I jolt awake and rub my body, the phantom pain gone.

I think it was phantom.

I breath heavily, slowly convincing my brain that nothing that felt akin to fire was touching me and that I was not stabbed.

After a moment, I stretch my aching limbs with a wince. I suppose some pain was real, I think to myself, and I laugh.

After I wash my hair and give myself a quick rinse in my water basin, I realize that in my state of tiredness I had forgotten to change out of my cloths from the previous day, I don a fresh set of festival cloths; a bright, blood red blouse and skirt, the sleeves and trim of which were black, and the skirt was double its usual circular cut, making it very full and perfect to dance with and manipulate. Every Metrom levetsef garment had the same base, but what made them unique was the embroidery. Mine was embellished with a fine red silk in the black parts and an equally fine black silk in the red parts, each weaving beautiful flowers and hanging leaves, vines connecting them all together as if to entangle me.

I run a hand through my blond, curly, mid-back length hair that is usually twisted back and kept in a loose bun, a headband separating my parted bangs from the back.

My mother always does my hair, and I hers.

Now a chill runs down my spine at the thought.

But I ignore it.

If I just keep telling myself that nothing happened, it is like it truly didn’t.

I take a breath and go to interact with my mother more than a simple “hello” or donning of a task since I discovered…

I must not think of it. It is just another day; we have already gotten used to the feeling so what does it matter.

I dig through the basket of Metrom decorations once again, having done it already to find my garments, and bring the black and red ribbons to the front of the house where my mother was setting the final decorations; red flowers in a reef hanging on the door, the red columbine in the middle.

“Um,” I start, “when were we going to do our hair?” I say tentatively, knowing that she is very likely aware that I have been avoiding her.

Something sparks in her eyes and she perks up as she says “Now, if you can!”

I smile at her against the burning I feel and she motions me inside to a stool where she weaves the ribbons into many braids. We talk little, but the discomfort I feel eventually lessens and I can enjoy this moment as I have for so many years.

Once she is done, we trade roles and although my braids are not as skilled or even as hers, she stands up and hugs me when I finish. I freeze, not expecting it and all of my discomfort comes rushing back in more ways than one for a moment before she lets go, but I hold onto the moment where it felt like it was once again just us, Silver, the band, and the willow tree.

“Is there anything else you need help with?” she asks.

“Not that I can think of.” I say.

She nods, then says, “Would you like to help me make some of the food for tonight? Ula is not feeling to well, sadly, so I am covering for her part of the feast.”

“Ula is… sick?”

She pauses before answering, giving me a look I can’t quite make out “Yes, she must have gone to deep in the forest and got some toxic mushroom spoors on them.”

I store this information to mull over later and agree to help with the food, spending much of the day baking the dough that my mother prepared yesterday and cooking up mushrooms and vegetables in sauces.

After the cleaning is finished, I go out to see if one of the three carts in town were in use. Finding an empty one at Zari’s home in Iren’s cluster, no Iren to be seen as she was equally as busy as me, I load it with all the food I have prepared and bring it to one of the booths in the center of the coven. I unload the food into a magic circle beneath the booth that was drawn into the ground and would keep everything fresh, salt added around it to keep away animals.

The rest of the day I spend taking naps in and under trees near my cottage, staying inside the temporary wards set up to hide us, preparing for the night ahead.

Finally, after the sun has gone and the moon is not yet set, I stroll back into town in those red hours and put my mask on for the beginning of Metrom levetsef, the festival of the dead.

I find my mother through her hair in a group with her friends and together, with the rest of the village, we stand around the pyramid of sticks in the middle of the coven. Everyone who has lost someone to the world receives a small piece of bread for however many they have lost and who they mourn. Looking around, I see that more people are holding more pieces, a pattern I have started to notice in recent years. We held our heads down, thinking of the fallen. The fading orange and pink light paints the sand with vibrant colors. My mother steps forward with her piece, and slowly others follow suit, placing it at spots on the pile of sticks and branches before us.

Once everyone is back together, the eldest among us step forward, and I cant help but notice that Ebonies great aunt walks with a bit more of a stagger and limp than last year.

The sticks light slowly at first, but soon the heat is almost searing my skin, and my eyes glow with the light of the fire in the now darkness. The moon is a small sliver, making it harder to see as we walk towards the stalls that are on the edge of the light from the fire that will rage on for five hours as the festival goes on.

Eventually, the chatter of friends and loved ones fills the air as festivities commence, and though I glimpse Ebony, Iren, and the Namay siblings together throughout the night, I never quite have the chance to do much more than wave as I follow my mother as her and her friends shoot through all the games and stalls filled with trinkets and food, and dancing around the fire, manipulating our skirts to look like licks of flame that beat along to the music that reminds me all to much of Silver and everyone else.

Suddenly, hours have gone by, and slowly the day comes to a close as the fire grows dimmer and dimmer. Once it fully fades, we all get a large jar runed to rapidly cool and fill it with the hot ash and coals, who sizzle and his as they enter the jar. After Me and my mother fill our jars, we go to the forest surrounding our clusters and the coven, and we sprinkle little bits of ash all on the ground and around the trees. We split up to do this, and I unconsciously make my way towards Ebony’s house as I do so.

The lightness moon hangs high overhead as I hear a branch snap to the left of me as I was sprinkling the last of the ash. I pause and slowly turn my head. I sigh comes out of a dark figure in my vision a few paces ahead of me.

“Oh thank the sprites, its you.” Says a slightly deep pitched voice, and I finally recognize Ebony’s golden-brown hair woven into the customary braids. “I almost thought you were your mom for a moment,” she laughs.

“Why are you this far out?” I ask, knowing that the patch of forest she does is usually further away towards her house. I hadn’t wondered that far, had I?

“I was looking for you! A bit more progress had been made on the… spy tree thing, and we were going to test it out tonight and just hang out since we didn’t get to earlier.” She says eagerly.

“I-I don’t believe I can come, my mother is expecting me back any minute now.” I stammer apologetically, and am about to say ‘sorry’ when she laughs again slightly.

“yea, so go back and wait for her to go to sleep, everyone is tired.”

“Them aren’t you?”

“We all took naps earlier because we planned this, and I know you usually take a nap before Metrom anyways. You did, didn’t you.” She asks.

I nod tentatively. What if my mother doesn’t go to sleep fast enough, or I wake her up on the way out, what if she comes into my room while I am gone or-

“I mean, if you really don’t want to go its fine.” She says, losing some of her former enthusiasm, and I realize she might not have seen my nod in the dark.

“No, no, I’ll try to make it!” I spit out, not wanting her to think thus.

“Okay, we’ll be waiting!” she says before bouncing off into the dark, before I could tell her not to wait.

I walk back fidgeting with the jar, all of the things that could go wrong swirling in my mind.

Once I arrive at my cottage, my mother is waiting for me as expected. I leave the jar on the table with hers and we retreat to our room.

I go about the regular motions for preparing for bed, but instead of donning my nightgown, I instead slip into a worn and faded dark orange dress with yellow accents that is much quieter than the Metrom Levetsef garment, and then slip my nightgown over that and crawl into bed.

I lie still for an hour, then an hour and a half before finally, slowly, I uncover myself and my dress and tip-toe to the door, slipping out with minimal sound.

I move through the outskirts of the village so as to not awaken anyone, and once I get to the side of the river, I rely on memory to get me to around where the tree is.

I tentatively look around.

“Hey!” a quiet voice yells from atop the tree

I can see the silhouette of Masy peering down at me and motioning to come up.

“What took ya so long?” she says as I climb onto the platform.

“I didn’t want to get caught, sorry.”

“Na its fine.” She waves it off.

they catch me up on their topic of conversation: Wey.

“Wey is going to his hair died soon.” Iren says, and I congratulate him. Witches typically will get streaks died permanently in their hair that match the color of the cult or coven, what cult they are joining, and by extension what magic they specialist in, once they reach adulthood. My mother never did hers because she says that she has found it unnecessary and too flashy and expensive for her.

“What cult are you going to go with?” I ask.

“Sylvania, but the potions side though maybe a more light and bluish green instead of the boring brownish green.” I nod. Potions, just like what my mother specializes in. venynae typically is represented by a muted, possibly brown-green rather than sylvania’s usual grass green, and that muddled color does not seem like it would fit Wey.

The conversation eventually moves on to various different topics, one that caught my ear being that Masy was going with her mother down to the south again to visit family after Wey gets his marks.

Eventually, we all stand up and go to the ground to dance together, I lament the fact that we did not keep on our Metrom costumes, as I have much fun twirling those skirts. Ebony, Wey, and I took off our festival cloths, but Masy and Iren kept their skirts, and I watch longingly as they dance a partner dance, Iren in the men’s dress which has a shorter skirt to show off more of the footwork, and slightly less volume. They dance around each other, sometimes twirling in each others arms, and as the dance ends, Masy lays back dramatically with an arm across her forehead, and Iren laughs maniacally as she drops Masy, who screeches on the way down.

We all laugh as Masy huffs and dusts herself off in equally dramatic motions, head tilted up and eyes half closed, lips pouting.

Something makes me turn my head and look across the river. I can make out the faint distant shapes of cottages, and something moving. It looks like a biped.

I turn back to where everyone is poking fun at Iren and Masy, though mostly Masy, and silence them, pointing to the moving figure. We watch closely as it moves towards the river, becoming bigger, and more appear behind it. The faint breaking of leaves moves our head to the left of the scene to see more.

Hurriedly, we rush around the tree and silently, one by one, climb up to the platform, hoping that it is dark enough that the gaps in it are not substantial as we intend to test it out.

The figures convene, seven in total, and cross the bridge, and Masy sucks in a gasp.

“I…I think they’re heading to where I found the inuriagi,” she whispers.

They come to a stop and we look to her, wanting her to tell us that she was wrong, but she just nods her head slowly, her face as pale as I have ever seen it.

Our heads whip back to the scene as a faint voice starts, and we strain to hear, cursing our past selves for not picking a closer tree.

We can make out some words, but it is all together incomprehensible. I look around for a solution. I crawl over to the trunk of the tree and try to connect to other trees. I have been trying to learn this trick for years now, and while I have been getting better, I still am not able to go more than a small plant besides the tree, and hearing through trees is almost as hard as what we are hearing now.

I know what I can do, but I am to scared to say it at first.

“I can go and hide behind a tree to listen.” Iren whispers, taking the words from my mouth.

“No!” Wey and Ebony say together.

“If anyone is going, I will,” Wey says, and Ebony bats him lightly.

“I’ll go!” She says, and I want to interject the same, but the words wont leave my mouth.

“I’m older!”

“And I’m younger!”

“I-”

“Oh, shove it, will you! Shes already gone, idiot.” Masy smack Wey on the head as he scrambles to look over the edge to look at the retreating Iren. “Hey!”

She turns, puts a finger to her lips, waves, and continues on.

He is about to go after her but I catch him, a slight jolt going through me at the contact. “She is using the grasses to clear away anything loud in her path, you would be much louder!” I say as I watch Iren disappear underneath the branch in front of us. Wey gives an angry sigh as he sits back and we all return to watching what the people were doing.

They have moved into a circle now, and one is in the middle talking. Eventually, they set something they were holding on the ground and step into the circle. Nothing happens at first, then a very faint, eerie white glow starts to emanate from the thing, and the people.

A memory flashes through my head of a tar-like rune burning onto my arm.

It was the same shade.

I cup a hand to my mouth as we watch them draw runes in the patch of dirt they are standing on, all of them emitting that growing white glow, though the more I look at it, the more I notice that it has a hint of blue to it. suddenly, the glow from the runes slinks in a strait line that must have been drawn while we weren’t looking, and they converge into a square pattern of runes surrounding the object on the floor.

The chanted whispers of seven people graze our ears as we watch the light engulf the thing.

From it arises a fully alive bird.