“It is as if they are hiding something right?” I recall snippets of times recently when I had walked into a room and my mother had hurriedly shoved something into a basket, or when a neighbor had been quieted once my presence was noted. I had not even thought of such things.

“Yes!” She thinks for a moment, then adds, “We should ask the others if they have noticed anything!” She notices me shrinking and how my now faded smile is completely slipping off. “Evika, come on! Every time it looks like you are having such a nice time with them, and I know you are not that good an actor.” she finishes with a laugh, “Come on, lets go now, I know where they are!

“What about the mint?” I yelp.

“Already picked it! I can drop it off on the way.” She snatches my wrist and runs lightly towards her house, quickly runs in, places the mint leaves in a jar, sprints out, and leads me toward the market. After some looking past stalls, we find them, and Ebony carries us over to a patch of trees near the river. She summarizes our conversation as everyone, to our surprise, nods in agreement.

“I… my neighbor, Laur Noks, has been sneaking out at night. Sometimes I will think I hear a tree rustling, but them I hear his door slam shut. It’s weird, to say the least.” Iren wrings her fingers as she speaks, unsure.

“Same here! Sometimes I will be out picking stuff and see random roots having been taken but never cleaned back up, they just left a hole in the ground” Masy starts to snicker and Wey says, “and it is clearly not an animal, Masy, I know the difference”

“Yea, no, I believe you. I think I’ve seen them too.” She sobers. “And I think I have seen… never mind! Mabry we should ask some others too…” she glances nervously around our circle.

Everyone nods with a shrug, and we make our way back to the market, moving through the crowd, stopping people close to our age, I believe most of them to be between the ages of 15-18, and asking if they, too, have noted anything unusual of the landscape or friends and family. After a time of me being dragged along with them, we are approached by a boy in varying shades of brown village attire, whom I realize I have seen around for as long as we had been in the market. Something about that is off-putting… it is not the smallest market.

“What is it that you are asking everyone?” He says nosily. We look at each other, and I see that they do not share the unnaturally thick, somewhat familiar inky feeling I am receiving from him, for they smile and say unto him, “We are asking if anyone has seen anything unusual lately. Have you?”

“What kind of unusual?” he responds. Some cadence in his voice unnerves me; it is not suspicious, not accusing, not even scared. I frown, fidgeting ever the more, unsure of when eve I had started, maybe I had been doing it the whole time, which is why some of the people whom we approached look at me specifically. I look for Ebony to share my uneasiness, but she seems to me content, exited even.

“You know, grass that seems unhealthy, odd behaviors of people, random holes…” I continue to watch Ebony as Masy explains, begging her silently to notice it, and, finally, she squints. The slightest of signs, one could almost not catch it, but I noticed. And I noticed when her expression subtly went from exited, to the same unnerved feeling that is overtaking me. I look back to the boy; she had seen something in his face change, when we specified our worries. I hadn’t noticed, but somehow she had, and it looked like Iren and Wey were catching on as well.

“I don’t know anything.” He boy says in his odd cadence, and it only continues to grow more thick and inky to me. Finally I see Masy flinch, having caught her own warning sign as everyone else had, and she says; “Well, see ya then, thanks for the time!”

With a wave, we all back away and continue down the strip with less vigor than before, the uneasiness never fully leaving us. We had gathered a few more witnesses, but otherwise everything was normal among the majority of the people whom we interviewed.

We say half-hearted goodbyes and make our ways home. As I walk the path between the honeycomb structures toward my cottage, it comes to me.

I felt with the boy a similar feeling as I feel with my wrist. Slightly altered, yes, but essentially the same.

Suddenly, my home stands erect in front of me. The handle to my cottage door is rough, made of wood. I don’t like it. I don’t like that I can feel every grain of sand underneath me, sliding and shifting in even the slightest of degrees. I can hear my mother inside, scrubbing viciously at something, somewhere in the house. I remove my hand from the door and stroke the strap of my satchel, taking deep breaths, not entirely sure why I feel this way about entering my own home, seeing my own mother.

My satchel!

I had completely forgone my original intent!

I sigh. Take a step back. My head swivels towards the tree line to the west, the green spruce trees framed in a light orange from the setting sun, their deep green scent surrounding me in a sudden gust of wind.

I have time to at least start.

I beg for my mother to forgive me as I make my way deeper, back into the forest,

I am almost running by the time I find a sufficient spot, and I quickly unshoulder my satchel and pull out the spellbound, it’s rough pages making a high pitched swish as they rub together. The next spell to learn is propositun, a spell to see what the properties of a plant or possibly another object may be. While witches are trained to know most of this by heard as well as educated guessed, such as rock for something solid and unmoving, there are still th8ngs which we know not.

I look to the sun, see that I have a good half an hour before I need return, and I begin gathering the components.

Milkweed, daffodils, some silver dollar. Overall it cost me a precious 27 minutes to run to known sites and gather it all, and I walk home thinking over my schedule for the next few days and planning when to make the plants into the potion and what I might use it on to eat its workings. I hold the book open in my hands reviewing the different colors and theirs meanings. The potion works thus: grind into spring water the necessary amounts and ratios of each plant while whispering the incantation and let cure in a bowl with the appropriate charcoal runes for two days . Strain into a clear glass of appropriate size and let drop the object which you wish to know the use of. After approximately five minutes of waiting, colors will swirl in the liquid, each color signifying a different property. It is that which I am currently studying for I have not yet memorized them all.

Again, my cottage appears in front of me without prior warning, but now with my mind occupied I am relieved to not feel the same overestimated feeling that I had prior. Still, I am hesitant to enter as that feeling re -enters my mind. What had made me feel such a way? I had not been in an overestimating environment or even a stressful one. Come to think of it…

I have not had such a feeling since Silver first brought the band together.

Thought of him have come in much less frequency and strength lately, and I had almost forgotten about him. But now, it comes back in full force as I remember the last time I had felt so overwhelmed, how he had comforted me in such a way that no one has. I suck in a deep breath, collecting my feelings, reminding myself that he will be back soon. He promised. I trust him.

I take another breath, composing myself after the sudden wave of loss, and open the door to the familiar scents of my home.

“Where have you been? I didn’t expect you back this late.” My mother inquires.

“I was with friends.”

She smiles, and I feel The slightest tang of bitterness at her trying so hard to connect me with others. She wouldn’t need to if she simply accepted my real friends. Friends that aren’t currently here, but they will be back soon. But she just wants what’s best for me.

My wrist tingles.

I try to smile back and we sit down to eat. It is again the savory meat pastries, my most trusted meal. Afterwards, we make a sweet cream with the recipe that my mother had borrowed from Masy and Wey’s parents, though with smaller portions. Our box might not get as cold, but it should work well enough. We place it in and I retreat back to my room.

With the sudden yearn for my greatest of friends, I take out the singular thing that I have gotten from him in the past two years: a sprig of pine, now wilted, a small seashell, possibly from a hermit crab the letter had said, and a packet of dry sand.

Just.

Sand.

As I have done multiple times now, I carefully soft through it, analyzing, trying to see something in it than I had before. What could it mean? That our relationship was drying up? Was I reading to much into things? Surly he will come back…

And he will. As I have already stated, I trust him. Perhaps the place that it is from was simply particularly pretty.

I set those meaningless fears aside as I slip into my nightgown and settle into bed to re-read the few letters from Silver. Another reason to believe that the sand has meaning is the fact that he cared enough to get a letter to me, which, me being from where I am, is no small feat. The letters were damp and just slightly eaten by bugs when I had found them, seeming to have been in that hollowed out log for quite a few days, maybe even weeks. I am unsure of how they had arrived there, and it was only by chance that I had found them when wondering the forest alone one day.

I smile as I remembered how I had subconsciously drifted closer and closer the village. It had been 7 months since he left, and I had just come to terms that I had many more to go when a white flash caught my eye. It was a small, thin, silver disk hanging on string attached to a tree. I climb up the short way, curious, and saw a faint arrow etched into it. Untangling the string, I fallow the arrow and after many paces, I find another, then another, and they eventually total to six, the last hanging on a small branch before the opening of the fallen log, this one having an X etched into it. There was a letter addressed to Gold, and it’s sender was Silver.

It had instructions not to open it until my 16th birthday, and so I waited the month out. Finally revealing its insides was like having your first wound magic-healed: elating, awe-inspiring, and relieving. It held the pine and a letter detailing just how much he missed me as he recounted his travels thus far. He ended it with stating that he would be sending a letter every year close to my birthday by way of his sister, whom, he informs me, cares not if I were a witch or a hermit, simply that II do no harm. He apologies for telling her without my permission, and while it took a few weeks, I forgave him.

This letter that I now hold in my hands, the second letter, came only a few months ago on my birthday. This one contained the shell and the sand, as well as another letter, once again regaling me with his and his compatriots travels.

I smile and curl up with the objects on my bed. They feel steady, familiar, and even the sand puts me to some ease when I feel overwhelmed.

I fall asleep analyzing the day, including the odd encounter with the odd boy, and concluding that it was mildly successfully day.

Over the next few weeks I meet up with them to learn the magic that they know and to help them practice what me and Ebony were teaching them. No one mentions that day with the boy, no one knew whom he even was, and no one talked any longer about oddities in the village.

It was as if it that day never happened.

And, in all honesty, I was quite content with that. The weird feeling in my home and wrist have become bearable, and as the weeks stretch to months, it becomes commonplace.

The ice box was as successful as could be anticipated, different and not as cold or long lasting as Masy and Wey’s, but the end product was similar enough. They gave me and my mother tips as Iren, Ebony, Masy, and Wey had come over to try it.

I have successfully made the identification potion thrice, as it only makes a small amount, and…

I didn’t use it on the sand. That was the whole reason I was so anxious to make it.

And I…

I couldn’t.

I trust Silver.

I have learned five more spells from A Hedgerows Guide to The Sun since I memorized the colors to propositun, and every time I do, I feel a twinge of guilt at not having done it with Ebony.

We have always learned these spells together.

But I continue on when I can, in snippets of time when I am not doing chores, learning with my mother, or socializing in a way so foreign to me; in the open, not hidden from anyone in the coven.

Winter grows thicker.

The sun comes back, the air becomes humid.

The sun once again begins to hide for longer stretches of time as it grows colder once more.

Eleven months, almost a whole year, had passed since I had last been to the tree with Ebony, and that had been the last time since, even all this time later, something still stops me from going all the way out there.

I sit now in the cold-growing weather perched on a sun-warmed rock, pecking at the fruits Iren had brought as we weave baskets together to trade with merchants. They have been especially lucrative for us this year.

We finish with time to spare and decide to return the remaining honeysuckle vines to Irens home. I take my place at the rear and listen to the forest sing as we make our way along the outskirts of the village to her house, stopping occasionally to pick certain plants.

We are walking through a patch of grass directly outside the village when a familiar strangeness comes over me. At first, I don’t give it a second thought for I have become so accustom to it, but I then realize; there is no reason I should be having this here. No one whom triggers this change is near.

I look around, hoping to prove myself wrong, hoping that the feeling is not leaking into the outer world as well.

Faintly, I hear them in front of me stop, and I realize that I have also stopped. I look down at the grass, then around at the trees. I remember this place.

What was it…

“Hey,” one of them says, I think it to be Masy, “isn’t this where we first hung out?”

It is.

The grass looks wilted and it feels of death.

Death… and fear.