Starsign

A witch should not live on a mountainside. Certainly not on the eastern slope of Hub-and-Spoke mountain, within clear view of Starlight City. Witches are supposed to be mysterious folk who do dark arts in dark places, out of sight and just out of mind enough to be frightening. They drew power from inhuman and evil sources, performing acts that defied the laws of society, good taste, and especially of magic itself.

This was what the human being named Aura had been taught, a long time ago. Her parents had told her, because she was a Sorceress, and while the Sages and their soul magic were orthogonal to what she was supposed to be, witches were worse: they were opposite. She had to respect the sages and revile the witches. She’d later sought out other opinions behind her parents’ backs, and read a volume by an old, long-dead witch writing on his own theories of the craft. In fact, his opinion was much the same, but from the other end.

What she’d learned from it was this: that her magic was a concrete thing, born from rules and order and nature and channeled through her own discipline, while the witches used rituals and undefinable ideas. They lived outside of society because venturing into a dank cave or a haunted swamp was itself a ritual of great power. Aura needed that power. She needed a magic that was not logical or orderly. She had to break the rules. While going in the middle of the night would have been more appropriate, sneaking out of her home was beyond her abilities. Instead, she set out on a sunny Spring morning to climb the mountain.

It might be more accurate to say she hiked, as Hub-and-Spoke Mountain is neither especially steep nor especially harsh. It took her about an hour to reach the witch’s house, situated roughly halfway up on a reasonably flat patch of land. She’d been able to see it the night before as a faint mote of light against the dark backdrop of the rocks. Like a star. That was the moment she’d made up her mind to visit, no matter what misgivings she had.

The witch’s house was ordinary. A little too ordinary considering it was the home of a witch, connected to no power or water, and had simply appeared on a mountainside one day as if deposited by a freak tornado. It lacked the certain level of foreboding she’d hoped to see. A brick house like this wouldn’t have appeared out of place in some of the neighbouring towns, though it didn’t quite match the preferred architecture of the city. Familiar yet foreign— maybe that was worth something too. When Aura moved to knock on the door, it creaked and slowly swung open before she could touch it. Finally, something witchlike. She’d been trained to never enter a home without permission, but a mysteriously beckoning door was good enough. It was starting to feel like this might work out after all.

Passing through the threshold, she was delighted by the smell of baking and alarmed by the sight of clutter. The cozy living room immediately in front of her was littered with open books, glass vials and jars bearing the traces of various liquids, and food wrappers. If Aura’d ever left her bedroom in this kind of state, her parents would have locked her up for a decade.

The left side of the room was taken up by an open kitchen, occupied by a suite of modern appliances and a single person. They had their back turned, but their pointed purple hat gave no room for misinterpretation: This was the witch themself. The hat was paired with a coat of the same shade and a couple of pink ribbons tied around the hat and their neck. Somewhere between a traditional witch and a magical girl. She couldn’t see much of their face, but they had a cat-aligned soul, with fluffy grey ears and a tail of ample fluff that stood at attention behind their back, tip flicking one way or the other.

In the city— actually in the entire world— being a cat was commonplace enough to be considered unoriginal, but Aura had been raised to understand that the practice of magic required one to keep their soul pure. Aligned to the natural order. Even if she wanted, she could never be a dragon or even a ferret. You could have one or the other. Even the artificers usually abstained from soul modification. To see someone so casually dabble in two things at once gave Aura a kind of culture shock. She didn’t know what to do with her feelings. It didn’t seem very fair.

She stood by the door and fretted, suddenly unsure of what to do. Aura knew how to deal with most social situations easily, but she hadn’t exactly been taught the etiquette one uses when meeting a witch. Should she announce her presence? Did this require her to be more polite, or less? There was an argument to be made for both. She now wished the door hadn’t opened on its own, as it was so much easier to do things right when the host came to greet her face-to-face.

She spent so many precious seconds worrying that the witch either noticed her, or simply tired of waiting. They greeted her in a high, lilting voice: “Uno momento! Please, take a seat, move anything you need to move. It’s a minor mess around here.”

What would qualify as a major mess?

She picked her way over the debris as best she could, making her way to a big, plush chair— purple— that sat facing the kitchen on the opposite side of the room. She attempted to place a book that was on the seat— filled with unfamiliar sigils and no words— onto a nearby table, only to find it wasn’t a table at all, but a classic witch’s cauldron with a white sheet draped over the top. The book and sheet hit the bottom of the empty vessel with a muffled thud, but the witch didn’t react to the sound at all. Aura sat down rather than try to fix it.

“I saw your ad.”

“Ooh, very good, very good” replied the witch, “I was worried nobody would see it. Or if they did, that they wouldn’t understand.” They bent over to excavate their labor from the oven, momentarily being reduced to just a tail. Their fears were reasonable, though Aura would never say so. Her visit was nothing more than a move of desperation, an action pulled from instinct. There was almost nothing on the ad that said what the witch actually did. It was simply a small sheet of paper, posted on a number of light poles downtown, which said two things: the location of the witch’s house, and their name.

Mx. Pewter Undermoon, the Cosmic Witch. It had been enough to give her hope.

The witch finally turned around, revealed themself to be less than fully feline. More of a partway. The ears and tail were the only pieces of them that didn’t look human, though their messy hair was the same grey shade as their fur. She had to wonder if that made the hair fur… or the fur, hair. The witch pranced over from the kitchen carrying a plate of chocolate chip cookies. “No pressure, but I value feedback,” they said.

The cookies were a little sweeter than Aura would have liked, but she said they were good, and the cat giggled with delight. She thought she heard the hint, just the slightest trace, of a purr. Aura sucked a lungful of air through her teeth and tried not to look downcast. She was losing faith in this trip again. After all, she was asking for something extraordinary and Mx. Undermoon didn’t seem very reliable. Low expectations, she warned herself. No false hopes.

"Before we begin,” the witch started, “I feel like a change,” and then their body became fully catlike. Aura blinked. They must have a more complex setup, a pair of soul augmentations. One had the ears and tail, and the other had the rest. She was aware that they could be turned on and off with some effort, but she’d never seen it happen in person, and it was easy to assume there’d be a puff of smoke or something. Instead they’d just… changed. Now they had whiskers and big almond eyes and fur all over.

They kept talking without further pause. “Now, you know who I am. And you… Are you from the house of Rosycross?”

Aura Rosycross balled her fists her fists up tightly. Hers was the only all-human family for miles, so there wasn’t even anything mystical about knowing that, but she was rattled anyway. If Mx. Undermoon knew who she was, they knew the significance of her being there. She’d been hoping the witch hadn’t been in the area long enough to guess. Really, she’d just been hoping she wouldn’t have to talk about it.

“Um, I’d like to request that you keep my visit a secret. Is that… acceptable?” Selfish. Disrespectful. But if her parents knew she’d solicited a witch, there would be trouble.

They answered as if it was nothing. “Certainly. Sure-tainly. Privacy guaranteed. What I should have said was: you’re a customer. That’s what matters.”

Aura let herself exhale. It could be a lie. She could imagine the witch betraying her. If that was going to happen, though, then there was already nothing she could do to prevent it.

“My request is a unusual. I don’t know if you’ll be able to fulfill it.”

“I don’t, either. I don’t even know the request!”

She ignored that. “Are you able to change the star I was born under?”

They perked up, ears twitching. “That is unusual. I’ve never even considered anything like it. You don’t mean your Zodiac, do you? I’m on bad terms with Pisces.”

“It’s not,” she assured him, “The stars have different significance for sorcerers, and anyway I’m a Capricorn.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with your system. Read a book on it a few years ago.” The witch muttered to themself for a while, moving fingers in a way that suggested calculations were being performed inside their fluffy cranium, and then they popped off their seat like a spring that had been coiled and released.

“I’ll do it. Follow me!” They strode out the front door almost before Aura could process what was happening.

Aura didn’t move at first. They’d agreed. They were actually going to do it. She’d spent so much time telling herself it might not happen that she now realized she hadn’t spent nearly enough time telling herself that it might.

The witch poked their head back into the house, and sang at her to get up over and over until she forced herself to move. She would get what she wanted, and there would be time for self-reflection when it was done.

They led her only as far as a little pond, well within sight of the house. Even calling it a pond was too much: it was a trickle of water from higher up on the mountain that pooled in a small divot, just a few meters across and a smidge more than ankle-deep, and then spilled over the side to continue its journey groundward. A small creature might be able to drink from a little pool like this, but it was inhospitable to plants, and the water flowed as clear as from the tap.

Stooping down at the edge of the water, the witch placed their thumb just under the surface and slowly swished it back and forth. A blackness like ink spread from the point of contact until the water looked as if it had been used to clean a thousand paintbrushes. The movement of the surface ceased, and the pond became placid and even reflective, a perfect mirror of the mountain and the skies above. And yet, the scene it showed was wrong. It wasn’t just the darkness that had spread through the water: the reflected sky was dotted with light. It was a reflection of the night, every star perfectly mirrored except for the closest.

“Okie dokie, step in,” they said, thumb still submerged. Aura hesitated. She started to remove her sneakers.

“No, keep them on,” the witch corrected her. They weren’t even looking at her to know she was taking them off. “The ritual requires it.” She grumbled but obeyed. Her job was just to do as she was told, like getting a filling at the dentist. Like meeting some new important visitor at home. With one awkwardly large step she brought herself to the edge of the water, and with one more she plunged into it.

And plunged. And plunged. She missed the water and the pebbles and even the ground, and in her panic she lost her footing and heaved into the pond, where she tumbled downwards-upwards into the sky below. Her world became a darkening blur as she fell past the clouds. After the initial burst of terror, she felt calm. It was too absurd to take seriously, after all. Aura had flown with the help of magic before, and she knew it was distinct from the sensation of falling upwards. Whatever was happening was intended: witch stuff. Her turning gradually slowed over the span of a few minutes until she could see the stars clearly again. Just stars and sky, no earth or sun or moon.

Aura took one deep breath. Held it, and then let it out. She wasn’t in space, but in some kind of constructed reality that looked like it. A metaphor. Witches used illusions and hallucinations all the time, or so she’d read.

The witch’s voice suddenly came from behind her. “You got settled faster than I expected! My first time, I was spinning around down here until I threw up!” She was able to turn her body completely around despite the lack of any handhold and found them quietly floating there at an angle slightly removed from her own. Their feet dangled down freely, kicking a little bit as if treading water.

“You should have warned me,” she chided them.

They shrugged. “More fun this way. Now, I need you to find your star.”

Not once in her life had Aura seriously studied the night sky. She could probably find the Big Dipper if you gave her a minute, and she could name all the birth stars of her immediate family, but actually finding down her own was simply out of the question. She chided herself for not considering it before she left.

“I don’t know where it’s located in the sky, I only know it’s the Heart of Growth.” After admitting this, a little bit of resentment stirred inside Aura’s heart. “Shouldn’t you know? You call yourself the Cosmic Witch.”

With a click of the tongue, the witch made a sweeping gesture at the expanse around them. “Those aren’t my stars, so I can’t. Don’t overthink it. Just choose the one that feels best and point at it, the act of choosing is what matters.”

“Do you mean that I’m guaranteed to choose correctly? Or is it that my choosing will make the star correct?”

Another shrug. “Dunno! I told you not to overthink it.”

Ridiculous. Witch magic was so strange. So inconsistent. But then, maybe that was a good thing. Aura understood the rules of her own craft, but had no talent. If Mx. Undermoon had the talent, then understanding and consistency didn’t matter much at all. Aura let herself spin and turn at the same time, keeping a manageable speed as she surveyed the lights surrounding her. By the time she’d rotated orthogonal to the cat, one star in particular had caught her eye. It was a little brighter than its neighbours. That was all it took.

“Point.” They reminded her. With one outstretched finger, she did so.

The witch snapped their fingers, and there was all at once a disturbing lurch Aura could feel in her gut. Everything seemed to have shifted very slightly, and she couldn’t even find the star she’d chosen anymore. She felt slightly nauseous for a moment, but the feeling passed without incident.

A tiny light now existed in the space between herself and the witch. Just a single dot, like a pinhole in three-dimensional space, a flashlight shining through from another reality. If the witch’s coat had been lighter coloured, she might not have noticed it at all.

It was the star, but it had gotten closer without appearing any bigger. She frowned silently.

“You believe that this star has power over you, right?”

It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “I think there’s some connection between it and me, if that’s what you mean.”

“But you also know that a star is just a chemical reaction. From a physics standpoint, that’s impossible. Nonsense, even.”

She hesitated. It wasn’t as if she knew the mechanics of the thing. Her mother always said that her star was watching. A ball of gas, lightyears away, couldn’t possibly focus on one specific human being on one tiny planet, even if it was capable of perception and thought. It might be that some other kind of being watched over her, connected to the star in some way. She herself had the ability to change the flow of energy in the space around her body, so it wasn’t hard to imagine a more powerful intelligence that could control the energy around an entire star. Or it might be a natural phenomenon. She didn’t care about any of that. She only cared about the ends. The undeniable reality of what had happened to her.

“Yes,” she said. She accepted the contradiction.

Undermoon nodded. “We need to tie those understandings together. That’s where the truth lies.”

Aura said nothing. She waited and listened.

They regained their more human form from earlier. “They’re both right, you know. A star is more than one thing, just like a new moon and a full moon are different even though they’re the same moon. Does that make sense?”

“It does,” she lied, “But what does that mean for me? Does this magic fail if I don’t believe in it?”

“You already believe. You know that a star is not alive, and you know that it is. If you can accept that, then you’ll know what to do.”

They’d dodged the question again, but they looked more serious than usual. Aura was floating closer to her star without really trying. It was natural, subconscious. A kind of gravity that only affected her. Was that the problem? If she stopped believing that this star controlled her fate, would it stop being true? But then, that made no sense either. If she believed that a lack of belief in the star’s power would affect her, then she was actually believing in the power. Losing faith isn’t something one can simply will to themselves.

“Ask yourself this,” the witch offered. “Why? Why is a star more than one thing?”

Aura thought about it. She’d drifted so close to her star now that she could feel its warmth. It wasn’t like the warmth of the sun, or even a campfire. It was body heat. It felt exactly the same as being hugged tight by her parents. Like being a little girl again and feeling them, strength so much greater than her own, focused entirely on her comfort and protection. The tips of her fingers started to tingle. It was her own magic. Her own inner fire, struggling to break free of her. If she wasn’t careful, she would start leaking.

“People didn’t know what the stars were,” she said out loud. “They must have looked up at the night sky and tried to guess. Now, we have telescopes and satellites. We know what the stars are.”

“And yet,” the witch replied, “We still believe. You yourself believe. Why is that?”

That wasn’t actually a difficult question. “Because it’s real. Everyone in my family, going back for generations, has talents to match their star.”

“Except for you?”

“I don’t know what went wrong. I’m meant to have the magic of life and growth. That’s my star. But I’ve only ever been good at… burning.” In order to demonstrate, she relaxed just a little. Let some of her fire leak out. Here in space, she didn’t even have to worry about the grass being singed. She could just let it flow, enveloping her entire body like sinking into a warm bath. If she was alone here, she could have removed her clothing and truly relaxed. What would that be like? She’d never been able to do it.

Mx. Undermoon regarded her for a while, full of barely-contained excitement. “What I see here,” they said, “Is a star of life and growth.”

She cut them off. “I know. I know what the sun does for the earth, and I know about the affects of cooking food, and I know how a controlled burn helps the forests. I’ve used all those arguments on my parents, but it doesn’t change anything. I’m the eldest child, and I have my family’s greatest star. Not being able to create life isn’t an option for me.”

“In that case, you have a choice to make. I can change your star, but I can’t change you. I can’t change the people around you, and I can’t change the circumstances of your birth. With that in mind, what is it you want?”

What did she want? Peace and happiness. To be able to make everyone happy, including herself. To be left alone. To have everyone’s approval. Only when she saw this star of hers up close could she admit that it was futile. This wasn’t just her star— it was her self. If a hundred children were born on the same day as her, under the same sign, then they had a hundred copies of the star of life and growth between them. A star was more than one thing. Changing hers would be about as helpful as wearing a new pair of shoes.

Besides that, it loved her. And she loved the star. More than she could manage to love herself, most days.

“Nothing,” she finally replied. “There’s no point. I wasted your time coming here.”

“Not at all.” They played idly with the bits of hair that stuck out from under their hat. “If I tie you to another star, then the star will change and become the same as this one, but that doesn’t mean nothing can ever change.”

“You’re saying that I need to change myself.”

“Not quite,” the witch harried her. “Say a big boulder fell onto the path you were walking on. Too big too shove out of the way. What would you do?”

Aura was tired of these games, but in no hurry to leave. So she played along. “Climb over it?”

“Maybe.”

That wasn’t right, then. She considered the question a little more closely. They’d only said the road was blocked. They didn’t say what kind of road. A cliffside highway with no way around had entered into her mind on its own, a function of bias and unspoken implications. Trickery, in other words.

“Go around it.”

“Now you’re starting to get it.” The witch’s eyes sparkled. “But take it one step further.”

Aura was currently floating in an outer space that was not outer space. Everything was an assumption when dealing with a witch, including physics. In a situation like that, the most straightforward solution, no matter how absurd, was correct.

“Go through it.”

Undermoon gave a wink, but Aura wasn’t looking anymore. As soon as she’d shifted her mode of thought, the course of action she needed to take had become clear. The riddle itself had been a ritual, designed to break her free from the shackles of common sense and reality.

Actually, that was still wrong. Just because it was common sense didn’t make it reality. Just because someone told her something was true didn’t make it so. They’d told her fire burned, but the fire was spilling out right now, flames lashing out in all directions, did not. Her skin ached where the it escaped. but her own flames never burned her.

Fire could be more than one thing, too, then. It’s not as if she was immune to heat. She could still remember burning her fingers on a burnt sparkler when she was a kid. Aura Rosycross’ fire was different.

She would take her star with her. It was small enough, after all. And she was close enough to reach out and close her fist tightly over it.

She was as hot as the sun and twice as bright. Even the witch was drifting backwards to stay clear of her flames which were now white and hot enough to turn anything to carbon in an instant. The star a beach pebble in her hand, hard and small and so smooth and she wanted to take it with her forever so she opened her mouth wide and jammed her star inside and it searing pain supernova

And then it was done. She was standing in the pond right outside Undermoon’s tiny house again. Her feet and her shoes and her socks were soaking wet, and the midday sun tore into her pupils, which had adjusted themselves to the darkness. The fact that she was able to stumble back onto dry land with her eyes closed, without tripping over herself, was probably the most magical thing to happen to her all day.

She splayed out on the rough-but-dry ground and made a series of frustrated groans, first worried her parents would find out what she’d done to her clothes, and then embarrassed that her first thought was something so pedestrian. She flipped onto her back and very slowly exposed her poor eyes to the light over the course of minutes.

The cat was sitting on the grass, exactly where they’d been before. They said nothing, but looked rather pleased with themself.

Later, Aura lit a fire in a little circle of stones in front of the witch’s house for drying her clothes. Her shoes and socks sat next to the fire, and she sat close enough that hopefully her pants would reach an acceptable state. Worst case, she’d say the city sprayed her while growing a new water main. That sort of thing did happen on occasion. While waiting, she lay back on a cheap plastic lawn chair the witch had provided. She could already feel how much hotter her fire was, inside and out. Lighting the kindling had been so easy. Frighteningly so.

Undermoon vanished and then reappeared a moment later with a tray containing two large glasses of lemonade. A little bit too sweet. Didn’t need quite so much ice, either.

“I’m not sure how I’m going to pay you back,” Aura admitted. That had been one of the many things she’d planned to worry about later.

“I hardly did anything,” Undermoon admitted casually and incorrectly. “Besides, this is just part of being a good citizen.”

“Of the city?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You don’t live in the city, though.”

“I get my groceries there.” The witch tipped their glass slightly towards her. It was already half empty.

“Hmm.” She fell silent. She’d think of something down the line. There was something else on her mind.

“Um, may I ask you something personal?”

“You may!”

“Is it difficult, being a witch? Living out here on your own?”

Thoughtfully, the witch swirled their drink around in their hand as if it were wine, listening to the clinking of ice on glass. “This is just the kind of person I am. Always has been.”

Aura hadn’t expected a real answer, so she wasn’t disappointed. A witch was a mysterious being by definition.

“ I can’t be more enlightening than that, I’m afraid. Apologies.”

“It’s alright. I can’t expect to learn everything about you in one day.” She stared intensely at her own glass. The ice cubes were melting too quickly. Her fire might actually be getting out of control. Things were going to get more difficult before they got easier, but she felt alright about it.