6

That little house your grandma hid away in the branches of a hemlock tree has been your home for more than ten years. You're only 19; that's most of your life. And it wasn't just the house. The forest itself—green and dark and glittering with hidden sunlight—is just as much your home.

Because the deeper you go—the closer the trees grow, twisting their roots together under tangles of moss—the more the place seems to change, feeling less and less like a normal place attached to the normal world. With so much energy sleeping and seeping into the earth, the forest is thick with magic. It's there that you and Grandma have lived for so long, strengthening and honing your magic, learning how to connect your bodies with the forest around you. And you've learned how to be careful. That deep in, the forest is strange, beautiful, unpredictable, restless—it's not always safe, even for Witches, and it certainly doesn't belong to you. You know just enough to understand that the forest—just like magic itself—is not something to take lightly. At every moment, you need to remember just how dangerous it can be.

But you've learned all about that over the years, and hundreds of other things besides. Grandma taught you well, after all. She was the one who taught you what it means to be a Witch—or at least, your own private definition of Witch. There may be a better word out there for what you are, but "Witch" is simply one of the easiest ways you have of understanding it. That was just one of the many things your grandma taught you.

You can't pretend to remember every lesson perfectly—but no matter how many other little things you've forgotten, you've always remembered the first thing she ever told you about being a Witch.

You were: