Lily’s jaw aches, just below the corners of her wide lips. A full sensation, more like a bloated stomach than a sore tooth. It’s been there all day, ever since she woke from a dream of delicious release, but in the last hour it’s grown near intolerable.
“What is a moth?” a witchling asks; an innocent question, just a glimmer of the voracious hunger that set her along her path. She does not understand the look on her teacher’s mask, the strange reflection in its mother-of-pearl eyes. “Find out for yourself,” it finally answers. She is not yet wise enough to understand what it really means; young and hungry enough to believe in her own immortality with a strength that almost makes it real. And so she does not take her time to prepare: she slips away as soon as she can find a chance to. ...
It regards you from behind the free-standing mirror, its long-beaked skull quizzically tilted; you weren’t supposed to summon it again before your half of the deal came due. But— You’re careful not to stutter as you speak, as hard as that is. “You tricked me, and I want out.” Its shoulders shake, and it takes you a few moments to realize that It is silently laughing at you. “It’s not funny!” you sputter. “The power and wealth you gave me wasn’t what I thought it would be—you wrote the contract to be unclear, and took advantage of me!” ...
When you first met her, running to catch the bus on a crisp autumn day, you hardly thought to notice her. Just another artsy witchling walking to the park to sketch the sigils falling leaves trace and listen to the world’s voice. Good fashion sense. Way out of your league. Heavens know that the city is full of witchlings just like her. (You’ve read that the archetype has power, that conforming to a mold makes some magic easier, but that always seemed silly. Surely divergence is a better way to get attention? Maybe that’s why you’re no witch.) ...
The chittering chaos of countless insects rises from the emptiness before you, the grating noise of chitinous limb against shell, of mandibles gnashing and antenna curling in anticipation– “No, that’s not it at all. Look again.” Nine candles ring the pit, eight pinning the world into place and the last opening it up, each burning with the power of the turning year; inside the circle the hardwood gives way to churning void, to vast things moving beneath, strange crustaceans shifting by candlelight– ...
She drifts, unseeing and unfeeling, a speck of strangely dense matter wandering through her prescribed path—an arc countless centuries long, guided by the slow pulls of celestial bodies and solar fire’s angry wind. An interruption is neither appropriate or expected, and yet— She comes to ground in a storm of displaced momentum, energy ripped away from her and scattered to the eight corners, lensed into more manageable forms—explosions of light and color, bubbles of compressed time sending trees hurting far into their own future deaths. ...