Minerva

Chapter 3: Echoes

The moonlight felt like sunlight to her. It was invigorating, like being enveloped in life.

Minnie had always thrived in the night. 

Her mother's line been nature-oriented magic wielders. Light magic, as it was commonly known. Her great-grandfather was a powerful healing warlock. Her grandmother had a green-thumb like no-one in history. Her great-great aunt was the keeper of the gardens at the vampire council's headquarters until she passed just after Minnie was born. Those gardens were known the world over, during her aunt's reign over them, as some of the most impressive the world over, with species thriving even out of their natural habitats. The Harlows were synonymous with life in the magic community. 

Even though all of the Harlow witches had been a bit fearful of what skills Minnie would inherit, none of her powers had manifested in such a malicious way that anyone would be instantly suspicious of her ancestry. She wasn't quite as strong in some areas the Harlows were famous for, but passable enough to evade suspicion.

Her strongest power by-far was necromancy. Even from a young age, she was always speaking to ghosts and ghouls, echoes of long-past spirits, constantly. It got to the point where most adults didn't want to be around her. She hardly blamed them. It was quite creepy. And after she brought her first body back to life, she had been all but banished to the Harlow residence in the forest, away from anyone who might bring up concerns about her oddly-received powers. 

There hadn't been a witch in a thousand years strong enough to raise the dead. Grandmother was afraid they would come for her. They being the amorphous term she used when Minnie did anything others might be suspicious. They might find out. They might steal her away in the night. 

Her necromancy deviated from the typical. Since her mother's power was pure, it somehow evened out the power she'd inherited from her father's side. Minnie didn't create deformed zombies out of the dead like legends described past necromancers. No. Minnie's power was special, once she got the hang of wielding it. She could bring souls back from the depths of hell, place them right back into their body. It didn't take much for a witch of her power to heal a body. They were present and aware, after she fixed their minds. 

She never told anyone of her special gift. 

She surely wasn't going to tell the wolves either. So she did her best to avoid any eyes, following the harrowing whispers without being obvious, until they led her to a courtyard on the most eastern side of the castle. 

All of her senses were on high alert, but she allowed herself a moment to bathe in the familiar moonlight before setting to work. She deserved a moment to breathe free, after all. 

The spirits had found her as soon as she was outside of the walls of the castle. The main building was spelled- she wasn't sure how she hadn't felt it earlier. It must have been done by an old witch, ancient magic, the type of spell she was so used to living under that it didn't register on her radar. But once she left the building, they found her almost immediately.

She ignored the spirits, or echoes, as her grandmother referred to them. They weren't really people. Most people weren't strong-willed enough to remain on the plane of the living after death. Instead, when people died particularly painful or emotional deaths, their spirits sometimes fractured, a piece remaining to replay the moment of death over and over again. Echoing their last moments, or sometimes hours, on earth. Her grandmother used to say it was to keep them from having to carry that pain through the afterlife. A clean slate of sorts. 

It was difficult to interact with echoes in any meaningful way. Minnie knew this from experience. It took a lot of magic out of her to change the echoes from their prescribed movements and mold them into a type of sentient being for even a little while. She knew to get to the bottom of whatever mysterious curse her mother had set upon the werewolf king, that was what she was going to need to do.