Names of Witches

III.
Names of Witches

Laionne is the Ashen Witch. All witches have an intrinsic name describing their essence, and it is granted by some sort of divine providence. Nobody has control over it, and nobody hears it from another person’s lips before they’re made aware of it. That may sound strange, but it’s because these names are in-built into a witch’s very being. The moment you become one, you are made aware of your hexensign. Additionally, when a witch lays her eyes on another for the very first time, she’ll immediately learn her hexensign as well. That transmission is difficult to explain to a regular human. You just… know.

Hexensigns are silly monikers that may or may not hold any water. For example, I am the Auburn Witch. Does this have any significance besides the colour of my hair? Well, the orbs on my staff are red, but those would better be described as bloody, scarlet or crimson. So it’s probably stupidly arbitrary. There’s also a rule that no two witches may share the same hexensign, even if a thousand years removed. (Would 1001 years be fine then?) This leads me to believe that ‘divine providence’ is simply running out of ideas, hence my undescriptive sign.

It’s also the more convenient thing for me to believe, because Laionne is the Ashen Witch. I’d much rather think that her hexensign is based on the colour of her locks, or maybe her skin, instead of some messed up prophecy that she’ll leave everything in ashes. Many witches get swept up by such beliefs; the Burning Witch will burn at the stake; the Dark Witch will bring calamity and darkness; the Emerald Witch will be sold off like a precious stone. Fortune tellers and prophecies are the bane of living happily, so I’ll wave them off and keep moving in my own direction. If I believed in such nonsense, I would’ve followed in the footsteps of everyone else who had abandoned this girl, like a total and complete moron.

So, Laionne is the Ashen Witch because her hair is the colour of ash, or maybe it’s because of her pure destructive power. You may think this contradicts my previous statement, but there’s a league of difference between dooming your loved ones and controlled annihilation.

I had the chance to witness the calibre of her strength during our first witchcraft lesson. We were facing each other in the outermost courtyard, the petals of the flowers around us reflecting the perfect summer sky, to the point it almost felt like we were floating. There hovered a single, puffy cloud high above out heads, and I instructed her in order to gauge her abilities.

“Alrighty, Lai-o. To begin, I need you to summon your staff, okay?”

“It shall be done.”

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “An ‘okay’ is fine! Ah, well… I guess I shouldn’t impose on you. Here, always make sure to summon it without pointing at anyone. Safety first.”

I bit my thumb to draw blood and extended my arm fully to the side. The thin stream of red liquid bubbled as if boiling, and then expanded rapidly into the shape of my staff. Much like hexensigns, staves are emblematic of a witch’s essence. Mine takes the shape of a dark, steel rod, with bended gold snaking around it in an angular spiral. It reaches its zenith with a velvety grip, followed by a golden, horned crown holding a large, crimson orb of power, and a second, smaller orb that I use as a focusing iris. It’s a bit sinister and elaborate, but nowhere near as haughty as it gets. There’s a certain misguided view; the more orbs and the more complex her staff, the stronger a witch is. However, this only signals that she’s heavily specialized towards a singular spell or purpose—like a key with many teeth that can only open its own lock, versus the universal lock pick. Sure she’s probably unrivalled in her field, but an overly sophisticated staff tells me you’re lacking in a thousand general ways I’m free to exploit.

Laionne was the lock pick, or maybe an unstoppable skeleton key.

She mirrored my movements, but had no need for blood due to her alignment. She just snapped her fingers at her side, and this was enough to tear open a cerulean rift from which she drew her own staff. Hers is a lot shorter than mine, half-way between a staff and a wand, and its body consists of perfect silver, snaking into two spirals at both ends in a shape similar to a tornado. The wider end holds a deep blue orb, glowing with so much force it’s blinding to look straight into it. It’s deceptive and deadly simplicity.

“Right, just being near it makes my hair stand on end, haha…” I commented half-jokingly, but it wasn’t a lie that her staff’s mere presence supercharged the air in the courtyard. “We draw our mana from different planes, but there’s simple things any witch can do. I’d like you to point your staff at that cloud, channel in your mana through your thumb, and just fire it like a beam. Let me demonstrate.”

I struck a dramatic pose, grinning smugly as I directed my weapon and began the charging process. The winds picked up in my vicinity, crimson lightning crackling around me with increasing frequency, and my hair bellowed, whipping my face. Then. . .

Bwoom!!

Blasting off faster than sound, a ray of hyper-focused energy shot out from my staff. It was thinner than yarn, but it left a gaping hole in the fat cumulus cloud, dissipating shortly after. I placed my free hand at my hip.

“Ta-tah! Just like that. If you can blow a hole larger than mine, I’ll reward you with some head-pats, how about that? Well, don’t get your hopes up! Natural talents or not, it’ll take some time to surpass your teach—!!”

Without any build-up, I was deafened by a witching-roar I can’t hope to recreate in onomatopoeia.

The column of violent, blue hellfire she’d conjured had to have been at least 5 meters in diameter. Unlike my traveling beam, it was instantaneous, lasting for a good three seconds before slowly splitting apart and fading away. It reached from her staff all the way to the stars and beyond, probably blowing holes through the luminaries of the Inner Plane along its path. The whole country must’ve been swallowed up in the light she’d created, and afterwards no indicator remained that the cloud had ever existed in the sky. I stared with my mouth agape like a bewildered pillar of salt. What I saw that day was utterly insane.

“It’s terrible, is it not?” She spoke as blankly as ever, though her breathing seemed shallow. “Even if I hold back and use as little mana as possible, this kind of reaction… Haah.”

“N-No! Not at all! That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen! I don’t know what to say! Hey, Lai-o—“

I had to stop myself from gushing when I’d finally pried my eyes from the sky and back to her. The tips of her locks had been set aflame with blue smoulders, and an unnaturally goopy trickle of blood was dripping from her nose. She hadn’t held back at all. To her, ‘little’ had an entirely different meaning from someone like me, like an elephant trying to comprehend what ‘tiny’ means to a fly. If it tried to feed the fly with a portion it considered ‘small’ for itself, the fly would still explode after the second bite. As a result of this inconsistency, Laionne had fried her body, which still belonged to a human.

I cried out to her, “Laionne! You hurt yourself!” My immediate instinct had been to scold her, but the sight of her forced me to hurry over instead. I caught her just as her eyes were growing unfocused and her balance unsteady, lowering the both of us and allowing her head to rest on my knees. Inadvertently keeping my petulant promise, I stroked her hair carefully.

“You worry about everyone else, but your power’s sapping away your lifespan most of all. Does this happen every time? That’s terrible...” In my mind, I had sworn a resolution. I would acclimate her to the fly’s definition of ‘little.’

“As it is above, so it is below.”

Yeah, I’m sure she said her strange catchphrase at that time. She must’ve learned it from a treatise on alchemy.

“You know, you can’t just use that like a ‘c'est la vie’ or something…”

I ended up nursing her back to health afterward, so I can look back on it as a silly incident. I did hear it caused one hell of a panic with the nearby villagers for well over a week though.