Thomelisa Taken, Pt XXII

In the end I decided to be simple: I pulled out my knife, and began carving.  For as long as the rain fell, I carved, into the trunk of every tree, near the grass, facing all different directions, five letters: T WAIT

When the rain stopped I’d carved nearly ¾ of the available trees, and decided it would have to do.  It might have been a complete waste of my time, but it would have to do.  I wiped my knife clean and re-sheathed it, then took the time to bandage my knuckles and push my hair out of my face.  Finally I stood,  re-settled my back, and stared long into the trees.

“I’ll be back,” I said.  “I will come for you.”  I didn’t whisper.  I didn’t shout.  But there was power in my words, power in the promise I was making, charged by the blood soaked bandages on my hands, and I felt the atmosphere shudder with it.  Then I turned away, and began the long trek back to my cabin.

I walked because I needed time to think.  To think about how to do what I wanted to do, where to get enough life force to charge it.  Generally speaking, I prefered animals to vegetables when it came to large-scale spells, because it took a great deal less time to grow a new adult bear than it took to grow a new adult tree.  But bears (or moose) are rarely found in numbers to rival a mature forest.  And then of course there was the consideration of how much power it would drain from me.  Power builds up over time, of course, but most witches use it often enough that they keep a more or less reliable amount on hand.  I hadn’t been doing real magic- with the exception of the past few days- for years, so I had a considerable reserve.  But to craft this spell would drain me, even if I used some of the power I’d stored in crystals.  It would take me days to recover enough to feel comfortable leaving the house, and if the need should arise for more power, in my pursuit of my daughter… I shuddered to think of not having.  Unacceptable.

The solution, then, would be to find another source of power, to augment my own.  And that required even more thinking.  Taking someone’s power was always tricky- and even if one managed it, it had an annoying way of angering other witches in the area, who got paranoid that the thief might come after them.  Which is why I, personally, had always just killed the ones I’d taken power from- killed them in such a way that it looked like an accident, no less, because no one goes hunting for Accidents of Fate.  But such “accidents”, of course, required even more planning, and more damn time.  I ground my teeth, the beginnings of a migraine pushing against my skull, and regretted that I’d killed Ofrse so rashly.  I’d been out of the game for a long time- where was I going to find another witch on such short notice?