Behind Their Backs || Douxie Casperan

4 || A Witch's Spell Book

Based (vaguely) on Season 1, Episode 4: Gnome Your Enemy

(Unedited, Not Proofread, 4848 words)
Trigger Warnings: Slight mentions of trauma

"For centuries, the troll and human worlds stood separate and at peace, divided by bridges that acted as doorways between our two realms. But the Gumm-Gumms wanted to devour all of mankind. They were led by Gunmar the Black. The rest of trollkind fought against him, culminating in the great Battle of Killahead Bridge, the portal to Gunmar's Darklands. After many moons, good triumphed over evil, and our great Trollhunter, Deya the Deliverer, locked Gunmar away, exiling him to the Darklands, and sealed the Killahead Bridge with the sacred amulet. After, we tore it apart, stone by stone. We left the old world in search for peace. We stowed away on a ship called the Mayflower, just a handful of us and some gnomes we'd brought along for companionship and nourishment. Finally, we arrived in a strange and exotic realm."

"New Jersey," AAARRRGGHH!!! interrupts Blinky's historical speech. 

"We kept walking. Eventually, we came across a new Heartstone, and we realized we had found a new home under Arcadia," Blinky continues. 

The two trolls, Jim, Toby, and I are all in Blinky's study, where Blinky is teaching the history of Heartstone Trollmarket. Toby and AAARRRGGHH!!! are watching and listening to Blinky with interest, both of them hunched forward while Blinky reads from the book in his hands. I sit off to the side, curled up in a stone chair while I work on homework— both mine and Toby's— and listen to the stories in the background. I can recite most of them, since I was around during the time this was all happening, but it's still nice to hear them told from the troll perspective. 

I left Camelot almost immediately after the fight at Killahead Bridge. I don't know the exact years, but I do know the fight was between 1100 and 1200 because of human records I have found in the following centuries. I was born in 1100, and that should've been a good indicator for me about when the battle happened, but wizards and witches stop aging at a certain point, and during that time we typically forget our birthday until years or sometimes even decades later, so I had no idea how old I was at the time. I do know that I was physically sixteen, because that has remained the same up until sometime in the last few decades where I suddenly felt like I was seventeen. I expect to feel eighteen sometime soon, because associating oneself with humans and refusing to use one's magic speeds up the aging process. My birthday is in January, so perhaps I can look forward to it.

Regardless, I left Camelot after Killahead and headed south. I had abandoned everything I once had in Camelot, searching for a new purpose following the final outlawing of magic. I was mainly running from execution and to find a place to heal from the injuries I had sustained at Killahead, but I was also running from the people in Camelot. 

There were a lot of people who didn't like me in Camelot because I was practically a master at avoiding execution, but there were also a few who hated me for other reasons. Those were the ones I was running from. Wizards, mostly, who thought that my pact with a patron was less than acceptable. 

It took me about two months to reach the southern coast because of various reasons and difficulties with my injuries, but once I made it, I joined a witch coven located there. I remained in the coven for almost two hundred years, raising younger witches and training myself, until I moved back north with a band of trolls travelling to a Heartstone. I was asked to accompany them at first, as my coven had gotten used to showing me off the passing travelers, but once we arrived at the Heartstone, they asked me to stick around. I built my own coven outside of their home and began raising and training troll witches and wizards.

I stopped using my magic before the Mayflower set sail in 1620. The end to my rein as one of the most powerful witches in England came in 1587. My coven ended the day I quit, and I moved to France.