Witchever You Prefer

Welcome, you’ve stumbled into part 12 of The Tori Story Series. If this is your first visit to this realm you might want to catch up.

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Tori saw it before it happened. Normally, when this type of thing presented itself she never intervened. The Ether was the Ether and if happenings happened who was she to stop them? Obviously, they were meant to be.

Most times when her gift of seeing into the very near future manifested, without her conjuring it up, she assumed it was to mentally prepare for it. Like the time she was cutting a salad with a very sharp kitchen knife and saw the lettuce mingled with blood. 

She could have simply stopped cutting the salad and instead called for take out. But always a deep sense of foreboding overcame her when she thought about changing the outcome. Who was she to alter the future? Therefore, she simply refused to intervene. Come what may, was her attitude. After all, it was merely a cut.

Up to this point, though, she only ever saw matters as pertaining to her. 

And so this time, when it wasn’t her future she saw, but that of her son, Rowan, she froze. Uncertain.

~

Rowan had been jumping on the bed. 

“Rowan, stop.” Tori said. Irritated at the energy that didn’t seem to ever show signs of waning until the boy just passed out from exhaustion. I will tell you, there never was a warning— it just happened. And the timing was never predictable. Rowan’s endless bounty of energy left Tori drained and exhausted.

Tori was trying to pick up the myriad of toys strewn about the room. “Come pick up your toys, Rowan.” She said but he ignored her altogether and continued to jump wildly about. 

“Take that!” Rowan screamed— he knew no other volume— he wielded his invisible sword slicing it through the air. “HA! You fool, I have vanquished you. Die now as you have lived. A cowardice disgrace to all things valiant!”

Tori chuckled; she couldn’t help it. The boy was too young. What four-year-old came up with this kind of play? What four-year-old had this type vocabulary? Well, for starters, this one. Rowan was sharp. Like the before mentioned knife, and maybe just maybe, he was too sharp for her. And that was saying something. 

At any rate, there was never a dull moment when Rowan was around. Exhausting as it was, Tori adored his incredible imagination, and didn’t have the heart to further interrupt his play. 

Tori stopped picking up toys and smiled. It was a resigned smile but a smile nonetheless. She stood there watching him. 

It was in that momentary pause that the future unveiled.

~

For starters, two views opened simultaneously. One was a portal; the other like that of a lens. This puzzled Tori the most, for in the past, she had only ever seen a portal. The lens was new. 

In the lens Rowan lay, sliced up on the floor in a pool of blood in the very room she stood in now— his bedroom. Several shards of mirror protruded out from his already too large for his age body. 

She witnessed the event in reverse. The boy rose from the floor while glass shards removed themselves from body and floor, droplets of blood sucked back into Rowan’s body, cuts fused back together and disappeared. Like pieces of a magical puzzle, the glass shards came together. A previously shattered Antique mirror completely restored. Rowan’s head made contact with the mirror and then he sailed through the air and back onto the bed. 

Tori gasped. 

To hesitate is to pause through uncertainty. It was very unlike Tori to hesitate. She saw this type of thing all the time; after all, she was a doctor. An accomplished surgeon. Well respected. Admired by all. 

‘The cream of the crop!’ Anyone who met and got to know her declared.

Honestly, Tori had heard this phrase from so many it had became a rather annoying cliché but still it made her blush. 

The hesitation itself, however, wasn’t what bothered Tori the most. It was the thing that caused her to hesitate. For she knew she could put the boy back together. The mirror was an entirely other matter. The almost otherworldly antique mirror meant so much to her. She had procured it nearly five years ago from a man who called himself Peddler. 

“Peddler.” Tori sighed under her breath, recalling the night. Chemistry. She finally understood it. He was the first man to ever pique her interest. And I tell you there were many waiting in line, but she was too focused on her career. She was… until the Peddler.

~

It was late, and Tori knew from what the lens was showing that she would have to spend the next little while sewing her son up, tending to his injuries. She had had an exhausting day at the hospital already; She just wanted to leave work at work. Sewing up more cuts was the last thing she wanted to do. 

Still she would never have disturbed the Ether over exhaustion. So it wasn’t her son that caused her pause. It was the loss of the mirror. The mirror that she sometimes stared at for so long she imagined the Peddler standing there in front of her. She could almost sense his presence right in the room. Almost like he too, was staring through the mirror right back at her.

Did he even know about Rowan? Was he aware of the child born of chemistry?

~

The other view, the portal, showed, a boy (or was it two?) suspended above the ground in a net. It was a very unfamiliar place almost like a forest one imagines when listening to the familiar old fairy tales. A Witchy looking figure with no face stood there. The Faceless Witch appeared to stare back through the portal, she too hesitating. 

At that time, Tori chose to ignore the unfamiliar world and focus instead on the world she knew. 

After all, the other world wasn’t even real. She thought she knew better than to chase after fantasy and decided instead to focus her attention on the lens whose view reflected back to her what was in her immediate future.

Besides if she didn’t, she’d lose the mirror, and that was a loss she couldn’t bear. This time she decided to act. 

~

Tori skimmed across the room to intervene right as Rowan leapt in the air. An outsider looking in would have seen her in one second standing across the room and the next materialize in a crouched position right beside the bed beneath the boy. And that’s exactly what the outsider saw because the lens wasn’t there for Tori to see the future— that just happened to be the by-product. The lens was there because she was being watched.

Tori guided Rowan, leaving his body untouched, by forcing the air to repel him. His forehead lightly brushed the mirror like the stroke of a delicate brush on an almost finished masterpiece. Leaving both the boy and mirror in tact. 

Tori sighed. Relief? 

Rowan fell to the ground with a thud, head slamming on the concrete floor. A gash opened up. One moment of shocked silence, then he erupted in a deafening howl. 

Tori gathered him in her arms, and pressing a discarded hand towel against his head to stop the flow of blood, she walked him over to the rocking chair. His howl soon turned to a soft whimper as she rocked him, and all at once, he fell asleep. 

Tori went to work sewing up his cut, all the while, crushed. Knowing on a cellular level that what she had done was wrong, she couldn’t shake the foreboding. In truth, she didn’t understand the damaging consequences at the time. 

Had she known, she would have immediately fled the room, her house, her life but she didn’t. And so she stayed. Holding the boy close, not knowing it would be the last time.

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