Chapter Text
A chill was in the air. Hecate drew her shawl closer around her as her eyes refocused on the piece of homework she was supposed to be marking. The fountain pen was loose in her hand—the ink had run out mid-sentence—but her thoughts had been elsewhere, in foolish wishing for might-have-beens that ought to be firmly put to rest.
After dismantling her pen, she located and uncapped the cool glass bottle, and dipped the golden nib in. As she was about to slide the mechanism on the cartridge and drink up the blood-red fluid into the pen’s veins, a cloud of fur blurred her vision.
“Morgana!”
Failing to wrangle her cat, and giving into the inevitability of receiving a headbutt to her bony jaw, Hecate allowed Morgana to wreak her loving brand of havoc upon her desk. Her face wrinkled as what felt like half of Morgana’s extremely ticklish tail went up her nose, and then she groaned at the sound of glass clunking against wood.
“How many times have I told you not to jump up onto my desk?” Hecate said, sharp with concern for the probable catastrophe of her desk currently obscured behind Morgana’s voluminous fur. The pen had already been dislodged from her hands and skittered away. “You would have thought thirty-odd years of being my familiar would have granted you at least a modicum of wisdom.”
Morgana shot her a narrow-eyed gaze of contentment, evidently oblivious to being chided. She padded nonchalantly over to the edge and hopped off, revealing in her wake tiny pools of spattered ink and red pawprints now daubed across the page. Hecate sighed, and sent a cleansing spell from her finger to prevent further spread of the ink all over her personal chambers, causing Morgana’s fur to bristle with magic. Sometimes Hecate wondered if Morgana had ever been properly bonded to her, for the familiar link often gave way to these moments of ungovernable chaos.
Fortunately, not too much of the ink from the bottle had sloshed over the wood of the desk, and most had been absorbed by her students’ homework. Taking a dropper of Ink Eradication Potion, Hecate went about distributing it between all the separate mishaps, muttering words to isolate just the red ink from that of the students. The unwanted pawprints and droplets dispersed out from the centre, fading to a petal pink before disappearing.
Just as the new growth of summer gave way to the decay of autumn, so too did her resilience when old memories withered away at her fleeting sense of self-control. The colour pink never appeared without its own complicated array of feelings, and even though she knew it was an emotional response, she was particularly quick to take disciplinary action when a uniform infraction was caused by something of that colour. Her emotions were not as easily eradicated as the pink marks.
One did not try to take control of Cackle’s Academy as a “super-head” and force modern witchcraft on one of the oldest witching schools in the country and get away with it in Hecate’s eyes. Mollified though the transgression had been by her explanation, Pippa became quickly frustrated by Hecate as she made her excuses for any events taking place outside of the castle, without a thought as to why. So much for her drivel about wanting to be “like her”. Those words echoed hollowly in the following months—and now years—of passive-aggressive politeness.
The romantic days of their youth were all over, now. The last thing Hecate had personally heard from Pippa was that she was engaged to some vainglorious relation of the Great Wizard’s. The most recent inter-school event could hardly have been worth Pippa’s attendance without one of her enormous magical sunbeams refracting a veritable fairytale of rainbows around the hall from the sizeable rock on her hand. It would put her in standing to become a member of the Magic Council, if not lead it someday.
“Good for her,” Hecate forced the words out, bitterly.
The sudden pinch of claws and Morgana’s heaviness in her lap heralded her familiar’s return. Her fur was, as ever, the most comforting balm under Hecate’s cold hands.