#Airisu: The Crow and the Witch

Grimoire Obscuriea I: Part 10
#Wss366 Backroom

My name is Sumika, and I’m a witch. However, I’m nothing like a yamauba, a mountain witch. I’m more like Sabrina: an ordinary store clerk who met a couple of foreign women interested in crystals, pentagrams, and charms.

They say you should show, not tell. So I would like to show you.

“Crystals, Charms, and Divination.” I read the title out loud as I rang up the price. Our brightly lit bookstore was close enough to the “American University” that we stocked many foreign titles: English, French, German, Korean, Mandarin, and of course, Japanese, along with books that would never sell downtown. This was one of them: an eclectic collection of information on Western New Age magic.

I recognized the woman at the counter. She often haunted the corner where we kept metaphysical books. She was an exotic European lady with blue eyes, pale skin, and long ginger hair that stuck in my memory.

The friend who was with her was also foreign, with short brown hair and a plain face. I vaguely remembered her as well.

“Would you have a copy of this?” the second woman asked, showing me a slip of paper with the title “Love Charms and Potions” written on it.

The title seemed very specific, but we had some odd things, so I said, “I’ll look in the #backroom.”

As I suspected, we didn’t have that book, but I found a leather notebook, so old that the cover had cracked. The faded gold title read “Grimoire Obscuriea.” At first, I thought it might be a valuable antique the owner had mislaid, but as I flipped through the stained pages, I found that most of them were blank. That was except for the first page, which was filled with crudely written Latin. The spidery letters were blurred with frequent blots.

When the light in the room flickered, the letters in the first few lines seemed to jumble, then resolve into a poorly constructed tanka. I wasn’t sure how I could have missed it at first.

          Lo, seeker
          And the sought
          Night breeze
          Moth on the fly
          Gem unrecognized

I had no idea what it meant, but that was the case with most poetry, especially old stuff with archaic courtly symbolism.

#TootFic #MicroFiction #NMFic #Crows #Otherkin #Fantasy #UrbanFantasy #MythPunk