The day goes on -- the fair overcast weather slowly withdraws into the darkness of the night; bright blue skies bleed out into yellows and the yellows darken into blood oranges until they stain a bruised purple into the evening’s indigo. In a few hours, the cloudy blue sky becomes night lit up by the various lanterns dotting the trees in the greenhouse and the light coming from the shop, the healing hut behind it, and the house to the side.

Jennie watches the changes perched at her spot on the  steps in front of the shop or at the  counter right beside the register. Rosie passes by her multiple times throughout the rest of the afternoon, running a hand through her fur in a gentle swipe every time.

Jisoo doesn’t leave the hut and Lisa keeps training with Cotton. Or, more accurately, spends the rest of it playing around with little fire tricks closer to performative magic tricks instead of actual combat moves. Cotton chirps laughter when Lisa conjures a fiery Barney-looking dragon, more friendly-neighborhood-dinosaur-like than scary, and has it chase after the familiar.

Eventually, the  two tire out and they come into the house. Jennie and Rosie close up shop. The rest of the evening is as uneventful and quiet as the past six evenings prior.

They all have dinner together, Jennie being the cook for the day and preparing tofu soup with magical but edible herbs from Rosie’s garden, some Brassica and Malvaceae, serving it with rice. The shapeshifter carefully channels some of her magical energy to desensitize her nose as the broth thickens and bubbles in the pot. Witches usually use their magic to heighten their senses, but Jennie being a shapeshifter from one of the most powerful lines of shapeshifters, her senses are almost too sensitive for things mundane and day-to-day. So, being that day’s cook, she dulls her sense of smell to make sure she doesn’t pass out in the middle of stirring.

Cotton, being the delightful familiar that it is, happily helps adding spices and seasoning, zooming in and out of the kitchen and the greenhouse to pick up herbs it thinks would go well.

Rosie, who’d moved from sketching some of her plants in the greenhouse to drawing on the kitchen table once it had gotten dark, offers to help and Jennie gratefully levitates an apron and ingredients towards her with a gummy smile and a flick of a wrist. Lisa tries to help, too, but Jennie shoos the half-demon away, so she settles for playing with Lola’s enchanted chess set.

(Lisa wasn’t much of a chess player and any other day she would have been playing around with her phone. But another thing they’d made sure of was to disconnect all their devices and ensure that they were undetectable both magically and technologically. Even Rosie’s customers didn’t know that a seer, a half-demon, and a griffin were staying at her place.

Except maybe Joy.

Joy had played jealous and asked if Rosie had any other demon besides her as a  customer. Jennie’s little cat head looked up at the succubus and she narrowed her eyes, while Rosie just laughed and said, “yes, another demon came in to buy some aura blockers.” Joy’s eyes had softened then, knowing that most of her kind needed to hide because of the magical society’s prejudice against them.)

Once the food finishes cooking, Rosie calls Jisoo from the hut for dinner. When Jisoo arrives, she and the healer make quick work of setting the table, casting simple levitation and movement spells on the plates, utensils, and cups.

Meanwhile, Jennie decides on whether to eat her dinner as a cat or as a human. The shapeshifter decides it would probably be best to eat using her hands so she doesn’t shift. They all settle down to eat with Cotton perched on a spot on the table, in between Lisa and Rosie.

It seems like Lisa was becoming fast friends with the familiar and Rosie couldn’t help but adore them. Looking around the table, the healer can’t help but smile at the scene before  her.

Jisoo takes her dinner with dead leaf tea to make her dreams vivid at night, just in case visions visit her in her slumber. Cotton pecks at a magical crystal lazily, not really needing much sustenance being a being of pure magical energy. Jennie eats a few slices of raw blood salmon as if it’s sushi. Lisa sprinkles her rice with zombie fire flakes, harvested from the embers of a vanquished ifrit.

(It was a delicacy from her childhood that she never thought she would see again, seeing as the demons have scattered since her father’s murder. She found a whole bag in Rosie’s cupboards and practically vibrated with joy, and the healer was happy enough to let her have as much as she wanted.

Lisa ended up having the fire flakes with every meal, coughing smoke and tearing up every now and then at the intensity of its spice, but loving how it burns anyway.)

And Rosie, herself, snacks on boiled Habijan sweet potatoes after dinner, for no particular reason other than she loves them.

The changes in her life had been sudden, but for some reason, at that moment, everything felt right.

Lola left Rosie everything in her possession, the old lady having no known descendants. So everything built on the little patch of land at the edge of the forest was Rosie’s -- from the shop, to the hut, to the house, to the greenhouse and all the plants within. But one of Rosie’s favorite inheritances has to be the old worn out wooden round table -- the one where they ate their meals together -- in the middle of the house.

Lola never told Rosie how old the piece of furniture is, but even as a child Rosie could feel that it was ancient and definitely imbued with magical energy. The healer had only figured out that the table was made out of hexed Xanthostemon wood after Lola’s death, when she’d fully committed herself to taking up the mantle left by the old healer.

Rosie can’t help but think about the old lady, the person who had cared for her and taught her everything she knows. She only wished that Lola could have stayed longer and taught her more. Witches lived for centuries -- far longer than the average human’s lifetime. It seems like when Rosie came into the old healer’s life, she was nearing the end of her thread. It makes the younger healer sad, but she thanks the goddesses for letting hers and Lola’s threads entwine, even if it was at the end of the old healer’s.

Rosie looks around the table, taking time to look at the faces of the people sitting at it. She moves her eyes from the shapeshifter Jenne who had been a loyal friend and protector for the last six months, to the seer Jisoo who barged into her home more than a week ago and managed to pierce through her protective barriers and wards, to her pink rosenfinch familiar who is probably the only reason she stayed alive in the days before Lola found her, to the half-demon, half-witch, Lisa who had come to her half-dead but is now nearly completely recovered. Then there was her, this little girl who was raised around rare herbs and who somehow has a one of a kind magical ability, a gift not found nor explained in the books.

Somehow, the four of them and the familiar made sense sitting there -- it felt right, for all of them with their differing abilities, gathered there at an ancient magical table made of rare cursed wood, doing something as domestic as eating dinner.

Rosie imagines that if Lola could see her right now, eating together with the odd bunch -- all of them sort-of friends, but definitely each other’s allies -- the old healer would be happy and proud, despite them all coming together under these circumstances.

The waxing moon glows up above them, empowering the magic in their veins. All four witches and Cotton can feel the looming full moon in two days, the shifting in energies almost palpable in the air -- even Lisa who is only half a witch. It brings them a sense of comfort, an assurance that they would be at the height of their powers soon, and should anything happen, they would be able to take it on.

So they eat and talk and laugh. Rosie compliments Jennie’s cooking, Jisoo nods in agreement and asks which herbs were added, while Lisa just stuffs her face with the tofu soup and zombie fire flakes rice.

And it is with the comfort of this waxing moon and the coming full moon that they retire to their respective rooms -- Jennie and Rosie in Rosie’s room and Jisoo and Lisa in Jennie’s room in the house.

Rosie joked that she got the best deal out of all of them; she got to sleep in her own room and Jennie slept in her cat form, so her bedmate took up little space and the twin bed was enough for them. Jisoo and Lisa meanwhile, had to fit themselves in Jennie’s twin bed and they would both accidentally kick and smack each other in the middle of the night, the blankets slipping off to one side and one of them waking up shivering the next morning. Jisoo jokingly blames Lisa for her lack of visions, saying Lisa’s existence deprives her of her peace. Lisa just sticks her tongue out at the seer, knowing that if and when Jisoo does get her visions, it doesn’t matter where or in what state of mind she’s in, she would see them.

Jennie had first suggested that Lisa and Jisoo could take the patient’s cots in the hut and move those into the greenhouse and outfit those with comforters and blankets to make them comfortable, but Cotton spoke up against the idea. The familiar expressed that it would be better at ease if the four witches weren’t more than a few feet away from each other, in case whoever was after them was bold enough to attack at night, at the height of the witches’ powers but when they are also asleep with their guards down.

It is a little before witching hour when the magical trip lines in the forest are set off.

The magical trip lines are invisible threads of pure magical energy, laid out by the familiar and the shapeshifter as they were the two beings most used to controlling and manipulating energy for long periods of time. So the trip lines extend out into the forest like a thin web, covering foliage and brush and the forest floor. So any magical or non-magical being that steps into the forest - walks amongst the brush or even flies above the trees, both Cotton and Jennie would be able to sense them.

But all of a sudden, all the magical lines snap.

It’s as if the threads were elastic, pulled taut and stretched out as far as the familiar’s and the shapeshifter’s abilities would allow.

Then, somehow, impossibly so, the trip lines were cut and all of them painfully crack back like multiple whips snapping back to their wielders.

Jennie wakes up with a yowl that develops into a roar at the pain and impact of all of her threads retreating into her body -- her heart thumping madly, blood in her ears, and fur bristling. Her small feline body feels like it can’t handle the sudden surge of magical energy into her and she falls to the floor, trying to shift into her panther form, the more muscular animal would be better fit to withstand the sudden onslaught of her own power.

The roar wakes up the healer who sits up in panic.

“Jennie! Jen, what’s wrong?” Rosie rushes to the shifting cat’s side, sees that her friend is slowly stretching out to her bigger panther form with much difficulty.

Cotton flies into its master's room in panic, one wing looking stiff.

“The lines!” Cotton explains, harried and terrified. “Something cut the lines.”

Rosie looks up and processes this for a beat.

The lines were cut. Not just set off, but cut. The healer knows how painful that would be, that is, and part of her wonders how Cotton even manages to fly at this moment. Magical energy does not dissipate and it can only be transferred and transformed. With the lines snapping, they would have nowhere to go but to rush back to their creators like wildfire -- the energy that was carefully channeled and thinned out would be flooding in like the tide.

There wasn’t really anything the healer could do to help them, except to get them to relax, and she curses under her breath.

The seer and half-demon run to their rooms, panting and panicked. Jisoo sees Jennie writhing at the floor, growling in pain and halfway to her shift from cat to panther.

“What’s wrong?” The seer asks.

“The lines were cut and the magical energy came rushing back.” Rosie explains quickly.

Jisoo and Lisa’s eyes widen.

“All of them?” Lisa asks in shock and horror.

But Rosie doesn’t answer and instead starts to hum.

“Yes, all of them.” Cotton chirps, sounding pained. “Miss Jisoo and Miss Lisa, please dull your hearing.” The familiar asks.

Before Jisoo asks what for, Lisa swiftly covers her friend’s ears while desensitizing hers. She watches Rosie hum with closed eyes, knowing that this was a relaxation spell and they needed to be awake to keep a lookout with their other senses for any attacks.

Rosie hums a tune, voice like a soft breeze caressing both Cotton and Jennie.

The shapeshifter feels her muscles relax and Cotton glides down to rest on the bed.

The healer stretches out her own energies just to get a feeling of how much more energy is coming back into their bodies. Almost the last of it are reeling in and Rosie keeps her tune going until the last bit of magical energy has settled and she holds out the last note before opening her eyes.

Jennie is in full panther form now. She lifts her head and shakes the grogginess induced by Rosie out, and she opens her eyes and bares her fangs in anger. In the dark, her eyes glint a dangerous gold, her pupils sharp as needles.

Cotton flies up again, settles on Rosie’s shoulder. The seer and half-demon allow their senses to come back to them.

“All of us, we’ve gotta go out, now.” Jennie growls.

All of them move out of the room quickly and jump down the stairs. They come bursting through the kitchen door one by one -- Jennie leaping in front of all of them protectively, Lisa with her daggers in hand behind her, then Jisoo and Rosie kept protected in the middle and Cotton taking up defense at their flank.

They face the direction of the fores and wha they all see sends a chill down their spines.

The forest, the night sky, and everything outside the barrier was black.

Or rather, engulfed in black.

And then Jisoo faints.