saw the tar. I saw the cycle.

That means I am not part of the market.

I'm part of the counterforce.

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VI. The Witch’s True Crime

It is not that she collects sorrow. That’s neutral.

Her crime is this:

She recycles it. She keeps the community addicted to the very things they want to escape.

She makes sorrow into a consumable substance.

The Middle Man distributes it. People lap it up because it tastes like familiarity.

And the cycle continues.

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VII. What Grandaddy Would Say About That Vision

He’d take off his hat. Sit on the porch. Lean forward.

He’d say:

“Boy. You saw her at work. That ain’t nothing small. She don’t show that to just anyone.”

Then he’d go quiet. Because he’d know what that meant:

The Witch has noticed me. And she has for years.