The old magic abides. For six friends, that means new experiences in each others' lives, as new magic is spun and a web is woven.

---

Circle of Friends

--Kiai 03jun03/28mar04/16mar07

 

 

Hi, I'm Richard, or at least today I am. Want to know something weird? I'm in the body I was born in.

Yeah, I know, you want me to explain. Okay. Where to begin...

Ever heard the expression, 'walk a mile in my shoes'? It's not funny when it happens, especially when there're more than two sets of shoes for you to walk in. You get used to it, though; I think people can get used to just about anything, really. In this case, there were six of us, plus, eventually, two surprises, but that came later.

We weren't so much a tight crowd in high school as just a group that got along real well and liked to do things together. We could try things out, make mistakes and get messy, and trust that nobody in the group would laugh at us. We laughed with each other at our mistakes and messes often enough, but it was never cruel. So we ended up tight, and I ended up knowing a lot more about a girl's growing up than your average guy. Hey, I helped pull off a sticky sanitary napkin when one of the girls, I won't say which one, was starting to leak and she was too drunk to manage the job herself. That's the kind of trust you don't find too often.

The funny thing is, as close as we all were, and despite the fact that, strictly speaking, we were three couples if we chose to pair off, we didn't get really intimate back then. It was like we were all too close for sex, and anyway we had something better: real friends. I'd fantasize about the three girls sometimes, and so did the other guys, and the girls let it be known that they fantasized about us sometimes too, but nobody got around to doing anything about it physically back then. Not because we were too young, either; there were two temporary pregnancies in our grade already. Maybe we thought we'd break something if we tried. Maybe we would have, at that.

How it started, I don't know. Kim was playing with the occult stuff -- you know, runes and Ouija and crystal-gazing, trying to open her Third Eye, as she put it -- and Matthew was playing around with hemi-sync tapes and two sets of headphones, and giving all of us a try... and I was, well, I was probably astral traveling, though I called it "going someplace interesting". Maybe it was all just dreaming, but it sure felt real while it was happening, and there were a few times when I woke up with bruises from fights I'd been in while I slept, bruises I hadn't had when I went to bed.

Or maybe it was Halloween, when, after all the little kids were in from their trick-or-treating, we all went over to the Old Grove. It was on a rise in an older section of the forest that surrounded the town. That place, if you looked at it in the day, didn't seem like much, not unless you really looked, and then it was impressive.

There were old trees there, I mean old, real old growth. Some of those trees seemed like they were at least a hundred feet tall, and they looked as if they'd been there since the beginning of the world. Maybe they had, which made them real special when you think that nobody'd gotten around to cutting them down, a couple hundred years back when a lot of the forest was cleared out for a while for farming. It couldn't have just been the rocks, there at the heart of the place, because you could walk around them or sit on them. It wouldn't have been that much trouble to plow. Something made the people back then leave this place alone.

It was misty and cold and nice and spooky in that grove, then, and we just sat there in the dark for a while huddled together, boy-girl boy-girl, seeing if we could see anything special, anything at all. We never did see anything, but that place sure gave us all a strange feeling, like there was something there that we should have seen but couldn't. By the time we left there, we were all ready to go sit huddled by a lit fireplace together and drink something hot.

Maybe it was all of the above, I don't know. I just know that, on the seventh of November, all six of us woke up in the wrong bodies, and, just to make it real embarrassing, the wrong sex.

I didn't know about any of the others when I woke up, of course. I just recognized that I was in Kathryn's bed, and then I got up and went to the mirror and found out I was wearing Kathy's face and Kathy's everything-else. And, just in case I wasn't too spooked by it all to even think about exploring how things felt in Kathy's everything-else, I also had Kathy's mother hollering at me from downstairs that I was going to be late for school if I didn't get dressed and get down for breakfast.

That morning was... interesting. I'm sure that Kathy would have chosen different clothes to wear than I did, and I'm sure she would have worn more makeup. I just threw on stuff that looked like what I'd seen Kathy wear and got going, the less said the better. I didn't need Kathy's mother asking me who I was and what I'd done with Kathy. She never had time to notice because I was out the door so quickly. I needed that extra time to find out where the other kids were lining up, and even then I almost missed the bus.

I had homeroom with Kathy and Kim, so that's when I found out that Kathy and me weren't the only ones who got swapped. Kim told me she was Joey, and my own body, Richard, told me he was Sharon, and we wondered what happened, and then it was time for first period. It wasn't until lunch that we could all get together. Fortunately, nobody else was paying attention, because all six of us were acting weird if you knew how we normally acted. Joey's body kept doing these little fluttery hand things while he talked, which was normal for Kathy but odd for Joey, and he had to tell me three times to close my legs and stop showing off what was in my skirt. We got schedules passed around, and advice on who to avoid and what to say to who, but nobody had a clue how this had happened, and that's about when we ran out of lunchtime.

After school, we had more time. I should have gone to chess club, and Sharon had acting, and Matt had track, but we all skipped those to meet in the library to talk this over. Kim thought it was the Old Grove that had done it, and, thinking back, maybe she was right, but at the time we didn't have a clue about Old Magic, and so we all blew that off. We thought this one switch was going to be permanent, so we were pretty much focused on helping each other to manage living in a new body.

That idea of permanence kind of got blown away the next morning when I woke up in Kim's little bedroom, and had to fake being Kim long enough to fool her little sister who slept in the same room. Fortunately, I'd listened in on what Kim was telling Joey, so I wasn't totally lost.

One thing we'd made sure everybody knew is how we all got to and from school, bus numbers and bus stops and everything, just in case, so I knew to allow extra time because Kim walked to school.

This time it was Kim in my old body and Matt in Kathy's body who met me in homeroom. Matt hadn't heard anything Kathy had told me, so I had to warn her to expect her period and even find one of Kim's pads to give her.

Lunch was almost a repeat of the day before, except that I was getting used to girl-sitting, so nobody had to tell me anything about that. Kim did ask me why I was wearing a bra, though; she was small enough that she usually went without. I'd noticed that before, but I wasn't sure if she did that all the time or just for us guys in the group and so I'd played it safe.

This time the after-school conference was all-to-all, with everybody sharing what could be vital details on fitting into their life. Unlike the day before, I didn't feel that we'd near covered everything by the time the late bus left and I set out for home.

That evening, Kim's little sister wanted a bedtime story, and I gave it my best shot. She told me I'd done the voices all wrong, and how could I use that expression when I was pretending to be the fox-woman, but she hugged me anyway and went right to sleep afterwards, leaving me lying in the darkness in the next bed listening to her breathing, and wondering who I'd be when I woke up, and when the change would actually happen.

It was another day before I got to be a guy again. When I went to sleep in Sharon's bed and Sharon's flannel nightgown, the next night, I was worried that I might just wake up as Kathy again, female forever. I woke up as Joey, though.

That morning was strange. Joey has strict Fundamentalist Christian parents, and I had to sit through a morning prayer before breakfast. I was almost out of time by the time that got done and I could eat. Then I was supposed to hug both of his parents, and kiss his mother on the cheek, before I could get out the door. In one way it was neat, and in another way it was very scary. Those parents of his cared a lot about their kids, you could see it in everything they did, but they were so sure that they were right that they didn't have a clue. We, the six of us together, had kept Joey out of drugs, not them, but there was no way you could tell them that.

And so it went. Every night, every damn night, we'd rotate.

We got radios. Fortunately, we all lived within range of each other. Every morning we'd get up early for a group conference, then split off twice to share an update on the previous day. If you weren't up on time, you missed out on your clues for the day, and so did the person you were supposed to brief.

At least, back then, the rotation didn't vary. I'd have three days as a girl, then three days as a guy, with my own body as the last one before I was Kathy again. I could wake up in the morning and know who and what I was without even feeling around.

All of us got awfully familiar with being in both kinds of bodies over the next few weeks. None of us were willing to experiment with each other just yet, but we all had fingers. It made the girl bodies look less foreign, especially when I was wearing one, but it didn't make them less interesting. It made the guy bodies more interesting when I was in a girl body, and that made for interesting fantasies.

Maybe it was that 'been-there-worn-that' familiarity, but it got to where we could sense where each other was, and sometimes what the others were doing. It was like a web was growing, a web with all of us at the same time out on the edges and in the center, and it made the six of us closer than ever. By now we were hanging out together all the time, enough so that other people were starting to try to guess who the couples were within the group.

We actually gave some thought to pairing off so people would have their curiosity satisfied and they'd go stare at somebody else. The rotation worked against it, though; there'd be no way for us to make the pairing look real, not with six people playing the parts on different days, and that'd focus even more attention on us.

That didn't mean we didn't spend more and more time thinking about each other, though. What was weird to me was how, more and more, my fantasies went along with the body I happened to be wearing. On a day when I was Kathy, I might fantasize about any of the three guys in our group, my own body included. When I was one of the guys, the girls were on my mind a lot.

It started to affect how we'd act towards each other. We'd be together as a group, and out of nowhere the thought of being naked and intimate with one of the others would bubble up, and everyone would pick up on it and suddenly be in the mood too. Suddenly we'd have three girls hugging themselves and three guys dealing with the tree that sprouted in their front yard. All of us got equally familiar with, not only feeling the effects, but watching the other side experience them.

It got to where we'd think nothing of being naked and aroused in front of each other, because, of course, we'd not only seen it all, we'd worn it all and felt it all.

We even starting teasing each other. The mood would flash around, and then we'd have the guys showing off their erections, especially those who started out as girls, and those of us who happened to be girls at the time would respond by flashing our stiff nipples. Then we'd hang out like that for a while before putting everything back on so we wouldn't get caught.

Finally school let out for the year and then we at least didn't have to pretend to people our own age; instead, we had to pretend in front of parents who didn't know what we were going through and couldn't have understood if they had. I guess every teenager feels the same way, but in our case we had real reasons for that attitude.

We went on a lot of hiking trips and beach runs that summer, and hung out in the town's parks a good deal every day, at least until mosquito time. Our folks thought it was smart of us to avoid vegging out in front of the TV, but we were more concerned with not having to put on an act in front of them. It gave us a lot more time to learn all the little details about each other's lives, so we wouldn't be caught unprepared when they came up.

On those hot summer evenings, if we had someplace where we could get some privacy, we'd end up with everybody topless, sharing the sweat. We all got real good at getting all the tank tops and bikini tops back on real quick if somebody showed up. It was funny sometimes, when someone would reach for a familiar top and have it pulled out of their hands by the person who really needed it, and only then realize that they didn't need it that night because they were a guy.

Towards the middle of the summer, we got back from one of those all-day beach runs and hung out for a while at Kathy's place, because her folks were out a lot. That happened to be who I was at the time. I went upstairs, pulled off my bathing suit, showered, and then walked into the den wearing a short tee shirt and nothing else, just to see how long it took everybody to notice, and how they'd react.

They reacted, all right. I had the other guys-in-girl-bodies pulling off my shirt and kissing my boobs, and then the guys were doing it too, so the other girls took off everything and got some attention too. The guys got attention as well; there was a lot of fondling going around, all of it playful but all of it seriously affectionate too.

That party went until late, and a few of us fell asleep waiting for the right movie to be on. When we woke up, those of us who'd dozed off were switched all around again; I went home in Sharon's body.

After that, the change didn't just rotate us, it mixed us up every night. At least we had some kind of 'override' on the constant switching, though, now that we knew about it. If you needed to be in a particular body, you could do that if you could get some time alone with the person who was wearing it, long enough to take a nap together.

With all the switching around, relations with our natural families had to suffer. Sharon's family was Jewish, and Joey's were fundy Christians, of course, and the rest of us had laidback parents, but the position of each of us in the family was getting to be just a role, something we memorized to go with the form. With six roles to be played, that's all they could be. That distinction distanced us from our other family members even when we were in our own bodies. Joey had it the worst.

Joey had long since discarded his parents' beliefs, of course. He had to. As intelligent as he was, the glaring logical holes in their doctrine gave a a nursery-rhyme taint to it all, especially once he started seeing it through others' eyes. It would have been like believing in the Tooth Fairy even after you caught your parents in the act of swapping the tooth under your pillow for money. What he was going through just didn't match their dogma at all: knowing your place and being happy in it meant exactly nothing when that place kept moving.

That didn't give him anything to try to replace it with, though, just an emptiness he hadn't expected of life, and it left him lonely and dispirited, forced out of belonging to something that was warm and well-meaning. Now he was beyond them in a way he hadn't asked for, and he was hurting for it, especially so one day when he was sitting alone in his own body and feeling cut off from everything that was supposed to go with it.

The rest of us had to notice, of course. I waved to Kim and Matt and we all gathered around him, sitting close and hugging him. I told him, "You've got a family right here. You know we're going to have to all be one big family. There's just no way any of us can cope otherwise."

There was agreement from the other four, of course. I had crystalized something that we'd been feeling lately: that no one outside our group of six could possibly understand what we were going through, and we would have to build our own family based on that. Now we had a reason to work on that too: replacing some of what Joey had lost.

Over time, there was a little bit of telepathic leakage, and that grew, slowly, with all six of us trying to push it along. It was a survival trait for us, really. When I was Kim, I could think questions at her and at least get general-feeling responses, enough to fake my way through her close family relations. The others were working on their own interconnections, for the same reasons.

It got to where we could do the radio net without radios. That was easier after dark, so we'd get up even earlier, before dawn, using the radios only when things had to be passed precisely.

By then, Kathy and I had a constant connection going no matter who we were wearing. Then Joey and Sharon did too, and Matt and Kim were working on it. Kim still tended to connect easier with me and Sharon than to the others; there was just something about our personalities that made the connections easier.

Meanwhile, we were exploring other connections.

The first time Kathy and I had sex it stunned everyone because "it was so LOUD," as Matt put it.

The others had gone to see a movie that neither of us particularly cared for, so we went to the beach instead. With just the two of us there from the group, we spent most of that time staring at each other and trying to hide the effects from the other people there. When we got back to town, we both knew without speaking what came next.

We were lucky to line up that way on a date night, so we stayed out late. In the woods behind Kathy's house there are deep gullies, good for hiding out, and we'd all improved on that. We'd put up a brush leanto there over the summer, big enough for the six of us to hide in, but that night there was just us two, so there was loads of room.

The fact that I was in Kathy's body at the time, and he in mine, might have had something to do with it. When he pulled the bikini off me it was like it was something he had every right to do. To be honest, though, I was just lying there, hungry to feel him put it in, desperate for some relief and for him.

For the two of us, part of the intensity was the fact that we were sharing the feelings of each other's bodies, sensations we'd come to accept as our own, since they were from the bodies we were born in, even when they were felt through the connection. The others picked up on it just fine, though, and it turned what was intended as a social outing into a makeout session that got them some stern looks from the other people in the cinema.

Back in the leanto, in the afterglow, we were laughing about putting Dick's dick into Dick. It was funny at the time, even though I don't like that nickname because of just that pun.

Joey and Sharon were the next to try it, and they even managed to be in the bodies they were born in. It took Kathy and me a couple of months to manage that. We kept trying, though, and, between the two couples, we managed to keep a stash of condoms ready in the leanto for when the opportunity arose. Matt and Kim had a dry culvert that was closer to them, so we seldom saw them at the leanto unless it was to borrow some.

When all three girls went on the Pill, it felt like all six of us were doing it, really. The new mild sensations of false pregnancy became something we were aware of even when male. Not that that was anything new to us, really; almost as soon as the original sharing had started, all three girls' periods had come into sync, independent of any other women in their immediate familes. Our group was just closer.

Eventually we had to impose scheduling rules. The coupling was so intense for everybody, involved or not, that we had to pin down times when it was safe. That often meant doubling up. Fortunately, even with Joey and Sharon joining us, there was still room for Kathy and me in the leanto. It was adequate, but crowded, and we started work on something better to replace it; now that we were using it regularly, we wanted something a little sturdier. It was good protection against being caught, but we needed something to protect us from the weather too, I mean, winter was coming. Even in the middle and end of summer we could see that.

School resumed, and now we were old hands at acting our roles there. One thing that did change was, with our connections to each other, our grades all went up drastically. Not that we didn't study diligently anyway for the classes that went with the day's role, but, once a fact or procedure was learned by any of us, it was there for all of us. It was insurance, and that's how we used it.

Near the end of October, the pull started. By Halloween it was unmistakeable. We were being drawn once again to that ancient bit of old growth, out there in the woods. On the seventh of November, we went up to the Old Grove again, chatting as we hiked in about just how much had changed for us in just one year.

It was foggy that night, but not too damp, just enough to make everything spookily misty. The hush of the still air, combined with the way our own sounds were muffled by the damp leaves, made the place almost dreamlike when we reached it.

The mist also made it rather cold, but we'd brought blankets to huddle in. Sitting together like that, after a while hands started to roam across familiar flesh. Then, since no one could see us anyway, just the six of us, we paired off according to body couples and started celebrating being alive. I was in Kim at the time, but it didn't really matter, the way all of us were feeling everything that any of us felt, with an intensity that went beyond the senses.

We must have all climaxed around the same time, and then, when I next thought to notice, I saw that I had Sharon's breasts. I felt around our web and realized that everybody else had changed too. So we went at it again, and this time when I could breathe again I was in Kathy. We had time and energy enough for one more, and I actually ended up in Richard.

Through it all, there seemed to be an extra something there under the trees, or in the trees. None of us saw it, but we felt it, and we came away from there very sure that, not only was there something there, but we'd not only touched it, we'd shared with it, celebrated with it.

By midwinter we were all in constant contact, even to exact words and images. We could "listen in" on what each other was experiencing, even if we were miles apart. From then on, the radios went unused. We all knew or had ready-to-mind what we needed to know to handle whatever role we woke up in. We also could know what every one of us was feeling at any one time, without reaching, just by paying attention, we were getting that close.

With that kind of sharing, there could be no arbitrary boundaries, so, when Sharon in Kathy's body, and Kathy in mine, wanted to have sex, the logical response was obvious. 'Do it and share it around,' was the vote, actually more like a unanimous instinctive reaction.

I was being Kim at the time, and I crept up to my bedroom. While they were lighting up the link with incandescent foreplay, I was fingering myself, contributing my own heat and lightning, and trying to do it silently, acutely aware of the little sister asleep on the other side of the room.

It felt like I was actually part of that coupling, feeling the female side of it because of what flesh I was wearing, but experiencing the joining along with all the others. As I settled into sleep with a fierce afterglow, the thought occurred to Kathy and was passed around: 'We are all one couple composed of six.'

From then on that's how we played it. We were deep enough into each other's minds by then that no secrets were possible, no emotions were overlooked, so it truly didn't matter what bodies we wore among us anymore.

Back during the summer, we'd started building a dugout in the side of a forested ravine well down off a ridge in thoroughly untended Federal land. With the six of us spending as little time at home as possible, the project went quickly, finished by the second weekend of the fall school term. Bag at a time, we hauled cement down there. It took us a couple of months but we built a half-assed foundation for a cabin. We didn't bother to put a shack up on it, we just roofed it over, put a wood stove in and buried it. Then there was room for all six of us when the horniness was going around. There was even room for the bicycles, which were the only practical way for us to reach it, given our school year schedules.

Now we were putting that hideout to use, gathering there to talk, to have sex, or just to cuddle. It felt like we needed to spend that free time together to reinforce the growing bond that, increasingly, was the one stable thing in our lives. That little hideout felt like our only real home, a place where we could be ourselves. We went through the rest of our senior year that way.

With our near-perfect grades, all of us were accepted into schools in the Boston/Cambridge area, so after graduation we went to the city and rented a house. Then we had the summer to prepare for college life, all of us together, with nobody to tell us what we couldn't do, finally with someplace larger than the hideout to ourselves.

That new independence included getting part-time jobs to help with tuition and expenses. Our timing was perfect: that was when graduates were preparing to leave jobs they no longer needed. The most menial jobs couldn't get too boring when no one had to do the same thing every day. Even if your hands were busy with mindless work, somebody else was usually doing or talking about something interesting, enough to take the distracting edge off the repetition. We did well as a result, and had a couple of quick advancements and raises. Finances were still tight, but, sharing as a group, we were easily getting by.

When the fall term of school began, there was that sharing again, making it easier for us as a group. We all studied for all, necessarily, but it made it easier to learn: the studying seemed to spread solidly across the web of us six, with the knowledge caught and held somewhere among us for retrieval, along with cross-discipline connections and insights. In fact, it could be distracting, if you were trying to discern what you knew as opposed to what one of the others knew. Anyway, that was a waste of effort, since none of us were ever out of touch.

When that seventh day after Halloween arrived again, even though that pull towards the Old Grove was there again, and stronger this time, we couldn't hope to get out to our town, not on our schedules. Besides, it was rainy and cold outside this year, and that would have made any hiking a miserable experience.

Instead, some of us gravitated together downstairs in the living room, which had a fireplace. Four of us quit studying for the evening and settled in, getting cozy under a big blanket, all sitting in front of a nice warm fire, and then hands started to wander and be welcomed.

Suddenly the four of us were standing up long enough to pull off all of our clothing, and then we sat back down under that blanket. The blanket didn't stay on us long, though, with all of the energetic movements under it.

Joey stiffened on top of Sharon's body about the time I orgasmed into Kim. Then Sharon lunged for me as Kim reached over for Joey and those two continued. Sharon and I looked at each other, deep into each other's eyes, simultaneously nodded, and just flowed into each other. Then his hand was bringing my breast back up to full arousal while I stroked his dick to stiffen it back up.

It was the first time any of us had ever intentionally swapped except during sleep, but it was the right thing to do. Kim and Joey sensed it; they did it too.

Matt wandered in, spooked by the changes in vibes. I looked up at Sharon, and he paused and nodded grinning, so I made eye contact with Matt, and we flowed into each other. Then I got busy on Matt's breast while Joey massaged my dick.

Kathy had been napping, but then she woke up and came in already wet. We made eye contact, once again there was the flowing, and then I lay down and spread myself so Kathy could slide into me.

Eventually Kathy slumped onto me, momentarily spent. At that point Kim caught my eye... and then all of us went dizzy. Then I was wearing Sharon again, and we all resumed for one more round before dinner and study, knowing we'd all experienced, not only more loving sex than a normal person could ever know, but a breakthrough as well. We were no longer at the mercy of sleep and random transfers: now we controlled it ourselves.

Later that evening after studies, Kim, who was wearing Kathy and sitting on the toilet, thought at me. I was wearing Matt, with Joey who was wearing Sharon. I reached out and Kim and I flowed across. Then I finished and wiped up and washed while Kim and Joey filled the link with more fireworks.

I could feel trial swaps going on all around, but I had done a lot of that lately and I was more ready for bedtime than bedding. No matter; I sat down on the couch and immediately I was in bed alone wearing Kim, with my fingers at my crotch, two fingers inside.

It had been Kathy, of course; her persistent horniness was a constant by then. So was mine, for that matter: I immediately started stroking my clit and my G-spot, putting more sexual energy into the air and trying to bliss myself out so I could sleep. After a bit, Joey wearing my body came up to finish me off. We were all quite late getting to sleep that night.

The next morning, I woke up in Kathy. I was the only one awake, and it was getting late, so I dressed Kathy's body in Kathy's trademark faded jeans and black turtleneck. Kathy had the earliest class; the others would be up in time, I was pretty sure, since I could feel them drifting towards wakefulness, but that didn't help at the moment.

I was gathering Kathy's books when I felt Kathy wearing Sharon rouse and shake Kim wearing Matt awake. Kim pulled himself out of Kathy and Kathy got up quickly, stumbling a little with Sharon's long limbs, and met me in the downstairs hallway, almost at the front door. Kathy tugged at me from across the room, I turned, and we flowed across. Then she went out the door while I went and pulled Kim into a sloppy good-morning kiss.

Kathy, still minutes out of sleep mentally, slipped and fell on the wet leaves on the steps outside. I felt her part in the mesh go vacant. That brought us all awake. There was a frenzy of belting on bathrobes, then Kim wearing Matt and Sharon wearing Richard went and brought her in. She'd banged her head pretty good on the stone step. There was no blood, but she was out of it for a few minutes, and I could feel the headache as she roused.

I was her public boyfriend, so I swapped with Sharon and got my body dressed, then I took her books and notes and attended the class for her that day before going on to my own schedule.

We all managed to cover all of her critical classes while she was walked over to the medical office. Their diagnosis was that there was no concussion, so Kathy was back into harness next day; but it was a cautionary experience. If something like that happened again, or something worse, what would we do?

Matt had most of the day off, so he spent the time on the Internet looking into healing, magical and otherwise. After classes, the five of us gathered round Kathy in a circle, holding hands and doing our best to prove our love for her by "bringing in the Light". It was haphazard, but after a slow start we could feel something happening. Kim and I put our open hands on Kathy's head, pulling on flows the same way we'd pulled each other across to trade, but this time pulling healing. We could see a little bit of a glow under and around our hands, which was amazing considering how untrained we were, but, after all, it was five people's worth of energy.

It seemed to work, though. Kathy's headache was nearly gone, and she was less pale and she just felt better, safer.

We shut down the circle like Matt had learned, then we gathered around Kathy, just wanting to all be close to her at once, still a little shocked at what we knew was a close call.

"We have to do this some more." We were all feeling that, but it was Sharon who put it into words, and everybody started nodding and talking about it. For self-defense, we needed to learn to do magic, whatever that was, and first we had to find it; so we went looking.

Gardner, Farrars, Cunningham, Cabot, Starhawk, Huson, Castenada, Crowley, even Masters & Houston: topic by author by tradition, we built our library, putting up shelves in the front room, because suddenly we were serious about learning witchcraft, because, from everything we could read, that's where the magic was.

We found that singing helped us to sync up better for moving energy around, so we found Goddess chants and learned those. That led us into music.

We could be in our own bodies when we wanted to now. If we flowed in, we were less likely to trade when we slept. With all of us so deep into each other all the time, it was mainly convention by then, something we did to fit into the world outside and keep it from guessing our secret, but it gave us a little more stability for some activities. Kim's fingers knew her guitar best, though all of us had string-calluses on our left hands by now from her determined practicing. For that matter, all of us could at least play bar chords now, even if the rest of us had nowhere near her speed and dexterity; somehow the skills we were individually learning were spreading across the link, perhaps from our constant casual swapping.

Matt had been nearly tone-deaf before. Now, hearing through others' ears when his voice wandered, he learned to keep himself on pitch. After a week or two, he tried taping it. Surprise, now he could do it when no one else was within hearing. That pleased him no end; he had always enjoyed singing, but hated being told to shut up when he could only add sour notes.

With our link, we could gently sing unison, which came out as a spooky kind of whisper, we were so tightly in sync together. Our six-part harmonies were glorious -- still with that extra-tight synchrony of syllables and rhythms, but in wide chords.

Kim made up a round that we all liked, and we all helped with the words, so it was all of ours, really, and it felt like it. We'd start it off softly with the lighting of the altar candle, barely whispering but in sync, then gradually get louder as each corner candle was lit. We'd be singing full voice by the time the circle was brought up.

That song was powerful. When we sang that song, we would bring up a glow that we all could see. Our auras would get really bright around all our edges when we felt when it was, not only all on pitch, but practically in phase. Our music was leading us into some real power, and we were happily following it, equally pleased with the magic and the music.

Sharon had had some piano lessons. With a little help from a spare-change collection, she bought a used synthesizer. Matt hooked it into the stereo system for her, and then we had more than just Kim's guitar to back us up.

We needed more rhythm, though, so Kathy bought a tambourine. She and Joey took turns with it. She'd be wearing Richard (my body) when she played it, since she liked having strong arm muscles for playing it, and for some reason I liked singing female better, so I usually wore her body when we sang.

We weren't sure how far into the Wicca stuff we wanted to go, but we made a point of singing every full moon for maybe an hour, maybe more, depending on the mood and the music and the magic. It was our version of an esbat, and it usually had a nice silvery feeling to it.

That feeling came easier one evening in particular, with the moon shining in through the front window, peeking over the building across the street. We actually cut a circle that night; Matt used a wand he'd built and Sharon used an athame she'd bought, to cut power-lines we could see and feel, claiming the whole living room for our music-magic.

We were just finishing a new song of Kim's with Matt's words, something really powerful. On the coffee table in the center of the group, the two candles, silver and gold, were starting to glow blue when we reached the ending chord, held it for as long as all of us had easy breath... and then there was a furious knocking on the door.

I swapped with Kathy, went and got my baseball bat, and went down to the door. Matt was waiting for me, ready with his fists. We made sure the door was chained, and opened it.

There were two greying longhairs standing on our porch. They were male and female, we could sense that, but they were both wearing robes, so it took a moment for us to pin down which was which.

The woman stepped up to the door and said, "Merry Meet. May we come in?"

I looked at Matt; he shrugged. I unchained the door and let them in. Kim put the kettle on for more tea while we shared around the spice bread Sharon had baked for afters, and we chatted.

She called herself Marla, and he called himself Herne, and it was obvious that these were their Circle names. That was something we hadn't thought to adopt, though we knew about them; among ourselves, such names weren't needed. Now we had trouble remembering these invented names we were given for them, because they didn't seem to fit them, really. It was more like the names kept sliding off them somehow.

The topic came up: did we know what it was like to be in a real coven? That was a puzzler: we knew we had something special, but we had no idea how being in a real coven felt, so we had nothing to compare it with. Finally, Joey expressed it for all of us: "No, what's it like being in a real coven?"

The woman smiled, a kind of twinkly wrinkly smile in a weathered face. Then we felt a nudge in our network of minds. Startled, we all started zeroing in on the source, and it came again, stronger.

It was her.

Then we felt him join her, boosting her presence, not invading, but... present, and getting stronger by the moment.

At this point we all thought about the shielding we should have been learning, as their presence got more forceful. Then they started pushing their way in, and we reacted automatically and started to close them off. They started to fight that, and then suddenly they were no longer there. They were still there physically, we could see and hear them, but we had shielded them off.

The man mopped his brow with his sleeve, while the woman gave us a sad look and rose to her feet; he rose too. She said, "Some other time, perhaps. You're in our neighborhood; that's why we dropped by."

His comment, as they slipped out the door as soon as Matt opened it for them, was more succinct: "Merry Part."

In the aftermath of that, we all had a long discussion, in spoken words so that we could try out new thoughts. It was our first real conference in a long time, but then, this was a major new development and it had us spooked. Who were they really? How did they do that? What were they trying to do? And why?

We had one answer ready to hand, because it was obvious: they'd tried to take control of us. That meant that they assumed they had the right to do so, and that made us nervous. Over the next week or so, we quietly asked around at the places where we bought our books and ritual supplies, and got more answers.

Marla and Herne were fixtures of the Craft community. They wanted to be high priestess and high priest, which was a dignified role for elders, and for that you had to have covens under you, and lately they hadn't been having much luck in keeping those. In fact, most of their own coveners had hived off and voided, so they needed new coven members for their own circle.

That was the wrong way to go about getting some, though, at least with us. After that, we spent much time learning defense, offense and astral working, and a lot of time practicing how to make high-intensity flows of the power go where we chose. We got good at that, especially when we sang; we could make candle-flames leap on cue when we were all in sync. We also blessed and shielded every wall, every opening and every wire coming into the house, just in case they decided to try it again from outside.

Then we more or less forgot about them. Christmas was coming, and with it a chance for us to reaffirm individual family relations in traditional family celebrations. For the first time in a few years, we could be confident of attending those in the bodies we'd been born in.

That was fun, but sad too. Even as we were sharing out highlights from our own family gatherings, all of us were reaching out to help Joey stay calm and collected, as well as, surprisingly, Matt, whose parents had separated when he was leaving for college, and who had to remain neutral in the face of their increasing bitterness towards each other. Getting through that soap-opera was tricky for all of us.

It was late January when Marla next came to mind. With early classes, we had to be early risers, so we were early-to-beds as well; we could chat mind to mind as we fell asleep, cuddled up or alone as we chose, so there was no need for any of us to stay out late.

We were mostly asleep when a loud wordless cry sounded within our web, and that brought us all wide awake. It was her again, but this time it wasn't an assault on our shields, it was a desperate call for help. We all felt her pain and panic as she earnestly reached for the hidden forces of the world to guide and support her in her time of need. We just happened to be closest, and perhaps the most attuned to her, so we started automatically focusing on her and sending what help we could.

Then, quickly dressed, most of us started running for the subway, because we knew where she'd be.

When we got off at the Charles Street station, we saw the ambulance from the aerial walkway, cutting its way through the traffic beneath us, and we knew it was hers. When we got to Massachusetts General Hospital, she had just been brought into Emergency. We had a few minutes with her then, and, though she was groggy with pain and fighting a concussion, she managed to tell us what had happened.

She'd been hit by a car skidding in the snow through the crosswalk. She'd narrowly dodged getting her legs run over as she fell; she said she had the luck of the Goddess with her on that. She'd taken a blow to the torso on the curb, which had her worried about possible rib and hip fractures. Aside from all that, she had bruises on her face where it had struck the curb, and pavement rash on her face and hands and legs. She wasn't in good shape.

The four of us standing around her stretcher started sharing and dissipating her pain and pushing life at her, making it soak into the broken places and telling them to mend, now, before the doctors got to her, because her older body wasn't so resilient anymore and the decisions of doctors tended to have lifelong consequences.

Meanwhile, Matt and Joey set out searching for Herne. Using the link that the four of us at the hospital had with Marla, they could sense him, track him, and finally found him just getting out of the subway, stumbling up the exit steps into the snowy street.

He didn't so much as blink when he saw Matt and Joey, he just said nervously, "Where is she?" and Matt answered, "We know where she is. Follow us!" and started towards the inbound stairs of the same subway station. Herne nodded, turned and followed them to MGH, saying nothing.

By the time they got there, she'd been in and out of radiology and was waiting in a semiprivate room for the diagnosis, so we all left him at her bedside after giving them our phone number. Marla was even groggier by then, but she came out of it long enough to accept a kiss from Herne and to tell us all, "Thank you."

Herne called us next morning to thank us, and to give us her bedside phone number, something none of us had thought to note when we were there. Then he had to go to work, and we all had our class schedules, but we managed to fit in a daily visit by at least one of us; it just felt like the right thing for us to do. With one of us on-site to guide, the rest of us could pause what we were doing and start humming up the power, and the one who was visiting her would direct it.

We actually did some healing, I'm sure of it, though exactly how much was our doing and how much was other forces is something I guess you never know for sure. The doctors were sure that she had at least one fracture at the thigh as well as cracks in bones and a possible greenstick break, but Marla got up and walking on a cane within a few days. It was a Saturday, so we were all there, circling round her as she walked and doing more healing when the doctors weren't looking. They took fresh xrays to find out why, and all the breaks and cracks were gone, leaving just bone bruises and torn skin for them to mend and tend.

The next day, Marla was discharged into a wheelchair, and of course we were there, crowding into the elevator with her and Herne, who had rented a car. While he went and got the car, we stood around chatting with her on the sidewalk, but as soon as the car pulled up she wanted to talk to just the girls.

Since I was wearing Matt at the time, I was one of the guys helping Herne get her stuff into the rented car, so I couldn't just break off and sneak a listen to what was said, but I didn't need to anyway. The web went live, with the three girls all sending exactly what they heard and adding their own feelings and thoughts to the mix. I had a hard time paying attention to loading her luggage, it was so overpowering, but I was glad I did.

"Did you know that he--?"

She was talking trash about one of the guys, little knowing that the guy she was talking about was one of the girls huddled with her now. There was silent laughter across the web, because everyone knew that the stories were false. The sad thought was passed around: she's still trying a power-grab, now by divide-and-conquer.

The girls didn't say anything to contradict her, they just listened wide-eyed as she talked, and finally she wound down, realizing that she wasn't going to get a response she could use, at least not yet.

Between myself wearing Matt and Sharon wearing Richard and Kathy wearing Joey, we guys managed to get everything packed into the little car, and then the girls were helping her into her seat. Then we all stood and waved goodbye to them as they drove off from the hospital, before heading for the subway, all sadly thinking pretty much the same thing: Merry Part.

Maybe it was to get the bad taste of that out of our minds, but after that we started looking for Pagan get-togethers to attend, other Pagans to meet, and, after we discovered the Horns & Crescent newsletter, we found them. We met others in the Craft, and then other covens, and then we started getting invited to circle. Sharon had a sewing machine, so it wasn't that hard for us to pull together robes, and besides, with the six of us all robed, it looked like fun!

In time we had more trouble from the pair, but then, after our intense exposure to the two of them after the accident, their thoughts tended to leak through our shields, so we usually knew when they were nearby, what they were up to, and how to defuse the situation harmlessly.

Their coveners were another matter. One by one, we would meet them, only to find them usually trying to cause trouble. When we asked them, "Why are you doing this?", the answer was always the same: "You're in our covendom. If you don't like it, you should move out."

"Why should we?" was always our answer. The idea that we lived on their turf seemed like something out of a gangster movie, an assertion that we couldn't accept. We had our rented house, and that was where we did our singing magic, and none of what we did was aimed at them so they had no cause for complaint.

Their response was usually to go away mad and then try something. We knew about the Rule Of Three, but we'd never really seen it in action. We just knew that, with all six of us united in fending off whatever it was, it would bounce back at them; we could feel that much. A couple of times we heard afterwards that the person had left the coven.

Finally we sensed them giving it up as more trouble than it was worth. Whatever their coven was doing, it had nothing to do with us as long as it wasn't aimed at us, so we refused to be budged from the idea of peaceful coexistence, and maybe that was what was needed.

We were more interested in other Craft-oriented activities anyway. There were musical events listed in the newsletter, and we started attending them, wanting to see how others put together music and magic.

At one point we rented a minivan and drove up to Salem. The event was good, but the ride was better. We all came away impressed by the freedom that went with having a vehicle that would fit us all, and the unanimous verdict was, "We should get one of these."

Looking around, we eventually found a used Caravan in good shape, and, with my parents cosigning for the loan, we bought it. Now, between the back storage inside and the luggage rack outside, we had a way of carrying ourselves and our instruments, and we started thinking of adding a few drums to the collection of instruments.

I had picked up a bass guitar, one I could play with Kathy's hands, and a small amp to go with it. Kim had a new 12-string, and we two put in some serious practice, swapping the three stringed instruments around to see what felt better on what songs. The two of us rounded out the sound then, finding ways of putting a chunky bottom under the songs where required, and driving the song forward where that was needed.

Kim was talking about getting an electric, but we all knew that that would put our sound too far into rock territory, losing the openness we had worked so hard to build and perfect. I could just about handle the 12-string in Kathy's body, I'd worked up her hand musculature that much, but no one else wanted to handle any of the guitars, and we needed a six-string acoustic in the mix to keep our sound open the way we liked it. Kim got the electric anyway, just because, but there was no room for it in our sound, not yet.

Even with that limitation, we started feeling pretty good about what we were doing musically. What had started as a way to convince the magic to come when we called had become something we could use to make another kind of magic, the magic of new ideas in song. Now we were starting to feel like we were ready to let others hear it.

One of the places that we'd taken to visiting regularly had music on the weekends, but when we wandered in there on a Tuesday there was nothing scheduled. After talking with the manager, we got up on the stage and performed one of our better songs, using a borrowed guitar and a borrowed tambourine. The sparse audience was appreciative, so we came back in two weeks, fully equipped.

The place was a lot more crowded this time; apparently word had gotten around, just from that one song. The talking stopped when we started singing, and stayed stopped until we took a break. We wowed them, or at least we thought so. We did a couple of sets, filling an otherwise nonmusical weekday night event with our songs, and then we got down and started packing so we could get back to town at a decent hour for school the next day.

Immediately we had people gathered around us talking mile-a-minute. Before we knew it, we were booked for Beltane at a gathering in the central part of the state, and somebody was pressing us hard on the idea, "Ever thought about recording?" We took their card and promised that we'd think about putting a few songs on the Internet in mp3 format to see if anybody was interested.

Packed at last, we were getting ready to leave, and almost missed it on the way out: Herne and Marla at a table, sitting by themselves with a defeated air, shunned by the people around them.

Once again there was that automatic urge to help. We knew these people, after all, especially after linking to them in order to do the working of healing Marla, and we didn't wish them harm. We resented how they'd tried to take control, but that was obviously no longer a problem. Perhaps we could make real peace now, if we could find the proper opening.

As one, we pulled our instruments back out and gathered around them where they sat. Marla looked up at me, startled, so I took the opening and offered, "Sing with us?"

We went back up for one more set, this one of standard chants and rounds and songs everybody likely knew, with Marla and Herne among us. With them involved, it was less of a performance and more of a sharing, and the sharing got infectious, it was so much fun. We got most of the room to sing along with us by the time we were done. I caught Marla grinning, and then I saw Herne, a little lost, smiling and contributing his part.

This was new behavior from them, and our web was thick with discussion of the two of them even as we sang our parts. Maybe she had faults to iron out, but she could guide power as she sang. Him too -- he was right there with her, supporting her, and conducting and enlisting the males in the room, not trying to force anything, but offering the opening. Even for the grumpy solitaries in the corners of the room, it got to be too much fun not to join in.

Then we were all caught up in the moment. We felt both of them at the fringes of the web, not forcing, just there and enjoying, so we touched them a little closer. We let them be part of at least the outermost layer of what was being built in the song, and Marla got wide-eyed, smiling as she sang, and Herne was intent on his part but his eyes were smiling too.

It was getting late when we finally we broke for the evening. As we packed up our instruments for the second time, the group evaluation being passed around was, yeah, that worked. Then, proving it, Marla came up to me and Kim and told us, with none of the superior attitude we'd been seeing, "That was fun. Thank you very much."

Kim looked up, grinning, and said, "We could teach you a few of our songs if you like."

Marla looked surprised and delighted as she responded, "That would be good!"

We invited them over for a songfest the next weekend, and then the next, and then no invites were needed because by then we were thinking of them more as rehearsals, because they really did work as part of our music. So we slowly drew closer over the next few months, they and us, and then as a full moon approached it seemed only natural that we invite them to a sing-at-home esbat.

They brought gifts for the priestess. We didn't know how to take that, really, so all three of us who were female at the time gathered to accept.

"What are you all doing for Samhain?"

When we all drew a blank, she invited us over to join them for a sabbat ritual at their circle, and this time we had no reservations about accepting. In truth, we had no clue about Samhain because we hadn't thought that far ahead, because we were too busy with what our new friends -- because that's how they were behaving now, like friends -- added to our sound.

With Herne putting a gutsy rhythm on the six-string acoustic, I could play the twelve-string parts, and then Kim finally got to use her electric, adding soaring counterpoint leads as well as some real punch within the verses. Sharon got a couple of new keyboards so she could add more than one tonality at a time to the background, giving Kim's electric a solid foundation.

We had both Joey and Kathy on tambourine by this time, playing off each other's rhythms, but lately sometimes they got buried, so Joey went out and got a field snare for some of the louder numbers, and then Kathy got congas. Now Marla added bothran, a kind of flat wide drum that put the bottom on our rhythm where a kick bass would be, and then we finally had our instrumental sound filled out the way we wanted it.

On the vocal side of things, Herne's mature baritone and Marla's smoky contralto added to the richness of our sound. With them in the group, now our sound could go where we wanted it to go, from somber whispering chants to roaring full-voiced themes, without turning it into rock and losing our uniqueness.

We were all settling into a good groove, all eight of us, enjoying this even as we worked harder than ever at covering all our bases -- school, work, music and magic.

And then it happened. We were all together on a Friday night, kicking back and enjoying being done with the workaday week. Sharon had been busy in the kitchen making some more of the spice bread that was a Sharon trademark by now, and, when it was done, pulled it out of the oven and brought it out to share around. Sharon happened to be wearing Joey at the moment, though, and Herne did a doubletake.

Kim was playing at a new chord progression while wearing Richard, which was, of course, my own body. I put down the 12-string and got busy handing around the fresh-cut pieces as Sharon cut them, which was my usual contribution, but then, I was wearing Sharon.

He got it. He pointed at Kim in my body, then at me wearing Sharon, and I nodded. He pointed at Sharon wearing Joey and then at me wearing Sharon, and I nodded again. Then he pointed at Kim and at Kathy who was wearing Kim, and I nodded again, saying in as casual a tone as I could muster under the intensity of his gaze, "Yeah, we're all over, now, sharing it all, whenever we want to be."

He got goggle-eyed, and roughly whispered, "How?" and I shrugged, at a loss to explain all we'd been through in few words, or to explain the magnitude of our changes when so much of the experiences which produced those changes were so deeply private to the six of us. He must have sensed that, because he dropped his gaze, abashed.

In the mental silence which followed his intense scrutiny, I could clearly hear the woman, even as she kept her gaze downcast and averted. She was silently, bitterly laughing at herself for her earlier behaviors, now knowing the impossibility of ever controlling our web.

We could feel him react to her self-recrimination. He hugged her close, and offered up loving energy to her. It was pitiful, but heart-warming, too, seeing how the two of them did whatever they could to try to work together as the six of us now did automatically and completely.

"Hey." I walked up and hugged the two of them together. After a moment Matt in his own form did the same, followed by Sharon wearing Joey and Joey wearing Kathy. The two of them looked up from each other to me, the man craning his neck to do so, and I caught their eyes. Careful to show the right kind of soft smile, I told them, "You're welcome when you share..." Around us, the others nodded agreement.

The woman closed her eyes, and then there were tears leaking out as she was nodding and saying, "That would be good. Thank you."

We gathered together bright energy and wrapped it around her, letting her choose whether and how much she would accept. As it soaked in, it visibly buoyed her up, and then him too.

She looked up. "Would you like me to show you a circle dance we use?"

"Sure!"

She stood up, then gave me a narrow gaze. "Are you a man or a woman?"

Unsure of how to handle that, I looked down at myself, at the bosom that Sharon had grown, at the kind of body I was born to want rather than wear, and asked, "What do I look like to you?"

She gave me a patiently doubting look, and repeated, "Are you a man or a woman?"

This time I had what had to be the right answer because it was true: "Yes!" I grinned, delighted to find that such a simple answer was all it took to be honest.

She looked at me, caught and decoded my grin, and cackled. Then she put my hand in Matt's and took his free one, and Herne took my free hand. We all chained male-female, then listened patiently while she taught us the dance.

Something about the dance was making me very aware of being in a female body. I could feel Matt feeling it too, not arousal but awareness. It was powerful, the way that it pushed genders at each other. This was a dynamic we weren't used to; we were used to flowing through genders, sharing them.

Finally, when all the steps were learned, we danced it. As we circled, the power slowly rose, like a barely-visible mist about our feet and legs, until my legs were getting tingly and goosebumped in the pantyhose I was wearing. I could feel Matt's scrotum puckering as if it was cold, and then my nipples were tightening. As it got more intense, I felt his tightening too. I wasn't so much aroused as extremely aware of being an embodied female and in the presence of an embodied male on each side of me; it was the kind of excitement that makes it hard for you to draw a deep breath, but I had to breathe deeply anyway for the exercise of the dance, while the feeling rose and intensified until I was very sure that I could count each hair on my scalp from the inside.

The two stopped their dance suddenly and thrust their arms high, and we clearly saw the glow that traveled up their arms to a point in the center of the room. We all echoed the move, and the power, for that's what it was, crawled up my arms too and went up in a wave that left me breathless and suddenly more than a little moist underneath.

I could feel all that power, unspent and clinging to the walls and ceiling, ready to be commanded by whoever knew the way to do so, and then Marla took Herne's hand and, together, they raised their free hands and guided the power into reinforcing the shielding we'd raised around the place. Only then did they drop each other's hand. Marla turned, looked around at each of us, smiled, and said, "That was impressive. What you all raised. No, what we raised." Then she grinned at her own words and added, "But you all were most of it." She turned and kissed Herne, taking him into her embrace in a way that told us that that was often how such rites ended. You could just see the sexual tension easing between them, or perhaps being exchanged for a firm promise of later activity.

The thought went around: they are showing us deep secrets of theirs... Can we? Should we? Would they want it?

The idea became an impulse, and we gathered in and hugged them together. They broke their kiss, looked around at us, then began hugging around. I seemed to be the closest to their attention, so I was the one who cleared her throat and asked, "Would you like to see through another's eyes?"

Marla turned and regarded me curiously, and I added, "We can share a little of what we do, if you like. Sit down."

She and Herne did so, and we all gathered round, sitting where we could. Two of us remained standing: Matt on one side, by the woman, and me on the other, by the man. We gently touched their temples with fingertips, then let our nerves conduct them in, and so felt them enter our web. We let them sense a little of each of us, then opened a path between them, reinforcing it with our own awareness but carefully keeping the pathway clear of our clutter.

They stared at each other. His hand went to her breast; she caressed his side. We eased our hands away but steadied our support, letting them set the pace but making the pathways obvious and firm from our experience.

Her eyes shifted focus to deep within his eyes, and then, from Matt, I could see him do the same. Then, unexpectedly, I felt them slip across, and held them up with my mind as they passed, keeping the support strong.

I felt her in his form. His hand went to his new crotch; hers went to the breasts that weren't part of her experience before, gently touching with fingertips. Then she looked up, and he did the same, and I sensed them sensing us all around, trusting us and gratefully taking in the new viewpoint, the the expansion of possibilities.

No one spoke, but then, no one needed to. All of us were sensing the flow of their thought as they examined the new wealth of sensation for more than a few minutes. Then Matt thought at them that perhaps they should turn around and go back. Marla in Herne's body broke eye contact with Herne in her own and looked at me and asked, "Can we keep this for a few days?"

I nodded. "If you both want that." I looked over and got Herne's gaze, in the woman's eyes, and she nodded and smiled, still too entranced by the differences in awareness to speak.

"Come back when you're ready to go back, then." I smiled; "if you're not here already, that is. Or already back."

We felt them sharing the change with each other, groping for valid roles in the exchanged flesh. Sharon went and got more spice bread and passed it around, and the two of them chewed thoughtfully, their eyes still holding each other's gaze, still wrapped in the other the way lovers do. Finally the man-within-the-woman who was Herne asked, "So we're not trapped."

I shook my head. "Nope. You can probably go back yourselves. It's a lot easier when we help, right now, anyway... It just takes practice."

"And the connection, the sharing...?"

"We're always like this."

She nodded, a little sadly, as if we were privy to something she could never be told.

It seemed like the right thing to do, then, for us to back away and let them feel each other more than us. They felt the web of us easing off; there was a moment of panic from Herne as she felt her connection with her male form fade, and she lunged with her mind, clinging to the feeling of the connection, before noticing that it was down but not gone. She realized and relaxed, and I confirmed it, saying, "You're still connected. Both of you are. You just have to sense it. It takes practice, but it's there."

They were back in a week, already back in their own bodies, but arm in arm, physically and emotionally a lot closer to each other than we'd ever seen them, and a lot happier. Sharon, who let them in, asked them, "Not that we mind or anything, but, if you've already figured it out, why are you here?"

Marla grinned in a shy way and said, "To share...?" and Herne smiled and nodded agreement with that.

"Oh. Well, then... Merry Meet!"

And, share they did. They would come over at odd hours, or invite us over to their little apartment, more temple than living quarters, whether to learn or to teach, or to sing, or just because we got along well together, because now we all did. At their place, Herne and Marla were often switched and teaching each other the priest and priestess roles that went with the forms, and we all learned right along with them, adding our own insights to the lessons and boosting the power that they could put into that little circle of theirs so that it was easier to learn with.

We usually ended up singing when they came over, and, over the months, every time we all sang together, the link got stronger when Herne and Marla joined into it, and then eventually we could feel and hear them fully in our web when they were close by one of us, and then it got to where they were part of the web no matter where they were. Increasingly, the only thing separating them from us was their ages and their living quarters.

Samhain came, and, after all the trick-or-treaters were off the streets, we all trooped over to their place for a classic ritual celebration, one which they led. Now we all meshed so well that they didn't try to push, and didn't need to, instead it just worked, with all of us filling our parts as a team, pushing our magic around to fit the turning of the year.

On what we'd taken to calling Seventh Day, all eight of us crammed into the Caravan and their Celica and drove out to our town. We parked at my folks' place and hiked up to the Old Grove. This time we knew just what we were celebrating, or so we thought: new ways, and old ways, joining as equals, the only way an inner joining could ever happen, in 'perfect love and perfect trust'.

Marla and Herne together cast a circle, then, within it, we spread out all the blankets and, discriminating only by who had what would complement what each of us had in abundance at the moment, we began our celebration of life. How many times we exchanged forms I can't tell you; at times it felt as if I was three or more people at once, at one point even pumping into myself. As the afterglow lifted, the thought went around, asking, what is the next step? Then it seemed as if the answer came from the trees themselves.

For some reason, all of us felt that we should get into our birth bodies. It felt as if we had to complete something that way. When the flowing was done, we partnered for a final round of ecstatic intimacy.

In the shared afterglow, Marla looked up at me from within my arms, and then I clearly heard her voice speaking in my mind: 'This is like the Great Rite.'

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Herne raise his head from Kim's breast and grin and nod, and then I knew that this clear speech was being heard by all of us.

Kathy's mental voice responded, 'Isn't it?'

Herne mindspoke then, in an interesting blend of tone which was somewhat in the middle between how his voice sounded and how he sounded when he was wearing Marla's form: 'No, it's better.' He looked around at the rocks and trees of Old Grove, and all of us took in his newcomer's perspective.

We had all played here when we were young, growing up with the place, really, so we were long-familiar with it. Now, through his eyes, we saw it afresh, and savored his discerning view of this place which was surrounded but undisturbed by the touch of man, with its lines of force reaching down through the milennia to the roots of the world. His summation was quiet but clear: 'We didn't call in the Goddess and the God. We went to them instead.'

I mindspoke, 'So they called us into their presence.'

Marla grinned up at me: 'That's what it feels like to me!'

'Then they've been doing that to us for a few years now. It's why we're like this.'

Marla silently nodded, her eyes widened, and we heard her thinking through the religious significance. I looked around.

We were all glowing, now, with what we'd raised in our ecstacies, and it seemed like the glow was partly us and partly what permeated the Old Grove. Now it felt like there was something we were supposed to do with it, something that the Old Grove, or the abiding presence which we could now feel within it, wanted us to do, something that needed to be done.

Sharon got it first. She flowed into Matt, who was on top of her, and then pulled out and stood up, calling out softly in his voice, "Everybody, get in your performance bodies and let's sing 'Build The Light'!" As the wave of background thoughts which he summed into that statement spread throughout us, we all suddenly understood what it was we'd come here to do.

"Build The Light" was that song that we'd all helped Kim dream up, even though she was the one who put it down on paper. It was the one song with the most group effort in it, and maybe that's why it was the most magically powerful in our repertoire. We suddenly knew that, whatever it was that abided at Old Grove, it had helped us create or recreate that song, for a purpose. All songs are spells, of course, but that song was an explicit one just waiting to be noticed.

Now we started singing it softly, with Joey and Kathy clapping the tambourine part, spontaneously putting new accents in it just right to drive the glow higher and brighter, until we all spontaneously got to our feet and joined hands in gender alternation, all of us nude but not naked, clothed instead with intent: sky-clad.

Marla and Herne stood conjoined, in the middle of the group, wearing each other's forms, holding each other tight as they sang. Singing as we circled around them in the dance they'd taught us, and surrounded and supported by the mostly-unseen but forceful presence of the Old Grove, we sang them young.

They had some explaining to do, later, of course. You don't just suddenly change from being near sixty to being in your late twenties or early thirties, not with the kind of jobs they had. Fortunately, they were both out of the broom-closet where they worked, so they could just answer, "Witchcraft, of course."

We kept working on them, of course, now that we knew how it worked. Every time one of us others saw them, we'd make another tweak, healing and youthening them some more. We did it through them, of course; there was nothing forced about it. They were in the link now, so they were part of the decisions on what was needed when.

Marla had to get used to having a period again. She joked about us demoting her from her crone status, but then she'd turn around and tease Herne a little about it when they happened to be swapped at a rainy time of month, and then the six of us, especially those of us who started out as guys, would be in there reminding Herne of how PMS dissipated as it was shared across our web.

They were part of us, now, and they belonged at their full vitality, even though, since they weren't college students, they didn't usually share forms with the rest of us during the week. Their workday jobs were enough alike that they could share freely between themselves, and that seemed to be enough to help the magic work on their bodies.

Even though they had their own close binding, built of their long history together, they shared with us as we shared with them. We knew their circle secrets without being told, and they knew our history almost as if they'd lived it. We knew their Craft lore, too, and their familiarity with the Pagan community-at-large in the area.

We also shared with them an impetus that we'd brought with us from the Old Grove, something hinted at in what we'd done on Seventh Day. It wasn't until the next sabbat that any of us figured out what it was.

We had all gotten together for a Yule celebration which was partly a classic ritual, with Marla and Herne serving as priestess and priest, and partly an evening of song, and, yes, of ecstatic celebration. At the close of the evening, all of us were pleasantly glowing without and within as we sat together under blankets, watching our Yule log burn.

It was Marla, as he casually held Herne close as she sat in his lap, who looked around at the group and commented, "You know... This is a coven..." And then Herne smiled and added her agreement, "Is it ever."

Then we all knew that we'd been waiting for that realization, to sum up what we'd experienced so far, so that we could take the next step. Whatever this way of living conjoined soul to soul had made of us, we were also a coven, and covens often grew and then hived off, propagating from within, carrying the core tradition in each new grouping.

We had already, with Marla and Herne, proven, without ever meaning to do so, that we could initiate others into our ways. They had a closeness of their own, something we six with our own closeness had come to respect and love even as we shared the greater unity with them. There was nothing to prevent us from teaching others, all eight of us, and then this coven could grow and spread, at least anywhere that there was old growth forest.

It would take a special kind of person, though: someone who knew enough of modern Wicca to understand its customs and its magical logic, but who wasn't afraid to 'live with their skin off' all the time, not just in-circle, in ways that we now knew were old-beyond-old.

You don't find many of those these days... or do you?

And that's why I wanted to talk to you today.

We know that you have a deep commitment to the Craft; we know that you have power, and, from what we hear, you use it justly... and what I'm picking up from the thoughts you're radiating now shows me that we were right about that.

You were in a coven, but you're presently solitary.

Would you like to learn from us, sing with us on the sabbats and esbats, and maybe join us?

---

Disclaimer and notes:

The preceding story is fiction. Real places and publications were used in its setting, but any resemblance between any real persons or groups of persons and persons or groups as depicted in this story is strictly coincidental. In particular, the characters Marla and Herne are NOT drawn from nor modeled after any particular persons, rather they're a synthesis of personality types common in the Craft community.

The Horns & Crescent newsletter, the successor to the magazine Harvest, carried a print calendar of events which covered Pagan events in the New England area. It had converted to an online calendar publication, at http://handc.org/ by the time this story was written, now best viewable in the Internet Archive.

For a more general look at witchcraft in the real world, point your browser at http://www.witchvox.com/, The Witches' Voice.