Chapter 10
Life Before Was Tragic

So I could do magic now? A part of me felt like I should’ve been taking it slow, but once I found out that that was just, like, a thing I could do? Not even Pancakes falling asleep on my lap could stop me. Not that it was easy, of course. The Witch had been very uninterested in getting magic to work, preferring to focus on natural and practical remedies where possible. However, a lot of things that hadn’t made sense to me, symbols in the byline of his journals, words I couldn’t place, started to form a picture in my head of how things might work. 

The first and obvious order of business, of course, was to try and figure out what was up with the lycanthropy thing. While I didn’t really mind being turned into a wolf — it was liberating, quite fun, and sleeping while curled up with Pancakes was quite nice — there was the real danger of some random villager seeing me and hunting me down. The same went for Pancakes. Maybe I could turn both of us back. 

But that meant starting with the basics. The first hint I’d found was in an older journal, a project the Witch seemed to have started up but had then abandoned, a sort of manual. Maybe he’d once considered taking on an apprentice, or becoming a teacher. Regardless, the fundamentals of magic were outlined, very roughly, the way someone trying to explain advanced mathematical concepts might outline the basics for a returning student. 

It wasn’t easy to make sense of at first. The symbols were arcane, the language was worse, and the Witch had clearly assumed that the reader would have either some kind of supplementary material at hand, or some understanding of things already. 

The first test was outside, of course. I wasn’t going to risk blowing up the Witch’s house. If I understood everything correctly, magic was essentially a kind of… mathematics? It had very clearly defined rules, and was a lot less esoteric than I’d anticipated. At first I tried to make sense of the vocalizations, the hand movements in quickly drawn diagrams, the poses and symbols that were supposed to be drawn on the floor. 

That’s when Pancakes, trying to lick the back of his own head and falling off the couch gave me an idea. Well, not that specifically, but it shook something loose in me. A memory. 

“Stand in the corner, and if you spin 720 degrees and fire rockets straight down, the game thinks you’re moving up in every direction at once and will clip you through the world floor.” I remembered it specifically because it was something I’d been watching when baby Pancakes fell off the couch for the first time. 

I scratched him behind the ears while I drew the last of the symbols in the snow. It was probably not going to work, but that was okay. Once I realised what the Witch was actually doing, it was easy to see how I was supposed to do it. Sticking the landing wasn’t even the point yet. 

Pancakes sat down obediently when I handed him a small dried sausage, and I stepped into the magic circle. If I had it correctly, all this was supposed to do was create some light. Holding my hands like this, saying the weird noises like that, and light that was supposed to hit my hands would, in theory, sort of… stop, about an inch from my hand, and ball up there. 

Now, everything I’d learned in physics back in high school had taught me that light didn’t work that way. Light followed some really complex but ultimately very clearly defined rules. You couldn’t scrunch it up like a newspaper. The universe didn’t work that way. 

Of course, the universe didn’t stand a chance in the face of speedrunners. I exhaled and hummed the last syllable of the impossible word, and I saw the glow in front of my hands. I jolted in surprise, and the light stayed in place for a moment before dissipating. Okay, that was fine. That was fine. Magic worked. I could do magic. All I had to do was break reality a little bit, and it seemed to snap back just fine. 

Of course, I’d also seen the kids’ movies about hubris, I’d read Icarus’ story of girlbossing too close to the sun, so I wasn’t going to overdo it. Once I realised what magic actually entailed, a part of me really understood why the Witch didn’t seem to want to bother with it. It seemed the kind of thing that might invite “attentſion from thoſe inviſible to the nayked aye,” in his words, and I wasn’t risking that. So I stuck to small things. Technically, if reality could be broken, time probably could as well, but I wasn’t messing with that. 

But I could do magic now, and it was kind of hard not to get overly excited about that concept, to the point where, for a while, I forgot about the whole ‘turning into a wolf’ thing. What had stuck with me was the fact that the lycanthropy had come with a very strange side effect. 

Of course, the Witch had been spectacularly vague when it came to the kind of magic that could change someone’s form. He hadn’t, it seemed, been interested. So it came down to me to try and figure out what I could based off of his cryptic notes, and the kind of weird logic that seemed to keep the universe together, especially if I wanted to try and replicate the effects. For now, Pancakes didn’t seem especially bothered, but I got the feeling I would be more productive if I had some experience under my belt, even if that meant being turned into a woman again. That thought didn’t bother me at all. I had the clothes to change into if I managed to do it, after all. 

There was also the other reason, of course. Tavi came by a few more times, asking after Maya. She was always disappointed when I told her she’d been traveling — “to gather supplies” was my go-to excuse — but perked up when I told her she’d probably be back at the end of the month. I didn’t know, of course, but the two changes had gone hand in hand, after all. And a part of me, a very silly part of me, had felt a really strong flutter in my chest when her face had lit up at the news that Maya would love to visit her again. 

She asked after Maya a lot, when she came by, asking how ‘she’ had been doing, and if Maya had mentioned her at all. I didn’t want to seem creepy, but her enthusiasm was both infectious and a little flattering, so I told her Maya had inquired after her too, which was clearly a satisfactory answer. 

So I kept plugging away at magic in my free time, though there was less and less of that as time went by. While the Witch had been extremely remote and had filled his day with study of plants and just surviving on his own, I came by the village quite often. Every time, someone came up to me with some ailment or another. A sick cow here, an injured child there. Being mostly on their own, these people knew how to survive, of course, but with what I picked up from the Witch’s journals and my own magazines, I could at least increase their standards of living a little bit. 

It was, all things considered, a fairly comfortable way of living. The most annoying thing was shaving every morning. The Witch, it seemed, had facial hair that came in fast and hard, so I had to learn how to use a straight razor, and quickly. I had more than a few nicks and cuts in the beginning, and I learned early on that, no matter how annoying, boiling water every morning was paramount. I made the mistake of shaving with cold water exactly one time, and shaving dry half of that. My skin was sore for three days. That would be another advantage of turning back into a woman, I thought idly more than once. 

And I did, slowly but surely, make strides in that field. I could do magic now, after all, and magic was just… tricks. It wasn’t looking reality in the face and daring it to change, it was more like… pointing over its shoulder, going “What’s that?!” and then running in the opposite direction and getting done what you wanted before it caught up with you. 

So two questions remained: How would changing shape work? Was there some kind of inherent ‘shape’ that things were supposed to have, and could I swap those out? Was that what happened with the whole werewolf thing? After all, if it was ‘just’ magic, then I’d be turned back from a wolf into a person as soon as reality realised I had a tail too many, so there was clearly some kind of permanency component to it. 

The moon probably played a part, so I tried to look into what the Witch had written down about the moon. Too much, apparently. He’d been exhaustive in his studies of the moon and its effects on… animal behaviour. The Witch would’ve made an excellent field biologist, but he made for a terrible teacher of magic. But the moon probably played a part. I mentally put a pin in that. So, body changing, or at least the wolf-and-woman parts, were connected to the moon somehow. Moonlight was just reflected sunlight, so I had to guess it was less the light and more the possibility of something ‘breaking’ when it was both night and being hit by a large concentration of sunlight mixed with… something else. 

Maybe I’d been infected with something, some kind of disease — I really hoped it wasn’t rabies — that reacted with moonlight in some strange way. I’d have to wait to do experiments with that until the next full moon. 

The other burning question was what had caused myself and the Witch to trade places. To SWitch, if you will. Had he done so deliberately? Had he tried to pull me through for some reason but had caused myself and Pancakes to end up in his body and that of, I presumed, his own pet wolf? Was there a version of him in my world, walking around in my body, with a wolf in Pan’s body? I had to assume as much, and the thought of Feral Pancakes was both funny and terrifying. 

But why? His latest journals, which I had read front to back several times, kept mentioning “ſynchroniſitye”. Synchronicity, the idea of things that seemed to be connected but had no real cause-and-effect link, was somehow a part of this. 

“I wish he actually said what he meant sometimes,” I mumbled mostly to Pan as he kicked his legs in his sleep. I gently stroked the fur between his eyes as I dug through the journals again. Maybe he needed help with something? Or he needed to keep something synchronous? Was that a word? Did he need something from my world? 

The infuriating thing about his journals was that they were stuffed to the brim, top to bottom, with What and How, but not a whole lot of Why. The Witch was an enigma, and I wasn’t likely to figure out what he wanted out of his journals. He was too analytical for me. So I focused on magic for my own reasons, and I made sure to write down a whole lot of why in the ones I started. 

Why was I learning how to make butt-creams and joint-balms and penicillin? Because I wanted to be helpful to the people of the nearby village. Especially since they always paid me in things I could use. And… well, I made a small note of the fact that I didn’t hate the fact that it let me see Octavia every once in a while as well, as she was always eager to hear more from and about ‘Maya’. 

Why was I learning magic? Well, because it was there, obviously. I wanted to know how the world worked in a way that had never made sense to me before. But also because I wanted to understand what had been happening to me, and how to recreate the scenario, so that I could turn it back if I had to. Especially as the days ticked forward to the next full moon. 

Oh, and I made sure to write down everything about Pancakes. Anyone coming after me deserved to know about Pancakes.

Elamimax

Everyone deserves some Pancakes in their lives.

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