“Jain, turn off your sight,” Wol ordered.
I did. I began to mentally prepare myself for whatever was coming.
It didn’t help.
There was so much will around us that the very air itself gave off an audible buzz. Instinctively, I knew that even people without their Sight awakened would sense it. With my Third Eye closed, I was spared from the worst of it. But flecks of bright light streaked across my mental mindmap, separate from the scene that played out before me.
The Hudson Witch bent over, shuffled her feet, clapped her hands, threw back her head, and howled in a wavering, high-pitched fashion that I didn’t know human anatomy allowed. The snow beneath her began to rumble and cracked open to reveal countless tree roots that traveled underground straight towards the Valentine Practitioner. The last few feet before they reached her, the roots escaped the ground entirely and reached out faster than my eyes could track.
Charlotte waved her staff once and said, “Fyr.”
A sheet of scarlet flame bloomed out from her staff in a perfect semi-circle, lighting up the night sky in a brilliant display. The fire clashed against the roots, burning them. I could sense the magic in the roots being burned away too. The blackened roots stopped less than a feet from Charlotte, then fell to the pure white snow in crispy ashes.
The Hudson Witch reached into her knapsack, bring out ashes and threw them into the air. As they scattered, she snarled in animal tongue. The the wind picked up, trapping the ashes into a vortex, and a freaking black wolf the size of a minivan leaped out. It’s tongue lolled out, and it snapped once in Charlotte’s direction, before bounding towards her on all fours with its nose low to the ground.
Miriam met it head on.
The mirror-girl screamed, her mouth stretching wide and showing rows of lamprey-like teeth. She launched herself out of the mirror, her torso stretching disgustingly, and started stabbing the wolf with the stiletto in her hand. She spat, cursed, and the wolf did too; the two of them were locked in a fight that only predators could have. Claws, fang, knife, teeth; everything blurred with lightning speed movement.
Charlotte pointed her staff towards the Witch. “Fyr,” she chanted again.
And a freaking beam of concentrated flame streaked through the space in between them. A high-pitched sound began to build up. I was forced to covered my ears as it reached a crescendo, and the hillside around the Hudson Witch exploded into powder.
Then the Valentine pointed her staff towards the Witch’s Wolf. “Miriam! Scīnan!”
Miriam released the wolf and went back into her mirror, disappearing completely. The wolf looked at its own reflection, confused. Before I could comprehend what was going on, there was another wolf now. White where the other was black, and somehow wrong, like you were seeing a hastily made copy. The two wolves went at it, spitting and snarling.
The snow cleared, and the Hudson Witch strode out.
Valentine brought out another trinket. A small pocket watch. She breathed on it before opening it.
A ball of white flame rose from it.
White phosphorus. Willi Pete. Or rather, the memory of those flames. The same thing that Victor used in the trial.
Charlotte hurled it straight at the Hudson Witch.
“Shit! Watch—” I started but was too late.
The Hudson Witch swayed down and up in some tribal dance move. The white fire vanished, then resumed its course where the Mother Tree’s ashes were. It hit the ground and lingered, sticking to the snow and continuing to burn.
But as much as Charlotte was a skilled evocator, she had other practices to rely on. She’d shown that when transmutating the snow around my feet to solid ice.
She brought out a string, and Miriam picked up the other end. The mirror girl flew towards the right, until the string went taut with tension. Charlotte whispered a word, and I saw the string’s tensile strength turn to something else. Density. Sharpness. Hardness. Everything turned up to the max, while still being light enough to be held. Charlotte had transmutated the string’s sharpness to turn it into a freaking ten-foot-long wire blade. Still holding the other end, Miriam began to draw a circle with Charlotte in the center of it, cutting down everything between them.
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The Hudson Witch backpedaled, reaching into her bag.
For the first time, Charlotte smiled. The pocketwatch she’d thrown with the white fire lay near the Hudson Witch’s feet.
Glass. It had a glass surface. Miriam’s Mirror reflected on it.
Mirrors are trippy. Reflections, more so. The creatures who inhabit them? According to the books I’ve read, good luck trying to bind them, because they can instantaneously exist anywhere that they can reflect off of.
With a terrible joy, Miriam exploded out of the watch and cut through the Hudson Witch, separating her torso and lower half.
“Oh! Oh! Oh, that was wonderful!” Miriam sang, a hair-raising, unsettling note. “Now I—”
But there was no blood. The upper half of the Hudson Witch gave a little wave and smiled before she faded from view.
An illusion.
A silver-furred fox launched itself out of the snow. It landed on Charlotte’s face, raking its claws all over her eyes, cheek, and hands when they came to shove it away. The fox stuffed her bushy tail into the practitioner's face, then reached in with its muzzle. There was a horrible scream as the fox leaped off, melting into the Hudson Witch’s human form.
“Charlie!” Miriam screamed, careening towards the Witch.
“Miriam, take her into the mirror!”
Before Miriam even reached her, the Hudson Witch summoned up another layer of roots from the ground. The winter had made them thin and brittle, and Miriam tore a few of them away with her bare hands. But the Hudson Witch had summoned dozens of them. They wound around the mirror and even entered the space within, twisting and invading. It didn’t take long for the mirror-girl to get entangled within.
Charlotte lifted her staff, her other hand over her bleeding eye socket. Through her fingers, I saw that it was a hollow, bloody, mess.
The Hudson Witch held an eye in her hand.
“The eye of a practitioner,” the Hudson Witch said, lifting it towards the moon with both hands, her voice revering. “A fine ingredient.”
Then she lowered it to her mouth and slurped it up, never breaking eye contact with Charlotte Valentine.
“What the fuck,” I slurred, drunk on the magic, as well as the dizzying fight that happened just now.
And the Hudson Witch began to change.
Her skin began to slough off, dropping to the ground in great big slops. It was the worst around her face. Her chin just plopped, followed by her cheeks then her eyes. Everything was turning to goo, and the smell of pus pervaded the air. An old stale stench that was both funk and rot. The Hudson Witch lifted her arms, the skin hanging off her like clothes before those too, fell to the ground.
Her skeletal body went up in green flames.
The flames coalesced around the skeletal frame, blanketing it in a tornado. The vortex grew larger and began to resemble familiar shapes that my human brain could comprehend. A wing. Hindlegs. An elongated neck. Twisted horns. A long snout. Everything made entirely of green flames that flowed like muck. A body so large that it blotted out the sky.
A dragon. The stuff of fairy tales.
And it felt all wrong.
Deathly miasma permeated from the dragon, roiling against my Third Eye and rubbing it raw. It was painful just to be in its presence. When it opened its jaws and spoke, I felt wet stuff dripping down my ears. In fact, I felt wet-things dripping down my eyes too. Tears or blood, I couldn’t tell.
The dragon shot itself into the sky, still growing in size.
‘A draco-lich,’ Hwari spoke into my mind. ‘Close your eyes and your ears, Caller.’
Wol spoke at the same time. “A necro-wyrm. Don’t look, Jain. Don’t hear. Don’t do anything.”
But I couldn’t stop it. Even with my eyes closed and my ears shut, I could see and hear. It was too much.
Charlotte half-turned her body, her remaining eye staring right at the space above my head--which was what my Third Eye saw from its viewpoint.
“Remember this, Hallow. This is what you are allying yourself with,” Charlotte said sadly.
Then she walked over to the branches where Miriam was locked.
“Miriam, I dismiss you.”
The mirror began to fade. Like a pencil mark, slowly being erased.
“W-Wait, Charlie! We can still—”
Charlotte leaned against the mirror, putting her forehead against Miriam’s. “Thank you.”
“Charlie! You were my best friend! Stop! Don’t do this!”
Shivers went up my spine when I saw the sinister smile on Miriam’s face as she spoke.
She didn’t mean a single fucking word.
“We can do this, Charlie! Come on!” She squealed in her bone-grating voice. “Just a little more! Let’s get your grandson here! Victor could help. Or perhaps cut a deal with the Hallow? Wasn’t he about to say a name? Oh, Charlie, I’ll miss you so much.”
Charlotte Valentine smiled and put a hand on the mirror. “Good-bye, old friend.”
Still smiling, Miriam said gleefully, “Oh, I hate that you’re dying.”
The mirror was gone.
The hillside was dark. And silent.
And the light came from the eastern side, brightening up the sky.
I thought it was the sun.
It wasn’t.
The necro-wrym’s wing surfaced beneath the clouds, so large that I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. My mind simply could not contain the sheer size of the thing. One limb and the whole sky had lit up, breaking the astronomic law of day-and-night cycle. Sickly green hues blighted the entire forest, and I immediately threw up. I’d eaten nothing all day. Watery stomach juice burned my esophogus as they escaped.
And I still could not close my eyes. I had to see.
Green fire burned Charlotte to a crisp.
She didn’t even scream.
I don’t know how long I threw up for. But when I stopped, I heard Abigail and Mina’s voice calling my name in the distance. I finally got off my stomach, lost strength, and fell on my back. Looking off to the side, I saw footprints around me. Hidebehind. Tagalong. Remembering, I crawled over to my pink backpack. Wol appeared, carrying the teddy bear in his mouth.
“W-Wol, my promise. I—”
“Shhh, Practitioner. It will be fine. You did well.”
Hwari. She was more susceptible to magic than we were, being more of the astral plane. “Hwari… are you—”
‘I am well, Caller. You are wounded,’ she replied.
As the other’s voice began to grow closer, I hugged my pink backpack close to my chest. Wol stuffed himself into it, sniffed once, and lay his head on my chest. Hwari floated out of the ground, laying near him.
That was everything that I cared about. My pink backpack with the Girl Power!’ written in green glitter. Wol. Hwari. The preternaturals I made a promise too.
My eyes closed before the others could reach me.