Chapter 26: Pay Up for a Legend!
On this continent in which the nine major kingdoms bickered endlessly, the so-called "war between good and evil" was just a matter of sides.
The Lyon Empire, for instance, despised the undead, but that didn't mean that all liches like Ambrose were irredeemable monsters. And though Ambrose viewed the Lyon Empire as a soulless cult of zealots, that wasn't quite the case, either.
It was a matter of stance and perspective.
But hags were a different story entirely. They were pure evil, born twisted and cruel to the bone.
Hags looked like hideous, warped old women, with hearts just as ugly as their faces.
Even their means of reproduction were a crime against nature.
Hags couldn't bear children of their own. Instead, they would steal human babies, sometimes straight from their cradles or even from their mothers' wombs. Then, they would devour the infant and "give birth to" a human-looking girl.
The child would grow up appearing perfectly normal until her thirteenth birthday, at which point she would transform into a creature identical to her "mother."
Generally, most hags would return their "children" to the grieving couple from whom they had stolen them. For more than a decade, those children would live as normal girls in a normal family.