Chapter 9: Chapter Eight

I'll have to get up eventually. I know that, but--

Aside from my eyes, I go absolutely rigid at the agonizing grind of stone on stone. My eyes, though: I can feel my pupils dilate, my lids drawing back in mute, motionless terror. It's not coming from the entry way. It's coming from my left. From the north face of the chamber.

I don't dare turn my head, and yet, I have to turn my head.

That depressing corner, that angle-wedge-thing built into the room, is splitting wide like a giant, sideways bird's beak. And within? A passage. A passage surging with pale bluish light, with rays I can see flowing like tides of silk, and licks of fire, and brief lightning arcs.

I sit up. Face it.

"Uh," I call, "Guten abend! Ich muss mich entschuldigung--ich bin einer Amerikaner studentin!"

No answer. The beak-doors grind to a halt, fully open. I scramble back over the altar. Now that I look at the engraving, I can see the triangular shapes of the beak-doors still faintly present around the carved passageway. Is my brain just filling in a detail that wasn't there? Am I hallucinating? Has my sanity imploded at last?

… but then, why would it do that after I made peace with all this, and not when I was in the middle of a depressive fit? Unless Hannah didn't actually come in, so I never actually talked to her, and… and I've considered all this. Considered what it would really do to my worldview if magic was real, if portals to other dimensions were real, if demons were real. It would be so out of touch with reality as I know it that I'd think I was going crazy.

And sooner or later, I'd either have to assume that I was, or… or choose to risk being proven wrong. Choose to believe in the reality my senses and my feelings are telling me is real, even if every day of my life before that I've been told it's just a silly dream.

In a weird way, it feels like nothing's changed at all. I just have another path to take as the same woman I always have been.

"Ich… ich bin ein ausländerisches Hexen!" I call.

A snarl of lightning, a surge in the rays. The fire pours over me and yes, I scream--but it doesn't burn. It's… soft? The fucking fire is soft. It's warm, and soothing, and I feel… I feel loved. This is right.

I belong here.

I'm a real fucking witch, and this is a shrine to witches, a last vestige of the ancient sisterhood. I haven't trespassed anything. This is my home. It's not my fault I was born into such a fallen age that mundane archaeologists have more say than me about whether I deserve to claim it. But, then… it's not like the German authorities are going to be able to reach me anyway.

No earthly force will ever touch me again.

Well, this is it. I can always come up with another explanation. When the world becomes this open, when all the old rules fall away, you can always invent any new ones you can imagine and feel like the answer is right. I could say that it's a government experiment, a joint project of the U.S. and Germany on some next-level mind control technology. Maybe it's a shadowy organization using Moonsilver as a front to kidnap vulnerable girls for the sex trade. Maybe this shrine is full of hallucinogenic compounds that my candles activated.

I don't know if it's any or all of those, or something else entirely. All I know is that if I'm living in a world that can come this close to giving me my heart's desire, but still be cruel enough to reveal it was all a trick--of smoke, of mirrors, of my own mind--I cannot bear to keep living. So if going through that door is death, then that is the price I accept.

It might still be death even if there's no lie, if all my urgent whispers have found an answer at last, if magic really is real. If this is what I hope, what every instinct is screaming at me I see, if this really is a portal to a spirit realm and the reason the flames caress me is that they know me, they know the soul of a witch when she calls… well, I have to go. And since I've never found or made or heard of a proven one before, these portals must be just as rare as I'd feared. I don't know if this one will ever open again in my lifetime.

This, I know deep in my soul, is my one and only chance to make it through.

I push my luck. I have to. I'm too afraid of crossing that threshold. I walk back out. Drift around the encampment on the fringes. It seems like Moonsilver and company had their orgy after all. Now they've broken out beers while everyone takes a breather before round two. Someone has a movie playing on her laptop--oh, you're shitting me. Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost?

Thank you, every ghoul and goblin and warlock's revenant, for so sweet an omen.

"I'm Sarah motherfucking Ravencroft," I whisper toward the sleepy shapes around the camp fire, "and you can have this sad little world if you want. May your victory over the night and your denial of the devil turn to ash in your mouths. May the heartbreak of the sisters you scorned fall upon you a thousandfold." I make the sign of the Satanic Cross over my chest, and finish with a flourish, "Thus do I curse thee, until you repent of your treachery, and bleed from the soul as once you bled the soul from me."

A lightning bolt splits the sky at the exact second I lower my hand. Every face in that camp turns towards me. And I? I am as exhilarated as I am horribly, crushingly, endlessly sad. This is the last they'll ever see of me. I could do anything I wanted to them and escape into the other world. You can't improve on perfection, so I just turn and disappear up the slope.

Ascending into the night.

The worst part is, I don't think my curse will do anything. It doesn't have to. I'm only speaking to the future I already know Moonsilver's false coven will live. Because, the hell of it is--I think they do want to be witches after all. Even now, any of them could spring up and follow me, and I wouldn't try to stop her. But, they don't. That's why they're not witches. Not because they don't really want it, but because they've already lost themselves in denying that this world can have the power to take their power from them.

They're going to know heartbreak because they keep living on Earth. That's just how it is. Casting a curse on them that I know will have no power here, or at least, will only manifest its power far enough to take the place of the things that were going to happen to them anyway--a doppelgänger of the world-soul--in a twisted way, it's the only thing I can do to leaven the tragedy they're all headed for.

At least make it personal. A geas laid upon them by the power of another witch out of spiteful recognition for their own, not just another acutely impersonal demonstration by the world of how powerless it's made them.

I hope they'll feel that it's so, in some distant and unprovable way.

Maybe I should turn back and tell them. Try to bring them through. But, well… that's not an unqualified good, is it? There's no guarantee I'll find friendship or safety or joy on the other side. I can meet the other world on these terms, even if I'm walking right into a Dante's Inferno, where every demon mocks me for my arrogance and laughs at my cries for kinship before pitchforking me into the lake of fire with all the other lost souls. I am ready to die--to martyr myself for my own witchcraft. I truly don't believe any of those girls have faced these same questions, or answered them. It's not right. It's not wrong. It just is.

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I'm the only witch I can take this journey for. Sorry… sisters.

I quicken my pace back up the hill, suddenly overwhelmed by that same weird pressure I'd always get when class was over and I was the last one in the building--the one keeping watch over the emptiness, left behind. I'm so afraid the portal will be closed, but it's not. It's there. It's there, and bright, and open, and I'm so fucking scared. I am quaking down to my deepest fathoms. I am cold and shuddering and so infinitely afraid of whatever powers I'm about to submit myself beneath, and… and I'm going through.

I know in my heart what this will mean. If there's something on the other side that loves me, that's been wailing with each failure to reach me just like I've been wailing here, then the only reason it wouldn't appear in our Earth is because it just can't anymore.

I don't know why tonight was different. It's not the solstice--not that I think the dates associated with seasonal change have inherent power, but humans broadly assume that they do, and I do believe that human belief has power.

Am I benefiting from some last lingering spell of the old witches? Maybe there was something special to them about today, some older pagan holiday? Or maybe tonight is a night witches would cast spells precisely because it's not associated with important days of ritual and divine power in any ancient Germanic religions, so there are fewer and weaker opposing forces to dull the magic.

I don't know. I probably never will. All I know is that, if I don't go now, I'll never get another chance. Even if I'm still alive on the other side…

I'm an outcast. Deserved or not, I just am. I know better than anyone that life isn't just breathing and a beating heart. It's the people we live it with. I'm already used to the idea that social death is a real form of death. As far as everyone on Earth is concerned, the handful of people who I know truly love me and care about me… I'm committing suicide if I cross over.

And of course, people who like the workaday world always write the story so that the one who crosses will always come back if they get the chance. Those stories are for people who like this world. Why wouldn't they? It's built for them. What do they care if they're writing stories about people who don't, forcing pretty words and praises into the mouths of the very kinds of people their world has most hurt? What do they care if, writing those stories that way, they're really saying that abuse victims should go back to their abusers?

Not here. Not tonight. Not me.

Now that I'm here I know what I suspect all along was true, that this isn't a choice at all, and it never was. Just me, doing the only thing I can do. My decision was made a thousand times already. Made every time I woke up in the morning, and chose to keep breathing. It comes straight out of the woman I've always been working to become: a witch who is true to herself alone because her word is the only one she still trusts.

"Sisters," I say. I turn side-on to the entrance. I lower my hood to let my hair stream free past my left shoulder. "May the wind carry these words, spoken truly of my true soul, to your hearts and to your dreams." The rays and fire of the world-threshold pour out around me. They rush up the stairs, twine together, and dissipate just as they leave the doorway to pour down the slope. More thunder flashes in the night sky. "Would that I could say I claim this moment for all witches, true in heart and song and spell, forlorn in the mundane corners of the Earth where our betrayers have cast us aside."

I do manage some tears, at least, for all the little girls hiding in my head with their scribbled spellbooks: under their blankets with a flashlight, huddled in a library corner, or trying on the big silly witch hat because, come on, it just looks like fun. I know that no matter how fiercely I feel it shouldn't be so, that my word should move heaven and earth to lift them out of the soul-breaking sorrow this world will give them, I cannot save them.

"I cannot," I speak aloud. "I alone am here, though so many of you are as deserving, or more! I cannot claim to share this moment for you. No matter how I divide its weight in my own heart, the world of our birth will never let it reach you." I clutch my hawk's-skull pendant. "You must keep the dream alive," I whisper. "It's real. Please, hear me. I know this life will be agony, but you must be strong. You must stay true to yourselves. The other side is real, and you will find it in death if you do not in life!"

This sucks.

Is that really the best I can give? Tell them to live out decade after decade of broken hopes and stale, unkept promises because eventually magic will turn out to be real? After they die the thousand soul-deaths of loss, loneliness and disappointment, only to face the final agonizing terror of the flesh-death, just to find out at the other end that they shouldn't have had to wade through any of that and magic was always meant to be part of their lives?

Yeah. I guess this is the best I can give. It does suck, and I'm completely powerless to make it do anything else. I didn't make this reality. I can't try to take its whole burden on my shoulders. It'll just crush me, and nothing will change.

So, I carry on with my spell of eulogy: for all the little witches whose dreams, I know deep inside, are never going to come true in this life. I hope they still have the courage to live on into the afterlife when they die. I hope their hope hasn't failed, and they don't choose annihilation instead of reaching one last time for a joy that's finally, finally in reach.

"May the boundary-lines of this world, and the next, and the others be broken before death has claimed your lights." The heaviness of a spell near its final words settles in my belly. "May the day come when your vigil is vindicated. But… I do not know if it ever will. For myself alone do I take this chance. For myself alone can I claim this joy of flight. And, if the fates be willing and the spirits will fly far… for one other would I have my words sing."

It takes everything I have to force those last three words out. "I'm sorry, Daddy."

And, leaving my hawk's skull pendant and my phone on the altar, my spellbook under my arm, I turn my back on the way of return to the human world and the earthly night. At long last, every delay exhausted, every loose end tied off with what meager ties I can, I rush across the threshold.

It's a long walk, but the hall never splits. I trace the currents of power back further and further. Down rough-hewn stairways. Through gardens of smoky, ghostly flora in uncanny colors. Around plinths surmounted by basalt statues carved in the likeness of fanged creatures to which a cathedral's gargoyles are but childish parodies. All the while, a sulphurous mix of smells and a deep-driving heat grow heavier against me.

I round the bend and emerge into a long hall divided evenly between light and darkness. On the left, twilight sun pours red-orange radiance through a slit gap in the cavern ceiling. On the right, blue moonlight streams in from a gap of equal size. The two-tone glows meet and blend in the middle on a sprawl of sitting areas, beds, and tables amid statues of, well… demons. Ones that, I can't help but notice, have golden plaques inscribed with names and paragraphs, just like the dedicatory statues we use for any one of a number of real, historical people. Below, with rampways and lower platforms marching down to meet it, I can just make out the roaring seep of an enormous river of lava.

All of that is secondary to the sight of a tall, elegant figure in a deep red gown enhanced with gold embroidery. Scrollwork divides it into segments, and gives more form to the occult symbols woven at key areas. She has four great wings, the upper ones larger, all scaled and leathery like a dragon's, and a huge tail that lashes with slow amusement.

I mean, if I make the risky assumption that a demon's body language is like that of a common housecat. The tail's tip is steely, glinting, not a needle but a narrow double-edged spearhead--though, I think I can make out a hole at the very top, so maybe it is hollow.

Her limbs are shapely in a strange, ideal way that no human woman's ever have been: full without fat, toned without muscle or veins, showing bone without being bony. Her skin, if I should even call it skin, has a rippled pattern like folded steel--Daddy really likes watching Forged in Fire, and, okay, fine, I do too--except around her lips, where it turns to a fleshy pink just to give better contrast to the blood red of her full lips.

She's smooth and poreless, more symmetrical than any of those early attempts to build an android, yet somehow she feels utterly alive and not unsettling in the slightest. Her four horns look like they're made of pure iron, flanged like a medieval mace and branching out from her head like antlers.

And her eyes? Serpentine slits glowing with green fire.

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