My frustration turns to confusion when I realise that it’s not that she can’t fight back. She doesn’t want to.
What is wrong with you little one? Why won’t you fight back?
I can see in the way her tiny hands ball up into fists that she wants to fight back, but I can tell in the way her hands bleed from her nails sinking into her flesh, that for whatever reason, she is determined not to. “Whatever happens, don’t let them turn you into one of them.”
A melodic voice echoes through my ears. It’s the voice of a woman. Her warm tones are soothing to me and gently brush against the surface of my mind like a feather, as I try desperately to find her.
When I turn my attention back to the brave little soul standing there looking helpless, her face is soaked with tears. She cries silently, perhaps too proud to wail, though in my heart I am waiting for her. Even from here, I can feel the overwhelming sadness she has been trying to mask, almost as though it were my own.
“Whatever kind of witch they mock you for being, don’t let them turn you into a bad one.”
Again, the words echo within me like a calm soothing the storm. I can feel warmth spread across my chest as the words bounce through within me.
I find myself weeping for her; releasing the sobs that should be coming from her. Her determination is inspiring. Despite the twigs in her hair, the mud on her face and the holes in her already tattered clothes, Ii can almost hear her telling herself to stand her ground.
“You are more than what they think you are.”
There is a waterfall cascading down my face in response to the constant reassurance of this sweet invisible woman. The love in her voice is unmistakable. If only I could see her. If only I knew who she was, or even where she was.
“Everyone wishes you were dead!” the shouter boy standing towards the back of their little pack yells at her, a scowl scrawled across his mean face.
But the hurtful words are contradicted with a voice full of love, “You are my wish.”
A shout comes from the distance, and the boys turn in unison. One of them whispers, “It’s sister!” They all scurry in the direction of the voice without giving much thought to the mess they’ve made.
The brave girl continues to stand, watching them run off until her trembling knees finally give in.
There, alone on the ground on her hands and knees her shoulders vibrate as sobs rip through her and she tries and fails to catch her breath, weeping at the cruelty she’s had to endure.
I can’t help but admire her. Even in my glass bubble, I cry with her, relieved that even for a moment, they’ve left her alone. We are both a crying mess.
I badly want to run to her and tell her that she did an amazing job. That though I don’t understand why she was incredibly brave and very strong for standing her ground and not fighting those bullies. I want to apologize for the stupid bubble separating us. For not protecting her, but she suddenly interrupts my chaotic train of thought with a sad confessionary tone.
“I did it.
I didn’t hurt anybody as I promised,” she sniffles in between as she speaks to God knows who. There’s no one else around, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t seen me.
“Are you proud of me, Mum?”
Mum?
It hit me like a speeding truck.
She did all this… endured all this just to honour a promise she made to her mother.
A mother who’s already...
Gone.
The thought surprises me.
Why do I know she’s gone?
I search within the corners and depths of my mind for an answer that I was not ready to see. I find it sitting in the corner of my cob-webbed mind. The dark parts where the light never reaches.
The girl is me.
The girl in front of me, crying her heart out as she calls to a mother who can never answer is me.
I clutch my chest; the feeling of heavy despair pressing against my rib cage. A building pressure that only a loud wail can ease, and only fractionally..
If I stop crying, I feel a pending explosion inside me. An ominous hand climbing up to my throat, threatening to suffocate me.
“Liliwen! Liliwen!...Lili!”
I jolt from the bed, latent sadness still gripping me as the sound of my name pulls me out of the dream and brings back to reality.
“Breathe, Lili. Breathe.” A cold touch goes up and down my back, as I struggle, do just that.
The familiar vanity mirror still sits across the bed with the closet, still as elegant as it was, besides it. The window looks the same way it did the last time I was here, and the red velvet curtain dances gracefully around it.
“Welcome back.” His gaze is warm despite his chilling touch.
I still can’t believe Bran is here, alive and by my side yet again.
His savage death is still so vivid in my head.
That wasn’t a dream. I know it wasn’t a dream. Although the entire night was horrific… almost a nightmare, I still know it was very real.
“Is it...really you? Are you really... Bran?”
There’s a familiar familial affection that springs to his eyes as he smiles at me.
“Of course, I am silly. Do you know any other vampire with a face as good-looking as this?” Definitely, Bran.
No mistakes about it. I don’t know many vampires as full of themselves as he is… I doubt I know anyone else as full of themselves as he is, and I love him for it. He turns his face to show me his ‘good side” and urges me to examine his flawless face. “It’s a garbage face, really,” the snotty remark comes from a large man standing behind Bran. I hadn’t noticed him standing there before and now that I have my heart feels overwhelmed with relief. My last memory of him is a cruel one. I still remember the feeling of my stomach churning as I saw pieces of the werewolf rain down on me.
“Dain... Dain is also here?” I just can’t believe my eyes.
“Yeah. I’m here,” his voice is as deep as ever, but his response is so soft, so quiet, it’s almost a whisper, and he can’t seem to meet my gaze. My reluctance to accept this reality keeps kicking me in the gut. This cannot be real, can it? I must have fallen asleep on the storage room floor or inhaled too much dust or something. This cannot be real… but if it’s not, then these are perhaps the most powerful hallucinations I’ve ever experienced. Maybe my mind has taken me where my heart longs to be. This is the place… these people… I don’t know why, but my heart longed for them. These figments must be the signs of a mind traumatized by a brutish coven and a vengeful witch. The damage they’ve caused must be enough to break and scatter beyond the boundaries of reality.
I seem to know all the faces here… even the woman standing to my right with innocent brown eyes staring at me as if she’s trying to see through me. I don’t recall seeing her the last time I was here.
Her long brown hair bounces as she cocks her head to the side, worries etched into her delicate face.
“Are you feeling alright now? You were crying in your sleep.”
My fingers reach for my face to find evidence of truth in her words. The trail of dried tears below my eyes confirmed she’s right. It must have been a dream.
If that was a dream, then what is this?
“Did you dream of something?” Bran’s eyes shine with curiosity...
“I...I did.”
“What was it?”
I tell them about the girl and her wounds. For whatever reason, I included the part where I felt what she felt and how the tears streamed down my own face as hers did. I conclude with the confusing realisation that the dream was showing me a part of my past and that the poor little girl was me.
The room is suddenly filled with silence. There’s an owl on the outside perched in a nearby tree that offers the only sound filtering through the open window as the three stands, silently looking at each other, as though having a private conversation.
The look in all their faces is enough to tell me that there’s something important about this dream, and I
want to know what’s going on. I’ve been kept in the dark for long enough.
“Well? Is anybody ever going to say anything or are we just going to stand around all night staring at each other?”Bran is the first to speak, though when he does, there’s a seriousness in his eyes that unsettle me. “It will probably overwhelm you, but there’s something we need to tell you now.”
I’m already overwhelmed. What more could he possibly have to say that will add to that?
The other two remained silent. Dain seems determined to look at anything but me, and the lady, standing by me, can’t seem to look away.
I can feel the tension in my body wind me up even tighter as I brace myself for what he’s about to say. I feel like I have to prepare myself for this.
The owl goes quiet, and in the dead of night, I stammer out the question I know needs to be asked.
“W-what is it?”
With a sigh, Bran nods then leans into to whisper, “The truth.”
Chapter 5
The Curse of the Circle
A cool breeze blows in through the open window. The clear blue sky slowly gives way to a rhapsody of the sunset. Orange and yellow streaks the sky in a dramatic exposition, mirroring the drama unfolding within me as I lay here, trying to wrap my mind around the things I’m hearing. None of it makes sense. None of it seems true. Yet somehow, I know inside me that it all is. “What you just told us means the ritual is working,” Bran explains slowly as though speaking to a toddler. I would be offended if I didn’t appreciate the pace. He really did need to go slowly.
“What ritual?”
“The Undoing Ritual,” the lady on the other side of my bed says sweetly, though with less caution than Bran. I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
The undoing ritual… okay. If this was supposed to be an explanation, she was failing.
“It is the ritual we used to undo the spell that was cast upon you. You probably know by now, the Guardian witch was erasing your memories every year and replacing them with another set of fake ones,” her thin brows crease as she keeps her eyes fixed on mine, studying my reactions.
“They’ve been cruel to you and your mind. Your real memories have been repressed deep within you, which is the only thing they can do to your brain since it’s so powerful.”
“Powerful? Me? My brain? I… I don’t know what you mean.”
“You have the most powerful photographic memory at this time and ours. An erasure spell on any other person, on any other creature, on any other witch, would do exactly that. It would erase the memories and their pathways completely.”
“But not me?” I ask, still in complete surprise.
“Not you,” Bran smiles, and there’s a look of pride in his eyes.
“They cannot erase your memories. They can only repress them. They’ve had to resort to pushing them down into the depths of your mind where you can’t easily access them.” She smiles, though I can see the annoyance lingering in her face. She doesn’t like this coven at all, and something about that makes me like her even more.
“They made up things that would fill the space left by your real memories.”
I suddenly feel very naked. My hands reach for my head automatically. It’s like I can feel the way they pushed down my memories, the way they scooped the fake ones out and poured in another year’s worth of new artificial memories.
Bran puts his hand on my head and gently and pats my hair like I’m a kid. He keeps getting away with these otherwise offensive actions
because, in this moment, this kind of reassurance is exactly what I need. The growing anxiety in me dies down with each pat.
“Do you remember what I said you are?” Bran asks, and I look up at him and nod. Even if I didn’t remember, the little boy from my dream had reminded me just a few minutes ago.
“A Catalyst Witch?” I whisper, and he nods.
No one has bothered to explain what it even means or why they seem to think I am, and why, if I was born a Catalyst Witch, is it such a bad thing?
Maybe this time, I can finally have some closure about this whole Catalyst Witch thing.
“I’ve mentioned that you have a tough barrier in your mind that can only be infiltrated in two ways: if you let them go through, or someone very powerful is involved,” he continues, “In your case, what happened is the former one.”
The first time I’ve heard this from Bran, I never considered the possibility of me letting people have access to my brain to have their way with me. I feel like I can never do that.
But what he just said right now makes me think that I have no idea who I really am.
“There is a reason you let them. But let’s talk about why they would do that in the first place.”
There’s a sudden shuffling on my right that brings my attention to the woman beside me. She folds the hem of her yellow-ish orange mage cloak and dress speaks as she settles comfortably in the chair by my bedside. “Let me enlighten you about Catalyst Witches with their brief history.”
It’s about time. “Long ago, Catalyst Witches were considered special. This is because they are key witches to perform grand rituals that helped in the way of life: construction of structures, building civilizations and so on.”
That does sound pretty important.
“After several generations had passed and the leadership of the covens started to change, and magic and technology progressed, Catalyst witches were treated as unnecessary,” a grim expression washes over her.
“They were reduced to being puppets. Made to do the bidding of the powerful. A lot of them went against it eventually, when they had enough of the treatment,” her frown keeps getting deeper.
“The people and witches in position knew that despite having no capabilities with spells and basic magic, Catalyst Witches were capable of bringing about powerful rituals that could wipe out entire races and kingdoms.”
That’s a lot of power for anyone to wield. “The world, then, plotted against their kind and eventually it was agreed that they should be purged.”
Purged? As in… executed? That’s not legal. That’s not possible. No!
The demented powers that be had no mercy in the first place for using them only for their benefit and then when it became inconvenient, they were all just… murdered?
I can feel my jaw tense as I grind own on my teeth and the scowl on my face intensifies. There’s a tightness overtaking my body as this story continues. I feel like I’m being wound up and when let loose I may spring to violence.
How can they do that?
“The purge wasn’t completely successful due to the intervention of some of the races. The Faes put a stop to it. They saved the Catalyst Witches from going extinct. They were able to convince the whole world that the Catalysts can still be of help to everyone without being a threat to anyone. That saved tier lives, but it didn’t stop everyone from seeing the witches as the bane of the coven’s existence. This term was eventually rooted in the fact that they have no basic witch capabilities.”That was it? That’s all it took for generations of prejudice and a close brush with total eradication?
This is why Ryia was so stressed about being ‘unintentionally’ related to me? “The purge might have stopped extinction in the moment,” she follows up, “but the decline in their… your population resulted in Catalyst Witches being even rarer than a Witch of Wishes.”
Well, at least that kind of witch I’ve heard about before. A Witch of Wishes has the ability to grant people’s wishes in exchange for a condition to be fulfilled or something to be given.
I always thought they were the most enigmatic species of our kind, considering that, in addition to this incredible ability, only one witch of this kind is born every one thousand years. In my life, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Witch of Wishes. That would have been beyond incredible. If Witches of Wishes could wish for anything, I wonder what it would be.
Perhaps a bit of company. Being the only Witch of Wishes in any generation must be so lonely.
Suddenly, I’m struck by the comparison. How could Catalyst witches be rarer than that?
“Are there any other Catalyst Witches aside from me?” I ask, somehow knowing the answer before it leaves her think lips.
She looks at me with the same sadness she’s had in her pale eyes ever since she started telling this horror story.
“None my lady. You’re the only one left… and,”
She pauses, and I feel myself swearing to all the gods that it’s not for dramatic effect. There’s nothing more dramatic than this. There just cannot be.
“What is it?” I urge her, the steady weight on my chest, crushing me as I wait on her to say the words I dread.
“You may very well be the last one.”
My eyes become hummingbird wings.
“That… That can’t be right.” I whisper
I’m the last of my kind?
“I’m the… I’m the last?”
This time, she turns to look at the other two who have been quiet. “Well Lili, she said ‘might be’ because we’re not particularly sure what your full plan is. You didn’t tell us the whole thing before you started this?”
“I’m sorry, what?
This is your play Liliwen. This plays out how you want it to.”
“Me?” I gawk at him, desperately scurrying around my brain for an answer, any answer.
“Yeah, you,” he gives me an ambiguous pointed look as if there was something I did that offended him.
I thought this was supposed to be an eye-opening story. I thought this was supposed to be laden with revelations and oracles and a thesaurus to help me decode the crap that’s been apparently happening for the last one thousand years. The lady mage rolls her eyes and frowns at them, standing from her seat with both hands on her hips
“I think you guys should tell her what the current circumstances are”
I think I agree.
“She hasn’t regained all her memories yet. It’s better to clear things up first before she gets even more confused.”
I like this one.
Bran sighs, “You’re right. Sorry, Liliwen. I guess we’re just impatient.”
“Here’s the thing,” Bran starts, “since you’re a Catalyst Witch, you’re a part of a grand ritual, the ritual of opening the gate to Paradise.”
Witch's Cursed Circle Complete Collection Page 10