Chapter Text
“Mother Witch, is this one safe to eat?” Grubby hands too big yet for such a small body hold up a mangled bunching of blackberries still hanging off the vine and dripping purple juice down the arms. She leans down with a hand on her flat brimmed witching hat to keep it on and puts on a show of thinking extremely hard about the little berries. Another village child somewhere between the ages of seven and ten trots up to join them, a toad in one hand and a bundle of of wild mushrooms in the other.
“Not only is it safe but it’s overly sweet. Why don’t you take one of my baskets and go pick your fill?”
“Truly? No tricks?” The older boy asks with awe in his voice and wide dirt brown eyes.
“Oh, tricks aplenty little one! Be sure you follow the path of toadstool red and if the air begins to smell sour, you have gone off. Return promptly or perhaps sit and scream. Either way, help will come.”
The older boy eyes her critically to check for a lie—a clever little thing—and gives a nod.
“Thank you, Mother Witch!” The smaller one gleams as the sun with his gap-toothed smile and, before he leaves, he gifts her his handful of half mushed berries as payment for her kindness. She nibbles on them from her porch when she watches them flock into her forest, ready to chase after if they take the toadstool of blue caps rather than her instructed red. They obey her careful instructions which is why she always like the Masons from three farms over. They raise their sons good and right with a healthy respect for a witch’s workings. Someone taught them to be careful of magic but never closed minded. For that, she allows them into her woods to pick the sweetest and ripest of berries and because the Mason matriarch always makes a crumble that the largest slice of is saved for her.
They will be gone for at least an hour wandering the labyrinth of her paths berry hunting, so she returns to her shack to set about making tea. It shivers and shakes upon her entry, the wood creaking through the home and the glass flexing in and out with the deep breath of something coming from a deep sleep. Her hat drifts from her head to hang itself on the rack made of antler and bone above the doorway. A soft purring fills the ribbed hallway from below and above, around her, in the walls and from the candelabras that light themselves as she passes them.
“Hello to you too,” She ducks under the dark wood that grows through the hall ceiling from the second story, brushing aside thin spidery branches, “I thought of making a heavy lunch that the children might enjoy some of when they return. Fish?”
A softer chirping purr sounds near her ankles just as something soft brushes against her calves. The little black cat yowls as it stretches across the top of her pointed leather boot.
“I thought you’d like that, you little devil.”
The fish is sautéed whole with sliced tomatoes, crushed garlic, and freshly made palm oil in a shallow cast iron pan and while it simmers, she makes lumpy little biscuits with poppy seeds and parsley overtop. It just finishes when there are a rapid series of knocks on the door that shudders and vanishes in a petulant huff.
“Now, now. They knocked with upright decency and downright chivalry. Let them in.”
The shack makes a low moaning sound that is wood plants being broke over the knee and glass splitting in the panes from the extreme cold, but the door reappears and swings open. Two young boys—smart enough to wipe their feet outside where the mud will not get on her pelts lining the walkway—bustle inside in a race to latch onto her skirts with berry-stained hands. She taps the youngest on the tip of his cold-red nose.
“I made lunch. Fish! Fish, imagine?”
“Mother Witch! Mother Witch, we found something!”
“No, you did not.” A lump of bread is put in his and his brother’s hand.
“But we did Mother Witch! A big—“
“—hulking skull! With six-point antlers and fangs! It was like a snake!”
“It was too big to be a snake skull you great idiot!”
“Hm,” The piece of fish poked on the sharp two-tine end of her fork is held accusingly in front of her, her eyes narrowed to a dangerous warning, “did you touch it?”
“No mum.”
“No mum, I lie? Or no, mum, I promise we did not touch a wild thing in your wood muck with magic of unknown origin and strength?”
“No mum, we did not touch it!”
“Ah, good then. You’re sensible.” The fish is perfect to taste, savory from the palm oil and just a bit sweet from the tomato. Well made.
“But mum—“
“No, no buts.”
“Don’t you want to see it? It seems…magic.”
To the oldest one she cuts a particularly sharp look, “And are you a wizard, Collin Mason?”
“No Mother Witch.”
“No? Then surely you must be a young wizard in training,” Something occurs, and she leans in close to whisper a question, “or witch?”
His face scrunches up in thought, “Can I be?”
“Certainly darling, and that’s something your Mother Witch can help you with. But until then, you must follow the toadstool red—never blue—you must not eat apples with white flesh and red meat, and you must never touch a wild thing. Especially if it appears as bone and rot. Not even in dreams. In fact, cast it from your memories this instant.”
They obey and agree with the sweetness of berry-stained lips and the goodness of youth, so she walks them home with all her extra lumps of bread to gift to the Mason Matriarch. If she lingers it is only because the Mistress of the farm touches the brim of her hat with a smile that lingers on flirty and says, “Thank you so much. You are so good with the boys. Want to stay for…tea?” with a fetching flutter of her lashes and sultry smile. She remembers the Mason Matriarch when she had been Juliet Rose at a young age of 19 who had come to her three nights before her wedding and asked to be shown pleasure so that her wedding bed would not be so daunting. Sana had gently rejected her with not so much as a kiss that she begged for yet despite it, Juliet had never allowed her eyes to wander anywhere else but Sana if she was around. Sana was gentle with her heart, always, so she lingered with impatience simmering under her skin.
When she returns to her wood, the shack has begun to sag to the right with all its shingles having gone a shabby tar black and a deep snore comes from it that makes the ground rumble. When she goes inside, she will put away her mess from cooking to clear way for the potion orders that need filled and then, if there is time, she will read a few more chapters of the odd book that appeared under her front porch a day ago.
She kicks her boots off at the first step of the porch, lifts her skirts to tuck them into her belt, and turns to face the wood. Thoughts of the antlered skull crowd her mind more and more now that she is alone, worming into the oldest moth-eaten parts of her memory, where Magic lives and sparks with life at the mere mention of it. If it is out there, if the boys were telling truths rather than stories, then she needed to find it. Her feet do not need to follow the paths she has made but still she feels a certain level of worry when she walks for hours upon hours, deeper into the wood until all light seems to be swallowed and she is a small thing bumping around blindly. Something sharp pricks at her skin but it is smart enough to not dare draw blood without permission. Still, it stings, and she feels agitated. These are her woods. Nothing that is green or flying, fluttering, floundering, foraging, or forever fucking off disobeys her and nothing has ever shown her such disrespect. Not for a long while, anyway.
“Do you not wish to be found? Is that it? Or,” She comes to sudden halt when her feet step into muck and tar that is sharp with old bone and tries to crawl up her ankles, stinging and biting with hundreds of little teeth, “or are you not mine? Are you not green at all?”
The further in she pushes, the more she begins to wonder what it is the boys truly saw for magic as old and ripe as this would never let a mortal see it, not even ones so young. It makes the air ripple like a heat wave that rolls off an infected wound, thick and putrid enough that she swallows to keep bile down. It is not green. It is not the goodness of freshly tilled soil, of a creek and a basket dropped into it to catch crawdads, it is not lightning storms and burning ozone, but the crust of ash left on a burnt tree, the maggots that crawl inside a deer’s skull after eating through the brain, it is oily skins reduced to dried husks and fat turned to chalk dust. It is dead but not all the way dead and that has her kneeling in the stinging, stinking muck to dig into it with her hands so she can find the bone at its epicenter.
It was not what the boys described but that much she expected for the eyes of youth are fallible.
The bone is thick and strong though marred by weather damage and, in the places, it made the mistake of cracking which allows black moss and red fungus to sprout, growing between the teeth and hanging off the lower mandible. It is feline in shape with the sharp fanged front teeth and flat back teeth of an omnivore but is the size of a bear skull and sprouts two different sets of horns. A thick twisting set that curls downward, similar to that of a mountain goat, and a massive rack of antlers—she touches her fingertip to each point and counts sixteen total—that turn up and flare out at the back like that of a stag. It is, in truth, aside from the darkness that clouds it and the death that it permeates, the most beautiful thing she has ever held. It is not what she is, and it burns her hands to hold it but something about it consumes her very soul, something in it makes her lean close and smell it along the along the parietal bone, down to the zygomatic arch where the muck cannot cling as easily. Underneath the decay and rot there is the faintest smell of rain and that is wholly green. She touches the frontal bone, between the two orbits, to slick her thumb through the black muck it seems to constantly create and frowns at the burning red runes burnt into the bone.
“A curse?” More muck is sloughed off to reveal more red burning hatred, scratched into bone and still exuding heat, “An immortal curse.”
These are the very things her mothers and aunts and grandmothers taught her to turn away from, to bury back in the earth or cast over the side of a mountain and walk away from. This is hatred concentrate pressed into hundreds of red runes powered by enough blood and rage to last an eon or more. Whatever this creature had done had earned it a lifetime of mystery half living, half dead in rot and decay with just the barest hint of itself caged inside. This wild thing had sinned against a witch, had invoked fear and hatred, or it had been of such a grotesque evil that it had been put down with the intention of keeping it down. It was dead and she should leave it dead.
But it pulsed with the faintest heartbeat in her hands, an echo of its life that still clinging to the withered bone and begged to be heard again. If she pressed her thumbs down into the sinus bone, she could almost feel a cool touch of labored breathing, can hear awful panting of a pained dying beast.
She takes it home with her.
The ritual is…complicated and she fails the first three times to properly draw the circle in the dirt outside her home because she may be foolish but not foolish enough to allow it inside. It is an overlapping array of red and green circles that require ground root and animal fat dropped over them and even more blood and bone-dust to set it then it must sit and set before the process is repeated four more times. Odd that the book which appeared under her porch has the exact spell needed to reawaken a wild thing that is neither green nor shadow.
Once the circle has been made, she blesses the skull over each red hatch-mark curse, wraps it in embroidered linen strips soaked in creek water, and plants it in a mound of dirt center most in the circles with just the horns poking out. The green of her magic and of the earth will allow for the rest of the work to be done from there with the water and soil to feed it and her to cast spells over it each week, reapply bone and blood ash to the circles to keep them strong. At times she sits just outside the circle with a cup of tea and marvels at the horns so proud and strong, wickedly sharp, and thick enough at the base to rival the healthiest of saplings. Other times she stands on her porch and watches it grow underneath the lump of earth that has gone dark in areas and bulging out and upward, stinking of a pus filled wound. At times she longs to abandon all senses by crossing the carefully laid circles to touch it, taste the rock and soil that changes to know it by flesh and blood, to be close to it and encourage it with her own presence but she refrains. Only barley. A strange root system has taken inside her, one with stems of pride and longing for the little cracked skull clawing its way back to life in her front yard. When she is alone and far enough away from it that she starts to miss it, she wonders at what it will grow to be. A bear with horns and a vile spirit? A talking cat that will try to kill her many children who come around? Will it be a vulgar instrument of malice bent on her destruction—Malllleus Maleificarum in flesh—that she will have to summon her deepest powers to put down? The idea of harming it feels like a hammer blow to her soft exoskeleton and that fills her with such a yawning horror that she does not sleep that night.
She is a witch of the Green, the one to mother any child that crosses her wards and who will care for any woman afraid of men and marriage, and she is bringing back a cursed shadow spirit of the wood with all the love and dread her heart can make.
If her mother were alive to see how she reverently kneels in the dirt and smiles when she squeezes the blood from a stag’s heart into the channels dug into the dirt to feed it, she would call her insane. Sana thinks she might be. Something in her forever changed the day she found the skull and a large terrified, besotted part of her tore away from her good senses to in-debt itself to the shade skull. Even she does not know what has possessed her. She latched onto the feeling that something about the skull makes facing the long, lonely path of immortality she walks feel less daunting.
The first signs of life it shows are great heaping mounds of white wriggling maggots pushing up through the dirt so quickly they tumble over and begin drowning themselves, growing as an inch thick layer of writhing, black-banded snow inside the circle. This is easy to reckon with even with its putrid smell ever-present on the wind because it does not take much to feed and even if it is a sign of rot, it is one of clean rot. For a week she throws across the scraps from her meals with a twisting stomach and a warm heart, watching them wriggle over the wine-soaked bread husks, work through the fatty half eaten bear roast in a marching order set to the sound of their own wet noises. She feeds them until they grow to the size of fat sausage fingers on a lordling’s hand and then, the next morning, they have retreated in the earth leaving behind a pockmarked surface in the topsoil.
And then blood, thick and black and rank with death, begins to well up from the many holes the maggots burrowing left. For two days it simply pools in quivering little black puddles that quivers beneath direct sunlight but then it starts to turn into something solid that looks like a skinned cat but howls like a wolf. It drags itself across the bloodied patch of soil upon folded up legs, muscle meat exposed and raw, cracked open and bleeding while it mewls. It is not more than a mess of meat and malformed teeth and hidden eyes yet she longs to touch it, to sooth it through the painful metamorphosis. She sits in the dirt most nights with her hands on the barrier separating them and chokes on her own heart when it drags across the earth to her, bashing its grapefruit sized skull against the lines of her circle.
On the fourth night she realizes the grievous error she made by assuming it was a simple shade of the wood because it breaks through the blood wards with the same ease as a fist passing through wet paper and then through the wards made of Green, made of herb and sage and fresh water. No shade, simple or elder, could have done such a thing and certainly not with enough force to make the barrier around it scream when it ripped through. Torn from her sleep she had run outside in her knee length chemise, into the sudden thick sheets of rain pouring from an angry boiling grey night sky, to find the earth of her yard torn open and the lines of her runic circles entirely gone. Not a single trace of magic remained. For a moment she is consumed by such a raw, visceral fear that she cannot feel her own legs, does not even feel the biting chill of the rain that soaks her through. The thing is gone. It has detached itself from her side where she has kept it, stole away into the night with not another glance back at her or the amount of blood, time, and care she has devoted to it. It left the woman that adores it, that has cut herself open for it, that has shelved her morals and teachings to nurse it back to life, and it has gone. She never got to see what monstrous thing it would become.
She does not even realize she is sobbing until lights dance across her eyes because she has grown dizzy from lack of oxygen. Part of her wants to fold over in the rain becoming one with the mud that will eventually suck her in and crush her into the insignificant speck of matter she is.
It left her. It has gone and it has left her. The woman that loves it beyond all reason.
“Why?” Her whisper is lost beneath the crack of thunder that follows a flash of light. Her feet carry her into the part of the yard she has not stepped foot on for half a year, toes pressing into upturned earth to feel the shriveled husks of maggots, chicken and fish bones, and something viscous and webbed. Her left step hits earth that crumbles with a slick sound beneath it, jerking her off balance as she sinks to her knee.
Something squelches like mud where that foot hits but the feeling her bare skin senses is bristly fur and sharp tines. A godawful crunch reaches her ears just before a loud unending wailing and barking, even louder than the rain and the torn-open sky, rips through the night.
Realization dawns on her with a veil of absolute horror and a deep feeling of self-loathing.
Slick sounds mingle with her heavy panting, knee aching from how hard she hits the hard earth. There is a shovel inside her gardening shed that she could unitize for efficiency, but her mind is a buzzing hive of bees with the single working thought: it is alive down there. So, she shovels with her bare hands that go numb and start to bleed by the time she sees a black-socked fox foot poking out.
When she has it free and laid out in the rain, she begins to weep again.
The body is that of a mangled fox—of fur colored the same as the red breed but one that has fallen into a bucket of coal—that is smaller than it ought to be, one long leg twisted at an odd angle and patches of fur torn back to expose lengths of flank meat. Coal dusted ears are on a constant swivel in a desperate attempt to escape the agony it is in. The poor creature is too broken to even writhe. Along its ribs there is a depression where bone should keep it convex in the roundabout shape of a human foot. Foam gathers at its yawning mouth that is pink from blood, growing as its cries go silent.
She is too heartbroken to even speak. Her hands shake when she lifts it into her arms to kiss its coarse fur near its nose and by its twitching ears, not minding the stick-shaped horns that poke her cheek. This, her precious thing, and she broke it. Her beloved creature of shadow and bone and its dying in her arms because it was strong enough to break her wards but, rather than run, it has chosen to stay. And as thanks she had broke its fragile shell.
“Why didn’t you go, you stupid little thing?” She sobs. There is no response outside of a leg twitching too slowly and a mangled hum of a cry low in its throat. The sound absolutely wrecks her, leaves her undone as the flayed fur broken shadow thing she clutches against her heart.
Never invite darkness in your home, her mother witch had warned.
Bone has no place inside the hearth of a Green witch, her other mother had taught.
Sana carries it past her hearth, past the wards writ in wood of arches and doorways, into the very place she lays her head at night and settles it on her pillow as if it is a holy relic and the soft silk is its alter. That night she sleeps only because she exhausts herself casting healing spells on the shadow-bone fox and dressing it’s barely-there body in a paste of green herbs and creek-soaked linens. Twice she wakes because it moves with anguished whimpers to be closer to her and twice she shushes it with choked back tears and reprimands it for trying to hurt itself over silly wants.
In the morning—late afternoon?—she is woken by a series of musical knocks on her door and a cheery, “Mother Witch!”
“Who calls?” Her voice sounds hoarse from the lack of sleep or from the anguish of her previous night. A wet nose nudges her arm so she looks down to meet the eyes of her most ardently loved thing for the very first time. The color is startling enough inside the face of a fox—a fox the size of a bobcat—wholly black with orange-red rings that glow like superheated metal but the sheer intelligence that looks back at her sucks the air from right between her teeth. Sana has met many shades and spirits haunting a deep wood that have looked back at her with dastard design who she knew could outsmart her if she were a lesser witch but shades and spirits are created to think along a certain path. This creature was entirely free in its own mind therefore it was nothing like anything she has ever encountered.
“Hold! Do not speak your name child! I know who calls.”
The fox gives a soft chuff of irritation, one ear flicking back to lay against its dainty horn. Sana hesitates to touch it now that it is cognizant—it must think her a boorish woman for kissing it without consent—but yearns to so instead she brushes the pad of her finger over one of it’s clubbed paws.
“I’ll be back.”
It’s ears swivel back, eyes narrowing into an unhappy glare.
“Please stay.”
She rises from the bed and it yaps at her with bared teeth of black hardness then yowls from the pain that action causes. As a magnet does to metal she is drawn to its pain and sinks her fingers into the patches of fur that has grown right in healthy thick softness at the back of its neck. It quiets instantly, lifting its head to butt the front of its skull against her palm.
“Stop being a pest and just listen. She is just a child and you are,” Sana flinches when it meets her eyes, drawing back to her full height with her aching hands folded over her chest, “I don’t trust you around my children.”
The shadow-bone fox whines and yips its displeasure and she sees it burrow under her blankets when she leaves. Every step she takes away from it feels like agony that worms intrusive thoughts into the cheese of her brain: did I insult it? Will it leave me now? Will it keep breathing if I’m not there to feel it’s broken ribs flinch under my hand?
The door swings open to Delia Tillen’s beaming 15-almost-16 round face dusted with a light layer of fashionable cosmetics. The smile fades the instant she sees Sana.
“Mother Witch! Are you hurt? You’re covered in blood!”
“It’s not mine,” She foolishly replies in a sleep slurred voice which makes the girl’s brows rise to meet the moon so she continues with a tired smile, “don’t worry too much about witch work, love. What do you need?”
“Oh, well—Mother, are you sure you’re well?” Delia knows better than to touch her but she reaches like she intends to take Sana’s chin in her palm.
“Dear, our time is precious and you’re squandering it.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry,” A massive basket is hefted onto the glossy wooden table the appears just as she needs it smelling of fragment bread.
“The village sent me to check on you and every time I got more than a block I was stopped and ordered to give you something. It would have been two baskets if I hadn’t convinced Mrs. Mason to put away the chicken pie she had just finished.”
It’s excessive and unneeded but the village cherishes her almost more than they do their Christian god so she never rejects the offerings but she doesn’t like them either. The house responds to her unease by growing a branch from its support beam to take it away.
“That is most kind Delia. Give the village my thanks and perhaps my perplexities too.”
From the corner of her eye she sees Balwix, a sleek black cat who acts as her her loyal familiar, perk up from a sound he must hear somewhere in her sleeping quarters. His whole body gives a shake and a long canting stretch before he hops off her reading chair to go investigate. Panic over what will happen when the shadow-bone fox meets Balwix sends her into such a spiral that she doesn’t right away hear what Delia is saying.
“I’m sorry dear, could you repeat that?”
“The twins are here! The midwife delivered them during the storm last night. The, ah, clergymen say it is a very bad omen to give birth during a storm at night.” Delia flutters her lashes in a way she must have been taught is pretty for Delia has always been the type of girl to use her pretty as a shield for her discomfort. Sana hums around a grape that fell into her open hand and draws the conclusion without the question being prosed.
“If any deformity, malfunction, or decay should befall those girls it will not be over the celestial mechanics and the rain’s machinations.”
Delia painted mouth purses into a wrinkled walnut shape, “Mother?”
“They will be fine. Rain at night is a sign of good luck, not bad. Now,” She clicks her fingers for her hat to fly to her head and gives her shoulders a stretch all as an act to appear busier than she actually is, “is that all?”
Delia pales, “I interrupted.”
“Never darling but I am burdened with chores that need done.”
“I-I’ll write a letter next time! Oh but letters need messengers, lord. What a bother I am.”
“Delia, dear,” She clicks her fingers again to summon a cloak for the girl to drape over her shoulders, “please visit. It bothers me only when I am left alone out here for so long. You simply caught me at a—“
A loud clunk followed by the sound of broken glass sounds near the rear of the house where her sleeping quarters are. Balwix comes trotting into the room shortly after with a limping fox against its side, their tails twined together. As a pair, they settle at her feet with similar looks of feigned innocence.
Delia jumps back with a shriek.
“Mother Witch, what is that thing!?”
The shadow-bone fox bares its shiny black teeth at the girl, one bent leg stepping towards the girl with intent but it gives under its own weight. The sound of bones grating against bone makes her want to cover her own ears and scream.
“It’s none of your concern, Delia.” She snaps out of anger at herself and anger at the thing for disobeying her. She starts to bend to scoop it into her arms, encouraged by its hopeful look, but stops just shy because Delia makes a choked sound.
“It’s—it’s…it’s a demon! It looks like a nightmare! Mother did—“
“It is not a demon! I am a witch of the Green and I have seen, felt, fought, and killed more demons than years you and your mother and your grandmother are old! Demons are nightmares, demons are vulgar thoughtless things born in fire. This creature is clever and gentle and mine.”
“But Mother, it has teeth like I’ve never seen and it—it gives you such looks. Like it wants to…eat you.”
The shadow-bone fox makes a sound that is aggressive but not threatening, clacking it’s teeth in a short, sharp chomp. Balwix butts his head against the side of the foxes face and she hears him say, without words, peace, shadow-thing which is another revelation for her. Sana cannot speak a language her thing understands but Balwix can. The second revelation to come is that, until that moment, she had been so wound with nerves over the fate of her beloved shadow-thing that she was waspish and taking it out on poor Delia. Sana had been called Mother switch by the village people for six generations now and not once had she ever gotten angry at one of them.
“I apologize Delia, I did not mean to snap. You may have caught me in a bit of a mood. My—dearest, no. I already told you to stay. And you, you slimy little slug, you coaxed it from bed.”
She, Balwix says smugly. The shadow-bone fox chirps her delight at finally being gendered correctly and tries once more to lift a paw towards her, scraping against the front of her shin. Another length of taught heart-wire loosens to know that it can be civil which means it—she, her beloved shadow-bone fox is a she—can’t be a ghost either. Ghosts don’t mind the ethics of mortals and would much rather run them dead for having the audacity to live.
What are you my love?
“It’s…sweet on you.”
The shadow-bone fox flicks her ears against her horns before she struggles to lower herself over Sana’s foot, curling around it as if it were a feather pillow. The same foot that broke her ribs last night.
The shadow-bone fox needs four meals a day that mostly consists of raw proteins but she has snuck into Sana’s larder to swipe some berries of different varieties on occasion and once a chunk from her cheese wheel. Mostly, she likes to eat things bloody and still twitching so Sana takes her into the wood to hunt and tries not to wince when she comes happily trotting back to eat it by her feet.
The shadow-bone fox refuses to be separated from Sana’s sight. Once she ducked behind a tree when she had run off chasing a fat pheasant and had waited to see how her shadow-thing would react. She had yowled and yapped and cried so loud birds flew from trees, worms began to crawl up from the mud, and the sky started to grow overcast. When they had reunited the fox had bit her hand and shook it and wouldn’t let go so Sana had scooped the thing into her arms and carried her home. She sits on the bank when Sana bathes in a hot spring, she curls into a tight ball in her lap while she reads, she sleeps against her chest at night, she scratches at the door when Sana uses the bathroom.
“I could snap my fingers and send you to London, you needy little thing.” She had joked once and her beloved shadow-bone fox had bit her ear and put a hole in her favorite pair of boots.
The shadow-bone fox becomes a companion to her that Balwix cannot be. The black cat adores the new member of their family—sharing his bed with her, bringing dead birds to her as a gift, giving her tongue baths that the fox hates—but Balwix is a part of her soul, a friend as well as an apprentice, and he doesn’t have to stay. During a brief period he left for a hundred years before returning and she had missed him but she had not been sad that he had been gone because she knew he would return. If her shadow-bone fox were to leave for even a day it would crack her heart to jagged pieces. She loves her shadow-thing, whatever she is, to the point of utter selfishness.
Sana tells it as much one night when it lays on her chest and she strokes it soft ears.
The shadow-bone fox does not stop growing and changing, sometimes becoming a variety of mountain creatures and once a very emaciated bear, almost like it’s flexing its own skin and sinew to see how far it can stretch. She thinks maybe it is tired of the fox form and wants to try something different so she casts polymorph on her beloved enough times that she needs to sit down because she is dizzy from joy and strain. It stays a fox but only for a month longer and it is a month later that Sana realizes the whole truth of what her beloved is and that it wasn’t tired of its true form but was tired and trying to build the energy to change into its true form.
Sana wakes late that morning which she only knows because the sun has poked through her curtains to pierce the lids of her eyes where normally the shadow-bone fox would have woke her much sooner. She likes to hunt with the sunrise.
Groggily she rolls over to prod her awake and, perhaps after tea, check to make sure she isn’t sick but rather than a fox of black and red fur curled up on her pillow, a woman lays sleeping in its place. The hair is the color of hot coal that is chopped short—just to the chin—and starts to turn black at the ends. Long dark lashes brush freckled cheeks that bulge around the arm she lays on. One of her small hands with short stubby fingers reaches for Sana’s shoulder even in her sleep to latch onto her. Short black horns protrude from the top of her skull that are at least the same color if not the same shape as her fox’s had been.
Her fox is not a shade, not a spirit or a ghost, but a woman who exudes raw magic and Sana loves her.
The women jerks awake with a pained gasp, one hand flying to cover her side and her beautiful face pinches into one of misery.
“What? What is it?” Sana’s hand covers the woman’s to push it aside and palpate the area. It feels….soft. Not soft the way new skin should feel but soft in the way that flesh slung over meat that doesn’t have its bone feels.
“You forgot your rib cage.”
“I’m still….weak… the transformation….” Her fox’s words are rich and deep in a luring, lovely voice but it’s slurred from pain and too quiet from lack of oxygen.
“Then why didn’t you wait longer, fool woman!?”
Black eyes blink back at her and she says, as if she is stating something as simple and obvious as how lovely the weather is, “I wanted to be with you.”
The words worm into her moth eaten brain to possess her and, before any kind of sense can touch her, she kisses the woman. It’s a quick hot press of mouthes she doesn’t allow to linger because the thing she loves—another witch perhaps? Something older than witches maybe—is suffocating and drowning in a flesh tube full of loose organs.
“Change back. Do not assume this form again until you are strong enough to do it properly.”
“My… Sana…don’t make me….leave you….”
“Do as I say and you may call me that and whatever else you wish.”
The woman changes back in a horrid display of cracking limbs, tearing flesh, and knitting muscles. When her shadow-bone fox lays in blood soaked sheets once more she hugs it to her chest and kisses it between it’s ears and says, “And I would never make you leave. I brought you back from the undead and I would and will do it again over and over if I must. You are mine now and I am yours. Forever.”
Three more months of shifting attempts before her fox finally settles into a healthy normal state inside the body of that woman. It happens when Sana is outside in the dirt on her knees tending to her peppers and chives, the sun hot against the back of her neck. She only knows because the house gives a great shudder, howls, and then there is a woman standing on her porch naked as a babe wincing against the light. In a healthy body things that weren’t before show now such as the dark stick-made tattoos along her ribs and arms and the sharpness of her teeth. Everything else is as it was before but more beautiful now because it will stay.
She will stay.
Sana stands and lets her work gloves slip off to hit the dirt by her feet.
“You’re shorter than I was expecting.” Is what her mystery love says in a lofty voice richer than a gem encrusted hand.
“You have been looking up at me from my ankles for nearly a year.”
There is a soft sound of mirth, the flash of sharp canines top and bottom when she smiles, and then she is stepping off the porch to get to Sana. She opens her arms without thought and—oh, her mystery thing is tall. In her work boots with their wooden heels lend her a good inch and a half but her woman stands easily a foot and a half taller than her. More than tall, she’s strong. An Adonis built of muscle and shadow.
Sana’s hat is pushed back from her face into the dirt with her gloves and she allows it to fall, allows her woman to lift her head by a finger beneath her chin, and allows the eyes—all black with gleaming circles of liquid sunlight—to inspect her face. Her fingers splay over Sana’s cheek in a heavy handed caress that feels too awkward to be endearing, feeling in a spider-walk pattern across the apple of her cheek to the bridge of her nose.
“You’re very soft.” The words are whispered more to herself than to Sana who snorts.
“You’re out of practice with flirtation, aren’t you my dear?”
The woman jerks, halts, looks to Sana’s sage colored eyes and for a moment she feels like she is staring down a feral mountain cat. Her lips pull back in a snarl—the gums are the same inky black as her eyes with a gloss of spittle—to reveal her sharp upper and lower canines. Cold chills tickle her skin in rippling waves that, for a moment, trick her into thinking she is afraid of the thing—the woman—she loves beyond reason or belief but that’s not possible.
Sana stopped being afraid of things she didn’t know by name or understand when she was a little girl.
What she feels is excitement.
“Why did you do this?”
“Do what, dearest?”
The woman dips her head down as a threat and comes closer, snapping her teeth a near the tip of her nose. She swallows her body’s natural reaction to flinch.
“I am not your pet. Don’t speak to me like I am,” The woman’s eyes flick to the hole in the yard that no amount of magic could fill or make hospital to anything green, “you are a child of the Green. Surely you saw the signs on me.”
“You mean those one or one hundred sage fire curses burned into your skull? Or the Biting Bile of Numeia that your skull bled in my wood by the way. I didn’t appreciate that but I didn’t blame you. You were dead, after all.”
The sky darkens when she squints her eyes, “Who are you? Why have you done this?”
“Sana the Kind—some call me, during the medieval era—Witch Mother more often now. My mother called me Katana and Bluebird and, ‘Shithead’. You may called me whatever you like. I’d prefer ‘darling’ or ‘mine’ has a nice ring to it too. As for why I have done this,” The hand moves down to curl, loosely, around her throat and now she knows she’s on a line between having a reason to be afraid and feeling her body heat up in anticipation, “I couldn’t really explain because I don’t know. I saw you—I saw you—in the bone and I felt you. I don’t know what you are, I still don’t, but I…there is shadow in most of you but a part of you is green. It called to me. I didn’t think you’d be….”
The woman’s ear—curved to a sharp point—flicks unhappily, “A fallen angel?”
Sana’s entire body flinches, stomach twisting into a ball of knots that drops to her feet, “Is that what you are!?”
She shrugs, “I’ve been called that. Also, ‘devil’ and, ‘Lucifer’.”
“My, my. And here I am nothing but a humble, boring witch. Oh!” She begins to cackle—bends over with her hands on her knees, eyes pinched shut from how hard she is laughing, tears on her lashes and lungs aching—cackle. Her fallen angel tilts her head in concern and takes Sana’s face into strong hands to give her a once over.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Oh nothing,” the madness of it still tickles her, “just that I, a branded heretic and proclaimed servant to the beast that walks, kissed Satan.”
“I’m not fond of that title. It’s not what I—I was something else…before. I think I was a child of the Green once. But then I grew outraged and I began to protect my wood with Shadow and the good religious zealots of backwater holes mistook me for the horns I wear and the wings I sometimes sprout.”
“So then, we have something in common. Neither you nor I know what you really are. Except…powerful.”
“Yes. I am…” Her eyes grow distant and fond when she lifts them to the canopy that sways in the wind and closes her eyes against the sun that has been allowed to shine once again. The birds that had scattered from the sudden drop in temperature begin to sing again from their high up places in the branches.
“These were my woods once. I knew these trails, the depths of the waters and the power they held, I sang to the birds and I gathered my shadow into walls and pools and the bones of the things that came to die here. I still feel a loyalty to me in the shade cast but…but the green…”
Her head tips down, eyes opening again to look deeply into Sana’s, “Now they call you their witch.”
When Sana first settled into this place hundreds upon hundreds of years ago at the bewilderment of her coven it had not answered to a single spell, small or large. That place is cursed Katana, it cannot know Green, it will not grow for any witch, it will suck the good from you and you will become a Hollow Man for them. They had nearly been right. The wood had been teaming with shadow that lashed out at her the moment it sensed her, crawling into her dreams to haunt her, blinding for months at a time, until eventually it got into her meat—the heart and the brain of her—to make her violently ill. It was somewhere between almost dying and burning her hand with scalding tea when she went suddenly blind again that she realized the thing vital to changing her wood: the Shadow wasn’t attacking her, it was trying to play with her. It had been quite the stir in town when rumors of her sanity waning spread after she was caught reprimanding shrubs.
Going forward the Shadow learned how to be respectful and how to earn her love if it wanted it and for the obedience, she carved a space for it in her wood. Imagine, she a thing of Green, allowing Shadow to live in her gardens, fester in the twilight, savage her flora and fauna, all because it was good to her. Shadow danced at her feet, whispered malicious jokes but jokes to make her smile, so of course she had loved it. It was against her genetic makeup but—
But she was named: Sana the Kind, Mother to All.
So Sana had built her home with toadstools of red for the path of the Green and toadstools of blue and black and rotting, maggoty purple for her secret love of Shadow.
Shadow which was born of the woman she nursed back to life, shadow that was a fragment of her, that was twisted, chaotic, playful like her, willing to listen and change for Sana, like her. It had always been this woman, always a path of toadstool red and black leading to this moment.
Sana barely resists her every screaming urge to kiss this woman because she needs one thing first, one small important detail—
“What’s your name?”
“I—“
“I will not be calling my future wife Lucifer,” she flings a hand back at her home that chuffs, sneezes angrily, and ruffles it’s shingles, “this is not a good Christian household and we do not use those biblical labels here. So? A name my..? my…? mine?” Perhaps her smile is a bit self satisfied and a little smug when her Shadow-thing mouths the word wife with a great deal of confusion.
“Yes, I’m afraid you don’t have much choice in that. You are obligated to marry me.”
“Why?” There is that familiar hint of amusement in a barbed tone that the Shadow in her wood has spent years mimicking. Sana’s heart flutters.
“Because I—hm. I’m fairly certain we are one of those ‘destined mates’ or what have you,” She points an accusing finger under the woman’s nose, “And I did bring you back to life.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“Hush, I don’t require input. Where was I? Oh yes, I brought you back to life and I reawakened the wood that was mourning your loss. The Shadow and the Green and it’s still not quite right. Maybe it will listen better with you beside me hm….oh! And, if it pleases, I am quite in love with you, as you are with me, of course.”
The woman’s head cocks to the side, one red brow lifting in contempt though she smiles in a fetching lopsided way, “Sentiments. Not very convincing for whom you speak to.”
“And whom is that…?” Sana flicks out a hand as if she is expecting something to be put in it.
The head drops obediently to place her chin in Sana’s outstretched hand, long dark lashes fluttering shut and a deep purr whirls in her chest which makes the single word she speaks a little hard to parse.
“Yours.”
“This I know dear,” She swipes her thumb beneath the lush lower lip and gifts her a soft kiss to the brow that had been raised to her a moment earlier, “but your name?”
“I’m not…sure. It’s still hard to recall….Marianne? No, that was too far back. When I was still just a witch. My name….Lilith. Lilith the Vengeful G…Goddess of the Everquiet Wood.”
“Perfect, thank you.”
Sana kisses her.
They make love with a raw kind of passion that makes Sana’s teeth rattle to their roots, makes her chest concave and her pitiful little heart turn to meaty, bloody mush. Lilith is an animal unchained at the start and Sana has no desire to hold her back but simply bask in the way she savages her body with tooth and nail. When the sun begins to sink and Sana’s soft skin has turned to a canvas for purples, blues, and reds left by hungry mouth and passionate thoughtlessness, Lilith starts to find her humanity and gentles.
Her warm nose nudges the patch of skin between her shoulder blades, but Sana waves a hand at her, huffing into the pillow, “Not now, I can’t feel my legs.”
Lilith’s hot tongue runs over the spot at her nape where she had left a particularly hard bite just before Sana had come so hard, she saw spots. Sana makes a little sound of protest and tries to roll over for a proper kiss, but Lilith slips her longer fingers around her hips and grips hard to keep her in place.
“Darling please, what else is there for you to do to me?”
Lilith makes an inquisitive noise, so she tilts her head on the pillow to catch her wearing a slight frown and the way her eyes run along the length of her body. She drops her face back into the pillow with a lazy wave of her hand.
“A jest dear. Perhaps—go to my wardrobe, the bottom drawer. You’ll find something that fits.”
Lilith’s radiating warmth disappears followed by the sound of her bare feet slapping against the floor, the drawer being wrenched open impatiently, and a surprised hum.
“You want me to wear this?”
“I’d like that, please. Could you?”
There is a sound of leather looping through metal brackets and little huffs of annoyance but then Lilith is crouching over her again to kiss between her shoulder blades. Something bumps against her leg and she lifts her hips on instinct for easier access. Lilith presses on the small of her back, down into the mattress away from the toy teasing her.
“It’s a bit dry.”
“Lucky I’m not, hm?”
“Hm.” A hand slips up her back into her hair, long fingers looping through her curls and that is the only hint she gets that Lilith is going to pull on it hard enough to force her up. Excitement fills her in rippling waves of excitement now that her body has started to get use to this treatment and it feels like her lover.
But then Lilith moves away, steps off the bed and hovers beside it and stands like she is waiting for something. Sana squints at her, knees already aching from their previous rounds, but that doesn’t stop her from moving closer when beckoned. Lilith’s hand curls around her nape to bring her mouth downward with a soft, “It’s a bit dry.”
It’s been enough time since she has last slipped her mouth around something like this in her bed so at first she bumps against it with her lips that are pursed in a frown. Then muscle memory takes over and she wraps her mouth around the tip that is made of the soft stuff she used magic to keep pliant and warm. Lilith’s eyes burn against the top of her head that begins to bop in a slow back and forth, rolling her tongue along the underside of the shaft. The fingers in her hair tighten just push a slight pressure is applied to push her further down and keeps her there until her lungs start to burn.
She pulls away with a gasp, blinking up at Lilith who caresses her jaw with a thumb and smiles pretty as a rose opening to a ray of sunlight.
“Turn over.”
She obeys, adjusting herself to have her back towards her lover but Lilith still pulls on her hips to drape her over the side of the bed. Her feet touch for a moment but then Lilith kicks them further apart and she lifts with the purchase point she keeps on her hips and steps between her legs. There isn’t a moment of hesitation or a playful presence of foreplay because Lilith is, she has learned, is not a patient lover neither is she capable of concealing her hunger for Sana. The push is gentle but quick, the head of the toy pushes past her entrance in a sharp twist of Lilith’s hips and then it sinks deeper, deeper until she feels those hips pressed against her ass. Her head swims from the pleasure and she almost doesn’t hear Lilith’s delighted, ‘Oh, I like this’ before the hips immediately draw back and press the toy into her hard enough to displace the air in her lungs. She moans loudly, claws at the bedsheets, and feels the pleased purring of her partner behind her, feels her sharp nails rake across her ribs to grip her hips.
Another hard pump, Lilith’s hips making an obscenely loud slapping noise against the swell of her ass. Pleasure pricks at her skin, bordering somewhere between too much and not enough.
“You like this too.”
“Obviously.”
Lilith draws the toy back to its head that catches against her entrance then slams it back in to the hilt and Sana’s knees wobble from the rush of pleasure that rips through her. Slowly Lilith repeats this same treatment, again and again, until Sana’s body becomes taught as a silver cord pulled between two knuckles. Sweat has collected at her hairline and along the path of her spine that arches from each hard pump of Lilith’s hips. Then, without warning, Lilith presses a hand against the back of her head to push it into the mattress and begins to rail into her at a blistering speed. The wet sound of her pleasure mixed with the slapping of their skin, her high pitched cries that start to climb into screams, do well to block out anything left of her still functioning brain.
When Lilith grips her hair to twist her head and expose an ear, she moans wantonly and arches prettily for her, begging without words for anything Lilith will give her. A kiss is pressed to her ear.
“Look who is the good little pet now?”
“Lilith!”
“You’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you pet?”
“Yes…”
Lilith rumbles with a pleased purr that tickles the skin of her ear. She pulls away to drag nails down her back that stings so badly but feels like a douse of oil to the already flaming inferno of her mounting pleasure.
“I just want one thing, for now.”
She keens, moans and arches, pushes her hips back to meets Lilith’s thrusts and hopes it conveys her wretched desire to please when she is too well fucked to speak. Lilith brings the palm of her hand down on the round apple of her ass cheek, hard enough that she nearly comes from the sudden spike of stimulation.
“Words, pet.”
She almost chokes on her own heavy breathing, has to dredge up ancient reserves of strength to open her eyes to meet Lilith’s and ask, “What do you want me to do?”
“Better,” Lilith smooths her hand over the welt she left in the shape of the slap delivered, “I just need you to hold out a little longer.”
Sana moans feebly, nearly cries because it’s the one thing she doesn’t want to give Lilith, “I can’t Lilith…please, darling, I just want—“
Lilith’s hips still, the dildo pressed fully inside her when she leans over Sana’s body and speaks softly against her ear, “But you want to give me everything, don’t you Sana?”
“I—yes, I do. Always. But—“
“I’m not asking much,” Here her tone gets breathy and innocent, even a little sad, “I just want you to wait a little longer. I enjoy watching you writhe beneath me. The sounds you make are exquisite. You’ll do that for me, won’t you pet?”
Sana presses her face into the mattress with teary eyes, chest heaving, “I’m so close…”
“Don’t you finish, I told you not to and you promised you’d do anything for me. Don’t betray me, pet.”
“Yes I’ll—“ Lilith braces her palms flat on the bed for stability before her hips begin a slow jog, working back up to their previous pace once stroke at a time. Sana’s head swims with pleasure.
“You’ll?” Lilith prompts, driving the toy deeper and harder into her.
“I’ll obey, I’ll…I’ll give you what you want.”
“Good girl.”
That nearly does what it would take for Sana to break her promise. She has to twist her head to sink her teeth into her forearm to stop the spasm that threatens release, a scream muffled against her skin.
“Oh, yes, that’s good my pet. Do that again but louder, let me hear you.”
“Oh, you absolute whore,” Sana’s hair is pulled to expose her face to Lilith who watches with the attentiveness of a wild cat stalking prey, “you fucking slut, you—I just want to….please, just finish me!”
“Name calling is beneath you.”
“Oh, you—!”
Lilith’s hand slips around the front of her hip to press down through the wet curls between her legs to find her aching clit. With the way Lilith is driving the dildo into her, it takes only a few rotations of her fingers before she orgasms. Sana screams so hard her ears ring, screams until her voice starts to shred itself and she can’t do more than squeak and pant.
Lilith’s pace doesn’t slow, her fingers continue to rub hard circles against her clit, to the point of it hurting.
“More.” Lilith growls and Sana feels it through her whole body.
“I can’t, Lilith, I’m—“
“Do as I say.”
Another wave of excitement rushed through her that mingles with the pain of overstimulation. She grits her teeth, eyes squeezed shut.
“You’re a bit of a—ah!—a bitch.” And Sana adores it, adores the roughness of her voice but the gentle care in her touches, enjoys the way someone finally craves her so much it drives them crazy.
Lilith nuzzles behind her ear sweetly and whispers, encouragingly, “Just one more. You can do it.”
“I might die.”
“I’ll bring you back.”
She starts to laugh, overjoyed and never having been this in love before, but Lilith kisses her hard as she fucks and all rational thought leaves her. This time it hurts a little so she whimpers between her moans which earns her a plethora of encouragements that start to turn the overstimulation back into pleasure.
‘You’re doing well’ and, ‘Good girl’ and, louder when she is growing tired of their game and the Shadow dark of her grows annoyed, she demands, “Come for me.”
Sana’s head spins from the little death and everything drops into an amber wave of honey that goes dark from Shadow now and again when she loses her grip on reality and consciousness. Somewhere between being bent over the bed and her mind breaking orgasm, her body is lovingly moved onto her back beneath the covers. She pats the top of Lilith’s head while her lover uses a sheet to wipe the wet off the inside of her thighs and opens her arms lazily for Lilith to crawl into. Her cheek presses warmly against her chest, long legs curling up over her hips, arms winding tight around Sana’s ribs that still heave from labored breaths. It takes almost falling asleep for her to finally rouse her mind back to its body. Lilith makes a disgruntled noise when Sana starts, lightly, scratching her nails against her scalp.
“Sleep.” She grouses.
“In a moment. I just want to enjoy this for a breath or two longer. What if I wake up and find myself in a whole new world?”
Lilith makes another annoyed sound, her head slipping beneath the covers to lay over her belly.
“Don’t be cryptic.”
“I never asked your opinion of me before I pounced on you and dragged you into my cave, that’s all.”
“I like you well enough.”
Sana laughs, utterly charmed by her Shadow-bone woman who curls even tighter around her as if Sana’s concerns has frightened her that something will come between them. She lays her hand over the head shaped lump under the covers.
“So you’ll stay?”
“These are my woods.” There is not hesitation or shake of fear in the face of commitment. There is only the brutal honesty in the one sentence that Sana parses out in the quiet of her room. These are her woods—even still after years spent as a cursed skull in a muck, Shadow filled hollow—they still know her name and feeling and rejoice at her presence but they call Sana mother now. Sana is these woods, she is every leaf, stag, creek and stick. She feels the wood in her blood, feels every rush of Green that thrives, dies, and is reborn. She feels the Shadow howl in its secluded places, crowning each set of bones inside a tent of rotting skin, feels it call her mother and heart, one that loves. These are Lilith’s woods, Sana is the wood, and a witch or Goddess or Shadow-Thing never leaves her wood. Not in life or death.
Sana slides beneath the covers to join her lover, wrapping tight arms around her.
“You’re making us breakfast then. I’m sure I’ll be too sore and too cranky to preform such a matronly duty come sunrise. You’ll do that for me won’t you?”
“No.”
Lilith makes breakfast and it’s atrocious.