Rise of the Night Witch

For SUAR 3

Summer Hill was a small town. That much was obvious to Marissa even before she moved here.
Less obvious was how connected everything felt. After Siris led her off-campus, it took a walking distance until they made it into the park.

The park was as small as everything else. Besides its fountain and its playground, only monuments of Civil War-era heroes interrupted the peaceful green.

A meticulously-tended lawn greeted them as they entered. It was so cold and wet that it felt like spring rather than late summer and its gentle climate attracted parkgoers. Stroller, joggers; there were lots of people Marissa had to avoid if she wanted to talk to Siris in peace.

She jumped at the bark of a rottweiler. The drooling, snapping dog was only held back by the lash of a stroller who, judging from her expression, was angry that Marissa had scared it just as much as it had scared her.

Marissa held her hands over her thumping heart.

"Easy," Siris said. "That's not a hellhound."

She pressed her palms against her chest until her heartbeat normalized. She needed some quiet place. Maybe that hill over there? It was a hill so large and sunny that the town probably owed its name to it and it carried a proud oak tree near its top.

For someone supposedly four hundred years old, Siris had a rather modern way of speaking. He probably used portals like the one he claimed the hellhound came through to stay up-to-date.

"Where's the gate?" she asked.

Siris stopped near the roots of the oak tree. "You should be seeing a circle of rose petals right here."

"I should."

He circled around the tree. When he still couldn't find what he searched for, he rubbed his nose into the meadows as if what he was searching for lay hidden in the grass. "I don't know why it's invisible."

"So, this circle is the gate?" Marissa whispered, careful that no-one was nearby.

"It's a fairy ring, yeah. They aren't always perfect rings, but it's the best shape if you want to trap spirit energy that's intermediate between the two worlds."

Good to know. Marissa still wasn't sure if she should accept Siris' call to adventure, but there was one compelling argument that made her lean towards "yes".

In his lecture, Professor Weber claimed that, in the US alone, about thirty thousand people straight-up vanished every year and never got found again. At the start of the century, it had only been eight thousand. If this waning Veil Siris mentioned had anything to do with that, this meant that as many as twenty thousand people died to monsters each year in her country alone.

And she had no idea if there was anyone out there to stop them. "Another question," she whispered again. "How many practitioners are there in this country?"

Siris put his nose out of the grass. "Look, I keep myself on the ball, but I'm not some census nerd-"

"How likely is it that there are practitioners other than me in this town?"

He looked at the sky as if he tried to divine the answer from the stars. "I suck at math, but I think there are ten thousand mundanes for every practitioner."

Ten thousand. Did Summer Hill even house that many people?

Marissa didn't have a martyr complex or anything, but if she was the only thing standing between the monsters in this town, it was an argument worth considering. "So, assuming I want to make a contract with you or whatever, how does that work?" she asked.

Siris looked at her. "Look me in the eyes and say my name three times. If you want to break the bond again, say my name three times backward. Since it's a palindrome, you can write it backward with the capital S in the end, that should also work."