Witches Of Windsor

As a child, Rachel would hide in the closet, as she watched her mother Alice would command the items around the house with smallest gesture and constant concentration. She would lift items, move them across. The moment she heard a sound, the items would set themselves down as if they hadn’t been acting of their own accord just moments earlier. Rachel's neighbour would come home and rant and rave about more and more witches being discovered in the village. Rachel's mother would nod her head politely in agreement, but Rachel knew her secret.

Whenever the ladies in the village enviously gossiped about how Alice managed to get so much done in a day, Rachel would smile knowingly to herself. She knew better that her mother was a witch.

When Rachel was twelve, she used similar gestures to her mother and cleaned her room ,switched on the lights sitting on the bed or lifted her plate above playfully and then settle it down on the table.Rachel was always careful to hide these things. The moment she heard the creak of the floor, or the door swing open, everything went to looking perfectly normal, perfectly un-magical. This went on for a few months,well it could not hid the curse.

Alice was a witch and so was Rachel.

The witches could never be with the human and some day or the other the identity would reveal and so it happened one day and before the villagers turned suspicious they fled.

They settled in a small two-bedroom house for six months before they moved again. The worry lines on Alice's face seemed to grow deeper with each late-night knock at the door. 

One house after the other, one town after the other, they never stayed in one place for too long. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel's mother sat down with her daughter to "discuss". She looked older than she was. She explained Rachel what they were and where they stand in the human world."There is always a portal between us and them and one should not cross each other' s" she said to Rachel.She viewed it as a curse,but Rachel never understood why. She explained they couldn’t practice in open and what the world thought of them.

Rachel stayed with her mother for a few months in the town of Windsor. Finally they found a small cottage in the edge of the town of Windsor near a creek.The owner had to sell it whereas Alice and Rachel had to buy it,he didnot come up with too many questions. He welcomed them as a widow and her grown daughter.

Rachel would go down to the cre

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ek and make little whirlpools in the deep water. Sometimes she would pull pretty rocks up from deep below the almost dry creek bed. Something about that creek made it impossible to stay away.It was magical and she enhanced her practise.

Rachel was always careful not to be seen,  On her regular walk home after a few month she heard little footsteps crunching through the leaves. She could gauge the little footsteps were running and she knew then that she was followed. By the time she got back to the cottage, there was a group of people with torches and pitchforks surrounding the house. It felt almost fake, like a scene from a storybook. As the thatch roof of their house went up in flames, she could hear her mother’s voice,"I told you to take precautions."

Part of Rachel wanted to turn and run,her mother was burnt alive now was her turn but she was unseen behind an old oak tree. She wanted to do something,avenge her mother's death,she and her mother had always wanted not to step in to the world of the human,but they killed her mother. Rachel wept and cursed herself as Alice's words played over and over in her head. "We weren’t supposed to be found." She whispered. "Still, it was done."

Rachel blamed herself,she should be damned for the act.

The thing about angry mobs is that they’re incredibly unobservant. . If they had, they wouldn’t have decided to burn a witch during the worst drought the town of Windsor had observed in twenty years. All it took was the snap of a finger to make an ember fall just right on the overgrown, dry grass in the cottage yard.

The entire perimeter of the property was engulfed, enclosing the angry group of people along with the house. Another snap and embers landed on roofs in the town, causing the fire to spread hungrily from rooftop to rooftop. Rachel stayed and watched, ensuring the only living things spared were the innocent animals. Even children were dangerous and she cannot leave her work unfinished.

Rachel left none in the entire town of Windsor alive all were engulfed in the fire, the fire that lit from her heart, tears, despairs.

Then she walked the worn path back from the creek to where she rebuild the cottage. The stone remains of the rest of the town were overgrown with moss and vines. The descendants of tThey have very little forethoughthe animals she saved in the fire ate happily. People no longer bothers her They hear stories about the witch that razed the town of Windsor.