The Vampire & Her Witch

”Isabell?” Ashlynn asked lightly, as she watched her friend become absorbed in her task. It seemed as though her mind was finally catching up with the changes in her body, and she was beginning to reach out to the pulsing power of the world that surrounded them, but there was a fumbling unfamiliarity to it all that reminded Ashlynn of her own first night as a witch.

”Go slowly,” Ashlynn cautioned as she stepped close to Isabell, kneeling in the soft, sodden soil to help her with her boots. ”You’re just like I was, you’ve never touched sorcery before your first brush with witchcraft. The real world is different from what you experienced in your visions, so go slowly and don’t let it overwhelm you,” she cautioned.

Heila, Virve and even Ollie had all received at least some training in sorcery before joining Ashlynn’s coven. They knew what it felt like to sense the flow of energy coursing through their bodies and to reach out and give that energy purpose. But for Isabell, all of this was completely outside of her experience.

The only sorcery she’d ever seen had been the ’miracles’ of the Church, and those were so steeped in superstition and ritual that it was impossible for a lay person to understand what was really happening. Now, however, Isabell found herself enveloped in the very same energies she’d always marveled at during high holy days.

”I just need to touch it,” Isabell said, pulling off her first boot and peeling away her the thick wool sock within while Ashlynn worked to do the same with her other foot. ”The earth, I need to feel it, I...” she trailed off as her bare feet finally pressed into the cold, damp soil.

The instant her skin made contact with the ground, Isabell gasped and her silvery eyes opened wide in amazement at the sensations coursing through her body. She’d thought that she understood what witchcraft was when the vision of Ashlynn guided her first fumbling attempts to channel the power of the world during her trial, but the sensations she felt in those visions paled in comparison to the reality of immersing herself in the strong, pulsing current of the forest around her.

For a moment, she sat completely still, overwhelmed by the surge of energy that flowed into her as soon as she opened herself up to the world around her. She was overcome by the strange sensation that everything around her was fresh and new, even as she realized that many of the trees around her were ancient, having grown from saplings long before she was ever born.

She could feel the forest around her, not just see it or hear it, but sense it in a way that even someone with as gifted a tongue as her husband the poet would struggle to describe.

The Hemlock trees surrounding them weren’t just wood and needles anymore. She could sense the slow, patient life moving through their trunks, the way their roots spread through the earth like fingers grasping for purchase, holding their lofty crowns high above the shorter cedar, oak and lesser trees of the forest as they stretched toward the sky above, as if they could almost touch the clouds themselves.

”Oh,” Isabell breathed, her eyes widening as tears began to form at the corners. ”Oh, this is... I didn’t know. I thought I knew after the trial, but... but it wasn’t like this,” she whispered as she listened to echoes of gentle breezes felt only by the highest of tree tops whispering in her ears, faintly tugging at her silvery hair with a wind that no one else could feel.

”What do you feel?” Ashlynn asked gently, placing a steadying hand on her friend’s shoulder as she was overwhelmed by the feelings that came from her first true contact with the living, breathing, interconnected power of the world.

”Everything,” Isabell whispered. ”The trees, they’re so old, Ashlynn. And they’re singing, or maybe humming? It’s not sound, it’s...” she struggled to find words for sensations she’d never experienced before. ”It’s like each one has its own heartbeat, so slow I could never hear it before, but now...”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and when she did, she felt the forest breathe with her. Not in the vague, mystical sense that she’d understood when Ashlynn spoke of her connection to nature, but as an actual, tangible response. The trees around them swayed slightly, though there was no wind, like they were waving hello, somehow simultaneously greeting a new friend and welcoming an old one home, as if she had always been meant to be here among them.

”I don’t know why I was afraid of this,” she said after several minutes spent just listening to the sounds of the forest around her. ”No, that’s not true,” she corrected herself, unwilling to accept saying something she knew wasn’t true, no matter how caught up in the emotion of the moment she was.

”That’s not right,” she said as she looked deeply into Ashlynn’s concerned emerald eyes. ”I was afraid that I would never be the same after this, and that’s true,” she said, looking at her smooth, unwrinkled hand in wonder as she flexed her fingers. ”If I had to give this feeling up... I think I’d sooner give up an arm than let go of a feeling this wonderful, and that scares me a bit...”

More than just a bit, she realized as she recalled images of desiccated, devastated landscapes that were a result of her blunders in the early stages of her trial. Her visions had extended across immensurable amounts of time, and within them, she had tremendous power at her fingertips to reshape the world according to her designs, to engineer a world where people could truly thrive.

But too often, the forces at her command spiralled out of control, leaving everything around her worse than when she’d begun.

Now, she could feel the trees around her, silently offering her their strength and expressing their willingness to bend to her desires. But she’d seen again and again in her visions the sort of calamity she could bring by over-indulging in the ability to bend nature to her desires.

And if she couldn’t pull herself back from the brink of this feeling, then she was afraid that the disasters that faced in dreams would turn into nightmares that she would unleash upon the world...