The Herbalist's Apprentice

  Amena’s garden held a mystery. It was on the cusp of autumn, but summer tomatoes and corn grew in tamed rows. Spring snap peas, kale, and radishes sprouted in abundance. It was wonderful. It was impossible.

  Desider was struck by a terrifying thought. What if it’s magic? The feeling that sprouted first was pure dread, the most primal and ancient instinct. If I leave now I can return to the village by nightfall. It’s not safe to ask. 

   A quiet yearning came from a second emotion: But what if this is my one chance in a lifetime to speak to someone who actually knows magic? His excitement started as a dull ebb but then grew in ferocity. It ransacked his mind, and the sensible part of himself left altogether. His curiosity conquered his caution. If he only knew then the unfathomable depths of his future regret, the dark fruits his curiosity would birth. 

  Amena leaned on a cane. She was a small, elderly woman with a gentle voice. She had given him food and a night’s shelter. He had wandered many hours in the forest the previous day. His father had abandoned him.

  “Child, is something the matter?”

  “No, it’s just…I have something I want to ask you.” She smiled in response, politely waiting for his question.

  “Are..are you a witch?” He winced as soon as he spoke the words.

  Of all the evil images his mind conjured anticipating her response, this was not what he expected. Instead of a violent accusation or an emphatic denial, she was gentle with a fringe of sadness.

  “There are some who would call me that. You are very perceptive. She stared out towards the tomatoes, her eyes lingering over the budding stems.

  “But no, child. Witches use blood magic. They enslave others to their whims and take life without regret. I use magic to grow this garden.” 

  He blurted out without thinking, “Can you teach me?” Her head slowly turned towards him. She studied him. She looked back towards her tomatoes, seeming to weigh his words with her mind. When she next spoke, she said the words as if she were far away, with the words drifting across a still lake.

  “Magic is like fire, boy.” She pointed to the gently smoldering cooking fire. “Under the stove or in the hearth, it can breathe life. But move the fire to the forest, and even the smallest cinder can burn the forest to the ground.”

  “I’ll be careful!” He pleaded with his eyes as much as his words. She looked into them, reflecting on some distant memory. She closed her eyes and sighed. A brief smile folded up from the wrinkles on her chin.

  “Your company would be most welcome, child. In time, if you do as I ask, and if I feel you are ready, I will teach you magic.”

  ***

The day finally came. The summer sun shone its brilliant rays. Desider spent two years in Amena’s abode. He hunted game and brought it back, a task she was too frail to do. His body grew strong as his mind grew sharp. In the mornings he would throw slops to Amena’s lone pig in its pen. He tended Amena’s garden with her, taking in its many wonders.

There was a vine that tasted of sweetness and mint. Strawberries grew in as many shapes as clouds. His favorite were her black mangoes, which by magic grew generously from a combination of both plum and mango. The skin was soft and tangy, and the flesh was always ripe and bursting with sweet juices.

  In his excitement to learn the secrets of magic, he’d also grown impatient. But he soon learned that whenever he would show it, her reluctance to teach him came with it. So he buried it beneath the guise of polite gratitude.

  Finally, Amena gave in, still with a hint of reluctance.

  “Give me your arm, Desider. Rather than tell you, I will show you the source of magic’s power.” 

  He obeyed, barely able to restrain himself. She reached towards his arm. In an instant, the world dimmed around him, and he saw a pearl light swirl within Amena’s outstretched hand. Without a word being said he understood. It was her life force, her essence. It swirled with great power and an impossible gentleness. She touched his arm. In that moment, he saw another light, no, he felt it: a bright orange restless energy. He recognized it as his own life force. He pulled back and drew a sharp breath. At once the strange dimness vanished, and the two auras disappeared from sight. He shivered in the noon sun. He had seen the power of life, and it overwhelmed him.

  “By showing you this,” Amena said gently, “I’ve opened the door to your magic. You have seen the magic of life with your own eyes. You must have felt it, both the power and the unmistakable frailty. This is why I have cautioned you to not take magic lightly, and why you must only practice what I give you to practice.” 

  Desider swallowed. “I understand.” He was both thrilled and terrified.

  She waved for him to walk to the center of the garden and picked out a turnip by the roots. She put it in his trembling hands.

  “Remember the feeling of what it means to see, and look at the turnip,” she said.

  He tried, recalling the ethereal dimming of the world. Then it happened. He gasped. Here was that same feeling of life and power. He looked at the turnip to see a faint blue essence.

  “Draw from the essence. Take some.” Amena said. “Reach with your will. It’s easier to picture it as a separate hand.” He obeyed eagerly, and gasped as he saw his bright orange essence swirl into a shape like fingers, and cradle the pale blue essence. Then he closed his essence over it like a fist, and a small shudder ran through his body. He could feel, no, smell, no, taste. No, it was a different sense altogether, but information flooded through his mind. He saw the day the bulb sprouted, the water flowing through it over many days, and the rich earthiness of the soil. Then it vanished, as quickly as it arrived. He snapped back to his normal perception and looked at where the turnip was in his hand. It shriveled in a matter of seconds, and frayed into curly skins like dust. They floated away in the breeze.

  He was thrilled to bursting, but still a little confused. “What happened?”

  “Desider.” Amena’s voice now contained the faintest trace of ice. “Did I not tell you to take just some of the essence?” He looked away, understanding nibbling at his conscience.

  “I, I didn’t realize how fragile it would be” he said, trying to force a somber tone. He tried not to betray the other emotion, the bubbling ecstasy. The power of magic.

  She put an arm on his shoulder, “In time, you must learn to take only what you need.”

  ***

Months of practice followed until the cusp of autumn, mostly under Amena’s supervision. But sometimes when she took her long afternoon nap, Desider would experiment. He loved exploring the essences of the herbs, tubers, and vegetables, saturating in their varying auras. He loved being swarmed with the knowledge of peas growing in their pods, corn bubbling to fruit under sheaves, and roots taking long drafts of life-giving water from the earth below.

  Amena even taught him how to merge the auras of different plants, by enfolding his aura as a catalyst over them. The possibilities were nearly infinite! He even managed to successfully fuse a cucumber plant with a pumpkin, to create long, thin pumpkins with a mellow flavor.

  He was in the middle of studying the aura of a cactus, when he felt a sharp pain in his thumb. He snapped back to normal sight and stared at it. He hadn’t touched the cactus, so why had he felt pain? Then he noticed the small ant hanging just below his nail from its mandible. That’s when an idea struck him so forcefully it overwhelmed him. If he could see the auras of people and plants, couldn’t he do the same thing with insects?

  He felt the true sight and focused on the ant. Its aura was blurry at first, then sharpened into focus. Unlike the colorful and steady auras of the plants he knew, this aura flickered in black and white. He wanted to consume its aura, to see what knowledge the ant contained. But then he remembered Amena’s warnings. Magic was never to be used on living creatures.

  Then again, he had seen Amena squish bugs that landed in the cooking pot, and even ants that had crawled onto her shoes. Surely this wouldn’t count as harming a living creature.

  Feeling justified and eager to learn, his essence swallowed the ant’s. Desider felt the thrill of climbing up mountains with lightning quickness, only to realize that they were actually tree trunks. He felt the camaraderie of tunneling underground with thousands of his fellow workers, harvesting and eating sweet foods. He felt the awe of standing in the queen ant’s presence. The vision vanished. When he looked, the ant was gone.

  “Woah!” Desider leapt to his feet and kissed the sky, then clapped a hand over his mouth. He hoped he hadn’t woken Amena. It was several quiet moments before he breathed a sigh of relief. His excitement rekindled. The knowledge of the world of insects was now within his reach.

  He soon became impatient waiting for Amena’s afternoon naps to practice, so he would sneak out after dark. Initially he was content to study critters one by one. He captured the essence of the flight of the dragonfly, the height of a grasshopper’s leap, and the unyielding resilience of the rhinoceros beetle. It wasn’t enough. There was too much to learn, and Desider had a new and bolder vision for the use of his magic. 

   The following day felt like an eternity waiting for Amena to take her rest. At one point she tried to strike up some conversation, but Desider answered with as few words as possible. She’d given him a quizzical look. He just shrugged in response. When he was certain she was resting, Desider leapt up from his stool, eager to begin.

  He wandered down the path, away from Amena’s tent. He first picked up a small forked branch. Then, with a deft swoop of his free hand, he caught a sizable blue lizard. In its terror it shed its tail, which squirmed on the trail behind him. There was a cave not too far away, one that held his last ingredient. 

  He stepped into the cool, dark cave with his eyes peeled. Within seconds he found what he’d been searching for. A small bat hung from the ceiling, its eyes closed. It swayed a gentle pendulum. With accurate speed he thrust the forked branch towards it, pinning its furry body to the cave wall. The bat vainly flailed its wings, its shrill cheeps echoing throughout the cave. He dragged it down and grabbed it. 

  Now the squirming, tailless lizard was in his left hand, the pleading bat in his right. Wasting no time he switched visions, delighting in the cool grey aura of the lizard and the vibrant gold of the bat. With unstoppable eagerness he brought the two bodies together, encapsulating their auras with his. Let’s see a dragon!

  He was shocked from his vision by a scream. Not from his new creation, but from behind him. He turned to see Amena gaping at the floor behind him, then at him. Her wide eyes thinned, then cooled. Every wrinkle was taut in her face. Her knuckles were white on her cane. She crossed the mouth of the cave towards him, each step measured and ominous. The usual sweetness in her voice was gone, replaced by a knell of fury. 

  “How many times have I warned you?! How many times have I told you not to play with life as some child’s toy?” The world dimmed and he saw her aura undulate with pearl, except now it looked aflame. He also saw it in her eyes.

  She walked past him first to his new creation. He saw it for the first time. The wings were not where they should have been. One was on the lizard's head, the other protruding from its stomach. It flailed desperately, making silent screams with a bat’s head where the tail should have been. The aura was a sickly green and purple. Amena reached a cold, wrinkled hand towards it. It stopped moving altogether. Desider saw its aura vanish. Amena shuddered.

  Then her gaze turned back to him. The rage was unmistakable in her voice; she lowered it to almost growling.

  “I must seal your magic now, because I cannot trust you with it from this day forever on.”

  Desider fell to his knees. He forced a whine into his voice “Amena, please! I’m sorry. I know what I did was wrong. I’ll never use it on living things again. Please, punish me any way you wish, but please, don’t take away my magic. I’ll do anything, anything.”

  Her anger burned for several minutes, but he saw the fire at the edges of her aura dwindle. She looked sadly at him, longingly.

  “Desider, I want to believe you. I want to believe you will live rightly in the world and not bring suffering to others, but you’ve broken my trust. If I even suspect you of attempting this kind of magic again, I will seal your magic, and we will go our separate ways.”  

***

  For several weeks he begrudgingly did as she asked. But that burning desire was there, and something else joined it. Resentment. He saw her getting fatter with the food he hunted for her. He had returned to the clearing at sunset with a rabbit. She was eating next to that fat pig, talking to it like a child. Pig. Amena was chomping her food. 

  Memories flooded back unbidden, how his father devoured all the smoked meat in a single sitting, with pint after pint of ale. Pig! Her lips smacked, and a piece of corn flew out of her mouth. His resentment boiled. Rage filled his chest. It crescendoed to its zenith and he screamed “PIG!!”

  He fell back. A wave of fatigue racked his body. He felt lightheaded. His sight blurred. Sound became distorted. “What?”

  As soon as the word left his mouth, his eyes widened in terror. Amena and her pig were changing, fusing in front of his eyes. He heard the bridge of her nose crunch back and flatten against her face. She screamed a scream no longer human, a shrill porcine wail. Her long silver hair shrunk back into sharp, bristly tines. An overwhelming smell of tar and barn stench hit his nose, making him gag. Pink and sickly purple flesh undulated in folds and wrinkles across her arms, chest, and legs. Her eyes sunk back into her head and shrunk to the size of small buttons. A lone hoof protruded from her back. Now on all fours, she stood on a mixture of hands and hooves. She screamed again. 

  “No!” Trying to fight the shock, he desperately reached out with his magic to hers, to see a violent, boiling red aura. He felt his essence burn as he tried to find an end or corner to grab, to separate her from the pig’s essence, but it was futile. It was a homogenous boiling pool, no longer pig or Amena.

  The abomination screamed again, squealing a cry of a hundred pigs, and it ran with frightening agility. He leaped to catch it, but it slipped through his fingers. It kicked over the boiling pot. The stew roared out and seared the tips of his fingers. He cried out in pain.

    The monster ran to the edge of the clearing.

  "Please!!" Desider cried, reaching out to it.

  It vaulted over the cliff face. With a sickening thud the screaming stopped, hundreds of feet below. A violent silence took its place.

  The black mangos looked blood red in the gleam of the sunset. 

  “NOOO!!!” His body heaved and wretched. He wailed. Desider pounded his fists in the ground. He remembered the way Amena looked at him earlier that day, as though he was her greatest blessing in the entire world. He would never know her songs or stories again. He killed the one person who loved him.

He remembered what she had said about witches. “Witches enslave others to their whims.” His mind quailed with horror, grief, and disbelief. He was utterly alone in the company of his tormenting regrets.