Fuchsia Pudding was still green when the wind whispered to her the name of a stranger. The Woods saw guests from time to time, but none in many seasons, and always travelers, passers-through. Fuchsia would welcome them inside — or, weather depending, out by the garden. Offer them whatever fruits her labors and magic provided — even a cup of hearty broth, if the gift they offered in return were deft enough.

But this guest — the branches rattled and scraped a warning, which grew louder with each step Fuchsia took away from her plot of safety, outside the circle of salt she’d drawn eons ago to shield her growings. 

Fuchsia always took heed of the wind, the sun, the bones of the chickens she raised and slaughtered and boiled into broth. The bones foretold the change of seasons — knowing when to pull the last squash was fortuitous magic for a Hag indeed — and the wind never failed her. But the sun that grew her broccoli had disappeared behind roiling clouds, and the wind, for all its hissed warnings, pushed insistently at her back. 

Perhaps, Fuchsia thought, the warning was not to stay away. 

Perhaps the warning was to hurry.

Signs never were obligingly transparent that way. 

The wind grew increasingly persistent until, between one step and the next, it ceased altogether. She had crossed a threshold, past a tree painted with a rune in bright, fresh blood, and into a clearing. The sky still churned overhead, but inside the remnants of whatever spell took place here, nothing stirred.

At the center of the clearing was a pool made of starlight, as calm and still as glass. Fuchsia knelt in the lambsquarter and purslane and peered down into the black depths of its water.

There, floating just under the surface, was a witch. An Occultist; the wind’s guest. Her eyes were closed serenely, her hair diffused about her head, as if frozen in ice. The accouterments of her spell clutched in her hand: a peach, a book, a feather.

Fuchsia never understood Occultists. She understood Mages — the thirst for knowledge — and she understood Seers, in theory, anyway. She could even understand Necromancers to an extent, and she certainly respected their talents, even if she’d rather not witness them. Occultists were wild, unpredictable, their power snapping and crackling like a flame, liable to lick at whoever got too close, to raze anything in its way.

She’d leave this Occultist to her business, but something about the way she floated, the storm, the wind, the cage of silence. Something wasn’t right. 

This witch was trapped. 

She appeared to be near the surface of the frigid, starlit water, but a Witch knows what they say about appearances.

Fuchsia was a being of sunlight and growth and warmth. And yet, she plunged in her hand.

The greedy water pressed in on her, its spell gone awry, too strong for containments.

As the filtered daylight grew weaker, Fuchsia saw the Occultist above, her face framed in that spot of hazy light; a witch of shades, dark skin and white hair and grey eyes, wide open now, looking down into the water. And then, Fuchsia saw nothing.

She remembered this nothingness. She hadn’t named it before, but it was there in the twilights, in the breath she took to blow out her candle, the Silence between bells. Familiar, yet wrong for her. Fuchsia belonged with bare feet sinking into fresh-turned earth. With green things, innumerable jars of white sage and clover, tangled skeins of purple and orange threads.

But this was another kind of wonder, wasn’t it? 

Nothing was never really nothing. It was space to hear her own heartbeat, to feel her blood under her skin. The magic that whispered its song on the water was layered; not wholly one thing; Occultist or Hag or light or dark or wild or schooled. Nothing is ever only one thing, just as nothing is never nothing. And just as there is time for growing, for harvesting, for mending, there too is time for surrender, for humbling, and Fuchsia knew this changedness well. The robins and rabbits knew. The bears who slept in winter knew. The chickens who followed her footsteps knew.

Nothing was never really nothing. It was space to hear her own heartbeat, to feel her blood under her skin.

It had been so long since she was not touched by sunlight, ruled by seasons. She’d almost forgotten that the moon was but a reflection of the sun, and what were the stars but many suns shining in the distance? Warm and cold, old and new, spring and then winter and then spring again.

For months and years, Fuchsia drifted in nothingness, percolating, growing even in darkness, as moonflower and evening primrose, as enduring as the dandelions the foolish farmers despised. 

When she emerged, pulled by occult power, Fuchsia was wreathed in starlight. 

The Occultist clutching her hand was still dripping wet, too. Not years then, but moments inside of moments. Around them were scattered corpses of rabbits and swallows and some chickens from Fuchsia’s own flock. Their blood made the markings hurriedly splashed on ground freshly scorched. When Fuchsia glanced over her shoulder, the pool of starlight was gone.

Fuchsia looked at Cereme Brawl, the guest the wind had delivered, the wild witch with wild powers not quite so unknown anymore, who had brought her back home when she could have walked away.

And Fuchsia said, “Would you like a cup of broth?”