Chapter Text
Here’s the thing about moments that change your life: most of them are so utterly and horrendously mundane that you’ll never know what they were. There are certain obvious moments, of course - accidents, deaths, sudden limelights thrust upon you - but by far and away, most of them seem a moment like any other. Just a book you read, or a food you ate, or an apartment you rented. Nothing special. Nothing unusual.
And then, one fine day, it’s twenty or thirty or forty years later and you’re married, or you’re not any more, and you live in the same city you’ve always lived or someplace you’d never have dreamed of, and somewhere, somewhere down a long thread of decisions and birthday parties and lazy afternoons in the dog days of summer, is the moment that first set you down whatever path you’ve ended up on.
Sometimes we can trace our selves back along that thin wire into the past, can piece together how one ordinary moment changed it all. Sometimes we can’t. It hardly matters. What matters is that for a little while the moments all feel the same - something simple. Something forgettable. A moment like any other.
——————
Gravesfield, the height of summer. Fireflies brushing across the tall grass, setting the creek aglow. The stars burning silver in the folds of velvet above. Smoke on the evening breeze.
Laid on his back, feet dangling in the water, Caleb Wittebane watched the thin, curling line of smoke still visible against the darkening westward sky. This, he assumed, was all that remained of Fort Good Hope - the last Dutch outpost on the eastern shore of the Connecticut River, watching the road into Hartford. They’d received word in Gravesfield a fortnight prior, a call to furnish a dozen men for the militia gathering to take Good Hope once and for all. For a year there had been an uneasy peace along the Hartford Road - for all the cannon fire and splintered wood between the Royal Navy and the Dutch fleets, for all the thousands of men staining the Channel red with their blood, the war had stayed in Europe. Until now.
When the word came, a dozen men from Gravesfield had shouldered their muskets and moved out - so had hundreds of others from across the Colony. Phillip, now a year into his learning at the grammar school in Hartford, had come home, both of the Masters of Study having temporarily traded quill and ink for musket and shot. He’d return when the fighting was over and the road to Hartford was safe once more.
And now Good Hope was burned - or so Caleb assumed. He had heard no fire from down the Hartford road, no injured militiamen had been dragged into town on the back of a comrade’s saddle. Most likely, the fighting was long over - if there had been any fighting at all. There were scarce two dozen Dutchmen at the fort, they hardly could have believed it would be worth their lives to hold out against unassailable odds. As far as he knew, the war in Connecticut was over. But…
He didn’t know. There had been no word one way or another, and the smoke was fresh and the fire still burned. Maybe the road to Hartford was safe, but maybe it wasn’t.
And… it had been so long since he’d had Pip at home.
Caleb tore a tufted handful of grass from the riverbank and tossed it into the air, letting the limp green blades trace the evening breeze down and onto his lips and his neck and his chin. A year, whole year. Their first year apart in, well, in ever.
Hartford was hardly across the Atlantic of course, and he’d gone into Hartford a handful of times in the months since Pip had left - buying a new chisel he couldn’t get in Gravesfield, hauling his meager collection of apple varieties to the trading post come the autumn market days, things like that. He’d seen Phillip then, met Goodman Brinklow - the farrier Phillip was boarding with while he attended the grammar school - and his wife and their six children, marveled at the way Pip could spout entire lectures in Latin about all sorts of evils in the world and all the wrongdoings of Man.
Well. Marveled was perhaps one word for it.
He was so very proud of Phillip. So very proud to be able to look at his brother and see the dear little boy who’d needed him to chase away bullies and sing him to sleep, and see just as clearly the fine young man who helped the younger Brinklow children with their schoolwork and helped Caleb with his market stall and offered Goody Brinklow assistance without being asked.
Phillip was brilliant, and he was polite, and when Caleb returned home to Gravesfield all the men would clap him on the shoulder and congratulate him on raising such an upstanding and God-fearing brother, and all the men with daughters would invite him for dinner, laughing and telling him it couldn’t be good for him to be so alone in that big old farmhouse.
But alongside all his joy in younger brother’s accomplishments, Caleb Wittebane harbored a secret and sinking suspicion that his brother was in danger of becoming the kind of man he knew Phillip would never truly want to be. A spiteful man. An angry man. A man sure of nothing more than the righteousness of his beliefs, the failings of others, and the infallibility of his own two hands. A man like their uncle.
It was a fear that Caleb had had ever since the first witch hunt, all those years ago, but it had long been a fear he had kept dormant, brought out only in his most melancholic moments and sleepless nights.
But…it wasn’t just playing at witch hunter any more. It was the hours that Phillip could spend talking about sin, about all the things he saw wrong as the walked through the streets of Hartford, about all the ways Goodman Brinklow and his wife and their children failed in their duty to God. It was the way the letters he’d received every fortnight for the last two months had been filled not with gossip the way Phillip’s first letters had, or questions about life in Gravesfield, but with Scripture and joking admonitions for Caleb to not become a heathen like the townsfolk whispered without Pip there to keep him in line.
It was the way Phillip ignored the elderly beggar-woman who’d approached them for alms at the last market day, sneering at her hobbled gait and ratty dress.
It was the way he’d refused to sell their apples to a Mohegan man at the market, and the way Pip had seethed with silent anger and disgust from afar, even after Caleb had reprimanded him and sent him away from the stall.
That had been the first time Caleb had ever yelled at Pip in public, the first time he’d ever made it clear - where everyone could see - that sometimes Caleb was Phillip’s guardian first, and his brother second.
Pip had been…cruel. Caleb knew the man, Oneco - he’d traded him cherries and flax the past July, in exchange for furs to make Phillip something warm for the coming winter.
For his own part, Caleb knew barely a handful of words in Mohegan, or any other language that wasn’t English, and even now he shuddered, hoping that Oneco’s English - more than enough to trade fruit and very casual gossip with Caleb - was still too incomplete to understand all the things his brother had said.
Lord, not that it should have mattered, but Phillip had refused to take back what he’d said even when Caleb had pointed out that Oneco had once mentioned he’d fought alongside the Colony’s troops in the Pequot War - that he and his nation had taken up arms against their own neighbors and allied themselves with Connecticut and Massachusetts. And while Phillip had been born after the war had come and gone, Caleb was just barely old enough to remember the all encompassing fear that had gripped the entire region. Indeed, he reminded Phillip, if the war had gone poorly - if nations like the Mohegans and the Narragansetts hadn’t fought alongside Englishmen and given the Colony strength of numbers - all of Massachusetts might have burned, and Winthrop along with it, and Phillip would have never been born at all.
Military service was hardly a requirement for treating another soul with respect, and yet Phillip had been unable to muster up even an ounce of humanity for someone who looked nothing like him.
Honestly, Caleb thought, as he sat up from his reverie amongst the cattails, as the sky continued to darken and the air still hung heavy with the scent of smoke. I don’t care if they say it’s safe in Connecticut now, that the war here is over and life can get back on its way to normal. I won’t send Phillip back, not tomorrow. I’ll keep him another day or two. We’ll take a walk in the woods, like the old days. Go fishing. He’s a good boy still, he’s just…he’s around the wrong sorts more often than not. He just needs some time at home. He’ll come around.
Back in the farmhouse he could see the light of a flickering candle in the long summer shadows - Phillip still up reading at the table, same as every night since he was sent home.
Perhaps I’ll join him. I’ve been meaning to finish carving that raven I’ve been working on anyway.
Leaving the creek and the cattails and the fireflies behind, Caleb made his way back to the farmhouse. His farmhouse, he supposed, though it was still hard to think of it that way. It belonged to him, much as any piece of paper could make a thing belong to a man, and he was the one who restored the beams when they’d began to rot the summer before, the one who tended the little garden, who fished in the creek behind it and raised chickens in the back of the clear-cut plot. But it was hard to feel like something belonged to you when it felt like you didn’t belong.
Gravesfield wasn’t home. It was a place he lived, a place he wandered through. It was…empty. Without Phillip around everything felt a little empty, but Gravesfield especially so. Sometimes, he found it hard to believe that this was all life was. As a boy, beaten and scared and angry, he’d imagined that one day he’d run off from Massachusetts and make a name for himself - or if not a name, at least a life. He’d get a farm, rescue Phillip, settle down in some town and set about meeting people and picking fruit and painting the birds he saw in the woods. He’d grow up, and life would be better. And now he had a farm, and he had an orchard, and he had a town and his brother and his paints, and still it felt like a shade of a real life, like a placeholder.
Like nothing he came across fit the world in his head, like life was slipping past faster than he could catch it.
It wasn’t even, he reflected, as he made sure the chickens were penned in to their coop, just that he was so very different from his neighbors, with their faith in obedience and their barely-hidden anger at the world. It was more of an impossible weight, a heavy coat of melancholy that settled upon his shoulders whenever he imagined spending the rest of his life in Gravesfield - getting married, growing up, watching the same sun setting over the same slowly-shrinking woods as the town grew and farms were cleared.
But that was a problem for the rest of his life - for tonight, he had Pip home again. He’d carve, and Pip would read, and it would be just like old times. They’d wander in the woods tomorrow after chores were done and pick blueberries beneath the towering elms and he’d watch the anger and the fear slip off from Phillip’s shoulders like a cloak and they’d be one again, just like they’d always been.
Things would feel better in the morning - somehow they almost always did. For now, it was enough that they were together.
—————————-
“Caaaaaaaaaaleb, come onnnnnnnnnn!”
Caleb shook his head as he made his way over a fallen log, following his brother towards a small clearing in the woods. Lord, Phillip was awfully spry for half seven in the morning.
“Caaaaaleb you’re lagging! You aren’t keeping up with me at all, you’re getting so old.”
Caleb laughed. “Aye Pip, I’m ancient. I’m your relic of a brother, all creaking bones and boring stories. In fact -” an idea took hold in Caleb’s mind, a wonderful, awful, brotherly idea. He paused to lean against an outcropping of stone, damp with moss and the morning fog that still hadn’t quite burned off, “I’m so old I might just take a little nap right here. You go right on ahead, I’m too old for adventures.” He shut his eyes and leaned back against the stone, trying not to giggle imagining the look on Phillip’s face.
“Caaaaaleb! Stop it!”
A tiny laugh escaped Caleb’s lips as he felt a handful of thrown wet leaves make contact with his cheek. He kept his eyes shut, and added in an enormous snore for good measure.
“Caleb wake up! It’s not funny! You promised we’d have an adventure in the woods! You promised!”
“I’m afraid it’s an ancient curse, Phillip, one only you can lift. Long ago I was a brave knight, but my armor rusted shut with age and glued me fast to this rock. Now I lay here, unable to move, waiting for a kind soul to take pity on me, and fetch me an apple from my haversack so that I might feast and be freed.”
“Caleb. Are you really going to make me get you an apple from the bag that’s at your feet?”
“Feet? What feet? Alas, I’m one with this rock and have no feet to speak of. Rescue me, oh brave Sir Phillip!”
He could hear Phillip trying not to laugh at his overly dramatic swooning, and he felt a touch of warmth in his chest at the thought. This was good. His brother deserved to laugh more.
“Alright, alright! I’ll fetch thine apple posthaste, Sir Caleb.”
Even without sight he could tell that Phillip had walked back towards Caleb’s rock, and that he’d bent down to grab the haversack from where Caleb had dropped it. He heard Phillip pause halfway through rummaging through the sack.
“But…Sir Caleb, did you not first say you were glued fast to the rock? And now you say you’ve become one with the rock? Methinks I sense trickery! Dost thou speak in truth?”
At this moment, Caleb could see that a number of options lay before him. And yet, when it came down to it, was there really any option but one?
“Yaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!”
Caleb flung himself at his brother, knocking him to the ground and playfully holding his hands down against the leaf-strewn forest floor.
“Submit, Sir Phillip! Thou hast been bested by the ancient knight of the deep woods!
“Caleb get off!”
“Dost thou surrender?”
“Caleb!”
“Surrender, or be tickled!
“I surrender, I surrender! Just let me up!”
Caleb sat up, offering his brother a hand to help pull him to a seated position. The boys were both covered in dirty and sticks and leaves, and after the briefest moment of grumpiness from Phillip, they both burst into laughter, falling over each other and trying to catch their breath.
“Oh Pip! You should have seen the look on your face when I leapt at you.”
“Because you leapt at me! You’re a grownup Caleb, you’re not supposed to roughhouse, you’re supposed to be in charge!”
“I am in charge you saucebox, that’s how I could knock you down so easily.”
“You only knocked me down because I gave up! I didn’t want to hurt your ancient bones.”
“I knocked you down fair and square!”
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
“Did not!”
And with that, Caleb flung himself once more at Phillip, and the brothers’ laughter echoed across the clearing and through the misty morning air.
———————————-
For Caleb, the most wonderful part of any walk in the woods came after they’d stopped and had their few apples and their handful of oats, when he would sit with his charcoals and the paper he’d carried from home and draw whatever came their way. Most of the time it was birds - he loved drawing them more than anything else, loved their strange little feet and the way their feathers puffed and turned as they sang. He wished charcoal could be mixed the way paints were to create color - how he longed to capture the silken green of a mallard’s head, the joyous yellow chest of the goldfinch. Most of all, he longed to capture the bright red cardinals that whistled throughout the woods - there was nothing else like that red in the world, not even the red tongue of flames. What he’d give to hold that red in his hands just once!
He always let Phillip go wander for a while while he sat and drew - sitting still was hard for the boy, and it was good for him to have time to sink into his imagination from time to time. He was still so young, and for all he knew and all the books he read and for all the ways he seemed as smart as any full-grown man, Caleb knew that his brother needed to still be a child - to still be his little brother, to know that Caleb would always be there to have his back.
Caleb sighed, pausing his sketch of the rabbit that had emerged from a fallen log in order to nibble cautiously at a nearby root. He was not a fan of rabbits. Who could be bothered to draw ears that big when they’d already had to learn how to draw human sized ears? But today the birds seemed to be staying far away from the clearing they’d chose to have lunch in. What a shame. He hoped Pip was having a good time exploring at least.
And then, he heard it.
A low and heartrending call, coming from further into the woods. A turtle dove, the mourning bird.
Caleb knew that turtle doves were hardly anything to look at, just dull brown and and dusty grey, but he’d never had the chance to draw one before. He’d never had the chance to draw anything that sounded that beautiful before - how could he put that sadness to the page? Could it be?
Without even pausing to gather any of their scattered goods, Caleb set off into the forest, charcoal and paper in hand. The call came again, closer this time. There, there at the edge of another small clearing surrounded by tangled vines, there was a tall oak. Caleb could just barely make out the rustling feathers of the dove in the foliage, but as it called again and again he knew that’s where it sat.
He stood at the base of the tree, peering up into the branches. Pip would have to forgive him for running off. This was far more exciting than drawing bunnies for the hundredth time.
Caleb turned over a blank page, his fingers smudging charcoal across it in his hast. . The sun beat down on the gentle green of the forest. The call came again, soft and low.
———————————
Phillip hated to sit still after eating, so, like so many times before, while his brother drew he grabbed a fallen branch to use as a walking stick and set out into the woods by himself, telling little stories and making up games along the way. He knew how much his brother loved to draw, and even if he couldn’t bear to sit still he loved their lunchtime breaks as well, because he knew that drawing made the creased lines of worry on Caleb’s brow disappear better than almost anything else he knew.
There were more and more lines on Caleb’s brow every time he saw his brother, and he hated how much Caleb worried - how much he worried over him. Why couldn’t Caleb see how happy he was?
For as long as Phillip could remember, for his whole life long, there had been a voice in the back of his mind telling him that he was bad - that he as a bad person. The kind of horrible, unlovable son whose father didn’t care about enough to stay, the kind of miserable, ungrateful nephew who ran away from home, the kind of weak, scared coward whose brother had to worry himself sick over. Only Caleb had ever really loved him, and he had repaid his brother by needing to be taken care of at every turn.
Only now he had something he was good at. Not just good at - incredible at. Something that everyone, an entire school full of people, knew that he was incredible at. But it was more than that: now he knew, deep in his heart of hearts, that there was a way for him to be good.
He’d always loved church, loved the stories and the lessons and the order they provided to a world that made so little sense, but once he’d gone to Hartford, once he’d gone to a proper school with a proper teacher, once he’d read the things he’d read - the great logics of Aristotle, Cicero’s oratories, Aquinas and Calvin and the centuries upon centuries of brilliant Christian men with thousands of things to say about the holy words of Jesus Christ himself - he knew. So many men, over so many centuries, could not be false. They knew how to be good. If he were to devote himself to this life - this life of strict goodness for the sake of fulfilling God’s plan for Men - he would be good too.
Caleb had always told him not to take things so seriously, told him that he was a kind and caring boy, and that being good meant treating other people with kindness. But for all of Caleb’s words, and all of Caleb’s love, the voice in the back of Phillip’s head had never gone away. Only now, now that he saw that he was bad, that the whole world was full of bad people doing bad things but that he could triumph over them, was the voice stilled.
It was like with the witches. How much damage they caused was hardly relevant - they had to be destroyed because to not destroy them, to not destroy evil when it was found, was letting the evil win out within yourself. And when evil won out within oneself, the little voice returned.
This, his schoolmaster had told him, was the mark of a good Christian, and it was called a conscience.
Phillip swung his walking stick branch against a tree in frustration, relishing the way the woods resounded against one another, sending a flock of starlings twirling into the sky in sudden surprise at the loudness of the blow.
He just wanted Caleb to see that he was on his way to being good now. Finally.
———————————
In the soft, cool stillness of the woods there was a flash. A flash of swirled lights, the colors echoing off the dark granite of gravestones, followed by twin flames of red - one the orange of brightly burning candlelight, the other the deepest ruby’s maroon - as a young woman stepped through the shimmering center of a silver gate, a cardinal on her shoulder.
She breathed in deeply, relishing the way the way the cool forest air filled her lungs, the sharp taste of the damp earth on her tongue as the miles and miles of loam and mushrooms and root-beds surrounding her flooded her senses.
Now this, Evelyn Clawthorne thought to herself, this is what adventures are all about.
Back home on the Boiling Isles, the sulfur smell of the sea-shore carried itself even to the furthest snow-bound forests of the Knee. Every spring came with the citric taste of the acid rain. But here, here in this strange and foreign realm, nothing was at it seemed. The rain destroyed naught; the flowers were still and unmoving. The waters, even at the shores of the great sea, were frighteningly cold to the touch. It was…beautiful.
And dangerous! Greatly dangerous! Came a chirp from her shoulder.
Yes, Evelyn thought, a smile playing over her face as she strode through the clearing of scattered gravestones and into the woods beyond, and dangerous. The most wonderful part of it all.
———————————
Pfft, pfft, pfffft, ack! Ick! Ughghghgghfffffflllllllllfff!
Grimacing, intrepid explorer Evelyn Clawthorne plucked the remaining gossamer strands of a spider web out of her mouth and from the tresses of her long red hair. Disgusting, absolutely disgusting. Were Human Realm webs somehow even stickier than webs back on Boiling Isles? She spit a gob of web out, shaking her head to try and brush the last of the crawling feeling off of her skin.
She was only a fifteen minute walk from the Gate, but already she’d seen a dozen of the oddest stretchy balls of tree-climbing fur she’d ever seen, a beautiful creature with spikes as fierce as any gryphon’s talons, and three strange and marvelous beings with long branching horns - not to mention the countless plants and other flying beasts she could hardly even begin to categorize. (At first, she’d assumed that the ones with iridescent wings were most likely variations on the Boiling Isles’ own fairies, but after brandishing her staff at a striped and fuzzy being the size her little finger - fully prepared to have to fight to prevent it from ripping her skin off - and facing nothing fiercer than a gentle buzzing sound, she felt that fairy was unlikely to be an apt comparison.)
It seemed that with every journey she made to this strange land, with every drawing she took of her horrifyingly beautiful surroundings, she only found more and more to love. She knew the stories of course, the tales of how the Human Realm was no longer friend to witches - how for a decade now at least, fewer and fewer of those who set out to make contact had returned home without some horror story to tell - but this place, it…it felt right to her.
Or not right, even, but…correct.
It was as if, even if she was fated to be back on the Boiling Isles, even if she could never imagine leaving her home for good, could never imagine fitting into a world as strange as this one, she was, somehow, supposed to have made her way to this realm, for at least these few stolen moments.
Mostly, she thought to herself as she continued through the woods, it was the birds. God how she loved the birds here, so much like all the birds of the Boiling Isles and yet so different. Not a single one was made of wood, not a single one could speak the way a Palistrom could, and yet they were so equally alive. She loved all birds really, their strange little feet and their puffed out chests and their love songs. Lord, isn’t it a wonderful thing it was to be alive?
She tickled the little talons of the cardinal perched on her shoulder, answering her own question as he burbled and chirped with joy. “What a wonderful and beautiful thing indeed.”
In time, she came to a knotted thicket of bramble and vines, surrounding an old and hunched-over tree. Beyond the brambles, she could just barely make out what seemed to be a clearing, or perhaps a little meadow. And away on that far side beyond the brambles, from up in the canopy of the trees, came the most plaintive, mournful bird call she had ever heard. Evelyn leaned up against the gnarled tree, resting her back against its sun-warmed bark and digging her feet into the soil beneath the tangled undergrowth around her legs. She stayed like that for a while, listening to the bird call - letting the pinpricks of the peeling bark grow calm against her, letting the sun heat her fiery hair, letting all the things she had left behind in the Boiling Isles melt and pour from her grief-iced heart: all the moments as the odd one out, all the moonless nights spent waiting for her father to finish throwing mugs and plates and chairs and anything else he could get his hands on at walls and at windows and, on his worst days, at her, the slow sinking feeling each and every morning when she awoke and realized she was already counting the hours down until the evening.
The bird called; the sun shone.
It could be worse, Evelyn supposed - she had food on her table, she’d grown up in a beautiful mansion, she’d even been allowed to finish her schooling despite her father’s opinions on the matter. And she had these trips - these few precious hours spent in an another world, an actual whole other world - when she could sneak off to the corner of her family’s estate where the Gate lay hidden beneath vines.
And one day, some day, she would grab her things and run to somewhere on the Isles where no one would bother her, and she’d build a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea and make it a home - stained glass windows, a cozy little house demon to keep her company, a turret maybe.
There were worse things than growing up with a father who loved you, deep down inside. She liked to think that her mother had loved her without condition - without grief, without hiding it - but in all honesty, she wasn’t sure she could remember any more. But even that wasn’t so bad - plenty of people grew up without a mother. Plenty of people grew up in houses haunted by laughter that they could only just barely remember hearing. Plenty of people spent their days wishing they were exploring some far off strange land. In the end, she wasn’t so sure any of it mattered. She couldn’t leave her father, and the Human Realm wasn’t home, and that was simply that.
The sun shone; the bird called from the thicket.
It truly was the most haunting birdsong she’d ever heard, all low and distant and achingly hollow. What sort of bird could make a sound like that? She had to find out.
Slowly, Evelyn began to hoist herself up into the ancient branches of the tree she’d been leaning on, straining her neck to see if she could catch a glimpse through the leaves. She made her way up onto a higher branch; she could just see beyond the thicket that hid the clearing from her view. She pulled herself up a little higher, and then a little higher after that. She could hear the bird calling from the clearing, maybe from the tall tree on its edge? Maybe somewhere in its branches?
And then, scarcely ten feet away in the clearing below, along a little patch of green and white and pink where flowers bloomed along the edges of fallen logs and moss shone wet on a few large rocks, she saw a man.
A young man, her age about, or maybe a little younger. A man, in clothes that would hardly have looked out of place in Bonesborough. A man with his long blonde hair pulled back, grey cloak spread at his feet, a pad of paper in his hands. A man with rounded ears beneath the flyaway wisps that unfurled down from his brow.
It took her brain a moment of fits and starts to catch up, her mind racing as it tried to put all of these things together. A man. Round ears. A human.
A cute human, came the thought, unbidden. Where had that come from?
And then, as Evelyn’s brain tried to hold all these things at once, tried to process what to do in the face of those long fingers that elegantly grasped at the charcoal they held, tried to process the many miles back to the Gate and the rumors of burning witches she’d heard at the pub in town, tried to process this human and the way he was staring up into the trees, almost as if he was looking for the same bird she was, the last branch she had pulled herself up onto cracked, and broke, and Evelyn Clawthorne tumbled down through wood and leaves and vines and landed, rather unceremoniously, in a heap in the clearing below.
At the crack, the man had startled, whirling around with panic in his eyes as he sought to find the source of the sound. When his eyes landed on the figure of Evelyn Clawthorne, red hair filled with twigs and spider-web, a bright-red cardinal flitting about her and pecking anxiously at her cloak, he startled again.
And when Evelyn sat up, the chirps of a cardinal ringing in her ears along with the ringing of her fall, he was by her side, looking concerned and saying something that she couldn’t quite hear.
And when she sat up and leaned back against the rock she had just barely missed, when he handed her the staff she’d dropped, when she looked up and saw the man looking down at her with the warmest brown eyes she’d ever seen, when he looked down at this woman who’d just fallen out of a tree and was still the most beautiful person he’d ever seen, when the calls of a cardinal and a mourning dove wound together in the shocked silence of the forest, Evelyn Clawthorne, witch of the Boiling Isles, and Caleb Wittebane, of the town of Gravesfield, beheld each other for the first time.
The sun shone. The birds sang.
You see, here’s the thing about moments that change your life: most of them are so utterly and horrendously mundane that you’ll never know what they were. There are certain obvious moments, of course, but by far and away, most of them seem a moment like any other. Just a book you read, or a food you ate, or an apartment you rented. A bird you wandered after to try and draw.
Nothing special. Nothing unusual.
Like magic.