Life slowly began to stabilise in Maine, with the state governor declaring that things were fine and everyone should get back to work. The usual messaging really.

He wasn’t necessarily wrong though, apart from a few isolated incidents, nothing too wild had happened. A bunch of people got some interesting new features added to their bodies, the general landscape of the state had gained a few embellishments, and the world still turned.

It was pretty funny watching everyone react to the existence of magic though. The internet had gone absolutely mental, with everyone and their dog running around trying to figure out how to use it.

Those of us in the know however, we were keeping extremely silent on the matter. The hunters because they had spent the last six thousand years or so eradicating magic, and the mages because they didn’t want to become the hunters’ next victims.

So the public was flying blind, and therefore the wild theories and conspiracies were rampant in all corners of the internet. From my perspective, it was just kinda funny and a little sad, considering some people really wanted to learn how to use magic, but they never would.

On the home front, Mum apologised for trying to force me into the skirt, then promptly grounded me for a week for not answering her calls. Ah, the inconsistencies of parental punishment.

I spent my time avoiding the stranger thoughts that had been floating through my skull recently, opting to do as much reading of grandad’s books as I could. Knowing my way around combat spells was suddenly very high up on my priority list.

I found books to be incredibly interesting, as most of the spellbooks were essentially journals, thus giving me an insight into the lives of my ancestors.

One such journal followed the investigations of a woman named Isabet Dorem, a witch who lived during the mid 1600s. She was known at the time as the Ravenborne Witch for her raven familiar, and she used that name to full effect. Her spells resembled various dark and spooky things that you might find outside any odd house on halloween now.

Contrary to the stereotype of a witch, she didn’t spend her time tricking children into her cooking pot or whatever. No, she spent her time destroying every motherfucker who came at her.

A battlemage without equal on the border between Scotland and England, she travelled about hunting the hunters and destroying whatever nests of their vile order she found. Her tool of choice? The very same gauntlets that now sat under my bed.

She hadn’t been their original creator and owner though, and so she went on a quest to discover just who had first made them.

I became enthralled by her, by the path of destruction she left in her wake, unafraid to become a target due to her vast power. Unfortunately, everywhere she looked for answers, she instead found the trail go mysteriously cold. It was as though past a certain point, around 3000BCE, all records of the gauntlets vanished into time. Just poof, gone.

They hadn’t even been in my family for all of that time either, coming into the possession of one of my ancestors around the same time that Odysseus would have been off on his adventures. That, of course, is a fairly ambiguous time frame, but people weren’t exactly known for their meticulous record keeping back then, especially up in the british isles, so both Isabet and I had to make do.

“Tia! Have you put your washing out? Also, I need your underwear, jeans and shorts so I can modify them for your tail!” Mum hollered from down the stairs, breaking me out of my reading trance.

With a weary sigh, I closed the book and placed my laptop on top of it. God, my eyes hurt from the understanding spell I’d used to read the damned thing. I was very thankful that my magical reservoir allowed me to cast fairly frequently now.

It was a wierd spell too, it made the text on the page wibble and wobble around like it was made of jelly. Then, as you began to read, it all sort of started to slot together in your mind, similar to how it feels when you finally remember why you went to look in the fridge.

Mum’s head popped into my room. “Tia?”

“Yeah, sorry… I’ll get all that stuff done now,” I told her quietly, hopping up off the chair.

She gave me a squinty-eyed suspicious look, but otherwise nodded and wandered off to do whatever mothers do when they aren’t pestering their kids. Meanwhile, I did as she’d asked, throwing my dirty laundry into the machine and sorting out everything that needed to be modified to fit my tail.

Mum had joined a facebook group for people who had new body parts, and they had been sharing ideas and designs for fixing clothing to accommodate our new appendages. I was actually kinda impressed with the solution people had come up with for tails. Essentially, a hole would be cut just below the waistband, along with the waistband itself. Then, a clasp or button or something would be added to the waistband to close the loop again once the tail was in.

When I finished with my chores, I returned to my book and picked up where I’d left off. Isabet found a strange ruin among the many hills of Scotland, hidden just beneath the surface of the lake.

She described the ruin as being wrong, as if the very stones that made up that place had been tortured beyond the point of sanity. While she found all the various rooms one might expect in a large and ancient fortress, the layout itself made very little sense.

The place had long since been ransacked, once when it was destroyed in an apparent battle, and again far later than that. What little were left, however, were artifacts of magical power beyond even her understanding of the art. One such artifact sat within the very depths of the expansive ruins, and it was obvious why it hadn’t been taken.

She described a massive multi-faceted spherical structure made of stone and bronze, a behemoth of magical ingenuity that had floored her when she found it. The purpose of the great magical engine was unknown, but it had very obviously failed in its final task, its core appearing to have imploded violently.

No matter what type of scrying spell she used, she couldn’t discern the nature or function of the destroyed device, other than the fact it had indeed once wielded vast amounts of power. Something her spells did tell her was how old it was, and the answer she got was baffling. The ruins were somehow hundreds of thousands of years old, far older than the place should have been given how well preserved they were.

“Tia?” Mum asked, interrupting me again as she poked her head in the door. Lucky thing I’d placed my laptop in such a way to block the view of the book from the door.

“Yeah Mum?” I asked, doing my best to keep the exasperation out of my voice.

“Have you finished getting everything ready for school next week?” she questioned, as though she hadn’t asked that three times in as many days already.

“Yes, Mum. I’ve submitted those forms and emailed my teachers about the whole girl thing,” I groaned, ears flicking irritably.

“What about your clothes? Do you know what you’ll wear on the first day back?” she continued, clearly having forgotten the entire conversation we’d had on this topic yesterday.

I rubbed at my eyes for a moment, holding back a snide comment about age getting to her. “Yeah, I’m just going to wear jeans and a hoodie like I always do.”

“Why don’t you wear something nicer?” she frowned, glancing around my room as though something nicer would just pop into existence.

“Because I’m not that kind of person Mum, I just want to be comfortable while I’m listening to my teachers waffle on about shit that won’t be on the test,” I said, perhaps a little sarcastically. There was only so much I could hold it back after all.

“A few weeks with a woman’s hormones and you’re suddenly a little shit,” she sighed, giving an amused shake of her head. “You know that you can look nice and be comfortable, right? The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“Well… I want to wear clothes that I like, not ones that you like,” I told her stubbornly.

“Alright, but you’ll regret it,” she told me, leaving the room with a roll of her eyes.

I stuck my tongue out at her back, but couldn’t help a little smile. Mum and I still definitely had our differences, but I felt like we were getting a little closer now. It was pretty funny seeing us both picking up on the new emotional cues from our new animal parts. For example, swishing tail and ears flattened and pointing backwards meant angry fox!

Oh wait, yeah… my book. Where was I?

Isabet left the ruin with a few more portable artifacts and a great many more questions. Even the architectural style of the ruins hadn’t matched any civilisation that she knew of. The journal ran out of pages before she was able to figure anything out, and so I closed it with a thoughtful sigh.

Grandad didn’t have any more volumes of her journal, but more clearly existed. I wonder what had happened to the rest? Did they still exist, or had the hunters burned them in some long forgotten raid on my ancestors?

Perhaps I could figure that out by reading some of the journals of my more recent kin. Surely they would mention a trove of ancestral knowledge? That, or there was another branch of the family in hiding with whatever missing pieces remained.

Grinning now as I felt my mind latch onto a rather interesting mystery, I decided that I’d be going out tonight to practice my magic. I had a disguise now, I could go out into the night and actually practice for real! No more surreptitious casting with just my fingers. I wanted to use the gauntlets again, I wanted to be Gauntlette again.

QuietValerie

Going into hospital for surgery. Not going to be able to write for a while. Sorry.