DIVINATIONS 
MAGAZINE

The mud was warm under her feet. She wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t usually so warm, but the Earth seemed to blush in her presence whenever it felt her cells closing in on its atmosphere. She liked to think that it was because she belonged there, after all.

She didn’t remember the beginning, of course. Who would? It was so long ago now, and she had lived a thousand lives, each more modern than the last. She hadn’t felt at home in any of them, she was meant to be one with the Earth. But the world insisted on encircling the sun, and she insisted on remaining.

It was harder now. Of course it was. Liliac had been born of clay and earth and mud. She breathed in the sweet smell of the pollen on the airs, she was clothed by the leaves falling through the trees, she moved through rivers and oceans as if she were a sprite. The Earth sustained her, and in turn, she wanted to sustain it. But it was more difficult now, growing ever more difficult with each turn of a new decade.

They had always ostracised her, but it was different now. Once upon a time, they would have called her names and thrown things at her. At one time, they would have tried to burn her or drown her, but that would never work, with her being as protected as she was by the earth. Later, they would claim that she stole men and children away and name her a threat to civilised life. But if their imitation of society was what they called civilised life, she didn’t want it, preferring to find her people in the bugs and the birds and the wildlife that surrounded her.

That had all changed now. They had changed, and the world had changed with them. Once-great forests had been pulled down where they stood, paved over, leaving a grey, soulless, concrete jungle behind. In an attempt to scare off the insects that crawled over her surface, the Earth tried to burn them off, but they remained: choking, depleting, and killing her. And Liliac despised them for it.

This world was not hers. She longed for the days before the humans when you could see the stars and hear the birds sing, but she knew now that it was too late to return. But she had to do something. She had to do something.

The older she got, the weaker her powers became, but she knew that the only way she could fight them was to use the talents the Earth had bestowed upon her. So, she decided that if she couldn’t stop them her way, she should use their ways against them. And so she went ‘online,’ learning everything she could to figure out how she could save her Earth. And it just made her hate them more. They were vile! They were hateful! And then she found them.

The ‘witches’.

At first, Liliac felt like a hot bile would uncontrollably spill out of her. They primped and preened before the cameras, claiming that their deities and the Moon guided their way. They played with silly little cards, claiming to see the future while mapping their own designs onto the readings. They pretended to sell spells over the internet, when Liliac knew they had never known true magic, not like her. She was infuriated by them. She wished she could destroy every single one of them.

The first time she did it, it was a mistake. There had been a girl — wasn’t there always? — who she had been watching sell ‘magic’ over the internet, and something inside her had broken. She had not used her powers in so long, and no way like this before, but the anger had bubbled up in her chest, and she felt it erupting from her, spilling out and destroying everything in its path like lava. And once she knew it had happened, she couldn’t stop herself watching.

It had been slow, at first. Initially, the girl hadn’t seemed much changed, but Lilac knew. And she noticed her, yawning more and more. Suddenly, the girl started complaining of fatigue, and then she fell asleep ‘live streaming’, as she had called it. The next day, Liliac could not stop smiling as she read hundreds of comments expressing shock at the girl’s sudden, overnight death, how she had slipped into an unending sleep, wondering how this could have happened to her. But Liliac knew. And it made Liliac feel powerful. A small surge of power that she hadn’t felt for centuries flowed through her. She finally felt renewed. She was on the right track.

She had tried it out again, of course. Well, more like again and again and again, searching for the perfect victims in the videos, watching life slowly drain from them. She’d watch them fall asleep while talking, feeling energy flow into her, electricity sparking throughout her fingers and toes, through every cell of her increasingly electrifying body. In their deathly sleep, Liliac was being reborn.

But it wasn’t enough. She worried it would never be enough, and watching people fall asleep to die was starting to not be enough for her. And then she thought of it. If these pretenders could sell their false spells over the internet, why couldn’t she?

It was perfect. How could they know that their falsehoods would lead to their downfalls, and her rebirth? This was how she would save the world, by wiping enough of them out so she could gain enough power to tear it all down, and if she were successful, that would be sooner than they realised.

A little ding sounded from the computer. A sale! Liliac walked outside, the mud heating rapidly underneath her skin, the crispness of the air crackling around her, her excitement building.

She would be able to save her Earth soon.