Dedicated to Eric Russell, Sarah Cook,
Chrys Lear, Linda Seaquist-Klein, Joshua Archer,
and Darick Robertson for your unwavering love
and support over the years
Tucked snugly away deep within the dead forest lived a family of witches. Their gray cobblestone mansion was perched on the tallest hill, which looked down on a vast landscape of lifeless trees with brittle and twisted branches that resembled long grasping hands.
Around this forest was an impenetrable thicket of rosebushes with tiny beautifully preserved rosebuds still clinging to them even though they had been dead longer than anyone still living could properly recollect. This was the boundary between the land of the living and the forest of the dead, and the witches who lived in the woods rarely crossed the boundary to do harm to those living on the other side. They asked for only one thing in return: their dead.
The witches’ forest wasn’t merely filled with lifeless trees. It was where the dead rested—or so the neighboring villagers liked to tell themselves. They chose to think of the woods as a cemetery they weren’t permitted to visit, and the witches as its caretakers, though deep within their hearts they knew their deceased loved ones were given very little peace in what should have been their eternal resting place.
But we won’t concern ourselves with that part of the tale at the moment. Right now, our story centers on three sister witches—Hazel, Gothel, and Primrose—and their mother, Manea, the dreaded queen of the dead, one of the greatest and most feared witches of any age.
Manea always let it be known that her daughters were a disappointment to her, pointing out that even though the three of them were born on the same day, they were not identical. It was widely accepted in the magical realms that having identical witch daughters was a great honor. They were highly favored among the gods, because they possessed greater power and magical ability than the average witch. Though Gothel and her sisters were, by definition, triplets, they couldn’t possibly have been more different from each other.
Let’s start with Gothel, the youngest sister by a mere handful of hours. She possessed raven hair and dark features, with large expressive gray eyes. Her hair was thick, wild, and unruly, often filled with little bits of twigs or dried leaves from her following her sisters around in the dead woods and romping through the landscape of cemeteries within its boundaries. When Gothel chose to look up from one of her precious books long enough to notice her surroundings, she had a very large personality, demanding the attention of everyone in the room. She was a thoughtful, pragmatic young woman, rarely ruled by her emotions and singularly focused on eventually taking her mother’s place in the forest of the dead. There was only one thing more important to her.
Her sisters.
Hazel, the eldest sister, was lanky and shy, with large light blue eyes. Her hair was a brilliant shade of silver, and cascaded over her shoulders like a shroud. She moved silently like a wraithlike goddess, which was fitting, really, considering where she and her sisters lived. Hazel was a soft-spoken and exceedingly empathetic young lady, always willing to listen to her sisters’ problems and lend her support.
That leaves us with Primrose. Now, she was a striking redhead, with sparkling green eyes, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and a light smattering of freckles across her nose. She was lighthearted and fun, always ready for adventure, and doomed to be entirely driven by her emotions, which sometimes vexed her sisters, causing the three to quarrel.
The sisters spent much of their time in the dead woods, exploring the mausoleums and reading the names off the headstones in what felt like to the sisters a small city of the dead. They spent hours walking the various pathways of beautiful and ornate tombstones, statues, and crypts, sometimes saying the dead’s names aloud as they passed them, reciting the names off the tombstones, singing them almost like a song.
With little else to fill their time, the sisters found happy occupations to keep themselves busy while traversing the dead forest. Hazel loved to bring thin pieces of delicate parchment and coal with her on their long walks in the woods so she could make impressions of some of the more ornate and decorative headstones. She called them rubbings. Sometimes she found a name on one of the headstones particularly interesting or funny and she would make a rubbing simply for reference. Later she would look up the person in her mother’s large leather-bound ledger that contained the names and origins of every person buried within their woods, which made her feel less alone. Not that her sisters’ friendship wasn’t enough, mind you, but she liked to imagine some of the dead as her friends. She and her sisters were quite alone in the dead woods aside from their mother, who was busy and sequestered away at every opportunity, occupied with her magic, leaving little time to spend with her daughters. So Hazel found comfort and company in reading about the dead in her mother’s ledger, feeling like she was getting to know the people who spent their afterlife in her forest.
Primrose often brought along her scarlet drawstring pouch, which contained a spool of ribbon, a small silver knife, and various wishes she had written on bright red parchment that she would hang from the dead branches on ribbons. It was just like Primrose to bring color into their stark world. Almost as if she had been created for the purpose of bringing beauty into their lives, because it did seem to follow her wherever she wandered. Primrose fancied the dead haunted their forest at night, reading her wishes while she and her sisters were asleep. She hoped the dead would love their afterlife. She wanted it to be a beautiful resting place rather than the dull gray landscape it really was.
Gothel was more rooted in the physical world than her sisters, with her eye always on the future. She often brought along one of her mother’s books when she went into the woods with her sisters—a book she had slipped into the pocket of her skirts when her mother wasn’t paying attention. She always took the opportunity to read when her sisters stopped to do a grave rubbing or tie wishes in the trees. Sometimes she read aloud to her sisters, but usually she just let herself drift into other worlds—worlds she desperately wanted to inhabit. The world of magic. And this day was no different.
“Gothel! Move! You’re blocking the headstone I want to do next!” Gothel looked up at Hazel, who gazed down at her disapprovingly. The sun was directly behind her, creating a shimmering silhouette that emphasized her ghostlike face.
“But I’m comfortable here, Hazel. Can’t you rub one of the other headstones?” Gothel asked, squinting to see her sister clearly.
Hazel sighed. “I guess.”
Gothel watched Hazel walk into the brilliant sunlight, which was low in the sky and cast a lovely orange-and-pink glow on their otherwise dreary landscape. It was Gothel’s favorite time, the magic hour. She had read there was a land where it was eternally twilight, and she wondered what it must be like to live in such a place. “Don’t go too far, Hazel!” called Gothel. “It will be dark soon, and Mother will want us home.”
Hazel didn’t answer her sister, but Gothel knew Hazel had heard her. Gothel had read about sister witches who could read each other’s minds, and she knew that wasn’t the case with her and her sisters—not quite—but they did have an understanding. At least that was what their mother had called it: “an understanding.” Ever since they were very small, each had known how the others were feeling. They couldn’t communicate with each other without speaking, so they didn’t hear the exact words, but they did get a sense of what the others might be thinking from each other’s emotions. Gothel had searched her mother’s books for the term “understanding” and decided it must be something her mother had made up, because she couldn’t find a reference to it in any of them. And she wondered if maybe someday, when they learned more of their mother’s magic, she and her sisters would have the power to read each other’s minds.