Despite the “independent” and “never distressed” damsel definitions Mateo had proclaimed herself to be aligned with once upon an evening, nothing about her current rendition endowed Briar with any reassurance. Apparently more disabled by a spell of shock than had originally met the eye, Briar lacked the patience and sympathy to coddle her back into a state of homeostasis. Sighting a couple of oversized feral dogs was an unreasonable cause to induce intermittent catatonia, even in the unlikely chance Mateo possessed a nasty allergy to fleas. At the back of Briar’s mind, encouraged by time constraints to regress the elaborate rigmarole of her professional practice with cruder methods, she recalled a prompt slap to the face usually did the trick of grounding a malfunctioning soul back into reality. Such an option only became more appealing when Mateo finally met her eyes, clouded by poignancy and panic before abruptly clearing, harnessing Briar with a focus so precise it was borderline stifling. Beneath the artificial gleam of a streetlight, the vampire distantly noted disturbance still plagued her expression to a startlingly unnatural degree — which might have perplexed her more if Mateo’s coinciding name-drop had not served to plummet her concentration elsewhere.
It had been a traditional peasant’s cabin comprised of logs and stone, with a roof covered in moss. Two small glass paned windows had been carved into one side of the structure, opposite the wooden door leading to a half-domesticated garden. The dirt floor was kept insulated beneath layers of handwoven rugs, imported textiles, and a makeshift mattress. Braided bundles of drying fireweed, hypericum, and meadowsweet dangled over the fireplace where an enchanted cauldron perpetually maintained its contents at just below a rolling boil. Upon one of the sole pieces of furniture, a round table, would sit two mugs filled with the golden liquor of long-steeped lingonberry and sea buckthorn tea. Standing in the doorway, Briar could account for every detail of the intertwined lives which occupied the home — an unimpressive collection of simple objects, yet significant enough to mean something to her. To them. On another occasion it became a place to bear witness and seek refuge, unable to move, after each earthenware vessel — the proverbial canaries in the coal mine; accustomed to being fired at temperatures into the thousands during the crafting process — was pulverised into dust by the detonation which engulfed every inch of the space. Sigrid had needed only the kindling of her emotions to have success at ignition. Without a doubt, the indefinite meltdown of a fire witch on a rampage rivalled the volatility of a compromised nuclear reactor.
Before her irreversible turning point, each heatwave had done something different. One made the windows shatter and swallowed their cauldron in a scalding eruption of steam. Two darkened the cabin’s foundations until charcoal scarred the walls like thick veins, expanding and groaning in protest against unbearable pressure. Three sucked all the air from the room, destroying Briar’s ability to yell cautions any longer; each sense sentenced to smoulder without repair. Accelerated healing had been rendered useless alongside Briar’s stubborn insistence she stand too close to the inconsolable pyre which had been Sigrid, repetitively subjecting herself to sear before the blaze’s source until her complexion ranged from raw and shiny reds to purple and blistering. The severity of her burns would take days to heal. Wave five was the most ferocious and irrevocable, exuding a surge of heat so nauseatingly intense it propelled Briar off her feet until she landed outside in the meadow, sizzling in the damp dewdrops of dawn. Pale ashes swirled in the swan song’s air like snowflakes, coating every surface in powder, inundated with evidence of Sigrid’s physical form. At least, when the witch’s body was consumed by an inferno decuple her size, the horrific scent of spoiled flesh stopped with her.
Accordingly, the force of the unseen blow had a knee-jerk effect which echoed beyond the boundaries of the memory’s devastation, sending Briar ( literally ) stumbling back on Seattle’s ground — but instead of the softness of grass, it was hard brick which greeted her back, digging in with enough force to unceremoniously extract her from the paralyzing hold of the past. Or was it a dream? Already rapidly fading to the point of obscurity, Briar’s body sluggishly calibrated to the present, entrapped by a thick fog of disorientation. She knew this place, this girl, this life — yet her head spun and her mouth felt unusably dry. Muscle memory alone guided her back on track, uttering the missing clues beneath her breath on its own volition: “Seattle. Mateo…” Without further ado, bitter recognition seeped back into her bones. Any lingering blankness inhabiting her form was eclipsed by her previous building simmer of frustration; all traces of that vivid mirage burying itself on the fringes of Briar’s awareness as her conscious mind took charge of tidily rehoming its lock of neglect, as if what had happened was no more than a baseless hiccup that perhaps hadn’t happened at all. The last relevant task of concern was all she remembered — and for no valid reason not yet performed. All she knew was that she felt, with every undead fibre of her being, inflamed with an enlivening anger. Without a target to blame for it, she both clung to and unloaded upon the next best avenue.
Roughly pushing herself back into an upright position, asserting her regained power over the invisible resistance which had cast her there, it was without hesitance that she stepped up to invade Mateo’s personal space, “The hell is your problem?” Both of Briar’s hands shot up to cuff the woman’s upper arms in a vice grip, “Did you not hear me? Go the fuck home.” A vehement squeeze of her hands emphasised the expletive, forewarning the spike of energy which unfurled along the lengths of her arms — charged from her shoulders to her fingertips — as Briar at last punctuated the command with a vicious shove.
What’s in a name? Names identify. Names bind and bound. Names give those that wear them powers. But names also takes them away. A name, unlike any other name, one rarely spoken, well... that kind of name cuts, angers, awakens. Sigrid. So simple of a name, and yet spoken it binds Mateo’s fate to Briar’s past, to Briar herself. The gravitational pull of the universe in full effect, one that had never been before crossed the boundaries of dreams and reality, Mateo searched Briar’s face as the other girl undertook her own cross-reality journey. It was unclear what connected them now, what had brought them together to begin with, all Mateo knew was that she was on fire and Briar was the spark. Despite everything in Briar’s deadly predisposition, Matty’s powers responded to whatever psychic connection their touch had brought to one another and it burned in a desire to consume everything around it.
Just as quickly their connection sprouted, it was severed by Briar’s aggressive touch to Matty’s arms, squeezing and grounding them both momentarily. The touch took her to another much hazier reality, one that Mateo had tried to forget but was cursed to remember.
“What the hell is your problem, child,” a voice snapped at her. A shrouded figure materialized in smoke. It startled her and she stepped back, an audible crunch under her feet. Matty looked down and found herself in a familiar room, a broken glass vial at her feet. She looked back up, the black figure moving around coming close. “I... I don’t...” she tried to speak. The figure came into focus, face inches from her, and she saw the face of her mother. “Don’t talk back to me, you sorry excuse for space. Do you have to remind me every day how much you don’t belong in this household. Clean it up. Now Mathilda.” Obediently, and without any control over her body, she kneeled down and grabbed onto a nearby shard of glass. “That’s not my name,” she uttered out, confused as to why she was reliving this.
Yet she knew what happened next. It’s a dream, Matty, wake up, wake up. You’re not that scared 21 year old anymore. Her thoughts were pierced by a warped disbelieving laugh and when she looked up again she was floating, feet inches above the ground. “You think you get to have an opinion. After I took you in, a bastard child, you think you get to have a say in anything? You don’t even have any magic. The only reason you’re alive is because of me.” Her mother floated around her, a plume of black smoke surrounding her. This isn’t real, you’re not real, you’re not real. Finally, the figure approached her and two hands shot out to wrap around Mateo’s biceps, hard. “You want to pick what it’ll be today? A little water? Maybe some air?”
“Fuck you,” Mateo snarled, spitting on the woman’s face. It earned her another warped laugh. “You want to play with fire, Mateo? Fine. Have it your way.” With that Matty burned, felt like her blood was boiling. It was a feeling long forgotten, and yet it felt like it had been just yesterday since it had last happened. She screamed, head tilted back in defeat, as she felt her inside erupt in that imaginary pain. “Please,” she sobbed when there was a moment of reprise, “stop, please, please...” The burning started again, and her shrieks with it. Yet in the pit of her stomach, something else was igniting. The longer she screamed, in pain, rage, anger, sadness, the more the pain dissipated, and the bigger the ball of heat in her stomach grew. She brought her head back up, face wet with tears but no longer openly crying.
Her mother met her eyes just as Mateo felt the hair on her neck rise. “I said, stop.” It was said, almost voiceless, like the silence before a bomb went off. And it did. Her hand shot up, grabbed her mother by the face while the other hand shoved the woman backwards. Both touch held an intense heat, an eruption accompanied by an invisible blast zone that sent them both in opposite directions.. And Matty’s entire body felt on fire the moment she hit the floor.
Seattle. She was in Seattle. Her back was against a dirty hard cement wall. And Briar, who had been in front of her a moment ago was now ten feet back, knocked down from a blast that she could still feel had come from her fingertips. Matty could feel the flames dancing behind her eyes, under her skin, in every crevice of her body. She was like an addict that had gone months, no... years, without any drug. The rush of magic was exhilarating and she stuttered a gasp of air as she struggled to cope with the intense feeling of the burn.
Like any rush of hard drug, the crash was almost instantaneous and she collapsed onto her knees, suddenly overcome with lightheadedness. She focused on Briar’s form ahead of her and swallowed heavily as she brought her burning hands in front of her eyes. Fuck.
