Court of Witches

The cruise around the capital is a mess of flitting images when I wake up the next morning. The windows are drawn. A golden tray of covered dishes is balanced to my left on the large bed. The bedroom is spick-span. Not a lint on the sheets. Not a speck on the red carpets. Not even a smear on the huge grandfather clock chiming away. The sun is already an angel's halo, spearing through the high windows in rays of misted gold. Sometimes, I think my bedroom was designed by an architect with a Cathedral in mind. I give a great yawn, stretching like a cat after a nap. A rich cat.

That was some road trip yesterday. One for Mythronos! I joke to myself.

A shadow of a small figure reflects in the domed ceiling above. My eyes fly from the painting of winged children to the bedside. I catch sight of the tail end of a gown just before it disappears into my closet. I immediately sit up on the bed, blinking away any vestige of sleep as pumping adrenaline clears my head.

"Who's there?"

My voice is groggy as it sounds in the room. God! No more medieval alcohol please.

"Announce yourself! Your Queen demands it."

Nothing at first.

Then a light patter, like a little child was running around in my closet. Being initially from the 21st-century, I've watched the likes of SUPERNATURAL and THE WINCHESTERS, enough to know that most Manors come with their haunting. And this castle is nothing if not a Manor's Manor. The patter of feet stops and then I hear light humming. Singing. I freeze in my sitting position, in the midst of sheets luxurious as they are comfy. The antique double doors sweep open with a whistle. I see first the peek of trimmed toenails. And then Yennara's lovely features come to view, a hourglass figure topped with a face made for Vogue. Her pine eyes are wide.

"Light! Yen. You scared me. I thought you were La Ilorna or something?"

Had she been singing?

Yennara walks close to the bed.

"You're awake Your Grace. Good." Her lips twitch like she's biting back a smile. Oh, she definitely is.

"What?" I bring a hand to my bedhead, noting a mass of intricate white curls spilling like a version of Whitney Houston's platinum album cover. I don't even want to guess how I look right now. My eyes are narrowed on Yennara, still expecting an answer.

"Nothing!" She finally lets out her smile, her shoulders caving in. Her voice dulls to a whisper. "You moan in your sleep."

I what! The tips of my ears redden.

"Oh god!" Both my hands fall to my face in embarrassment.

"It's nothing to hide over." Yennara's voice sounds closer. I feel warm fingers close around mine, pulling my hands apart. She peeks through them. "I too have dreams sometimes." She winks at me knowingly.

"Oh no!" My entire face burns. I bury my face in my hands again, wishing the entire ocean of sheets to swallow me. Then I hear a giggle. Another. It persists until it breaks out into a full belly laugh. I mock a frown, pulling up to find Yennara bright, blushed and giggling. The little witch. If she didn't look so pretty...

I love seeing her so happy, looking like the petals of a primrose slowly opening up to light. I never thought I'd be the one to tell someone to loosen up—Cheyenne most of all.

"It's okay."

She talks tongue in cheek, clearly still struggling to keep back her laugh in stifles. I find her totally cute in that moment, with her lips wet from her sweeping tongue. Irresistible. I stare into her tea-colored pupils. Humor fades into silence. My gaze falls to her lips. Enticing. Plush. Sweet velvet. As if on cue, her tongue darts out to wet then again.

Kiss her, my whole body screams. Taste her. You know you want to.

I'm so close, so close her breath fans my cheek. Yennara blinks once, lowers her eyes and pulls away. I avert my gaze also but not before I see her swallow.

"Your Grace, the Court awaits you."

Her voice reaches me as an echo. Distant. A second later, I hear the door click shut softly. She's gone. And I'm left alone. When I finally have rhe courage to lift my eyes again, I meet the vision of a spectacular crimson gown, with maroon threadwork like drops of blood, nicely overdone in a haloed cape of goth black. The Court awaits... Yennara's sultry voice permeates my thoughts. And as I head for the dressing room, her face swamps my mind.

I meet with the Court in a sparkling hall of glass. On my way there, the labyrinth of the castle hallways had proved tedious but I was nothing if not a lover of a good puzzle. My childhood bedroom can attest to that. While normal kids got skateboards and remote-controlled drones, and whatnot, I got Rubik's cubes. Much to my parents wonder, I actually loved figuring out the little multicolored squares. I'm sure they must've thought,

'Our child is destined for NASA. Either that or the FBI.'

Turns out we were all wrong. I was destined for the middle ages.

As I near the host location for the Court's meeting, I find the hall is shaped as a pyramid. It stands elegant and frosty on a slab of polished white stone. Nothing sits above it. No domes. No archways. The next substance above its pointy crystal end is a roving cloud and endless blue sky.

A glass pyramid? A mysterious Court?

I figure the architecture of the hall has something to do with the ancient rituals of harnessing energies. Mystics across time have always believed shapes to contain diverse interpretations to conjuring magic. The Egyptians had their pyramids. Babylon has the Tower of Babel. DC, Obelisks. Even the Free Masons believed in crescent moon and six-pointed stars as auspicious occasions for practicing the arts—if you know what I mean. Apparently the Court is no different.

The door to the pyramid is a secret gateway of hard stone, like something from a Sci-fi Classic. It's open, granting a wide view of the sculpted glass pointing at the heavens. This particular area looks separate from the castle, as if bore by an invisible pillar. Beyond the moon-white slab on which the pyramid itself sits, there is nothing. Just a dead drop into nothingness hundreds of feet deep. The whole enterprise seems like something a Tech billionaire would fancy. It's curious because technology is as far from this world as I'm sure the architect of this pyramid is from human.

I turn briefly to glance at my pretty Lady-in-waiting. Her hands are folded into the sleeves of her gown.

Yennara had said nothing the entire walk here. What could she have said? What could I have? That I wanted to kiss her so bad I practically trembled with the force of it? That I bet she'd taste like Frankie's rocky road? That just imagining it even now makes my skin prickle?

We settled for silence.

She nods to me, and her wordless assurance is all I need to take the first step through the spacious doorway. What was it Neil Armstrong said,

'One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.'

A grating sound focuses me and I turn behind to see Yennara and the royal guards who'd been following have vanished—behind the colossal rise of the gravel door. I'm by myself, on a white square with four steel edges. Funnily, it is like the science project I'd constructed in third grade; of the primitive concept of Flat Earth. Sincerely, I don't want to find out what lies below.

I approach the pyramid in zest but see no door.

Is this another puzzle?

My ready mind begins to assess the situation as a math problem, devising an equation, just about to dive in when a hand beckons to me from the other side. From inside the pyramid. I move closer, peering in. Translucently, I see a woman. She's waving me in. But there's no door.

Wait! Can I?

I put my leg forward, expecting for my feet to meet solid glass. But it goes through.

What?!

Half my body is in and I feel nothing. The woman is still waving. And so I step fully in, walking right through a three-inch wall of glass. It makes sense, and it doesn't. It makes sense that this mysterious glass pyramid would have no door, and it also doesn't make sense that I—a living breathing body with compact molecules not moving at the speed of the atoms of the glass—could pass through. There is no physics to it.

Inside the pyramid is darker, tinted, the hue of the clouds like a view from inside a spaceship. I feel like I'm inside a mirror. A virtual world looking inside out. I am in space. Weightless. I smell burning pyres and moist earth, first rains after summer and fresh spring. Cold air wafting into my bones but dissipating just as quickly. One word: Magic.

"Enchantress?" A soft voice quips at my side.

I discover I'm still staring at my point of entry and so I turn swiftly before anyone can catch on my surprised haze. I'm supposed to be used to this. My eyes meet with Miss Chandle, aka my Governess.

"Only those with the blood can pass through," she says, her words shadowing my thoughts.

The blood? Oh, she's a witch.

"Are you a witch?" I ask before I can stop myself.

Miss Chandle nods with a sage smile, oozing with a new vibe a Governess can't pull off, much less a principal's secretary. She has an aura about her. I don't know how but I sense it. A room full of it.

"So are they Enchantress." Miss Chandle gestures like a New York Realtor to the open space before us. About ten feet away are a group of five others. I notice them our similar midnight capes. A shared facade of the crafts. The wan shimmer over our cloaks. The unnatural light in our eyes. The sheer divinity pulsing in the room. The power within. Seven arcane souls. One shared flame.

This is the Celestine Court. A Court of witches.

We are five women and two men. The men are limber, with faces like crows, devoid of color, towering over the women with prominent aristocratic noses. Besides myself and Miss Chandle, the rest stand over a single crystal ball.

It floats untethered in the air. It is green. Green like the deeps of the sea where the light doesn't touch. Green like an emerald jewel in the thickest of forests. Green like leaves brushed over by the mammoths. Green like nature. A ball of pure energy. An enchanting mana.

"The Spiritflame." Miss Chandle mirrors my thoughts again. "Well, at least a manifestation of it."

I can't control my legs. I can tell I'm moving but I'm not sure I'm walking. Still, it's towards the pull of the green enveloping presence. It caresses and whispers. It's alive. A breathing entity. Now I get it.

Spirit. Flame.

I can't deny my attraction to it. It's my like whole existence hinges on it, a yearning, like I've been waiting on this moment my entire life. It's a part of me as I am of it. I know it. Somehow.

I am vaguely aware of Miss Chandle by my side as I flow towards the ball. The crowd of five witches part at the middle and I pull closer, the skirts of my crimson gown sweeping across the moon floors and my cape, a shadow cloaking me. I stop over it, transfixed. It rests on no pedestal. No thread holds it up. It's independent, free energy older than mankind itself. A symbiote lost through the centuries, only accessible to those with the blood. It beats like a heart.

I lift both hands to it, not touching but feeling. It radiates. It ebbs, the magic within terrifyingly potent. It can raise entire forests from nothing, conjure oceans in deep valleys. But it can also incinerate cities in seconds, blur the gold of the sun and make the rains pour blood. How I know these things are perturbing. I feel the Spiritflame. A fifth limb. Uncorrupted by hundreds of years of corrupted mankind. The primal element of the universe.

It was there at the birth of the first witch. It was there when it all began.

The other gather round, our collective shadow mirrored over the surface of the floating ball.

"Enchantress, what do you see?"

I don't know who speaks but all our thoughts are united in this. Looking into the mossy glass, I see tendrils of green, roots and vines twirling and twisting. I see thousands of brilliant suns, exploding stars, supernovas; an infinite power source. I see clashing armies, devastating battles, golden heroes. I see a god. An avatar. The prime representation of man and energy fused together as one.

"Power." My lips move in a subtle whisper. "I see power."

And a collective smile spreads through the seven of us. Dark and knowing.