“Who are you?” asks Aidan then, crossing his arms over his chest, head to the side, eyes narrowed as he gazes at her wonderingly. “Have I met you before, maybe at an open circle? Are you Wiccan, too? I mean you reacted to…” He trails off as he gestures to the painting, back to Virago, shuts his mouth. Waits.
Virago looks to me, and I nod, once. Now’s as good a time as ever.
And there’s really no use beating around the bush.
Which is exactly what Virago does not do.
She stands full to attention, rolling her shoulders back, her chin up, and her face resolved. Then Virago reaches over her shoulder and pulls her sword out of the scabbard (that she ecstatically was able to put back on again once we left the mall), now pulling it over her head and thunking it down so that the pointed end lands surely in the carpeting at her feet. She kneels down, head against the pommel, touching her heart with her fingers again. “I am Virago, of the Knights of Arktos City, capital of Arktos of the world of Agrotera. The lady Holly, your sister, said that you might be able to aid me in my quest, sir Aidan. I am hoping that you can.”
My brother opens and shuts his mouth again, glances up at me with wide eyes, then back down at Virago. Then he smiles, chuckling a little, sprawling back in his favorite too-stuffed chair (not surprisingly, a velvet purple number). “God, Holly loves all this chivalry stuff,” he says then, practically giggling as he hooks his thumb to point toward me. “She has since she was little. You’re very convincing, by the way. And I love your sword! I’ve been trying to order some good swords in for the shop, but…”
Virago gazes up at him, her eyes dark, and she shakes her head only once, my brother trailing off into uneasy silence. “I am not from the Knights of Valor Festival,” she says tiredly, softly, as my brother shuts up, his eyes wide. “I am Virago, and I know that this is strange and difficult to believe,” she sighs out again, “but I beg of your indulgence to try. I am from the world of Agrotera, and last night, I was fighting a sinister beast on my world, and a portal opened, and we came together, the beast and I, to this place. And now the beast has gone missing, and I must find him,” she says, standing then, feet planted strongly hip-width apart as she hefts the sword up easily from its resting place, imbedded in the floor, “and I am hoping that you may help me,” she says, eyes steely, “because you are a witch. Can you do magic?”
“Magic?” Aidan splutters, glancing to me. “I mean, I’m a Wiccan. I don’t go flying around on brooms or turning people into toads, if that’s the kind of magic you’re thinking.” He licks his lips, shrugs, says in a smaller voice: “What kind are you talking about?”
“I need you to be able to open a portal to a place between worlds, so that we may usher the beast through, so that he may be contained, and cause no more death,” says Virago easily. “Do you have the ability to open portals?”
Aidan is looking at me again as he splutters, tries to find the right words. And then his eyes narrow, too. “Is this woman for real, Holly?” he asks me, voice tight. “Does she actually believe she’s from another world?”
I shrug, fold my arms. “Yes. She does,” I tell him, simply. “Look…she’s not crazy. Things really add up. She really might be…” I trail off. I’d have to show him the massive, monstrous footprints in my backyard, and my smashed shed, and—admittedly—he didn’t see Virago heal, but maybe he’d believe that she did if I told him. But I shake my head, sigh. “I know it’s very strange,” I tell him softly, “but she really does need help, and I thought—I mean, I don’t know what I thought. You’re a witch. You’ve never talked to me about portals, but I didn’t know if…maybe…” I wave my hand. “She just really needs help, and I thought of you immediately,” I tell him.
His face softens at that, and he gazes back at Virago, then, eyes immediately drawn to her sword.
“So,” says Aidan slowly, carefully, “last night, I was doing a spell for prosperity because of the waxing moon...”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Muggle-speak, Aidan. We’re not all witches here. Please translate for us?” I ask him, my mouth twitching into a smile.
He chuckles a little, but it’s forced. “I was doing a spell,” he says, annunciating the words, “…and the power went out.” He points upward. “Which isn’t unusual—I mean, it was a bad storm around here last night. But I felt a great darkness come into the city, and I knew something was wrong. And then the bowl with my herbs in it cracked in two. And I knew they’d absorbed something dark that was meant for me.”
“Aidan…” I groan. Sometimes, he gets pretty new agey, and I don’t know if Virago is following this, but she’s nodding, puts her sword back into her scabbard effortlessly, shrugging the metal blade over her shoulder.
“That’s good,” she’s telling him, and then she’s walking in step with him toward the far altar beneath the painting of the Goddess Hestia. It’s a low table covered with candles, a brass incense holder, and multiple statues of Goddesses—all his favorites. “The beast would have been repelled by any good magics,” she tells him, crouching down before the altar and examining the crystal bowl that Aidan points to—the bowl that I assume held his spell ingredients. It’s in two neat pieces, like this was the way it came.
Again, I feel vastly in over my head.
Aidan flops down in a chair next to Virago then, rubs at his little beard, gazing at her with wide, questioning eyes. “But I mean…” he trails off, looks up at me. “How can we really know that she’s telling the truth?” he mutters to me.
I shrug, mouth dry. I don’t know. I mean, Aidan would really be the one to know over me. He has faith in stuff, and I really…don’t. I certainly don’t claim to know all of the mysteries of the universe, and when I join in on Aidan’s meditations, I feel something good happening in my stomach, and I relax, but how he believes in the Goddess and that spells and magic actually influence things, that rituals actually change stuff in the world…I don’t know if I necessarily believe that. I certainly don’t disbelieve it, and it brings him a lot of happiness. But faith has never really been something that felt like it was for me.
Virago sighs, then, and she takes up her sword. She holds it out to us in her palms, and I don’t really know what she’s about to do until she nods her head to me, holding the sword out.
“A demonstration,” she whispers. And then she grasps the blade with her left palm and squeezes.
“Oh, my God…oh, my God…” I whisper as scarlet blood begins to drip in a steady patter onto the dark carpeting. Virago grits her teeth together as she lowers the sword deftly, and then holds her palm out to us. The ugly wound that stretches across her open palm is mangled, raw and red, muscle and tissue visible, as well as a small shard of bone. I feel like I’m going to be sick as both Aidan and I stare at that gaping, angry for a spellbound moment. I don’t think either of us have a single clue of what to do. I snap out of it a little, move to go grab some paper towels on pure instinct.
But Virago clears her throat, and I pause.
“Blessed mother, please help me. By your power, Lady,” she whispers, and she closes her eyes.
Nothing happens for a heartbeat, but then beneath her feet, the carpet begins to…well, the best way I can describe it is that the carpeting itself is glowing with light. Aidan and I stare as light seems to flow up Virago’s body like a reverse waterfall, twining around her limbs like a vine made of white sunshine, and pours down her arm into her hand. There’s a pulse of glowing light, and then the light disappears completely, leaving black spots in my vision. I blink them away as Virago holds her hand out to us.
I feel my heart skip a beat, catch my breath.
There’s no blood. No wound.
It’s gone.
Aidan sighs out for a very long moment, then gazes at me, his eyes wide and round.
“Oh, my God, Holly. She’s real. She’s real. She’s…” He splutters, gets up, takes Virago’s hand and turns it over and back again, gently pressing down on her palm a few time
s with his fingers. Virago stands tall, head bent to Aidan, lashes lowered, her lips twitching into a smirk as Aidan turns her hand over and over again, his mouth open. “She’s real…” He repeats, voice wondering.
“Can you help me?” asks Virago then, searching his face. He gazes up at her, swallows, lets go of her hand.
“I…I don’t know,” he says. The truth. “But I can try. Hell. Maybe we can open a portal,” he glances up at me. “The coven. With so many witches together, maybe we could raise the energy, and…and…” He’s thinking fast, biting his lip. “Maybe we could open it up on the full moon—it would give the energy a boost for sure, at least.”
“How soon is the full moon?” I ask him.
“In three days,” he says distractedly, waving his hand.
“Three days?” I bite my lip, watch Virago, but she’s studying my face. “Aidan, what if…I mean, the beast—it could attack in the meantime.”
“I think that it’s gone into hiding,” says Virago, glancing over at me with her steady blue eyes. “But I must find it before the full moon and before we try to open the portal, because I believe the portal can and will be opened that day—doors between worlds are thinner during the full moon.”
Of course. That makes as much sense as any of this. I run my fingers through my hair and shrug. I don’t want to get my hopes up. I appreciate Aidan’s enthusiasm, and his coven is full of very well-meaning people and really nice witches, but they can’t agree on what type of cookies they should bake for Samhain (Halloween to us ordinary folk), and if they should do a gift exchange or raise money for charity on Yule. They’re a splintered group of people with strong opinions, and them opening a portal to another world…seems like a fairy tale.
But I don’t want to tell this to Virago.
This might be the only hope she has in getting the beast safely out of our world and locked away.
As I stare at her inclining her head toward my brother, I take a deep breath.
This might be her only chance to go…home.
“Okay!” Aidan cracks his knuckles. He’s grinning hugely. I think this might be the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. I haven’t seen him this excited in years. “So I’ll call up all the coven members, and we can…I mean. I have no idea what I’m doing. We have no idea what we’re doing,” he tells Virago truthfully, and she nods to him, arms folded.
“To be honest, I don’t know how to open a portal myself. I can do only small magics, and I had to train very hard to be able to do those,” she tells us, mouth in a thin line, sighing out. “But I do know that to open a portal, the witch simply went to the space where she said the portal was, drew up energy from the ground—as I just did—and asked the portal to open. And it did. She was unable to control where the portal pointed as well as she’d hoped, but still. That was all there was to it.”
“It can’t possibly be so simple,” says Aidan, shaking his head. “And Wiccans…I mean, we draw ‘energy’ up from the earth, but it doesn’t glow like what just happened to you. It’s very much more…metaphysical than that…” He trails off. “Um.” He bites his lip. “So refresh me, here…what happens if we can’t open this portal?”
“Oh, you know. Apparently the extinction of the human race or something,” I tell him, voice small. He glances at me with a grin, thinking I’m joking, but the smile melts off his face instantly when he sees my expression, when he glances to Virago and she frowns, bites her lip.
“Not exactly extinction, per se,” she says, trailing off. And then she sheaths her sword after wiping the remaining stain of her blood on the blade on her pants leg. “Shall I tell you both the story of this beast?” she asks then, sitting down on the edge of a plush chair. “I think it’s important that you know it. You see, us knights had never faced a beast like it before. But we knew its story, and in every story there are crumbs of truth.”
“Yes, please, we’d love to hear,” says Aidan eagerly, sitting on the chair opposite from Virago. I fold into a loveseat, watching the strange, graceful woman across the way lean forward, her elbows on her knees, her face shadowed, her strong jaw lit by the twinkling Christmas lights wreathed around the room, casting the painted goddesses on the wall with golden light.
“My mother was a storyteller,” says Virago with a soft smile. “And she told me the story this way. Once, long ago,” she tell us, voice going lower, stronger, “there was a great famine. The ground would not yield crops, the beasts in the field fell ill and died, and they could not be eaten for they bloated with disease. And creeping over the mountains and valleys of the world came a great darkness and a great fear. And with it came the Goddess Cower…”
Chapter 7: Two Stories
In those days, the world was just beginning, and humans had only recently been molded and made by the gods and goddesses, and the humans were only now just learning how to build a life out of the land and with each other. It was the beginning times, and it was very hard, but before the famine, it had not been impossible. But now the people were dying each day, more falling, and they did not know what to do.
The Goddess Cower crept across the land, dragging her clicking wand of bones behind her. She was sister to the trickster Goddess Fox, but unlike her sister, she had no bit of balance in her, not a scrap of light to combat the darkness. Fox was a trickster, yes, but she was neither good nor evil, instead a marvelous blending of the two, as are we all.
But Cower?
Cower was all darkness.
“The people fear,” she hissed into the hollows and valleys so that the desperate words echoed back to her; she whispered again and again beneath the rocks and into dripping streams. “They fear, and they are weak because of it. Now I will come to them, and I will make them believe in me and worship me.”
And she rose up, with her small powers, and she came to the people as a drifting thing, made of tattered cloth and small animal bones she’d gleaned from the forest that hung in the air like a puppet. But the people were afraid, and they bowed down before her and worshipped her, because she made them fear. They built small shrines to her, and they gave her their last bread and honey and milk and meat, and they adored her because she said that she could save them. And she had not a single intention or a shred of power to do so.
And the goddess of wooded places, Fleet, heard the people whisper in the forest, heard their fear and their hope concerning their new Goddess, Cower. Fleet had been sleeping, had not heard about the famine or the fear, and when she saw how the people suffered, she rose up, went to the animals of the wood, and asked them to choose some of their kind to go and offer themselves to the humans so that the humans would survive. And the animals said, “Fleet, you are our mother, and we adore you—we would do anything for you. We will do what you ask.”
But when the animals of the wood came to the humans in their villages and offered themselves to be eaten, the humans slayed the animals, and Cower said: “look what I have done for you!” claiming the animal’s sacrifice as a boon she had granted the people. And the humans gave her the best of the animals as a sacrifice, and she lay back on her bed of furs, and she laughed, for she still held the dying humans fooled.
The animals did not last long, as there was not much else to eat, and the land was not yielding grain or fruit. And the goddess of sea places, Wave, heard the people whisper along the water’s edges, heard their fear and their hope concerning their new Goddess, Cower. Wave had been sleeping, too, had not heard about the famine or the fear, and when she saw how the people suffered, she rose up, went to the fish of the sea, and asked them to choose some of their kind to go and offer themselves to the humans so that the humans would survive. And the fish said, “Wave, you are our mother, and we adore you—we would do anything for you. We will do what you ask.”
But when the fish of the sea came to the edge of the water and offered themselves to be eaten, the humans slayed the fish, and Cower said: “look what I have done for you!” claiming the fish’s sacrifice as a boon she h
ad granted the people. And the humans gave her the best of the fish as a sacrifice, and she lay back on her bed of furs, and she laughed, for she still held the dying humans fooled.
The fish did not last long, as there was still not much else to eat, and the land was still not yielding grain or fruit. Fleet and Wave came together, as they sometimes did, to discuss it.
“I fear that, as we slept, our sister Reap is sleeping, even now,” said Wave, holding her hands out to Fleet. “We must wake her.”
So Fleet stepped dry into the ocean, and Wave took her in her strong arms, and carried her down into the sea. But they could not find the Goddess Reap. And Wave stepped dripping from the ocean, and Fleet took her in her strong arms and carried her across the land. But they could not find the Goddess Reap.
They looked over the world and the water, but they did not look beneath it. And that is where Reap slept, with her seeds, waiting to rise with the greening plants, up and through the dirt, into life again.
But Cower knew where the Goddess slept, and as time went by, she grew nervous that the Goddess would wake up of her own accord and set to rights the dire mischief that Cower had begun. For Cower, of course, had released Famine out into that corner of the world, and if Reap knew what she was about, would end it quickly and severely. So Cower took some of the women and men of the village, some of the strongest women and men, for they had survived the famine thus far, and she took them with her on a trek into the mountains.
And she bade them roll a stone across the entrance to a strange cave.
“Goddess, we love and adore you,” they told her, “but why do you ask us to do this?”
“Too many questions!” the Goddess hissed, waving her clicking wand of bones at them. “Do as I say, or it will be bad on you!”
For in those days, no goddess or god could go against one another, and Cower herself could not trap Reap. But she could order it done. And the women and men put their shoulders against the great stone, and they heaved and they shoved and they pushed.
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