The sun beat down on the craggy pond as college students enjoyed their spring break in its cool water; they’d been coming for years, decades maybe. Lying under the warm shade of an oak tree that had wound its way up through the stone and was now strangling the same rock that once threatened to suffocate it. It was the eternal struggle played out over centuries.
Open to a page on thistles, the magical remedies book I’d been scouring was now leaning on my knees as I shut my eyes. Normally, I would have hidden the book from the crowd, but no one had so much as glanced at me all day. It wasn’t imperative that I commit the magical properties of the thistle to memory for the night’s excursion, but I’d recently discovered that a lot of plants crossed realms and I may one day need to know that I could patch a poisoned wound with thistle viscera.
“Hey, what are you looking at, witch?” a boy yelled as I felt myself drifting off.
Groaning, I sat up to face my accuser. He was in one of my classes, I was sure, but I didn’t remember which. Dyed blond hair and a tan this early in the season gave him the obvious appearance of someone who cared deeply about their looks. Because he was already picking his way up the stone path to the jumping-off point, I knew he’d been holding his tongue for a while. Even I couldn’t have read the cover of a book from that distance.
“Oh, I’m planning to poison the whole campus,” I replied loudly. People glanced over at me with interest and concern, but they knew I was joking, probably.
The kid smirked and spat, “Why not just use your powers to do it? Are you as poor a witch as you are a physics student?” Ah, he was from my physics class. To be fair, I was excellent at that course; I just didn’t want people to think I was too good since everyone already knew I was into occult stuff. For normal people, it was a short leap from that to putting spells on my tests.
“Because I’m trying to keep a low profile, you idiot,” I shouted as loudly as I could while lying down.
“Freak!” he called, stepping up to the edge of the topmost outcrops and making a show of preparing for his dive. I sucked in a breath, pulled a shard of slate from the dirt to my right, and whispered a spell to it. High above the pool, the boy’s brows furrowed, and he hopped between his feet as though the stone were on fire. “Freak! Knock it off!” he cried as he was forced to step back and lose his audience.
Grinning up at him, I asked, “What, exactly, do you think I’ve done now?” I leaned back and shut my eyes again.
“You made the stone too hot to stand on!” he replied, his voice higher than he wanted.
“Hmm, I think you’re confusing me with the sun,” I murmured drowsily.
The sun was completely gone from the sky by the time I was alone. On their way by, a few people had made derogatory comments at me, but most people were used to ignoring the witch. Stretching my back, I put the book into my bag and took the flashlight from the outside pocket. I made my way down to the water’s edge and let the beam of light travel to the very bottom of the pond as I set my bag in a safe spot. Carefully tying one of a pair of identical charms around the strap of the backpack, I slipped the other into my pocket and took a few deep breaths.
I’d been working on using an oxygen bubble charm, but it wasn’t quite working for me yet so this would have to be a free dive. Blinking in the darkness, I muttered a spell and pressed my hands to my eyes. For a second, they felt white-hot. When I opened them again, I could make out the shapes of the outcrops around me; this spell worked almost every time I used it. I pulled a pair of goggles out and strapped them on before standing right at the edge of the water.
“You can do this. You can do this,” I mumbled to myself, sucking in gulps of air and getting ready to dive into the freezing water.
As soon as I broke the surface, my joints began to freeze; I struggled against the pull to let the water take me. Moving constantly, I was propelled through the water and right at the base of the rocky mountain. I gripped the slate with my hands and squeezed through a tiny gap and into a larger cavern. Above my head, I could see the water surface breaking and swam up to it.
Breaking through the surface, I sucked in breath after breath of air as I got my bearings. Though the secret cave was underground, there was a lot of light streaming from the far corner. I swam up to the outcropping and carefully hoisted myself up onto it with my elbows. The whole endeavour was proving far easier than I could have imagined; I had been expecting traps or maybe poisonous plants to be protecting the cave from intruders.
For a couple of minutes, I sat just out of the water, shivering and soaking wet, and caught my breath. When I was sure I could stand up without my head spinning, I rose and pictured the spell I wanted to use in my head. Shutting my eyes, I whispered it and warmth filling me and instantly drying my clothing. With that done, I searched my pockets for the charm and read the inscription on the back aloud.
In a blinding flash of light, my backpack appeared out of thin air. Unfortunately, so did the boy who’d been calling me a witch. He sputtered when he realized I was standing in front of him and pointed at the bag in his hands.
“What did you do?” I snapped, ripping the bag from his grip, and placing it at my feet protectively. I glared at the boy and reiterated, this time louder, “What did you do!?”
For a full twenty seconds, he continued to flounder soundlessly. “I uh, I uh, but, I was, I, I, was, what?” he stammered, leaning against the cold stone wall to steady himself. I dropped the medallion inside the bag and hiked it up on my shoulder as I waited for him to put together an entire sentence. “I was looking for you. Your bag was there. I was there. Where am I?” he asked, staring at the bag as though it might bite him.
“Okay, just swim under there, then through the opening near the bottom of the cave, then up through the bottom of the pond you were standing beside,” I explained plainly.
When I moved to step around him, he grabbed my wrist and stared wide-eyed. “You can’t leave me here,” he demanded.
Tearing my arm away, I snapped, “I’m meeting someone here, and I don’t have time to bring you back through. Stay here and I’ll be back sometime in the next couple of days.” With that, I darted past him and stood at the crack in the wall where the light was pouring through. It wasn’t normal sunlight; it had a pale blue tinge to it and felt ethereal somehow.
“You can’t just leave me here,” the boy demanded, following behind me like an impertinent shadow.
Stepping through the hole, I realized we were just in another cave. This one was massive and full of crystalline stone. Every surface was more than covered in reflective surfaces that bounced like to every corner.
“What me,” I muttered under my breath. I walked carefully around the edge of a small pool of what might have been water and started down the tunnel on the opposite edge. Forgoing my flashlight, I let my night vision spell lead me.
“Help! Help!” screamed the boy as I reached a fork in the path. Turning, I considered leaving him; who was gonna miss a dick, anyway? “Pu-lease! Somebody help me!” he cried, his voice echoed a hundred times over in the cavern. It was like there were hundreds of idiots trapped in the cave with me.
Finally, I ran back up the tunnel and found him with one foot firmly stuck in the undulating liquid I had assumed was water. “What happened?” I asked quickly, kneeling down and opening my bag; that was about as far as the rescue could get without knowing what he’d done.
He stared at me as though I’d grown a second head and screamed, “What does that matter!? Just get me out, witch!”
Aside from the derogatory term, I could understand what he meant. “If I don’t know what the enchantment is, what happened, I can’t figure out the right spell to undo it,” I explained calmly. I was going to go into detail about how wrong reversals could go, but that would be getting into a terrifying territory I didn’t think he could take.
“I just stepped around the water and it attacked me,” he groaned, trying in vain to pull his foot out of the pool. As we’d been speaking, the ‘water’ had been slowly sucking him down; soon, he’d be kneeling beside it.
While I couldn’t remember a specific spell to fix the problem, I was pretty sure I had something that would do the trick. Delving into my bag, I pulled a tiny, worn vial out of the very bottom and uncorked it.
“Wait. What is that?” the boy asked suspiciously.
I shook my head and replied, “It freezes things. I use it on tea when I want instant iced tea.” That was true. Without waiting for a reply, I dumped a small quantity of the powder into the liquid and it instantly froze. “At least you’re not getting sucked further down now,” I murmured, opening the beginner spellbook I brought and flipping through to a page on ice and ice management.
After a couple of minutes, I touched the boy’s leg and confidently said the spell. Instantly, he nearly fell forward into the ice and I had to catch his arm to stop him from disappearing. “What did you do?” he asked as I read through to find the reversal.
“I made it so your body will go through ice,” I muttered. When I found the reversal, I warned, “This is gonna feel like you’re on fire for a few seconds. Just keep calm.”
Before he could say anything, I did the spell and he shouted in agony. It subsided a few seconds later and he grumbled, “Thank you for saving me after you put me in mortal peril.” That was probably all I could hope for. “You can’t possibly be thinking about leaving me here, now,” he added as I put everything back into my bag.
“I was, but you have a point,” I murmured. Sighing, I stated, “Don’t touch anything and stay right behind me. And, here,” I added, handing him the flashlight I didn’t need.
We walked down the tunnel and stopped at the fork in the road. Pulling out my dowsing rods, I shut my eyes and started to go right. Something stopped me and I tried the other way, which felt right.
“You’re like a water witch,” he chuckled as I slipped the rods into the belt loop on my jeans.
Turning, I asked, “What’s your name? If we’re gonna be stuck together, I may as well know what to call you.”
“Jeff. You?” he replied as we came to a turn.
“Isabell. And I am a witch, so, yeah,” I murmured as we reached another turn and sunlight shone through the rest of the tunnel. Finally, we reached the entrance of the cave and I paused to reverse the night vision because it was daytime.
We both squinted as we stepped out into the light and Jeff sighed, “I can’t believe magic is real.”
To be continued…
Pretty Twisted Mirrors 