What we do on the Mountain

The witch climbed higher, stones leaving traces on her rough hands and sandals until she reached the slate plateau of the Mountain. Her hawk familiar flew to one of the twelve monoliths circling the center table, and took watch over the doorway to be opened.

She wasn’t alone when she reached the standing stones.

“You made it,” said the Warlock, sitting with his cat, both gray as the stones.

“So did you.”

“It’s been a very long time.”

“It has.”

Even with age scarring her face like fine hair cracks run through old pottery, the Witch’s green eyes shown like sagebrush in a rainstorm when she looked at the Warlock, staring out from the fine pale shale of her skin. His eyes were wet stones under river water, moist with regret.

She rushed to him, her embrace as strong and suddenly youthful as she’d given him at twenty-five. After thirty years, her strength and her body were as lean as her lust, honed from years of solitude.

In his arms, head on his chest, the scent of him unchanged, familiar, and true, she said, “Why did we let it go?”

“I don’t know.” He tightened his grip and stroked her long gray hair.

“The world is getting dim,” she said, “These stones don’t hardly keep the doorways open anymore. And the storm is coming. Lightning, but no rain. We could’ve kept them open, you and I.”

“But we let it go,” he said.

“If I’d only known…”

“I know, I thought you would never take me back.”

“It is part of the test, all who love one from my Tradition must go through it, you know the ordeals of Tiamat’s sisters.”

“I failed,” He said.

“You passed, Warlock. You are the greatest shaman and scribe of your people on this side of the sea. There are none more worthy.”

“But—I lost you.”

“I was always here, just the other side of the Mountain, shadowing and mirroring you, with my forest, my woman’s work, and my hawk.”

“And now the tide is in, and my fish are dead, my sea is a bloody thing, and my people blame me and send me to the stone gates for answers.”

“You know the answer, dearest.” She pressed her body close to him, and gazed up at his face, running her nose along his neck and remembering how tender it felt to fit her head so perfectly into his shoulder.

He sighed. “I know that the time of All-Worlds-Folding is here, that the thinness I’ve been feeling, the way it aches in my dreams, is a symptom of the change to come…” he looked down at her and their eyes locked universes, steady and pulsing like newborn stars.

“Then you know what we must do. Why the gods came to us. Why they tried to say what they said back then, but we didn’t listen. Too proud for our own hearts. But why we have to listen, now. On the Mountain where the worlds meet in the middle of the circle, and bleed out in all directions.”

“I knew you were climbing as I was, I knew you felt it, too,” He drew closer, their faces nearly touching.

“Some shaman you’d be if my heart or my whereabouts could remain hidden from your sight,” She edged her face even closer, the tiny white furs that cover all humans invisibly standing on end, the space between their lips electric and alive.

The Witch drew her head back like a cobra. “Will you love me, Warlock?”

“I always loved you, Witch of the Forest East of the Mountain. I always loved you.”

She drew her head in, eyes like a stinging thing, craving. “I always loved you, Warlock of the Western Sea.”

And with that, the Witch and the Warlock encircled, entwined, and completed the unfinished, empowered with the youth that both had thrown away, leaping on each other like warring, lustful raptors. A violent passion between equally dangerous and equally tender creatures, claws not mean to kill, tearing off layers of time and clothing and regret, biting not to draw blood but to stir beauty inside the other, sweet and ravenous and erotic all at once.

As the two performed the Rite of Opening, mouths and lips parting new doorways into the other, a cloud slowly enveloped the lovers and the Mountain in privacy. Flushed with fresh magic and the sex of two powerful magicians, the Portal Keeper under the stones allowed the ancient doorways to open once more, casting the two down into another world, which neither of them noticed, but where only the least of their adventures were about to begin.

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.