THE SKY WAS AN INKY BLACK, with a harvest moon rising orange and pregnant on the horizon. In a small clearing of evergreen, a coven of three crouched around a fire, singing in harmonies like threads of fiber, intertwined. Off to the side sat the Seer, one milky eye visible behind her thick bifocals. It’s a fallacy that witches meet in caves or sit around cauldrons. They aren’t afraid, these days. Many people sit around fires, and most are drunk. And who’s paying attention to some bitches in the woods anyways, other than the guy at the convenience store who gave them directions and sold them lighters and toilet paper on the way up the mountain?

Huddled, resplendent, leaning back to back, they watched the flames change color, licking up the sides of the branches, turning them into a cache of alligator skin embers.

The older woman was named Tyreseus and had come to visit. They hadn’t seen her in an age of man, and they were in the midst of an argument about her recent sex change. She was called Tyra now, and after years of hemming and hawing, she had finally returned to woman form. She’d felt like this was the opportune time to do it, seeing as females were finally beginning to liberate themselves. Again. It had been a cyclical process, and she had seen much of it in her extended mortality.

Baffled, a younger witch with eyes rimmed with black and freckles over the bridge of her nose spoke up, chewing on the nail of one finger: “So you lived as a prostitute for seven years, birthed children, and then decided to go back to being a dude for like three thousand years? If you knew that women experienced more pleasure than men, why did you ever change back in the first place?”

“It wasn’t really a choice,” Tyra countered.

“How can anything be a choice if it’s already decided and you can see the future?” The first witch responded again, impatient heat flushing her face.

The second witch straightened up from her sewing and cut in: “Yeah, I’ve never understood that part. It’s like the whole divine free will thing. Before I came out as a Satanist, I was at Bible study with my cousin, and she tried to explain to me how God was supposed to know every single action we would take in life before we did it, but we still had the ability to choose for ourselves. I kept wondering: why would God or missionaries or whoever try to change anyone then? Why try to make them pure and all that, if you know all their future failures, like the book has already been written?” She held a half-finished denim jacket in her hands and was piercing it methodically with a needle, affixing a handmade patch.

“It’s really more like a map than a perfectly scripted novel,” Tyra explained, slowly, patiently, to the younger witches. “I just kind of see it stretching out, away from me into the distance. Some things are clear, and some things stretch out so far that they overlap, and I can’t really distinguish their relationship unless I move through it. Like a map that charts the dimension of time, rather than space.”

“Righteous,” said the third witch, tipping a flask into her mouth. She was fingering a battered ukulele, making a casual, eerie twang. “I can fulfill my Destiny, but I’m not here just to accept Fate.”

“I think it’s the other way around…” the second witch countered.

The first witch continued impatiently. “So can you see your OWN future? That’s what I’m wondering. You knew Hera would turn you into a woman and that you’d be turned back seven years later, but once you knew about the nine parts of desire, you wanted to stay a woman. So why go in the forest where the snakes were in the first place?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, and it’s hard to use words. It’s better to show you. Here. Let’s do this…”

**********

Dive deeper into this magical tale in SN13: The Ides of March, coming out March 15th!

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