Magic can do many things, but can it save a broken heart? How many times? One who seeks to die will find out.

---

Just A Matter Of Time

--Kiai 03aug03/14jan04

 

The still air is damp and chill, up here in the darkness. I'm well above the occasional cars. I can tell because their little splotches of light as they pass far below are visible through gaps in the trees.

It's frustrating to have to stay silent, even up here in midair, where the bats flit past on their way from one hapless group of insects to another. Up here is where they pause from reaping the harvest of the porchlights, when the nervousness from being near those bright lights gets to be too much. The insects worry about bats, as much as they worry about anything, and the bats worry about owls. I know: I can hear them.

The bats near me are attracted to the cloud of gnats that is attracted to me. Both are repelled by what keeps the broom up, though, and, in the case of the gnats, my antipathy for them. I don't like getting bitten, of course, any more than I like breathing them in by mistake, so I use a little bit of the magic to keep them away.

I can relax up here as long as I don't fall asleep. I have to be careful not to relax too much, though. I might tip over sideways, and it's a long way down to that unkempt lawn with its fences of loose rocks, a ragged velvet deeper dark in the moonless darkness.

I'm still getting used to being on a broom. It's not all that hard, it's just that all of my skills are either slightly off now or just plain irrelevant; I haven't been a witch for long. My balance is a little off because I haven't been a girl all that long, either: only a year, nearly a year and a day for both. And, no, the one does not imply the other -- there are male witches enough -- but it did in my case.

There was a time when I thought that magic existed only for those who were evil. That was what I was taught growing up, all I was allowed to know. By the time I was in high school, I sensed that magic was at my core, an innate and inseparable part of me, so I simply decided privately that I wouldn't use it for evil. That wasn't enough, though. I wanted the magic -- needed it, really -- but it eluded me. I couldn't find a corner of my world that I could grasp and peel up to see the magic clinging to its underside.

After my change, of course, I had no such problem, because I was magic. I existed at all because magic existed, around and through me, and then it was up to me to learn it as well as I could, as with any acquired skill. The barrier of obedient disbelief had been crossed... along with so much more.

Do they tell you to 'Take it to the Lord in prayer'? What happens when you do that? Do your problems get solved, does your confusion and misery dissolve into comfort and enlightenment, and do you wake to a better day than the one where you fell asleep?

Lucky you. I was brought up to do all that, but my prayers were never answered. They were just words. I could never feel anyone there listening no matter how hard I tried to sense it. I spoke the words diligently, while the room got darker, and the darkness pressed close, and it felt as if something was battening down to feed. I would wake in the morning to the same grim existence as the day before, only worse because I would be a little more despondent that there would ever be any way out of the role I'd been given: I was the guy without a clue, and I knew it.

One night it got to be so bad that I just didn't feel like living anymore, and I drank something. It was supposed to kill me so I could sleep. Instead, I woke up standing in cold water, with just my head showing, and it was still dark. I was in a well of some kind, and I couldn't even feel myself, I was that numb.

There was a woman standing over me. She told me that it would be better now, and that I had a job I must do, but I could do it, it wasn't all that hard. The hardest thing for me now, she said, was going to be to get used to the new life that I had been given as a gift from the Goddess.

As she said that, I noticed someone standing behind her, taller than her and all misty and glowing. She put her hands on the woman's shoulders, then the woman bent down and took my hands in her hands and helped me step out of that well. Then the Goddess, if that's who she was, reached around us both and put her hands to either side of my face and kissed me, and I fell asleep.

I woke up in a stranger's bed, but then, when I got up and found my way to a mirror, I was the stranger. I was a naked teenage girl with long black hair and deep crystal blue eyes and a red smile. I didn't know why I was smiling, except that for the first time in a long time I felt good. Not because I was a girl -- I wasn't sure I wanted any of that -- but because I wasn't me, the guy who had hurt so much.

Someone came in then and told me that she was my mother now. Her face was somehow familiar, and I saw it was the woman who had helped me out of the well. She showed me how to clean and dress myself, how to make myself pretty as a girl, and then she brought me downstairs to breakfast.

Afterwards, we talked for most of the day. She told me nothing about herself, but she told me a lot about the life that I had just ended. She spoke of it as though it were common history, not something forgotten as unimportant in the passage of the world, as if someone had thought it worthy of note when I was still living it.

She told me, "Time is flexible when it needs to be; you just have to know how to flex it." Then she showed me the day's newspaper, and pointed at the date. That was when I understood that my old life was over for good, because the date was a year before my life ended. I had been brought back in time.

Later, when I was bathing, she came in and found me exploring myself and pleasuring myself. She told me that there was nothing wrong with it, that everybody did it, but she said that I should do it in private so that other people's energies wouldn't be involved. Not even hers; she said that I now owned myself, for the first time, and I should keep it that way.

Later, up in my tiny bedroom in the little house, I thought about that, and I realized that she was right. That was why I was smiling: there was no one there to push me off- balance with their words and their feelings so that I stumbled wherever I went. For the first time, no one had any claim on my life but her and the Goddess, and she wasn't making demands, and neither was the Goddess, not yet. Perhaps I owed, but I wasn't owned.

That was when I let my hands wander where they would, enjoying how I could make myself feel, with no guilt for the first time that I could recall, and, when I fell asleep, my hands were on and in myself, but, as I slept, it felt like the Goddess's hands were with them, helping me to find how to love life by living it.

I have studied long and hard since I climbed up out of that well. My new mother is a witch, and she has taught me her tradition. There are deep secrets and even deeper secrets, and ways you can weave what the world is made of in little secret ways so that you get what you need, as long as you're careful that others get what they need too. It's not in just words, any of it, and it's not Little Theatre With Athames. It's magic, and I have been trained in its use until I am ready for my next step.

Now it is my first day of school, though the school year is already well underway, and supposedly I am transferring in. Somehow the school administration accepts this. I have little false memories that I can call on, when questions are asked about my schooling before, about military bases I've never really seen, and a life with a military father I find few false memories of ever seeing. In this new story of my life, my new mother is a military widow, returning to live in a place she remembered. We live in a small house, and we have passes and cards to use the facilities of the base nearby, but we never go there.

My first day of classes is over at last, mainly getting books and sitting in. I remember these classes well, but it is easy enough to be the new girl, introduced to everyone for the first time.

Then classes are over for the day, and I have someplace I need to go, someone I need to see. Two people, actually: one who was me, and one whom he sought.

He is in the school library because that is where she holds court. Not that he sees it as such, and not that she admits to it, but this is what she does. A touch here, a look there, a slight smile, and she has another courtier ready to vie for her briefest of attentions and wan hopes of her affections.

As intelligent as she is, I know that it is deliberate. She does modeling shoots in the city; this is where she hones her skills at teasing the camera while building up her portfolio of souls. She is young in years, and she knows no magic, but she knows the most ancient womanly art, Hunted Becomes Hunter, and her practice makes her perfect in their eyes.

She draws off their attentions and intentions, draining their impetus until they fall into stable orbits about her, destined never to touch. She shines brighter as they reflect her light back at her in a pleasing array of colors. They are beads on her necklace of lives, buckles on her garter, notches on her bow. She would say that she draws only on their surplus of hope, but some have greater reserves than others. She has drawn him to his death as an insect to a flame: he will batter his wings apart, vainly trying to get through her beaded curtain to quench himself in her glory, and fall to earth spent like a drone.

I cannot change that predestined end, I can only hospice him with affection that eases his suffering as he reaches the end of hope and turns to seek the end of feeling. It is time to begin.

I dawdle at the shelves, knowing already what book I have chosen, until they have seated themselves. She sits at the corner of the long table, speaking in earnest hushed whispers to the people gathered around her. He sits at her side, waiting to be remembered.

Now I pull my chosen book from the shelf and turn, looking around as if seeking a seat, then I walk over to their table. I let my hair fall, curtaining my face so that only my eyes, my smile, are featured.

I know how it looks. I have practiced this look with a mirror, tuning it for the effect that I want, knowing how a lonely boy will be drawn to the mystery that is me if I make it inviting, enticing, both chaste and womanly. It is a woman's art, and I am woman.

"Hey."

He looks up from his book in surprise. I smile down at him, willing him to see me as an equal and not a threat.

"Mind if I sit here?"

He shakes his head no, and moves his books and briefcase, allowing me a space at his side, and resumes his reading and his periodic glances at her. I seat myself, open the book that I have chosen, and begin to read myself, periodically glancing over at him, and, over his shoulder, at her, where she sits on his other side.

I have presumed to encroach on her territory. She notices, and refracts a little more of her attentions in his direction. I am the newcomer, but her glance goes to him, not to me. She is unwilling to let even the smallest and strangest of her catch off her string; her necklace must be complete.

I see through her smile, her momentary inclusion of him in her conversations, even though these are now changed events, events I never experienced a year ago. I see because she is a bull-dancer, and I am no longer one of her bulls, but I remember being one. I surprise myself in momentarily feeling a pang at the loss of even that marginal place in the dance.

Perhaps she reads that longing in my eyes when I glance over at her and catch her gaze for a moment, but then her gaze sweeps on in her grand survey of her court. Perhaps she thinks that I am one of those girls who loves girls; perhaps I am. I know that I loved one: her. I know what he is feeling because I was once him.

Her gaze refuses to return to me. She has dismissed me as inconsequential, and to her I am, but I am not without consequences.

Eventually it is time for us all to leave. The library is closing in time for us to catch the late buses to our homes. I rise and walk away, leaving my bag, then return as if I have forgotten it, as she stands and reaches for her own.

She brushes against me as she passes, and I guide her waist-length mane so that some of the hairs pass close by the metal buttons on my jacket, sifting through their spaces like a thread passes through the tension-adjuster of one of the sewing machines in the Home-Ec class.

She starts and looks back at my jacket with a pained look. I look down, seeing her caught on my jacket, then I apologetically tug her hair free of the buttons and apologize again. She dismisses the apology and the event and resumes her dance of departure, knitting all their emotions so they won't ravel and leak away in her absence.

I wait for him to rise. He, of course, is captured by her performance, and I must allow that, but I wait patiently, dallying without seeming to dally, until, as she moves from view down the hall, surrounded by those courtiers who also take her bus, he looks around.

He is seeking his glove. He already has one on. He will walk home, carrying that briefcase, and the snowy evening outside will be bitter cold without them both.

I have his glove, brushed from his coat pocket by the passage of people as he rose, and, perhaps, helped by me. While his back was turned, I brought it to my lips and kissed its inside lining. Now I hold it out to him.

"Here; you dropped this." I say it with a smile that puts patience and friendliness and amusement and perhaps a bit of caring up on display for him, and he senses it. He smiles, a casual smile that is the only one he knows, one that is honest, and, looking me in the eye, he says, "Thanks."

Then he puts on his glove, picks up his briefcase, and, slumped as ever at the departure of his dream, he leaves; but now I have set my hook, and he has two lines in his mouth. I do not need to pull: he has enough pain without that. I have merely to be there, and, whenever she forgets to pull at the hook she has set, he will be drawn to me.

I walk down to the school lobby, a few paces behind him, willing him to be warmed by my closeness. At least let him accept that much.

Perhaps he does. At the outer doorway, he holds the door open for me, and I give him a grateful smile that lingers a little before I have to turn away to go to the car that is waiting for me, my own ride home, with my new mother at the wheel stolidly watching the buses pull away. Once inside, I look over, meaning perhaps to wave if he seems receptive, but he is already gone around the curved icy sidewalk, heading out into the snow for the cold house where he will eventually die.

At my new home, up in my tiny room, I carefully inspect my jacket before taking it off. Caught in the clinched seam between the bottom and top stampings that make up the button is an inch or two of a hair, a hair that is not my color or his. I prise it free and put it gently aside in a marked and sealed envelope. It will not see use for close to a year, if ever; I have yet to make up my mind about that, but now I am better prepared.

My dreams that night are about him. Somehow we drift together in my mind, and then he puts his hands on me and we gladly begin the most ancient dance of all. They are not dark dreams, though. It feels like we are somewhere that the darkness cannot find us, someplace where we are sheltered by someone, I don't know who, because my attentions in the dream are on him.

I am surprised when I remember my dreams. I did not expect to accept being a girl so willingly, but I wake up happy.

In school, over the months, I pursue my hunt, now that I know my quarry. I know that it has to be done with the heart, not just with magic, so I don't use spellwork. Instead I use patience. He knows where my locker is, somehow next to his, and sometimes little notes, jokes really, find their way from one to the other. The first time I find one from him in response to one of mine, I have to hide my smile for the rest of the day, because I know I have brightened his day and helped push back the darkness around him.

If she is too busy to sit in the library, I am not. If she leaves, I am there. We are friends, and then we are smiling friends, and then we are warm friends, and there is nothing she can do about it, because I do not demand, I simply am. She holds his heart from her superior position, but I gently cup it from underneath. Whatever she lets fall, I catch.

I know that her plans beyond high school are a worry to him. She values her modeling jobs; she says she will go where she can get them while she attends college, but that will take her far far away. He has to go where there is money for him to go.

I know that he has heard bad things about the modeling, what that world does to the person, and he worries about her. She sees his worry as interference. Or perhaps she resents his seeming to advance any emotional claim on her by caring. Or perhaps I am too jaded now by her methods seen secondhand, her artifice turned artless when viewed from the wrong angle, the girls' side.

It is all-but-springtime when, after school, he seeks me out. Even without watching them together, I remember the events of what is to me a year ago, and I know what that means: she has discarded her line, cast him off as a catch she does not want to land. Her words can wound, I know; in broken whispers he tells me now which ones she used like Morgul-knives this time.

I can stay late after school today, past the late bus, because I have the car. My mother told me to drive myself to school this morning, saying that she would be busy over the next few days, so busy that I might not even see her, and I must not be stranded. As so often happens, I am grateful now for her forethought and foresight.

Now we sit together in the school lobby, after all the others have left, and I let him use my shoulder to try to force his tears to stay hidden, and to hide when they will not.

He firmly thanks me for being his friend, as if he is closing an account, and I know what it is that he is saying, because I once felt the same: he does not intend to live past her rejection.

I know better than to mention this directly; it will merely harden his stance. I know why he feels this way: his hopes in her were the only secret he owned. If his life is owned by others, the only thing he owns now is his death, and only because no one else wants it. It is the only part of himself he can feel, now that she has bled all his other feelings away. He cannot step away from it because he has nowhere else to stand.

Instead I gently raise his head so that he and I are eye to eye, and I tell him that I am still his friend, that he cannot stop that, and that I love him that way and more no matter what he says or does, or her, for that matter.

Now his tears are merciless, because I have taken his determination from him, leaving him with nothing. I replace it, gently, with a kiss. Then I tell him that I do not own him, that I cannot make a claim on his heart because it is not mine to claim, but I love him nonetheless and I want to share with him whatever he is willing to share. Then I kiss him again and I hold him to me, willing him to accept the warmth at my center into his own, where the fire has gone out and it is bitterly cold. Over long minutes I stealthily feed my fire into him, sharing it with him, even though it will give him the strength to reject it if that is his will.

I feel him stir, hear him sniff back his tears, and then he looks me deep in the eye for long minutes, gazing deep, trying to fathom why I would care and how I can stand to do so. Finally, failing to find fault with it, he has to accept it, even if he cannot return it in equal measure, and then he pulls me ever so gently to him.

Gently I let him take me into a kiss, and gently I return it, willing him to feel my caring. If this changes his lifeline and I am unmade because of it, it will be worth it; I love him and I wish him to live. Perhaps some of me will persist within him in his new future.

My hand roams up under his shirt, softly caressing his back, and then his hand is under my blouse, caressing mine. I slowly change our angle so that it is easier for him to touch the front of me, and know that I have won, for now, when I feel his hand pause on my breast where it waits inside my bra. I deepen my kiss, willing him to go deeper, and at last he does, his fingers dipping below the fabric edge to touch my nipple and find how hard it has gotten while awaiting him.

I stroke his waist, then hurriedly pull my hand away, and he does the same, as we hear the footfalls of someone in one of the corridors. We hear the rhythmic noises of a pushbroom and I realize that it must be a custodian. It is time for us to leave.

I stand, extend my hand, and whisper, "I want you to come to my house." That is in my words; in my eyes is, 'I want you.'

He nods, takes my hand, and rises, and I lead him out to the car and unlock it for him. It is hard for me to get my skirt to settle right, it seems to ride up so much, and I so much want it to, as I buckle myself in to drive. I glance at him as I push it down again, showing him a mock-rueful smile, and he shares that.

I extend the joke by flipping the hem of the skirt up, letting him see everything it was hiding, then smooth it back down. It is enough to keep him preoccupied for the short drive to my house, and when I let him in there is no one there but us. We pause for another kiss in the small front room, a kiss that allows him to explore me better once I undo my bra, and allows me to touch and caress his hot hardness.

As I lead him up the narrow stairs to my tiny room, I realize where my mother has gone: to the secret place where she and hers hold ritual communion with the Goddess. I would be there in sabbat with her, but my working here is more important.

It is the Vernal Equinox, the time of the Heavenly Marriage, and he is whom I have chosen for my lover. Freed of clothing, I bend down and kiss his erection, then I help him unroll a condom onto it to protect our pleasure from worry. I know it is his first time, and it is mine too, but, as his hands explore me, I whisper words of love and words of advice on how to work me, to make me captive to his hands, and he takes them in and applies them, making it difficult for me to speak or breathe. My hands roam his form too, welcoming him, reassuring him of my desire, and eventually he is at my entrance and then I am welcoming him home even as he batters down my gates with his ram.

Soon enough it is done, and the condom holds his seed, of course, but his spirit is not so confined. I feel it rising within my center, fulfilling me, completing me somehow, and I flow my love back over him even as my hopes rise. If we can be lovers for a year, if that can sustain him, then, even if he leaves after that, leaving me to continue as a woman alone, it will be sufficient just to know that he lives and that I love him.

I do love him. I know him intimately, cherish all his secret wishes and dreams, all the despondent groping towards something to hope for. We are compatible in a way that no one else can even guess at, save perhaps the woman whom I now call Mother though she is a Crone, because no one else but the Goddess knows who I am.

I even know the magic he has vainly sought, that he has never been allowed to acknowledge, though I can't tell him that yet.

How can I not love him, when I have willingly made of myself someone with whom he can fulfill those dreams, and in so doing fulfill my own? All of those dreams, he can find, if he is willing to accept my offering.

All but one... and that one is our hearts' undoing.

None of that is in our actions as we dress. Instead there is a true closeness, a casual touch that bypasses each other's guard with the password of remembered loving intimacy. There is more kissing, more shared amusements and thoughts, as I find us something to eat. Then he puts on his coat and picks up his briefcase, and I drive him to his home. Then we share a tired smile and a last brief kiss before he slouches inside, to somehow explain to the cold people there how he comes to be late.

My dreams that night are disturbed, but it is not until school the next day that I learn why. When I see him, he apologizes, and now I am horrified to see that I have helped him walk into a tighter trap. Now he feels guilt at what he sees as using me, even though I gave myself to him willingly.

I tell him so. I tell him that I know that she has his heart, but that I love him; if in time he feels the same for me, that will be good, but I cannot and do not demand it, and I am happy with what we now share.

Then I see how deeply he is tormented. He whispers that he does feel that way for me, that he loves me, and that he sees it as an equal betrayal of her and me. His despair is obvious, and I realize that, beset by dark thoughts and darker unseen voices, he has come to think that, in accepting a second hope in place of the one she spurned, he has become unworthy of both dreams. I try to tell him otherwise, that I accept him however he is, but he is not to be consoled. Then I see the darkness has already worked its way deep into him through the wounds of her words, closing in on the last of his hope, and I cry, and he turns away, perhaps mistaking my sorrow.

I go through the day heartsick. As soon as I am home, I go to bed, trying to sleep off this poison of the soul, hoping that my dilution is enough for him to shrug off its malice, but I know with inner surety that it is not.

I am awakened suddenly in the evening, feeling things in the air and knowing that those dark forces are exultant in their low triumph. For one petty moment, I look around for that envelope with a piece of her fishline in it, intending malice for malice, but I cannot find it; it must have been misplaced. I catch myself back up, then, returning my focus to what is truly important.

For me, there is inevitability. I have tried my utmost, and I have failed, but I have tried. Now I must tend to the closing of the loop. I dress in silence, pocketing things I will need, then, with a last look around at the room I have lived in for a year, I mount my broom and I fly, to wait through the final seconds close at hand, so that I can guide the pulling of the line that I left in his mouth, so that he will be landed in the Lady's Well, where he can live again in my own past.

It's time. I can feel it. Acting as his friend, I have gotten close enough to him to sense his moods. I know what horrid visions and thoughts they have been hammering him with. I suffered them myself up until a year ago, of course.

Now, floating on my broom in the still airs above his house, I sense it all from the outside as it happens. His spirit has curled up and withered today in the face of their constant mental assault, until, now, despondent without knowing why, he's drunk what he thinks is poison, but it doesn't just end his life, it ends his existence, and I am just in time in steering his departing soul from one Light to another. It's a potion, of course, one that tears him out of Time by the roots, unmaking his history unless someone steps in to fill the void... and that someone is me.

I silently descend to be level with his second-story window. I silently raise my phurba, and at my gesture the window screen slides quietly open. Now I hunch down on my broom and silently glide in through the open window, slipping slowly from lesser into greater darkness. Once through the window, I straighten up, cautiously because the ceiling is inches above my head, and look around.

He is gone, of course: erased from this web of maya. The drinking cup sits innocently on the bureau. I wave at it and it is unmade. I'll replace it later, but for now I want its evil out of the room.

The rumpled unmade bed is next. I gesture at it and its covers and sheets fly up in planes above the mattress, snapping taut, dislodging all traces of who he used to be and what has been done to him, flinging it all into the air where my guiding gestures vent it all out the window, before settling back down into hospital-corner tidiness.

I swish the phurba around, pointing at the floor below me, and a faintly shining circle brightens as it widens from a dim spot to a glowing ring resting on the floor.

Now I have someplace to put my foot down, and I carefully dismount from my broom, my bare feet making no noise as they touch the cleansed floor. I slip my phurba back into its silk-lined velvet sheath. Now my hands are free, and, careful not to step beyond the glowing lines, I set about sweeping outward with the broom, widening the glowing circle that edges the cleared space, until all the visible floor has been swept. Then with a gesture of my phurba I open the closet door and continue to sweep.

Now, pointing the broom two-handed like a weapon, I send clouds of that cleansing force across and through all furniture and impediments, until the very walls and doors are glowing from the baseboard up, a foot or more. Now turning deosil, I send out more cleansing, raising the lines as I work, until every wall, every doorway and the window and the ceiling are gleaming coldly with witch-light, cleansed and claimed.

Now I row the very air with the broom, sweeping everything that has been dispelled out the window until the air itself gleams within the room as if illuminated by hidden moonlight, and indistinct darkening shadows cling to the outside of the window, seeming to peer in after being evicted.

Finally I pull out my phurba again and make the window screen slide shut again. It too gleams: I had not forgotten it.

I walk over and touch the doorknob. The door had no lock before, but now it does, by my command. The door itself is now solid oak where it was a cheap open-core inside door. I reinforce the very natures of the hinges, anchoring them to the bones of the house, making them impenetrable. When I smudge a pentagram onto its surface with my fingertip, the door shines cheerily back at me.

Let the shadows crowd as they will, they cannot get in, nor can anyone open the door until I will it. After being cast out of this bedroom for a year and a day by my own hand, it is once again my domain.

I have changed, though. I slide my broom under the bed, making it cling to the underside, and cover it with glamour. I pull off my sash with its hidden cording, then I pull my robe up over my head and off, and hang both in the closet, leaving me skyclad.

There is a mirror above the desk. I walk over and stand before it, an indistinct shape in the darkness. Conjuring handfire, I hold the light up, letting it illuminate me. I look incongruous, even now, in this room, belonging and yet not belonging. My naked breasts have sharp shadows under them from the angle of the light. My hips seem angled wrong because they catch the light so crazily. My crotch is a hiding-place of warm darkness where all that can be discerned is that I have no manhood there.

If I think about the thoughts that occupied my mind when I last lived here, I could be aroused at the girl in the mirror, the girl whose flesh is mine now. I work at those memories, because now I need to recover that sexual awareness of woman. I need to act like a guy, even down to the inevitable erection when given a vision such as this.

Now I raise the other hand, this hand holding another kind of handfire, slightly different in color and intent. The two of them are the core of my seeming-spell. The interference patterns beat down upon my face and figure in the mirror, showing me a thousand different might-have-beens of size and shape and bloodline and gender, but I guide the effect so that the two shapes that alternate in the moire patterns are the two that I own outright: the girl that I now am and the boy that I was up until a year ago and a few minutes ago.

My male form grows stronger in the light and I begin settling it down about myself. I begin to feel the erection that I induced with my eyeing of my naked female form, and let that feeling pull me across so that, finally, all of the striations of the light show the same boy as occupied this room up until tonight.

I pause and look in sympathy at him, at his questing member that quivers erect and seeks a mate that it can never again find. For a moment I dwell on the memories of him from my year as the girl who was in some ways his girlfriend though only once really his lover.

During my time as a girl with him, I made time for him, made room in my life for him, and found private places where we could get close without being disturbed. We had a lot in common, since we were really the same person, and I leveraged that, to slip into his life, share his affections and brighten his days however I could until his inevitable end.

Now, in my role as the boy I once was, I can say that we cared about each other deeply, and I am still in touch with her, and when I am done with schooling here I will follow her. As long as I am careful in my choice of college, no one will know that they think of me as pursuing a phantasm of myself.

For the rest of my life, I will perhaps be a woman who sometimes looks and acts like a man, but that is an acceptable tradeoff. Their spells cannot bite in, because they are shaped to drill their way into a boy, hollow him out and own him; their bits will break before they can penetrate this girl. When they seek to find and own this girl who has his heart, they will fail even if they find her, for she will be fundamentally the boy they seek to control through her, so their influences will be all wrong.

In time I will learn how to keep this shape even when asleep. For now, I know that my bedroom door must be locked tight at night. No one must come in to see a girl sleeping where a boy is expected.

It's only for a year. One more year, and I'm out of high school, out of this house where devout worship allows dark things to feed, and on to college. I can do this. I can keep my bed magically clean of any secretions and menses from my inadvertent femaleness while I learn to hold my form all night.

Right now, though, I can pull on pajamas that would not fit my girlish hips half an hour ago, long enough to walk down the hall to the bathroom, where, for the first time in a year, I have to carefully aim. I will have to sleep naked afterward, of course.

Tomorrow is a new day, where today was not. I lived through this past year, up until tonight, twice, leveraging my foreknowledge of events to get this far. Tomorrow, the unknown begins all over again. As I fall asleep in a lonely bed that is once again mine, I look forward to it.

The unknown begins to surprise me when I wake up still male. My form feels more solid and stable than I achieved in my practice workings. Somehow my spelling has worked better than I expected; or perhaps it is because no one else now wears this form. That is less of a bitter regret than I expected; perhaps it is that I have had a year in which to know my loss before it arrived.

Now it is an effort to put on that girl's form, the form in which no one has any claim on me but that given willingly, but I assume it and hold fast to it, reassuring myself with its reflection. Then I regretfully retake my masculinity and dress it, having confirmed my grasp of my other shape, but with no time to explore that ancient familiarity or explore how I feel about it. It takes equal effort to assume either form, and that must suffice. It is a school day, and, passing through the cold family as if through a chill dream filled with wraiths, I go.

After classes, I am waiting in the school library with my briefcase at my side. I'm not sure why.

She cast him off with cold words and colder laughter, that I know. Why I should seek her out now, I don't know, I only know that I must know whether she still has the capacity to bleed my hope away, now that I am once again almost and almost entirely a man.

Perhaps it is the dark forces that dwell in the town. Their darkness cannot reach me now except through her. I must know if I am still hooked, and, if so, I must persuade her to discard the line for good, long enough for me to spit out the lure.

Eventually I see her enter, and I feel two years of bitterness welling up at the sight of her terrible beauty, a weapon whose edges have fatally wounded me twice. I cast that feeling aside; that is the poisonous residue of the darkness. This is a new beginning, and a new ending. The board has been reset, and, even though she plays for the dark pieces, I must let her have the first move.

She walks towards me, and, putting on a stiff polite smile, I curtly nod.

She stands facing me. I am in my accustomed seat, and hers awaits her next to mine. Around us, though, the usual pawns are missing. Instead, she is huddled, now, her head hung forward, sheltered by the cascades of her long hair, and I realize that she is sorrowing now.

Was this how it was, two years ago and yet only a day ago? Did she honestly have some feelings? Was my death so long ago something she did not want? Was she just too late to turn back and prevent it?

I watch her with curiosity, now, and now I feel anew the impact of her softly beguiling beauty, her deceptively gentle demeanor. My manhood stirs a little, feeling a connection with her on a primal level. This is more than we ever shared before; why am I feeling it now? We were never lovers, she and I. She still has the capacity to surprise me with my own feelings, it seems.

There is something else there, though.

Our eyes meet. I sit, she stands, both frozen in recognition.

Incredibly, it is him. Dressed in her flesh, it is his intelligence as well as hers, his heart-thrust-forward caring and his piercing scrutiny cloaked in her casual gentility. They are fused, merging, twin strands now spun into one life. I have its near-twin within me, and she is equally stunned to sense my two lives.

She sits beside me, now, and takes my hand in her own, and despite myself I am surprised: this is forwardness I cannot recall, ever, from her; but then, it is him somewhere within her eyes.

She whispers, "I will still model, you know; it is what is expected of me. But I will not be parted from you; not now. When I am old enough, I will go with you wherever you wish."

She peers out at me through that shimmering curtain of her hair, and I see tears glimmering in her deep eyes.

"Please... Wait for me. Don't leave without me."

"And..." Here she drops her hand to my lap, casually so as not to be noticed in this school library, and then, incredibly, I feel her fingertip gently stroking what is rising at my groin to meet it. "...Whenever I have to go model, every time, I want you to meet me afterwards so that I can give you back what you gave to me."

Stunned, I respond to the trivial to buy time in which to contemplate the monumental. One thing common to my life then and my life now is lack of privacy, other than, now, my room itself.

"Where?"

"The old house by the well. It's empty now, but it's ours when we need it."

This stuns me even more. "Empty. Oh. Oh no." I realize that someone I have loved as a warm step-parent for the past year must have crossed over. She sees my dawning recognition and she nods, but then I see someone else in her patient knowing gaze.

Now I recognize at last that her features always were those of the priestess at the well, the woman for whom I was a daughter for a year. I can see in the structure of her face how she might someday grow to be that crone, if she should somehow step back through the years in a closing of the loop. She also is here in her eyes, in her awareness, and, as I reach out with my other senses to learn, her spirit. There are three strands in her braid, and I realize that I love them all.

She nods slowly as she sees my recognition, and whispers a final addition to my first lesson: "I love you. I have loved you longer than you knew. Time does what we need it to. Time is within the Light, not controlled by it. So is form."

I feel one final tap of her fingertip on what is now erect, and then she pulls her hand back, but it is to take both of mine in both of hers. She leans close as for a kiss, glancing around for witnesses, and regretfully holds her position as she sees that she is watched by the librarian. She whispers, "Now that we both know that, we can wear what forms we please."

Her gaze pleads with me to accept her yearlong working that has brought us together at the end of three lives and the beginning of two others. I smile inside as I sense how heartfelt her words are. I feel an easing of a lives-long ache, a cleansing of a wound. The burden of becoming a man once more, of reassuming a form beset by others' strident claims on its life, is no longer so heavy, not when she is willing to respect it and share with it and perhaps sometimes share it.

The connection between us, heart to heart, no longer leaks life now. Instead, it resonates it, stoking and stroking it higher with each pulse, reinforcing us against the petty bitterness of the dark of the town.

I realize her cost now. She must have wrapped herself tightly in magic, allowing her timeline to be twisted to breaking to make amends, or to reach back for a dream too casually discarded as imperfect because someone imperfect dreamed it. This is both a gift from and a claim made by the Goddess, and, though it is not as I expected, I gratefully accept it. I let my eyes show her the kiss that I can promise her. My whisper is my formal acceptance.

"I love you."