Chapter 3 #3
“Yes, speaking of that,” Celeste said, “As I’m sure everyone in this room is aware, we have been to the Geatgri—I mean, the Source,” she corrected herself with the air of someone who was trying to respectfully acclimate to another culture.
“And I am pleased to confirm that it is indeed fully restored to its natural state. Catriona gave it a full diagnostic, if you will, and we could detect no dysfunction, which confirms what Jess reported to us.”
“For now,” Catriona said, speaking for the first time. “It sounds like you’ve got bigger problems here than a rogue ghost wreaking havoc, isn’t that right?”
She didn’t look up from her phone as she spoke, but the room went tensely silent at her words.
“Ah, yes. It seems to me that our most immediate concern is the entity you refer to as the Darkness,” Celeste said.
“We have no entity in our own history by that name. It’s vital that we assess its threat to the Geatgrima to determine what actions we need to take to protect it. What can you tell us about it?”
My heart began to race, and beside me, I felt my mom go very still. This was exactly what we’d been discussing before we left the house, wondering what kind of information the Conclave might have about the Darkness. Would Ostara reveal anything that we didn’t already know?
It was clear that the Conclave had expected this question, and was prepared for it. They all turned to look at Ostara, who cleared her throat.
“The Darkness predates our presence here on these shores,” Ostara said, the words sounding well-rehearsed.
“When our ancestors arrived on this stretch of shoreline, it was completely empty. We came to believe that the Darkness had long ago driven away any native people or subsequent colonialist populations who attempted to settle here. Even wildlife was scarce at first. The Vespers were the first coven to arrive, and they were shortly joined by my own coven, the Claires. From nearly the moment we set foot here, there was a duality—forces that seemed both to draw us and repel us from this place. We stayed intentionally to understand both sides of that duality. What was it here that strengthened our powers, and what was it that seemed to work against us? The answer to the first was, of course, the Source. The answer to the second became known as the Darkness.”
I felt like a kid sitting around a campfire, enthralled with a spooky story while my s’more dripped down my hand, forgotten.
“We persevered in this place,” Ostara went on, “because the benefits to our magic outweighed, in our estimation, the dangers of some other malevolent entity wanting the same power. We believed in our abilities to protect ourselves. Our abilities were up to the task. We did not take into account the possibility that our principles might not be.”
The air in the room was so thick with tension that I felt like I might suffocate. Our visitors appeared riveted. Even Catriona, who had until this moment barely glanced up from the phone in her hand, was staring at Ostara with avid interest now, phone forgotten in her limp fingers.
“The Darkness seduced one of our own. Somehow—we will never know the methods or the means—it ensnared her and convinced her to use her magic to aid in its quest for the power of the Source. We are not proud of it, but we own it as a part of our history, a chapter we must learn and grow from.”
My heart was beating so forcefully against my chest that I thought it might burst right through my sweater, because I realized that Ostara’s words were no longer true—at least, not if she was talking about everyone in the room.
It was true that the others had no concept of how the Darkness had tempted Sarah Claire into its thrall.
But I had stood inside the Circle with her.
I had asked the question and gotten a very vivid answer.
I knew how the Darkness had lured her, and I hadn’t shared a detail of it with the Conclave—it hadn’t even occurred to me to.
Sarah’s secret had died with her, but her ghost had chosen to divulge it, and now here I was, the only living person with knowledge of a memory that wasn’t even mine.
Well, actually, that wasn’t true. Jess had been in that Circle as well and, as far as I knew, had witnessed everything that I had witnessed.
Whether she had shared any of that with the Durupinen now in the room with me, I had no idea.
I tried to study Celeste’s expression, to understand how she was reacting to what she was hearing, but I could glean nothing from her serene countenance.
If she knew something, she was very good at hiding that fact.
“We have, over the centuries, struggled to understand the nature of the Darkness,” Ostara went on, and I yanked myself up out of my spiraling thoughts to listen to her.
“We know it is not human, but apart from that, its nature confounds us. It is not a spirit, it is not a human. It is not a demon. It is some other, unknown being. It has taken a variety of forms over the years, some of them almost human, others more… nebulous. It has magical ability, but not the ability required to access the Source, apparently, though it is singularly focused on doing so. We believe this is why the Darkness has always sought a witch to assist it in its goal.”
“And not just any witch,” Xiomara added. “The witch the Darkness seeks has a specific set of abilities, a rare combination. The Darkness requires a pentamaleficus, a witch of the five. This means that the witch he seeks has an affinity for all five elements. Why, we do not know.”
“So this Sarah Claire, she was a pentamaleficus?” Celeste asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” Ostara confirmed, and I could hear the pride and shame warring in her tone. It was, after all, a point of pride for a coven to produce such a witch, but to have that very witch then betray the coven…
The thought trailed away as I realized everyone in the room was now staring avidly at me.