The Grey Witch

Chapter 1

Neo closed his eyes. They were burning.

He opened them immediately, banishing the horrors that waited in the darkness. He didn't want to remember them that way.

His twin sister Nao gave him a nudge. They were waiting for him. He was the eldest. He had to start.

Neo lifted his right hand. No, it was time. He shouldn't hesitate. He snapped his fingers and an ice blue flame raced to consume the pyres.

Nao raised her hand then, adding her raspberry flames, and their younger sister Kaede added her amber ones. Then a rainbow of other colored flames rained down on the pyre. He found a certain peaceful beauty in it; a spectrum of flames burning against the sparkling backdrop of billions of stars. Mother would have wanted to paint it.

Neo turned to his clansmen. Some had already started to leave. It wasn't often that the kishin lost one of their own. The entire clan had come together for today. That was a sight to see. Over four thousand kishin in one place; their antlers held high and their tails low to the ground out of respect for the dead. Their hair flowed like a sea of color over the black vailo they wore. The cold, dark moon on which they stood mirrored the somber mood they felt. Truth be told, Neo had never seen so many of his own people in one place before. They usually each lived in their own worlds, separate and alone in their gardens, free to create as they pleased.

Nao took his hand and led Neo away. He looked back for a moment as the ash of the pyre began to mix with the dust of the lunar surface. Their parents would forever be a part of the world they loved.

She pressed tight to his side. [How are you feeling?]

Numb. [Fine. You?]

[I don't think I'll ever stop crying.]

Neo watched the rivers flowing from Nao's eyes. She had hardly stopped crying since it happened.

[Neo, Nao,] Kaede slid up to them and hooked her arm around Neo's arm. [Kokuo wants to see us.]

The head of their clan wanted to speak to them. Neo followed his sisters to the meeting place. Kokuo waited for them at their parents' tsuki, their base of operation upon the moon built from lunar dust. From the outside, it seemed to be a small dome and nothing more. Most of the structure sat underground and was quite spacious.

They found Kokuo in the library. It was Neo's favorite room in the whole tsuki. It housed a collection of literature as vast as the system itself. Neo had spent hours among the stacks and had yet to read every tome.

Kokuo stood up from the desk when they entered, his obsidian magicks glistening beneath his skin, flowing through the rivers of his veins. Neo and his sisters bowed in greeting.

[Neo, Nao, Kaede, I'm eternally sorry for your loss.] Kokuo closed the book he had been reading. [Your parents were some of my closest friends. They'll be truly missed.]

[Thank you for such kind words,] Nao bowed again.

[I received a letter from your parents just before their passing.] He reached into the folds of his vailo and withdrew a folded piece of parchment. [It expresses their wishes for the care of their gardens. As I'm sure you know, they had two gardens. Nagana and Nakaba.]

[They had two gardens?] Kaede glanced at her older siblings.

Neo shook his head. He could see the green, white, and blue world of Nagana swirling in the window behind Kokuo, but he had never heard of Nakaba.

[Yes, Reiki and Aoto had been tending to their own separate gardens for years when they decided to be wed. They chose Nagana, your mother's garden, to be their home, but your father still tended to Nakaba when he was needed there.]