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Finally, she surrendered, and the flood burst out of her like a broken dam. And that was exactly how she felt, broken, incomplete. She cried for several long moments, curled up into a ball on the cushion of the sofa. With one hand she reached out, slamming it into the soft stuffing, frustration and sadness milling inside her. As she did, a cloud of fragrance was released. Lemon verbena. Just like the perfume that her grandmother always used to wear.
Hazel took a deep, calming breath, inhaling the sweet, citrusy scent and she could almost picture her grandmother sitting there, patting her hand with her own wrinkled one, telling her it was okay to cry, as long as she remembered that there were so many more things to smile about.
She had barely got the chance to know her grandmother, the famous Mira Domitreu, but she had always felt connected to the other woman. More so even than her own mother. Hazel wished she really was there to help her, to guide her, to tell her what to do.
A thought struck her then. This was her house, and her study had sat upstairs basically untouched for the past almost twenty years. With a new sense of purpose Hazel popped up off the couch, wiping at the trail of tears with the back of one hand while she walked up the creaky set of stairs, down the hall past her own bedroom and finally stood in front of the last door at the end.
It was a room she didn’t go into much, where her grandmother used to sit for hours working on new spells, or old ones. Very old ones. She hesitated only for a moment before pushing open the door. It protested loudly on rusty hinges, but slid open fairly easily. She walked in, looking around the dust mote filled room, feeling blindly for a light switch along the wall until she finally found one and flipped it on.
Dim light illuminated the small, crowded room and she walked in, looking around but not really sure what, if anything she was searching for. Maybe she was just looking for some sense of connection to the great witch, the type of witch she had always thought she would be.
There were shelves and shelves of dusty books and crystals, bags and boxes and jars of who knows what stacked haphazardly on every surface. A large, old wooden desk, worn from use, sat in the middle of the room still piled with papers and books and a small set of pens and inks, as if they were all just waiting for her grandmother to walk back in and resume whatever she had been working on.
She knew her grandmother, Mira, had been one of the most powerful witches in the country when she died, but still, they didn’t hold a candle to the witches of old. Mira had loved exploring the past, their history and ancestry, to try and find where the magic had begun to fade. It had been one of her great life works, one of many. She had discovered a treasure trove of old magic, but there were none alive strong enough to cast them. There hadn’t been for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Hazel took a few more steps, drawn to the book left open in the middle of the desk, as if her grandmother had just stepped out for a pot of tea and would be back to finish it in a moment, but she never had.
Gingerly, she lowered herself into the wicker chair and it creaked mightily as she shifted her weight against the pile of cushions on top of it. Finally, comfortable, and confident that the chair itself wouldn’t give out beneath her, she turned her attention to the book in front of her.
It took a long moment for her to make sense of what she was reading and when she did her heart began to race wildly in her chest. Hazel traced her fingers over the beautiful scrollwork on each open page, the hand drawn images of a type of animal she had never seen before, but it was the spell itself that captured her attention.
“To Release the Inner Self,” it read at the top. Hazel quickly scanned the rest of the words, and then again, more slowly. After the third time, hope and anticipation blossomed heavy and poignant inside her. It seemed to be a spell to conjure a witch’s hidden power. Just exactly what she need. It was as if her grandmother had left it there for her, knowing that one day, she would desperately need it.
Without even stopping to read the next page, she scooped up the book, scavenging the study quickly to find what she needed. The spell itself seemed relatively simple, she just prayed she would be strong enough, and the fates would be kind enough, to let it work.
