Which Way is W.i.t.c.h.?
By: A J
Disclaimer: I do not own W.i.t.c.h. or Amber. I'm merely a Fan of both expressing my appreciation through this original piece of fiction, with no monetary gain sought.
Chapter 5
'Waking Dreams'
"My name's Random. I'm your grandfather."
Will gawked at the tiny talking portrait for several seconds. Then she blurted "Hi, Grandpa." They were both quiet for a few more seconds, looking at each other. "Uh, why are you trapped in a deck of cards?"
The blonde man in brown blinked in bewilderment, and then he started laughing.
"What? What'd I say?" Will asked belligerently. Today was already weird enough. Cosmic jokes, she so wasn't in the mood for.
"Martin didn't stick around to explain the Trumps, I take it?" he asked, still laughing."Martin didn't stick around to explain anything." She didn't add that they'd basically kicked him out for being a … jerk. She smirked as Elyon's kindly epithet came back to mind. "He did say he'd be back in the morning, though. We've got a two-hour drive to get to Dad's …" Will clammed up, and shut down, as fresh tears threatened. He watched her fight them off for a few seconds, then cleared his throat.
"Will, I'll be there tomorrow, and we'll talk then, okay? Rest well." She nodded miserably twice, once for both requests, and then the card in her hand stopped moving. It was still cold to the touch, though.
She guessed that that meant it would still work, but she really didn't feel like talking any more, tonight. She flipped it over and back again a couple times, but it didn't move again to her relief. She caught sight of the pattern on the back, and gave that a better look. The back was Lapis blue, with a gold filigree border scrolling around a beautiful portrait of a rampant unicorn. A quick check showed that the back of the rest of the deck was the same, except for two cards. Those two had a red serpent in an ouroborus on a shimmering black background. Will flipped them back to see what they held.
Two more portraits, of a black-haired man and a red-headed woman much like herself, both young, with the same nose, and something similar about their eyes. Not the color, which were blue and green respectively, or even the shape. No, it was something in the way the artist, whoever that was, had captured them ... like they were having the same thought.
Will shook her head at that. How could she tell what the subject of a tiny painting was thinking? She put the strange Tarot set back in their case, Random's picture on top, and went to bed.
w.i.t.c.h.
Susan woke up in the middle of the night with a headache, and a bizarre dream. She'd seen her little girl waving goodbye as Will stepped into a rainbow in midair, and vanished. Susan had had strange dreams before, and they'd all come true, that she knew of, except the last few. Since their move to Heatherfield, her quasi-psychic premonitions had called a strike of some kind, only showing her outlandish visions of her and Will flying, and Dean fighting a giant snake, then a dark angel in a gold mask. She remembered the last one she'd seen that had come true, though.
The girls. Those wonderful girls, Cornelia, Elyon, Hay, Irma and Taranee, who had befriended her daughter when the two had first moved to Heatherfield from Fadden Hills. She'd seen them in her dreams the night before they moved, and knew that Will would be okay. Unfortunately, she always knew when it was a vision instead of a dream, by the headache. The last one in Fadden Hills had been a two-aspirin vision. The freaky one about the gold-masked angel had been a four. The next day had been full of so many ups and downs, between her date with Dean at the carnival when she'd almost fallen off the boardwalk, and her weird conversation with Will that night, that she'd almost forgotten about it before the second vision hit her the next evening.
That one, of her and Will flying together, had given her another three-aspirin headache, and also the sensation that her visions, which had always been almost news-reel real to the situations they showed, were instead taking on a more symbolic quality. The battle between Dean and the dark angel was almost surely her near-death on the boardwalk, when Dean had saved her from the dangerous fall. The second vision, a night later, had convinced her that she and Will, while maybe not flying, were at least traveling together on the same path again.
"So what does my little girl disappearing over the rainbow mean?" she murmured to herself, digging in her nightstand for her aspirin bottle. Tonight was a three-tablet mobster too, pounding away like some goon with a sledgehammer busily working on the insides of her temples. She wished she hadn't lost her dream dictionary when they moved here. She hadn't seen it since then. "Hunh, I'll have to stop by the Esoterium while we're in Fadden Hills, and see if they still have a copy," she said, drinking some water to wash the aspirin down. With a sigh, she rolled back over and waited for the pills to work, so she could go back to sleep.
w.i.t.c.h.
Hay Lin awoke with a gasp, and dove for her sketchbook. Scribbling away, she put down as many details as she could of the dream she'd just had. Will fading into a rainbow from the top of a stone stepladder. She cursed as her pencil lead broke, and fished around under her bed for the big box of crayons she'd tossed there after watching Lillian Hale and Chris Lair over the weekend. Rubbing in hasty shades, she concentrated on the image as long as she could, and when the picture was nearly complete, she let the dream finish fading. "Okay, now, friend on steps, rainbow, fading. Let's see what we've got, eh?"
The skinny Chinese girl dug back under her bed, discarding a small library behind her and tossing any clothes she found onto the bed as she went. "Ooooh! There's that top! That'll be perfect for the service tomorrow! Now where ..? A-HA!" She crawled back out from halfway under her bed, and plunked down on top of her laundry to start flipping through the dream dictionary Will had lent her when she had her first visionary dream two years ago. "Now, fading's first …"
She took notes on the back of the picture, and remembered to stuff all her clothes in her hamper, except the white blouse she'd found last, which she took out to the washer and left on top with a note to her mom to 'Please, please, PLEASE wash this for me for the funeral after school. Thanx, HML.'
She forgot all about the picture, and the dream, by morning.