Alan

“Good morning.”

I looked up from the book I’d been reading – Introductory Course to Symbols, Glyphs, and Runes – at my sister Sylvie and her husband Anton as they walked down the stairs. “Good morning, you two,” I greeted them. “Did you have a good sleep?”

“I did,” my sister replied. “Though my back is absolutely killing me; I can’t wait until the baby is born, and I’ll be rid of this weight.” She cradled her belly with her hands.

I smiled as she sat down at the table. “Let me get you some breakfast,” I said, and started to get up.

“I got it,” Anton said, motioning for me to sit back down.

“But…” I replied. “You’re guests here.”

“We can’t just let you do all the work around the house,” he rebutted. “You’ve been an excellent host, Alan, but take it easy for today.”

I nodded, and sat back down. “Thank you.”

Anton nodded back, and moved to the kitchen; I could hear him busying himself with breakfast.

“Are you ready for the party?” I asked my sister with a grin.

She made a face. “Don’t mention it, please. Seriously, what’s gotten into Mom? A gender reveal party, of all things.”

I chuckled. “I think she mentioned seeing a few videos about it, and deciding it would be a good idea. You know how she is when she gets something in her mind.”

“I know.” Sylvie sighed. “Boomers. I will never understand them.”

“Technically, Mom is Gen-X.”

She waved her hand. “Same difference. What does it matter what gender the baby is anyway? I love them either way, boy, girl, or something else.”

I smiled, reached over, and gave her hand a squeeze.

“You know what we should do?” she continued. “We should turn it into a gender reveal party for you. That would be funny.”

I gave her a look. “Sylvie…”

“No, I’m serious. You can’t stay in the closet forever. You look real good in a dress anyway. I could do your make-up.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Just two more years. Until I’m eighteen, and I can get out of here.”

My sister clicked her tongue. “You should do it now. That’ll teach her to be a bigot. And if she throws you out, you can always come stay with me and Anton.”

“Yeah, but I would lose access to Mom’s books,” I said.

“You could always borrow Aunt Juni’s,” she answered. “And why are you reading them, anyway? You can’t do magic.” She lowered her voice and added, under her breath, “Same as me.”

I gave her hand another comforting squeeze. Mom had been really upset when both of her children had turned out to be non-magical: my sister had been the biggest disappointment, since she lacked the Spark, and I… Well, men just can’t be magic. Period. No ifs or buts about it.

“I just think they’re neat,” I replied. “And it gives me something to talk about with Aunt Juni.” I looked up at Sylvie. “By the way, she’s coming to the party, isn’t she?”

“She is,” my sister nodded in confirmation. Then we heard a knock at the door. “Oh, that should be her right now.”

I sprang to my feet and rushed to the front door to greet my aunt.

 

Juni

The door opened to reveal my nephew Alan, who smiled at me, before tackling me with a hug.

“Aunt Juniper! Hi!” he exclaimed, squeezing me tight.

“Hi, kiddo,” I replied, mussing his hair with my hands. “How are you doing?”

“Great,” he said. “I have so many questions to ask you.”

“Oh? Have you been getting into your mother’s library again?”

“Of course I have, magical theory is a really cool subject,” he grinned.

I smiled. He was so earnest; even though he couldn’t manipulate mana like us witches, he seriously loved anything and everything related to magic. I really loved him; he made me regret never having kids, but that came with the territory of being a catastrophe lesbian who can’t hold down a relationship to save her life.

“Alright,” I replied. “I’ll make some time for you after the party, I promise.”

“Great!”

I looked up and glanced around the living room of my childhood home; my niece Sylvie waved at me from the table, and I returned the gesture. Then I frowned.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked. “Is she not home?”

“She’s been cooped up in her laboratory for the past three days, only coming out for meals,” Alan replied. “She’s working on something for the party, I think.”

My frown deepened; that my sister had been working in her laboratory meant that whatever she was cooking up was definitely magical. And that usually meant trouble.

“I should probably go see what it is,” I said, and started walking towards my sister’s lab.

“Good morning, Juniper!” Anton greeted me from the kitchen as I walked by. “Coffee?”

“Save me a cup,” I replied. “I think I’m going to need it.”

Despite being old, the house wasn’t very big; in less than a minute I was at the door to my sister’s laboratory. I hesitated before opening the door, and then decided to knock; this was not my home any more, after all, it hadn’t been for ten years now, ever since we’d had our falling out and I moved out.

I knocked on the door once, then twice. No answer. A third knock yielded the same result, so I just opened the door and went in.

The room was a mess; magical equipment and reagents were strewn all around, and a few blackboards were filled with arcane equations – it looked like my sister had been working on a spell. Unusual. It was way outside her field of expertise; she specialised in alchemy and potions, I was the conjurer in the family.

I heard a light snoring, and looked over to see her sprawled over on a couch, sleeping soundly. I sighed, walked over, and shook her awake.

“Anne. Anne, wake up.”

She blearily opened one eye. “Uh… What? Who…?”

Then her stare focused on me, and her gaze turned cold.

“Juniper.”

“Anne,” I replied.

“What are you doing in here?”

I shrugged. “I tried knocking, but got no answer. Thought you might have turned yourself into a newt, and need me to morph you back. Again.”

She bristled. “That only happened the one time,” she answered. Then she pulled herself to a seated position on the couch. “What time is it?”

“Half past nine.”

She blinked. “Half past nine? I’m late, the guests will be here soon.” She got to her feet, and started walking towards the door.

I hesitated, but there was no easy way to say what I was about to say. “Anne…” I began.

She turned back to me. “What is it?”

“Alan told me you’d been working on something. Is that it?” I asked, pointing at the blackboard.

My sister nodded. “Yes, a little surprise, a simple spell to liven up the party a bit.”

I looked at the blackboard carefully. “That looks anything but simple,” I said. “Want me to take a look at it? Maybe--”

“Thank you, I’m fine,” she replied icily. “I think I’m competent enough to design a spell without my sister the prodigy butting in.”

“Still,” I insisted. “An extra pair of eyes on it would do good. You know, to make sure nothing goes awry.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re always so full of yourself, Juniper. You always think you’re better than I am. This is why we don’t speak with each other.”

I met her gaze. “No, that’s because you called me a dyke, and never apologised for it.”

We glared daggers at each other for a few seconds, until she broke the silence. “You’re lucky Alan likes you,” she said. “If he didn’t, you wouldn’t be welcome here.”

“If not for Alan, I wouldn’t bother to come here at all.”

She turned around and, without speaking, walked out of the room.

 

Alan

The way my mother stormed out of her laboratory could only mean one thing: she and my aunt had had a fight. As usual. The two of them couldn’t be alone in a room for ten minutes before they started fighting.

It was a few minutes before my aunt came out of the laboratory; she had a worried look in her eyes. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

“…Maybe,” she replied. “Your mother cooked up something in her lab, and I took a look at it. There’s something… I think the equations are wrong. Slightly off.” She sighed. “But she just won’t listen to me. Ah well, at least the intended effect looked innocuous enough; the most it can do is embarrass her in front of everyone.”

My brother-in-law Anton walked over, a steaming mug of coffee in his hand; he handed it to Aunt Juni with a smile. “Here you go.”

“Oh, you’re a lifesaver, Anton,” my aunt said. “The party hasn’t even started yet, and I already have a headache.” She took a deep gulp from the cup.

“There’s more where that came from if you need,” Anton said. “Just say the word.”

Aunt Juni nodded, and Anton rejoined my sister at the table, where they started chatting once again.

Just then, the doorbell rang, and my sister sighed. “That would be the guests,” she said. “I should go greet them.”

“No, you stay there,” I replied. “You’re six months pregnant, sis, you shouldn’t be exerting yourself anyway. I’ll handle it.”

She smiled at me. “You’re the best, Alan.”

“That’s what siblings are for,” I smiled back.

 

Juni

To say that the party had been boring would be an understatement. There was food and music, true, but for two hours all we did was stand around in the backyard, chatting with the other guests; I don’t know who’d planned all this, but they absolutely failed to liven up the celebration.

And what was there to celebrate anyway? Penises and vaginas? Gender reveal parties are profoundly stupid, if you ask me.

“Your attention, please!” my sister called.

Oh, good. At least this would all be over soon, and I could talk with my nephew about magic stuff. That I was looking forward to.

I turned around to look at Anne; she was standing beside my niece on a small, raised stage.

“Thank you all for coming today, to this celebration of life,” my sister said. “Where we will discover whether the next member of the Wenceslas family, an old and renowned line of witches, will be able to continue the family tradition.”

I frowned. So that was her angle. That’s why she cared so much about this. If her future grandchild was a girl, there was a good chance she could carry the Spark, and thus be a witch.

Usually, only about one in a hundred thousand women are born with the Spark, and become witches; we’re quite rare, to be honest. People know we exist, and we use our natural talents to make a living, though we need to be properly licensed to do so – don’t want any rogue magic users just walking around. The Spark, however, tends to run in families, so normally about one woman in every generation is born a witch; our family, the Wenceslas, had been exceptional in that both me and my sister had the Spark, but on the other hand, her daughter didn’t have it. And since I wasn’t going to have any children any time soon, a granddaughter was Anne’s only hope.

“So now, without further ado,” my sister continued. “Let’s proceed with the reveal!”

She took a deep breath, and she started speaking in the Arcane Tongue, the constructed language witches use to cast their spells – you can’t just use English or French or whatever, otherwise we’d risk stringing together the wrong sequence of words while talking and accidentally casting a spell. I listened to the words she was speaking, and thought back to the schematics and equations I’d seen on her blackboard; if I was right, the spell should…

Right at that moment, I saw a flash of white light pass between my sister’s extended hand and my niece Sylvie; a couple seconds passed, and then a symbol, the Mirror of Venus, appeared above her head.

Everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed, but my sister frowned, and I understood why: the spell had done exactly what it was planned to, it had revealed the gender of who had been subjected to it, namely my niece and her unborn baby. Only, because of the way it had been designed, the gender symbol had been programmed to appear inside the Sahasrara chakra, which is located right above a person’s head, much like an angel’s halo; obviously, unless the baby was positioned just right in Sylvie’s belly, their symbol wouldn’t be visible from the outside.

“I’m sorry, but that wasn’t quite right,” Anne said. “The symbol, of course, was my daughter’s. Let me try again.”

She started speaking in the Arcane Tongue once more, and once again the flash of light passed between the two of them. Again, the Mirror of Venus appeared above my niece’s head, but there was no trace of the baby’s symbol.

The crowd started murmuring, and my sister was starting to get nervous; she clearly didn’t want to be embarrassed like that, in front of everyone.

I, on the other hand, was getting worried. The spell, cast twice in quick succession, had caused an accumulation of volatile magical energy to gather around my sister and niece. That could be dangerous: if something set it off… Well, no. It was always the same spell after all, nothing serious would happen.

Anne started speaking again, and I frowned; the words were different from before. I listened carefully, and realised what she was doing: she was altering the spell on the fly.

She raised her hand to cast the spell.

 

Alan

“Anne, don’t!” Aunt Juni shouted. My mother looked up in surprise, at the same time as the spell shot towards my sister once more.

This time, however, the spell didn’t reach her; instead it froze, hanging in the air for a few seconds.

A swirling mass of energy started whirlpooling around the point of light suspended in the middle of the backyard.

“Get down!” my aunt called, diving to the grass. Most people, including me, imitated her, and Anton quickly moved between my sister and the stray spell.

And then the light exploded.

I felt a wave of energy pass over me; it made my hair stand on end. Looking around, I could see that everyone who hadn’t heeded my aunt’s warning had been thrown off their feet.

Symbols started appearing above everyone’s heads; most were the Mirror of Venus or Spear of Mars, but I also recognised the Scythe of Saturn and the Trident of Neptune. And some, I’d never seen before. One person even had what looked like static in place of their gender symbol; I wondered what that meant.

The symbols faded away, but surprisingly, the spell was still hanging there in mid-air; energy was still swirling all around it, seemingly gathering more and more strength. It looked like it was getting ready to pulse again.

“Everybody back!” Aunt Juni shouted, pointing toward the house. “Get inside!” Then she turned towards the spell. “Let’s see now…” she mumbled, pulled out three vials of amber liquid from the pocket of her dress, and chugged them as quickly as she could. Then she started speaking in the Arcane Tongue, rapid-fire. I was amazed; even though I’d studied the language in passing, I couldn’t even make out the words.

My aunt threw up her arms, and a translucent, shimmering wall formed between her and the point of light, extending upwards and curving backwards until it enveloped our house.

Just then, the spell pulsed again: the wave of energy hit the barrier head on, and bounced right back at the spell, hitting it and knocking it away, in the direction of the city park.

My aunt grimaced; she looked worriedly at the barrier, which I could see was cracked.

“Y’all stay here. I’m going after it,” she announced.

“Juniper, no!” my mother shouted. “It’s dangerous!”

“It is,” Aunt Juni nodded. “But I have no choice. I have to stop that thing before it gathers too much strength.”

“The Emergency Witchcraft Response Team--” my mother began, but my aunt cut her off.

“Call them, but it will be at least an hour before they get here,” she said. “That’s a Resonance Cascade, Anne; time is critical. I have to go.”

Mom hesitated, then nodded.

“You stay here,” Aunt Juni said. “Protect the house. Keep the barrier up.”

Without waiting for a reply, she ran off, passing right through the barrier; my mother started casting a spell, and I could see the barrier starting to mend itself.

I hesitated. What should I do? That thing was clearly dangerous.

But on the other hand, my aunt needed help. Maybe I could help. I’d studied the books.

Surely my knowledge would be helpful.

“Alan, stop! Where are you going?” my mother shouted.

But it was too late; with the foolhardiness and overconfidence of my sixteen years of age, I rushed off, chasing after my aunt and the stray Gender Reveal spell.

 

Juni

I reached the spell as it was slowly passing over the city park. I remembered this place; the only green area in the middle of a dismal town. But this was no time to reminisce, I had work to do.

Mumbling under my breath, I cast a detection spell: I felt my eyes start to burn with magical energy, and I looked directly at the rogue Gender Reveal. What I saw disheartened me; it was already much bigger than before, and gathering more and more strength with each passing moment. At this rate, within ten minutes it would pulse strongly enough to reveal the gender of everyone in the state… And have some other side effects, too. With wild magic like this, I couldn’t predict what it would do; worst case scenario, it could open a portal to Gehenna, and suck the entire country into the Eleventh Hell. That was something to be avoided at all costs.

The only choice now was a counterspell; one big enough to overcome the raw energy of the Resonance Cascade. But a counterspell of that size would require a massive amount of magical power, and there was simply no way I could find that on short notice. I would have to try and contain the spell, do damage control, and hope--

“Aunt Juni!”

My head snapped around to look at my nephew. “Alan!” I shouted back. “What the hell are you doing out here? It’s dangerous! I told you to stay in the house! Go back right now!”

“But Aunt Juni, maybe I can help you,” he protested. “After all, I’ve read so much stuff--”

“You think I haven’t?” I snapped, at the end of my wits with worry. “What do you think you can…”

I paused. My detection spell was still active, and it was detecting… Something. In Alan.

No. It couldn’t be.

But what if it was?

This was the best chance I would probably get.

I looked directly at Alan. “I’m going to try something. Do you trust me?”

Alan hesitantly nodded.

“Good,” I said. I turned back towards the Resonance Cascade. “Drop to the ground, and cover your eyes.” Alan complied.

This was going to be difficult. A counterspell this big, on the fly? No one had ever attempted this before.

Well, they didn’t call me a prodigy for nothing.

I took a deep breath, and started speaking in the Arcane Tongue, stringing one word after the other, making corrections and adjusting the trajectory on the fly. My spell went on and on, and had terrible grammar, was full of run-on sentences, but I could feel it working.

I started to see strands of rainbow lights emanate from the ground, from the trees, from plants, all around me; the bigger of those was coming from Alan. The multicoloured ribbons wrapped themselves around me and around the Cascade, connecting our magical cores.

I paused, and offered a brief prayer. This had to work, otherwise we were all doomed.

I spoke the final word.

Everything exploded in a burst of light.

 

Alan

When the light subsided, I opened my eyes and looked up at my aunt.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said, smiling at me. “How are you feeling? You okay?”

I hesitantly nodded. I tried to stand up, but then I felt my legs collapse under me; I fell back down in a sitting position on the ground.

“Careful,” Aunt Juni said, still smiling. “I took quite a bit out of you; you’ll be quite tired until you have had the chance to recover.”

“You took… What out of me?” I asked.

“Magic power. Mana,” she explained. “And I’m truly sorry for doing it without your explicit permission, but it was an emergency. I didn’t take all of it, though, otherwise… Well, look around.”

I glanced around the park, and realised that we were right in the middle of a… Circle? Yeah, looked like it. Everything in a hundred-metre radius was a different colour than the rest, a shade between grey and brown instead of being a lush green; as I watched, a tree about twenty metres away snapped under its own weight and crashed to the ground.

I looked down at the grass I was sitting on: it was completely withered. I reached down and plucked a blade with my fingers, and it crumbled to dust as soon as I tried to hold it up to my face to examine it.

“Aunt Juni, what did you do?” I asked.

“Your mother never properly explained what I am to you, did she?” she replied. “I’m what is called a conduit in technical terms, but most witches call me a leech instead.”

I thought back to the books I’d read; if I recalled correctly, that meant…

“You have no mana of your own,” I said. “Instead, you have to take magic power from other living things to cast your spells.”

“Correct! Excellent textbook answer, A-plus!” she exclaimed, offering me her hand; I let her pull me up to my unsteady feet. “Of course I only take it from non-sentient beings: plants, insects, very rarely animals. Never humans, not without asking for permission first. Hence the apology. I’m sorry, kiddo.”

I smiled. “Apology accepted, Auntie. As you said, it was an emergency, there was no time to explain.”

“Thank you,” she nodded. “Well, shall we get back home?”

 

Juni

“Juniper! Alan!” my sister shouted as soon as she saw us walking towards the house; she took off at a run, and when she reached us she clamped Alan in a really tight hug. “Alan, are you okay?”

“Mom, let go, you’re crushing me,” Alan said, almost gasping for air in her vice-like grasp.

“Oh, sorry, sorry,” Anne said, releasing the embrace. Then she turned to me. “What about the Cascade, Juniper? What happened to it?”

“Gone,” I replied. “I dispelled it.”

“…How?” she asked. “You had no time to study it, there’s no way you could’ve found the exact counter-resonance in time, not before it got too big.”

I nodded. “Correct. That’s why I cast the counterspell on all the counter-resonance frequencies, at the same time. That way, one of them ought to be the right one, and it was.”

“Again, how? That would have required a stupidly big amount of raw mana, much more than you could siphon from the environment, much more than there is in your mana boosters,” she said. “Where did you get the magic power?”

I took a deep breath; Anne wasn’t going to like this.

“I took it from Alan.”

There was a moment of absolute silence, which was then broken by my sister’s shrill shout: “You what!”

“Anne…”

“Don’t you ‘Anne’ me, you leech!” she screamed, fire in her eyes. “You could’ve killed him!”

“Only if I took too much,” I replied.

“Taking anything from a normal human is too much! They don’t have the mana reserves that witches have! How dare you! Putting my son’s life at risk! How dare you!”

“Alan isn’t a normal human,” I said.

“And one more – What?” she said, stopping mid-rant and staring at me. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said,” I answered. “When it was time to find enough magic power to stop the Cascade, I used a simple detection spell to look around, to try and find a mana source large enough that would’ve allowed me to cast the counterspell. There was none to be found, however… until Alan showed up.”

For once, my sister didn’t reply; she was quiet, though she was still glaring at me.

“Alan’s mana reserves are absolutely astounding, I’ve never seen anything even approaching them. What I took… Well, it was quite large, and it had to be, to disrupt a spell that big, but by my reckoning it wasn’t even three quarters of the total amount.”

Anne didn’t speak for a while. She kept looking at me, though she was no longer glaring: she had a pensive look in her eyes instead.

“But how can this be?” she asked, finally.

I turned to Alan. “Kiddo, can you do me a favour?”

 

Alan

I’d been watching the exchange with curiosity, but when Aunt Juni addressed me I shrugged. “Sure, what do you need?”

“Hold your hand in front of yourself, like this,” she said, demonstrating the gesture, which I imitated. “Then speak these words.”

She said four simple words in the Arcane Tongue; I recognised two of them as meaning “fire” and “conjure,” but I had no idea why she wanted me to speak them. I looked at her in puzzlement.

“Just say them,” she said, and repeated the words.

I nodded and slowly, carefully, repeated the words.

My aunt nodded. “Now snap your fingers, and hold your index finger pointed upwards, like so.” Again, she demonstrated.

Still puzzled, I complied.

A small orange-red flame, about two inches in length, appeared above my finger.

“Whoa, shit!” I exclaimed, flinching back in surprise, as did my mother; the flame flickered and disappeared as soon as I moved my hand.

“Language,” Aunt Juni said with a smile. “Do it again, and try and hold it steady this time.”

I hesitantly nodded; I repeated the words and snapped my fingers. The flame appeared again.

“Wow,” I said, admiring it. I slowly moved my finger, and the flame followed it.

I looked up from the magical fire to my aunt. “I can do magic?” I whispered. She nodded, and I repeated more loudly, “I can do magic!” A whoop of excitement escaped my lips, and I did a small fist-pump, making the fire disappear again, but I didn’t mind.

“Juniper?” my mother asked, looking at her. “What is happening? Why can Alan do magic?”

Aunt Juni turned to my mother, and took a deep breath. “Anne, did you have your children tested when they were born?”

“I’ve had Sylvie tested, yes,” Mom answered. “Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the Spark. But there was no point in testing Alan; after all, men can’t be magical.” She hesitated. “Can they?”

“They can’t,” Juni confirmed. “Though we should have Alan tested ASAP; if the Spark is there, well…”

My mother frowned. “I thought you just said men can’t have the Spark.”

Aunt Juni glanced at me, then looked back to my mother. “I have a theory. You see…”

She leaned in and whispered something in my mother’s ear; I couldn’t hear what was said, but my mother’s eyes went wide, and she stared at me for a long time.

“…Fuck,” she said, finally; and it was the first time I’d ever heard her swear.

I looked from her to Aunt Juni, and back again. “What? What is happening?” I asked.

My aunt walked up to me and put her arm around my shoulder. “What do you say we get back inside, kiddo? I think we have much to discuss.”

 

Juni

“Aunt Juni?” my niece’s voice said.

I looked up from the latest issue of Advances in Healing Magic. “Yes?”

“I’ve finished scribing the magical circle; could you check to see if I got it right?”

I smiled. “Of course, kiddo.”

It was six months later. After the chaos of the gender reveal party had died down, after all the cards were laid down on the table, my sister and I had decided that it would be best if I took my niece Ellen under my wing as an apprentice. It was tradition, after all: young witches always start learning magic as soon as they’re able, with an elder witch such as myself acting as their teacher and supervisor. Ellen had started training a bit later than normal, because of her… Unusual circumstances, but she had an enormous magic potential and was extremely talented; also, she had a bit of a head start, thanks to the books she’d read out of curiosity. Because of that, she was quickly catching up: I could easily see her becoming one of the most powerful, knowledgeable, and respected witches in history.

The discovery that who she’d thought of as her son until then was actually her daughter, however, had shaken Anne’s confidence; also, because of my sister’s traditional views, it drove a wedge between the two of them. Since Ellen had come to live with me, Anne had only visited her twice, and each time they’d barely talked to each other.

I took the sheet of paper from my niece’s hands and examined the circle: it had been neatly traced with a fountain pen filled with magical ink, a significant step up from the old quills that were common until the fifties, and which some old-fashioned witches still insisted on using. I looked carefully at the lines, I checked the runes, but I could find no imperfection; Ellen had done an excellent job.

I nodded. “Very good. I’m proud of you, kiddo.”

“Thank you, aunt Juni,” she replied, beaming with pride at my compliment. “Though I must confess I don’t understand what this circle’s for. I mean, there’s something about masculine and feminine in the glyphs there, and also about liquids and change; but it’s almost as if it’s… incomplete.”

“That’s because it is,” I said.

“It is?” she queried.

“This is just half of a bigger, more complex spell, one that I’ve been working on with a colleague,” I answered. “Taken together, the two halves should have their intended effect. In theory. But you know I’m rarely wrong.”

At that moment, the doorbell rang.

“Oh, speak of the devil,” I got up from my chair and headed to the door.

“Who is it?” Ellen asked. “The shop is closed today, isn’t it?”

“Not for family,” I said, and opened the door, to reveal my sister Anne; Sylvie and Anton were standing behind her, and Sylvie had baby Jules in her arms. I ushered them in with a smile.

 

Ellen

“What… What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Ellen, if I may introduce my colleague,” Aunt Juni said, pointing at my mother. “This witch has been helping me with the spell I mentioned. The one you scribed the magic circle for.”

I glanced nervously at my mother; she was looking at me, an inscrutable expression on her face.

“Did you bring it?” my aunt asked.

“Of course,” my mom said. “It finished brewing this morning, it should be good until sundown.”

“Alright,” Aunt Juni replied. “Let’s move to the laboratory then.”

She walked off, and my mother followed her. I took the chance to give my sister a quick hug.

“It’s so nice to see you, Ellen,” Sylvie said. “I must say, you’ve been filling out nicely.”

I smiled and blushed. “Thank you,” I whispered. The hormones I’d started taking six months earlier, right after I moved into my aunt’s house, had been doing their job. I still had quite a way to go, but I was hopeful for the future.

“Kids! What’s the hold-up?” my aunt called; I exchanged a glance with my sister and my brother-in-law, and then we walked to the lab too.

“Okay,” Aunt Juni said, placing the magical circle I’d scribed earlier on the floor and a glass bottle containing a purple-red liquid on top of it. “This will require some oomph.” She turned to me. “May I borrow some mana?”

“Of course,” I nodded.

“Take some from me, too,” my sister said. When I gave her a puzzled stare, she just smiled.

“Alright. It’s best if you hand Jules to Anton, though, don’t want to risk getting him caught up in the spell,” my aunt replied. Sylvie nodded, and passed her son over to her husband, who took a few steps away.

“Here goes,” Aunt Juni said. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes in concentration, and began speaking in the Arcane Tongue.

It was quite the lengthy spell, though again, the purpose of it escaped me. As my aunt continued speaking each word carefully and deliberately, I could see a flux of rainbow-coloured light, a flow of magical energy, come out of me and my sister, pass around and though my aunt, and gather into the bottle on the floor; soon the contents started bubbling, glowing, and shimmering, until the incantation was over, and the liquid settled back down. I could see that the colour had changed, and was now a deep, rich royal blue.

“That went well, I think,” my mother said. “There were no mistakes I could see.”

“When do I ever make mistakes?” my aunt teased her. Then she stooped over, grabbed the bottle from the floor, and handed it to me. “Here you go, kiddo. Bottoms up.”

I blinked. “Wait, what?”

“It’s for you,” my mother said. “We’ve been working on this for a while now. Go ahead, drink it.”

I gave both of them a puzzled stare, but I uncorked the bottle and swallowed the contents. I grimaced, and almost gagged – the taste was absolutely vile – but I managed to drink it all.

“Yeah, I know,” Mom said. “Unfortunately, sugar would make it lose its effectiveness.”

Still grimacing, I said, “What was this for?”

My mother and my aunt exchanged glances, and then Aunt Juni smiled. “Good news, kiddo! You know those pills you’ve been taking?” When I nodded, she continued, “Well, you can throw those away.”

“That’s right,” my mother added. “You don’t need them any more.”

“…What do you mean?” I asked warily.

“It’s the effect of that potion,” she replied. “Your body will make the correct hormones on its own now.”

My eyes widened in surprise. I was completely at a loss for words.

“This is your present, kiddo,” Aunt Juni said. “Enjoy it.”

“Present…?” I managed to squeak out.

“Of course,” she said. “Have you forgotten what day it is? It’s your birthday.”

As she said it, I realised it was true; it had completely slipped my mind.

My mother nodded in agreement. “Happy seventeenth birthday, Ellen,” she said.

Then she almost lost her balance as I tackled her in a really tight hug.

“Thank you, Mom,” I whispered, between tears of happiness.

I felt her reciprocate the hug. “You’re welcome, my dear daughter.”