Witchcraft Chapter 4: Getting Answers
Aya tucked Gwen's pillow to be more comfortable and wheeled the hospital bed out of the circle.
Ben pinched Gwen.
"Stop it" Aya slapped his hand so he won't pinch her.
"Did it hurt her?"
Instead of answering, Aya brought plastic chairs out from some dark corner of the garage, Ben took the chance to say sorry to Gwen. Aya saw him mumble something to her patient. She carried the chairs over next to the bed. And sat down next to him. They were both calming from the event. "She can't feel anything," Aya said finally. "And she can't hear you either".
Aya enlarged Gwen's spellbook and flipped through it sitting across from Ben, by Gwen's bed. Chickens and rats in cages still filled the place with sounds and smells. Thankfully the herbs' smells were almost as strong.
"When will she wake up?"
"It depends. If she has a normal rate, four days. You know what's her rate?"
Ben didn't know what she's talking about.
Aya sighed "Right" she pinched her nose bridge "let's check then".
She casted another enchantment and above Gwen appeared a holographic dashboard watch. At least, it looked like one to Ben. It displayed numbers from minus five until fifty. The red needle was on minus two and a half.
Ben asked, "Is that bad?"
Aya leaned on the bed frame. "She will be fine. But she will take longer to heal and wake up".
"How much longer?"
"Let's do the math. Two and a half days times nineteen. Forty seven days"
"She can't stay like that for that long, that's like - more than the summer vacation."
Aya shrugged "Then you better let her mother know".
Ben bolted up "Grandpa! I totally forgot" He turned Gwen's phone on and saw lots of unanswered calls from Max. Ben called him and told him everything. Gwen is fine. And there's someone here who helped her.
Max sounded relieved "That's… that's good. I thought something happened. You see, the dishes in the van just stopped washing themselves now. To be honest, when it happened I thought… Something bad happened. It's good you finally called back"
Max got directions to that garage from Aya, and then hung up to focus on the drive.
Ben asked "Why did Gwen go unconscious?"
Aya put the book on the bed by Gwen "Because magic power and lifeforce are the same thing. Witches have an invisible core"
she tapped the base of her neck. "Where we can create and keep Elixir."
"Is Elixir the cubes you gave me?"
"Yes" She reached out her empty hand and black mist came out of her palm.
"Elixir comes out of our hands as mist, then we can turn it into liquid," The mist gathered to a tiny black blob the size of a coin.
"and we can turn it into solid material." The black blob slitted into tiny squares. They landed on her palm and then she pressed them down with her other hand and they dissolved like they did in Gwen's hand.
Aya made Gwen's lifebar, or, Elixir bar, appear again.
There were three empty places for yellow, twenty spaces for orange, just one of them full, and a small red space.
"A witch enters a coma if there are less than twenty drops of Elixir in her core. As a natural fail-safe. These twenty Elixir are marked orange on the Elixir Gauge. But the spells in this book are greedy. They keep going until she speaks the enchantment to end it, and if she ran out of Elixir, the spell would consume her life instead."
Aya cast the Elixir Gauge on him, and only one red square was there. Ben was looking up above his head, and realised magic is not for him. Even if he could cast a magic spell, it would take his lifeforce right away, because he has no elixir to feed it.
"I didn't think magic was so dangerous"
"Not all magic, western witches are just asking for trouble." She double tapped the spellbook to emphasize. "Refusing to take precautions like circles and sacrifices, or even wands and staffs. And they're riding their brooms so high in the air… I always hate when people bring them in like this."
"So we did magic safely, because we made a circle?"
"That, and I got the spell to drain the lifeforce of a rat, rather than myself." She said it proudly. "I hardly used any Elixir at all on what we did".
Ben didn't like it. He didn't like that Aya said it like that's what Gwen should be doing. "What did we do?"
"The circle we drew is like a shield or a disguise, but so absolute, that as far as the dishwashing spell can detect, she didn't exist at that moment. That's why it ended"
Ben visualised the dish washing spell. The blue glow dissapear and the dishes falling and breaking in the sink. "It thought she was dead"
"Basically. Of course, spells don't really have a mind of their own".
Ben looked at the dead rat in the cage. A rat that died because a spell drained him.
He got angry. "Gwen's life almost got drained, she would have died like this rat. You had more Elixir to give her, I just saw it. Why didn't you just give her more?"
Aya looked away. A sharp thought or memory flashing behind her eyes. "It seems the easiest way to do it, I know. But Elixir drops, or cubes, are like medicine. like the very strong kind, where the wrong dose is lethal"
She looked at him, making sure he's listening.
"When I started witchcraft, like your cousin, I didn't have a mentor. No one to tell me how to do things safely. But even then, I helped many cases like hers. Witches who were losing Elixir fast. Whenever a witch lost consciousness, I would just give them twenty cubes or however many they needed to wake up and they would reverse whatever mistake they did themselves. My patients complained about feeling sick for months afterwards. They'd feel dizzy and their cores felt weak and not producing any elixir for a while. But they were awake, and alive, so I thought it was okay."
Her voice shook when she told the next part. "This one time, someone brought a kid to me, so I did that and… He woke up and said 'My core hurts, take it away!' And then he died". The guilt on her face was too much.
Ben didn't understand. "Why?"
Aya closed her eyes and touched the spot beneath her neck "His undeveloped little core couldn't handle it. I killed the kid when I was trying to save him. The next day I started looking for a mentor. And my mentor taught me that witches can absorb twice the amount of their Expendiable Elixir Capacity…"
Ben looked confused. So she simplified.
"He told me how to find out the amount of elixir each witch can take. It's the yellow part of the gauge, times two. It's different for every witch, the amount of Elixir we can use without passing out. I can only give Gwen Elixir cubes a day. More than that would have killed her".
"But you gave me just four"
"I gave her two when I held her hand".
Ben had a lot more questions, but then they heard the van passing by the garage door. Grandpa's here.