Chapter 3: Koolah’s Ploy Begins

Koolah woke again. Today she was going to sort everything out.

She slowly got up, the silken sheets cascading from her.

She was the eldest of the three sisters, and unlike her sisters, the fur of her body was completely black. Her hair tumbled in waves around her. This hair was an almost silvery white. It almost seemed like a hooded cloak, if not for the presence of her witch’s hat.

Koolah’s hat was a misshapen thing, made of green scales sewn together with golden thread, each scale was a different shade of green though the difference was subtle in some cases. There was lizard scales, fish scales, pseudo-dragon scales, even a few true dragon scales and many others. Not only were there these scales, but beneath the scales were various patches of the skins of amphibian creatures like frogs.

Koolah had began making it when she was a small kitten. At first it had just been a stuffed frog she wore on her head, but in time, bit by bit, it was replaced and it grew. It was an obscure thing, in truth nothing remained of that old stuffed frog other than a small patch of skin.

It must be understood that for most users of magic the amount of objects or sources of power that truly belong to them are quite few, and for Koolah, this hat was one. She had painstakingly made it, it had been with her most her life.

It wasn’t the most powerful of artefacts, but the sheer range of powers it offered to Koolah made up for that.

One of those powers was a “sense of misfortune”. It had resulted in a dull throbbing in the back of Koolah’s head. As the fog of sleep lifted she recalled that she had been acting on that warning already.

As she was about to leave the bed her eyes flashed, one of the eyes was green the other was blue, but in this moment, both glowed green.

Then she closed her eyes. Her own voice whispered in her mind.

-Wards-

This message had been left by herself to herself in her hat. She had no memory of doing so.

She tilted her head, humming and hawing, she reached out to the side of the bed for a tome on warding spells.

She glanced through quickly, hoping to find something that would lend a hint to her as the nature of the misfortune that was hovering over her.

The book was a tome that had been in her Dauftima pride for generations, each time more and more knowledge being caged into its pages.

Nothing however gave her and idea as to what had prompted her to leave such a message for herself.

She turned a page, and just as she was about to turn again, one of the diagrams of a protective ward caught her eye.

“Is there another ward placed into this pattern?” She murmured.

She pawed over it, she looked at it with magesight.

Had she just imagined it? A gap formed in her thoughts.

“Stress must be getting to me”

She moved to turn the page, but her paw froze in place.

-Since when was I this incurious?- she thought.

She grasped a strand of the flow, whispering to the magic and directed it into the drawing. Nothing happened, nothing changed and nothing looked out of the ordinary.

She sighed and again moved to turn the page.

A sense of disquiet arose in her gut.

One thing that had been drilled in her head by her mother, was that in the art of magic, only trying one method was a sure path to frequent failure.

This time, she took hold of the power within herself, her feeble heartflame. If it was not feeble, then she could have been a sorceress rather than a witch, using her own power rather than power cobbled together from around her.

Heartflame, the source of a being’s motion, thus their magic. The spark of animation. Of life.

From her fingertips with difficulty she refined the power and sent it into the ward before her.

Once more nothing happened.

This time, a gap did not form in her mind, and she moved on to try another method. She pricked her paw with one of her sharp teeth and dripped a drop of blood onto the tome.

Blood contained much of a person’s identity, heavy with their core essence.

Before the Blood reached the page, a ward different from the one on the page unfolded like the petals of a flower and reached out greedily devouring the droplet.

The petals rotated blurring into the shape of a cat’s eye, the eye changed into beam of light that pierced through Koolah’s forehead.

-Think, how many days has it been?-

Another message for herself… but why was it in such a convoluted manner. Why had she not just placed the whole message in her hat?

Koolah should have been able to make the connection, but her mind went blank as if something had pushed a wedge between her discovery and the answer.

She unnaturally with glassy eyes placed the book back in its place and went to clean herself. Sitting in a barrel of water, as she scrubbed with a furry eel, she gradually forgot what had just happened.

The question however did not vanish, in her mind, a magical ward surrounded it, and it was not washed away.

 

[Another update due tomorrow due to not doing last Thursday’s update]