A Cruel Wind is Blowing

The bow drew slow over the taught strings of her double bass. Temperance swayed in time with low sound. Her body moved as fluidly as her dancer sisters as she swept from left to right drawing an opulent melody from her instrument. her eyes were closed as she drifted in time with the music she was making. Lost in the beautiful simplicity of the moment, the witch barely heard the call of her name. She should have just ignored her strýc calling to her. She should have stayed in the peace of that moment, in the bliss of ignorance.

Because nothing could have ever prepared her for the horrible news that was delivered to their home. Temperance did not want to believe it. She refused. Her otec could not be dead. He couldn't. It wasn't fair. Her teta was with her matka. Constance was somewhere...who even knew. Thea retreated. Temperance followed suit. She hid in her room. She barred the door. She would not answer the knock from her sestra, nor her bratr, nor her strýc. She could not stand to see them now. She could not stand for them to see her now. Matka had Aurora. She would be okay for now. Temperance could hide. She could withdraw. It would be okay. 

The tears came first and then the howled screams of mourning. Cries of how unfair and unjust the murder of her father was ripped from her lungs and reverberated around her room. The palms of her hands pressed hard against her eyes until all she saw were white flashes. The pain was immaterial--anything to get the vision of her father burning to death out of her mind. 

She couldn't bare the visual. Her creative mind painted it so vividly in her imagination. It was vulgar and brutal--there were fewer more horrible ways to die that the witch could imagine. The deeper into her sorrow and rage she slipped, the more out of control her natural abilities grew. She had never struggled to control herself magically or otherwise. Not since she was a little child, even then she had been calm.

But she wasn't calm now. She was a disaster--and as her heart broke, so did her self control. Wind whipped around her room, mirrors and pictures were ripped off the walls. Temperance rocked herself in the center of the floor, head in her hands. Safe from the destruction she was creating, right in the center of the swirling winds, she let herself pour all of the emotion she could not process or comprehend into the manifestation. The wind howled, amplifying the girl's cries. A scream of anger and frustration came off her tongue as Temperance sat there, weeping in the eye of the tornado she had conjured.

When exhaustion began to overpower the agony she felt over the loss of her father, the winds began to die down. Objects fell haphazardly to the ground. She did not reach for her wand, the witch just curled upon herself and slept there in the floor. When she woke, she would embark on the process of setting it all to right---one repairing charm at a time, until all the evidence of her loss of control would be magicked away.