The Last Witch

I threw myself on the couch and closed my eyes, making Tails, the cat, jump and give me a disapproving look. Aunt Ara sighed while she walked to our small kitchen to make breakfast. Aunt Ara is a tall, slender woman. Her long dark hair is always braided, falling straight on her back, creating a perfect contrast with her pale skin and her bright green eyes. The same eyes I have, the same eyes my mother had. My unruly dark blond hair is from my father's side. Aunt Ara never met him, but she still has some pictures of them from the letters my mother wrote her. This has been our routine since I arrived here 10 years ago. We wake up before dawn, sit in the living room and Aunt Ara tries to teach me how to release and control my magic. When I give up, she cooks breakfast for the two of us and we go about our day. After breakfast, I usually study in the hidden room behind the fireplace, while Aunt Ara tends to our garden, sews new clothing for the ever-growing me, and makes any repairs needed in our cottage. It is a very small place if you see it as a human, with two tiny bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. If you have magic in you though, you will be able to find all of our hidden rooms. There is a study room behind the fireplace. You have to press the correct order of bricks to release the door. It is a simple room, with three bookshelves lining up the curved walls, a desk, and a couple of chairs. All the books are about our history, some simple spells, and the history of other supernatural things. Aunt Ara says they are all we have left with information about us. Since the day I showed up inside the old wooden chest that still sits in Aunt Ara’s living room. All I had with me was a letter that she threw in the fireplace as soon as she finished reading, never giving me the chance to read what it said. She told me my name was now Aspen, instead of my birthname: Freya. The last thing I remember from my parents is the look on their faces when they asked me to get inside the wooden chest that sat in our own living room. I heard a knock on our front door and their words were muffled by the thick wooden walls of the chest when they closed the lid. Once they did it, everything was silent. I didn’t know I was here and not there anymore. I am not sure how to explain where Here is, nobody ever talks about it. I just know it is not There, and that we are safe Here. Here is surrounded by trees. Beautiful, tall, thick trees. It is very humid and moss covers a lot of the rocks around us. In the winter there are times we get stuck in the cottage because of how much snow falls on the ground. In the summer, the trees provide a lot of shade, and the breeze that comes from the river behind the cottage is very welcome when we have dinner outside. There are a few abandoned cottages scattered around. I am sure they are only standing because of all the greenery that has taken over. There is a big abandoned house a few miles north of us, but Aunt Ara doesn’t know that I know that. That is where I found Tails, my orange cat with weird neon green eyes. He was just a kitten when I took him home with me after finding him all curled up in the bushes near the big house. He is as moody as a cat can get, and I swear he could talk if he wanted to. We don’t go out often, but some “miracles” provided by Aunt Ara have given us protection for when we need to go to the small town 5 miles down the road from us. The guards that come to town to check for magic beings every month have no idea we even exist. Magic was prohibited in this world 10 years ago. We were too different, too powerful to coexist with other beings. We didn’t believe they would hunt us, but they did. Aunt Ara and I are the only people with magic blood left in the world. How do I know that? We have a map that has been spelled for centuries hidden under one of the loose floorboards under my bed. It is a unique map created by the original witches and wizards to track their lineage through the years. It used to be filled with shiny dots that represented every single being with magic blood. Each coven and family had their own color, and the shinier your dot, the stronger you were considered. Aunt Ara says it used to look like a beautiful dancing rainbow. Now there are only two sparkly green dots on the map. When I was younger, I would spend hours under my bed watching the map, hoping that maybe my parents' dots would come back. Unfortunately, they never did.