The rain had stopped. Finally.
Palveia sat dismally on the stone balcony, overlooking the run down court yard of the apartment complex where she and Quinn had been staying for the last few weeks. Cracked pottery and flares of wild flowers choked through knots of withered brown plants, their brittle leaves parched beneath a layer of white flecked soil, too poor now for anything to grow. Now and again a wind stirred, swirling the shattered clay pots and lashing the flowers loose of their roots. The dark haired witch watched the slow decay and sighed into her hands.
Twelve days since Quinn had disappeared. Twelve days for her to become undone.
The two of them had been living in Goth, in a sun beaten old apartment complex in the heart of the slums. She had been trying to forget her past, and Quinn had been trying to piece back together his life. When they had finally run out of places to run to, they had come here, back to city of their childhoods to wait out the slow weaving of the summer and hope. But hope had not come. And the crumbling rented room held only one now, and Palveia was drowning between the walls.
She hadn't dared to leave the building. The groceries were going rancid in the fridge, because Palveia couldn't leave to get anything fresh, and because she couldn't bring herself to eat the meat that was there. She had always carried herself through hard times with a fistful of steak, or lamb, something bloody and with lots of spice. But there was nothing feral in her now, and the meat only made her nauseous. The vegetables, they were tainted too, the smell of festering blood absorbed into their wilting bodies so that she couldn't get the picture of dead pig, adorned in a splendour of vegetables, out of her mind.
The smell of the rotting meat had driven her to the balcony, and she had stayed there for almost three days now. She had wound a twist of scrap wool around her shoulders to use as a blanket, salvaged from the assortment of colourful items abandoned in the courtyard. She wore her jewels always. The bright Red droplets set in simple mounts of red flashed on her fingers, and the misty Opal hung at her throat, the exact color of the twilight. And another, more perilous piece of jewellery; A Black Widow's hour glass, the gold sand caught in the bottom and glittering brightly.
Shuddering a little in the raking winds that blew in over the ruinous city, Palveia leaned into her blanket. Her Widow's necklace showered sparks of golden light to dance in the courtyard, and she watched the patterns that they formed. Two golden eyes. And when the sun shifted, a golden web, shimmering with a brighter light where the strands intersected. So many patterns, reshaping with each flash of sunlight, with each scrape of dusty wind. She needed to weave, but over the users she had dulled her instincts until she was unworthy of the Black Widow's hourglass, and no longer trusted her hands to weave a true web. But there were visions here, so many visions. And deep within her, in a part that was not Black Widow, or witch, or woman, she knew those visions needed to be woven.
It was the damn city that was driving her mad. Palveia had grown up in Goth. The city, with its crumbling architecture; twisted spires; sun bleached stone; broken pavement that gleamed too blackly, it all kindled a nostalgia for the days before, when she had been nothing more then a simple gutter waif. Before she had made her offering, and become dangerous.
The waning sun flashed once more before disappearing beyond the Goth, and the sand in her hourglass made a new pattern. What she saw is only for a Black Widow to tell, but whatever it was, it roused her enough to shed her tattered blanket and stand, hands braced against the railing, to take a lingering look. Then she went inside, all resolutions broken save for that she must leave Goth. The city was swirling with too much memory, too much past. What she had seen was a vision of the future, and it was beyond the melancholy city that was slowly returning to the dust.
Two more days, she decided, as she threw the contents of the fridge into a plastic bag, which she later heaved over the balcony and into the courtyard. Two more days and then she would leave, and perhaps again reclaim herself as a Black Widow to weave this final vision.
Two more days.