Fairmont Rising

           The faint scent of damp earth and stone mixes with the smell of lilies and wild sweetgrass, a familiar scent she’s come to associate with the full moon now, the memory of past rites and gatherings etched and interwoven carefully into her memory. Tonight however, the smell of the cool night air is coupled with the faint, briny scent of an incoming storm, and the sharp, coppery taste of lightning brewing in the sky overhead. Anyone else might be concerned that they could taste the sharp sting of electricity gathering around them, like a swarm of restless wasps, ebbing and flowing in waves on the surrounding air-current. But she knew better- she knew it was no more than the universe responding in kind to their presence.

           She feels them before she sees them, watching with ease as the rest of her coven steps into the clearing from the edges of the surrounding forest, dense with calve-high brush and brambles, and a thick collection of tall, old, pine and maple-wood trees, standing overhead like fierce guardians and illuminated only by the iridescent glow of the full moon, their branches streaking long dark shadows across the night sky. She watches as her eight sisters, all robed in black and hooded to conceal their identities from anyone beyond the circle slowly approach the clearing in the field where she awaits; a small meadow they’d long ago come to call home for their monthly meetings during the witching hours. It’s just as they move to meet at the center of the meadow, that she tastes the sudden, sickly-sweet essence of something foul in the air, slowly moving to surround them.

           Aura wakes with a sudden start, and a pit in her stomach that sends a nasty wave of nausea curling through her. In an instant she’s out of bed and sprinting for the bathroom, tossing open the toilet seat and dropping to her knees as she heaves whatever remnants of food had been in her stomach from the day prior into the bowl. It takes her a moment afterward to collect herself, wiping at the tears forming along the corners of her eyes as she sits back on her heels, hoping that there won’t be any subsequent waves of vomiting to follow. When she’s sure she’s steady enough to manage it, she stands, flushing the toilet and moving to rinse her mouth out in the sink, before grabbing her toothbrush to scrub away the sour taste of bile as well. Her eyes feel like they’ve been stitched together with wool, scratchy and uncomfortable, her vision still somewhat blurry; her skin is too sensitive, too, like all of her nerve-endings have been flayed open, and even just the air alone is too much physical sensation. She’s painfully aware of the way her hands refuse to cease shaking, even as she grips the edges of the counter, her knuckles strained white with the pressure of the death-grip she has on the cool marble stone. It only seems to help minutely when she grabs a washcloth from the cabinet underneath the sink and douses it with scalding-hot water, pressing the soft cotton fabric over her face and the heels of her hands along the sockets of her eyes in the hopes that her vision might correct itself. When she opens her eyes again, she can see a tad-bit clearer, but she still feels no better than before, her body overcome with a mild ache all-over that seems to have arisen out of nowhere, and without having to pull her deck of cards she knows, somehow, that this must be tied to her dream.

           It’s the third time in the span of a week she’s had a dream like that- always waking to the foul taste of something sour in her mouth and in her nose, and always with a bone-deep ache she can’t explain the origin of, but that refuses to leave for at least an hour after she’s woken. She’s had dreams in the past- prophetic dreams were somewhat of a regular anomaly for her; she’d regularly kept dream-journals for years, making note of the things she could recall the moment she woke up only to find that they played out later in reality. It was a well-known secret amongst the family that Aura seemed to have a penchant for this, so it had surprised neither of her mothers when at only 12 Aura had dreamt of the fire at the neighbor’s house- she still remembers with an unshakeable clarity the way the smell of smoke and the sting of soot in her eyes had woken her with a fit of coughing, and gasping, haggard breaths, both Emma and Marcy running into her room when they heard her rasping cries for help. She’d relayed the dream to them, in all its violent and ghastly detail- the sound of sirens in the distance, drowned-out only in part by the screams she’d heard howling from within the house.  

For two days after that her moms had debated about how best to handle the situation- they’d taken the liberty that night of throwing up some protective warding, using a few of the old house-warming gifts the neighbors had provided them when they first moved in to tie the wards to them. Eventually they settled on watching the house like a pair of anxious hawks, awaiting what they’d assured themselves was soon to come; sure-enough the following week a fire had started in the office on the second floor- a faulty piece of internal wiring coupled with an old vintage lamp was all that’d been needed to kindle anything flammable within reach, and in a matter of mere moments the entire room had been engulfed in dark, billowing clouds of smoke, and bright orange flames. Thankfully, neither of the two women had been foolish enough to believe that a week would have been long enough to misinterpret Aura’s dream as no more than a child’s nightmare; the moment Emma had seen the first wisps of smoke she’d yelled for her wife to call 911 while she ran next door to alert anyone who might be inside. All members of the family had been safely evacuated, and thankfully due to the fire department’s quick response, the office was the only major loss to both the house and the family.

As Aura had gotten older her dreams had become less frequent, and surely less dramatic; with time she’d become more accustomed to dreaming about the more mundane- sudden, unexpected storms, and the sort of mild inconveniences she was always sure to warn either of her moms of running into on their way to work; sometimes the occasional car accident, though usually nothing more serious than a fender-bender with some minor resulting injuries. This was the first time in years that she had dreamt with such intensity that she’d awoken physically ill, and so irrefutably certain that something was deeply wrong.