Interlude 1751
Above us, the moon emerged from the clouds in full splendor. Our blood an offering. Perhaps the tree would grant us a final request.
I spoke into the void. “To the light and dark beneath the world, see us. Hear us.” Black spots crowded my vision, but my heart beat with the need to punish. The need to be born again into something new. Something powerful.
“Let our daughters and those sworn in blood as we are see us. Let them know us. Let them open themselves so we may work through them and know the truth of who we are. Of what we are. So they may know their power and correct all that has been wronged. So we may taste their treacherous father’s blood.
So we may reclaim what he has stolen. The power that is rightfully ours. ”
“Hear us,” Florence whispered, and I tightened my arms around her.
I felt as the words took root. A great shuddering I fed with my anger. My fear. I lifted my face to the moon so it might see the intent burning there. So I might see its light before I could not any longer. And I listened, joined as we were on the branch, as my and Florence’s hearts slowed.
There was no wind when Florence and I stopped breathing. Nothing that would have lifted our hair from our bloodied faces and tangled it together in a single braid. Nothing that would have joined us in such a way. At least not in the common, unmagical world of men.
But it was so. We bound ourselves to this place in blood and death, and because of that action, the tree saw and claimed us as a singular entity. No longer mother and daughter existing as if across a great chasm, but joined, close as skin, and hair, and bone.
In life, I would have had no name for what Florence and I became.
Ghosts. Spirits. Revenants. We were all and none of those things.
Bound to the tree for eternity, we bore the appearances we had in death because the magic only saw things for what they were.
It did not see the ugliness, nor did it know of the previous beauty.
It only gave us back the faces it last saw us wearing, and left us, forever waiting for a daughter of our bloodline or one marked by our shared magic, to see us.
Of course, they learned to fear what they saw. With our gaping, bloodied mouths and death-clouded eyes, we were monstrous. The witch women of the wood.
But before their fear, we were alone. For several years, people came and went from the clearing, but no one came to tap the tree as we once had. No one approached in reverence, aware of the power beneath their feet as they placed their hand against the bark.
Our story, our legacy, died with us.