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It’s strange how the night feels when one is alone. Everything feels different and looks different. Trees reach from the sky with tendrils like claws. Animals scurry from their hiding spots bearing teeth much like daggers. The wind moves through the brush like the howls of the damned.
And yet, here you are. You are walking amongst everything like you belong and perhaps you do. The walk of a witch is to be respected and respect you the night does. You are powerful, bending trees and brush to kiss your skin as you pass. It has been like this since your beginning days: the nature around you is drawn to you, kissing your skin, filling you with the power you crave. You hold this power away from you.
When the sun rises everything changes. Your power wanes to a level that you can bear and the world becomes softer. Safer. You walk amongst humans, then, just like your father before you and his mother before him. You find yourself enrolling in school after school, looking for a place that feels right. Your father told you, on the night of his death, that you would know. It would feel as if a missing organ had been replaced. You thought him a liar until you found Greendale. The first day, when you stepped over the threshold to the school there, something in your gut fell into place. It send wracking pain through your whole being, bending you at the waist. You struggled through the day until night fell and you knew. You know. You’re meant to be in Greendale.
So you stay, taking up residence in a mortal motel room. You find a job, you find clothing to blend in. You make yourself at home until you find what your father found and his mother before him. The witch that you would fall in love with, they were close.
It’s months before you find said witch, and Sabrina Spellman brings him to you on a platter. You’ve found friends in their rag-tag comorbid group of friends. Two mortals, a witch, a seer? You’ve seen nothing like their group. You fit right in, hiding your power just below the surface. Sabrina toils over her decision regarding her Baptism, something she speaks about in low tones to her family when she thinks that you cannot hear her over the din of dinner with her friends. You wonder how long she can resist the pull, the instinct that lays just below the surface of her skin. You don’t care what she chooses, but the taste of power that comes the night after one’s Baptism… You’ll never forget that.
In fact, that’s what you’re thinking about when Harvey snaps to get your attention, a stupid grin on his mortal face. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Absolutely not.” You say, tucking away the sigil that you had been drawing, pulling from your power to make. A gift that you’d leave on the doorstep of the Spellman’s. “Sorry, I was off… Somewhere.” You wave a hand in the air noncommittally.
“No shit.” He passes his sketchbook to you, thick lines of a sketch waiting for your touch. It’s a game that you and Harvey play- pass the paper as Rosalind calls it- and you end up with masterpieces that he tacks up around his room. “When ‘Brina comes back out we can go to the diner or something.” You wait for someone else to reply, lightly tracing the lead of your pencil around Harvey’s charcoal lines. The conversation dies naturally and you all hear the curt cutoff of the conversation happening in the kitchen. It’s easy for you to pretend like you don’t hear them, easier to pretend like you haven’t a clue what Sabrina is stressed about when she comes back into the room.
“Let’s go to the diner.” She says curtly, leaving no room for other decisions.
“I was just saying that!”
Everyone rises and you tuck the drawing away next to the sigil. Your group heads toward the door, Harvey tossing an arm around Rosalind as you do. You’re almost there, stepping over yet another threshold when everything changes. Your world shifts and so does the power in the room. Sabrina feels it, too, stopping to look at you. She says your name, a question mark tacked on the end. You don’t know, pressing a hand to your chest. You know this, the power swelling under your skin and crescendoing when another witch steps over a different threshold. You cry out, dropping to your knees.
The night protects you from this. The night kisses your skin with protection and love, something the day has never given you. The day rears her ugly head, gives you nothing to cool the fire running over your skin. There’s nothing for you to reach out to in the Spellman’s house, no plants, no cover, nothing to save you from the burning hot hands on your skin. The head the hands belong to are asking if you’re okay.
You reach a hand out to the side, blindly grasping to the plants that have shielded you thus far. They reach for you too, waning in their movements when sealing a grip around your wrist. Everyone backs off as you fall to the ground, letting the plant overtake you. She wraps around you like a mother, and you a newborn babe. You’re taken under her wing, letting her vines press into your skin and take away the pain of the power you so dearly hold away from you. She siphones it off gently. When she’s done night has fallen. You can hear the woods calling for you, screaming your name in their windy shouts, but there’s something more important hanging over you.
It’s the Spellman coven and the witch looking at you over tea with wide, honest eyes. You think, in a flash of panic, that this is what your ancestors found when roaming mortal towns. They found the one that would complete them, the power that was the calm to their storm. You wonder if the Spellman clan knows of such pilgrimage. It’s a very old tradition, one that died out generations before your grandmother decided to revive it. You’re very glad that she did. Eventually, you make your way to their butcher block, leaning heavily on it as sweat dews at your hairline. Sabrina lingers in the corner with her cousin, chewing on her lip. No doubt she’ll ball you out for hiding such a thing, but you’d find her later when you journey to the astral realm and apologize.
“I have only one question, dear.” Hilda refills your mug and pushes it back toward you after the questions are all done. “Why have you come to Greendale if you have no coven?”
“My coven is my family.” You admit after a hearty sip of the spell in your mug. It warms you straight down to your toes and the pain recedes in waves. “Well, they were.” Everyone knows better than to prod. “I have been carrying on a tradition that started two generations ago, with my grandmother.”
“The Pilgrimage?” Sabrina’s cousin, the one with the wide eyes and mug clasped in his hand, jerks into the room. He drops his mug in the sink unceremoniously. “Are you partaking in the Pilgrimage?” The other three witches in the room mumble in a group like a bunch of tittering hens, unaware of what he speaks of. “I’ve read about the Pilgrimage. It hasn’t been completed in nearly one thousand years.”
“What a crock of shit!” You exclaim, shooting up from the stool you were situated on. “My father completed his, and his mother before him. I will be the third generation to complete my Pilgrimage.” You flush, stepping back when you realize how close you are standing to this witch. “How is it you know of the Pilgrimage when the elders of your coven know nothing?” A smirk pulls the side of his mouth up, the man averting his eyes.
“I have had a lot of time to read.”
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” Sabrina must have gotten fed up being out of the loop, her aunts as well, because they sit you down with the man - you learn his name is Ambrose and you itch to test it on your lips - and they overload you with questions. It’s amazing, really, how many you can dodge about your power before they realize what you’re doing. Being secretive is like a family heirloom. You learned it from your father, and you’re sure that your children will learn it, as well. “I don’t like not knowing what’s happening.” Her fierce eyes are on you, and you shrink under her gaze. “Especially when it involves my family and someone I thought was my friend.”
“Sabrina…” The man warns. “Stop. This is a lot to take in for all of us. If you’ll sit down I’ll explain the Pilgrimage.” The man, Ambrose, explains everything. It hangs over the house like a shawl until Ambrose gets tired of it and takes you to his room. He’s pacing, hands clasped behind his back.
“It doesn’t mean anything.” You point out. “You said so yourself. Our power is just compatible. That’s all.” His eyes are hot on yours as he pauses in his pacing. “Listen, I’m just pointing out the obvious.”
“No, you’re… You’re degrading yourself. Sabrina complains about it all the time. Why do you do it?” He offers you a chair but takes it when you decline. “You’re one of the most powerful witches that the four of us have seen.” You smile, softly, and before you can stop yourself you reach out to touch Ambrose’s face. He leans into it and you know, then, that you both feel it. There’s a pull, much like the woods pull to you at night, that sits just below your breastbone. You wonder if Ambrose can feel it too, just below his breastbone. He leans into your touch, pressing his cheek to your palm as his eyes close. “It’s strange. I’ve heard about how this feels… The way the pull begins slowly in the bottom of your chest…” His hand finds the spot on your body that he’s talking about, fingertip barely grazing your shirt. “Mortals dream of this, you know.”
“Oh, soulmates.” You smile and press your forehead to Ambrose’s. “Mortals dreaming of something they won’t have, people that magic won’t touch. The trees whisper to me, Ambrose. For so long I ignored their call… I wish that I hadn’t all these years.”
“Well, I wasn’t going anywhere.” Ambrose pulls you forward until you’re perched in his lap. “I’m stuck here, darling. Eternally.” His nose presses into your cheek. “I cannot leave this house.”
“Unfortunate.” You giggle, his nimble fingers pressing into your sides, “Ambrose! You’re an awful familiar witch with wandering hands. I’m half your age!” He grins as you wriggle on his lap, your fingers locking like irons around his wrists to halt his hands.
“Half my age doesn’t mean much, darling. I’m centuries old. What does that make you?”
“The pot, I suppose! I thought the Spellman men had more decorum than this.” You can see the teasing glint in his eyes and you prepare yourself a moment before he moves. Ambrose throws himself, and by extension you. onto his bed. Both of you bounce only for a few seconds, but continue to shake with laughter. “I don’t understand this.”
“Understand what?”
“The way you make me feel.” He makes you feel like the woods are sprouting up where you lay, like the sun has been replaced with the moon. Ambrose, and his arms around you, make you feel like the earth is holding you in her arms. Your power surges and warmth spreads through your body as it does. “I suppose I should confess I didn’t read much of my father’s journal after he mentioned the pain of finding my mother. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen after this.”
“Well,” Ambrose shifts until you’re laying on your back on his bed and he’s propped above you on his elbow. “Lucky for our situation I read the whole book on the Pilgrimage. I do know what’s supposed to happen.” You push yourself up, intrigued, and find yourself mere inches away from Ambrose’s face. “Witches of today might oppose, though. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been out of the house in years.”
“Tell me.” You both drift closer, lips almost brushing. There’s something inside of you, perhaps an invisible cord, tightening and pulling you toward Ambrose. “Perhaps I won’t oppose. You have to try or the answer is always no.” Ambrose smiles, then, giggling low in his throat.
“Oh, I like you.”
He only has to move forward just a hair. When Ambrose does he kisses you, taking the side of your face in one of his hands as he lays you back. You lean into the kiss, into Ambrose as he moans. It’s not long until he’s leaning back, looking at you with eyes so blown you’d swear they were made of glass. You’re sure you look the same. “I hope you like me, Mister Spellman. Otherwise, I look like a witch with no jar to put my spells in.” He laughs again and you join him, pulling him back to your lips. If you could hear him laugh for the rest of your life, you’d be happy. “You never told me how we finish this thing, Ambrose.” You let the kiss linger as you trail a finger down his chest, heartbeat going erratic as his hand finds your thigh and makes a home there. “I am rather curious.”
Ambrose never answers you.
Instead of answering you he lets his lips trail down your jaw, pulling you impossibly closer. He moans when he tastes your skin, and when you roll your hips against his. You moan when he sucks a dark hickey into your neck and again when his thumbs press into your hips and hold you to the bed. He finds his way down your body, kissing and pressing and biting as he pleases until you pull him back up by the collar of his shirt. You return the favor, putting a hickey just under his ear, before you pull back and grin at him.
“Was I just supposed to guess that consummation finalizes the Pilgrimage?”