Sense

My mother used to tell me the legends of oracles who helped knights save their lands in the Middle Ages. She would tell me about times where we wouldn’t have to hide in the dark or avoid humans. Her favorite story was always about Merlin and King Arthur. My favorite story was darker.

My father told me the story because my mother thought it was too scary for me. He told me about a foreign warrior named Aldous who was born in a poor family and didn’t have many opportunities. He enlisted into the army of his kingdom and marched into battle against invaders of his city. His army was almost all killed, but Aldous rose up and took over as the leader of the army. He marched in and saved the city from invaders. He and his small army single-handedly slaughtered their enemies without mercy. Afterward, the oracles of the city decided to give a reading in front of lords and their subjects. It was then revealed that Aldous’ fate couldn’t be read, and the oracles panicked, claiming that he was dangerous. Aldous’ men were terrified by the news and while Aldous was sleeping, they slit his throat in the night.

A hundred years later, oracles hid from the humans in fear, and they slowly grew incapable to read the fates of humans at all but only the fates of themselves. There were still bloodlines that combined when oracles and humans married to each other, forcing humans with a drop of oracle blood to be removed from their world and put into a one centering around magic. To humans, oracles weren’t part of the narrative and were described as imaginary witches and wizards. I was always curious about the human world, and that’s how I became best friends with Rowan Decusi, daughter of the head oracle of New York City. I talked to her for hours about what her father had told her about the outside community. Rowan and I just stuck, even when she was reading fates.

I sat in a waiting room, which was really an old bar which Rowan was able to rent out. I slouched down on a bar stool, leaning against the counter and wishing that there was an actual bartender there to serve me a drink. I heard a door behind me open.

“Thank you so much, Rowan! I’ve gotten my readings done by Otho my whole life and when he passed...” I heard a young woman go on.

“Uh, yeah, I’m sorry,” Rowan attempted to console, “Otho’s passing was just so terrible.” Her voice trailed off.

I grinned at Rowan’s lack of comforting, still facing my back to them. She didn’t like being emotional, especially with other people. In fact, she found it annoying when people got sad. The woman left the shop.

Rowan turned to me, “Why are you here?”

“Hello to you too,” I replied, “I need fifteen milliliters of the extract of a fire lily and a dress, preferably black.”

Rowan rolled her eyes, “I’m not giving you the extract of an acidic flower. Plus, why do you need a dress?”

“You heard the woman. Otho’s funeral. In fact, he asked me to get the lily before he died, so the least of which I could do is figure out why this was the last thing he would decidedly ask for.”

“How commemorative,” she quipped.

“Hey, we all have our ways of mourning,” I reasoned.

She sighed. “Come on, Sage. That’s the thing. You aren’t moping or mourning, you’re trying to figure out his solutions for your own problems.”

“Otho said he would help me. He spent my whole lifetime trying to solve my mystery.”

“Fine. But I’m telling you, Sage. Don’t be so concerned about someone who’s already dead.”

I rolled my eyes at Rowan’s attempt to be wise. She turned around and disappeared back into her little magic witchy voodoo room. She came with a vial full of a clear liquid, surrounding an orange-red lily. The vial was engraved in Greek and had a cork stopper.

“Thank you.” I took it from her and turned away, but her hand caught my arm.

“I don’t what you’re doing, Sage, but you better not get into trouble. There’s only so much I can save you from,” she warned.

“Okay, Mom. I’ll make sure to be back before curfew too.” I turned back around and left, already knowing what expression Rowan’s face read without looking at it.

I brushed my baby hairs out of face and realized Rowan never gave me a dress. Knowing she wouldn’t let me in to bother her again, I kept on walking. I stopped at a tall apartment building that’s exterior was mostly made of faded bricks and tinted windows. I slipped the fire lily into my pocket as I walked through the door.

My mother, the landlord of the building, was in the lobby at the front desk. Stray white-blond hair covered her drooping eye bags. She looked up. “Oh, hey Ella!”

“It’s me, Mom,” I replied.

She brushed her hair out of her face. “Sorry, Sage. You know I miss your sister.”

I offered her a smile. “It’s okay. I was wondering if you still had any of her dresses.”

“Go ahead and check her closet.”

I hurried off into an open elevator and rode up to our apartment. I went straight to my sister’s room, which was slightly bigger than mine and still had the same look before she went to college. Ella was always someone who was intellectually perfect. She was valedictorian of her high school and was able to go to a college in Connecticut, away from oracles and magic.

I opened her closet sliding door and spotted the black shoebox with worn down edges. I opened it up to reveal my other items. My eyes avoided the black spider legs. I dropped my vial into the pile which was starting to overflow the box. My eyes searched my sister’s dresses. Most of the dresses were white, lacy, floral, or mix of all three. I moved her dresses away and say, finally in the back, charcoal grey dress peeking out of the back, barely hanging off the hanger.

“Sage!” my mother called before slammed our rickety front door. “We have to leave in ten minutes!”

“Okay!” I called back and slipped on the dress. I brushed my frizzy hair and tied it up into a bun. I slathered on some foundation that Ella left behind and loaded on some mascara that was definitely expired. I went back over to the closet, picked up the shoebox, and went downstairs.

I shoved the box under my arm. “I’m ready, Mom.”

My mother glanced at me and then grabbed her purse. She didn’t question the shoebox, in fact, I don’t think she noticed. I followed her out the door and into the old Honda Civic we’d had for as long as we could remember. We drove silently to the funeral. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I didn’t look ready, but that didn’t matter. My mom pulled into the parking lot of the church.

I slid out of my seat and started to follow my mom. “Um, Mom?” I called to her.

She turned around. “Yes?”

“I’m going to head to the bathroom inside. I’ll meet you in the outdoor area,” I quickly stated, clenching the car keys.

“Okay, just come soon. We’re already a little late.”

I offered a smile that she didn’t return and walked back to the car. By the time I got into the driver’s seat, my mother was nowhere in sight, probably chatting away with people she barely knew. I held up the keys that I had stolen from her and started the engine. I drove two blocks away to a tiny strip mall with a small Chinese restaurant and a phone repair shop. In the middle was a store with a closed sign in the window. Above were the words “OTHO’S READINGS” in large, red letters. There was a blue crystal ball hanging inside the O.

I hurried to the door and opened it with ease. I had only been there once after Otho’s death, and since then, no one touched the place, leaving everything in the same condition. The front of the store looked like it belonged in Harry Potter. There were strange objects laid everywhere, crumpled, old papers strewn to the side, and archaic books open to the middle. Otho claimed he was a collector, but we all knew that he was a hoarder.

When I was six, my mother took me to my first reading. She took me to Uncle Otho, who did her first reading. When Otho couldn’t read me, he tried about everything. He would tell me to do the craziest things to figure me out. He would send me places, swearing me to secrecy that I wouldn’t tell anyone. Of course, being only six, I told my best friend in the world.

“You’re the girl, right? The girl who wants me to give you the book.”

I spun around to see a man who was a long brown trench coat. He was short with curly brown hair starting to turn grey. “Yeah, I have the stuff you told me to bring.”

He steps forward and takes the shoebox from me. “I’d prefer if you didn’t store valuable ingredients in an old box.”

“That wasn’t clarified. I gave you what you wanted, now give me the book.”

“Tell me why you need such a book.”

I narrowed my eyes at him frustratedly. “I don’t need to tell you anything.”

“If you don’t want me going around telling people about what you’re doing here, I suggest you tell me what I want.”

“You can’t let anyone here see you, deserter. Give me the book or I’ll report you before you get out of the city.”

The man sighed and pushed a book with leather binding towards me. I took it and smiled.

He glared at me. “How do you expect to sneak around and not get caught like this.”

“Don’t worry. I take precautions.” I raised the vial I had been clutching and uncork it. I threw it at him.

It was anticlimactic at first. He raised an eyebrow at me, wondering what I was trying to do. I had a tiny panic attack also, worrying that I had read the wrong book or Rowan had given the wrong liquid. But she was right about one thing. She shouldn’t have given me the extract of such a dangerous flower. The flame started at the tip of his hand. It was like any other fire, but it grew faster and faster as it encapsulated his whole entire arm. The man screamed, waving his arm back and forth, too distracted to try to put the fire out. I sat down on a stool, holding the book in my lap.

“You’re psychotic!” the man screamed at me, trying to get closer, but the pain held him back.

The fire climbed all over him head to toe. He sank to the ground, and I heard faint coughing. The flames went out abruptly, ash covering the fallen body. I bent over his pitch black body.

I sighed and dragged him through Otho’s reading room and out back to the dumpster, careful not to make a mess. I wasn’t to worried about the faint burn spot on the wooden floor. I wasn’t too worried about people trying to figure out who killed him, considering that it would be viewed as murder in the human world, and it would take a while for anyone from our community to get involved.

He was was number three. I had killed three people for my own lost cause. It surprised how fast it took me to be used to it. Maybe because when you pretend like you’ve done nothing wrong, you convince your own brain that you aren’t doing anything wrong. I had already gone too far.

I checked my watch and saw the time. I had five minutes until I had to leave. I quickly texted my mom, telling her I would meet her at the car. I took the untouched shoebox and my new book and left the dusty place, quickly scanning for any remaining ashes I needed to clean up. The book was what I needed to get rid of the curse Otho so badly to exterminate. On the cover, it read BLACK MAGIC OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY in big letters engraved into the leather. Maybe it was a bad thing that I was willing to meddle with magic Otho never touched.

Otho looked everywhere for some cure for me, but he never went past the limits. And yes, that was for a reason, but for some deranged reason, I was willing to suffer the consequences. Another story my mother told me was about black magic. The greed of humans and power of oracles combined to make something dangerous using black magic. It wasn’t clear how dangerous, but it was dangerous enough for oracles to completely shut their world off from everyone else. Black magic somehow didn’t end up corrupting the earth, but it was hard to get rid all essence of it.

I drove back to the church and climbed in the passenger seat as people started to file out. My mother didn’t come until later, gossiping with one of our tenants. She had an extremely long goodbye to Mrs. Cavendish before she slipped into the car, not questioning how I opened it. We drove back home in silence with the bright flames in the back of my mind, soon to be replaced with shuffling of cards and pounding music.