Witch

The heretics slip back into their cave to avoid being seen when Joachim's body is found. Nina stays behind, collapsing in tears and cursing him as a liar for not enduring the Hell she dragged him into. A sound behind her turns out to be Luca, and when Nina hurls a rock that strikes her head and threatens to leap from the cliff, Luca only keeps advancing. Reaching the girl, she answers Nina's feeble threats with two hard slaps, then bends her over her knee and spanks her like a child until Nina, sobbing, finally apologizes. Luca ends the punishment at once and folds the weeping girl into an embrace, saving Joachim's story for the safety of their tent.

On their way back they find Casca ringed by the same heretics who abandoned Nina, and Luca realizes the bandaged woman had followed her. One man recalls Casca as one of Luca's prostitutes, said to be mad and syphilitic, and the group nearly leaves her alone, until a curious heretic rips away her bandages to reveal the lovely face beneath. Seeing she is no invalid, the men close in to assault her; her shirt tears open to expose the Brand of Sacrifice, and the sight of the leering crowd throws Casca into flashbacks of the Eclipse, where apostles once surrounded her the same way. She screams.

Before Luca can intervene, monstrous faces churn into being across the black sky. A spirit dives down, seizes a heretic, and uses him to bite the face from another, and the possessed men begin butchering one another as Luca, suspecting Casca of witchcraft, watches in horror. When the survivors turn toward the Brand, the Demon Child appears and silently drives the spirits from their bodies. Casca reaches for the deformed creature that is her child, but it vanishes the moment she closes her arms around it. The remaining heretics, now convinced she is a witch, bow before her, though she takes no notice. Far below, the strange watcher studies the still-breathing Joachim before darting away.

The chapter runs twenty four pages within the Conviction Arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 9 on April 23, 1999. Joachim survives his fall, and the veiled observer is the being tied to the Egg of the Perfect World.