The Forsaken

Chapter Ten - Guardians

Their lives settle into a routine. Breakfasting on day-old muffins and doughnuts that the corner bakery throws out. Showering at a nearby apartment complex gym, at which they gain entrance through a back window. Spending their mornings in the library, or in local bookstores. Their afternoons in the park, working the crowd. They treat themselves to dinner at one of the many restaurants in the neighborhood, ending the day back home in their little hovel where they are currently squatting. Living in this fashion, the years pass by without either of them noticing. In fact, if it weren’t for the many physical changes Raven experiences, Gwen might have gone on believing that they would stay children forever. And yet they continue to change.

Raven continues to struggle with the wolf deep inside. He finds himself unable to control his temper, often changing into his wolf form and destroying their home and their meager possessions. Frightened, Gwen still finds the strength not to flee, instead staying calm and focusing all her mental powers on penetrating the animal’s mind to find her friend Raven once more. In this manner, she is able to talk to him, to calm him, to help him manage the beast, to help him transform back into his human self. When Raven becomes the wolf, he feels an uncontrollable urge to hunt and feed on the flesh of other creatures, a terrible rage bubbling up from within that, without Gwen’s help, he never would be able to overcome. It frustrates Raven that he can’t control himself. It becomes more and more imperative that they find answers to their pasts and find their own kind. Raven hopes that his own kind can help him tame the beast within.

            Gwen visits local bookstores and shops that claim to be a part of the Occult or Wiccan in the hopes of finding real Witches, but time after time, she is bitterly disappointed. She chats up the owners and the shop clerks as she browses the shelves lined with spell books and ancient magic relics, asking questions about the craft, getting many confusing and contradictory answers. She tries to test them by speaking in her native tongue, but they only look at her, confused, thinking she’s mumbling or stammering her words. No one seems to know any of the spells she conjures. When she looks into their thoughts, she sees their typical human upbringings. They are clearly not her kind at all.

Still, Gwen buys several spell books, taking them home to test them for herself. Most are fake, the magical words meaningless, invoking no magic. She doesn’t feel the fabric of the world around her alter when she speaks their words. She even tries to cast spells using potions, but to no avail. Only rarely does anything in these books have any real magical value. In these cases, the spells only partially work, some of the rituals and sayings being incorrect. Gwen starts to realize that perhaps these books are the human interpretation of real Witchcraft, that maybe somewhere down the line an authentic Witch have taught some humans the art, and over the years--as the practices of Wicca were passed down from generation to generation--more and more of the true words have been lost.

It seems they are no closer to finding the truth than they were the night they left the Orphanage two years earlier. All this, however, begins to change on the night of Raven’s fourteenth birthday.

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Raven and Gwen, after just leaving a basketball game, board a bus headed toward the heart of town where they plan to finish his birthday celebrations over dinner. For this special occasion, Gwen has chosen a nice Chinese restaurant in an upper-class part of New York, far away from their current Bronx address.

When they step off the bus in front of the restaurant, Raven feels light and carefree, the day’s revelry having transported him into a higher plane of happiness, where all his worries and cares vanish into nothingness. He feels excited by the prospect of dinning some place new; Chinese is his favorite food after all. He looks at Gwen, dressed up for the occasion--wearing a cute, short black dress, a green cardigan, and her favorite black converse sneakers. Her hair is half-swept up in a French braid, everything about her perfectly angelic and sweet. Just looking at her adds immeasurably to Raven’s happiness.