I missed last week--too much work, I'm afraid. But, I'm back this week with a 298-word piece inspired by this Fiction Writers Group prompt:
Moonglass
I wore the form best suited to deceive a human, that of a lovely young she-child on the cusp of womanhood. It works every time, although this time it took over a year scrubbing his floors and doing his laundry before he trusted me enough to even let me into his workshop.
He was making a particularly messy potion that involved extracting the bile of pre-pubescent muskrats. A lot of bile. By the time Wildersmokenona—I just called him Master Will—completed the preparation, the workshop was littered with the corpses of all those muskrat puppies. Given the volatile nature and short lifespan of the potion, Will rushed out of the workshop to deliver the concoction to his patron, leaving me to clean up the muskrat mess.
Until then, I had suppressed every urge to use my own magic to do my chores from a comfortable chair. Not that time, though. With a waggle, a twist, and a flick of the wrist, the remains of Will’s butchery were transported to wherever it is we adepts dump our garbage.
Every day, when I listened at the keyhole, I heard his incantations and spells for mundane things like love potions, finding spells, and the like. But every night of the full moon he cast one very special spell. That one, the spell I wanted, I quickly found in his great book of spells. I memorized the runes, the diagrams, the precise timing of everything. Then I ran.
Every full moon, I draw the runes, say the incantations, and capture a whisp of moonlight in my moonglass, and each day I watch that captured moonlight run through it into darkness. For the month it shines, I keep this form. This winsome form that has its own magic to charm the gullible.