#( and revati stays super extra AS ALWAYS )

[bittersculs-blog]

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date: June 16, 2019 - night of a full moon 

summary: In which Cait’s magic takes a turn under the light of a full Strawberry Moon, and Something dark crawls into her mind and her magic. ALSO KNOWN AS: reasons not to fuck with dark magic, kids! 

tw: injury, blood 

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The Strawberry Moon climbed the sky, its pink light shrouding the world in rose. And Caitlin woke in delirious pain.

She couldn’t breathe, as the burning ran up and down her body, sinking deep into every bone. She was lying on a bed of coals and the air swam in front of her, thick as water. She gasped, choked and grabbed her own throat, feeling the fire inside it. Her nails tore at her flesh. She needed to scoop the fire, hot as a dragon’s breath, out. She needed to let it bleed from her.

There was a pink moon in the sky. A Strawberry Moon. It wasn’t her father’s tribe that had named it such, but it was him that told her what the Algonquin’s called it. It was the her mother who’d told her what that meant for her magic, even when Cait was too young to understand what her magic was. ‘The moon is a door, Caitlin,’ She’d say. 

Decades later, under the light of that very moon, Cait tried to scream. She tried to move. But her room was silent, her body frozen. The runes she’d placed on her body burned. The fire would wreck her in this bed and there was nothing she could do.

The black magic was going to rip right through her.

No—she tried to fight it back, though she could feel it battering at the walls of her rib cage, could feel its thick, darkness unfurling from her flimsy heart. No—I will not be a slave to you.

She opened her mouth and tried to scream.

She heard her mouth move with Its words before she passed out again.

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“The moon is a door, Caitlin.” Her mother says. “There is no other moon so universally beneficial a full moon. It’s the moon which begins the fading of the veils between the three worlds, until the veils are like smoke - to be waved away with a hand. “ 

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When Caitlin woke next, she found herself on the floor, covers still tangled around her legs. She’d rolled off her own bed. She was still herself, though, and that was what mattered—she could see through the haze of the pain her human hands, her human fingernails, the bits of dirt underneath them.

The pain licked up and down her spine; the magic coursed viciously through her body. The sigils burned on her and no longer felt like binding barriers.

She only had so much time.

Caitlin kicked with trembling legs at the covers still wrapped like mummy bandages around her body. She crawled to the chair at her desk and gripped at the chair leg with her sweaty hand. The wood began to glow red; she was going to set it on fire if she didn’t move it. She grabbed higher, pulled herself up, grabbed at the curved back of the chair until her feet were flat against the wood floor.

Cait took a shaky step, then another, and then she stumbled with the inertia of the pain out the door of her bedroom. The whole world spun around her.

She was going to die. She was going to die. She was going to die.

And then this thing inside her was going to kill everyone.

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“Miss Godfrey, what have you done?”

She stands in the corridor, only thirteen, but she doesn’t look at the older witch. 

“This is dark magic.” He says. 

“No it isn’t.”

“It’s playing with the rules of life!” 

“I built a channel with my magic—a loop—and the energy is transmuted through the loop, nothing is lost and nothing is gained—“ she begins to explain.

“Something is always lost,” he snips at her. “Destroy these at once.”

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There was magic to do– magic that would help her.

Cait clung to this thought, as she stumbled her way toward her kitchen. She hit wall after wall, each impact another shock, rattling up her already-rattled insides. But if she could get to her cabinet—if she could get to her potions—her concoctions and experiments —if she could, in enough time, burn another rune on her body to keep the thing inside— maybe. She already had so many, running up and down her arms and down her back and over her ribcage — always the long sleeves - but maybe another —

Magic never failed her before. Even in the darkest of her hours, even when her magic had turned a foul green, it had only ever been to protect her. Her magic was her friend when no one else was.

She just needed her kitchen and her box of tools. She could live.

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“You’re just scared of what I can do.” “And you should be too, Miss Godfrey.”

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Outside her kitchen window, New York’s heart kept beating as it met the first of summer. Caitlin body-slammed her counter and then threw up ash and acid into the sink.

The Strawberry moon’s ancient glow shed light through the window, just enough for her to see the pale pallor of her hand, gripping hard at the edge of the counter. Her vomit sizzled away in the sink, eating through the metal. Smoke rose and curled around Caitlin’s panting form.

But you know, she felt a little bit better.

Cait leaned her head against her arm and for a moment, she was so tired, so dizzy. All she wanted to do was collapse onto the ground and give up. But this wave of peace was temporary. She could already feel the next wave building, and it would bring a torrent of fresh fire, and another round of convulsions.  

She reached down into her stomach for her magic. “Help me,” she whispered and then let it burst out of her like a firework.

Every single drawer and door  sprang open. The kitchen faucet turned on—the stove too—utensils clattering off their hooks, silverware springing from their beds. She heard a smash, and then another smash, and then another, as her plates and cups catapulted out of their shelves. 

Rude, she thought, as her own home turned against her. She tried her best to ignore it - she needed her potion of good health.

Cait lifted her head, staring around at the mess of her kitchen. She found her potions cabinet and her face fell, seeing nearly all the bottles having rolled off their shelves and shattered, too.

“No…No…”

She stepped toward all those bottles, feet crunching against glass and ceramic as she went. She didn’t feel that pain; it was nothing compared to the rest.

She fell to her knees and shifted through the mess. She found half the bottle of her potion of good health, running her finger on the edge of the label, and on one of the sharp edges.

Her finger bloomed with blood. Cait curled her hand around the broken bottle, glass crunching, and let out a sob.

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She’s a little girl with sparks in her hair, pulling her mother’s laughs from the air and hiding them away in her little jar. She tickles her to get more, and she laughs and laughs for her.

Cassandra takes Caitlin on her knee. “Promise me something,” she says to her. “No matter how brilliant you become, you will always keep a jar of laughs on your kitchen shelf. Joy is an essential ingredient to becoming who we are meant to be.”

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Another wave of spasms had put Cait on her back, writhing around on the broken glass. But it barely mattered. She couldn’t fight against the pain and had no way to stop it—not even a rune and all the black magic in the world would help— so she let the convulsions curl through her, until she vomited again onto the pile of broken potions.

And then Cait got up.

Or this time, it was the thing, rising from inside her.

The strange magic’s strength surged through her, she slapped a bloody hand on the counter and straightened up. She breathed hard: in and out, in and out, in and out. As her eyes closed, she heard—she swore—the steady beating of wings, as it reminded her swelling heart to keep beating.

She crunched her way out of the kitchen and then out onto the fire escape where the Strawberry Moon hung low. It was watching her; she felt it. Its light poured over her bloody form with every step she took. At first, she stepped slowly. She eased her toes onto the first, metal step. But then faster, steps more steady, and then even faster, until she was running away from her house, up the stairs, as though she could flee from her sickness.

But she was fleeing toward the moon.

The moon is a door.

This thing inside her, it gave her the strength and gave her the pain. It roared in her chest. She remembered the first time she’d felt this, exactly a month ago on the last full moon, how the fire had been just as painful as this then—how she had learned to enjoy it, enjoy this thing’s ferocity, this thing’s hunger, this thing’s desire.  It had always been a mirror of her own.

She’d remembered joy and why she loved her magic –

Her heart has never beat louder.

Cait climbed over the edge and onto the roof, fell to her knees under the light of the Strawberry Moon. Her hands pressed into the cement. She was probably going to die. And she should fight it, still, but this thing had been the best thing that had ever happened to her.

You’re just scared of what I can do.

‘Just you and me now,’ she whispered to her terrible magic.

Something inside her cracked and all that strangeness Cait had been feeling for the last month, spilled out. And the first time, that something spoke to her. She felt the runes straining on her body, like they were rope she was bound by. Now the the binds were threatening to snap. They didn’t, in the end. She felt the markings hold strong, the thing stayed inside.

There’s a stillness, then, for a while. She stays. 

After, who knows how long - some untold amount of time - something ripples through the silence like a pebble dropped. 

< Hello. > Cait hears.

‘Hello.’ She thinks to herself.

After a moment, the thing speaks up again. She can feel it, wandering around the space of her body, slithering around her veins like a snake.

< Strawberry Moon, huh? > 

She looks up. 

< You can smell it in the air, can’t you, Cait?>

She feels her body breathe in deep. ‘Yes’ she thinks when she feels her lungs expand at someone else’s command. She’s not in control of herself. The thing is driving.  

<The Strawberry Moon is one of the most dangerous of all. Do you know why?>

She knows. ‘Why.’ She thinks. 

<The moon is a door, Cait.> 

She’s always known. 

<And doors work both ways. When we open a door, we cannot always control what will slip out.> 

A beat. 

< So allow me to introduce myself>

It raises her hand and Caitlin’s fingers point at the round door in the sky.

< I’m the thing that slipped through the moon. >

#( THAT ENDING THOUGH ) #( IN WHICH CAIT'S MAGIC GETS WEIRDER ) #( and revati stays super extra AS ALWAYS ) #( -- caitlin godfrey ; devil like me ) #( -- caitlin godfrey ; update ) #( -- para ; my heart and soul were never mine to own )