Here and there throughout the room, various items were scattered about. Jars lined the windowsills on all sides of the room. A table of books and feathers and bricks sat in one corner. A fire extinguisher sat alone in another corner, and many other peculiar items could be seen in various odd places. This was the magic room. More appropriately, the training room. Once a week, for as long as anyone could remember, the Blanchard’s would gather together in the large square room at the top of Blanchard House. Only accessible from a twisting wooden staircase on the third floor, the room was actually the tower which crowned the front of the house. The tower was a very special and ornate adornment to the house. More like a fourth-floor room than an actual tower, but the family always referred to it as the tower to outsiders and the magic room within the family. The walls came up only halfway, about three feet from the floor, and from there wooden square frames held a multitude of window panes finishing the wall to the ceiling. From the tower room almost all of the Blanchard land could be seen. Historians would say this was where the old plantation master would have purveyed his lands and slaves, however if a historian did proper research, they would know that there was never a slave owned by a Blanchard.
It was in this room where all Blanchard children first learned to exercise and control their powers. Salem moved her first object in that room—quite by accident when she was frustrated that she couldn’t keep Beryl successfully frozen for more than a few seconds. Seth first altered the weather outside standing at the windows of this room. He had been trying to provide Daihmler with a white Christmas that year but only succeeded in summoning snow clouds over Blanchard House. The mailman had been quite stunned on his delivery that day. And Beryl healed her very first patient in this room when she was seven years old, it was her hamster Ricco who’d been attacked by Fable’s cat Mr. Ice Cream.
Many memories of struggle and triumph had been made in the magic room. Every Blanchard succeeded in cultivating their own special gifts here, and as time passed and the young witches grew, they found training still an important part of growth as they tried to master new abilities.
“What am I working on today, Hecate?” Fable asked. “There’s pretty much nothing else to master with my animal communication.”
“Try astral projection today,” Olympia suggested.
“Why bother?” Fable remarked. “It never works. I can only do the one thing. No matter what else I try, I can’t do anything but talk to animals.”
“You are the laziest witch I’ve ever seen,” Demitra scolded her daughter. “You can keep trying, you know.”
“Why bother? I’m only half witch. I think I’ve peaked at my talents.”
“Artemis and I are only half, too, but we still practice new things. You never know what could develop.”
“Well, I can use the distraction,” admitted Salem. “I haven’t been in the magic room for years. I have so many fun memories here. It’ll be good for me to get my mind off things. At least I hope it does.”
“Yeah, well you are a whole witch. It’s easy for you,” Fable sneered.
“Not necessarily,” Salem replied. “Seth is, too, and he can’t do much of anything but control the weather.”
“That’s because Seth is just as lazy as Fable,” Demitra chuckled. “I myself need to practice mind speaking.”
Olympia cautioned her daughter, “Be sure not to lapse into mind reading, they are two separate things. You are so gifted at the latter it may cloud your ability for the former.”
“I think that’s the problem,” Demitra nodded. “I am so used to using my psychic abilities to read minds or pick up trace memories from locations that I end up reading minds rather than speaking to them. I can’t seem to find that specific wavelength.”
With a reassuring pat on the back, Olympia said, “It just takes more practice.”
“What do I do, Hecate?” Seth asked.
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Olympia looked at her grandson for a moment, contemplating ideas. She went over to a small cabinet and withdrew a pendulum. She placed it on a nearby table and said, “Use this and attempt to stop it by freezing it in motion. Salem can do this, and so you could be able to do it as well.”
“Uh, is anyone gonna mention the fact that Salem can also lift up our lawn and smash it together in the air?” Seth cried. “Why is no one addressing that little feat since it happened?”
“What Salem did the other day was achieve a very potent levitation ability,” Olympia explained. “An ability she needs to hone. That is what I am expecting her to focus on today, by lifting those bricks in the corner and placing them on this table in the center of the room.”
Within minutes the Blanchard’s were all working on their various assignments, with the exception of Beryl and Artemis, who were not there. Beryl had rounds at the hospital and Artemis was running late from doing the grocery shopping in town. When she finally arrived and walked into the magic room she saw the kids struggling with their lessons. Seth was trying to halt time, but it looked more like he was swatting at invisible gnats. No matter how many swipes his hands took at the air, nothing manifested. Artemis thought to herself for a brief moment, maybe the boy should study orchestra conducting. Fable was attempting to exit her body and manifest her spirit across the room. She was having about as much luck as her cousin. Artemis suppressed the urge to comment, but if she had she would have asked Fable if she were trying to force herself to go to the bathroom--because that’s about what it looked like. Salem was trying to levitate bricks. She had more luck with her lesson. The bricks were not exactly levitating, but every now and then one shook a little. Demitra appeared to be working on something of her own which she was not sharing with the rest of the class. Artemis was pretending to work on telekinesis, but in fact she was trying to figure out what her sister was up to. Demitra was lost in concentration and every so often her closed lids opened and Artemis thought she saw her eyes darting from left to right at such a frequency it made Artemis think of a copying machine--scanning something.
“Hecate, I can’t get the bricks to move very far,” Salem admitted after half an hour. “I just can’t focus.”
“Try harder.”
“I am, but it’s not working,” Salem huffed.
“Demitra,” Olympia beckoned. “Stop what you’re doing for a moment, and look into Salem’s mind and tell me what is clouding it.”
“Michael,” Salem said tearfully; she didn’t need her aunt’s power to figure that out for her. “I can’t stop thinking of him. I can’t pretend my heart isn’t in pieces while I work on magic. I don’t even know what the purpose of having powers is if I can’t save my family with them!”
Suddenly the bricks jumped into the air and splintered off in all directions, crashing through the windows. Seth had to duck to keep one from smashing into his head.
“Well, I’m glad now I didn’t get around to washing those windows this week,” Artemis chuckled as she swept her long black hair behind her shoulder. “I’ll call the window guy tomorrow.”
“Take some time my dear,“ Olympia said rubbing Salem’s back gently with her palm. “It has only been a week. Your grief is as powerful as you are. Channel it, use it. It will help you.”
“Nothing can help me,” Salem said, collapsing into her grandmother’s arms.
The day’s lesson ended after that as Olympia took Salem downstairs for a rest. Seth and Fable left the magic room too, neither one feeling much like working on anything with Salem in so much anguish. Only Demitra and Artemis remained, tidying up the room after lessons.
“I wish I could do something, anything, for her,” Artemis said. “My heart is broken seeing her in so much pain. Especially when I know she still hasn’t allowed herself to feel the breadth of it yet. Most days she is coasting until she has one or two tiny breakdowns. Then it’s back to the steely face and acting like she’s just here for a visit.”
“I know what you mean,” Demitra agreed. “Once or twice I’ve tried to tap into her mind to gauge where she is, and it’s just too much for me to feel. The intensity of what she is hiding from us is so great. I know what that feels like.”
“She’s been like my own daughter since Nacaria became that thing on the wall,” Artemis frowned. “I have raised that child. I’ve doctored her scrapes and bruises. Held her in my arms when boys broke her heart. Rejoiced with her when she married and had a baby. But I can’t do anything with this. I can’t fix anguish of this magnitude.”
“Maybe we can,” Demitra said with a glint in her eye which disturbed Artemis. “Maybe we could do a summoning spell.”
Artemis was astounded. “I cannot believe my ears. You seriously are not suggesting this.”
“Just temporarily,” Demitra explained. “Just long enough for her to say goodbye.”
“No, Demitra. No. It isn’t a good idea to try to regroup old energy. Think of the people and things that now contain David and Michael’s energy. Stealing that out of them is dangerous. We can’t deplete another entity’s ethereal composition.”
“They’ve only been dead a week, Artemis. Who knows if their energy has even joined anything else yet? And even if it has, that person will just feel disoriented for a while. It would just be a little piece of them removed for a very short time. They’ll chalk it up to bad equilibrium.”
“You know as well as I do it gets way more serious than that, Demitra. No. Summoning their energy back is not the answer,” Artemis declared emphatically. “We don’t mess with that.”
Which Blanchard do you think has the best power?
