( monica barbaro / cis female / she/her ) â CAITLIN SILTSHORE has been living in Port Leiry for HER WHOLE LIFE (BUT RECENTLY RETURNED AFTER A YEAR AWAY). They currently work as a SILTSHORE MAUSOLEUM (OWNER), and are TWENTY-EIGHT years old. No one is sure if theyâre actually a WITCH WARLOCK (TENEBRIS) or if theyâre connected to GARNETT COVEN. They tend to be quite SELF-DESTRUCTIVE and ICARIAN, but can also be CURIOUS and AMBITIOUS.â
( tw: death, murder )
tl;dr: cait comes from a bloodline of witches who made some mistakes centuries ago and found themselves cursed as a result. the siltshore bloodline gets picked off one by one over the decades, and now here's cait, the last of her name. the curse comes with a haunting - cait grows up having to handle it. she tries to get rid of it in her early twenties and it backfires, badly. she leaves her ex-fiance for dead and goes off the grid for two whole years. she comes back to port leiry when she learns her uncle, leader of the garnett coven, has been murdered died. her uncle leaves her the coven and the mausoleum. it doesn't take cait long to realize that her uncle has been murdered by none other than her ex-fiance.
the ex-fiance and cait work together to take her possession and turn it into a patron, making themselves the first warlocks this world has seen. the spell comes at a cost: 15,000 souls. well, 15,001 - cait leaves her ex-fiance for dead for a second time and this time, he stays dead. cait returns to port leiry shortly after to continue running her coven.
this only works for so long, faction leaders congregate and agree that there must be consequences for the town cait decimated and the souls she claimed. cait is exiled. it is now, a year later, the exile has lapsed on a technicality. she returns to her home in port leiry.
caitlin is a morally gray / evil leaning warlock who is an innovator at heart. running on sheer ambition, she wants to build her coven into something lasting; wants to create and create and create and encourage others do the same.
about under the cut I penned by rey
ORIGINS
name: caitlin siltshore
age: twenty-eight
creative touchpoints: cait is inspired by a few characters: edward elric from fullmetal alchemist in that cait is a walking cautionary tale and yet still has a certain ambition driving her. she has the rough edges and self-destructive tendencies of jessica jones. You might even see a little dark urge from baldurâs gate iii in there thanks to her latent violence. Sheâs any character you think of to be a godkiller, any character that can be described as icarian. god/john from the locked tomb is another touchpoint. in her heart of hearts, cait is an inventor - it wouldnât be out of place to think of her as a mad scientist or a frankenstein. definitely an insufferable know-it-all, necromancy prodigy. âunkillable ratâ are also good words to describe her. annoyingly, cait believes she is the closest thing to a god. her ultimate hubris is believing that she can tinker her way out of anything; that the laws of the world and the natural order of things do not apply to her.
alignment: chaotic evil (the faintest flicker of chaotic good can be seen on the darkest of nights)
species: warlock (patron: tenebris, former: life and death witch)
hometown: port leiry
affiliation: garnett coven (former leader)
occupation: siltshore mausoleum (owner)
family members of note: brennan siltshore (npc, uncle, deceased), nathaniel roy (npc, deceased)
BACKSTORY
THE CURSEÂ
 there is a nightmare in her blood, it's been there for centuries, moving from one siltshore witch to the next - eroding their mind and their marrow, putting them in the ground long before they are due. the siltshore curse blooms in cait when she is thirteen; it strikes her at the midnight hour and follows her wherever she goes. from then on, cait's body isn't her own.
the curse goes like this: if you are a siltshore witch, you will be possessed, and you will die a premature death. it is the bitter fruit of a feud between two witch families, the siltshores and the roys, who were once of the same coven. now, a millennia later, caitlin is the last witch of her name.Â
cait becomes familiar with the spirit that haunts her, but for a long time she refuses to hear its name. the spirit takes many forms. it's a malevolent whisper in her ear that sways like the tides. it's a shadow in her mirror that stares back at her. it reigns over her body when it wants to, slumbers when it wishes. it becomes her keeper and her teacher in all things necromantic. it calls itself 'dorian.'
GARNETTÂ
despite dorian's existence, cait's uncle brennan raises her. as leader of the garnett coven, brennan pulls his magic from the world around him. he's a good teacher and he does the best to bring others in. his magic hums with the vibrancy of life, he threads fate between his fingers. brennan's magic is good - brennan is good - and he seems to think cait is capable of such things too. he knows the weight of the curse she is carrying, his mother carried it too. but brennan believes cait can rise above it. cait tries, but dark things come too easy to her.
THE BOY
cait leaves port leiry for college - a chance to further develop her magic and keep building out her grimoire. a chance to maybe find herself, in the way that all cursed witches aim to do. there's a boy at college - one who doesn't know he's a witch, one who says he's seen her in his dreams. he's a necromancer too. cait takes him by the hand and shows him what she knows. curiosity pulls nathaniel and cait together, ambition keeps them stitched there. she doesn't tell him about the curse.
what nathaniel and cait do instead is talk about plans. They dream big, start crafting something new. there's that ambition again - and it is so bright at the center of her. so electric. sometimes it's hard for cait to remember the sound of her own thoughts, to understand where hers end and dorian's begin. but she wants this - she wants to build, and grow, and discover, and learn. she doesn't really mind how she gets there. she doesn't mind a little blood. she does know though, that when she does it, she wants her body to be her own.
love is so strange - strange in the way that you can let a person get so close to you. strange in the way that you can let them get to know you. no person should be allowed to take that knowing and turn it into a knife. nathaniel and cait get engaged and that should mean something. and yet, when cait tries to get rid of her possession and it costs her nathaniel life, she pays the price and leaves him for dead.
INTERLUDE
for two years cait runs, leaving behind her choices and building out her grimoire. for the first time, her mind is silent. a place to call her own. she still has big plans - but they all come to a stop when she hears about brennan's death.
warily, cait makes her way back to port leiry.
ASCENSION
nathaniel is behind brennanâs death - of course he is; the murder is bait to draw her home. she left him for dead, yet the possession has burrowed into him now, their work still unfinished. their reunion in port leiry is tumultuous, but ambition stitches them together once more: caitlin and nathaniel intend to raise dorian into something greater.
june 2025. at the cost of 15,000 souls - the entire population of ashford bend, nebraska - caitlin and nathaniel forge a patron from dorian, the newborn power naming itself tenebris. cait walks away the worldâs first warlock; nathaniel, meant to stand beside her, is claimed by the recoil. extreme magic, extreme, unexpected price - nothing can save him from death this time.
cait returns to head up the garnett coven and tells only choice few about her warlock status, but secrets like that have weight. word slips. ashford bend is a wound the world won't stop bleeding from - and when the factions piece it together, the verdict is swift and unanimous. exile. they strip her of her seat, salt the threshold of the mausoleum, and tell her to walk. cait slips out of port leiry the way smoke leaves a room, and for a while there is no caitlin siltshore anywhere.
NOW
it takes about a year. a seat shifts here, a vote turns there, an old enemy of brennan's takes a chair they shouldn't have. nothing changes about what cait did, only who is left to call it a crime. the exile collapses on a technicality, and just like that the doors of port leiry crack open again. cait comes home. she walks the long road back to siltshore mausoleum and finds the salt long since scattered, the dead patient as ever beneath the stones. the garnett coven receives her stiffly; cait takes her seat at the edge of the room, no longer leader. no matter. tenebris hums under her ribs like a second heartbeat. there's so much still to build. there's so much still to tear apart to build it.
WANTED CONNECTIONS
tbd - but really anything and everything. let her be the devil on your shoulder; be the one to keep her in the light. my god, cait is so quick to make enemies, but she is fiercely protective of those in the garnett coven. if you need a morally questionable warlock to invent you a spell or a curse, she's your gal. if you need someone to commit cold blooded murder, she is also unfortunately your gal
Like a memory, oozing from the cracks of a mind's purgatory â he can still taste the bitterness of the Georgian witch he had left behind, a month prior. If she was not already rotting bones in a library that would never be found, he could have continuously found her across any ocean of this plain. A waste, now buried beneath the desert of dust, and stone. Swallowed hole by the sands of time. He would blame a sister, for the intrigue of power outside of the blood, and he'd pursue its secrets beyond life and death, until there were none left to unearth.
"I know this earth, and I know when power is born in its soil." A beacon attracting an immoveable force; silent; unwavering; absence all life. It knows when something threatens to unravel the order. Not of magic. But there is some version of it, within his blood, for him to exist at all.
"It does not belong in the hands ofâ"
No. But it fit perfectly. "It has always been mine." A piece of myth; more ancient than Babylon, and written about only in languages long dead. Lines of script, destroyed and burned. Erasing its very existence from paper.
But even time eventually bends to hands that force the steel. Disturb it enough, whether mythic, or mortal and it falls out of worn grimoires, and flutters beneath floorboards, crinkles and cracks under candlelight. A Georgian witch should have known in their failure, that they would draw eyes, ruby red and black as night.
A dial; marbled and bathed in chromium, had laid in his palm like a pocket watch. An object he'd never wield in its singularity, but a catalyst forged in irony. The power to salt the soul of ever being tainted by the blessed or the cursed touch. Not the blood, where he would consequently destroy himself. But an impervious charm beyond immortality. A legend that even Zakar had doubted; belief without cause had been carved out of him, long ago. In the hazing of clerics, and the erasure of cassock-wearing fanatics. Briefly, across a great portion of the northern hemisphere. Their blood had marked the foundations of many great monuments.
Whilst he expected that in the wake of a fractured spell, that he â a creature barred from ever understanding the intricacies of that power, would be the only being drawn to the sanctum, hidden away from keen eyes. In her blast, the only thing she had destroyed, had been her wards that kept him out.
Had she never tried to equalise the order and kept the broken piece of a myth in her charge for another millennia, she may never have been found. Lomidze never would have stepped over the threshold of an unprotected hovel, to know what her life tasted like; an aged wine, ripe for him.
He hadn't been the only death-touched curioso to chase the pieces of an artefact that could swallow magic whole.
"And you are, exactly?"
Georgia, Moldova, Romania â
She's spritely, in a war across borders. Her by day, him by night. Distance that he cannot cross, without suffering the infliction of the light. Caitlin Siltshore does not have such restrictions. It is how she turns metres, into miles. Zakar has not laid chase against a youth, in quite some time. And she is unbound â in their battle, across the many months, he has not learned of one thing she cares about more than her own self-preservation, and her own lust for power.
She does not pause to reunite with loved ones, or cease to stop her attempts of ensnaring him in latin-laced hexes. Traps that he is too old to kneel, and bow into. No threads to pull on her heart, or her mind. No obvious tells of leverage he would exploit. They are a match that stretches across continents. Because he has family where she is heading, and he is not blind enough to believe that coincidence has no part in the artefact key she has siphoned away from him.
Zakarias is patient, but he is not without his impulses.
In Port Leiry, there is less places to run and hide. If this is where she must be to complete their shared spell, then he will be here too. Siltshore; he had thought the name had been a repeated carving on a gravestone of the thousands; she has a mausoleum of the same. He does not possess the power to feel energy he's always imagined as a pulsing vein, even if he knows the essence of how it works; the foundations of Lomidze architecture are rife with it. He expects it lies here, too.
Draped in funeral black; camel coat, and dress pants, with the undercut of a deep grey shirt. It feels fit for a Siltshore, who has given him more scars than most mortals have ever landed one. He wonders if hers have healed so kindly, in the overlap of their international greetings.
In the quiet stroll, there is one woman that refuses to be anything else.
Caitlin does not know when she will see Zakarias Lomidze again, but she gives his cunning the courtesy of certainty that she will - which is more than she gives most. Sometimes the memory of how this started comes uninvited, surfacing through the floor of her like damp through stone: a hovel with its wards blown wide, a witch already going cold, and the dial sitting in the wreckage like it had been waiting all along for someone with the nerve to close a hand around it. Caitlin had the nerve. She has always had the nerve - it's the one thing she was born holding that nobody managed to carve back out of her, and God knows the carving was attempted. She took the dial. She tucked it against her ribs where it has lived ever since, warm only because she keeps it warm, and she ran.
She's been running ever since. She's good at it; it's the family trade, after a fashion - Siltshore women have always been very practiced at being chased by witches, by hauntings. That's the part he doesn't understand, she thinks, Lomidze with his thousand years and his funeral patience. To him the chase is a marathon is a siege is a slow tightening. She wonders if he thinks he can simply outlast her, the way he's outlasted empires and clerics and whoever else's blood went into the mortar of his pretty foundations. He waits for her to tire. But jokes on fucking you ZAK - Caitlin does not tire the way the dead expect the living to. She gets fast. She burns hotter the closer the end comes, a star streaking white across the black, beautiful precisely because it is busy destroying itself, and far too bright by then to catch.
Georgia. Moldova. Romania. A smear of border towns she couldn't name now if you asked her, and wouldn't bother to. She moves by day, while he's tucked away from the sun like a coat folded into summer storage. The night is slow, and the night is his. Cait has stopped being interested in anything that belongs to him. Cait turns meters into miles.
But it is night now, months later. It is always night when it counts.
It is slow enough that by the time the shape of him finally cuts itself out of the dark at the edge of the graveyard, Cait has been keeping vigil for hours at the Siltshore mausoleum. She has crowned herself with a wreath of funeral lilies already going brown at the edges, and she has been talking to the dead women when the shadow of him haunts her doorstep.
There he is. Filling the doorway he was always going to fill, eventually. A silhouette poured into the threshold, funeral-black layered on funeral-black, every elegant centimeter of him as still and fucking annoying as a parasite that won't leave. He's just as she remembers. Cait inhales, and then throws her head back and laughs.
The sound tears up out of her and goes climbing the vaulting, doubling, coming back down at her in the voices of all her quiet dead - and for one bright unhinged second Caitlin understands, truly understands, down in the animal underneath her, why wolves must howl at the moon. It is so far past mirth it loops the long way round and comes back wearing mirth's stolen face. It is the body forcing the breath out so the everything inside has somewhere to be, so she can stoop and gather it off the cold marble and string it and draw it back and loose every trembling grain of it, elegant as an arrow, straight at the thing standing at the threshold of her family's land.
"Did you come all this way for little old me?"
The words come out warm, sweet as the rot of the lilies against her temple. He's followed her home to Port Leiry, then. When he asks - and he will ask - she is going to lie to him. She is going to look him dead in those drowning eyes and tell him she does not have the artifact he's looking for. She'll say it with the dial purring under her ribs. So let him. He can tear every stone of this mausoleum down to read her grave himself; Caitlin is very bad at staying dead.
"Do you think you'll kill me this time? I don't know if you've heard," she says, sweet as the lilies rotting at her temple, spreading her arms wide to her whole congregation of dead, "but I'm an unkillable rat." And rats, she'd be the first to tell him, have always done their finest work in tombs. Hers most of all.
Caitlin's explanation is succinct, stark, and so quickly to the point that Tressa can't help but be at least a little enamored at the certitude of it. She had done what painfully little she could, condemned to the sidelines of Pretorius in the wake of her own maker's disappearance. The clan of vampires she'd opted into hadn't exactly held onto its strangelhold of power in the wake of the seismic shifts caused by the Conclave. In a lot of ways, it had been a great equalizer.
So she shrugs. If Caitlin's absolved, she's absolved. If she isn't, what exactly is anybody to do? Tattle?
The Warlock begins meandering, and Tressa follows after a bit. At the mention of spines, she can't help but quietly scoff - perhaps for the same reason Caitlin's tone comes across so cold and stark. There are many people- herself included despite their thin, thin mutual interest in amiability and shared interest in death- who could benefit from causing her death. She wonders if she could do it. She arrives at no, mostly because a vampire is an apex predator only so long as:
- A) they have the element of surprise.
Tressa lurches at Caitlin's neck, hungry for the feather in her cap that taking down the world's first Warlock would land her with. Caitlin, having seen this a mile ahead, plants a sliver of rosewood in her chest, and Tressa passes from this world like the refrain on a Kansas track.
- B) Magic is not in play.
Tressa blinks behind Caitlin at a speed no mortal could hope to track, hissing at the witch - well, Warlock, apparently - before promptly being exploded into a mist of red fog, landing Caitlin with little more than an terse conversation with a breathtakingly anxious drycleaner.
- C) They have a good reason to want to be.
Tressa, standing triumphant over Caitlin's body answers the text, smiling when she sees Estela's beautiful face smiling back from its icon. The resulting text, along with the breakup text that immediately follows it, sees her lighting a cigarette for the first and last time in her life as she watches the sun come up the next morning and she bursts into flames.
All of these scenarios play out in her mind's eyes while she watches Caitlin appraise her surroundings, reminded of her own homecoming earlier in the year, wrestling her father's business back from unappreciative vampires of a different sort.
The note in her voice at commentary on the season stops her briefly in her tracks though. Does she know what's happening? Tressa can't put it past her, but she's not about to press the issue by asking. "Seems so. Hope you were planning on really digging in here when you came back, because it seems like we're all stuck here. Not that most people seem to care."
Caitlin won't care either, soon enough. "Maybe rules aren't really all they're chalked up to be - surely you out of everybody appreciate that."
Tressa reachs over to pull a clod of June snow from a bit of stone work, crushing it compact in her hand. "For what it's worth, though, welcome back. Planning anything?"
Most people don't seem to care. Of course no one cares. A good puzzle does not mean shit to half this town. Good puzzles, however, keep Caitlin Siltshore up at night - they are, in fact, among the very few small joys still standing in her life - and an eternal winter, slowly unspooling itself over the streets of her hometown, is exactly the shape of puzzle she would, under more rested circumstances, be delighted by. It is also, annoyingly, killing her plants. She does not want to give the witch who cast this curse the credit they are quietly owed, because some small petty corner of her keeps wishing it had been her instead. Cait waves the comment about rules away with her hand. "What do we know about it?"
She entertains, briefly, the fantasy of hunting the caster down, holding them at knifepoint in a candle-stale room, and lecturing them, at length, with diagrams, on every much, much cooler curse they could have inflicted on this town instead. Cait would bet good money there is some thematic calling at the root of this one, some neat symbolic cleverness the witch responsible thought was terribly on-the-nose, and the bet alone is enough to make her want to roll her eyes hard enough to dislodge them.
Something tugs at the corner of her lips at Tressa's inquiry about planning.
"No, Tressa, I am not plotting - I mean planning - anything."
She's being cheeky and she gives no fucks about hiding it. Cait has plenty of enemies nipping at her heels, an entire winter she now intends to investigate for her own private amusement, magic to be cast - and, beneath all of it, of course, her own magic. Tenebris'. To be fed. And fed. And fed. Until her bones have been whittled to thread.
"I have new abilities, as you may have heard." Conversational. Almost cheerful. "There are a few new cantrips I have been itching to test in the wild. Let me know if you know of anyone willing to be a guinea pig." A small pause. "Otherwise, I may have to make do with unwilling ones."
She looks down at Tressa as if she's considering making her one of said guinea pigs. There's a flash of something at the corner of Cait's mouth that is not, in any working sense of the word, a smile. Cait would love to use the new cantrip to slip into Tressa's dreams and conjure up the ambitions she suspects the vampire is keeping quiet about. Cait has, after all, had vanishingly few opportunities to test it on vampires; or, perhaps, not so vanishingly few, when one considers the enormous effort Cait has, historically, put into avoiding them.
Anyway. She mirrors the movement and scoops some snow for herself. Relishes the chill that pricks her fingers.
"Anything of note happen to you while I was away?" Still stuck behind the prison bars of the sun rays? Tragic. And then, because she has to ask, of course she has to ask: "How has Estela been?"
Because some part of Cait, despite herself, despite the silences she has kept and the doors she has shut, is still tied to the Garnett coven and the witches who count themselves among it. She would like, in her sideways, suspicious-of-her-own-sentiment way, to know how her old coven-mates are doing. She would like, in particular, to know if Estela has come into her magic yet - or whether the potential of it still terrifies her the way it terrified her the last time Cait had occasion to look.
"I've come in peace." TJ watched the woman's hands, as if she was going to suddenly use magic against him. She could, if she wanted to. He was useless and defenseless against it. But that's part of the reason why he was there. He'd heard rumors about her and while rumors weren't always true, he had to know.
"You know how to control power." He kept his hands up to show that he wasn't there to do any form of harm. "I desperately need a teacher. I need--" To take back what's mine. "I will literally pay you in gold." Gold that he did not currently have. "Teach me."
Does this gilded little intruder not know better than to sneak up on a witch in her own greenhouse?? Cait drops the stalk of the moonflower she has split open with her paring knife and said paring knife goes zing past his ear and lodges in the post behind him with the soft, practiced thock. In the next blink, Cait is already sketching the recall rune into her palm with the burst juice of a berry pulped between thumb and forefinger; small wet purple lines, the sigil almost embarrassed at being drawn so quickly. The knife, obedient as a well-trained dog, unsticks itself from the post and skitters back to her open hand. She throws it again on his âwait.â A few centimeters' difference and it would have left him a very pretty little scar to explain at parties. A fun party trick.Â
âWait?â Itâs a snarl, sheâs snarling. He has, after all, interrupted her plant-time. âIâm going to stop missing soon enough if you do not get to the point.âÂ
She has not, to be entirely clear, made any large effort to present herself as a particularly good Samaritan to Port Leiry since her return - which means appearances like these, from people like this, should by every reasonable metric be decreasing, not increasing. And yet.
She is in the Garnett greenhouse today, channelling from the plants. She flows into them, they flow into her, and Tenebris hums a third quiet line beneath the duet. The air in here smells of damp soil and bruised mint. It is the most peace she has had all week. And this man is, in his small useless way, standing in it.
She throws the knife to prick berries a third time. He flinches. Well that's good. Flinching is, at minimum, evidence of a survival instinct, and she had begun to worry he might not have one.
"Gold?" she sneers. "What is the use of gold as a magical reagent, huh? Let us start there." Gold. A scoff here, a scoff there. "What are you, an Asto-"
She does not finish the hard r of the surname. Oh, fuck this, she thinks, as her eyes drag down the line of the shoes, the watch, the whole quiet aura of inheritance - yes, fuck this, she knows an Astor when she sees one. Cait is split, suddenly, between a small bright smugness ("what, Atlas Jay couldn't handle you?") and the deep, immediate exhaustion of the suspicion that perhaps Atlas Jay is trying to unload the family failure on her.
Cait squints at him. "Why do you want this power?â Gold alchemy isnât even that good she thinks to herself, very loudly.Â
Caitlin's life, in the weeks after coming home, becomes a series of particular, sometimes infuriating, not entirely informative events, and the quick succession of them becomes the small mouth of a coastline she is going to have to walk the entire length of, eventually, just to see where it ends.
A man named Cody - idiot enough to put both his name and his IP address in The Leiry Conspiracy - a sentence she will continue to find personally funny for at least a year - slanders her. A different person, still a Codie but not a Cody, drags herself onto Cait's doorstep dying. Shortly after, an Astor turns up at her gate - and the encounter is the kind of illumination that reminds Cait there is another Astor, a stone's throw across town, that she should pay a visit to.Â
She decides to kill two birds with one stone.
In a deeply disturbing rendition of if you give a mouse a cookie - if you give a Caitlin Siltshore a thread to pull - she decides there is a level of efficiency to be achieved (and this is also, perhaps, the not-so-latent warlock abilities crackling within her, the ones forever pushing her toward more, more, more). And once she has decided there is a level of efficiency to be achieved, the matter of simply âfollowing up on a few inquiries with Atlas Jayâ folds, with quiet inevitable origami of her thinking, into âbreaking into Atlas Jay's penthouseâ (which is, in her mind, not illegal when she does it. Simply efficient.)
So: efficiency.
There is a ward over the penthouse. Caitlin snips it as cleanly as a cotton thread.
But here's the thing.... the thing about breaking into an alchemistâs flat for one purpose is that no working warlock worth the title leaves the rest of the alchemistâs flat unbothered. Atlas Jay's penthouse still carries the residues of the alchemy they did together a year ago - the very ingredients used to forge the very patron currently humming under her ribs like a private engine. There are materials in here. Raw materials. And a Caitlin Siltshore left alone in a room of raw materials has had - historically, repeatedly, on the record - ideas.
Her cartwheeling logic does what her logic does best: it cartwheels. Ward to alchemy. Alchemy to the use of alchemy. Use to - Cody. (Cody, IP-address, slander, idiot. Not Codie, doorstep, dying-thing, puzzle-box.) One stone, several birds by her math at this point.Â
So Caitlin catapults into Codyâs dreams. She infects them - uses her warlock cantrip to slip small wet hooks beneath the soft pink eyelids of his sleep - and within the hour Cody is on the elevator, riding up to a penthouse he has never been in, in a building he could not have named yesterday. He moves with the obedient, unhurried walk of a man who believes he has just been having an excellent idea.
Caitlin opens the door for him. It does not take long. A flick of her index finger against the centre of his forehead, that small easy touch of death, and Cody goes down onto his knees in her foyer with the gentle satisfied posture of a man finally arriving precisely where he is supposed to be. There is an athame somewhere in this flat; Caitlin remembers, because she used it last time. She finds it in the second drawer she tries.Â
Cody is hypnotized. Literally hypnotized (under her actual literal spell, not the figurative kind, and on this point Caitlin would like to clarify, for the record, for anyone: her ego has no need of the figurative kind. Her ego is of an entirely different and load-bearing denomination, thank you, and it does not visit that branch of the bank.)
Cody is on his knees. He is wholly incognizant of his own actions. His tongue is out, the way she has asked it to be out, and Cait sketches the rune onto it with the slow steady hand of a calligrapher; a rune to remake the vessel of him, to convert the entire warm dumb working machine of Cody into a conductor for whatever she next decides to put through it.
"You're a fucking idiot, Cody, for putting your IP address on there."
Cait knows, somewhere in the room of her head where she keeps her cleverer suspicions, that there is a perfectly good version of the world in which Cody has been framed. Some old nemesis with too much time on her hands and too little instinct for self-preservation, laying him out as a breadcrumb, hoping to send Cait on a wild and ridiculous goose chase. Cait has considered it and she has decided she does not care. The goose, whoever sent it, can be addressed in the next chapter. Cody has the misfortune of being in this one.
"Bad luck, Cody."Â
So you give a mouse a cookie. You give a Caitlin Siltshore a smidge of vengeance for a small petty thing, and she takes not an inch, a literal, very bloody mile. And Caitlin, being a good warlock, well-versed in life and death, understands that if Cody is going to catch this particular stray for an errant comment, then the pure dumb power of his dying is also not going to be permitted to dissipate uselessly into the rug. Efficiency. The veil is always there and it would be a waste not to use it. The dead, in Caitlinâs professional experience, almost always have something they would very much like to say.
"What's your best friend's name?" She asks.
Cody answers. It will be, as it happens, one of the last things Cody ever says. Cait holds the name on her tongue for the hair of a second, and then, in one long unhurried motion, channels the entire bright spilling current of Cody's life energy out of him and reroutes it, like an elegant circuit being closed, to summon Cal.Â
And it is somewhere right about there, give or take a heartbeat, give or take the moment Cody's body, having served, slumps into the rug (give him a moment, heâll sit back up, he will be Cal) that Atlas Jay opens his own front door and walks into the scene Caitlin has staged in in the living room of his penthouse. It is a full year, almost to the night, since they last laid eyes on each other.
It is dark in the penthouse; Caitlin's work illuminated by nothing but a dagger of moonlight. She realizes then that, in the small breathless race of her own efficiency she has, of course, neglected to turn on a single light.
closed starter for @ofgarnett
where: the mausoleum
It was all getting worse. The coughing, the black sludge, aches, pains - and now a new symptom: a weird, itchy rash that looked like small craters in her skin. Every time she'd speak to her Ma about it, she'd give her some gray concoction to stave off the symptoms. And it worked.. for about a day. Then it would come back with a vengeance.
The weaker she got, the more she tried to figure out more questions to ask about it - find some sort of information. It wasn't until she heard her Ma whispering on the phone about some exiled witch coming back to town that Codie decided she was going to outsource it. There was only one exiled witch that she knew of, and if all that was said at the Conclave was true about her, then she had to be as smart as a whip.
She shivers, now, in the piled high snow as she looks up at the stone buildings that carry more corpses than she could imagine. She should be on edge at the proximity of death or the idea that she's going to meet a witch who maybe isn't a witch anymore.
Another chill overtakes her and she steels herself to move forward to where there looks to be some sort of residence or, at least, somewhere warm. Mentally, she berates herself for not calling ahead or making an appointment - but her mind isn't exactly all there right now, and she's not the greatest at planning.
Still, she wanders up - looking worse than she's ever felt - and knocks on the door.
Word has begun to coil through town like smoke under a door, and Caitlin shies from none of it. She lets it move. She lets it gather in the corners of rooms she has just left, in the throats of people who have not yet learned the survival instinct required to lower their voices in her direction. The talk arrives ahead of her now, scenting the air, and she savors the way the syllable 'warlock' sits in unaccustomed mouths - a stone they have not learned how to swallow, an ember they cannot quite spit out. She is not, for her part, planning to teach them.
And then, on a sky-grey evening with snow still committing itself to the ground, death (or death wearing the skin of a young woman) drags itself to her doorstep and Caitlin can't help but wonder if this is the fault of said reputation.
It is not the first time something dead has put itself on her doorstep, but is the first time in a few moons that Cait is not the one to have set it there. However, on this evening, there is a visitor and there is sickness. The sickness changes the air around the visitor the way a fouled string changes the air around a violin. Caitlin, who has spent her whole life listening for exactly this kind of dissonance, hears it through the door before her hand has even found the latch.Â
The warlock looks down the length of her nose when she opens the door. She has all the cool disinterest of a collector regarding an item and Caitlin thinks how she might, on reflection, prefer this woman pieces. Parts to spare, if you will. It would, after all, be a generous quantity of undue kindness to assume Caitlin would simply help a dying thing that has made it to her doorstep. And if her magic is correct (and itâs a rare time that it isnât) there is very much a dying thing on her doorstep.
Because there - on the visitor - is a rash. A small almost-pretty constellation of craters, a careful punched-out lacework. Particular. Caitlin sees it and clocks it and then leans a few degrees to the right. Her gaze drifts past the girl to the line of flora bordering the path (the flowers and grass she had stubbornly forced into bloom out of frostbitten ground, dammit, garnett witch in her, unerasable) and she watches them the way a woman watches a canary in a mine. The petals do not shudder. The blades do not wilt. Whatever weeping plague has been stitched into this small bright body, whatever abscess is hollowing it from the inside, it has not yet learned how to leave the body it lives in. Contained. For now.Â
Ugh. Is this woman here for a cure? Surely, Caitlin thinks, the whole wide town of Port Leary doest not see her as a medicine woman. Surely they must, by now, know. Surely some part of the long whispered telephone line of this town has carried, somewhere along the way, the rather important footnote that Caitlin, the warlock, would much, much rather grind your bones to make her bread, or whatever.
"You're on my doorstep." Cait says, interrupting her own thoughts. "Why are you on my doorstep."Â
Oh, and a crucial detail. One that Caitlin does not highlight, but one, she supposes, others might:
She is, preseintly, up to her elbows in blood. She had been, before this interruption, on the brink of a particularly delicate piece of architecture: the most efficient route by which to summon something that did not want to be summoned. Rare work. Difficult work. Her work. And this child has knocked. Find some Phial witch with a white knight complex why donât you? Surely Port Leiry hadn't run out of those. âWhoever told you to come here owes you an apology I am not equipped to deliver.âÂ
The Siltshore Mausoleum has had a long and storied past in the city. It's also stood as a strange landmark in her career; Tressa remembers her first year at the Morgue, picking up bodies from a shooting that had taken place in and amongst all this old stone. Funny to think how little she knew then versus just how much she knows now.
She's seen, albeit briefly, what lurks on the other side of the grave. Insider experience she'd never imagined she'd get to live to tell about.
Her grandmother's buried here. She finds that funny, that she has so many connections to this place. That people important to her have the same kinds of deep connections here. God, she misses Estela.
What she doesn't miss though, is the profile of a woman who - to Tressa - needs little introduction. Caitlin Siltshore may need no introduction, but she does require explanation.
How does one casually approach a Caitlin Siltshore. The Allegations surrounding this woman are... well, big.
Still, she feels this six-degrees-of-separation feeling. Like she's meeting Goth Witch Madonna in the flesh. "Aren't you like, barred from existing within a bajillion miles of this place?" She says it as if she herself isn't technically supposed to be banned from being out in broad daylight, though with the strange winter settled over town, freezing those stuck here into their odd complacency, even vampires without blood-red stones get to come out under the cloud-covered sun. So maybe rules just didn't matter anymore. True horror.
The exigency of the exile had forced Cait to resort to means she would not, under more gracious circumstances, have resorted to. The Mausoleum had been left to Tressa (vampire!) Her grimoires, sealed (fuck that!) Her magic, sealed (fuck that!!!) The Catacombs beneath the grounds, sealed (triple fuck that, etc etc) - every door she had ever loved shut and warded with her own name written in a hand only she could read. For the better part of a year she has missed the quotidian: the dull holy rituals of being on a site, the maintenance of graves, the small daily honor of having bones that could sing to you, speak to you, pass along the long whispered struggles of all the lives that had not, in the end, gotten what they wanted. There is a sacred magic to be found in the place called home, Caitlin wants hers back.
In her absence, the Mausoleum has become a lone-standing synecdoche for the ghosts of her past - for the bones she put in the ground herself, for every door she sealed with her own name on it. And as she stalks back toward her home, each step kicking up dirt like an upturned grave, she hears Tressaâs question and the word Allegation without it even being said. Capital A. Italicized. Hovering. Tressa should know. This whole damn town should know. You cannot keep a good woman down. You can hardly keep a bad one down. She - and specifically, she as in Cait - will simply find another floor to stand on.Â
She comes to a halt a half-step from where Tressa is standing - a step respectful only in as much as it is the precise distance from which it is rudest to refuse to come any closer - and tips her chin in something that is not, but might pass for, a greeting.
"I've been told," she says, evenly, "that the terms of exile no longer apply." It is the truth and it is not. A vote shifting here, a seat shifting there. "I have to assume the matter is settled, since I am standing here. Or perhaps I'll be struck down in my sleep tonight." A breath. The dry small flutter of teeth that, on a kinder woman, might pass for a smile. "Which would be, in its way, funny."
She says it dryly, because Cait does not, in any working sense of the word, believe that anything in this town has the spine to strike her down. And if they had tried? Well, she would have pried her way back regardless. Exile is a vote; home is a covenant.
She begins to walk the perimeter without inviting Tressa to follow, though she does not, particularly, forbid it. She's checking on what she's left behind. Eyes on the runes - there, the one she set the night before she left, still holding; there, the older one Brennan laid down a decade before she was born, still humming faintly to itself like an old man whistling. The greenhouse breathes its slow green breath at the western edge, and Cait notes with love that she refuses to call love, that she will sleep beside it tonight. The plants will be glad of her.Â
Her gaze drifts - briefly, almost incidentally - to the line of light along Tressa's jaw, the soft inappropriate daylight she should not, by all the older rules, be standing in. "Strange winter, isn't it," she says, mildly. "Rules getting loose all over town."
From afar, it might look like two lovers having a moment in an alley. They still smelled of sweat and liquor from the club they'd met in, bodies finding each other's in the throng of movement. Dancing, writhing, and then a few words were exchanged before they were outside. It was cold, but Winter had never minded the cold, and he didn't really care about how the other felt about it.
"Just a little taste," he reassured the other breathlessly, detaching from his neck to whisper in their ear. Winter smiled, fangs bared, and dove back in, not needing to take a breath even if his partner probably could have.
When he'd finished, the other was no longer conscious, held up only by Winter's hand firm on their shoulder. He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand, leaned down a bit to take a look at the human, and then let go of them. They slumped to the ground, and for a moment it seemed like Winter would just walk away.
At the last second, he hesitated, and then he leaned down to fix the other. It was quick, no more than a second or two, and the human's back was against the wall, head lolled to the side but definitely looking more comfortable than before. They were breathing, Winter knew, and they were bundled up well enough as long as they were found soon. He made sure they weren't in the dark, light enough on them to alert some passerby.
But then he was walking away, leaving the alley, finally noticing the individual who had likely seen a lot of what had just happened. With his hunger satiated, he was calm, confident in a way he usually reserved for at work. Winter smirked at the other, raising a brow. "Problem?"
Caitlin has spent the better part of her life understanding what blood is for. Blood is her magic, or her magic is blood - depending on the hour of the day, and which side of the altar she is standing on. The warlock despises vampires for the simple nature of them: she finds the consumption of something so potent in exchange for something so meager to crawl the earth far from an equivalent transaction. She believes it doubly tonight, as she watches this hollow little parasite in a leather jacket drain a passerby like a cheap beer.
"Problem?" the vampire is asking. Brow up. A shade of confidence in his tone. The warlock does not answer. Her coat is drawn all the way to her chin so that she looks like the stalk of a streetlamp, gravity shifting like a well around her, eyes fixed on the slouched figure he has left at the brick. She does not sow a single fuck for the vampire; she seethes, instead, for all that blood about to go to waste. She moves then - striding past the offender, hopping some alleyway debris, and kneeling at the side of wastefully arranged human. Two fingers slip up along the cooling jaw - the easy, practiced touch of a warlock who has spent her whole life siphoning life-and-death, life-and-death, life-and-death through the long quiet tunnels of her veins.
"He left a great deal of you," she informs the body, conversationally. What a waste. What a fucking waste. "I think it is important, in moments like this, that we are honest about who finishes what."
She lays her palm flat against the human's sternum, and pulls. A small contemptuous sneer touches the corner of her mouth as she pulls, and pulls, and pulls at the magic. There must have been an ancestor of hers once - one who probably still sits nestled somewhere in her bones - who pulled just like this at a loom: patient, steady, gathering the long bright thread of something that did not, strictly, belong to her, and making something new of it because she could.
As she takes the blood for herself, the magic for herself, Cait wonders if the vampire knows yet that she has just finished his dinner. That is what is happening here. He left it on the plate; she has eaten it for him; and now they are both standing in this alley, one of them simply surviving and the other measurably more powerful for it.
"I've seen rats with better economy," Caitlin finally, condescendingly, speaks. "I do not, as a rule, think highly of rats, and the comparison is frankly, unkind to the rats - who at least finish what they start."
Her sneer gains the smallest gleam of tooth behind it. And why not? She is a warlock, with fresh blood at her fingertips. Whatever he says next, she would like him to say it under the load-bearing understanding that he is, presently, the second most efficient predator in this conversation, and the gap is not what one would call close.
"Alright, love. Don't push it." It's a threat without the violence of capability. And it's a worthless statement, because Caity, as ever, pushes it when a hand vices on his wrist and he feels the tendrils of magic slither beneath his flesh and burrow into the marrow; calcifying his bones, whilst equally raking sharp nails along the lengths of them. This is Caity, without playing conduit. But this magic isn't hers, or is â but fresh; restless, like a newly given heart in a transplant. It feels like there's some potential to reject its host. AJ knows from the first invasion that her success is explosive. He's also done terrible things to those who weave their magic unsolicited under his skin. He thinks about Riv, when he oversteps, blowing his pit out of the abyss with a flash of gold. The waitress he threw off the edge because she dared to touch his heart. Caitlin is pushing. Always.
Something almost inhuman tears out of her, and it has Astor's eyes narrowing on Cait. When he gains full control of his arm again, he has to wonder if he utters an old curse to spite Garnett, if it would even strike with intention, or if it would fall into his cup, sizzling at the base of it. There's more things than murder that AJ cares about, so he practically dismisses her cast-off: "I'm glad you know the distinction."
He knows what part he played in it. Takes satisfaction knowing Cait is what she is now, because he solved her riddle. A thousand years of mess, for AJ to meddle with the broken pieces and trigger a metamorphosis like no other has ever known.
She makes herself at home, gathering flora, and herbs from his units. He filters through his mind-grimoire of spells, recipes, and what protoscience she's been scratching up on, given his display of power a week ago. He's flicking through the pages of memory, suspicion written all over tired features.
"I'm not getting in a bloody Uber, Garnett. What for?" He suspects he knows, because she will want to leer it over his head; this status of stunted magic, on crashing display and bleeding into every drink and pile in the penthouse. "I'm fine, Caity." Despite his predicament, every name rolls of his tongue, laced with bitterness. It's what got him here to begin with. A joke that her shadow couldn't hack.
He's never seen Caitlin drop a drink like a shot, but he smiles â it's hilarious.
She is hilarious. Eyes skirt to the gilded statuettes at the door, pieces of memories of nights well-spent guarding his rented hotel room like Janus, seeing both the past and the future in one sweeping motion. Garnett might suit it, if he didn't find it agitating that he liked her bloody wit. Even her inability to quit. It's as hungry and all-devouring as his. But his hunger is ravenous, and he lacks the resources â the power, to feed it, with slithers of his magic weaving through the gaps in his ribcage; a wounded snake, curling and slithering its way around his core, preying on what Astor might feed it next. Maybe a fragment of Cait, if he tore away the golden tattoo that no longer serves their agreement; a pact completed.
More than one, in fact.
He doesn't acknowledge that his shirt is unbuttoned, that sweat beads in the cracks of his chest, glistening gold scars against the penthouse lights. It's dingy, still. Because he's made a mess of the place. New black shorts that Bvlgari gifted him, despite missing the Rome meeting several weeks ago. Caity's about to drag him out of his wasteland he's wallowing in, and he's never wanted to leave a burn deeper than now across her hands, for the deadpan mockery.
AJ almost moves to make another drink to replace the one she stole, but he refrains. Slipping past her to at least change his shirt. "You want me to trudge through a forest with you, love? I don't do romance like that. But I got a bed we can explore." a beat, because he's joking on this occasion: "Talk to me about Nebraska, I get a kick out of watching for your tells in your allegories." She's got a few, and her eyes are the ones he notices most. Because there's no way he didn't catch her hesitation a week ago about a city to wipe out. It'll weigh on a soul, he imagines. Dominoes knocked over that aren't smart or good enough to match real power. But if she's anything like him; there's always a cost they'll pay to know what could come next.
âGet in the Uber, Astor â unless youâd like my grand debut as a Warlock to be me trussing you up and hauling you out without ever laying a finger on you.â The threat leaves Caitlinâs mouth on a ribbon of smoke-sweet mockery, and she savors the way the syllables coil in the candle-stale air of his ruined penthouse. Her magic â new, bright, raw as a blister â crackles across her knuckles as she wiggles her fingers, a matadorâs flourish daring the bull to charge. âChin up, Astor. Itâs not even an XL. Itâs Shared, just for you.â A lie, of course. She ordered a Comfort ride, but she thinks itâs fun to see him sweat.Â
She watches the words sink into him like needles and catalogues the minute tremor at the corner of his mouth: irritation, maybe admiration, maybe both. Power tastes best when itâs half-bitten, still bleeding.
He fires back the tired innuendo about his bed â âAnd I donât do romance like thatâ she says and she snorts. Romance. As though what either of them craves could fit inside satin sheets and candlelight. For her, romance is forged in friction: two flints striking until one ignites or shatters. For him, itâs the exchange of leverage, a barter of soft flesh for harder secrets. Theyâre just two apex predators spinning different labels onto the same hunger.
He turns, fingers twitching toward new fabric, and she tracks every hitch of muscle beneath gold-laced scars. If heâs willing to shed his shirt in front of her, heâs either showing off or forgetting himself; either way, she records each seam of damage, every uneven line of healing. Weak spots. Doors she might pry open later. She wonders what he would read in hers â the sigils Tenebris carved across her sternum, the network of self-inflicted glyphs that lace her arms like constellations. Atlas Jay sleeps with anyone and hands them the map of his ruin; Caitlin would rather die than be that naked. She drifts closer, a moon pulled by some dark physics, half-glutted on dread. His skin still shines â feverish, salt-slick â each breath rattling like a bird trapped in a rusted cage of ribs and waning spellwork. Thereâs an aureate seam arcing from hip to hip beneath the twelfth rib â a half-moon of melted gold soldered to flesh. It catches the low light like a locketâs hinge, daring anyone to open him again. Above and below it, smaller gilt flecks stipple his back and stomach â wear-and-tear wounds heâll laugh off, deny, tuck beneath swaggerâbut the metalized skin refuses to forget. She notes each one, pins them in her mind like rare insects.
His palms, already familiar to her, flash those thin, ritual scars â frail lines that once ferried power, now ghostly crossing guards. Over everything coils the tattoo he calls protection: twin black serpents slithering from each shoulder, looping across his chest and meeting at the sternum in lazy eternity. Decorative, almost ordinary, yet their inked bodies frame the bright fault under them, as though the snakes cling to the wound to keep him stitched together.
Untouchable, he would say. But Caitlin sees the truth in every radiant welt. A quicksilver thought: trace one scar, just one, feel whether it quails like a foal or flares like phosphorus. Her hand aches with the wanting, but she lets the want hiss in her palm, bright and poisonous, like foxglove sheâs too wise to swallow.
The Tom Collins â or the idea of Tom Collins â rises in her blood, warm as wildfire. He asks about Nebraska, lips curling around the word like it still tastes of ash. She answers the question about Nebraska with half a shrug, letting the memory bloom behind her eyes.
âImagine peeling back the sky and finding nothing underneath but want. Thatâs what it felt like in Ashford Bend: I took the townâs rib cage apart, bolt by bolt, and invited the black-star thing inside my chest to step through. One minute the air tasted of diesel and corn silk; the next it tasted like the inside of a struck bell â metal, echo, inevitability. I watched fifteen thousand sleepers sigh their last, and in the same breath I felt the universe sigh open around me. I should have crumpled under the weight of that contradiction. But I didnât. Do you know the high of that, Atlas? Itâs cleaner than any drug: the moment proof and faith collapse into the same heartbeat.âShe lets the silence ring. âMade me feel, in that moment, like I was the best witch in the world.â
It isnât bragging. Itâs confession â razor-bare, ungilded. And itâs the truth. Since that night sheâs walked with gravity bent a half-degree toward her. It thrills her; it terrifies her. Both sensations live in the same rib, fluttering like twin sparrows.
The rideshare alert pings her phone. Perfect timing. She shows him the screen, a green car icon inching toward the lobby. Her smile is all teeth, no mercy.
His mother still lived in him. Like a parasite left to fester in rotting insides. Even when he was done, dead and buried, parts of her would still remain, laced through empty veins and brittle bone.
Her magic, not his, had killed that vampire. It was her magic that had reached into a ribcage and crushed a heart, not pumping blood, no, but still living. A heart that still spoke, still wore the illusion (better than one he'd ever cast) of breath and touch and feeling.
Heâd seen them â vampires mimicking life so perfectly that creatures fell in love with them. Kissed their mouths and whispered promises against cold throats. Believed.
That vampire deserved to die the moment cold hands touched the warmth of Tomas, but not by his hand. Someone else's death, even if justified, wasnât something he wanted lodged in his conscience. It would be her hands that did the killing. Not his.
As if to rid himself of her the witch wrenched his hand back, like Caitâs skin might burn him. "This isnât me." A lie, that he was desperate to believe. Desperation flared in his eyes, tears blurring his vision, hot and sharp like a hundred swords stabbed through his eyes. No. Noâ This wasnât true. It was all words, words, words âuseless, brittle things. Wind and nothing more.
Magic recoiled, he turned and then he was walking fast. Faster. Leaving Cait behind like she was the plague. Like her ugliness might catch on him if he lingered.
ââââââââ
How far could he go? Was there anywhere far enough where she wouldnât reach him?Ever since Cait had stepped foot inside his apartment, it was like sheâd laced her magic with his motherâs. Like something ancient had stirred. Awoken, as though her spirit, alive again, tucked behind Caitâs ribs â speaking through her mouth, breathing her air, melting magic with hers. And from that alchemy, a new kind of monster was forming.
One that wore Caitâs skin and a dress, long and beautiful. Her hands were wrapped around AJâs. They walked in together. And Riven didnât know what to make of it. His friend wasnât the type to fall for silly games. Power like his didnât need enhancing.
Didnât need her. What are you doing with her, Astor?
His feet betrayed him and took him forward. Curiosity: a terrible vice that dragged him closer, where pain struck like a knife in the back at the sight. His eyes locked onto her, drilling into the woman.
Cait feels Rivenâs stare long before she sees him. It needles between her shoulder blades, cold and insistent, even while Atlas Jayâs laughter still vibrates against her skin. She peels away from the conversation, slips through the throng, and sets a straight course for the gaze boring a hole in her spine. Mid-stride she flicks her wrist; a champagne flute lifts clean from a passing tray, drifts across the ballroom, and hovers inches from Rivenâs chest â held there by nothing but her will. He can claim it, or let it crash and stain his suit like a challenge dropped at his feet. The glass trembles, a glittering ultimatum.
âOne day, Riven,â she says, voice low but carrying, âyouâll find the courage to approach me yourself at these sorts of parties instead of just staring at me from across the room. Until then, Iâll do the honors.â She stops close enough to see the tension in his jaw, the questions in his eyes. âHi.â
Her smile widens, bright and wicked. âSo â howâs the grand project of pretending your legacy doesnât exist? Any cold-sweat nights yet? Wondering if mediocrity might be terminal?â She lets the words settle. âI heard youâre editing books these days. A website swears half of itâs mermaid smut. Interesting hill to abandon your magic on.â
She studies him, searching for flickers of his mother in the angles of his face. Cait doesnât want to echo dead voices; she wants the truth Riven keeps shoveling into shallow graves fo. If that truth is tangled with the late witchâs shadow, so be it. Her eyes drop to the floating flute, still trembling like a pinned moth. âTake the drink â or let it break. Either way, doesn't matter to me.â
Nadia's eyebrows raise as the woman - another leader here in Port Leiry - turns to her. She's done her damned best to attempt to learn as much as possible in the previous weeks about the locals and the ones from afar. It had done nothing to help the feeling of inadequacy fully thrumming through her entire body now. Her magic needed to be dampened for the time being, so she couldn't stretch out the threads of knowing to figure out the specifics of what Caitlin Siltshore means.
The basics, though, are things she's heard from elsewhere. She hopes that's enough to carry a conversation.
"Rune enchantment, from what I've heard, requires a very delicate hand - Maybe it's precision we ain't so hot at?" Her own magic is not precise at all, and it's not a knock on her colleagues either. "I wouldn't mind crashin', to learn more, but I feel like I'd learn just as much speakin' with you."
She holds out her hand to shake. "Nadia Holme, head of Augury."
She inclines her head. âI can see that. Precision ââ The word lingers until Nadiaâs title lands. âStill, if anyoneâs built for needle-point accuracy, itâs the diviners. Reading futures atom-thin has to steady the hand.â A smile ghosts across her mouth, sly but not unkind. âCaitlin Siltshore, Garnett.â Her handshake is firm, brief, the greeting of someone forever in motion. âIâm newish myself â blew back into town in February.â
She flicks two fingers toward Nadia, echoing the dropped ainât. âI hear a drawl. Whereâs it from?â
Nadiaâs timing is impeccable. In a few hours at theyâll stride into a closed room with every leader in Port Leiry â Jameson and Danielle there too â and Cait would rather not walk in half blind. She owes nothing to the out-of-towners yet, but this Warlock twist matters, and the local coven leaders deserve a clear sightline before midnight detonates with a convergence. Better to trade truths now, while the future is still soft enough to carve.
Lana's attended many events like this one in her long life, many galas thrown by The Conclave. Has seen all the different factions parading around like they were trying to put on a show enough to be mostly bored with it all by now. But never had attending alone been so bothersome for her. And she couldn't help the way her eyes kept moving around, searching for dark eyes and a challenging attitude.
She hadn't realized who she had stopped next to, but the strong scent of magic reached her nose, different, just as soon as the words caressed her ears, and she turned, a raised eyebrow and amused smile on her lips. Wyrmwood Coven, the tree fanatics if she remembers them correctly. Powerful still, with their craft.
"I do believe you need only ask one of them, though you know how some elders are with their knowledge, best kept between their own." Not that Lana could blame them for that, she was particularly fond of keeping things to herself. "Or perhaps it was merely a reluctance to share with a vampire, they're very... nature inclined."
âSvelana Lomidze,â Caitlin greets, letting the consonants chime like cut glass between them.
To her, the Lomidze clan feels like a manor sealed against sunlight â old-world, inward-facing, the antithesis of Garnettâs wide-open gates. She canât ignore the quiet tragedy etched into every vampire: an eternity of breathing without expanding. The thought of being denied perpetual growth â of never widening, never deepening â threatens to split her at the seams.
Yet here, their views converge. âThe elders are petrified of what happens when knowledge stops being their private currency,â she says, voice smooth but unyielding. âIf youâre afraid of empowerment, you should have built a world where power isnât so easy to abuse.â Simple arithmetic.
Caitlin tips a smirk open in easy barter. âNature welcomed is a virtue in Garnettâs books. Whatâs your read on the KanoutĂŠs and the Pembrokes? Half the room already knows how I feel about the latter.â
Charlotte is fascinated by the woman who has taken up beside her. Most people would look at her, see the slight movements of her head, and only see a queen observing her kingdom. But Charlotte had learned to watch the eyes, the corners of the mouth. And this womanâs eyes were tearing this room apart like it had done something to wrong her, the corner of her mouth subtly twitching like a displeased, worried Mama.
She watched her gaze flick over a woman with raven black hair, a man with black curls, a woman with hair that gleamed like honey, and a tall boy in a silk suit. Charlotte knew what it was like to be a mother duck. Noted the slight nod in the womanâs head as she counted her flock. But then the womanâs gaze turned her purpose. A change only noted by a darkening in her gaze. She started to devour the foreign faction leader.
Charlotte had read up on the visiting parties before coming to the event. She knew the power of information as it had once been withheld from her grasp. Her temporary neighbour had obviously done the same. Was forming and reforming opinions in her demenour as she took in the newcomers.
Charlotte hadnât though she was staring until the womanâs gaze quickly sliced into her. She would have stepped back if she wasnât slightly stunned at being so suddenly perceived.
This woman spoke. Words clear with purpose. Charlotte would love to figure out the kinetic nature of Wyrmwood. Her own magic was often considered kinetic in the movement of water and the ocean. But would this inquisitive observer care to have her along for a debate.
âI would love to learn more.â She signed. âIt would also be interesting to learn if given the nature of the world tree, if certain areas are better suited to their sort of runic magic than others.â
Charlotteâs magic had always been better suited to salt water than fresh water. There never seemed to be any reason behind it, other witches in her coven had similar magical tendencies. It would be interesting to learn if covens that relied on a source were similar.
Charlotte removed her pad. She was not helpless in a conversation with someone who couldnât sign. But would this woman have her as a conversational partner.
Caitlin blinks in pleased surprise when Charlotteâs fingers move. The muscle-memory of college evenings as President of Latin club come back to her, having learned ASL for the accessibility of all her members. She rubs a thumb against her knuckle, shakes the rust from her wrists, and signs backâslow, deliberate: Iâm out of practice, forgive the lag. A rueful smile curls as she mouths, âGive me grace.â
Then â nerd-mode. It settles on her shoulders like a mantle.
âFrom what Iâve read,â she signs, punctuating key terms aloud for clarity, âterrain can overpower rune complexity. Old-growth root systems, peat marshes, even abandoned orchards behave like living capacitors. The lignin lattice inside century-old roots stores ambient charge the way a lithium cell hoards ions. Anchor a kinetic glyph there and it fires faster, recharges almost instantly ââ she pulls out her phone then, thumbs racing, as her vocabulary outruns her signing â âbut you court feedback loops. Nature dislikes debts it canât reclaim.â
She turns the screen so Charlotte can read:
I want soil samples tbh. Iron-rich or quartz-veined soil can work a natural conductor, especially if groundwater salinity sits above 3%. Barometric swings and coastal humidity jitter rune stability; drizzle on a high-pressure front can spike discharge by twelve percent.
Add ritual history and you get imprint echoesâcumulative resonance from every chant, burn-mark, or blood-drop ever spilled on-site. Wyrmwood claims the World Treeâs echoes boost efficacy five percent. My stuff I've read says closer to two, but their ritual density is⌠absurd.
Caitlinâs gaze lifts, bright with curiosity. She sketches a small wave-motion in the airâwater, oceanâand signs, Salt bias? âMost water witches Iâve read about show stronger coupling in brine than in freshwater. Chloride ions increase plasma conductivity; tides give them cyclic pressure gradientsâfree kinetic priming.â A playful shrug. âPhysics loves a good rhythm.â
She pockets the phone, returns to hands for the part that matters. Caitlin Siltshore, she signs, fingers steady now. Garnett Coven. You?
There are very few faces here she recognizes, which is alright. That's part of the point, isn't it? And as she finds herself continuing to settle in Port Leiry (though home is just a few hour's drive away), she knows more and more of these people will become familiar, and perhaps even friends.
Summer is enjoying the music performances, though she doesn't exactly partake in any of the dancing that accompanies some of the livelier tunes. Her dress doesn't drag, exactly, but she's certain she'll trip or otherwise get herself tangled in with someone she doesn't intend to thanks to its bountiful, soft lace.
But then there's Cait, confident as she moves about the space like a shark -- ever forward. Aside from the recent street fair, which had a different sort of energy all together, Summer hasn't seen her coven leader in a truly formal social setting. Even with all the fabric and lace and pretense wrapped around every partygoer this evening, Cait seems wholly unrestricted by the social contracts of the evening. In fact, she seems to exist outside of it, for a moment.
"And yet, the single beat of a butterfly's wing can change the entire history of the world, right? Isn't that what they say?" Everything to its season. Nothing lasts forever, but everything renews. Revives. One butterfly might not last, but butterflies are eternal. That is, if they care for the earth as it deserves to be cared for.
"The night is lovely so far, thank you. I have the easy job -- you're the one who has to work tonight," she says, reaching out to take a champagne flute. "I think just because they're all from out of town doesn't make them better than anyone here. Or worse, for that matter -- I look forward to learning from them, I think Wyrmwood most of all. But what about you?"
A single wingbeat can knock the world half a degree off its orbit â good for that butterfly, Caitlin thinks â but she answers aloud, weightless and sure: âI donât think I could ever stop at just one beat.â
Now that sheâs within armâs reach, Summerâs magic rolls across her skin like warm surf on a moonlit shore. It smells of cut grass and salt, bright pollen and a hint of bonfire smoke. The current tugs and releases, tidal, synchronized to cicada hum and chlorophyll pulse. High summer presses in from every window, and the season itself seems to pool at Summerâs feet, begging to be poured into something living.
âSpeaking of butterflies â this is your quarter of the calendar, isnât it?â She lifts her champagne in salute. In that dress, Summer should be on the floor, dancing. âWe should do more than toast. Channel that swell into roots and petals. Garnettâs greenhouse could use a new wing - letâs coax one from the loam.â
She flicks her hand at the mention of leadership. âLoveâhate arrangement. Looks good on paper, kills spontaneity. I end up living vicariously through Mara â sheâs allowed to make the messes Iâd be scolded for.â A quick spark lights her eyes.
âWyrmwoodâs my pick too. Their Yggdrasil fixation dovetails with Garnett, and Iâm a shameless fangirl for their tech. Bet theyâre still gnashing teeth that we cracked daylight jewelry first.â She tosses her head back and cackles a little at that. Her laugh is quick and bright. âMariposa fascinates me, though. All that glamour â whatâs it really hiding? I know Iâm missing a piece. Catch me later and Iâll give you the full Pembroke rant. Berserker feels like a frat house; Zhongshanâs grifts are almost admirable; Kanoute? Pretty brushstrokes, if youâre into that sort of thing.âÂ
Kore stands tall, highball glass in hand as they survey the occupants of the room freely. When they meet anyone's eye, Kore takes an extra second to match their gaze before moving on coolly. Plenty are doing the same with them, and they face the challenges head on. A few have tried to pique their interest, and Kore wonders what they are thinking when they see the sparkling jewels on several of the vampires scattered throughout the crowd. Jewels that they had a hand in creating.
It's comical almost, to see all of Port Leiry out in their finest and trying to make a good impression on the visitors to the city. They know that Nadia is here to represent their coven, has caught a glimpse of Viktoria, which means Lana likely is somewhere among the throng of people.
Their lips thin briefly until a voice is cutting through their distracted thoughts, and they turn their head to look upon Caitlin Siltshore. Like everyone else, Kore takes their measure of the younger witch, and there is a humming energy that seems to vibrate just off her skin. There is a difference to her, one that Kore can't quite put their finger on, but Cait is nonetheless a good ally to have in this moment, particularly when there are so many new faces about.
"Could do a bit of quid pro quo," Kore adds amiably with a glint of mischief in their eye. "Knowledge for knowledge." They know what they have to offer, and are curious what Caitlin has under her own domain now.
Caitlin knows the witch even if theyâve never traded words until now. Digs the glint of mischief in their eye. Matches it with her own. âWell, if it isnât Kore Matsui â the witch this whole evening is built around.â Daylight jewelry. It's been the talk of the whole gala. She tips an acknowledging smile. âQuid pro quo with Wyrmwood sounds perfect.â She lifts her hands, palms open in an easy gesture of barter that nevertheless feels ceremonial, as though she is laying rare seeds across a marble altar. âGarnet lives to share knowledge, I can brief them on our latest work in botany and entropy â â Her voice slides from cordial to conspiratorial, â â but I bet you anything Wyrmwoodâs desperate to meet you. Half their coven canonizes you for daylight jewelry; the other half curses your name for cracking the code first. Existing only matters when the response is seismic, donât you think?â
Caitlin certainly thinks so. A quiet legacy isnât a legacy at all. Better to make the ground buckle, to force history to rearrange its bones around your footprint, than to leave tiptoe prints the tide can scrub away.
âTell me â what was it like, that exact instant the idea snapped into place?â Cait has been reverse-engineering daylight pieces herself; whether most vampires deserve the sun is irrelevant. She needs to grasp the gears beneath the miracle. She wonders what drove Kore â simple curiosity, aching love, or something closer to her own pursuit of Warlock-hood: raw, uncut ambition? Either way, she sees them both as the worldâs Pandoras. The box exists, so they open it â no matter what spills out. Show them the hinge, and witches like them will test how far it swings, charting every creak of possibility. âAnd what exactly set you on that path?â
"Yeah!" Millie says, because she knew some of those words.
She nods, looking around, trying to figure out where Jeanette slipped off to. "Hell yeah! Let's fuck 'em up, witch lady!"
She sips on some sort of funky fizzy drink she'd swiped off a passing tray (something done with difficulty given how far she had to reach up) and nods. "Lets figure out how the Wyrmwoods graft kinetic runes without blowing half their shit up."
This was all about mingling right? All these monster big-wigs in town to be like 'hey look at us, we're monster big-wigs'.
"You are a witch yeah? You smell nice, but also like a witch, you know, like, witches smell funky? But not dead funky or dog funky."
She nods, like that was the most normal thing she could have said. "You think they got magic wands? I want a magic wand. Like the guy in the movie with the brooms. Oh shit! That'd make my job so easy."
Cait tilts her head, replaying the strangerâs rush of enthusiasm and trying to gauge whether itâs bravado, mischief, or plain sincerity. The personâs eyes are clear, her grin unforced â genuine, she decides, bewilderingly so.
â âFuck them upâ might spark a diplomatic incident,â she says slow, mouth tilting into a wry curve, âbut I canât fault the spirit. Very much my speed.â
Her question about witches still hangs between them. Cait inhales, catching her own signature mix of clove and incense â the smell of spellwork half-finished. âYes, witchââ she says, choosing her words carefully. âMid-glow-up. If you will.â The warlock revelation can wait; Mara and Estela deserve to hear first. Even so, thereâs a flicker of delight at how easily this stranger coaxes honesty from her. She laughs, low. âFor the record, Iâll take ânot dead dogâ as a compliment. Necromancers get worse.â
Technically necromancer-adjacent now. Something else entirely. Semantics. Caitlin tests the air around Millie, sensing no familiar pull of coven magic. âYou, on the other hand, definitely arenât a witch â interesting.â
Her gaze follows Millieâs toward the Wyrmwood contingent, all runic steel and restless innovation. âAbout the wand,â Cait muses, slipping back into lecture mode, a tone she takes all too often with Jaya. âIf you need a simple amplifier, they can manage that. A fully self-contained focus anyone can use? Thatâs trickier, but not impossible.â She angles her body, curiosity piqued. âSo tell me â what job of yours gets easier with a wand?â She wonders if this person, with all their... energy... should even have a wand.
Who: @ofgarnett
When: Cocktail hour, too early for this bullshit
With a quick try not to get into too much trouble, he left Billie near the refreshments table, crossing the room with grace. This was a chance to mingle and speak with other witches in the city, and he was not going to pass that up. He would stick to his usual strategies, a quick scan of the room for anyone who seemed interesting, check up with familiar faces andâÂ
Well, there goes that plan. It was him. The vampire that heâd been searching for since the hurricane, the man who had taken his blood and, unforgivably, his necklace. His left hand had already moved to clasp his right, twisting one of his rings in a familiar, grounding motion as his thoughts raced.
He had yet to come up with a name for the spell that he began to focus around his fingers, energy crackling under his skin. Usually, he liked to take his time with perfecting spells, coming up with variations and clever names for them, but this one had taken so much energy in balancing the complicated necessity for the casterâs specific emotional state that it had never progressed past its working title of Fuck Your Life Forever. It was a bit wordy for his tastes, as is, but it alluded to the effects well enough. He was never very eloquent with his anger, and that man had taken something precious from him. He tapped the pads of his fingers against his thumb, muttering his incantations as he walked before lifting the thumb to his teeth, drawing blood with a sharp bite and repeating the tapping again, building power with each movement. It was a slow process, the first step of almost a dozen, but he had enough anger and blood to fuel it.Â
The sight of Cait on another side of the room, catching his eye and raising her glass in greeting, made him stop, pouring a bucket of reality over his rage. This wasnât his home, this wasnât an event where he could shove his anger into a spell and have his parents spend more time complimenting his spellwork than chiding him for being so brazen with his magic at a supposed diplomatic event. This wasnât the kind of spell theyâd cover for, anyways.Â
He was a member of Garnett, now. A member of a coven that he was expected to play by the rules of, and that meant he couldnât simply curse a man in the middle of a gala over a personal matter. It was with no small effort that he paused his spellwork, letting the energy fizzle away. What a waste.Â
He turned, heading towards Cait instead, his voice coiled into a tense facade of pleasantness, matching the smile he dragged his face into. âYour dress is stunning, where did you get it? The vampire is here. Black suit, white designs on the front, peacock feather, behind me.âÂ
Cait clocks Jayaâs finger-crooking hex before the ice in her sazerac has time to sweat. Too early for this brand of bullshit, she thinks, and curses the curse of leadership: someone has to stop over-eager witches from nuking gala floorboards. There was a time sheâd have pocketed an eyeball for sport, but rank comes with paperwork â and she is not letting six faction heads reduce her apprentice to ash tonight.
She lifts her glass in a lazy salute â I see you, simmer down â while the dark in her ribs unfurls, sleek as a whip, itching to lash across polished parquet and strangle the budding sigil out of existence. Given half a slip, it would scour Jaya clean off the map and leave a jagged burn in the fabric of reality for the custodial clerics to patch. Leadership, alas, means keeping the darkness on a leash â no matter how satisfying the snap would feel.
Still relishes the thought of the feeling though.Â
Jaya reels himself in â credit where itâs due â and drifts her way, magic doused but nerves still sparking. Caitlin ignores the obligatory compliment about her dress; couture is camouflage, not conversation. Sheâs more interested in the real intel, which he coughs up in seconds. Her gaze tracks the direction he indicates and lands on the unmistakable silhouette of Reardonâs leader. Figures.Â
âOh, honestly,â she drawls, sazerac swirling between her fingers, absinthe licking at her lip. âOf all the leeches in this circus, youâre fixated on the one that has fangs on a payroll.â She keeps her voice soft, casual, belaying the danger underneath as she calculates. Her eyes have narrowed in the direction of the Reardon head. âTell me you ran a locator thread first â does he actually have your necklace on him? Or were you planning to hex now, fact-check later?â
No judgment, only surgical curiosity. Then a slow, wicked smile: âAnd for my own morbid interest â what brand of ruin were you about to unleash?â
Caitlinâs arcane senses flare brighter than she expects â warlock work has clearly turbo-charged her radarâ and she can practically taste the flavor of Jayaâs half-formed spell. Nebraska kept her away for a few days (and saddled Jaya with enough homework to floor a lesser witch), but she still remembers the first thing he ever asked of her: magic that runs on the caster alone, no borrowed herbs or moonlight, no quiet theft from the world. Sheâd recognized the hunger; what is a warlock if not a self-contained engine?
Now sheâs back, currents humming under her skin, more than ready to sharpen his edge. But first, priorities. âPlease tell me you havenât spent this entire week lurking after one overpaid neck-biter,â she says, eyebrow arched. âDid you even say hello to the visiting dignitaries, or are we still in stalk-and-seethe mode?â Her eyes jump to his neck to see if there are any pricks to be found there. "Are you here with someone?"
