Chapter Two #2
The Bureau Training Handbook version was mostly accurate, but some parts of the story were excluded; namely, it threw every shred of nuance to the wind.
And while Senán could confidently write a full dissertation on what that training text had gotten wrong, there were two details in particular which he felt were crucial to understanding the full picture:
The Bureau and its predecessors consistently used the term “human” to distinguish anyone who wasn’t a Witch until well into the 20th century, when a faction of Witches (himself included) lobbied to have the term (as it appeared in Bureau documents, training texts, and Agent vocabulary) for non-magical humans officially changed to “Quotidian.” Witches were humans, after all—just special ones.
Naturally, even decades later, there were Quotidians who still objected to the term and continued to refer to themselves as “humans,” as though Witches weren’t.
Point being, the Witchfinders didn’t think of Witches as humans, which meant Witches were generally treated inhumanely.
The BSCO training materials described a nefarious Witch who seemed to be taken from the pages of The Brothers Grimm, or perhaps a Walt Disney film.
In reality, the “evil” Witch from the story had whole-heartedly kept her promise to only use her magic for good—the problem was that Witches and Puritans had, as one might guess, very different definitions of what “good” was.
Senán knew this because he had been there. Ailbhe was his mother.
He was still learning his own magic when a young woman had come to their cottage, a woman ready to end her life for the pregnancy which had been forced upon her against her will.
“It is not a child which grows within me,” she had sobbed, “it is a demon. No child could be born from the evil of such a man, and I will not see it brought upon this world. Please, rid me of it, or I shall rid myself of this Earth.”
Ailbhe held the woman as she cried. She called the woman strong and told her she deserved happiness and freedom, then gave her a potion to drink to empty her womb.
But the Witchfinders took notice, charging Ailbhe with “stealing an infant.” The young woman fled the town and, two years later, wrote a letter to inform Ailbhe that she was happily married to a kind man upstate, and expressed her deepest gratitude for the potion which she believed had saved her life.
The claim of a “changeling” referred to a girl who begged Ailbhe for help to show her family the truth she had known for as long as she could remember.
“They believe that I am a boy, but I am not,” she’d pleaded. “Nor have I ever been. I have never felt anything to be so true as this, but they do not understand. Worse yet, each day that I grow older, my body looks more and more like that of a man’s. There must be a way you can help me.”
Ailbhe held the girl’s hands in hers and told her she was beautiful and brave, and that no one else could know her like she knew herself.
She gave the girl a series of spells which would help her body match her mind and heart, and Ailbhe and Senán watched from afar as the girl blossomed into a beautiful and happy young woman.
With time, her parents came to love and accept her for who she was.
Of course, the Witchfinders called it “dark magic” and demanded she be returned to her original form. Ailbhe refused to change the girl back unless she asked for it. She never did.
The plague of toads… well. That had been Senán’s fault. Replication spells were really very easy to overdo. Still, a slip-up by a novice Witch hardly ought to be an arrestable offense. And he’d de-replicated them eventually—it just took him a few days to find them all.
Ailbhe and Senán were eventually forced to abandon the village they had called home since they fled their native Ireland years before.
Senán’s youth was ridden by anxiety and loneliness, exiled from one place to the next because of who he was and what he was learning to become, and when his mother asked him to bear the weight of immortality in order to protect the generations of Witches after them, he accepted.
It was an isolating responsibility, but an important one—and after his mother’s death, he was the only Witch left who knew the first-hand truth of their story.
Once, centuries ago, Senán had hoped that the ethics and approach of The Bureau would improve, that the Witchfinders and Witches could form something closer to a partnership.
Over time, this hope was slowly chipped away, and just when he thought he had none left, an interaction would run his faith in the Bureau even further into the ground.
The Bureau could not be trusted, which meant their agents could not be trusted. End of story.
Being inconspicuous is not one of my strong suits.
I can’t stay in my feminine form indefinitely—that’s the body I use to navigate the hotel as an employee, and although it would allow me to hide from the Agent that way, the rest of the staff would quickly take notice and begin to question my constant presence.
I can’t simply lock myself in my room until the agent leaves the resort—my disappearance would only serve to make me appear even more suspicious to him, and I’ll eventually have to make my way into the woods surrounding the property to complete the work I’m doing there.
I’ll have to spend some time out in the open, and the more time I spend performing “clearly innocuous” tasks, the easier it will be to slip in a few incriminating ones undetected.
The problem is that, to a Witchfinder, there is no such thing as a Witch performing an innocuous task.
Having drinks at the bar? I must be on a stake-out, searching for the next victim for my maleficious deeds.
Strolling aimlessly about the grounds of the resort?
Clearly plotting the best place to cast a summoning circle.
Reading a romance novel? Surely there are dark spells written in code on its pages.
I can’t hide in plain sight, and I can’t hide in the safety of my suite. I have to find some kind of secret, third option.
Unfortunately, the only solution I can think of is avoiding the Bureau agent like a plague, and every day I fear it grows more and more obvious.
As the week passes by, I continue to notice, with increasing frequency, the Agent lurking around corners and watching me from places where I’m sure he thinks he’s hidden.
If nothing else, I have to feel grateful that the Agent seems to be even more unskilled at stealth than I am.
After two days of obtrusive and irritatingly childish hide-and-seek, it becomes clear that I cannot continue my work this way, which leaves me only one method of moving forward. Thankfully, it’s a method which I happen to be quite good at:
Confrontation.