Chapter Text
When you rise from slumber, it’s in a blanket cocoon like a chrysalis; you're still resting in here, still forming and developing. But you can leave whenever you like, from the safe and warm confines of this swaddle.
Limbs stretch out one after one; first the left arm, then the right. You turn onto your back, and gently unfold your knees. Awakening comes to you in bursts, and the misty air from a window draft brushes across your face.
It’s a cool caress, and you open your eyes to examine the lines of salt and the warding herbs and symbols above the door frame. It’s raining out.
As you stir, the butterfly wings of your dreams unfold from your back. You sit up, and take your first deep breath of the day. It's a yawn that fills your weapons of flight and pushes them out from the cocoon to dry in the sun. Beams of light filter into your single loft room. You have to remind yourself the wings aren’t actually there sometimes.
With each inhale through your nose, the wings pulse and fill and fluff and you sit up just a little straighter. Like tendrils of setae you gather yourself to you. Your facades, your life path, your knitting, and your tendency toward black coffee. Your knowledge of darkness comes next, and then your habit of sticking your tongue out when you try to undo knots. Your family, your friends long since passed, your list of tasks for the day, and your skill with arranging flowers.
And then comes the bad. All of the things that are wrong. Errors, social qualms, bad... habits. Your role as a midwife and cut-wife both. The lives you give and take with your medicines. The plants you were unable to keep alive. The darkened futures and sins you foretell. They weave themselves into the filament.
The cat hops up onto your bed. Jaspers doesn’t need to stand on his hind legs to brush against your chin; he’s far too big, and you are far too short for such a thing. It's time to start the day.
The butterfly metaphor is discarded on your pillow. You may have dreams of flight, but they will never come true.
You don't quite deserve that freedom anyhow.
You leave Jaspers lounging on your porch, napping in the sun, same as every other day. A champion mouser, but only for a portion of the day.
This morning, you are on the hunt for a queen bee as you go about your daily tasks. It is the right season for it, and having your own hive will make your dye garden bloom even more beautifully. Honey too can be used for so many wonderful things.
Your skin has been rubbed with a special bitter cream of your own making, so that they might not sting you. In your herb basket is a small jar in which she will rest. There is a little spell that you will cast that will attract a portion of her old hive to you, and from there it will build and flourish on its own.
As you hunt, you make sure to take into consideration the Dark One from whom you receive a portion of your energy to work your magic. It’s a part of her tithe that you spend some time thinking of her as you gather things for your spells and tinctures.
You find your queen for your hive.
It is a routine to think of the Horror, every time you go a-gathering. And every time, you happen to find something worthwhile. It is also the full moon tonight. This gathering is a special one, one of your Esbat, and the things you find today will be potent.
As well as the queen, you pluck an entire clutch of infertile lizard eggs from their nest. They are yellowed, amber-colored and left alone to themselves. Now, they are yours, to dry in the slot above your hearth, and make into the barest shriveled and calcified stones; they will be lovely talismans. Matched with a shock of rabbit fur and set with some rose quartz pebbles, they will help women with their pregnancies.
For a price, of course.
You have to live, and you have to buy some things you cannot make yourself.
Nothing is without its price.
A bird twitters overhead, and a beetle scuttles away on a dry leaf.
Your eyes cast upward, the sun peeking through the foliage to pierce your eyes.
The soft-woven woolen cloak you wear falls back from your shoulders and short-cropped hair. Its black material is riddled with the fluff from weeds and the seeds of plants; it will have to be cleaned, soon. You’ll have to make time. Maybe tonight? You could imbue it with something to aid you in the winter days coming. It would be good to do that tonight.
The moor breeze is a humid chill on the back of your neck.
As you straighten, back creaking, you catch the barest movement out of the corner of your eye.
At first you think it one of those white-footed black foxes that scamper about in the twilight hours. They like to dig little holes behind your house. They’re also the reason why you stopped keeping chickens. But… it’s not any fox.
It’s her.
Kanaya Maryam. The woman who comes to you for dye only. She’s a significant and never-changing part of your days, coming by twice every moon for nearly half a decade.
A mystery, she is. Tall – taller than you, with black hair always twisted up into a knot behind her head. So… human, and yet the most beautiful woman you’ve seen in nearly fifty years. Right now, she’s walking along the path from the forest clearing. There is a bundle of flowers in her basket.
Those flowers that the young children go and pick for their paramours; yellow and brown, a few pink. Maybe she’s selling some new dresses for the young ladies? It is the marrying season, after all. Maybe those colors look good with white. She is the town’s tailor, after all. And the town has grown a good amount in the past decade. She’ll be doing more than just tailoring preexisting clothes, soon.
A single sunbeam hits her through the trees, at just the right angle, and her gently sloped face is cast into relief. She is pale as snow, and what a thing to behold. Eyes so green they might be jade. Hair blacker than your damned soul, and fingers more delicate than a harpist’s.
She has caught the light, and caught your eye. So many times, she’s caught your eye.
So many times, she’s caught your eye.
It makes you inhale deeply, and then shakily let it out.
She may be gorgeous, but you will never have her.
She is ‘normal’. No magic, not a creature of any kind that you can tell. Just an ethereal beauty in your life, that doesn’t even seem to need to pull her boots out of the muck as she walks. She will marry a young man in town, or a visiting noble, and then she will be gone to you. Maybe she’ll keep her business. That would be wonderful. Ideal, even.
She notices your short form, staring from halfway behind a tree, and waves one slender hand.
Oh, and her smile is even more beautiful than her eyes, or her face, or even her low and gentle voice.
You raise a hand, and wave back.
You’re pitifully lost on her. She continues on, and you turn back to your basket of prizes and eggs and roots and berries and flowers. It’s time to go home, right. You still need to maintain the dye garden; Kanaya will be by tomorrow for her pinches of purples and blues and reds and yellows. She must have her dyes.
And you must have her visits.
Despite all of your being less than her by painful degrees, you smile to yourself.
You clutch the hand you’d used to wave to your chest.
You pull your hood back over your head, and step out onto the path to head home. There’s a scorched campfire hole on the path, and you sigh. Villagers, needing their hunting. You hadn’t seen them, but you figure they must hunt at night. You wish they would stay out of your forest.
The sonorous and peaceful funerary singing of a few mournful mothers’ wailing rings out over the hills as you turn your back to the sun.
Dew flecks spit from your boots.
It’s so much lovelier than the yapping of the evening hyenas of your childhood.
It begins to rain.