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Story: The Hazelwood Pact
Ten years ago.
The moon was fat and smirking over Briar’s Hollow, the air so thick with enchantment it clung like sweat.
Somewhere, an owl was attempting to serenade a cat.
Somewhere else, a baker’s sourdough had risen with suspicious enthusiasm.
And in the clearing behind Aunt Mirin’s vine-smothered cottage, Rowan Blackthorn was trying very hard not to scream at the love of her life.
“I know what I’m doing, Linden,” she snapped, shoving a tangle of chestnut curls out of her face as she adjusted the chalk circle for the third time. Her hands were trembling. Not from fear. Certainly not from fear. “You don’t have to hover like I’m going to blow myself up.”
Linden Thorn, with his warm hazel eyes and leaves-in-his-hair softness, stood just beyond the line of lantern light.
He looked like the Wildwood itself had taken up concern and knitted it into a man.
“I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re doing,” he said gently.
Too gently. “I’m saying you’re doing it too fast.”
Rowan laughed, and it cracked straight down the middle.
Like eggshells. Like old glass. Like something she’d been keeping whole for far too long.
“Too fast?” she echoed, flinging her arms wide as if the whole clearing could bear witness.
Her voice was too loud for the hush of the Hollow, bouncing off mossy stone and the heavy boughs overhead.
“I’ve been preparing this for a year . The coven agrees.
The stars agree. Even the blasted runes agree. ”
She whirled back toward the sigil etched in salt and silverleaf, its edges precise and glittering with captured starlight. She didn’t look at him.
“But you don’t,” Linden said softly.
That made her turn. Hard and sudden, skirts kicking up with the whisper of angry petals and dried lavender. Her boots scuffed the edge of the ritual circle. “You think I’m afraid.”
He stepped closer. Moonlight caught the silver dust in his curls. His voice didn’t rise, but it rooted deep, gentle and infuriating. “I know you’re afraid.”
Rowan hissed in a breath, her teeth flashing like witchfire. “I’m ambitious,” she spat. “Not reckless. And if I were afraid, which I’m not , it would be because I’ve got a fae telling me I should be small and slow and safe. Again.”
Linden’s mouth parted and she hated how her heart ached just looking at it. A flush rose high on his cheeks, a pale greenish-pink blooming like spring shame across his skin. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” Her voice rose again, iron-laced and brittle. “Every time I want to move forward, it’s you . Standing there like a hedge in my path. Telling me to wait, to breathe, to trust.”
She was breathing too fast. Her fingers curled into fists.
“Trust what , Linden? My instincts?” Her laugh now was sharp as crushed glass. “The same ones that’ve been telling me to kiss you for the last two years and look where that got me?”
The woods held its breath. Even the wind stilled. Somewhere above them, the moon blinked behind a cloud, as if it too had gone shy with embarrassment.
Linden flinched. Just enough for her to know the arrow had landed, deep and true. His whole body stilled the way the forest does before a storm.
And then, he did it again . He pulled back. She felt it like a door closing between them. Like an inhale never followed by an exhale.
His voice came soft, mossy and sad, the way all beautiful things are when they’ve been hurt too often. “You don’t have to prove anything, Rowan. Not to me. Not to anyone.”
But she couldn’t hear him. Not really. Not past the roaring in her head, the way her heartbeat pounded in her ribs like fists on a locked door.
Not past the shame already curling in her gut like smoke, thick and hot and choking.
And not past the panic, the sheer animal need to win at something, become something, mean something.
“I’ll be High Witch by moonrise,” she said, her chin rising with all the pride and fury she had left. Her voice shook a little. “With or without your blessing.”
He looked at her then. And there was something in his face, wounded and warm and helplessly, hopelessly loving, that nearly undid her.
But he only nodded. Slow. Solemn. Like trees bowing under snow they’d known was coming.
“Then I hope the moon’s kind to you,” he said.
And like fog retreating from the edge of morning, he was gone.
***
The ritual space had always felt older than the rest of the Hollow, like the woods themselves bent reverent around it.
Carved into the glade like a forgotten hymn, the clearing pulsed with hush and memory, wild violets creeping over sun-warmed stone, dew-heavy moss drunk on moonlight, and the weight of ancient things listening from the dark.
Rowan stood at the center. Her boots sank slightly into the velvet loam, and the smell of burning lavender clung to her throat like a plea. She was calm. Polished. Grief lacquered over with confidence, rage threaded neatly through her spine.
Around her, the coven gathered: six witches in a ring, each humming with the sleepy thunder of blooded magic.
Candles burned blue and low, their flames leaning inward like they too were watching.
Sigils blazed across the stones in foxfire gold, etched by her own hand.
The ritual was tight. Balanced. Everything should have worked.
But she could still feel Linden’s absence like a bruise, a wound she wouldn’t name. His leaving had left the air thinner. Like something sacred had been pulled from the circle when he walked away.
Aunt Mirin stepped forward. Her voice always sounded like bark and bone and hard-earned knowing. “Rowan Blackthorn,” she intoned, lifting her arms toward the moonlight. “Do you come willingly to the binding?”
“I do,” Rowan said.
And to her credit, the words didn’t stick in her throat. Not even a little.
The binding was meant to be beautiful. Holy, even.
A sealing of self to the land, to the ley lines that spiderwebbed under Briar’s Hollow like veins under skin.
It would root her here, forever and always.
It would declare her High Witch before the Hollow and the stars and every smug-faced ghost in the woods.
It would make her enough .
She opened her left palm and drew the ritual blade. She didn’t flinch when the tip kissed skin. Blood welled, red and sure, and she let three drops fall into the sigil’s heart.
They hissed. The way blood always does when it meets old magic. Then shimmered gold.
“Ley lines awake,” Mirin murmured, her voice reverent and taut with awe. “Circle made, blood paid, path laid…”
Rowan closed her eyes. The world tightened to a single point of heat behind her sternum. She reached out with her magic, with the parts of herself that ached to belong. Down into the soil. Into the threads of magic beneath Briar’s Hollow, the latticework of ley lines like breath beneath earth.
She felt it.
A current. A heartbeat. Magic old enough to remember names not spoken in centuries. It welcomed her at first, warm and sinuous as honey.
But it wasn’t enough. She wanted more .
She reached farther.
Too far.
The ground shuddered.
It was barely perceptible at first, just a flicker in the candles, a single warble in the spell-song. Rowan's brow furrowed. She didn’t stop.
The sigils warped.
What had glowed gold now bled crimson , the way sunset bleeds into bruises. A sound rang out, the kind of noise bones make when they break under a spell.
The earth howled . The ley lines bucked like wild horses under the soil. The carved stones cracked. The candles exploded in twin jets of blue fire.
“No… no, no, hold…” Rowan gasped, but the power was already yanking her under like a riptide.
Then the circle detonated .
Sound vanished in a heartbeat, swallowed by a blast of pressure that sent the trees bending backward, wind snapping like a whip through the glade. Blinding light surged. It peeled open the sky, turned air into glass, magic into shrapnel.
There were screams. She saw Aunt Mirin’s mouth open, red at the edges, but there was no sound. Someone flew sideways into the trunk of a tree and slid down like a puppet with its strings cut. Another witch curled in on herself, sobbing, blood pouring from her ears.
The circle, the anchor , was gone.
Rowan’s own magic burst inward, burning through her like wildfire. No. Like a star collapsing .
It was painful and wrong .
Her spine arched. Her hands lit up in sparks that fizzled and caught her sleeves. Her vision fractured. Blotches of color, fragments of moonlight, silhouettes like ghosts pressed up against her ribs.
She was falling, except her body didn’t move. She was burning, except her blood had turned to ice . She was unmade .
It stretched on. A breath held too long. A heartbeat skipped. A lifetime in the blink of disaster.
And then… Silence.
***
From the treeline, Linden watched.
He had felt it begin. The moment the ley snapped, the moment Rowan reached too deep. He had tried to run to her, but the magic had held him back, screaming through his bones, a storm too ancient and feral to disobey. All he could do was watch the girl he loved break herself open.
When the light finally faded, she lay crumpled in the wreckage, hair singed, blood at her temple, her aura frayed like an unraveling thread. The coven staggered around her, some weeping, some silent.
Linden did not move.
Not when they lifted her limp body.
Not when Aunt Mirin whispered, “Her magic… it won’t settle. It’s gone wild.”
Not when they carried Rowan away, leaving the shattered ritual site to fester like a wound in the land.
He stood in the dark until dawn, listening to the Hollow weep.
Rowan had wanted everything.
And that night, she lost it all.
Her title. Her future.
And Linden.