Belladonna

"And we fight for the northern star."

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There was a war in the west, she said. The swamp witch, from her garden of great secrets and shadow. Her voice a thread of wind-matter, dark-matter, cutting to the point, and to the bone. She escaped the death somehow, settled in the valley, where the treeline and the marsh lay undisturbed still.

She'd brought the stars down on the soldiers there. All the might of the heavens and of darkness, the strength of all ages, of permanence. And when the armies fell and were silent for a moment she disappeared behind their backs, sick of the blood, and of burying the dead. It's much simpler, she said, to grow starlight instead--new suns, asteroid belts, the hearts of moons and planets--from magic and from planet materials she'd collected on the waterline. Sending them to space on the night of the new moon, blowing kisses, tossing spells from her claws into the black abyss of sky.

And by the light of dusk and of dawn, she mapped the heavens across the walls of her chambers, on the old scrolls and old shelves, ceiling to floor, in languages lost once to time. She moved on like darkness, like the path of the stars, circling centers of gravity, circling clues in her books and scrolls and on the small shards of scratch paper she'd collected through the years. Her ink is poison from her bottom jaw, her wisdom as wild and ageless as the forests, draped with mist, as the dances of dust settling, silent and slow.

She packs away her poison teas and smiles, tends to her gardens as the sun circles. Drying herbs and sifting through the branches and the unfiltered light of her universe, self-grown, self-respecting.

Oh child, she says. And she sinks her claws and small seeds into the soil. From the tips sprout comet tails and roots and seven wonders of the world. There is much to do still.

But the stars know. Oh yes, the stars know...