If I Die By Choice

I've learned a lot in my twenty years of life; things like how to read, and how to fight, and how to speak multiple languages-- the basics, really. There's also the more unconventional topics, like how to harness ancient and forgotten powers, and how to utilize the innate supernatural abilities that exist in the 'real world'. It-- that unconventional education-- might've been a regional thing, or maybe a family thing. All I really know about it all is what I was taught, what I learned, and what I grew up doing. All of that is just to say that I know things, I've seen things-- I'm a self proclaimed expert on most things un-freakin'-believable.

One such thing is that every woman in my family has been more-or-less buried at sea, no exceptions. Every woman I've ever heard about in the retellings of memories, or seen in pictures on mantels and in old lockets, has been wrapped in thick linen, burned at the stake, swept up and poured out into the depths of the ocean. Tate says it's a way to honor our beginnings and make the natural cycle of life a circle-- we are unto ashes as ashes we become, or something like that. Muma always said it was a way to make sure we'd never come back, that we'd get to stay in peaceful rest floating on the waves forever. I just think it's another thing I've learned, just another thing my family does.

I learned about death, personally and not just as some abstract concept I'd heard about growing up, when Muma died. Tate and I were twelve and just starting to get the low-down on family business type secrets. We had finally learned that being "a recluse" was actually a cover for being "hunters" and "protectors", and that the women in our family were deeply in tune with ancient practices of a long forgotten elemental craft. We learned that Dad and his family-- a whole group of people that Tate and I had never met, let alone heard about before now-- spent their lives tracking down supernaturally-abled individuals and ripping them from existence, and quite literally at that. It's odd being twelve and hearing about the gruesome murders of people who sound as innocent and unassuming as the woman who raised you and the sister on your right, but that's just another my family thing, I guess.

Anyway, we were twelve, and Muma and Dad had gone away to Fryte Hill to meet a girl from a family like Muma's, and only Dad came back, looking numb and carrying an old jar of dirt. Tate and I would learn pretty quick that it wasn't dirt and Muma and Dad hadn't just been separated like we thought, and that dumping a Harper woman's ashes at the foot of the shore for crashing waves to carry away fulfills the prophecy.

Dad was different after her death. He went back to his family and the things he learned growing up and there were long periods of empty time when Tate and I wouldn't see him, wouldn't know where he was or what he was doing. After a while, Tate and I placed protections on the house he left us in and used our limited knowledge to remove ourselves from his consciousness, and a while after that Miss Grady, an old friend of Muma's, walked right up to our house, as far as the powers that be would allow, and placed her own jar of dirt just outside the mushroom circle.

"Return him to her," Miss Grady had said. "Set him off to peace, it's the least we can do."

And then she left, and Tate and I poured the jar out on the same shore he had placed Muma, and we went about living as unsupervised thirteen year olds. Tate took to wandering into town and bringing back like-minded 'people' to stay in the empty shell of our home. Chase was the first to come, a fire-headed teen with accusing eyes and angry, finger-like burns on his wrists. He had mumbled an apology for the injury, something like, "I didn't know how to make it stop and so I tried to hold it in," and Tate had waved him off, rubbed mud from around the well on the wounds, and sent him to the shore to collect himself.

Moira was next, with her advanced Harper knowledge and fae blood caked under her finger nails. She taught us like Muma had, and explained that Harper women often strengthened their blood by mingling with others in possession of gifts, and that our mother had been an exception; she later explained, "I meant that Jean intentionally fell in love with a filthy hunter to ensure her successor's protection from creatures keen on exploiting a Harper woman's practices. It's easy to mark up a supernatural scent to a line of work rather than a state of being." I didn't exactly understand it, but Tate did. She smiled and nodded and welcomed Moira into our group of three, and she pretended that I didn't know she was pulling every drop of water from Moira's body to make her sick for two whole weeks as punishment for defaming the people who brought us to life.

We shared our family secrets with them and they learned to harness the supernatural just as Tate and I had. We were a new type of family, two Harper women, a girl with fae and grey mage blood, and a Son of Pyr under one magicked roof. Our unconventional way of life drew attention from town that Muma would've been able to wave off with a laugh and a simple, "The trees must have you confused." But we learned new spells and better illusions, and to the naked eye our house looked like the charred remains of a blast site, and the town cried and prayed for our safe passage onward. Miss Grady brings herself around to deliver care packages of rotted bones and fresh herbs, and she pretends she can't see through the disguise to the four youngsters watching her from the fully in-tact porch.

It was a peaceful life to stay at our childhood home while Tate, sometimes accompanied by Chase or Moira, came and went with the wind in search of knowledge and more supernaturally-abled bodies for our coven of sorts. They handpicked our friends from the damned and the lonely, and our friends picked us right back. It was a shame we all couldn't be Harper women, but we sure as hell could be family. Another shame that, in my experience, family had to end far too soon. I'd returned Tate to the sea myself when we were eighteen, when something out of a Croatoan retelling started eating away at her brain the same way she started eating away at people in town.

And all of that is just to say that in my twenty years, I'd dealt with death and loss and grief. I'd learned from my experiences and figured out how to move forward through the whispers of the past. I'd learned that losing someone changes you in ways you can’t imagine or prepare for, learned that the grief is much like tides and the weather. Some days it's calm enough to skip stones and the memories of Tate and Muma and Dad feel like having lunch with an old friend. Other days are like hurricanes and the grief picks me up and rolls me around in a swell, pouring into my lungs and drowning me from the inside out. On days like that, Tate's charred face stares back at me in the mirror and curses me for putting the greater good above my own sister, and Muma claws her way out of the sea as a hobbled together mess of ash and sand, and Dad stands at the foot of my bed screaming about tearing me limb from limb to atone for the Harper in my blood. On days like that, I miss them most.

But all of that is behind me because, in this moment, I've turned off the grief and the love I still have for those I've lost. I've burned our home to the ground and poured its ashes out onto a different shore in a different state. I've built a new home in the heart of mountains and I've brought my new family with me. Moira became our new figurehead in Tate's absence, and as her first decision she brought in the daughter of the woman Muma had met in her last days. Her name was Kit and she had Harper blood and she brought us lessons and shortcomings and a new outlook on the powers we possess. Unfortunately for her, I am incapable of maintaining a family,

Kit had brought home artifacts and curses and knowledge. We created new magic and learned how to wield the sacred spirits attached to the land we call our own. Kit had gone and taken her practices far enough to welcome the spirits into her body and mind, but she hadn't learned enough to know that becoming a host needed strong bindings and specific instructions, and so the incurable possession began. I tried to exist with the new Kit-- the Browan possessed Kit-- but Browan created brainrot, and brainrot is contagious, so Moira rests in a jar on the mantle and Kit rests inside of a coffin, inside of a steel safe, inside of a storage container at the bottom of the Ulna.

But I'm not twelve or thirteen or eighteen or nineteen anymore; I'm twenty and I've learned my share of knowledge and grief and I'm ready to put the Harper in Kit's blood to rest. I can remove Browan's conscious and bottle him up and bring the shell of Kit's body to peace. And that is where I stand, walking through the carved out hallways of our mountain home, pulling Chase and Lou and Grace from their rooms and forcing them into my study. That is where I stand as I teach them what I've learned and I map it all out and say, “We’re getting her back today.”