The Witch

“A witch must learn to control her mind,”
was the first thing the young girl heard as she woke on the Mountain, bloody and covered in ash. Ice for feet, hair for a blanket, no clothes to speak of, just a thin dress worn ragged over her fasting body. The Teacher appeared before her now more lucidly than in the past; no longer a shadow thing, the glowing orb pulsated and breathed above her like a thinking beam of light. The beam spoke again:

“All things through fire are perfected; in air they are manifest; in earth they die, and in water they are resurrected, and back in the forge they will burn. Do you understand what I mean when I say this is the first of many deaths? This is only the first fire, the physical fire. Your body must be burned to be strong, the sword masters know this as well as any magician. Your life is no longer your own; it has a purpose, just as a sword cuts the air and flesh of the living, your life will cut the ideas and minds of the dead, to make them know they are living. Wake up, child, there’s no time to waste.”

The light burned bright and then blinked out of existence forever. In thin the thin air of the morning on the Mountain, gasping, bruised, and beaten, the girl became a witch.

Death like a mindless thing

The witch remembered initiation like one remembers their first sex; the tension and anxiety before the ordeal, the madness, fear, and doubt throughout, explosions of the mind and self at last as with the realization that no death is greater than the death of ego. But, like sex, these initiations vary in their frequency, and some may come rather unexpectedly. She thought of this as she walked through the forest where the bodies of hundreds of thousands of crows lay rotting, rough blood coagulating around their burst eye sockets like dried pomegranate seeds.

The greatest shock was she hadn’t seen it coming. Since her first initiation, she’d lived alone by the forest, as instructed by her Teachers, and built a home from the wood of trees she’d asked permission to cut. Forests like this one came from one root; in essence, all trees were the same tree, as all waves belonged to the same ocean. Had she just lived too close to them? Was she growing old and deaf? Her body was strong and felt the same as it had at forty-five, and her mind sharp. She walked for miles into the woods every day to hear their poetry as she gathered herbs to treat the townswomen of certain inconveniences. For the children of the forest to suddenly swell and explode without forewarning, no dreams or signs of their death, was of great concern.

She gathered a pack together, strapped on her thick sandals and wrapped herself in a brown cloak. The sky was overcast and no one would dare go near the forest today. If they did, they’d likely suspect she was involved, a situation best avoided for the time being. The witch walked out her door and steadily climbed the path to the Mountain. Whatever dis-ease afflicted the forest, she would not know it by staying so close to a dying thing.