Byron: The Dark Witch

Prompt the Eighth - Frozen by Fear

What if instead of ‘fear’, we called it ‘stories’? That’s what his therapist, if you could call the doddering Mrs Brickette a therapist, asked him. That’s really all fear is, isn’t it? An act of imagination.

It was part of your plot, your story. You could lay claim to your fear. That was her argument. It was unintentional storytelling. Fears had characters. They had beginnings, middles and ends. They had suspense. They focused attention on the question of ‘what next?’ in the most extreme versions, ‘is there a next?’ And every answer was another story: the plane crashing, the house catching fire, the whole family dying, the Church discovering the coven. Fear was the result of a question with an imaginative answer.

Until he hit twenty-three, Byron never felt fear. The odd skirmish had raised his blood until it beat in his ears like a bass so low it was felt rather than heard, but they were petty. Random riots, indiscriminate hate crimes, high risk first world problems: they stirred the snake in his spine but they didn’t cause it to unravel.

You weren’t really afraid then. When you tried to answer the question ‘what happens next?’, you weren’t afraid of the answer. The traditional outcomes of capture, prison or death held no sway over you. You didn’t believe enough in the answer. You weren’t convinced. Your story lacked a the characters, the villains, that made the fear real and concrete. She was good at making him stop and think and analyse. To think scientifically.

It wasn’t until Atlanta that he experienced the cold flood of fear, the absolute of panic. In those moments, which could have been minutes or days or months, his blood hurtled through his body, making him quake in time with his heart, trembles so strong he jerked and winced at a gust of air. Sometimes he couldn’t breathe. Other times he was breathing too much. He gasped and sobbed. He was undone. He fractured. He splintered like glass over the concrete ground. He saw his blood on the slithers, glittering like carnelians, stinking of iron.

You wrote your story. Brickette nudged. It was her way of asking her patients to expand. You wrote your fear. What was your story?

Betrayal. Impotence. Regret. Anger. No. Rage. Self-hatred. Self-realisation. Black magick consuming him from the inside out, turning him into a shell of a man, a creature closer to the Otherkin than humanity. Desperation. Love so hard it hurt. Despair as his heart cracked in his chest and his body unleashed a well of unwrought agony.

But fear wasn’t rational like a story. He still remonstrated over this point each time he saw Brickette. It was intuitive. Out of control, faced with imminent dissolution, his fear had pooled in his chest and rippled outwards. Fear. He hated it. It burned and froze. It scoured and dirtied. It had no linearity and it never, ever truly ended. Not really. Ignorance had been bliss even as it damned him.

Things were different just a scant five years later. He knew his worst fear. Entirely losing himself to the blackest of magicks, wiping his narrative clean, destroying the plot that gave him purpose. He was terrified of that.

So with heart more jaded, but less black, his brow furrowed in thought as if contemplating a peculiar logic puzzle, “How long do we have?”

Her smile was out of place, wicked, “He’s outside.”

“He followed you? Then we’re compromised. We need to move. Where did he find you? How –”

“I brought him here.”

“What?” Byron stopped firing questioned, “We need to leave. Now.”

“No. Byron. I want you to hear him out.”

His eyes turned frost green on forest trees. He clenched his fists and stared into his sisters eyes and wondered if this was the unfunniest sibling prank she’d ever played. The air turned cold, turning their breath to ghostly vapours as all the warmth left them. Aoife remained unaffected, piercing gaze watching him, waiting for him.

This was his home. His sanctuary. The one place that, until magus McBawbag appeared had been safe from the sorry eyes of the church. It was a place you had to know about to find. Wrapped in wards as close to place magick as could be so far from a leypoint, he’d desired little more that to protect him and his sister when she needed. And now that very sister had violated his space, this time with a Templar. Their enemy.

Trigger after trigger fired, each second witnessing a thousand nuerological firings as his reactions dashed comet trails through his conscious mind. Whilst not all of it, she knew what happened to him in Atlanta. She’d seen the aftermath. She’d organised Brickette and pieced him back together again. When the blue-eyed man who betrayed him tried to return, she’d driven him away again after seeing the effect he had on her brother. He told himself story after story, created fear after fear as draconic visions tormented each tick of the clock. He no longer tiptoed along a hair trigger but every panic, every trauma echoed in his mind, every bruise and broken bone and chip of soul smarted at this blow to his self, again by someone he loved. Betrayal was the bitterest fear. It festered.

“Byron, come back here you scallywag.” Called Jack, whose presence he’d almost forgotten, “I’m here. I know, remember. You’re better than this and you know it.”

Aoife’s face showed a little concern as she watched Jack step close to her brother, not quite touching his arm as if worried that might set him off, but seeming to caress his magick so it calmed, lifted the haze of his fear. She’d not seen an episode like this since... well it had to be years ago. And she’d never borne the brunt of such a look as the one he gave her now. Like she was unrecognisable to him. A new disciple of Iscariot.

Jack shot her a scandalised glare, “Why did you bring one of them here?”

“Because he proved himself.” She sniffed, not particularly taken with the pointy faced mortal, “Unlike you. I don’t know you.”

“He is here as my guest.” Byron’s voice rang before any argument, soft and sinister. His emphasis fell upon the last two words.

In the moments past, his thoughts had reconciled. Pulled back together, his magick unfolded and swelled, if he was to meet face to face with one of those Church demons, it would not be unarmed. He would fight if need be. He would win as must be. Whoever this monster of righteousness claimed to be to Aoife, he knew firsthand the cruelty of the Church and the wretched templar. Indeed, by the time Aoife and Jack turned to acknowledge him, he had grown. His hair danced between invisible fingers, he was drawn to his full height, tall and proud, he radiated radiated power and all but blazed within it.

He would face this templar.

Word Count: 1,170