#riverwitch

Come with me......

And you'll be......

If you want a fortune from one of my tiny fortune tellers, listen closely. Format your asks accordingly.

To Ask The Golden One

Choose 1:

honey

roses

bees

pollen

Choose 2 (can repeat):

III

IV

VII

VIII

Choose 2 (can repeat):

I

II

V

VI

Example Ask: The Golden One, roses, III & VIII, V & V.

To Ask The Red One

Choose 1:

RED

GREEN

BLUE

YELLOW

Choose 2 (can repeat):

2

3

6

7

Choose 2 (can repeat):

1

4

5

8

Example Ask: The Red One, BLUE, 2 & 2, 1 & 8.

To Ask The Living One

Choose 1:

life

hate

death

love

Choose 2 (can repeat):

1

11

4

7

Choose 2 (can repeat):

5

3

13

9

Example Ask: The Living One, death, 11 & 4, 5 & 9.

My first novella is coming out soon! ‘Riverwitch’ is full of witchy goodness, friendship, rivals to lovers and a heaping spoonful of environmentalism, along the sunny banks of the Waikato River. 

Preorder it here!

2021 reads // twitter thread

Riverwitch

Novella about a hedgewitch in Hamilton who senses a curse on the Waikato river and investigates the problem with her flatmate and the cool goth witch who seems to hate her

witches with cool familiars (ruru, bat, eel)

f/nb enemies to lovers

We tend to think of water spirits as existing in rivers, lakes, and oceans. Yet water itself exists within the earth throughout the globe. The "water table" under the land may be very deep, but it is there from tundra to rainforest under every bit of walkable landscape

As I sit on the mountain side listening to the crickets of the night air I think about the deep wells that surround this isolated cabin. The various springs and water mines that dot the mountainside portals to that underworld of the land's water. Pockets of aqua that bring life to the land and its inhabitants and often represent gateways into the otherworld of folk belief.

Each of these water spaces traditionally contains a spirit, often one with a history of local social interaction. The spirits of the wells of England are long thought to possess healing powers that were often later appropriated by the Christian church. Pagan sites converted to shrines of the Virgin Mary and her various saintly retinue.

This phenomena of folk belief in a water spirit that exists within the boundaries of a source of water is a practically global concept, common throughout world cultures. Yet in Portugal, like in Britain, they have come to have a long evolved set of ideas associated with them.

The moura of Portugal are often thought of as the Portuguese equivalent of fairies of the British Isles, yet they have come through a historic past that has shaped them in ways unimaginable to the average celt. Legends of Moorish magic from the time of the Iberian Caliphates ingrained in centuries long folk magic practice, romantic notions of hidden treasures tracing their roots to that people driven so long ago from these lands by Christian Crusaders. Distilled into a corpus of Cyprian related magics seeking to reveal that which is said to have been hidden by Arabic magic.

Bubbling under the surface of this landscape is an ocean, even here in the high mountains of the Açor, where the namesake açor goshawk cries above me as I write. It flows from springs to form streams and creeks that merge downland into rivers, ultimately flowing toward the Atlantic.

While these aquatic protrusions into the land, river and well alike, are often believed to be the home of some spirit or another, the water inside the land stretches in all directions unseen and underfoot. THe well and the river are merely the gateways to that realm of water hidden by the landscape itself.

My investigations into the apotropaic markings on agricultural buildings has led to a number of interesting documents of markings on or near springs and water mines. These marks, scratched into the soft schist stones, resemble in some forms those markings found near agricultural buildings that housed goats and other livestock. Yet more prominent near water sources are circular patterns, not always closed or complete, that repeat.

Found deep inside the watermines these markings have led me to more exploration of their cause, though local inquiry turns up a blank among the people of these hills. None of my mostly reliable sources have been able to find even a whisper of a memory of what or why these markings came to be in the watermines. Contrary to those on buildings, who seem to have as many opinions about there purpose as there are locals to ask about them.