So You've polished the stone, but Where Does The Wishing Well Lead?

Gillian pilfered the newer tea canister from the corner cabinet with an ease in conflict with her emotional state. She’d made the decision some decades before inheriting her parents home to never again drink tea from a bag, this was not simply pretension on her part, but more so owed to her own anxieties.

If she lacked a steady hand, she certainly didn’t need any kind of infusion. So with practiced ease, she set herself a mug, with a heavy scoop of leaves to her infuser ball.

It had been a calm morning before, a heavy breakfast of oats before seeing her girls off to a leisurely day through the forest on their property. It was the usual thing, if they hadn’t gone in the morning they’d go in the afternoon. But then she’d been coursing with worry, ice in her veins, a stone grew in her stomach the very same size as the day her sister died. 

Gillian didn’t want to name it, at her age it could always be a mistake. Something merciful she thought, maybe it was her health, nothing like that sorry time so few years ago when her deck was stacked with three girls that were much too young to lose their parents.

Well, any age woulda been too young for Gillian. No matter the danger of her sister’s profession, she hadn’t been prepared for three more children, certainly not with her son so worrisome about his father’s memory.

She was glad he’d grown from that time. Though she supposed she had Isabel to thank for that, the girl was still as stubborn as an ox.

Of all the recounted fondnesses she could falter to, she still had things to do. And so she stilled her thoughts, and went back to her chores. It was a calm day, when she finally got to it.

Though the stone was still there.

“The Well took her!” her son told her, she didn’t need to know which of them it was, not immediately, no matter how wrong it was. Her thoughts had worn thin around the stone in her stomach, as she then felt the relief of what it was.

One of her girls was gone.

And then it was Claudia, and she knew why the stone was sharper this time.

The youngest still, and so dearly hers. This child she’d raised from her second year.

She worried for a moment that the sharpness she’d been feeling was guilt, like she could feel the future in the edges of the stone. But she wasn’t such a fool as to truly see the future in her memory.

She went back to her kettle, seeing the fear clouding her vision. Her son’s vision. Certainly their’s.

She supposed it was a bit of polish brewing again a tea, though more a Tisane this time. A thermos full, with an additive from the stranger stores of her’s, to part unkind truth from wicked lies.

For safety from those spirits, no matter how bitter it needed to be.

A dark night. 

The memory didn’t match with bright mornings or sallow afternoons but still it carried her back. Little girls convinced they’d done wrong against the capricious nature of boundary crossing spirits.

Torn to pieces over their own guilt.

They’d been too young the first time, and still so now, by the old Ivy ridden Well. Blightful oak shaded them from the harshness of the sun held high, and still she heard those callus snipes between the two.

More so by Isabel, but Alina had always been softer in her tone.

She watched them carefully before they took notice and looked over at her. It wasn’t as if she’d been unaware of how stricken they were, but they still took her strange offering as the dearest forgiveness.

However bitter it had tasted to her, neither of them seemed to notice. 

“Alex described what he saw, and what you said, I need you to be honest. What did it look like?” she said, glad of the tonic’s warmth if not it’s flavor.

“Hands, Claws. It was bigger than her.” was how Alina described it, with no lost assurity of her vision. She watched Isabel back away from any such promise.

Gillian tries to remember the specifics of her sister’s notes, how did spirits behave anyway? “How did it move?”

“Like a snake, it was a little stiff too.” Alina tried to mimic the movement with her hands, while Isabel kept looking back and forth between the well and the ground.

“Did it seem to know where it was going?”

Alina kept a keen eye on the well, “Somewhat,” there was a pause with her gaze, “what was it? Aunt Gillian, what could it be?”

“I don’t know dear,” Gillian was almost certain of the kind of thing it was, but she still didn’t have the words, “You’ve witnessed something horrible, you both have.”

Finally looking fully away from the well, “Why are you so sure it happened?” Isabel spoke, sharp and scared. 

“I’m not completely ignorant Izzy, there’s always been more to the world than most could realize,” 

she answered carefully, “and beyond that, it doesn’t surprise me that something like you’ve been describing could be lurking inside an abandoned well.”

Alina saw it, she’s sure of that but Isabel. Isabel didn’t trust her eyes, “I’m still not sure of what I saw.” 

And so, with the recognition that the most severe danger had passed she pulled the girl from her leaning tree, and to the open well.

It may’ve been a shock, but it was better than leaving her with whatever ache was eating at her heart.

She touched the well first, before Isabel took her lead. She barely paused, “do you see blood? Do you see viscera? Do you even smell anything strange?”

“No, not really.” Isabel responded, looking into the abyss of the well. She looked up from the Chasm to see Alina had followed after them.

“What do you think that means?” she asked them both, between the two she had one answer. 

Though she herself could only see a void.

Alina walked away first set for the house, surely, toward the shed also. While Gillian sat still with Isabel. Alex will certainly warn her, if Alina were too obstinate.

“Why are you letting her go? She can’t have survived it, Why are you letting her go?”

“You don’t know that Izzy.”

“And you do?”

“The Root’s Claw hasn’t reappeared, we were right above it, and it didn’t strike.” she hadn’t had a name before, for the thing before but she was certain now. Of what it was.

“So what? You’re letting her go cause it ain’t hungry yet?”

“We should go home before it gets dark.”

And so they went back, quiet between the two, the way Isabel saw it, this was all just an awful thing she could do nothing about. To Gillian? 

There was little she could do, but she knew well enough what was on the other side. That there was another side, beneath the well and Gillian at least knew it could be surmounted. She held no quarrel with the attempt of any of her children to do so.

Still she’d never expected it of Alina, she’d always been of a mild nature, honest if not boisterous, studious more than anything. It had always seemed Izzy’s tick, stronger than she ought to be. 

Even her son had seemed a better fit for such exploration.

But this wasn’t a blind expedition, Hell might not reward the desperate, but she knew what it did to the curious. Whatever else was said at that table this was truly the deciding factor.

What hell it was when the cord went slack and the stone was sharp again.