Episode 6: The Witch Queen Chapter II: Doubt

Blurb
"To live forever and keep this land..." was the promise made. What happens when a promise is kept but with a vile and broken spirit?

Plot Synopsis
On December 26, 1821, 27 year-old Timothy Vandover goes out to hunt near the town of Yellow Oak in the Cumberland Gap. His wife Clara has just arrived from New York, pregnant with a child Timothy doesn’t particularly want. He feels anxiety at the idea of being a failure as a father, and goes hunting to clear his head in spite of the fact that he has never really hunted before.

Timothy is not a seasoned woodsman, and was only in Yellow Oak to scout logging territory at the behest of his father-in-law Albert Dunaway. Timothy and his brother-in-law Anson are setting up the enterprise. This contributes to the fact that he manages to get himself lost in a snowstorm half a mile away from Yellow Oak, falls off a dropoff, and ends up lying in the snow too badly injured to move and freezing to death.

At this point, he hears a woman ask him if he’s dead and ask a massive animal the same question. Timothy opens his eyes to see a bear and a young woman, who gives him something to drink that makes him feel warm and causes him to fall asleep.

The woman is The Witch Queen, who sends Bartholomew the bear home and brings Tim back to his family. Among the town is an older Granny witch that Daughter Dooley has run into before.

The episode then segues into a flashback, outlining the events after Daughter Dooley accepted Horned Head's deal in 1783.

Daughter Dooley has been young the entire time, having accepted Horned Head’s deal. She finds herself lonely in her isolation. She lacks nothing, everything she wants or needs appearing on her porch the next day. She has a proper house, because when she turned 20, six men with blank eyes who couldn’t speak appeared on her land. A letter explains they are hers, to use as she likes.

She tells the men to fetch wood to build a privy, and they come back with wood from an existing house, having killed a family to take it. She treks to the homestead to see the devastation and is filled with rage. Still, she feels as if she can’t blame the Sixmen, since they were compelled to do what they did. She tells them to cut wood for the privy and stay in her sight while they do so.

They build her a house, but she keeps the shack as a sacred space.

Once, she felt as if she made the right choice by taking the Stag’s deal, as she’s had many opportunities to send bad men away from the Green. But years of dark rituals and readings she can’t fully remember have brought her to a place of doubt.

To the far southeast is a settlement named Last Harbor, and a letter tells her to travel there and live there for six months as a widowed midwife. Overjoyed to live among people again, and perhaps meet another witch, she packs a trunk and leaves on a cart driven by one of the men. She arrives in Last Harbor in 1794; the events there are detailed in Episode 10: The Witch Queen Chapter III: Last Harbor.

Relevant Characters

 * Daughter Dooley
 * Hornéd Head