Life was never supposed to have turned out this way.

As Nellie ripped up the umpteenth picture within the hour, she couldn’t properly stop the fat, ugly tears streaming down her cheeks.

Some video or another played in the background, but she had no idea what it could be going on about. It had been on an automatic setting to just continue playing video after video from the last time she had indulged in more than an hour of entertainment and she had turned on her laptop mindlessly when-

The burning in her eyes that had begun to subside became an inferno once again, the tears flowing acquiring even more weight to them. They gushed, she sobbed, and her nose flowed with disgusting, thick snot.

The life she had known only one hour ago was not one she would be able to continue living.

It would have been easy, she knew. It would have been so easy to act as if what she had just witnessed was still completely unknown to her. It would have been the easiest thing to do, even to play the part that was supposed to have been her own; to seem like she was still ignorant to what had taken place and that she still had no idea that it could have even taken place.

Even though she had already written out everything she felt was necessary to be said, word-vomited onto her phone and explained the explicit reason why they were done… she couldn’t bring herself to hit send. Her finger refused to get anywhere near the button she needed to press to officially cut all ties to the person she had once revolved her whole life around.

A snide, insidious voice within her sneered, “It can still revolve around him. You can just let this go. It was a one-time thing. Be better! Then he’ll never want to do this again. Because, clearly, everything that happened was YOUR FAULT.”

Her breath shuddered and faltered; she shook her head.

But those horrid sneers were not shaken. As her head pounded with a migraine unlike anything she had ever experienced before; with pressure so tightly built up it felt her skull was about to be splintered and destroyed; all she could truly think of was about how easy it would be to act as if what she had witnessed only a few hours ago had never taken place.

No one had seen her.

No one knew what she knew.

And because no one knew what she knew… she could very easily act as if she still didn’t know it.

Her life didn’t have to fall apart today. She could pick up the pieces, make it seem like it was still absolutely whole with no fractures or fissures in sight. If she really put her mind to it, she could even make her relationship stronger; but only if she kept quiet about what she had seen!

Another video started up.

Even though Nellie had been so trapped within her own mind for so long, every little noise a muted, incomprehensible sound to her frantic mind, the eerie music that began to fill up her room cut straight through her.

Even as tears continued to bubble up within her eyes and glide down her cheeks, she forced herself to look at something other than the blurred phone screen below.

Everything in her room was exactly the same way it had been when she had left to surprise Bennie… it was unfair, really, how nothing had changed.

Here was her life, crumbling all around her, facing the biggest form of upheaval she had ever feared aside from first applying to university and having to leave her small hometown to attend the biggest university in her country… and, yet it seemed like nothing would ever care.

Who would, after all? If not ever her boyfriend cared enough about her to keep his hands off of her own cousin…

“Merry meet, whoever has chosen to watch this video. As you have undoubtedly gleaned from the title, my name is Ainsley Aimes and I have been a practicing witch for some ten odd years.”

The voice she heard coming from her laptop was clearly tinged with a melodic lilt, perfectly accompanied by an accent that Nellie was not quite able to properly place outside of undoubtedly Western European.

Admittedly, that voice and the soft melody playing in the background of the video made something within her feel… less tightly wound up.

How long had she even been crying for?

She knew better than to look at the clock, even with curiosity trying to convince her it would be a good idea. There was no doubt that she had spent an embarrassing amount of time crying over the ending of a relationship the Bennie had clearly not cared enough about.

What was it that her mother had always told her? Once a gambler, always a gambler; once a beater, always a beater; once a cheater; always a cheater- a tiger cannot change its stripes.

She forced her eyes to unglue themselves from staring at her phone- when had they strayed back? Hadn’t she been lamenting how her room was unchanged as she had looked at the much too same walls that surrounded her?

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

This herculean task resulted in her looking at an equally blurred scenery… her laptop, slightly skewed on top of the desk strategically pushed up against the wall directly across her bed, was playing a video with a rather colorful person at the front and center. The colors on the person were particularly striking, considering the relative darkness she could make out surrounding their form.

She really should put on her glasses.

But… if she did… and the crying kept up…

With a soft sigh, Nellie forced herself to detach her fingers from her phone. She kept the screen on, which was still resolutely set on the messaging app where she had written what could be the official nail in the coffin that was her relationship… what should be the coffin that was her relationship… she could still, feasibly, not allow it to die… find a way to make it work…

There was no way she could make this kind of decision right now, though.

The phone dropped onto the mattress, beside her thigh, and she felt as if she had just dropped a ton of weight. The tension in her shoulders was beginning to radiate up to her neck, tendrils of sharp aching going all the way up to her chin.

Stress would one day kill her, she was sure.

Still, she needed to acknowledge that she had at the very least managed to let go of her phone.

Now that she wasn’t obsessively focused on it, she was able to really listen to the video playing on her laptop. And what she heard was… odd, to put it simply.

“-and you do NOT- I will repeat it just to truly put the necessary emphasis on this fact, alright- you NEVER have to take part in a practice that makes you uncomfortable. Witchcraft is all about intuition. If your intuition, your GUT is telling you that something feels off- it is probably because it is not what is right for you. If ever you get anyone telling you that you HAVE to do something for your practice, please do both you and me this big favor: Run. Away. And fast, while you’re at it.”

The person on the screen seemed to be speaking as if they were talking about witchcraft but… they didn’t sound like they were talking about it as if they were immersed in some weird kind of fictitious roleplay… but, wait… if they were, wouldn’t they sound just like this?

But there wasn’t any big, well, anything, really, to make it seem like this was some weird roleplay she had somehow managed to stumble onto. The person’s background was relatively normal, filled with all sorts of books to one side and a bunch of anime and comic book related figures towards the other. And their own way of dressing and makeup was pretty down to earth- like any run of the mill person would dress to record a sit-down-and-talk video.

After a couple more words clarifying the point, the person referred to going onto another video. And then, in the right bottom corner of the screen, a miniature screen popped up and a small video began to play.

Oh! This was a form of a reaction video!

Soft, somewhat hippie-sounding, music began to play as a bottle of water appeared in the new, mini-video. Nellie moved forward, shifting ever so slightly on her mattress, in an attempt to be able to read the small text that appeared on that video.

“Please tell me they’re not about to-” the person stopped as a rock, vibrant green and smooth, Nellie wagered from what she could see, was dropped inside the bottle. The person gasped, a shrill, horrified noise, and paused the video with a forceful stab of their keyboard. “No! Bad! Malachite is NOT a crystal you want to put in water!” they looked at the camera with nothing short of horror on their face, their wide, dark eyes even seemingly surrounded by the softest hint of red. “Alright, let me be very quick about this in case I have any viewers following this advice- malachite contains copper. Do you know what you don’t want in your body? Copper!”

The person went on to explain the difference between water safe and water unsafe gemstones that could be used to create crystal water. They took a moment to acknowledge how the original creator’s information on malachite being a rock that signifies change and protection, along with a handful of other meanings, and so gave a thumbs up to that part of the creator’s research. But they went on to really make a point about how, while crystal water is a great and accessible magical mini ritual for witches to take part in to add magic to their day, they must really be careful over what they place in their water! At the end of the day, they are going to be consuming that water; and whatever goes in must be something that should go in. A safer alternative to creating crystal water without truly knowing if a rock was water soluble or not- if it could bleed into the water or be destroyed by it- was to line the water with the rocks on the outside of it, not within it.

It was all… so… unbelievable.

The person was talking about magical properties of stones, how malachite had once been coveted and mined by the ancient Egyptians to create hues for things as unbelievable as eyeshadow- which, knowing about the copper, sounded incredibly dangerous to Nellie- and as jewelry to adorn their bodies. But they also spoke of how most stones ending in -ite were best kept far away from all bodies of water, not just the kind that would eventually be drank.

It all sounded so very matter of fact… as if they were talking about things that were one-hundred percent sure.

But.

They were also speaking of magical properties; of the ways in which different stones could be utilized within someone’s witchcraft, within their magical practice…

It sounded so very unreal.

And.

Yet.

Nellie didn’t stop the video.

Instead, she inched closer towards the edge of her bed. Once she was about to topple off the side, she decided it would be in her best interest to just make the jump and make her way over to her desk.

As she did so, she made the conscious choice to leave her phone behind where it had fallen. She had been tempted to look for it; to turn it on and begin to agonize over the decision she knew she needed to make. But she had managed to be strong enough to keep herself to falling for such temptation.

Instead, she just barely managed to slink over to her office chair and plop down on it. It had been a slow and agonizing process, of course, with the still relative blurriness of her vision and the way her whole body seemed to ache as if she had just finished ten consecutive days of strenuous exercise.

But.

She had managed it.

And once she was in the relative safety of her chair, she was able to sit herself down and focus completely on the video that had begun to play in the midst of the worst day of her whole life.