Affinity Witch

Chapter 9: Impossible Magic

The next evening, Sabrina rushed through dinner with Maedra and Gerta, gulping down her soup and nearly swallowing her bread whole as the other girls settled into their chairs and arranged their napkins on their laps, chatting animatedly about their day. While she normally would have enjoyed eating with her friends, every moment spent eating was time away from her research, time that was already far too limited.

Apologizing to her friends, she returned her empty dishes to the serving counter, then hurried out of the Essen Hall, made her way to her workroom, closed the heavy wooden door firmly behind, her, and applied a silencing spell, ensuring she wouldn't be interrupted.

She'd used every free moment she'd had over the past few days to practice taking apart metals and putting them back together again, and she'd successfully performed the actions on every single metal object in her possession.

While such successes were certainly something to be proud of, no one changed the world or made life-altering discoveries by sitting around congratulating themselves. Successes were meant to be built upon, each one a brick in the foundation that would ultimately become a tower of knowledge. She'd carefully recorded the process, specifying what it felt and looked like with each type of metal, but that being completed, it was time to move on to something else.

Something new.

Something even more impossible...such as changing the way she accessed her affinity.

Every witch used her affinity in a different way, communicating with inanimate or living objects through a myriad of different channels, each one a unique connection between the individual witch and the magic she drew upon. While the specifics of what your affinity allowed you to do varied greatly among the Hexen, all witches in the coven fell into one of two categories...those who needed to touch the object they wished to connect with and those who didn't.

Sabrina fell firmly in the first category. While she communicated visually with metal, sharing pictures and text and taking her gaze deep into the metal where she could view it from the inside out, she needed to touch the metal in order to establish a connection with it. Her affinity was useless without direct, physical contact. Since some metals, such as lead, were highly toxic and dangerous to bare skin, she only handled those with her spelled gloves, but the gloves merely acted as a protective barrier, allowing communication to occur without otherwise influencing her affinity.

Needing to touch something in order to access your affinity was by no means abnormal, as roughly half the Hexen accessed their affinity this way.

Gerta and Sabrina, for example, had vastly different affinities...Sabrina worked with metal, and Gerta was an Emotional Healer. While Sabrina didn't understand everything about her friend's gift, she knew Gerta accessed emotions through smell. According to her, every emotion had a scent, and to Gerta, happiness smelled like roses blossoming in the sunshine of a summer day, while anger smelled like the burning logs of a fire, charred and smoky, easily overpowering and prone to lingering.

Regardless of how they experienced magic and what they used it for, though, both Sabrina and Gerta needed to touch the object they wished to communicate with, be it a person or a piece of metal, in order to use their affinity.

Had Sabrina not been seeking ways to strengthen her gift, she likely never would have viewed needing to touch something in order to communicate with it as a hindrance. But now she saw it as something in need of improvement, something she could alter if only she pushed herself hard enough.

She considered what she knew of those witches who didn't require touch in order to access their affinity. Tante Louisa, who oversaw the animal sanctuary, heard the animals speaking in her mind even when she wasn't near them. Maedra had an affinity for baking, and she didn't need to touch the ingredients or even be in a kitchen in order to create recipes in her mind and know how they would taste. Sabrina's mother didn't need to be near fire, much less touch it, in order to communicate with the flames.