The Wandering Warlock

Chapter 4: Mischiefs

As she grows older, Ava begins wandering off on market days. Leaving Mama Raz to dazzle her customers with enchanted garments, Ava lets her curiosity lead her. Roaming the stalls and dodging under tables, Ava finds all sorts of strange things - mushrooms that sneeze magical spores, books that whisper for her to tell it her secrets, flowers that bloom when you scritch their leaves at just the right spot.

In particular, she pauses with interest to observe the market's various animals - the apothecarist keeps a terrarium of frogs that ooze healing slime; the shepherd guards a pen of goats whose milk can bestow curly hair soft as silk; caged canaries whose gentle song can sink you into a lucid dream. Whenever Ava sees these peculiar creatures, cooped up as they are, looking longingly past their constraints, she can't help but feel a pang of sorrow. How sad she would be to be so confined - behind walls, behind bars, bound to serve others and never allowed to venture into the wider world. Nothing like the freedom she has in the woods.

Still rather short and underfoot, Ava sometimes finds herself unnoticed by the shopkeepers as she peers in at their creatures with her large dark eyes. Slowly the creatures drift towards her, collecting at the edge of their confinements like curious bubbles. Maybe they call to her, maybe she calls to them, but regardless, her deft weaver fingers often take it upon themselves to unhook, unlatch, untangle whatever stands between these creatures and their freedom. The flurry of escaping magical beasts usually provides enough cover for Ava to scurry back out of sight, but her stealthy escapes don't always pan out. Word spreads and wary shopkeepers begin to keep an eye out for the pale troublemaker, shooing her away whenever they notice her gazing thoughtfully at their stock for too long.

More years pass, and Ava reaches her teens. Mama Raz's magical enchantments continue to flit about her: the helping hands around the hut, protective illusions disguising their home, forest creatures summoned to carry messages to and fro. Whenever Ava asks if this is the year she can learn magic, Mama always agrees but tends to get distracted by one thing or another - dyeing another thread, weaving another spell, tinkering with this or that. Time goes by, and Ava waits.

Ava has noticed that Mama Raz often gets confused about time. It was like somehow time doesn't flow the same way for Mama - rather, it... jumps. Rewinds. Replays. Sometimes Mama searches frantically for a magical cloak she hasn't made yet, or asks Ava and Paco to go invite Mara to dinner because they're having her favorite meal - whoever Mara is. Whenever Mama finally pauses from some manic preparations for some future or past event, she gets a distant blurry look in her eyes before returning to the now.

Ava has relived one day with Razalina many times over: The Storm. It's hard to predict what triggers it - Ava considers that maybe it has to do with seeing a specific angle of the sun through the trees? Or a particular smell on the wind? But once Mama Raz is set in motion on the day of The Storm, there is little Ava can do to pull her out.

It always starts the same way: Razalina desperately sets out into the forest searching for berries to go into a pie, insisting they must finish it before The Storm comes. Paco always follows, squeaking in a frenzy in response to her distress. Despite some days having cloudless blue skies, Mama's fear of The Storm does not calm, no matter how persistently Ava urges her to look up. It's like Mama is afraid of the sky - like she's afraid that something will descend and take something away.

Upon returning to the hut with berries, Mama crashes around the kitchen, unseen servants and magic hands dropping tools and pans in escalating chaos. If Ava tries to change the subject, Mama charges through, not allowing any interruption to the baking of this pie, because it must get done, it must get done, it must get done before The Storm hits.

Eventually Ava always succumbs and obediently carries out Mama's frenzied instructions. She learns to start the wood-fired oven before they set out to forage berries, because despite Storm days always leading to pie, Mama Raz always forgets to light the fire and will leave raw pies in a cold unlit oven for hours while distracted by other things. Every day of the Storm, Ava wonders what could have its hooks in Mama so deep to cause her to be so single-minded. Mama was the most skilled mage Ava had yet to see, so what could make her so fearful? Ava wishes that someday she will know enough magic to help free Mama of this turbulent burden that drags her mind back and forth in time.

After making it through the Storm, when Mama Raz returns to her usual goofy self, Ava drifts back out into the forest. She takes a quiet morning to enjoy the weightlessness of being in the woods, unconstrained and unburdened. She continues to explore, to imagine, seeing pieces of her surroundings both there and not there, illusions and realities of her own design. There is always somewhere new to add to her mental map of wandering, her canvas of imagination.

One day, Ava starts bringing a journal with her - the one with the inscription that Mama Raz said she's had since she was a baby. She finds quiet places to sketch what's in her mind, blending the contours of the forest with her own imaginings. A pristine white feather marks her place between the pages.

Oftentimes during Ava's long explorations, she notices things. Patterns. Especially blue patterns. Paths of blue flower petals leading down a faint deer trail; a scattering of blue pebbles wending up a stream; blue-tinted motes floating in a sun-streaked clearing. She sketches these, too, but the way they seem to faintly sparkle never quite comes across on the page. For some reason these patterns intrigue her, beckon to her. If Mama Raz is ever nearby when these blue trails appear, she has an intense reaction, shooing it away vigorously with her broom. Ava tries to ask what's wrong, but Mama usually just grumbles to herself before continuing in the opposite direction.

But when Ava finds these trails alone, she tries to follow. Tries, I say, because the blue patterns mostly lead to places she can't quite reach. Over a river too swift to cross, up a tree with no low branches to climb, into caves with entrances too small and crumbled for her to shimmy inside. Though Mama's poor memory and elusiveness around magic didn't truly bother Ava, for some reason this always did: continually striving for something just beyond her reach. Whenever she persists too long in following mysterious blue paths, Paco inevitably comes to retrieve her, nipping at her ankles with small weasel teeth until she makes her way home.