Teresa’s niche magic
The Dublin witch
Things have been slow.
Usually Teresa has one or two people to help each week. They find her through the witches’ channels. The usual ones, they have groups on Facebook, on Twitter, some on Instagram. You do need to know how to spot them and you need to be invited by somebody.
Nowadays witches are still hiding. They are not hunted and killed like before, but still people want to hurt them. The most hurt is caused by filming them and putting them all over social media.
Witches lead very private lives, they try to survive the best they can and they work hard to blend in. Being watched, poked at, and studied is the new burning at the stake. For these reasons witches hide and help only those they feel they can help without hurting themselves. And this is where guilt comes in.
Teresa, like some other witches, could help ease the pain of life for many of the humans they meet, but doing so would expose them, leading to the loss of their normality. Being alive for more than two hundred and fifty years has taught Teresa how much hurt the wrong human can cause a witch just for the simple reason that they do not understand how witches are and how their magic works.
Yes, each witch can create a potion or other, a mild spell or a slight change in the weather, but each witch has a power, their power, that they learnt and refined over hundreds of years. It is just one very specific power, they cannot all walk through walls, make people fall asleep, or hurt them.
Very important. Witches cannot use their magic for evil. Yitches can.
Yitches are turned witches. Witches that have sold their soul, and therefore their immortality, to the Devil.
Witches are immortal, but immortality itself can be a burden when you can be subjected to all sorts of cruel punishments you cannot get out of, except wait for the people that are inflicting this on you to forget about it or die in the end.
Yitches still live a long time, more than humans anyway, usually around 150 years from their contract, but they can do whatever they want. Build empires, change the world, as they cannot be locked and punished by humans.
The tricky part comes when the contract must be honored. Yitches rarely go willingly and most often their anger turns against the humans around them. Don’t know if the name Nero and a certain burning event means anything to you.
Anyway, back to witches. Although witches can do magic that does not mean that they are not vulnerable to the humans around them.
Teresa’s magic is a very particular kind of shapeshifting. Let me explain. Teresa turns into the person whose clothes she is wearing, she becomes that person, same height, same looks, same mannerisms, but inside she is Teresa, so she does not get the life knowledge for that person. She would look like you if she wore your clothes, but she would not know your PIN. I think this explains it best.
Teresa’s magic seemed quite useless in the beginning, but then as life went on things changed and Teresa found ways to use her magic and actually do some good. Intriguing I know. That is why I chose to write about her, because of this very strange, niche kind of magic.
I mean like, what could you use it for?