Cemetery Shenanigans
Part Three: Punishment

It all happened so fast. One minute I was standing in front of this strange woman, the next moment I was being guided back down the long hallway. A few minutes later I was being ushered into what I'm going to assume was the spare bedroom she had mentioned earlier. The bedroom was about half the size of the other rooms I've seen. Just room enough for a bed, a night stand and a small closet. The walls of the room had been painted a coral pink color, and on the floor there was an oval rug, also pink in color.

CHAPTER 46
University life was so very different from school. It looked, on the surface, as if we had much less work to do, lessons being fewer, free time seeming to be endless, but it wasn’t at all that way. There was so much background reading to do, for starters, and then we weren’t being handed the answers for later parroting. Our lecturers actually expected us to go out and bloody RESEARCH things, the sods.

The moon was high in the sky as Natalie took slow, tedious steps toward the cabinet in her apartment’s unused guest bedroom. The bedroom she now knew as the one Astian slept in before the… event.

There was only one way to end all her pain for good.

She took a shaky hand and grabbed one of the door handles, opening it to reveal a pistol on the top shelf.

It needed to stop.

She grabbed the pistol and examined it in her hands.

By any means necessary, it needed to stop.

*Sorry about being a day late, had some computer problems when I tried to post last night.

Joshua is utterly broke and desperate to boot.
That's when his neighbor Twilla offers him a little job on the side.
But not before revealing that she is a witch and the job in question is everything but ordinary.
Despite the drawbacks, Joshua can't help but partner up with Twilla.
However, her offer might be too good to be true.

There were more people in line than I expected for a town that size, more than we usually saw at the Brocksboro library on a weekday. Most were doing boring rejuvenations and improvements in each other’s appearance, as usual, but one couple venned each other into giant matte-black insectoids.

I was expecting to land on something soft. Maybe an awning, a pile of refuse, a puddle of water, anything,. That was how it worked, right? In stories, the hero would face certain death and then find themselves saved just in the nick of time by mysterious circumstance. I was no hero. Instead my body hit solid ground. Rough round cobblestones greeted my body; the shock came first, then the pain, then the garbled, muted scream that barely escaped my lips through a crushed windpipe. Rib cage shattered, left arm twisted and malformed, knee caps cracked.

Have you ever looked over the edge of your life and pressed the rewind button in your brain? Just looking back at the things you might have done, could have accomplished, or conquered like a battalion on a literal battlefield of life? I’m pretty sure the general in charge of my life was either asleep at the morning briefing or he was annihilated and no one informed me as I ran up and over the hill into the line of fire.

Charia is the head councilwoman of the Central Witch Council. An organization that keeps mundanes unaware that magic exists.
Today is the review day. She and other council members are apprised of recent misuses of magic by agents working for the council.
However, this meeting derails as more and more cases appear to be connected.

Another slow, boring day at work. The corporate drone in the meeting Natalie just left had been going on for hours about a bunch of stuff she didn’t remotely care for. What was the meeting even about anyway? It had just ended and already she couldn’t recall.

At least her lunch break had arrived so she could openly drown in her sorrows in the worker’s lounge. She hadn’t actually brought a lunch, eating would require a level of effort and commitment that she, at the moment, wasn’t able to uphold. She hadn’t eaten breakfast either, she simply couldn’t eat at all.