Once upon a time, there was a boy who wanted to be a witch.

Witches were smart. They were the keepers of secret knowledge about both future and past. People traveled long distances and gave up great treasures in return for their wisdom, even as cryptic or mysterious as it tended to be.

Witches were powerful. They harnessed great powers of magic, bestowing great blessings and terrible curses. Some said that the strongest witches could simply snap their fingers and transform themselves into a cat or a raven.

And witches were helpful. …Even though many people didn’t quite believe this. The boy knew the truth: witches wouldn’t give you what you wanted. But they would give you what you needed.

For all these reasons and more, the boy felt from a very young age that this was who he was meant to be. No one else understood it. His parents told him it was impossible, and threatened to punish him when he kept bringing it up. When his brothers found out, they just teased and bullied him. At times the mocking escalated to physical violence, and his parents turned a blind eye to it, hoping that he would simply toughen up and to give up on silly ideas about witches.

But the boy knew something no one else did: he could do magic. Minor illusions, mostly, tricks of light and shadow that he practiced over and over in secret, jealously hiding his abilities from anyone else who might find out. His magic was meant for him alone. It was the only thing that gave him hope.

He dreamed every night about a witch appearing in his village, picking him out of the crowd, and whisking him away to a new life. But this never happened, even as he waited and waited, even as time seemed to be rapidly running out. The other boys his age in the village began to talk about their own futures, deciding which craftsman they wanted to apprentice with, what girl they wanted to marry, what kind of man they wanted to be.

And one day the boy couldn’t take it any more. He couldn’t live a life trapped in what everyone else expected for him, not when he knew he was meant for something different. He was too uncomfortable in the constraints of his family, his village, even his own body.

So he ran away.

He knew where he was going. Everyone knew about Vidalia, the Witch of the Western Swamps, who lived in a cottage that roamed the marshes on legs like those of a stork. If anyone could help him become a witch, it would be her. If he could find her, and if he could convince her to take him on as an apprentice.

He had to travel a long way. It didn’t take long for his meager savings to run dry, and then he had to rely on his only other resource: his magic.

He used it only when he needed to, sometimes in impromptu performances on a street corner, sometimes to let him swindle an unsuspecting traveler in a game of chance, and sometimes to hide himself when he needed to escape the undue attention that the other things caused. He never stayed in one place long, but kept moving, heading west.

When he came to the border of the marshlands, he didn’t hesitate. For days and days he trudged through the swamps, at times spending hours carefully making his way through waist-deep water and mud that left him chilled to his bones.

His food ran out. He kept going.

His clean water ran low. He kept going.

He was too far in to turn back. Even if he had wanted to, he was totally lost in the mists of the marsh.

It was his third night alone in the swamp. The full moon overhead cast a pallid glow over the marshlands. The boy was still struggling onwards, even in the dangers of night, because he knew at that point if he stopped to rest he might never get up again.

That’s when he saw a column of smoke rising in the distance. And as he made his way to the source, he saw a thatch-roofed cottage with a stone chimney, sitting right there in the middle of the swamp as if it were a pastry shop in a town’s market square.

And as the boy desperately stumbled, splashing his way towards the door, he took one wrong step, and plunged into water over his head.

The swamp did not forgive. Mud pulled him down and down into darkness.

 

---

 

When the boy woke up, he was lying on a pile of straw in an unfamiliar room. Not too far away, a black iron cauldron bubbled, obviously the source of the tangy smell in the air. All around him were shelves, full of jars that held all kinds of strange and unsettling ingredients. One had a mismatched collection of eyeballs, and the boy could have sworn that one of them was slowly turning to follow his movements.

“Ah, you’re finally awake,” a raspy voice said, startling him.

A tiny old woman with a cane made her way across the room to the cauldron, walking slowly and with difficulty. She looked positively ancient, her grey-white hair braided and pulled up into a pile atop her head. She calmly ladled the viscous red liquid from the cauldron into a bowl, and then made her way back over to the boy.

The boy accepted the bowl, staring down into its contents. “What kind of potion is this?”

The witch smiled. “Tomato soup.”

The hunger of the previous days caught up to him then, and he devoured the entire bowl. The witch didn’t even ask before refilling it.

“I don’t get many visitors,” she said as the boy continued to eat, “and those that I do get are usually seeking me for very important reasons.” She snorted. “Or at least that’s what they think, anyways. I’ve had kings come to learn how to bring the rains and end a famine. I’ve had knights arrive on a quest to reverse any number of horrible curses. But this is the first time I’ve had a mere child show up at my doorstep. So tell me: why are you here?”

The boy knew his answer. “I want to learn from you.”

The witch laughed, and the boy shuddered, trying to put aside memories of years of being mocked and disregarded.

“I— I have payment. Everything I own is—” He desperately looked around the room, until he saw his pack at the side of the makeshift straw mattress. He dug to its bottom, where wrapped in an old shirt he kept all of his most valuable possessions: a silver brooch, a gold pocketwatch, a handful of copper and silver coins.

He thrust them in the witch’s direction and waited, holding his breath as she held each item up an inch from her face, observing them in detail. “This truly is uncommon,” the witch finally said. “I’ve never before seen a magpie so willing to part with all of her shiniest treasures. This must seem important to you, indeed.”

“More than anything.”

The witch cocked her head to the side in silence. The boy met her gaze, but couldn’t quite tell if her milky eyes could even see him. She finally sighed. “Eat and rest, little magpie, then leave this place and return to your home. The swamp is no place for a child like you.”

The witch started to shuffle back across the room to the door, moving slowly and leaning heavily on her cane.

The boy stared after her, words that he couldn’t verbalize roiling in his stomach. He felt like something inside himself was wound so tight that with the slightest touch he might explode. Instead, he forced himself to breathe, to stop, to think. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly calm and direct.

“No,” he said.

The witch was almost out of the room, but she stopped, and then turned back to look at him. “I’m sorry? I don’t think I heard that right.”

“I’m not leaving.”

She laughed again. “There’s not many who would dare to defy Vidalia, the Witch of the Western Swamps.”

“Fine, then, turn me into a newt.” The boy pressed his lips into a thin line. “I just want a chance. You can use the help and I can pull my own weight. Just— just let me stay.”

The witch snorted to herself, and kept walking, leaving the boy with his bowl of half-finished soup.

 

---

 

It wasn’t until the next day that the witch actually acknowledged the continued presence of someone else in her house.

“Magpie,” she said abruptly, and the boy jumped up from where he was sitting on the floor. “Fetch me a bundle of dragonsteeth.” And then she went about her business, ignoring any attempts the boy made to try and speak with her.

He eventually found a book on the flora of the marshlands underneath a carton of chicken feathers. It revealed dragonsteeth to be a kind of fungus that grew on fallen logs, common in marshlands. He carefully memorized the crude sketch in the book and then ventured out into the swamp, taking great care to remember where the cottage was.

When he returned with an armful of the ivory-colored mushrooms, the witch had simply nodded, and dumped them into a jar.

Then: “Magpie, go find my snakewax candles.”

And so he set about looking through the mess of junk in the cottage’s cellar.

They quickly fell into that rhythm. Sometimes, Vidalia would ask for something simple, like boiling a pot of tea. Sometimes she would ask for something that didn’t even make sense, like collecting a quart of rainbow. In each and every case, Magpie would do the work without complaint, contriving a solution to even the most impossible tasks.

Before long, the expeditions into the marshes had reduced Magpie’s old clothes to rags. After Magpie spent a particularly frustrating evening trying to mend the scraps that were left, the witch grumbled to herself and climbed the stairs down to the cellar. When she came back up, she handed over two sets of clothes, both plain but sturdy. One was a tunic, breeches, and pair of thick leather boots. The second was a woolen dress, and a pair of house slippers.

After a bit of deliberation, Magpie carefully packed the tunic and breeches away in a drawer in case they might come in handy later, and then put the dress on along with the big leather boots. It only seemed practical. When she checked a few days later, another couple of dresses had joined the clothes in the drawer.

That was how things passed for about a year. Magpie found herself pleasantly surprised at just how happy she felt in this life, and how much her impressions of her self had been able to change for the better. She had never liked her old name to begin with, and as Magpie she felt more alive and real than ever before. In her old life, she had to be careful, constantly analyzing what others might think in case they might try to hurt her. But now she just lived the way she wanted. And she thought about herself exactly the way she wanted too.

The only downside was that she didn’t exactly feel like she was learning to be a witch. All of her tasks were relatively mundane. There were no lessons, and no magic. But she also had plenty of time to herself, and she spent it reading, working her way through the cottage’s surprisingly expansive library.

One day, she was out front of the cottage, sweeping a flat section of ground clean for a ritual they had planned later that night, when she heard a splashing off in the distance, accompanied by a lot of loud cursing.

She leaned on her broom, peering out into the trees. Eventually, the source of all the noise came into view. A knight, his armor splattered with mud and muck, stumbled his way through the swamp, leading a whickering horse behind him. “You!” he boomed out. “Is this the abode of the Witch?”

Magpie nodded. “Shouldn’t you be riding the horse?”

“There is too much unstable footing in this treacherous marsh,” the knight said, his red complexion deepening.

“So you fell off.”

The knight’s bristly moustache trembled with indignation. “I am not here to be talked down to by a mere serving girl! Lead me to your mistress.”

Magpie simply grinned. Behind her, the door of the cottage creaked open. The witch peered outside, frowning when she saw the knight.

“Magpie,” she said, “deal with this.”

“Yes ma’am.”

It took a long time to soothe the knight’s ruffled feelings once he realized that the witch wouldn’t speak with him further. But over a cup of herbal tea, he finally gave Magpie the full story. It turned out that the knight was in love with a princess who had been cursed to turn to stone for a thousand years. It was all very poetic and sad, though Magpie also found it faintly silly for a grown man to pine away after some lady who had been a statue for going-on three hundred years. But she kept that to herself, and cross-referenced a few potions manuals with a book of legends. Luckily enough they had just enough bat wing to brew the proper elixir.

“Is that it?” the knight said. He looked sort of disappointed.

Magpie stopped. She considered what it would be like to be awoken from a few centuries of perfectly good stony slumber by an overeager suitor with a bad moustache. “Not quite,” she said. “This potion will only work for the truly pure of heart. First, you must give away half of your possessions. Then you must go out among the poor and needy and perform a truly heroic deed. Only then can you awaken the princess. And even then, if you approach her with selfish intentions, then the curse will fall upon you instead, trapping you in stone.”

The knight looked suitably chastened, but also resolute, and Magpie had to raise her estimation of him a few notches. He bowed very deeply to her, and gave her a heavy pouch before leading his horse off into the march once again.

When Magpie checked inside, she found gold coins - more wealth than she had ever even seen in one place before.

She brought it to the witch, but Vidalia waved her away. “Keep it,” she said. “And good work, Magpie.”

That was perhaps the first compliment that Magpie had ever heard from her mentor. And that was the moment that she realized:

She was a witch.

 

---

 

They got a few other visitors over the next few years. Sometimes, Vidalia would tell Magpie to handle it. Other times, she would send Magpie out into the swamp on some business clearly meant to get her out of the way, like fetching firefungus even though they had more than enough. By the time Magpie returned, the visitors would be gone, and Magpie was never sure exactly how Vidalia had handled the situation.

Everything was wonderful. But as the years passed, they brought other problems with them.

Vidalia was as ancient as ever, but she seemed entirely removed from the flow of time. Magpie suspected that she was already over a hundred years old, and could easily live a hundred more.

No, the problem was that Magpie herself was getting older. She had always been slow to develop, and after reading through several anatomy books, she had started taking certain herbs in secret to make that even slower. But she could only hold back the passage of time so much. She had started to grow taller, and then broader in some places and bigger in others, her body twisting into a shape that made her feel ungainly and uncomfortable. Worst of all, she started finding hair in places, coarse and dark and horrid.

It took her a while to confront it directly, but she always knew what was coming for her. She started using her illusion magic again, wrapping it around herself in a cloak that made the unwanted changes less obvious, even though there was no one there to see her and even though the exertion left her more and more exhausted.

There was no easy fix. Magic could do a lot, but it couldn’t do everything. She researched and read about transmutations and transformations, but mostly learned how tricky and dangerous such magics really were. Something that was permanent required a great power, far more than what she possessed. Perhaps more even than Vidalia possessed.

One night, as this weighed on Magpie’s mind, she was staring into the cottage’s sole mirror, trying to measure how much worse things had gotten from the prior week. She had thought that Vidalia was sleeping, which is the only reason she allowed herself to cry.

But she heard a soft voice from behind her say, “Magpie, talk with me.”

Magpie had never disobeyed a command. So, she did.

When Magpie awoke the next day, she was surprised to see that her old pack had been brought out from where it had been stored in the cellar. It sat beside her bed, packed full of supplies and a handful of books. Vidalia was washing up the glassware, one of her least favorite tasks that she almost always delegated to Magpie.

“What’s going on?” Magpie asked.

Vidalia kept washing, not looking directly at her. “Tell me, have you ever heard of the Necromancer Queen?”

Magpie had to stop and think about it. “From the history books? She was a sorceress of tremendous power, but was slain by a Hero of Light. But that was ages ago. It’s probably just a myth.”

“It’s not.” Vidalia wiped a flask dry, moving with uncommonly nervous energy. “She was all too real, and truly powerful. And only a few know where she’s buried, in a country far away to the north.” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “In fact, one might say that she has more magic in her littlest finger than a score of witches like myself all put together.”

“Wow, so—” Magpie breathed in quickly. “Wait.”

She checked the spines of the books in her bag. Practical Ritual Foci, Sympathetic Osteomancy, Alethia’s Compendium of Grand Transfigurations…

“If I had a bone, I could use that power. I could—”

“One bone,” Vidalia said sharply. “Anything more than that would be far too dangerous.”

Magpie looked down at her things, her mind racing. But then she looked around her at the simple cottage. This was the only place that had ever felt like a home, the only person who felt like family. “But… I can’t leave you here.”

“I managed perfectly well for the past century,” Vidalia said. “I can take care of myself. Even if I fear this journey may be longer than you expect.”

Magpie felt herself tearing up. “I’ll come back.”

“Hmph. Obviously.” Vidalia turned away from the dishes, and looked Magpie straight in the eye, smiling grimly. “Magpie, go and be happy.”

 

---

 

Magpie traveled for months and months, moving from the marshlands over hills and mountains to a new country where fields of golden grain stretched across rolling plains. This time, she rationed her pouch of gold carefully, living frugally. She allowed herself only one major expense, hiring the services of a mercenary for protection.

More than one run in with bandits on the road proved that decision to be wise. Each time, the mercenary showed steel, and the thugs backed down, unwilling to risk a fight.

Magpie kept to herself and only thought of her goal. At times, the mercenary asked for their destination, but she simply said that it was to retrieve something important.

When Vidalia shared the location of the body months ago, Magpie had been surprised that it wasn’t kept in some castle or crypt, but a humble village graveyard. Vidalia had said that many dark forces still sought those bones, and that anonymity provided more protection than any stone walls or armed guards.

And that’s how they found themselves in a graveyard on a dark and rainy night, Magpie keeping watch for the lantern of the graveyard keeper while her mercenary dug up the wet earth at the foot of a blank headstone. It seemed to take hours, the chill wind howling as if possessed, but Magpie hardly felt the cold.

Finally, the wet crunch of metal in soil gave way to a solid thunk. Magpie flitted around with nervous anticipation as the mercenary freed a coffin from the ground, heaving it up to the surface.

The dark wood of the coffin had no name or identifiers, but Magpie could practically feel the power radiating from within. She held her breath and pulled the lid open, revealing a perfectly preserved skeleton. In her eyes, the contents were too overwhelming to look at, glowing with enough dark magic to make her teeth ache.

The mercenary couldn’t even tell, apparently. “Is that it?” he said.

Magpie tightly nodded. Her hand darted out, grabbing the smallest set of bones that made up the left pinkie as she tried not to throw up. As soon as she had what she needed, she slammed the lid of the coffin shut and put all her weight into shoving it back into the hole, where it landed with a bang.

She was breathing heavily from the exertion, trying to collect herself once again when she noticed the mercenary staring at her.

“Bones,” he said. “Not some artifact or treasure. Not even jewelry.”

“It has sentimental value,” she lied, uncertain of the wild look in his eyes.

He was shaking his head now. “No. No.”

“Look, I paid you fairly, and—”

“Not enough.”

Magpie’s hand went to her pouch of gold. “I can pay you more, then.” She fumbled with it, trying to retrieve another gold coin. And then she felt something cold at her very center, colder even than the rain and the wind. She looked down dumbly to see the hilt of a dagger in her stomach, and then crumpled up and fell over.

The mercenary stepped over her, reaching down to grab the pouch before he yanked the dagger back out of her. It was only then that the wound registered. Magpie began writhing, trying in vain to hold her blood inside of herself as everything exploded in a constellation of agony.

The mercenary didn’t even speak as he turned and walked away into the darkness.

And that’s how Magpie died.