They cant go.

Wey came to me, fear obvious in his eyes as he peered through my window, Iren on one side and Masy on the other, telling me that both of their parents thought it far to dangerous with witch burnings on the rise, and hunts becoming more and more fruitful.

I had tried my best to comfort them, but I, too, was panicking.

What now?

We sit, once again, brooding before the waterfall that precedes the split in the river, the sun fresh in the sky.

No one wants to say what we must do.

“You can’t get your parents to agree?” Ebony tries a last time, but it is knowingly futile.

“They forbid me from leaving this damn coven!” Wey shouts before bringing himself in, Iren nodding in fury beside him.

Finly Masy finds the gull to say what we are all thinking.

“What if… you two just run away?”

They look defeated, knowing that it is not a question. Running away is banishment from the coven, and shunning from everyone in it. The coven is your family, your home, and to betray them thus shows that you do not care for them, so they must not care for you. Whether they wish to or not.

To talk to a runaway is to cast yourself out.

“Surly they would understand, right?” She says.

“It might make it hard to get help from another coven… but I think it is the only way.” Ebony concedes.

Iren takes a deep breath and looks to Wey, who nods, and says: “Okay.”

“We stick with our original plan, but leave in the middle of the night tomorrow” Wey says.

“We should all go.” Ebony says.

“No! We already talked abou-” Wey starts but she cuts him off.

“Your story is going to be practically invalidated being runaways, no one will believe you ‘star-struck lovers’. Asking to go on a date trip, and when your denied you run away. That doesn’t seem trustworthy, but if we all go, there are more voices and more memories to support each other, not just two supposed lovebirds.” She states.

Iren puts a hand on his shoulder as he prepares to argue again. “She’s right.”

He gives an exasperated sigh at finally losing this battle he thought he had won.

“Fine, again. But Mays isn’t coming. She is to young.”

“Like hell your leaving me here alone!” She scratches.

He groans as he realizes that she has a point in that it may be more dangerous for her to stay with these people without anyone here to make sure she is alright. He mumbles a fine, and we update the list with more rations and who will carry what.

Tomorrow until midnight.

That is all the time we have to prepare.

We sepperate and start gathering supplies, each person being given a certain part of the list.

I am tasked with gathering water and my sleeping arangments and garments. I go around, looking for anything that could hold so much water. Our first stretch is three days to a major river that we will stay beside for two and a half days, before skirting around a major human town. There will be small streems, I am sure, but my goal is to pack for four days should something unfortunate occur.

I find leather flasks and jugs in the market and in my home, all of it amounting to around one day between us all, assuming one would use two flasks a day. Scavenging around, I find three more tin bottles, each big enough to last a day, bringing the total to around two days between us. I try not to worry, knowing that the others have some of their own flasks and tins, and that we could finish counting once we reconvened, and I remind myself that there will be streems to fill back up with, and the rain will be coming soon.

I pivot to packing my essentials and sleeping supplies into a large sack, leaving the bottles empty in another. Five day’s worth of cloths, no nightwear to cut down on weight, a hair brush, tooth brush, two ribbons with which to tie my hair, a blanket, a coat and warm trench coat stuffed on top of it all.

I carefully lower the bag out my window, which faces only forest, after looking to see if anyone was near. Quickly, I rush it out into the woods, cross the river at my usual point using some stones, and set my bag down behind a tree. The river acts as a border, very few crossing it for fear of being discovered by the human village near us, so I trust that no one will venture far enough to find it.

Even still, I cover it halfhazardly with leaves before leaving to fetch the bottles.

Once both bags are gathered, I swing the bag of cloths onto my back and carry the bottles in my arm as I make my way to the split in the river once again, taking care to stay far to the outside of the river, out of sight of the coven.

I stash my luggaege more carefully this time, and dig a small hole at the base of a tree, avoiding it rood and apologizing profusely to the grass I uproot, and cover them with fallen leaves and dirt. I also recolonize the grass in a separate, more barren patch as I wait for everyone to appear.

Soon, Ebony appears, holding her bag of items. She was tasked with finding bags that could hold everything we have comfortably, as well as finding squares of fabric that we could stuff with biomass to make a pillow.

“There was only one bag that I found that would be big enough, but I think I found enough small bags to combine with our bags so that we can sew them together to match the bigger bag and use the scraps to make the pillows.” She says as she takes out the two flasks and a tin bottle she could find, making it an even two days rather than two days of sharing flasks.

I nod and start cutting the small bags with her, then going to unbury my bags and empty them out. As we are finishing cutting up the last bag, Masy and Wey appear, two bags each, and hand me five more flasks and two more tin bottles

Last to appear is Iren, who was given the same task as Masy and Wey; to gather food, to which they agree that they have gathered enough so that we can forage our way to the next coven.

We can only hope that they will provide us with food.

She brings the water count up to around four days.

We use the three hours of sunlight left to continue on making the bags and pillows, finishing three bags, and nearly finishing the last.

Reluctantly, I say “We should go home… leave everything you can here and come an hour before midnight to pack. Remember to bring light things we can trade with and money. Who wants to finish this bag alone?”

“I can take it, my father always makes fast meals so I may have more time,” Ebony says, “might as well finish what I started.”

We split up again, me and Iren covering all of the supplies with roots and dirt, replanting some grass above it to make it look less disturbed.

Once I am home, I finish off the dinner my mother had heated up from the previous day, and snoop around the house once again, memorizing specific locations of things of value and where the money is kept.

A dark-skinned girl stands in front of me, holding up papers. Her hair is dark, but with the slightest dusting of red, and light freckles cover her body, especially big on her legs. Her legs are covered in fur, and bent as that of a goat, ending in hooves. With slight shock, yet no shock at all for this is normal, I see now that all of her skin has a light coating of fur, and her ears and pupils are that of a goat aswell. My hands take the papers, and as I look at them I am transported into different scenes.

The first one is of a great hall build of wood and clay, banners of what looks like an orange leaf curled into a ball against a tan background, leaning towards the blue end of the spectrum somehow. The leaf-ball radiates a sunny glow through the use of stiff yellow lines that radiate out of it, making it reminiscent of a sun.

The hall is decorated in similar colors as the banner, brown and arrange being the most frequent, even the rug that I stand on has an orange tint to its red and is trimmed with gold and wonderful embroidery of stiff pattern leaves of all types.

There are many people. To many people.

The hall is crowded with people who have fur, scales, purple, green, orange skin, and all sorts of dress. some are tall, some short, some biped, some quadraped, some have wings, some have horns and different ears. This is normal.

They are all staring at me.

I feel the color of my dress feels as though it is constricting me, choking me, and the people all seem to get bigger, bigger, bigger…

A painting now stands in front of me. It has all of the races of the world on it, but one is pointing an arrow at all of them. It has round ears, tan skin, two legs, no wings, no excessive fur…

The creature from the painting stands all around me now, pushing closer and closer, their message ringing loud in my head.

‘One of us’.

I jolt awake again. All to much recently, I have been having dreams that make my sleep wrestles. Sometimes they are good, but most often they leave me barely recharged.

I crawl out of bed and quickly get ready for the day ahead, though I make sure to scrub myself especially well, for I do not know when I would next have the chance to. I have very few chores to do today, luckily, so I finish helping to clean what is left of Metrom levetsef and canning the older pears that are about to go bad. Once everything is done and in order, I decide that I will spend the rest of the day, the rest of the time I have in this coven for at least three quarters of a year, that I will help my mother with some of her work as I used to, before anything ever started.

I help her mix together tinctures, tend to plants in our garden and even some outside of the garden. We talk little, as was usual, and although that feeling of wrongness does not subside as much as it had previously, I still enjoy this claim to normalcy that I was able to stake, and I enjoyed being of use to my mother once again. With only a quarter of the day left, she is dragged away by her friends who wish to talk over drinks, and she has to reluctantly shoo me away.

I venture back home and pluck a book off of the shelf. For once, it is not an instructional book on magic, but a historical novel. I stroke its old leather cover fondly and can almost hear my mother uttering the words that she once did when I was too young to read it myself. Although I already know the contents of the book, every time I read it, its aged pages sooth me and bring me back to a place where nothing in the world mattered but the words on the page or in my mothers mouth. Everything else could just fade away.

I pack it in my satchel and head off to the woods. I cross the river, duck under thick overhangs of trees, and finally enter the familiar clearing that I have not visited in a whole year, far to long.

The willow tree has not aged a moment.

I approach its sinking roots and climb to the highest branch, the actions muscle memory from years of doing so alongside great friends. As I lower onto the branch and turn to rest my back against the trunk, I feel the willow give almost a sigh of relief, and almost unconsciously I tie my emotions with it, sinking into its feeling of contentment and happiness as the sun’s rays hit its leaves. The tree folds its rough bark around me in a cradle as I open the book, and everything fades away.