Chapter Thirty-Nine
Sabine
Grove witches are not born. They are made.
Sabine of the Lavender Isles was one of the first. Back when she lived in the old realms where Fae were not shackled by new gods.
A world of floating trees. Where roses spun their petals like wings to move from place to place.
Waterfalls that ran upside down and the fauna used their magic to blink from place to place.
Sabine used to think that world was perfect.
How could she ever want to be anywhere else?
Tale as old as time, she happened upon one of the many faerie circles that grew in abundance.
A realm made of pure magic, portals to places where magic did not touch were to be expected.
They were curious little things, the humans.
So full of wonder and amazement. Even her tiniest little parlor tricks entertained them.
And they tasted so good when they were delighted.
They would beg her come into their homes, show them magic, break bread with them…
and when they fell asleep, their defenses down, she would sop up their blood with warm bread from their hearth.
Sabine wasn’t like her mother, she didn’t drag back several humans, kicking and screaming to water her gardens or swing by their toes. She didn’t enjoy their suffering.
They were so tasty, though. So, Sabine came to the human realm often. Slipping through at night and going as far as the trees would cover, only to run into a human at first light. She liked spending time with them, hearing their tales, listening to their songs.
Always, there was the Hunter. A child, really, in the eyes of an old one.
29 years was not old for fae, that barely got one out of the crib in her realm.
However, the Hunter, for humans, was an adult.
He was wise and suspicious, having come across Sabine a few times.
He’d catch her luring small children into flower groves and he’d shoo them off.
Big, bearded, broad shouldered, he was the oxen of humans.
Barrel chested and able to split a tree with a single blow from his axe.
Despite every attempt, when the Hunter saw her, he’d refuse her in every way.
Until he’d convinced everyone in the woods through that portal to ignore Sabine.
It shouldn’t have upset her, as there were so many portals to try.
So many other places to find food and entertainment.
Her mother would have scoffed at her. But Sabine stalked the Hunter.
Found him and his home. Demanded he come out and face her.
She recalled pounding her fist against his door in her rose petal dress and wings fluttering behind her.
The winds stirred and rain spat over top as her fury grew.
He ripped open that door to yell at her, telling her to leave as he always did.
But, something loomed behind her. Sabine never feared a thing in those woods.
Bears avoided her out of respect for her power, wolves trembled at her feet, and the very trees moved when she commanded it. What was there to fear in those woods?
The Hunter gave her little warning when he pushed past her and lunged at a shadow behind her.
Sabine, in all her foolish curiosity and desire, didn’t realize she’d attracted the attention of a nearby cleric.
Her mother warned her that the gods outside their realm were unkind.
They did not view fae as gods, nor did their followers.
In fact, she distinctly remembered the word ‘heretic’ being lobbed at her before the cleric was struck down by an axe.
Apparently, not all gods cherish life over glory after all.
The Hunter did not take kindly to the followers of a vengeful, righteous god.
Something he told her over bread in his cabin.
After the pair of them decimated a pack of the cleric’s, he made her swear a truce for the night.
If it weren’t for the silver axe he waggled in her face, she’d sneer at him.
Swear? No fae swears an oath for anything.
To swear an oath is to be rooted in place.
To make deals is to be bound by them. And she never thought herself that much of a fool.
Only, she followed him into that cabin, practically stuffed from feasting on clerics.
Fine, I won’t eat you…tonight she told herself.
And they shared stories. Him of the clerics like the ones who attacked.
They were followers who saw nothing wrong with burning a village at the whims of a being that did not have to bury the dead. The Hunter hated them for that.
Apparently, Sabine, he understood unlike the clerics.
She was curious and she was hungry, like a wolf finding bleeding prey, she hunted.
He understood hunting for food. It was hunting for sport that made no sense.
Because it made them feel alive, that he couldn’t understand.
While she scoffed originally at his insinuation that she was understandable by the likes of him… she grew to enjoy his company.
For night after night, she returned to his cabin.
They’d call a truce and he’d tell her about the humans outside the woods.
She’d tell him all about her realm. She told him of her mother, of the magic, of places she’d visited.
Night after night, she’d sit on his windowsill, watching him sleep.
At first he wore a silver necklace, a warning for her to keep back.
Silver was one of the few metals that didn’t grow in her realm.
Its touch was enough to melt the flesh off her bones.
Granted, a hungry dog will eat through the pain, and she could heal herself.
Or she could simply eat him from a different end.
But the more time she spent with the Hunter, the less she wanted to eat him.
The less her stomach ached for humans, and the more his stews filled her up.
Or maybe it was him. His smile and laugh, the way he taught her how to dance around a campfire on a starry night. Then there was the way he kissed her.
A thing she’d never expected of him, but her Hunter was always so full of surprises.
From his ability to calm her unbridled rage to egg on her curiosities.
Exploring every inch of him in that cabin during a cold winter’s night was a fond memory.
Feeling his warm skin and hearing his heartbeat, she replayed that over and over.
Sabine was in love with her Hunter. And he loved her.
They loved and kissed and made love and hunted for years together.
Because for humans that were well tended to, 29 is spry.
Then he was 39, and his beard was starting to grow silver streaks in it.
Her heart could take him getting old. Her heart could take him living with her till his end.
That was something her heart knew how to handle.
Sabine swore to herself, that when her Hunter passed on, she’d take his bones to bury in her garden back in her realm.
That way he could always live there with her, his memory preserved.
What her heart was not capable of handling was returning from her realm with supplies he asked her to gather…
and finding her Hunter beheaded at the front of their cabin.
She couldn’t withstand the feel of silver wrapping around her as the brethren of the clerics they slayed together returned for vengeance.
Her little heart shattered into tiny, jagged pieces as they dragged her through the woods.
Fingers buried in the soil, howling like a wounded beast as the last thing she saw was his eyes, wide and full of terror.
Her Hunter who feared nothing, not even her.
There was an old rule.
Those who do not heed the danger of human realms are doomed to die in them.
Sabine had played in the human realm too long, lost too much of herself to the mortals.
Forgotten herself. But in that moment, feeling his blood saturating the soil, she remembered.
Everything she was. Everything she could be.
She ripped open her palms on the silver they chained her with and bled into the very woods around her.
“This is my home!” she proclaimed.
Because a grove witch is made. Not born.
They are an Old Fae who has bled for a grove.
They are tied to it. They live and die by that grove.
And as she fed the trees the clerics’ bodies for nourishment, she made that endless forest her home.
The portals to her old realm were closed off.
Snapped shut and locked from the other side, specifically to her.
As she had claimed her home. She’d sworn an oath to the trees in that forest. Her roots were planted.
Sabine ate the bones of her enemies and fed her new home with her magic.
Groves are a symbiotic relationship. Her magic fed the trees, staved off the harsh winter snow, and helped new sprouts break through the tough earth. The trees sustained her, keep her company in her solitude.
For years, she mourned his life. Then for years, she haunted those trees.
Lurking within the shadow of them as patches of humans appeared, then died off.
Kingdoms rose nearby and collapsed. A manor was put up in the woods, but those that lived in it's shadow did not feel their lord’s protection.
Not with the grove witch that hunted in that forest. She watched it all with impassiveness.
Complete and utter disdain for the living but not enough desire to wipe them from her trees.
If there wasn’t prey to keep her busy, then she’d have nothing but the hole in her chest to play with.
Until the dragon came and nearly burned her alive.
It scorched her precious grove down the middle. Like it struck her with silver again, she was nearly cleaved in half. Her heart practically stopped.
Sabine buried herself in her tree, the one right outside his forgotten cabin, for a long time, unable to breathe without tasting smoke.
She thought being a tree for once would solve her ache.
Because if she wasn’t alive, but she wasn’t dead, she didn’t have to watch her grove finally die.
She slumbered. She wept. Then she slumbered some more.
Some fool must have heard her weeping and mistaken her for a squonk or something…for she awoke one day. Ripped out of her tree into the front yard of a home inside a city. A marvelous, glittering city made of metal and concrete and magic. It felt like being back in the old realm again.
It felt like being Sabine, from before her Hunter, from before the heartbreak and endless eternity. No longer hollow, she was back.
And Sabine was very…very…very…hungry.