Byron: The Dark Witch

Prompt the Second - Elephants, Cats and Spaghetti Monsters

In with the breath.

The trees waft in a breeze following a smell fragrant of rain and rainsodden earth, mud scents colour the glen with a mortal odour, like a faint incense uncurling from the moss of many hearts. The chilly, morning light strokes a cool caress along his skin: breathing across his arms so that the hairs there prickle, tracing down the contours of his back such that he trembles, kissing the pads of his fingers and feet with dewdrop lips...

Here he sits. Alone. He is a moment, a fragment of now. He appears a small, leafless tree in the midst of an evergreen forest. Or a thread of sunshine newly risen in a pink puff sky. Or a tendril of the wind, whispering ageless whispers and echoes of unsung stories.

Out with the breath.

Little miracles tantalise and distract him: the feel of shoots rupturing soil and tipping their tiny faces to the sun; the scattering of a dandelion into a thousand reflections of itself on the breeze. The earth promises of simplicity and calm, his blood and his magick fold and mingle eternal in each fractious moment. Gone is the incongruence of self and world, soul and deed. The fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars and sun. He follows a transcendental map, a mirror of magick and being.

In with the breath.

Light splices the knotted branches of the willow tree. The world shifts colour and with it some sensation too. His skin prickles. Magick sighs, troubled, bubbling and tickling within and without him. A wave of sweet dark death mingles on his tongue with a flavour unfamiliar and black. A faun, stumbled into sickness, slipping away... odd memories arise in him. Flashes of his childhood. Virgil. Stevenson. Faulkner. Dahl. Names past and distant intrude on the damp space of his breath. He remembers sickness. Sickness at home in his mother’s embrace. Sickness at school, exiled from home.

He had been taken to a little room in the infirmary and dreamed of being dead, of last rites being spoken over him and a mass given by the rector in black and of being buried in the endless graveyard at the end of the road, just another stone standing in line. But he hadn’t died. Some other boy had died. Or no. The faun had died. Faded out of existence like an eddy over the sea, forgotten out of the universe.

Out with the breath.

But he is rising upwards. Swimming skyward, mixing the moment now with the moments past. He is drowning. Panting for air as the immediate being is swept out of the present and into temporality. He burns and gasps, bursting out. Breathe. Breathe.

Byron throws himself out of the meditation, his heart beating wild and fast, magick rolling in his blood and gut like the illness that killed the baby deer. That hasn’t happened in a while. Such loss of control. He struggles to compose himself, the sudden cold of the heavy, damp morning seeping down to his bones.

Not since the early days has he been so overwhelmed... But back then it was explicable. He’d been forced to break his bad habit: his blackened, overused blood magicks had revolted against past perjuries and the rotten mistreatment he’d attempted. He’d been trying to help then too, though the wrong way, without ritual or thanks to magick. He’d wanted power but not sacrifice.

Now though... He frowns, thinking back across the rupture. A faun had died. He’d tasted the sweet smell of decay, felt the quivering of a young heart extinguished and he had not mourned as much as he had accepted it, such was the proper way of life... Why then...? Something unnatural lurked behind this, he’s sure of it.

Shivering again, Byron uncurls from his seated position in the middle of the forest. His bare chest and arms are pale, bloodless as his bone continued to ache with cold. Something is wrong. Something elemental has changed in the past few moments and it is disrupting everything. He senses it, an insidious void bleeding through the landscape. His magick swims to the top of his skin, wind snaking round his torso like a cat shrinking into its owner when it sees a new dog in the street. He tilts his head to the sky, seeking the answers. He doesn’t find them.

He doesn’t find anything until Walpurgisnacht.

*

Walpurgisnacht sat antithetical to Samhain in the calendar; the more commonly celebrated All Hallows had, of course, turned into a joyless occasion in recent years but few had the fortitude of mind to recall Walpurgis. It was too wild for the many headed multitude, one of Byron’s teachers had once mused, but it meant it was still safe for them.

As things went, the festival was wild: wild and violent and raucous. The magick of those past swirled and spiralled, returning to gambol and frolic as the barriers between living and dead thinned to the merest twitch in time and space. Some refrained from attendance. It was risky for those of weak will or young mind or great power to expose themselves to the dark extremes of magick as Walpurgis festivals necessitated.

Byron was all of those things: he was a recovering addict and magick abuser, he was barely considered an adult by older witches and he was strong now – strong enough to attract the swathes of Walpurgis magick without trying. Yet there he was in the night, in a field he’d never seen before and likely never see again. He stood, a man in love with his magick and it with him, a man that was servant to it, worshipper and master. He craned his neck back, exposing his throat to the heavens where the shimmer of magick webbed across inky skies like hoarfrost on onyx.

His own magick answered the Walpurgis call, stretched out with feline luxuriousness. All around him, the wisps of other witches did the same. All strangers to each other, they were solid shadows amongst fires that glowed silver. Leaping ghostly flames tangling in a dance as wild as the magick around them. Men and women hurtled through the field, across the plateau of verdant green. Laughter bubbled up in their throats, fuelled by the power in their blood and in the air. The magick wanted them to be happy. It wanted them to remember the joy.

Amongst them ran Speakers and Seers, white-haired Oracles, necromancers with hoods lowered but still carrying the smell of the dead, the witches whose sacrifices had been the greatest, the most profound. And then the dead came, drifting and dancing, more and more of them.

“I wish you jade,” one man made his offering, “I wish you the lost chords of sound and the memories of a summers eve. I wish you the brush of snow and quietude. May we -”

“I wish you bone.” Began a woman, “I wish you blood and the damp on a tree. I wish you the final note of a swansong. May we all -”

Byron cried out his own. “I wish you hyacinth and basalt, the edges of the stone. I wish you the fires of eternity and the wind beneath the stars. I wish you the light of an eclipse and the heat between veins. May we all be unbound.”

Everyone made their own offering – an offering of a wish in greeting and sacrifice. The magick tugged pulled it from them. It was the night when magick returned and renewed and the night when the wild broke back into the world. Fae might walk there with ease. Supernaturals were safe in the embrace of their mother.

And then one of the dead whispered to him. The blue music of their power trickling through his ear, entwining with his own... The mysterious dark of the day the faun died emerged from its chrysalis. Breaking with the knowledge, he bent and howled out his soul, captured the attention of the other worshipers. The wild magick cried with him.

*

It was the end of another day.

Another day with another congregation. Byron settled into the back, close to the door. He hadn’t thought to return here so soon. It was the same colourless hall, the same chairs that squeaked under the weight of discomfited parishioners, the same vapid faces milling through the motions of Christian deference. But everything was different too.

Today they had trialled a witch in the town over, a woman whose witchery stood out so vividly none could comprehend why she was not previously caught. Reviled and revered by her watchful neighbours, the woman had tried hard to refute her daemonic allegiances but it was hard for any who knew her to shun superstition with death peering through the window. The priest himself had attended her trial. Trumped up with callow joy, Byron knew his type. This was the younger son from a successful, suburban family, whose life so far had held few ambitions or adventures, for whom the chance to see, to condemn and destroy a witch, electrified him. He could make his stand, his mark.

The priest surveyed his flock with a vainglorious eye.

Byron knew that this country preacher remained a man of self-importance rather than real authority. He also knew, with the icy surety of a knife blade, that this man now had information relevant to Byron’s cause as well as his own.

The death of the trialled witch stained the outline of the priest, the blackest energy twirling at the edges of his cassock. Hers had not been a quick death. It had not been a merciful one. Her magick still broiled around them and only Byron could sense how it agitated the crowd of uncertain onlookers.

He knew the moment the man recognised him, noted the way his eyes narrowed. He smirked in response. What would this man say if he knew? Likely much the same as his home town would have done had they discovered him – the black sheep in their Christian fold. What could come his way but hate and blame in a village where the Moravians once preached and Baptists eyed Episcopalians with wry scepticism? This church wasn’t so different. That priest certainly wasn’t.

It was people like this man though who seemed to be disrupting the balance. The dead had named them – or as close as named them – and Byron was determined to find out why and how they were destroying the essence of a witch’s soul.

“I wish you zephyrs between clouds,” He prayed as the congregation bowed their heads, “I wish you stardust across your eyes... Let us all be unbound.”

Word Count: 1,775