“But where do the ripples go when they die?” Soganna asked her teacher. The elder witch grinned beneath her toadstool cap.
“Nothing ever truly dies, dear one. It simply transforms,” she assures her young apprentice. The girl’s face screwed up in thought as she tried to think what a ripple in the swamp would transform into. Certainly not a beautiful butterfly like the caterpillars they had seen yesterday
“So you mean, that’s why my spells can’t just poof something into existence? Because it has to come from somewhere?” Gleesa gasped as the girl caught onto the one idea that all of her apprentices seemed to have such a difficult time with.
“Yes! That’s it exactly!” She picked up a branch and fed a modicium of her power into it. It sprang into full bloom before the girl’s eyes. “I don’t create life, I coax it out of hiding,” she explains. Then, feeding a little more power into the branch, they watch as he blooms fade, wither, and crumble. “I don’t create death, I hasten it’s approach,” she illustrates.
Soganna nods, brow furrowed in understanding.
Her entire apprenticeship progressed in this manner, Soganna always grasping concepts with ease, and putting them into a practical light that had Gleesa in awe, and her other students thinking that Soganna possessed another type of witchery all together. And though it was not unheard of for a Swamp Witch to have the Sight, Gleesa did not think that was the source of Soganna’s innate understanding of their Craft.
Though she did have to admit a certain amount of envy at the ease with which Soganna learned things which even she had struggled with, or struggled to explain to her students. The teachers had always maintained that there were some lessons which could not be explained but which must simply be felt to understand. Soganna managed to put words even to these abstract concepts. Granted, that it sounded like poetic gibberish to even the High Matron.
It wasn’t until the Winter Ball that a visiting Wizzenholm member heard Soganna’s poetry for what it was, a bit of prophecy.
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