Chapter 22 Burn the Witch #2
But Laurel…The way that the spell was dangling her on strings with its pretty temptations.
It had calculated so cleverly how to sweep her up, with all of her girlish joy, and keep her clenched firmly in its fist. She had the literal bruises to prove how tight its grip was, and her speech…
it had seemed different at the festival, worryingly altered.
Robin, also, who was the strongest man she’d ever known in so many ways.
The magic had coiled around him already, with barely even a whisper of effort.
It had taken only a matter of days to ensnare him, clouding his normally razor-sharp judgement.
And Casimir. Perhaps he had managed to retain an inch or two of composure against the temptations of the enchantment, but he too was hurt.
The spell had drawn real blood from him, her oldest friend.
And…her mind gave a sneer of cruelty. He had shown at the gazebo, with his spell-clouded, “charming” confessions, that the enchantment was only taking tighter hold.
It would be just a matter of time until all three of them were lost entirely to the magic, not to mention the rest of her cherished hometown’s residents.
That kind of lovely joy was not hers to claim. She couldn’t lose them. She couldn’t lose anybody else.
Sage let out a furious, bitter roar and tossed the contents of the heavy, loaded box straight onto the dead embers.
A plume of thick smoky dust billowed out from underneath and swallowed all of her precious work in a filthy coating of ash.
Her arm stretched out in front of her, and she wavered only for the briefest of moments.
It was as though her magic acted separately to her mind, emboldened by her recent recklessness.
The spell flew from her finger, and a perfect burst of flame erupted beneath the books.
The papers caught fire quickly and mercilessly.
Sage allowed herself only a moment to watch them burn, to see how the flames licked and devoured. She felt completely numb. The tears that pooled in her eyes were simply from the sting of the smoke.
“Good riddance.” Her voice sounded shaky, but Sage shook her curls back vehemently.
She turned her back on the flames and marched towards the museum again with renewed conviction. It was high time her naivety was quelled for good; it was time to grow up. This would only take a few more trips.
Not even half an hour had passed before Sage was watching her entire life’s work turn to acrid smoke and ash. As always, she had made light work of a seemingly impossible task.
Although a more humane hour had come, the sun was struggling to break through to declare the dawn, and thick clouds swirled like the darkest of shadows.
The late autumn light that had greeted them each morning of the past week with welcoming warmth and a reassuring goodness felt like a distant, disconnected memory.
Her heart had cracked wide open several boxes ago. The sight of worn leather spines and well-read pages devoured by the flames was a devastating one. But, as she kept reminding herself over and over as her chest rose and fell in sobs, it all had to go. Magic had to go, in all its forms.
One part of her plan remained, and the daybreak was a blinding reminder that she needed to hurry.
Horse hooves and clattering cartwheels were already audible somewhere in the distance.
Port Sylvan was awakening. Anyone could soon find her, and she wasn’t sure her resolve would hold up to any kind of persuasion.
Surrounded only by empty cardboard boxes and their discarded lids, Sage dropped to her knees and turned to the satchel at her feet.
She flipped open the leather flap and pulled out the contents with shaking hands.
Lilara’s book was the final item that remained from her life as a scholar of magic.
But before she could bring herself to burn it, before she could close this cursed chapter of strangeness and threat forever, she had one last, desperate requirement from the witch she had admired her whole life.
Sage pressed the star charm on her bracelet against the lock, and the clasp gave a satisfying pop as it yielded.
She opened the book on the ground, forcing the heavy pages apart to reach the centre page.
Frosty dew drops from the grass clung to the cover and Sage placed her incantation finger into the inner spine.
She wasn’t entirely sure how this all worked.
It was something that she had never managed to find the specifics of, but she had long supposed that instinct and affinity were a valid sort of magic in themselves.
It was time.
She had to dig deep for it, really drag it up from the depths of her soul. But, as always, Sage managed to find the iron control that she clamped around her heart whenever she felt it was required of her. She forbade herself from turning back on her word.
“Please.” The sorry waver in her voice wouldn’t do.
“I call on the grimoire of Lilara Mournfell, once the witch of Port Sylvan,” she said more firmly, making sure to keep her breathing steady and her nod certain, “and all of the magic that she left behind in her wake. I call on her and her witchery to help me heed her warnings, as I should have done long before this moment. Please, take mine too. Take my magic.”
The pages flittered either side of her finger in the breeze, but her words had no effect.
With renewed determination, a need to prove that she could do it, Sage grimly set her jaw. “I don’t want it anymore. I never wanted it.”
She struggled to keep an even, dignified tone.
In all her years of research around magical banishment, she had only ever found one truly plausible lead.
A reference to the darkest of spells that dragged up a witch’s soul to act accordingly when she was in the depths of despair.
Sage had kept it up her sleeve for a long while now, this particular incantation, never even sharing it with Casimir.
She was a little scared of it herself, truth be told.
“Tenebrae Obscurum,” Sage said quietly, her voice carried away on the wind.
She had discovered its existence a couple of years ago via a note scribbled in the margin of a text that she had borrowed from the British Library, a study on the effects of magic on memory.
She had tried to match the handwriting to the lender on the library card, in hopes of contacting them for an interview, but found only the initials B. B. associated to the reader.
Through further research, she had since found that all signs pointed towards it being a legitimate spell, but a kind of draining, difficult magic that wasn’t to be tampered with lightly.
It was a spell that would assist in the banishment of not only her magic, but all recollection that she had ever even been that way inclined.
All memory of this part of herself would be obliterated instantly.
She had never been brave enough to attempt it, stowing it away under lock and key to come back to another day once she understood it more. Now she scolded herself for not being brave enough to try it before. It could have saved all this trouble.
Lilara’s words had cemented the decision. There really was nothing to lose anymore.
“Tenebrae Obscurum,” Sage repeated, furious at herself when she heard her own voice waver yet again.
She balled up her fists, scrunched up her face.
“Don’t you hear me? I don’t want this. I don’t deserve any of it.
This magic is not for me!” The words sounded choked, but she was shouting now, unwavering and certain.
“I’m not good enough. I’m not special enough.
It can’t be mine. Tenebrae Obscurum! Tenebrae Obscurum! ”
She felt something. A shift. A change in the direction of the wind.
A drastic, definite plummet, like the stomach drop on a roller coaster that, if it didn’t sound so frivolous, Sage would have said was an alteration in the make-up of her very soul.
It was as though a cloak of heavy, leaden despair had been placed upon her shoulders, as though she’d never be able to stand under the sheer weight of it.
Then, just when she thought her heart might give out at the stark emptiness it felt, she saw the magic leave her.
It poured out of her. A burgundy stream that could have been blood if it weren’t for the glitter of undeniable, unknowable witchery that laced it.
It poured out from the tip of her finger and leaked straight into the central binding of Lilara’s book.
Greedily, the pages drank the magic from Sage’s system and took it all for itself, storing the sacred supply between the pages.
Just the same as it had done for Lilara all those years ago, when she too had decided that no good could come from a witch’s cursed heart.
Sage had finally done it. She had finally followed in Lilara’s footsteps. She had successfully banished magic from her life and soul.
She watched in the strangest mix of heartbreak, horror and twisted happiness as her own magic left her, and with a gust of chilling, unkind wind that blew through the entirety of Port Sylvan, the cover of the grimoire slammed shut with the finality of a thud and a lock click.
With the final ounce of strength that remained in her body, Sage picked up the treasured artefact that had, for reasons she understood now, found its way to her so strangely. It was always meant to be this way.
She rose to her feet and, with one last stumble of energy towards the roaring bonfire, tossed Lilara Mournfell’s book, full of magic old and new, into the roaring flames.
As could always be relied upon, Sage had done all that was required of her, and she had done a good and thorough job of it.