Series: Willow Winters
Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 472(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
As the path has opened my eyes to Hades’s home, Silvie opens my eyes to curiosity.
Magic cannot flourish where there is fear.
Listening as if I know nothing, being able to step back and think about magic in a way that’s far more innocent than I’ve felt in a long time… It helps. I have to believe it will help me.
And if it does not—
I must believe it will help me, no matter the outcome. No matter what. My mother’s voice is echoed in Silvie’s stories.
I begin to make a habit of believing it. Each time I go out on the path, I encounter a soul who dips their head when I pass. This is not a sign of mockery. This is a sign of respect. Each time it happens, my curiosity increases.
They know nothing of me other than stories they’ve been told. And what exactly is that? Do the stories change? Are they real? Or is it simply its own kind of magic?
I listen to all Silvie has to say about magic, then listen some more. She walks with me some days in the dark halls that seem to be brighter as my eyes adjust. I keep my gaze and my mind on what is in front of me, not the home I was stolen from. I do not resist my reality and suddenly I see the freedom she spoke of.
“There is a way, then?” I ask Silvie one morning, as she is sitting at the table with me, her hands folded in her lap. “What you mean by all this is that there is…another way to have power here.”
“Yes, my queen,” she answers.
I stare out the window, but I do not see the gardens and the Underworld beyond. It’s blurred to me.
There is no life in the Underworld, so I will not be able to use my powers to create. There is only death. I do wonder if Hades made the crystal gardens and the dead blooms that have dried and lined the path for my comfort. At first they were only a reminder of what I lost, but as I watch the garden grow with dried petals that were ash on the mortal realm, I learn to enjoy their beauty.
Maybe that is the freedom Silvie spoke of.
But, I decide, there is only one thing to do, and that is to practice magic.
I start by enchanting bells on the doorknob under Sylvie’s watch. They will ring if anyone tries to enter, and will only allow those who want my highest self to flourish to pass through the threshold. Vaguely I wonder if Hades will be able to enter.
It’s a simple spell she says. Three old bells who have seen enough to know what will come. And one little jar that hangs from the rope with the words: I am protected and guided and safe in these quarters. Only those with who want my highest self to flourish to pass through the threshold.
“Do you feel it?” she asks me.
“Yes,” I answer although that stirring in the pit of my stomach feels much like what I felt with Hades. The pleasure, the safety, the warmth. I have not felt it before.
When Silvie is gone for the day—or for the time being, as I can summon her whenever I wish—I kneel at the hearth and think of magic, not my powers. They are both divine and worthy. I think of the forces that whirl through the Underworld and Olympus above.
At first, there is nothing. I’m not familiar with this kind of magic. I had thrown myself into studying my own powers and only wanted to draw life out of the earth so I could prove that I had them—the gifts that I had been granted at my birth, from my mother and father.
Now I must reach in another direction.
I close my eyes and try to feel those other sources of power.
It is not lifelessness that I sense all around me, though that is what my childhood would have had me believe. It is not cold death—or not only cold death. The souls in the Underworld are not the same as stones left to be battered by weather.
I try to light the fire again. Did it go out before I knelt at the grate? Did it sense, somehow, that I wanted to try my hand at magic? I cannot remember.
It does not take. Closing my eyes, I raise my palms to the fire, my knees against the hard rock. I attempt to light the flames again, “You will light for me. For that is my wish and what I wish is what is granted,” I whisper.
I swear when I open my eyes there’s a flicker of light, but it’s quickly gone and in it’s place, my frustration. “Would they bow their heads if they could see my failures?” I hiss at the unlit fire. My sense of worth fades as I pace the floor and in that moment, I am compelled to leave. I cannot stay trapped in this room. It’s suffocating.