Thomelisa Taken XXIII

(I'm so tired, you guys: we did a lot of driving today.  So tonight's bout of writing took a lot of very serious Self-Lecturing to get my butt in the chair and my fingers to typing, and in the end it was mostly me trying to work more of the magic system out... which is to say, the plot doesn't really progress at all, and things also don't necessarily make sense.  But I got my 10+ minutes of writing in, and surely some part of it will be useful in the long run.  Happy Thanksgiving!)

***

It did, indeed, take me months to craft the spell of Greater Understanding.  And as summer became autumn, and autumn began to wend its way towards winter, I began to realize that winter, for Elisa, was especially deadly time of year.  Always before she’d spent it in my company, with the food that I provided for her.  Left to her own devices, she was perfectly capable of gathering nectar from flowers, or eating from tiny sweet berries that grew near the earth, or even creating miniature salads from certain edible leaves, and prying open fallen nuts.  But what would she do when the frosts came, and the plants died?  Not to mention that the first snow of the season might well kill her; even the tiniest snowflake could cover her face entirely.  My sense of urgency grew greater still, but unfortunately the nature of magic does not care about one’s urgency.

Certain components had to be left for lengths of time- to charge, or to await a specific phase of the moon, or a particular direction of the wind- and during those times I turned my attention to the problems of power and charging.  To the first I had no easy solution, but to the second I decided to spread out the harvest.  First and foremost, I would take a few moose- they were just as dangerous as bears, true, but they were also substantially larger, and for my current purposes large was more important than safe.  If only they weren’t so damnably solitary- it would take time to track them in any reasonable number.  Still, I could take them without permission.  The trees on the other hand, I must negotiate with.  Old growth trees had life force that was almost beyond the scope of my understanding, but adult trees (that is to say, trees with more than five decades) had their own magic- and that magic made it so that nothing could be taken from them that they did not freely give.  You could steal from younger trees, of course, but it angered the older trees, and a witch with any sense at all did not anger trees.