Fairy Dust and Starbucks Cups 9
Th perspective of a Witch.
She woke from her half-consciousness feeling as though somebody had tied her down with lead weights. Her joints ached, and her chest felt almost too heavy to breathe. Through the gap in the scanty, threadbare curtains of her cheery yellow room came a great rectangle of ten o'clock sun.
A glass of water sat on her bedside table, smeared with fingerprints. A bucket at the side of her bed was filled with an inch of vomit. She had no memory of going to get these things. Her heart was pounding, and a certain excitement had prevented her from going back to sleep. Hikari knew she was running a temperature, but did not know what had woken her up after so many hours of partial consciousness.
Hikari's head throbbed, and the mild, sunny colours of her room were bright and hot around the edges as if they were molten. One of her arms burned like it was on fire. There was a faint rank and choking odor like burning plastic and scalded milk on the air that made her tender stomach flip. Not even the smell of her own mess in the pail could mask it.
She rolled onto her side to heave into the bucket, but there was nothing left in her to expel. She wondered with a foggy head where the smell was coming from. Who was watching the florist's?
A clatter came from the kitchen, the sound of pots banging together. She could hear a cabinet open and close, the squeaky cupboard next to the stove where she kept the cups and plates. The fridge opened and shut again. The oven. Her heart leapt to her throat and stayed huddled there, trembling. The rush of blood to her head made her dizzy.
Wizard stood over the steaming crud in the pot. It was a sickly, fake crimson, and stunk sweetly of rotting meat and boiled milk. The book's instructions had been highly specific, and the many improvisations he made worried him. It would be nearly impossible to swallow when it was done, and he was glad that he wouldn't be the one to do it.
He had borrowed the recipe book from Witch, and it was full of old scraps of parchment on which she had written notes and doodled stupid things in her youth, cats and frogs in bows and dresses, a detailed and well-shaded sketch of an overflowing iron cauldron. A very early comic stretched down the margin in the table of contents, detailing her plans to surpass him in magic and become queen of the world. The ink had gone brown and the book was a faded translucent relic, yellow with age and old memories. He stirred the heavy sludge, which bubbled angrily in the pot, and seeing that it was nearly done, added a few powders. He decanted the hot, disgusting soup into a few flasks and put them into Hikari's fridge.
Wizard stood for a few moments in the unfamiliar apartment, ill at ease. He did not know what to do with himself, having completed his vital task.
She listened to the sounds in the kitchen, tense and stiff in her bed. It couldn't be any of her friends because she had not called any of them, and they had no way of knowing she was sick. Most of them were in the middle of their lectures at the university, anyway. A kind of desolate hopelessness saturated her fear.
She willed herself not to scream or cry out, and stood, wobbling and sweating. Hikari pulled the quilt from her bed and draped it over her shoulders, feeling the heat leave her body and the sweat on her brow grow cold. She stumbled down the hall, looking into a kaleidoscope room that changed constantly. She kept one hand on the wall to guide her. The quilt dragged behind like a child's cape.
The kitchen noises stopped as she drew nearer. Shaking with exertion, Hikari lowered herself to the ground and peered through the door to see another face looking back at her.
"…You should be in bed…" It was Wizard, squatting on the floor, speaking with a father's low seriousness.
Her fear dissolved, but her uneasiness remained. She didn't know him well enough to take him out of the Strange Man category.
"What are you doing in my house?" Her voice was weak and rushed, and she smelled of sweat and sick. "What have you done to my kitchen?"
He didn't answer, but his face wavered and trembled before her eyes, and her arm itched. He rose and opened the door, looking down on her with concern. The white tattoo on his face swam and grew and shrunk.
He smelled like coffee and rotting candy, and it made her stomach snarl and twist.
"Do you need some medicine… some water?" There were dishes in the sink and the rank smell was thick in the air.
She decided that he was probably safe. Why would he take care of her if he was here to hurt her? What could she do, in her state, if he decided to jump her? Hikari had lost track of her cellphone in the night.
"No, I… I just need to go back to sleep." She set off shuffling back toward her room. He turned to the dishes.
The scum wasn't coming off.
Witch's days were full of sweets, sitcoms, and beauty treatments. She had had her fill of travelling in her youth; there was no reason for her to do magic research when she could bother Wizard for his notes and books and recipes.
Earthly indulgences had mostly ceased to amaze her, and she had grown bored with magic. Witch had made a name for herself in the magic community, not as great as Wizard's, but enough that money was never going to be an issue. Nothing filled her schedule. She supposed she was becoming something of a shut-in, just like Wizard had been for so many years.
There was nothing important to do. There was nothing she wanted to do anymore, nothing to learn, nothing to make. She could not afford to expose her name, and though fame was something easily attainable, she purposely stayed away.
She had hundreds of years to develop the kind of talent that humans found worthy of their transient attention, but she had witnessed the fate of those who made their abilities public. If the public thought you were too good at what you did, you were prosecuted or ostracized, or, as in the old days, subject to a much worse fate.
The Harvest Goddess was never particularly interested in her, and nor was she absorbed in her activities either. The Goddess favoured Wizard by far, the little altruist, the saviour, Master's genius pupil. Witch went through a period of a hundred years or more where she spurned anything associated with him. Her envy was such that it spread to the Goddess, who had never done anything more to her than shake her hand once or twice.
Her actual sickness was of very little concern to Witch. What did she care if the goddess lived or died? She was not the first pick to inherit the magic power that would be displaced when she finally kicked the bucket, and she had no special feelings for her either way.
What elicited her almost predatory excitement was the sudden whirlwind of politics that erupted when news of her illness was leaked. The Association meetings filled her with a juvenile, dizzying joy that contradicted their true stagnancy. There was a web of truths and lies behind the Association, waiting to bring it down, enough to blow centuries-old friendships to bits. Tantalizing.
Who was going to be the successor to the Harvest Goddess' position? Her best guess was probably the Harvest King, her aide and co-ruler.
The magic world was in an uproar, and all she had to do was sit back and watch the show. Who was behind the strange happenings? Who would try to fake her writing and signature like that? There was someone moving in the shadows, behind the scenes, and she was itching to know. She was a little suspicious of the brown-haired flower kid Wizard was paying so much attention to.
Witch's ability to foretell things was very limited, and only told of what could be, rather than what was definite, and with much less clarity than Wizard, but she could see the very basic paths of magical creatures.
Unlike Wizard, who had sealed this ability to out of politeness and to save his own sanity, investigating the lives of magic folk was a favourite pastime of hers. Their fortunes appeared as coloured threads.
She could see fuzzily that the girl and Wizard were going to be very involved in the future. The lines of their fates intertwined with hers in a short time frame, and then separated from her entirely, crossing and uncrossing like the double-helix of DNA.
She could not read the Harvest King's fate at all. He had probably taken steps to block his magic signature, which set off an alarm in her head. How suspicious.
The Harvest Goddess had too many strings of fate attached to her to determine which was most likely.
She put Hikari and Wizard on the back burner to dig around in the mess of the Harvest Goddess' knotted fates, and to try and bust down Harvest King's barrier. Witch was honestly not particularly interested in the pair out of her centuries old contempt for Wizard and a lingering and complicated emotion which she didn't care to label that arose when she thought of them together.
Perhaps she should have been interested in them most of all.
I really think of Witch as a bit of a princess, a gossip, a bit of a sadist. More to come, maybe. Thanks for your support. I really appreciate your feedback.