Byron: The Dark Witch

Prompt the Sixth - In the Eye of the Beholder

Music drifted in the background. Old country music from his childhood in the mountains. Raleigh felt nostalgic.

He smiled to himself, glad he’d left his coat behind despite the thin, peculiar chill that had crept between the streets. It refreshed him. The strain left his shoulders. Lifting his face to a welcomed breeze, he turned to follow its path, relishing the wind plucking at his clothes and hair, telling him where to place his feet.

The world seemed just that little bit more right than it had the day before. It had been a little under a week since he’d awoken to the knowledge that a breathing magus resided in his house. A strange little fellow, this Edward McTaggart, represented a terrifying yet thrilling prospect. He was a slight man with high cheekbones, a thin lipless mouth, crooked nose, and sharp, peirching eyes. In fact, Byron was convinced he’d seen his likeness hanging in the Cleric’s gallery in London’s National Portrait Museum. Everything about him screamed pencil-pushing Word weaver and it unsettled Byron more than he liked to admit. Though there was nothing gloomy or chimerical in his counternance, his presence filled the stilt home with uncanny unfamiliarity. His words had done little to detract from that too.

Prophesies of hellish priests, of broiling blackness blowing like an icy wind upon the internal magicks of the world, McTaggart drew, with only a few daring strokes, a picture so full of the colours of a nightmare that neither Aoife or himself knew how to react.

“How could this happen?” Aoife asked, “It’s hardly subtle yet we’ve barely understood what this means.”

Byron had recounted his experience at Walpurgis, shooting uncertain glances at the cleric all the while.

“You didn’t say.” Aoife noted.

“It slipped my mind when I saw that priest in the Piedmont Chapel.”

“The dead spoke to you,” McTaggart’s voice then interrupted contained only curiousity but Byron had been wary of scorn and derision, “They knew of this. But how did they come to you?”

“The magick knew. It’s not precisely the dead that speak on Walpurgis, it is their magick – the wild magick that resides in us and continues with us throughout life and death. When the barriers are at their lowest on the solstice – those are All Hallows and May Day according to your terminology – magick is at its most... volatile I suppose. Unlike midwinter and midsummer, there’s an excess of one energy over the other – light in this case...” Byron swallowed, he wasn’t sure why he was saying so much, but he felt he had to explain, “Walpurgisnacht lets the dead return, their magick to come back to us. And it sets us all free.”

“Free?”

“Byron...”

“You whirl free.” He continued, ignoring their prompting and hesitancies, “You offer the night a wish and you whirl free on them. The magick takes your sacrifice if you are willing to take its hand and you can... whirl free.”

After the dead had spoken to him, he’d been unable to comprehend anything and the magick had extended itself into him, across his soul and purging a little more of its blackness. He’d risen, a small thing upon a dark wind that blustered around pinpricks of stars. He’d ridden through space, through the unending and wondrous voids and he’d felt, he’d felt so much – all the broken emotions, the addictions and the pain, he’d felt the shards of his soul where it had cracked. Soaring like a creature possessed of wings, he’d climbed, spiralled, danced away from the world. Then he’d ridden a wave of stardust back to his body, reclaimed it, been touched and caressed by the dead who worried and loved him. He had been free.

Whatever had happened that night would stay with him forever but never be part of him.

McTaggart’s face remained pensive and straight, avoiding any discussions of theology with a studious acquiescence that riled Byron to no end. Instead, he’d said five words that cut the young, red-headed witch with greater violence and skill than any bullet or blade, “You have a beautiful soul.”

Byron had risen and left without another word. He could explain magick but he couldn’t explain himself. Not when those words had once been spoken by different lips on a different day. Those words belonged to a mouth that once snatched his breath away. Byron’s breath caught in his chest, world filling with colour for a splintering second: a memory of blue eyes, cold and accentuated against pale skin and soot hair, staring straight into him and from which it was impossible to glance away. He heard the words again, in a voice from far away.

Would he ever forget that man? Would he ever see that beauty in anything else again? He felt it unlikely. Rambling days in Atlanta, dancing as a flame among moths but with only one whose gaze would pierce his heart, talking until dawn, holding and caressing one another beneath a liquid sky on a moon-blanched night... those memories never faded. The rest of the world paled in comparison to the moments whiled away with him... the one, true, wonderful thing he had ever touched or known. Whilst brief, whilst ending in brutality, the days had held a loveliness, a beauty only magick now paralleled. For life was mere automaton in contrast. It seemed utterly without vision, without colour, without the ray of life to light it. If not for magick... if not for the exquisite moment where it became the last shred of vibrancy or beauty in the world, he would surely have spent his life in monochrome. It alone retrieved him from the quietude of those post-Atlanta days and nights when his whole self had been little more than shadow.

Byron brought himself out of his reverie. It felt good to be away from the house and McTaggart. To be walking through Raleigh on this chill day, thoughts free to ponder on other things, even though they weren’t. Holding all the information that he did, it felt tricky to leave it behind without leaping into the embrace of magick itself, into meditation and ritual. Instead, he went about his biweekly shopping, taking every small pleasure he could, skipping across every second idea that flickered across his mind when he caught himself reflecting once more upon things on which he’d rather gain perspective.

The tugging jitter of his heart thrummed through him refused to abate even as he settled on a motive, nor did the breath of wind at his back. Streets passed. Tourists and locals blending into each other as he entered downtown. It might be contrived or banal, but it was life that he missed, the life all around him, that he alienated himself from time after time for the sake of redemption. There was a beauty to all of this, all of the prosaic day-to-day activity. He smiled to himself as he walked. Maybe it was time to indulge just a little.

But the restlessness in his soul had only eased, not vanished. And as he looked across the world, rejoicing in the way every face seemed to have lost a hint of the waxy horror he’d witnessed in the churches not so long ago, he wished he could be part of it, fully and entirely part of it.

Eventually, he returned to the house.

He let himself into his current home, drinking in the sight of the dark stairs conveying his complete isolation. Taking them two at a time, he scampered into the house, wondering where his guests were, Aoife having not left since the magus arrived and the magus having lingered longer than perhaps intended. Padding along the landing, he headed his room.

He’d made this place safe, or so he’d thought. Safe from intrusive magicks, safe from the Otherkin and the riddles of the dark - he thought he’d made it safe as any home not grounded with place magick could be. But still the magus discovered him...

Entering his room, he relaxed again. Round and lit to feel like soft flickering candles, his room was the only one that felt like home. The kitchenette and living room were light and bright, each room open to the next, which created a sense of lustrous space. But whilst it was perfect, it was... empty... Byron dropped his bag to the floor, frowned, moved to look out over the darkening sky and the lights pricking across the distance, ending with an orange horizon all over the city. Raleigh was close to his safe house and whilst not vast, it remained a city large enough that it was easy to sink into as just another face, another tourist, another stranger. Whenever his family had ventured from their mountain home, they stopped by there, jumping at the chance to spend time in a town bigger than a shoebox. They had been close, brought closer by their shared liberalism – perhaps not as liberal as his uncle, the affable Simon Loughtun-Seelie who’d acted as a support for Byron when his sexuality became too awkward to discuss with his parents – but still, none of them had been fond of the Church. That was why the fae had entrusted them with their iron-blooded faeling, the baby Aoife who’d been born of a brutal, bestial union. He sighed, frustrated with the turn of his mind to melancholy thoughts. They so often did these days.

Whatever blackness brewed over Carolina, it laid its treacherous toils within them all, holding them fast and drawing them along a path of peril and destruction. It stirred their souls, tilted the earth.

“Byron? Where – Ah there you are.” Aoife was in the door way, smiling with a small sign of relief passing across her features, “Just thought I’d let you know that I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“You need to get back to your work, as well I should get back to mine.” He agreed, “Thank you for all your help with the magus.”

“Of course.” Her eyes were pensive, “It worries me, you know, how much he upsets you.”

“He keeps reminding me of things long past. Everything does. But I think that’s in part due to the magick and the unbalance.”

She paused, perhaps thinking there was more to say. Realising he had finished, she shook her head, “Atlanta? Even now?”

“Even now. Probably always.”

“Biro...”

“Don’t. It can’t be changed.”

“But I wish you could see what we see.” She argued despite his plea, “Even if it came from Mc-Pompous downstairs, your soul isn’t black like it was. These are uncertain times –”

“And the beauty of uncertainty is that it motivates us to seek certainty. Uncertainty becomes truly beautiful when connected with the certainty that there is a better life beyond the life that is known. I know the saying, Aoife. I was the one who read it to you when we were kids.”

“But I’m the one who apparently lived to understand it. You deserve to live and enjoy life as much as the next person. You fight for freedom and for the balance of the world but you surrender to the fear of actually living your life. You’ll never win that way.”

“But it remains my life, not yours, sister.”

“But it is a half life. An ugly life.”

“And beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” His last words were almost a sneer, he was trembling and angry and he wanted to be left alone.

Aoife stared at him, long and hard, clearly wishing he would listen, clearly knowing he would not. She knew about the man who gave him the scars on his face and heart, she knew the blackness of his addiction – how close he had come...

“I’m leaving tomorrow.” She finally repeated, frowned. “But I might not.”

He watched her go, sinking onto his bed as she left.

That night he dwelled on Atlanta.

Word Count: 1,981