The ever-thickening potion starts to froth and hiss.
“You should have no trouble using all sorts of magic with your heritage,” the witch says. “Endless possibilities race beneath your skin.”
“Endless possibilities?” I ask. “Aren’t we limited to our birthrights? And to oracular gifts?”
“Most are.” She looks at me like I need an intelligence-creating potion rather than a magic-unlocking one. “Are you like most?”
I shrug.Well, when you put it that way…
“What can the Gods do?” she asks.
Warily, I answer, “Pretty much anything.”
She stares at me, partly disgusted, partly expectant. Definitely like I just answered my own question. It’s the kind of look Mother used to give me, and I don’t like it any more now than I did then.
“I’m not a God. Far from it.” If I could do anything I wanted, I would have definitely avoided a few key moments in my past, like near-death by Hydra, for one.
“Shortsighted,” the hermit mutters, going back to her potion. “No vision.”
“Excuse me?” I say, stiffening. What does she know about me? About anything?
She shakes her head, stirring.
“Look. All I really want is the thunderbolt. It comes and goes. I can’t seem to control it, which means I can’t count on it when I need to. That’s what the potion is for, right? To make the magic flow?”
She turns back to me, her power-lit, light-green eyes disturbing. I’m suddenly glad I don’t see myself in a mirror very often. I don’t know how Griffin can stand it.
Looking down, I push a chunk of meat to the back of my bowl. It gets caught in a tangle of orange and white root vegetables. I’m not hungry anymore, and as I meet the witch’s piercing gaze again, the nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach grows.
“Born with the thunderbolt. Only the Origin was gifted so.” She scoffs, and her bitter tone strikes me as excessive. Honestly, I’m not just uncomfortable anymore. I’m confused.
Wariness and true unease unfurl where there was only caution before. “I wasn’t born with it,” I say slowly, definitely not adding that I’m the new Origin of Thalyria. “It’s only manifested recently.”
Her gnarled and spotted hand is steady as she reaches into the deep pocket of her shawl and then pulls out another powder, this time contained in a small vial. She uncorks it and sprinkles the entire contents into her potion pot. The mixture foams again, stinking so much that I grimace.
Holy Gods, how am I ever going to drink that?
Stirring briskly, she says, “No one gets new magic. Not unless it’s an oracular gift.”
Well, it wasn’t. Not this time. Does that mean I’ve always had it? Why didn’t I ever feel it before I met—
Oh.Pieces of my own personal puzzle click into place. Griffin. He’s changed everything in my life, changed me. Has our being together somehow unlocked power that was already inside me, just waiting to come out? The ichor? The lightning? He’s certainly upped my will to survive. And protect. Andfeel. Has the magic been there all along, but I needed Griffin to help bring it out in me?
I turn to him. Griffin watches me. He watches the witch. Like me, he’s hardly touched his stew.
Unfortunately, we still have the same problem we had before. Even if Griffin has helped make the magic surface within me, it still doesn’t work like it should.
I track the path of the hermit’s spoon through the now-lumpy sludge of her potion. I don’t want to drink it. I want to leave. That’s my gut feeling, but a big part of me wonders if it’s instinct telling me to go, or my stomach protesting the idea of swallowing something so vile.
“You want immense power in your hands.” The witch sets the spoon aside and then looks at me.
“I already have immense power,” I reply. “Now I want it to be reliable.”
She keeps looking at me, and I look back. I have no idea why we’re having a staring contest, but at least I’m good at it. Eventually, she turns back to her brew and utters a series of words in the old language—none of which I recognize—directly over the pot. Finally, with an odd hiss, she adds a carefully measured pinch of something granular and mauve.
Amethyst?It’s a balancing stone, enhancing intuition and mental powers of all kinds while also limiting their destructive nature. That would make sense for the kind of potion I need, especially when the magic in question is explosive, to say the least.
The coarse grains sink one by one, dragging the hissing top foam down with them. The potion suddenly goes still. All bubbling stops.
