36. The Thing About Auras #2
“There’s no such thing as accidents. Everything happens for a reason.
Choices. Decisions. They map the way for us all.
” This sage bit of wisdom is offered by one of the smaller harpies.
But no less less. She is still terrifying and grotesque and happens to possess the longest claws of them all, which she flexes and curls in the air as though eager to use them.
Hopefully not on me. “Don’t you think so? ”
I don’t feel much in the mood for philosophizing with these terrifying creatures . . . especially this one that looks so eager to slice away.
Since they have not yet turned their sharp teeth and claws on me, I hope they mean me no ill will. They might not get along with dragons, but I am not one of those. I let this embolden me to ask the question. “Could you help me get out of here?”
“Why can’t you help yourself? You’re hardly helpless. You should have no problem getting yourself out of this hole.”
Are they being deliberately cruel? Or do they merely think themselves funny? I assess them warily. “I’ve tried. Unlike you, I don’t have wings.”
“You’ve tried, have you?” Again, they swap peculiar glances with each other.
“Not very hard,” one of them mutters.
“You are a helpless sort of witch,” the little one with the enormous claws says with a snort of disgust. “Not very impressive at all.”
They all nod in agreement, chuckling. “You are right on that score, Drifa!”
I jerk.
They think me a . . . witch? Is that why they haven’t killed me? Do they have an affinity for witches? I recall someone, Merik or Viggo, saying that harpies were once witches.
“Wh-why . . . do you call me that?” I ask warily, not wanting to explain I’m not a witch in case it is the one thing keeping me alive.
“Because you are one,” Drifa says, pointing, motioning to the air around me. “Your aura is clear to see.”
My aura.
“No, you misunderstand.” I swallow, uncertain if revealing this truth to them is the right decision, but at this point my demise feels imminent.
If not in this moment, then soon, eventually, ultimately.
The vulnerable do not thrive in the Crags.
I certainly won’t make it to the Borg. Tage always knew that. He told me that, but I ignored him.
“A witch cursed me. Years ago. The light around me . . . the aura you see,” I clarify, repeating the word as though it’s something I’m now accustomed to saying, to knowing. “It’s because a witch cast a spell over me. I’m trapped under a spell.”
Again, they swap looks.
And then they laugh.
They look so human as they do this. They hold their sides, chortling as though truly enjoying themselves. “Oh, is that so?” one asks, wiping the tears from her eyes.
I nod roughly, anger rising up in me. Instead of containing it as I should, I snap, “That is so, and I don’t find it funny in the least. For years, I’ve lived in a prison, enduring this .
. . this”—I search for the words to encapsulate all that I’ve lost and arrive only at—“spell! Simply because some witch decided to amuse herself by sentencing me to a horrible existence.”
“Yes! You! You!” One of them points at me in a fit of glee. “That witch is you! You did that to yourself, dearest cousin.” I flinch at the endearment that only seems to confirm the familial connection between witches and harpies.
Another shakes her head. “Daft girl.”
Fury bubbles up in me, but beneath the simmer a small niggle of misgiving twitches, a sprout beginning to break through the cold winter ground.
The one called Drifa sidles closer, her feet skimming the ground as her wings carry her forward. “We know every magical creature in and out of these mountains. It comes with being born of magic ourselves.”
“N-no,” I insist. “I’ve seen dragons. Talked to them. They didn’t know, and they’re magical, too. They didn’t tell me this . . . they confirmed that it is a witch who cursed me—”
“Dragons,” she sneers. “What do they know? These new ones know nothing. They’re still learning what it is they are. They’re not like the Old Ones that knew a thing about a thing about a thing. These strut about ignorant of their own magic, how can you expect them to know anything about yours?”
I shake my head, a sinking sensation starting in my gut. “It cannot be.” I would know.
I would know.
“You should be thankful they didn’t recognize you to be a witch.” They all nod in agreement. “They have an unhealthy hatred for your kind. You wouldn’t be here now. They would have torn you apart.”
“I just—no.” I continue shaking my head, and then say harder, “No.”
“Fine. Be foolish. Go about your life uninformed and oblivious. Stay under a spell of your own making.” Drifa shrugs. “It is nothing to us.”
“If . . .” I struggle to get the words out, unwilling to even admit that a kernel of possibility exists in what they are saying. “You can’t be right . . . I wouldn’t even know how to do such a thing to myself.”
The largest of the harpies steps closer, her thick, snarled hair caught up in a band, matted ropes jutting out in every direction from the top of her head.
Her bright black gaze, void of whites, fixes on me, almost accusing.
“You merely had to wish it . . . give it voice and put it out there into the universe, and your magic will answer the call.” She sticks her face close to mine, and the smell of her breath is enough to make me gag.
My attention drops to those stained fangs, bits of gore trapped between the crowded teeth.
“Ah. Your eyes. You’ve the look of a moon witch. ”
“A . . . what?”
“A moon witch. There are all kinds of witches, identifiable by hair color or other features. Moon witches always have one eye like the moon. A frosty blue—more frost than blue.”
Drifa steps closer to peer at me, looking at my mismatched eyes, always a point of embarrassment for me—that thing that made others do a double take. The only thing I did not miss these last years.
“My eyes?” The same mismatched eyes, according to my father, my grandmother possessed.
The mother he claimed to have lost long before I was born when he was very young.
Speculation had been that something happened to her.
Some mishap. Wild animals. Bandits. Something.
One day she’d gone into the woods and never returned.
Maybe nothing happened to her at all.
Maybe she had simply left.
Witches don’t age as humans do. Maybe she had to leave because of that. Because she wasn’t aging as every other human in the village, and she feared being caught and put to the pyre.
My thoughts race feverishly. If this is true, then I . . . I’m to blame for everything.
I shake my head, a choking lump rising in my throat. “I don’t understand,” I whisper.
“It means your power thrives when the moon is visible. You are lucky. That’s a fair amount of the time. A desert witch can only wield magic in a desert. Who wants to live in a desert?”
“What happens when the moon is absent?” I query. Like in the daytime and those few times a month when there’s not a moon in the night sky.
“If the moon is absent, then so is your magic. The fuller the moon, the brighter your magic. On a full moon . . . a supermoon, you’re very powerful, indeed.”
Your magic.
I wonder if the night I fled into the woods and set loose those stupid words had been the night of a supermoon.
My limbs give out. I dissolve to a boneless puddle as everything sinks and settles into every crack and fissure of me.
I can’t move. I don’t want to. I just want to disappear, expire into nothingness.
Their songlike voices come to me from far away, through the sudden buzzing in my head. “Ah. I think she sees it now.”
I do see it.
I think back, seeing that night when I fled into the woods so clearly, from my family, from my life, the words I spit out beneath the hungry watchful eye of the moon.
I wish I could just disappear.
After I uttered those petulant, selfish words, the air had stilled, swelling with a buzzing energy. My magic. Happy and fed, it sizzled along my every nerve.
I see it all so clearly now. What I couldn’t see then.
I had said those words. Me. No one else. No other magical creature watching and waiting to ruin me.
I ruined me.
It all falls neatly, horribly into place.
The truth.
The harpies are right. I’m a witch.
I did this to me. To myself.
The witch I’ve been hunting . . . is me.