Nastia’s vice was the compulsion to count rocks. A coping mechanism taught to her by the tutors to help her mind focus enough to perform magic. She’d counted every stone she came across until Thames, one of the brother bear security guards, took Nastia to his cave to mate her. Love her. He’d loved the sister so good, he’d had enough light to keep her anchored when she lost her light, and Adira and Mirena flung a drastic last ditch effort at saving her.
Just remembering the night they almost lost her to darkness made more sweat glaze Mirena’s forehead and a violent shiver run her spine.
Adira’s vice was just as odd as Nastia’s. She had the compulsion to rhyme. Since arriving at the lodge, she’d been much less Dr. Seuss-y. But over the past week she’d been slipping back into the rhyming habit.
Mirena’s was challenging others and being challenged.
The tutors had issued her first challenge when she was barely old enough to read. As a child, Mirena’s fear of the dark had been crippling. Even blinking in a room with low light terrified her, which made training under the stars, where their magic was honed, nearly impossible.
She had memories from before she was born, before she was given light. When she was a small sliver in the darkness that cradled the stars. It was unusual for young Sorcera to remember the Before, but not unheard of. And the Father Isaac had known just what to do.
“Dare you to scream as loud as you can, little one,” he’d said one night when the stars shined on them. She’d been quaking, remembering the Before. The cold lonely blackness that she’d been made from. The nothing before she was something.
She’d taken his dare, and felt better. Freer.
“Dare you to look into the darkness without blinking.”
She’d done that one too.
“Dare you to challenge me to something scary.”
She’d thought of the worst thing she could, and dared Father Isaac to do it. When he did, the challenging became a game. Each time she bested a dare, her sense of confidence grew until the darkness—literal or figurative—was no longer scary. Nothing was.
Now sometimes her urge could be fed by something silly. Dare you to touch your toes. Dare you to say pickletits five times fast. Bet you can’t stand on one foot and pat your head. But other times, when she was feeling unsettled, drifting… it took something bigger.
It took jumping off a cliff.
She gripped the rope tighter and took a deep breath, feeling for her magic. Her light was fading. Just as it was supposed to in her twenty fifth year.
This was the year of her change. Hers and her sisters’. The closer they came to the autumnal equinox, the more the power they absorbed from the stars and moon faded. By the equinox they will have either found an Anchor to hold them to the light, or have transitioned to dark magic.
It was everything horrible and dreaded by the Sorcera, who only believed in using magic for good. But it was a necessary law of existence.
Light must be tempered by darkness. Darkness must be tempered by light. In order for good to exist, there must also be evil. It was a balance of nature that was not so different from the shifters. Their beasts were tempered by humanity. Their human nature enhanced by their animal.
It made them strong, just like darkness made the Sorcera strong.
Where there is light, there is also shadow. One only exists because of the other.
If only they could embrace both magicks. Light and dark. But that also went against nature. One would undoubtedly eat up the other, feeding off it until there was nothing left.
Two dogs left in a room to starve, would eventually find sustenance at the death of another.
Still, Mirena didn’t want to embrace darkness. She didn’t want to mindlessly harm the ones she loved most, as her sister, Nastia had done.
They made it through that mess by the skin of their teeth. Adira had concocted a dangerous spell using death to break Nastia’s connection to the mystics above. The lights in the sky that sourced their magic. The spell brought her back as something entirely different. She was no longer human, no longer Sorcera. She wasn’t a beast as the shifters. She was a new thing all her own. One that required living blood for sustenance, and the power of the greatest light in existence.
The sun.
It would take generations to fully understand what Nastia had become. But she was alive. She was herself. Safe and happy and thriving.
They’d gotten lucky. But Mirena wasn’t fool enough to think their luck could carry her and Adira through the magic transition as well.
She chewed her lip, thinking.
One of them wasn’t going to make it. The odds were stacked against them, and betting woman that she was… she wouldn’t put her money on either of them.