Birthright

Not overly fond of ranch-style homes, the house on Hobson street had still offered enough promise that Emmeline had purchased it after only two viewings. It was new enough that there was very little trouble to modify it for her needs - a central sanctum to house her more rare and somewhat eyebrow-raising artifacts and books, only accessible by a hidden panel in her bedroom closet - and the land that came with it, an extra lot behind the house itself, was the real draw. While her brother had come for a visit and helped to modify her home, the two greenhouses she had erected behind the house had required a professional touch, and had taken more than two months before they were ready for use, longer still before they were producing anything of note. But with time, top notch irrigation, and a touch of elemental magick, Emmy was growing her own plants for use in the store and in her own work.

There was a chill in the morning air but it was still balmy inside the greenhouses, and Emmy hummed softly to herself as she inspected the jasmine and honeysuckle she had recently re-potted. She had decided upon waking that she would not open the shop today and instead spend the time with her plants, and had left a handpainted sign on her front door reading "In the Greenhouse" for anyone that might come calling.

She smiled. The honeysuckle was doing well enough that she would need to add a trellis soon to allow it to expand; she wondered if it would play nice enough with the moonflower that they could share.

"You are such a lovely little thing," she said fondly, and leaned forward to take a deep breath of the sweet fragrance it produced.

[Thread open to Echo]

There had been a gentle tug at the back of Emmeline’s mind for days. She had meditated, prayed, thrown runes and drawn cards, all to no avail; the tug persisted but brought with it no fruition, driving Emmeline to distraction as her daily routine became more scattered and confused with her mind occupied elsewhere.

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Emmeline jingled when she walked. Not always, of course, but on most days a soft tinkling of metal upon metal, beads against beads from the bangles and long strands she wore, followed her wherever she went, adding its own soft form of music to her day, something that she found she rather liked.

Her day had begun early, up with the sunrise to work in the greenhouses and harvest some of the herbs ready for drying and sale. Then she had to clean herself up, shower off the greenhouse dirt and dress, make a small breakfast of weak tea and dry toast – anything heavy in the morning always made her ill – and make her way into town to open the store.

She never kept regular hours but it didn’t seem to matter; most of her clientele were of the tourist sort, roadtrippers and family vacation bandwagon blazing by on their way towards the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon or the bright lights and sleaze of Vegas, stopping by what they must have thought to be a kitschy little oddball of a shop set in some throwaway desert town. Emmeline didn’t mind a bit; there were still a few dedicated regulars, whose patronage was reason enough for Emmeline to keep the store open.

There were too few talented practitioners keeping up with the craft for her to leave them out in the cold.


She busied herself throughout the quiet day, dusting displays of crystals and statues of pagan gods, straightening rickety metal racks of incense and oils, and meditating when the heat of the day overcame the power of her air conditioning and left her sleepy and warm.

In the late afternoon, Emmeline jingled her way behind the counter and plugged in the tape deck she kept there, popping in a cassette from the box beneath the counter without even reading the label. It began playing just at the start of Simple Man, and Emmeline smiled and hummed to herself as she drifted across the empty store, settling at the table in the far corner draped in purple velvet, a deck of Tarot cards sitting and waiting for her.

The Tarot of the Witches deck was certainly not her most attractive set of cards, nor the most elegant. The images were surrealist and strange, far from beautiful, and often downright ugly. They weren’t even printed with what Emmeline would consider the proper suits, using coins in place of pentacles and batons in place of wands. But it was her first deck, the one most imbued with her essence and power, the edges of the cards faded from her constant handling. It wasn’t a perfect deck, but it was hers, her working deck, and the cards knew her as well as she knew them.

On a whim she cut the deck and flipped the top card, shaking her tousled dark locks as she stared down at the card looking back at her. The Queen of Swords, in the reversed position. Again.

The card had been haunting her, turning up in the same position, over and over again. Every time the cards slipped from her fingers, the Queen of Swords was always the only one to fall face up, and always reversed. Each time she pulled a random card, just for curiosity’s sake, without a question in mind, it was the Queen of Swords, reversed.

At first Emmeline thought it was meant to represent her own insecurities, something she was projecting out into the universe. Perhaps there was something she was trying to ignore, or something she was lying to herself about. But the more it happened and the more readings she did, the more it became clear: the card didn’t represent her, but someone else.

Something was coming.

Someone.

“Who are you?” she pondered aloud, while Skynyrd wailed through the tinny speakers of her tape deck.

She had the distinct feeling that she would soon find out.