Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA
*** TW for brief reference to miscarriages ***
Every great gift comes at a great cost.
It's a truth understood and accepted in the magical realm, lending to a certain hard-hearted, unsympathetic acknowledgment of the pain. A yes, yes, so you were hurt sort of impatient attitude followed closely by, but let's move along to the important outcome: your magical powers have been released within you.
The magical equivalent of get over it.
For witches, the cost is steep. A witch doesn't get her powers until her heart is broken because it is in the breaking, the figurative spilling of the blood, that allows the magic to be released and invade every cell of the witch.
A great gift at a great cost. Pain for power.
The gift of magic always came as a surprise. Witches were witches from birth, but before they came into their powers, there were subtle hints of their birthright: a fleeting glimpse of the fae from their peripheral vision, an inexplicable feeling of power on the solstices, an affinity with animals or plants, but no true power.
"Táimid ar aon intinn, mar sin, ar na trí croí glan atá faighte againn." We are in agreement, then, on the three pure hearts we have found.
The assembled fae fluttered their wings in agreement, darting about in excitement. They'd spent the year searching for the human women most deserving or in need of the three blessings they were allowed to give on the Winter Solstice, a time of supreme magic, one of the two times a year when the powers of all the fae were at their highest, their most potent. Throughout the year, the fae wandered the world, they watched, and they waited for the pure hearts to reveal themselves.
And now, the night before the Solstice, they had decided on the three women whose lives would be forever changed with the gift they were about to receive from the fae:
A grieving woman who had just lost her husband.
A couple in their mid-forties who had given up on having children.
A younger couple who had experienced many losses already and were drifting apart in their despair.
Each woman would receive the gift of a baby girl. An impossible miracle but proof that wishes could come true. And when each Winter Solstice child was born, the fae would whisper the child's name into the mother's ear:
Magnolia
Alyssum
Clover
These girls would be a bit otherworldly, children of light and goodness, and older people who knew would say the girls had been touched by the fae. And they had been, but it was more than that. Any child born through the fae on the Winter Solstice would feel most at home in nature, in gardens especially, surrounded by flowers and trees.
These girls would be accused of being daydreamers, of having their heads in the clouds, of not paying attention. But it would simply be due to them listening for those odd whispers they heard occasionally in an unknown language that was somehow familiar, when the veil between the fae and these girls would sometimes be lifted for a moment before falling back into place. The older they grew, the more often the whispers came. Instead of alarming the girls, though, they brought comfort. A feeling of home.
If you knew what to look for, witches were easy to identify. Each girl was born with a tiny freckle in the shape of a heart by the corner of her left eye. The girls were also ethereally beautiful, so much so that people, whether male or female, would stop and stare, recognizing that the beauty they were seeing was not of this world. The witches were not fae but a blend of the fae world and the human world. Not one, but not wholly the other, a hybrid of sorts.
They were good witches with powers, but their gifts came at a cost. Their cost would be difficulty finding love and surviving the deepest betrayals. It took a brave man to love a witch and there was always something working against that love because magic requires a perfect balance. So for every good witch born, there was an anti-witch born.
These anti-witches had no actual powers other than their great beauty, an irresistible, natural allure and the deep desire to manipulate those around them. The redheaded ones were intended to interfere with the love the good witches found, and it was a double-edged sword: the witch's heart would have to be broken to release her powers, but unless that betrayal occurred, she would never come into her powers.
It was a crushing lesson every witch had to learn herself and then face. Love could strengthen and heighten a witch's powers tremendously -- but it was more a matter of the witch ever being willing to trust in love again with any man after being so brutally betrayed.
It was a journey on a lonely, painful road that every witch had to make.
It could not be avoided: every great gift comes at a great cost.
Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA
YOU ARE READING
WORK IN PROGRESS: Three Witches #1: Magnus and Magnolia
RomanceI fell in love with Magnus, and I thought he fell just as hard for me. Then my class got canceled and I went to the club house so we could spend an unexpected evening together. Unfortunately, someone else was already there keeping him company. My he...
