Sabrina slammed her palm down against the table, letting out a strangled cry of frustration before stalking across the room. Digging her fingertips into her scalp, she groaned as she paced back and forth, shaking her head, dropping her face into her hands and muttering angrily to herself.
This was never going to work.
She couldn't make it work, no matter what she did, no matter how much she read, how hard she tried, or how thoroughly she prepared. This was beyond her. She'd finally reached the limit of her affinity. She couldn't do it on her own, and she couldn't find anyone capable of helping her.
Whenever she'd explained to one of the Hexen botanists her idea for joining plants with metal, they'd first struggled to understand why she wished to try such a thing before assuring her it simply wasn't possible.
They were wrong. Sabrina knew that firsthand, having seen herself do things others had previously labeled impossible. The Hexen witches weren't thinking creatively enough...they were content to use their affinity as they always had and saw no reason to act differently.
In fact, Sabrina was convinced a few of them didn't want what she was proposing to be possible. She'd questioned every witch with an affinity for plants, flowers, and trees, and received some version of the same answer from each of them.
By now, she suspected everyone in the coven saw her as delusional, if not completely crazy, but that wasn't what bothered her. The lack of progress was what bothered her, stole sleep from her, and consumed her mind during every waking moment.
Sabrina clenched her jaw.
She would figure this out. She had to. Anything was possible.
Rubbing the back of her neck, Sabrina walked over to the wall of windows and gazed out at the moonlight reflecting off the Neckar River. The stars twinkled in the dark velvet sky, shimmering pinpricks of light shining down over the Schwarzwald. The tall pines appeared black in the moonlight, skeletal silhouettes standing tall and proud against the sky, a world apart from her problems in the solarium.
Thunder rumbled in the distance and as lightning flashed across the sky, Sabrina blinked at the forest, lit from above with an otherworldly light, illuminating trees covered in twisted vines, ferns with elongated fronds, and night flowers that only bloomed under the loving gaze of the moon.
Thinking back to everything she'd read about the forbidden forest over the past three years, the image of the laughing Treasure Fox suddenly sprang to mind, the citrine-colored fox prancing through the forest, leaving piles of gold in her wake. Sabrina sighed and shook her head; the last thing she needed right now was to waste her time thinking about a magical creature that likely didn't even exist.
But then again, other magical things existed in the Schwarzwald...
The Nichts who'd been chased out of the forest near the Zurasammen coven had reported seeing a tree lift its roots from the ground, using them to capture a man before dragging him underground to his death. She'd read similar accounts in books from the library, stories of trees that roamed the forest at will, their roots dragging them forward like the tentacles of a great sea creature Sabrina's father had shown her a picture of once.
Based on barely legible accounts from witches who'd lived hundreds of years ago, plants in the Black Forest were capable of the same sort of movement, pulling up their roots and propelling themselves across the forest floor to resettle in a more desirable location.
She recalled the briars that had exploded fully-formed out of the ground after the Nicht's failed audience with the Waldkonig, as well as the vines she'd seen slither like snakes and the tree branch that had moved like an arm, fighting back against an intrusive Nicht.
YOU ARE READING
Affinity Witch
FantasyA light obscured often goes dark. Sabrina Verrun is a witch and the most gifted metallurgist her Hexen coven has seen in a century. Unfortunately, she has no interest in being a traditional metal-worker, repairing broken items and making trinkets to...
