Part 2 [the witch]

Like veils falling, each delicate piece of fabric separating her further and further from the reality of the moment, Hilde's voice cascaded down as the timid first notes of her song gave way to the opening stanza. There had been a time when all she could sing were Psalms, when her mother told her that the only right way to do it was to close her eyes and open her heart. Now that she was no longer a child she knew many more songs, and although there was no place in Church for what she wanted to sing, she still followed that advice. Her mother had clearly not recognized the knowledge for what it was: a Remnant, a whisper of the Old Country, but she knew; like she knew which herbs to pick under a blood moon, and what to offer to the fair folk before harvesting. She'd heard them from other cunning folk, had pierced the details together from children's tales, from what story tellers shouted drunkenly at the pub every fortnight or so. What little books she had been able to get her hands on had served to complete the puzzle – why, even the Bible boasted of many a heretical teaching!

The ghost of her voice left a tingling in the air. An offering, they'd called it once. A way to appease the spirits of the forests before invading their domain, partaking from their fruits. She knew her ways were forbidden, that there existed only an illusory sense of independence for her, as her tinctures were lauded as the result of a very exact, very tortuous alchemical process. That her knowledge was righteous as long as it remained under Lorenz's tutelage. They'd said to her, what a beautiful wife she'd make. Very studious, very clever; quite fit to be the companion of the Alchemist. Wasn't that why her parents had left her in his care? Because only the most righteous, the one privy to the highest secrets could quench the thirst of a woman who asked too many questions?

Neatly tied garlands of herbs and flowers filled up her basket. There was dirt under her fingernails and her skin glowed with a fine sheath of perspiration; here and there, her face would sparkle under the sunlight. In the clearing, all was caught ablaze in the sun's life-giving rays. Her next song had once been a church hymn, but she'd realized that with just small, definite changes to the wording it could easily be adopted to praise Him-That-Shone-Beyond-The-Sky. The Invisible Sun.

She made her way back. In her breast she carried a powerful secret; one that she meditated upon in silence before and after such excursions. It was crowned seven times along the length of her body; it flowered above her head, and reached down from below her feet. As all things had been, she recited to herself, and arose from one by the meditation of one, so all things have their birth from it by adaptation. The Sun was its father, the moon its mother; the wind had once carried it in its belly, with the earth as its nurse.

Clothed in light, she left her bounty in the makeshift laboratory she'd set up in the greenhouse. Its existence indicated the presence of certain tensions in the household, anybody would be able to surmise; one explanation for its presence was that the more elaborate and richly equiped installations were barred to her unless she was chaperoned by her tutor. Another explanation was her insistence that her work – what Lorenz called 'woman's work'- with herbal tinctures and salves, was better done where there was quick access to fresh ingredients. Underground, dank caverns brimming with poisonous fumes were anathema to the process she undertook to do her alchemy; and in order to extract the correct properties of plants, it was only natural that the retort remained in the presence of light and nature. A third, unspoken explanation, one that she'd never voiced out loud, was that she felt ill at ease in the abodes that her tutor seemed to thrive in; she worked under the careful eye of the sun or of the moon, and nothing else.

Although she wouldn't ascribe to it the same fearful powers her mother would, it was hellfire that she gazed upon in Lorenz's eyes when they both shared a lesson in that dark, cthonic realm. Something feverish overtook him in darkness. She was afraid it'd take a hold of her, too.