Chapter 6: The Witch Brigade is Founded
Lumina sat at the table with both hands around her bowl, drinking her soup with a kind of careful, deliberate focus — one slow sip at a time, like each mouthful was a test she was administering to herself. Real. This is real. The warmth, the weight, the taste — not a hallucination. Not the Curse Power.
Across the room, Galatina had settled into a chair by the stove with one of Uriel's old shirts, the one he'd outgrown last year. She held it up against the rough idea of Lumina's proportions, turned it over once, and began quietly calculating what would need to come in and what would need to let out.
She didn't say anything about it. She just started.
---
A few evenings later, Galatina disappeared into the kitchen to start on dinner.
Uriel sat in the yard with a stick in his hand, drawing vague shapes in the dirt. Lumina sat across from him with her knees pulled to her chest, leaning over to look.
"Scribe," she said — using the title Uriel had assigned himself — "what's it like out there? The world."
Uriel pressed the stick into the earth.
"Big," he said. "Trouble everywhere. Plenty of places with nobody looking after them."
"Like what happened to me?"
"That was small." He began spinning the lore. Layer by layer — everything he'd read, everything he'd pieced together from watching Aether move through the world, all of it arranged now into something that sounded like authoritative experience. "The bigger things: the Dark Clergy. Demonic incursions from beyond the border. Sacrificial rituals using living people to concentrate Curse Power. Entire villages dissolved into ruins overnight. Cities where everyone turns at once, some kind of mass corruption spreading like plague. And a prince who culls his own city with a cursed sword to stop a plague. There are even places where the whole country is one enormous ritual circle, and the people living in it never knew."
Lumina's fingers tightened, almost imperceptibly, around the rim of her bowl.
Uriel kept going.
"You're not the first. You won't be the last." He let that sit for a moment. "Not unless someone stops them."
"...Stops them."
She repeated it quietly. And then something shifted behind her eyes — the vague, drifting look that had been there since she woke up burned away, and what replaced it was clear and bright and completely serious.
"I will become your strength."
Uriel blinked.
That was not the direction I was steering this.
He had been telling a bedtime story. A reassuring tale, loosely based on reality, heavily padded with dramatic embellishment, designed to give a frightened child something to hold onto. He had not meant to sound like he was calling her to arms. And yet somehow, in the space of two exchanges, this girl had arrived at I will pledge myself to the cause with the conviction of someone who had just heard a prophecy.
From the kitchen, the fire crackled. Galatina's needle moved quietly through cloth.
Lumina was still watching him, her expression steadier than he'd expected from someone who'd woken up in a storage room three hours ago.
"Next time," she said, "I won't let them win."
This child — who had been dredged out of a Curse Power mass of rotting flesh this very afternoon — had listened to his heavily improvised account of the world's evils and responded not with relief that she'd survived, but with anger. And the specific, immediate desire to protect someone else.
What a genuinely good kid.
Terrifying, but good.
---
"Witch, thank you for saving me today."
The words came out of nowhere. Lumina set down her chopsticks midway through dinner, straightened up, and bowed her head with the gravity of someone delivering an official address to a head of state.
Galatina paused. She had been in the middle of piling food into Uriel's bowl. Her chopsticks hovered.
She looked at Lumina. Then at Uriel, who was making a face at her with barely concealed desperation.
She read neither expression correctly.
Uriel seized his opportunity. He pushed his bowl forward and said, with precisely calibrated casualness:
"...Witch. You don't need to give me that much."
Galatina looked at him. Then at Lumina. Then she appeared to think about the word Witch for a moment, turning it over, deciding something.
Her eyebrows curved slowly downward into a smile.
Oh no, Uriel thought. She likes it.
Please tell me she doesn't think this is a cute nickname the children made up for her. Please tell me she understands the connotation is dark and terrifying and —
"Mm." Galatina set her chopsticks down, picked up her tea, and leaned back. "No need to thank me. It's simply what a Witch does."
Uriel stared at her.
That fast? She just — accepted it? On the spot?
She caught his eye and smiled at him — the same warm, unhurried smile she used when she was tucking him in, soft from corner to corner.
Uriel dropped his gaze and shoved a large amount of rice into his mouth.
I'm not questioning whether you can sell it. I'm asking you not to look so — gentle — while you do it. You're supposed to be a Witch. A Witch. Where's the gravitas. Where's the mystery. You look like you're about to ask if I want more soup.
---
After dinner, Uriel explained the Brigade's current personnel to Lumina — and, by extension, to Galatina, who was sitting under the eave in the yard with her sewing.
He laid it out carefully. The Witch. The Scribe. And now, their newest and first official member.
Galatina looked up once during the explanation.
Her needle didn't stop.
Her expression was soft and faintly entertained, the way someone watches two kittens batting at each other across a floor. At no point did she ask a follow-up question. She only smiled a little when the details got specific.
Uriel caught that smile in his peripheral vision.
She thinks we're playing pretend.
She thinks this is make-believe heroes.
She is not wrong, technically, but —
He let it go.
---
The days that followed were louder than before.
A small bed appeared in the corner of the storage room — Uriel had helped drag the frame; Galatina had pulled an old quilt from the chest, washed it, aired it in the sun, and folded it down at the corners without comment.
The yard now had two children in it.
Galatina stood in the kitchen doorway one afternoon, watching the two small figures moving busily around the courtyard, and wiped her hands on her apron. She didn't say anything. She just smiled and went back inside.
---
Magic lessons started one morning after breakfast.
Galatina pulled a low stool into the yard, sat down, and called both children over. Then she began, without preamble, to explain Aether.
The basics. Sensing it. Drawing it. The kind of foundational work every mage began in childhood, because there was no way around it — only through. No shortcuts. Just practice.
Lumina sat perfectly straight, her narrow elven ears giving the faintest twitch as she focused. Uriel sat beside her and listened to the theory, and felt it slot into place against everything he'd already watched — years of observing Aether move through people and places without quite understanding why it moved the way it did. The gap between knowing and understanding closed in a single lecture.
Galatina paused and told them to try.
Both children looked down at their palms.
Lumina pulled carefully, and something came — thin and unsteady, a novice's first reach. A small flicker gathered in her palm, trembled, and scattered. She pressed her lips together and tried again.
Uriel reached inward, found the thread, and pulled.
A sphere of Aether condensed in his palm. Even. Smooth at every edge. No flicker, no instability — just a clean, quiet, perfectly formed light sitting in his hand like he'd been doing this for years.
Galatina glanced at it.
"Little Uri is clever," she said, and smiled.
Uriel closed his hand. The sphere dissolved. He did this with complete external composure, because he was eight years old and he had a reputation to maintain.
Internally, he was absolutely losing his mind.
IT WORKED. THAT'S MAGIC. ACTUAL MAGIC. I JUST DID MAGIC.
Am I a chantless-casting prodigy? Do I have infinite mana? Am I an omni-elemental monster? Do I have a hidden cheat skill? Where's the 'Ding!' sound? Where's my blue translucent system prompt?
Beside him, Lumina looked up at his closed fist. Then she dropped her gaze back to her own palm, reset her posture, and started over. Her jaw was set. Her expression said, plainly, that she did not intend to finish second.
---
After that, the structure held.
It had been built entirely out of misunderstandings stacked on top of each other, and yet somehow it stood. Galatina played along as though this were a very elaborate game of make-believe heroes — because she believed it was, and she found it charming. When Lumina asked at dinner one evening how the Witch had handled her first great evil, Galatina set down her tea, thought for a moment, and began to speak.
Plain and unhurried. The same voice she used for bedtime stories.
Except the things she described had happened.
Uriel sat beside them and sipped his drink, saying nothing.
Right. So this is how Mom actually tells the truth. As a story. Like it's nothing. That was when it clicked: Mom was the Hero.
...I have been listening to these stories my entire life. I should have realized sooner.
He watched Lumina's eyes go wide across the table, the way they always did — and then watched her quietly revise upward whatever she already believed about the "ancient Sage's heir" Uriel had invented on day one.
Wait. I didn't create a monster... Mom is the actual monster here! The monster is doing this on purpose and doesn't realize it.
Wait. This is wrong. Am I getting led astray by Mom?
He put his drink down. Looked out into the yard. The old trees were casting long shadows in the evening light. From the kitchen came the quiet sound of running water and Galatina's unhurried humming. Lumina sat on the steps outside, using the last of the daylight to practice, her hand cupped and steady.
The leaves shifted. The yard settled into its usual evening quiet.
Well, Uriel thought. Good enough for now.