They say that gold is power, but "they" are mostly male, and thus idiots.
On the day she decided to stop living on goodwill and bland virtue, instead using her power for its hell-intended purpose, the witch did not begin dabbling in alchemy. After all, what do men pay gold
for
? Surely that's more powerful.
So, she planted a garden. An innocent, beautiful garden of Eden, with every delicious fruit and herb that was good and fair, all that was delightful to the scent, touch and taste. She laced each fruit with just a drop of magic, nestled deep inside, and when her garden was heavy with fruit she loaded a cart and took it to the market. She wore a crone's habit, her hair tucked away and her voice a sweet seduction over the market crowds, her eyes as trustworthy as ponds.
Apples, peaches, cherries sweet
All the fruit you'd like to eat,
Rampion, for long, lovely hair,
Free tastes for the ladies fair,
Come, come, taste my wares!
Fruit after fruit, pouch by pouch, she served her fruits and herbs. Every woman that tasted wanted, then craved, then demanded. They came. Then they came back. They offered gold if they had it, chickens, grains, cows, or cabins if they did not. Finally, all the couples where the woman had eaten the witch's fruit were destitute. The witch had more than enough of everything she could want. She was renting the peasants farms to them and living on their bread and their beasts, while they worked as slaves on their own land.
Yet still, they wanted more. The women were frantic, eye-hollowed, and... pregnant. What else could they offer? But what were children without that fruit, that wonderful, wonderful fruit...
The witch selected only the most beautiful girl-children. She took them to a tower recently vacated by a lighthouseman and his frantic, pregnant, and regrettably plain wife. The witch planted one child on each floor, cultivating them as she had cultivated her garden.
The eldest had a room at the top of the stairs with a trapdoor up to the lighthouse's firepit. She was a rampion child, with hair the color of sunlight, and it would not stop growing. She delighted in sitting at the edge of the firepit and combing those twinkling locks in the cool evening breeze, watching the road that ran not too far from the tower and sighing for a man to come and rescue her from a life of boredom.
The witch listened day after day, and soon sap after sap of useless pansy-boys came mincing to cry their love to that barely grown slip of flesh and magic, and she sighed her heart to each of them.
The witch became steadily more annoyed. Although fatuous men were all part of the plan, the young girl was and would always be
hers
. It was coming time for that baby girl to grow up.
The witch stood watching the young woman sleep. She had a petulant pout on that pretty little mouth. The witch just wanted to slap it off. The girl's near-white hair was curled across the pillows, entangled with the blanket. The witch brushed the soft curls from her forehead. The curls arched into her hand like a cat seeking its master.
When the rampion child awoke, her hair was creeping across her throat. She gasped and tried to sit up, but her hair had tied her wrists to the bedposts, her neck bound to the headboard. She screamed, but the witch standing over her was the only one who heard, and
she
just smiled, hovering, her hand splayed in the center of the girl's chest.
"You've been wanting something, little rampion child?"
The girl screamed again, as the witch ran her hand from her chest over the mounds of her breasts and the softness of her stomach to the damp patch in her cotton nightgown. Her scream dissolved into a sharp intake of breath.
