Enchantment

Chapter One

A small explosion started Willa's morning off with a start. Surprisingly, it wasn't the first time she'd blown something up and it most likely wouldn't be the last. She had zoned out while brewing again and had left her potion on the heat for just a bit too long. It was still salvageable, but the mess that it made was dreadful nonetheless. Thick liquid now splattered from the pot and onto every surrounding surface. Willa was pretty sure there was even some in her hair.

After quickly removing the pot off the stove, Willa grabbed the rags she had on hand for incidents like this and quickly soaked up the potion. She was lucky it was just a cosmetic potion and not a medicinal one, or else she could have been in quite a bit of trouble.

Sunlight started to filter in through the back windows of her cottage. She was glad there didn't seem to be any grey skies this morning. Her indoor plants needed plenty of sunshine after the past week of dreary gray days and rain showers, not to mention the needs of her garden.

Quickly, Willa gathered up the rags and placed them in a basket for her to wash and deal with later. She checked the list of orders that needed to be finished and made a mental list of ingredients she still needed to grab from the garden. It was a perk that she didn't have to go very far or pay for the potion ingredients she used, well most of them anyway.

Willa checked the old wooden clock hanging on her kitchen wall and realized that there were only a few minutes left until it was time for the shop to have customers start coming by. She lived and worked out of her family's cottage so the process of opening up each day was pretty simple, she just had to walk downstairs and unlock the door.

The Arcen cottage sat at the base of a steep hill, nestled in the forest that bordered town. A few families from Cedre built houses in the forest a few decades ago to gain some semblance of privacy that couldn't be found while living in the town's center. Before families started building in the forest, there were only two options. In the town itself, where houses were packed together tightly and then surrounded by shops and town buildings, or the farmland leading into town where the biggest houses and families lived. Not many wanted to make the venture into the forest just for privacy, and others were scared of the wildlife that roamed the woods. So the families that did make a life there got plenty of privacy and space to themselves. 

Willa loved living in the forest. Her cottage had no neighbors in sight and the trip into town was a manageable 20-minute walk. She had a nice-sized backyard which was really just where her father had cleared out some of the forest's trees to surprise Willa's mother with a garden as a gift. The garden was fenced in to protect it from any wandering critter's appetite. Not that they would have enjoyed the stomach ache that would have come with the stolen snack they may have managed to nibble. As magical herbs tend to cause more harm than good when they were eaten raw instead of prepared in potions or bundles. There was a sweet picnic table, which was a new addition to the garden, and it sat in one of the only empty spots of the garden by the backdoor. It currently had quite a few herbs laying out to dry.

To finish her morning prep, Willa went out to the garden to check up on some of the herbs that laid on the picnic table and even a few berries from the bushes on the fenced edge of the garden. The berries weren't for potions, but for breakfast. She had brought a mug of tea with her on her short adventure which had surprisingly made it out unscathed from the morning's potion explosion. It was a soothing routine of Willa's to have a mug of hot tea while opening the shop up. While she checked on each of the herbs lying on the table to see if they were dry enough to be usable in the orders, she sipped from the mug. 

Scrunching her nose up, Willa sighed as she placed the herbs back on the table. They weren't quite ready to be added to the herb bundles as she had hoped they would be. It was okay since she was not in a time crunch, but it was slightly disappointing since she had wanted to finish that specific order early so she could have more free time later in the week.