The Witch's Toy ✔

32: the witch's toy

It was more so warm than anything else. Inviting, even, if I had to say.

The first thing I saw was the fireplace at the very corner where a lounge room was, blazing a crackling, the wood burning so furiously that just glancing at it heated me to my very core. A single leather loveseat and a matching ottoman were placed right in front, but there was no one there. Photographs leaned across the wall on top of the mantle, framing two figures together. But there was no one anywhere from where I stood, despite how brightly lit my surroundings were.

I felt like I should've felt calmer, but my nerves stood at an edge, wondering how a place like this could have such warm colors painted across every wall when the exterior told of nothing but the freezing cold and a certain darkness.

Things were not as they seemed. People weren't as they seemed. Even sorceresses like Madame Blanc shouldn't take form in my mind when I didn't even know the first thing about her true self. All I understood about her was the fact that she'd been cursed years ago. By who? I had no clue, but it felt very close to my heart. When she'd spoken to me with that distinct look in her eye — the way someone who'd been betrayed did — there was a piece of me that cracked. Broke away a little like thin ice over a frozen pond.

It didn't make me less afraid of who she was, but more. Because I knew that people who had been wronged in their past were more frightening. More terrifying. They wanted revenge, to put their pains on someone else if not on the person who hurt them.

I'd felt it too — that same feeling. For years, I'd had it brewing inside of me, wanting so badly to make Mina suffer for what she did to me.

So looking inside this mansion, seeing it so cozy and comfortable when the person who lived inside it appeared to be the complete opposite, I softened a little. Felt that anger that I'd held at the pit of my stomach lessen. But not enough to forgive and not enough to justify her selfish actions.

I understood that all she wanted was some kind of company — someone or something to stay by her side, but she had to open her eyes sooner or later and know that the way she was getting what she wanted was wrong. You couldn't take someone away from another person just because you wanted them. That would be forcing that same feeling you felt onto them —that feeling of loneliness and disconnection you had yourself.

Closing my eyes, I brought myself out of my thoughts, distanced myself from them so I wouldn't be swallowed whole like I usually was.

There was always another time to think about all of this but now was not the time. Now, I had to focus on digging Raphael out of the hole he was involuntarily tossed into.

Pulling my hand from inside of my pocket, I let it hang by my side. I didn't need to use the talismans against Madame Blanc. If anything, they were probably useless against her. But more than anything, I didn't want to take Raphael back by force. I wanted to change the Madame's mind, see if I could help her understand that there were other ways to gain what she defined as "happiness" in life.

I was sure that this forced way didn't even give her a shred of what she wanted, anyway.

Raphael's not here.

Not on the first floor. It was for entertaining, for guests to come in. Perhaps for her ghosts to roam into and around as they pleased during the night. Definitely not where she'd be holding Raphael. He was most likely at the top where her private chambers were, locked away somewhere so he didn't have any means of escape and so that no one else knew that the Madame had him.

Gripping the stair's railing, I glanced up, saw how high it went in winding swirls all the way to the top. It was like looking through a rounded hole and wondering why everything seemed so far away when, really, it wasn't.