I sit in the dark hollow holding her body. I can’t let go. I listen to the rain thump onto the fallen log. One of the only steady things I have left, the other being my trust in Silver to keep his word. Even that was wavering.

     In retrospect, it was my fault, all of it. Our neglect, our success, and our gods-forsaken “plan”. I reflect and try to think. Where had we gone so wrong? I take it step by step, but soon I am sucked down by my memories, and they carry me through the night.

One Year Prior…

     “Mum?” I say. She answers with a ‘Yes, dear?’ and I pause, thinking.

“What is the spell for seeing into the future?” She pauses. She sets the dishes she was drying down and shakes her head.

     “You aren’t ready for that yet.”

     I nod and she goes back to the dishes. It’s for the best. I trust Silver to keep his word.

     I pack my satchel with food and books, the gesture engraved into my head from years of practice.

     As I walk out of the door, my mother appears in the doorway to the kitchen.

     “Where are you going?” This is new.

     “The woods.”

     A pause.

     “Why don’t you come help with the Metrom?”

     “I helped yesterday, and I have plans with Ebony today.”

     “You two are always in the forest. Are you going to that blasted village again? I try to give you

your privacy, but what are you doing in there?”

     Oh, I have been waiting for villagers to come along like they used to.

     “Playing with Ebony, Mum. What else could I be doing. Why would I go to the village.”

     I am surprised she hadn’t asked sooner. I walk out the door, ending the conversation, and head to the woods.      

     If anything, my mother is the one sneaking into the village. A sudden sense of wrongness has been shooting through my body when I think of her, and the puzzle runs through my mind as I make my way to the Willow tree.

     “Evika.” Ebony says.

     “Hi.” I notice that she looks unusually downcast, and as I sit next to her, she fiddles with the hem of her skirt. “So, what do you want to do today?”

     She looks at me, lost in her mind for a minute before she responds. “Same as always, I guess. That’s all we ever do.”

     I don’t know how to respond to that, and as she gets up it's as if she shakes off her mood along with the leaves on her skirt.

      "Well, we better get gathering before it gets too late. Wouldn’t want to hold us back for another day, right Eve? What do we need!”

      I nod, still confused, but I pull out A Hedgerows Guide To The Sun Vol.1: In The Water, flipping through the pages and saying the incantation to reveal any witch book’s true purpose.

     “So, what do we need?” asks a suspiciously cheery Ebony.

     “Duckweed, oleander…” and I rattle on, saying everything in the list.

     We search around the forest and sneak through gardens until we have all of the ingredients. We boil a pot of water with a spot of mint and pepper, and begin to brew.

     “Evika?” Says Ebony while we sit and eat. 

     “Yes?” I say, eager to find out what has been making her act so off. I wait, and she takes a breath.

     “We have to stay in the village. We can’t do this anymore. My parents are getting more and more frustrated, and… I can’t come anymore.” I set my plate down. So that’s it.

      “My mom has been pestering me too.” I fold my knees up to my chest and press back into the willow. “But we can’t leave. They won’t know where we went and they might come looking.”

“Evika, Silver is not coming for another year! You already know where to meet him, and not everything is about him anyhow!” I’m taken aback by her sudden outburst and sink further into the tree, letting it engulf me. She’s never talked like that before. I just want Silver and the band home, for things to be back to the sweet thing we called normal. As adverse as I had been when the band first started here, I had grown to enjoy their company as well. I look at her through the corner of my eye and see a hardened expression, her resolve plain as day.

       “The potion should be done by now.” the murmur escapes my lips after a moment. I get up and hurry to the pot.

       “Evika-” Ebony tries, but she gives up and goes over to the pot as well.

       After some stirring, Ebony takes a plum seed out of her pocket and dips its into the green substance.

       A sprout appears.

       “We did it!” she cheers, and I does her best to match Ebony's energy, deciding that I can ignore what just happened for now.

            I take a small vial from my satchel and collect the potion. Together we climb up the sweeping limbs of the willow tree all the way to the top, stopping below a cracked branch. They carefully drip some of the potion onto the base where a month earlier some village children had been to rough with it, and watch proudly as the tree knits itself back together.

Yes, other villagers had been here. So what? It is a rare occurrence, and me and Ebony are carefull.

I run my hand on the rough, newly-formed bark and smile. The tree sings to me its glee at being healed and I feels something drift down onto my head. I reached up as Ebony stares in amazement as I pull down a flower, even though willow flowers are far out of season.

     They climb back down in silence and head home, earlier than usual to my horror. Just as we reach the very edge of the cult, Ebony turns to me and says, “I mean it.”

     I watches her walk away for some time before heading back to the yellowing leaves of the Willow Tree.

     I climbs to the highest branch I can and sit with my legs drawn up, and back to the trunk

     The tree can sense that something is wrong, just as it did before, and accepts me to become one

with it.

     She stays there in the tree's embrace and falls asleep.

     A man with silky green hair and emerald eyes walks towards her, his face not visible. He walks through her and stops to turn toward her once again. She looks down and sees herself in a light blue skirt and men’s white  overshirt, in fact, she is a man. Her nose has a more protruding ridge and her jaw is more square.

     Suddenly she is falling then standing, herself again, in the middle of a circle with something dead underneath her. She is almost ghostlike, hovering unseen above it. Witches, to shrouded in shadow  to see, surround the dead and raise their hands in union. There is a flash, and the thing rises. It's her. But not? She looks at her body as it morphs into his.

     “Silver?” she wants to say, but she can't seem to force the words out of her mouth He reaches towards me and suddenly cries out, his face shifting into too many to count, but three in particular catch her eye; the man with the green hair, Ebony, and the boy she just was.

     Everything turns black.

     “Where have you been?!” mother shouts as soon as I opens the door. It is just barely getting to dark, but Evika is never home this late.          

     “I was starting to think you were found by villagers! Why didn’t you come back with Ebony? I saw her pass by. I’ve been worried sick!” she slams her knife into the table covered in wood scraps from the trinket she had been widdling.

     So she’s that mad.

     “I wanted to stay behind a while longer. I won’t do it again-”

     “I know you won’t.”

     This can’t be good.

     “Wha-”

     She grabs my wrist with lightning speed and says a few enchantments, sending a tingling feeling up my arm.

     As I pulls my wrist back, I stare at the fading rune on my inner wrist. A dazzling-white, tar-like rune, with some faint drips spilling off of it.

     I look in horror at my mother and catches the faintest glimpse of shock, and a tad bit of fear, on her face as well, but it is quickly composed.

     “You can go tell that little brat that you can no longer leave the encampment, if you wish.”

     I take a weary step back, shaking my head in confusion, and I run to my room.

     I quickly close my door and lean on it, slowly sliding down while holding my wrist in front of me, dazed.

     My mother has never been so violent. She rarely even raises her voice. That wrongness she's been feeling is in full swing, specifically in her wrist, and she looks down.

     No witch’s magic is supposed to look like that, it can look anywhere on the rainbow, even black, but a pure white, and that tar consistency.

     It's almost completely faded now, but the feeling of it being so utterly wrong won't fade with it.

     As my mother pushes me towards the door, acting like last night never happened, I feel utterly sick. I have  to socialize with new people my age.

     So this is the punishment my mother planed.

     I walks the little ways, past the modest wooden cottages much like my own, to the cult central, dreading what is to come. The cult is composed of mostly small wooden or clay huts that are re-used as much as posible. Placed in a honeycomb grid, relatives all face each other, and the closer to the center you get the bigger the clusters get. The biggest cluster has one bigger house meant for guests and meetings with other cult heads, as the oldest, and therefore biggest, family's root elder is the cult head. In the center of the cult is a large plot of land occupied by various stalls and community gardens. Against the back of one of the clusters is a small school. Unlike most human villagers, all young witchlings learn from their guardians until they turn 18, where they can go to the school to learn truly complex spells, and perhaps even make their own!

     I have been counting down the days until I can attend. But I pull away. I have more important things to do.

     To make myself as unavailable as possible, I head straight towards a decently familiar face.

     "Oh, hello Evika! Nice to see you actually out and about for once." The amount of snark that sometimes comes out of Cory's mouth never ceases to amaze me.

     "Is there anything I can help with?" I look around at what they have done already. Stalls have been draped with red and black tassel made of dried leaves, and lanterns have been hung at every point possible.

     "Well, we could use some help on the props. Wey has been working on the Toku masks, you could probably help with that," Cory gestures behind me, "He is in cluster 4."

     "Thanks." I nod and make my way to it, disappointed that I have to now work with someone.

     "We can only make so many masks in a minute Cory!" Wey yells around the corner as I tenderly crack open the door. "Oh."

     Evika meekly raises her hand, partially to the boy in front of her and partially to the rest of the group "hi.

     The boy and one of the girls has similarly dark hair, siblings. The boy dresses in more witch-like garments than what me and Ebony tend to sport. They both wear white shirts, but the boy's is tinted green and he has tucked it into plain brown trousers and boots. The girl opted for a more extravagant skirt, though not as voluminous as a settlers due to the lack of a petticoat despite the growing bite in the air, and her blouse is more intricately laced .

     "What has Cory sent you over here for?" Says the other, dirty blond girl in witch-wear working on the masks. She is dressed similarly to Wey, with her trousers being a slightly lighter tinge of brown, but with a more settler hair style. A bold choice for a girl from a coven so close to a village, but I can see a skirt haphazardly stuffed into the bag beside her in case of an emergency.

     "I was wanting to help with masks, i-if you'll have me."

     Wey puts the mask he was working on down. "Oh, well the paint is over there, that’s all we have left to do."

     "That’s a lot we have left to do, glad to at least have one more pair of hands" grumbles the sister.

     I walk over to the pile of unpainted masks thrown carelessly into the corner of the room and sit down with the rest of painters.

     "Masy Namay" says the supposed sister as she thrusts her hand towards me. "haven't seen you 'round, so I'm 'gunna go off and assume you must be that Evi… som'in. Evik? Evin?"

     "E-Evika" I stammer, barely audible over her droning, as she moves on from my name as soon as I utter the first syllable.

     "Anyhow, the masks are s'posed to look som'in like a crow or raven, but more… 'demon-ish'. Ya know, more scales and horns and bloody red stuck in there somewhere. Here," she tosses me one of the finished masks, "just copy that."

     Everybody knows what a Toku mask looks like, so I am slightly offended when she states all of this as if I couldn't possibly know. Haven't seen you 'round, so I'm 'gunna go off and assume you must be that Evi… som'in. I suppose I have been more reclusive that I thought.

            The other girl, her hair a muted blond blob on her head in the style of the human

settlers and dressed similarly to wey, turns to me.

     "Don’t mind her. She may have bad manners but she means well enough. Just doesn't know when to keep her mouth shut." she whispers that last part. "I'm Iren."

     I am about to reply with my name but I already said it, didn’t I? Did she hear it over Masy? I'd hate to repeat myself. But… if she didn’t hear and is waiting for an answer?

     Well now I've waited too long, it's too late to answer now right? Or… I let out an internal sigh. This is why I liked the forest! The trees are much less socially complex, and only want to experience with me. We can communicate in a much more efficient, accurate, and quiet manner!

     Why must mum make me deal with people?!

     Riddled with anxiety, some confusion because I still don’t know if I should answer, or should have answered, and my face flaming, I grab an unpainted mask and get to work.

     The anxiety eventually subsides and I am soon lost in the work as the others chat. I am so focused that I don’t hear the door open and I am only out of the trance when the person plops down besides me.

     I look up, startled, to find a smiling Ebony reaching over for an empty mask.