Your Witch Friend

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.) ...

She hears the water dripping, deep below, just at the edge of her senses. The rhythmic tapping of something that’s not rain, not an unquiet faucet, down where there should only be silence and the low wooden sounds of the house rearranging. If only she could stay asleep. The door to the basement sticks, doesn’t want to open, wood swollen by damp and grown willful with disuse, but she still makes it open. ...

This week the witch is living in a half-destroyed warehouse right on the edge of one of the impact craters, close enough that your phone won’t stop interrupting your conversation with alerts about impending exposure. She says it’s fine, though, so you just swipe them away. The city is always a bit too aggressive about geofencing their alerts, so it’s not like you’re unused to being told to ignore them by people who really should know. ...