Spell Me A Love Song

 Lena fall into her Aunt’s arms hugging back as tightly. “I love you too Mom.” She basically was her Mom, her sister, herself. Lena was more than she knew. But exactly what she was always meant to be.

“Don’t forget me alright?” Lena questioned giving her Aunt a small squeeze and a kiss on her cheek. A bright pink mark left as Lena’s skin took on a pink glow. Glitter and shimmer surrounding the two women.

The wind picked up swirling around the two Lena’s hair kicking up into pink strands before she completely faded into the pink light whoosing out and back in toward Magica.

Magica wept. For the first time in her life, she was at a loss for words, because she couldn’t pick any that could make justice to what she was feeling.

The woman’s hands laid there on Lena’s back as she held the girl tight. Eventually, she felt as if the solid feeling of her body began to fade, and her fingers curled in desperation, attempting to keep her as she was. But Lena faded and, in just a few seconds, it was as if she was never there.

The memory faded. All around her was, once again, the town. All was the same, and nothing was amiss. Except for her girl. Magica was left clinging only to a broken locket and drenched in tears.

Lena as she knew her was gone.

Poe cawed and perched on her shoulder. The woman looked up at her cursed brother. “It’s time,” she mumbled even in her still-flowing tears. “We need to fix you.”

For the first time in years, Magica felt her eyes welling up. Lena was determined. And she was probably right. After all, she couldn’t well leave her brother like that forever, and life would be ever different now that the girl knew the truth.

“I’m going to miss you,” the woman admitted, her voice cracking a little. “I love you,” she added, and forced Lena into a hug - the first in a very long time, as well as the last in even longer.

 Lena fall into her Aunt’s arms hugging back as tightly. “I love you too Mom.” She basically was her Mom, her sister, herself. Lena was more than she knew. But exactly what she was always meant to be.

“Don’t forget me alright?” Lena questioned giving her Aunt a small squeeze and a kiss on her cheek. A bright pink mark left as Lena’s skin took on a pink glow. Glitter and shimmer surrounding the two women.

“Do you truly mean it?” Magica asked, almost incredulously. “I would… miss you around the house,” she admitted. Then, to her head, came her other sibling: Poe. Lena had to know about Poe, too, before anything happened.

“Poe isn’t a bird,” she stated. “Poe, my brother… our brother. He’s cursed. He’s not truly a familiar, but a cursed man. I was about to help him, but my selfishness got the best of me and I figured I’d do it after I returned from avenging Lena.”

The woman looked at Lena. “It was all my fault, as you can see. Would you, even then, be willing to return to be one with me? I am not our better half.”

“Then you have to do it when you go back. First thing you do.” There wasn’t any question in Lena’s mind about this. After all of this, watching this for the first time Lena felt like she was at peace.

“That’s very true,” the woman admitted, still staring at the frozen image of the two from more than a decade ago.

“But that does not matter, because you are a person now. The circumstances of your birth do not matter as much as what you have achieved. I know that very well,” she said, crossing her arms. “Though perhaps we are defying nature. In truth, I’m not able to tell what is more selfish: To forcefully keep you by my side or to forcefully return the balance to what it was at the beginning. Neither sounds particularly pleasing.”

What did Lena want, she wanted to live. But the last week was difficult, she had always felt tugs to nature, to Enchantra and lately that had been amplified. Look at where they were right now.

“A person prone to be romantic would now say that you make me whole,” Magica admitted. She looked at her younger self, frozen in time, and took a deep breath.

“What would you do? The essence of what you are… It would live on in me, for we are very much the same. You could say you’d be literally making us whole. I don’t know if I would earn your memories or your experiences. I’m not sure of what would truly happen to us.”

She took a seat next to the girl, on the frozen ground. “I think a part of me always hoped you’d grow up to be my sister. And another one assumed you would just be a temporary vessel until such time that I came across my magic again. Yet, it turns out I feel more like a mother than a sorceress nowadays, because you are neither my sister nor a simple vessel.”

Lena didn’t know what she would do in Magica’s position. But she maybe understood her a little better. The reason the locket had been tucked away. The reason people had gone magic crazy around her recently.

That could be her life now wouldn’t it.

Maybe it had been wishful thinking. Lymantria shook her head slightly. She did not want to waste this girl’s time if it was just a trick of light.

But what if it wasn’t?

While the girl wasn’t looking, Lymantria focused on creating a firefly.

This time, a full bug manifested, brighter than anything real. Lymantria gasped. It flew through the air. She tried something else – a delicate moth now, and sure enough it swirled into the space in front of her. Her magic, she could feel it through her, stronger than it had felt in awhile (while she was awake, at least; in dreams, her magic was strong, sure, and true).

It took a moment before Lena turned around. Recently things had been weird for her. People around her hot hotter than normal. Or colder than normal. Light reflected and plants grew.

A moth flew around the store.

“It depends on how you define a person,” Magica responded. Her voice was now drained of the authority and imperativeness that was so common in it. “If you strictly want to define a person by the way they were born, then I suppose you are not.”

“However,” she continued, “if you define a person by them actually living a life, then you are, by all measures, a person. You could also say you and I are the same person. You look very much like myself when I was your age, and you will probably look like me when you are mine. However, we are split, if that makes sense, and will probably not achieve our full potential.”

Lena for once didn’t have a retort, a comeback, some stupid comment either. She was left thinking about everything. She had lived a life, she made friends, was going to university. She had done all that.

Just like that, the memory stopped. It was as if time now stood still. The woman on the ground and the baby were both motionless, along with the snowflakes that drifted into the room.

“I suppose it had to come out at some point,” Magica’s familiar resonating voice echoed. She reached out to touch Lena’s shoulder. Except, Magica was still there on the ground, motionless. This was the real, present Magica, standing by Lena. She’d been watching, too, albeit somehow in hiding.

“You’re smart. You know what just happened, don’t you?”

Lena jumped at the touch, after not being heard this entire time, not being able to be able to interact with the world she hadn’t expected anything to interact with her. She thought she would just wake up and move on. Just like every other thing.

“You’d think a decade or so might make you forget,” Magica claimed, “but so far? All I’ve needed was this moment. You fools stand on stolen ground: My stolen ground. And you will not leave it alive!”

With that, the staff in the woman’s hand let out a spell filled with hatred, so powerful that she had to use both hands to hold on to her tool. The bolt hit the younger woman in the group that huddled together in fear, and with a painful yell, she fell unconscious. Whether she was dead or not, Magica would never find out, for the family’s guest had sprung into action: In between the girl and the spell he leapt, holding up the locket in his hand.

As if it were a vacuum, the ordinary piece of jewellery began sucking up the magic of the spell and, when that was done with, it reached into where it was coming from. In short, it began draining Magica through her very own spell, without her being able to stop it.

Realizing she’d been cornered at the moment she couldn’t stop the magic from flowing, she had to think quick and instead directed her magic elsewhere, putting her every effort into it.

Her eyes closed shut as she felt the incredible pain of her magic drifting away in two different directions, one of them entirely controlled by her own concentration. The effort was such that, at some point, she merely passed out.

As the family and their sorcerer ran away while they could, the woman was left alone in the large hall. and everything darkened around her.

When she came to herself, Magica saw she was not truly alone. Next to her, there was a baby. It looked like a newborn girl no less, and a simple touch of a finger was enough to realize: Her magic had manifested into this.

There was a baby, a baby made of nothing but Magica’s magic. Lena could feel the tug of magic. Pink energy bleeding from her skin as the energy bled from the baby’s skin but unlike Lena where it tugged in different directions it swirled around the baby.

Lena could have run to her Aunt. To check on her but she had already learned she couldn’t do anything. This baby though. This baby was her wasn’t it.

Lena wasn’t even human was she? She was magic. She was nothing. She was a mistake.

Rubbing the tears that streamed down her cheeks Lena walked over to the baby moving to pick her up and her hand went right through her. Tugging more at Lena’s magic. Leaving her so utterly breathless on the ground trying to stop the tug of energy from her own heart.

But there her Aunt was reaching out for the baby the way Lena hadn’t been able to.

But Aunt wasn’t the right word was it?

As far as Magica was concerned, nobody was talking to her. That was quite upsetting, because she expected the people in this house to, at the very least, put up a fight or beg for their lives.

It angered her that they did neither. And so, she marched forward, and pulled the large doors at the end of the hall open. Within, as expected, was the opulent family who’d ruined her life without blinking by ending her sister’s life. With them, however, was a stranger.

A powerful stranger.

“Your rampage ends here, witch!” the person exclaimed, and pulled out the familiar locket along with a wand. “Turn back and let go of this matter, or regret it forever.”

Magica frowned and then laughed at the man. “What are you going to do? I can tell your magic is mediocre, and you don’t even know who you’re helping,” she said, scoffing even though tears built up in her eyes. “I can feel your fear. I can feel all of it. And yet it seems there’s no regret lingering anywhere.”

The sorceress finally pointed the staff at the scared family. “This is how your story ends, fools.”

Okay Lena needed to be smart about this. She had to. Something was up and even with her head twisting into spirals she couldn’t even read herself. She stopped mid run paying attention to the little details now.

The locket that was her Aunts. How young her Aunt was. Her name. It wasn’t her that had died. It was her Mom.

For some reason she could not explain, Lymantria got the urge to conjure fireflies. Something about country music made her think about sitting on a back porch somewhere on a muggy summer night – of course, a hyper idealized version as were all her illusions, but she wanted it right now so badly. Something idyllic. Something far from here.

She followed the blonde girl into the store, holding out her hand slightly, wishing that she could conjure that summer night, when –

“Oh!” she gasped, something light fluttering out of her palm. She blinked. It was gone now, but she could feel it – her magic – rushing at her fingertips.

Breathlessly, she asked, “Did you see anything?”

Lena wasn’t always the most observant. Not when she wasn’t out exploring. Really there was nothing exciting going on in a record store.

She did however notice a trick of light or something of the sort.

Seconds after her calling out, a pair of guardsmen were basically shoved out the door at the end of the hall. They were private security of sorts, armed with guns that their scared expressions already knew wouldn’t do anything against a powerful sorceress on a rampage. The woman could literally see and smell their fear steaming off them like a powerful stench.

“You murder Lena and yet you hide behind closed doors! Have you no shame?!” the woman yelled, and once again pulled the crystals from the windows, this time the ones closer to the guards, so that the snow could bury them. Then she continued moving forth, her body not even reacting to the increasingly colder surroundings. “Come and do the same to me, if you’re so brave!”

Again her Aunt ignored her and the feeling deep in her stomach continued to twist. It was just a stupid Swynlake thing. It had to be. She just had to figure out what was happening. She just needed to react and go with it.

She just had to walk in front of her Aunt.

That brilliant plan was stopped the moment Magica mentioned her.

She wasn’t dead.

This time she ran down stumbling to get to her Aunt.

Magica’s footsteps echoed through the enormous building. The windows made it evident that it was snowing heavily outside, but she didn’t feel cold at all. There was only one thing in her head: Retribution. It certainly drowned out Lena’s voice.

She walked along the vast hall and extended her arms to the side. The crystals of the windows collapsed upon themselves thanks to a whisper escaping her lips. In one hand, the young sorceress held a carefully crafted wooden staff, and her robes waved with the wind as the snow closed into what looked like a palace.

“Come out, cowards!” she exclaimed into the echo, tossing a lingering manservant into a pile of snow. “You know what you’ve done!”

Her Aunt had magic, that didn’t make any sense. Unless she opened the locket without her. And maybe just maybe she opened it without her though Lena wanted to be part of it.

Wasn’t she allowed? She helped find it after all.