I wouldn’t bother her. Not today. Best keep those formalities tucked away in your pockets for those mannerly friends blessed with visions tamer than hers, for those prim and proper ones with no magick to speak of- bless their demure and beige-suited ways- who walk the earth bound by rigid rules and an unwavering understanding of next-steps and to-dos. She’s got a particular heathen rebellion in her blood that won’t be ignored, you see, and there’s a new ache in the sky that’s pulling her northward, toward the wilds of the green-dwellers, the crow-women, and those faceless, lightning children.
Oh, you’d like to know what she’s after, would you?
She dreamt of those old, boar-snouted, lusty gods last night, and she’s woke with an insatiable craving for that heady brew of beauty, tree-speak, and a marrow-deep belonging to that ancient, mournful land of mist and stone. I wouldn’t wait up; those forbidden haunts will want to keep her until the moon is full, until she’s remembered how to hear the sparking seeds beneath the soil, until those dirt-in-the-eyes underworld maidens claw their way up through the moss, retching bloody pomegranate seeds and reminding her how to say “grandmother” in the language of snakes.
If I’m being honest, I’d say her distaste for illusion has swelled these last long years, and the only teachers she trusts are those with grey bark skin, unforgiving thorns, and deep, running roots. She’ll be kneeling at the feet of no one except that crusty, long-fanged blackthorn tree she calls the Bone-Mother, and she’ll be tending that humble milk-and-blood altar she built beneath her lowest branches until she proves herself worthy of that hag-tree’s best stories, until the jolly junipers and shaggy pines nod in approval and grant her just one tale of wild queens and their devoted lovers, of long-forgotten circles of slow-brewing sorceresses who harbor the patience of crones and the passion of hunters beneath their robes.
She’s going to let that land have its way with her. She’s going to strip herself bare of the weight of winter’s ceremonies and wait bare-breasted for her horned beloved. Those wilds will become her house, and she won’t be back until there’s nothing but pagan poetry, faery nectar, and wolf-howls spilling from her tongue, until the trees have told their tales and her bones have since twisted, thinned, and split at the end like the branch-and-twig fingers of oaks and the veiny-root limbs of baby willows.
She won’t return until she’s changed, is what I’m saying, and only the most feckless soul would dare interrupt the grotesque beauty of a Witch’s becoming.
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Those wicked hours before morning found me wrapped in human-skin leathers stitched from the puckered faces of dead kings and wanting a fire. I took my time. I gathered river stones still stained with the blood of my orphaned dreams and circled a feeble bundle of storm-wet pine wood, juniper branches, last year’s sticky grief, and the oil-slick skull of a holy raven who died the good death.
This moment wants a new anthem.
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I wouldn’t bother her. Not today. Best keep those formalities tucked away in your pockets for those mannerly friends blessed with visions tamer than hers, for those prim and proper ones with no magick to speak of- bless their demure and beige-suited ways- who walk the earth bound by rigid rules and an unwavering understanding […] -
I wouldn’t bother her. Not today. Best keep those formalities tucked away in your pockets for those mannerly friends blessed with visions tamer than hers, for those prim and proper ones with no magick to speak of- bless their demure and beige-suited ways- who walk the earth bound by rigid rules and an unwavering understanding […] -
I wouldn’t bother her. Not today. Best keep those formalities tucked away in your pockets for those mannerly friends blessed with visions tamer than hers, for those prim and proper ones with no magick to speak of- bless their demure and beige-suited ways- who walk the earth bound by rigid rules and an unwavering understanding […] -
A soft and sudden flicker of warm candlelight bade me wake, and I knew the wandering hag-ghost was haunting my halls. Every Blood Moon she comes, hooded and hungry for the spice of my human arrogance, skull-faced with bare jawbone dripping, cavernous eye sockets sucking me from my dreams like twin black holes pulsing dead-center in the wild womb of the world. I no longer fear her, this fleshless creature who eats my certainty, who drags her frozen fingerbones down my cheek and tightens her grip around my neck, who steals my breath for a moment before blessing me with her arrhythmic dance.
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