STRONG ENOUGH TO WALK ALONE: Future Fay Flash Forward

The miniature of the Palace of Westminster chimes the three-quarter hour. You look up from your mesmerized contemplation of the thickly brocaded green and gold band upon your sleeve to contemplate the Clock Tower.

"Fifinella, what are my appointments for the remainder of to-day?"

The owl-sized green dragonette -- transformed, at her request, from a gremlin, because she had earned a wish from you upon completion of her service, and is now serving you by her own will -- reads from the glittering, entangled Akashic mesh hovering above the better-than-lifelike model of Big Ben.

"You wished a reminder of Delilah Sidon's rite of Confirmation in an hour and three-quarters. After that, nothing until the Heads of Houses Tea, Mistress Applebum," Fifi says.

"Wonder of wonders," you say. "You have been a marvel for my efficiency."

Fifinella beams. A word or two of appreciation kindles such earnest gratitude.

"Very well then," you say. "I shall stroll around the grounds and make myself at home."

Looking out from your office in the corner tower of House Draconis, all seems as it should be in Statuary Garden. Dorothy, Grounds Mistress of Boarbristle, directs a gang of animated picks and shovels. The corner of the expanded courtyard that you had claimed from the unused grounds of the Fifth House, is sluggish to drain and rather spoils the effect of your well-ordered world. So Dorothy, after twelve years' tenure as Boarbristle's Portress, has been ten years a full witch, eight years Grounds Mistress, and six years the wife of Master-Emeritus Elbegast, formerly Boarbristle's dwarfish Master of Devices, whose genius for fabrication is now largely devoted to making the earth move for his half-giant lover Dorothy.

A favor to Granny Threadneedle's successor as the Witch of the Weirding Woods, Morgan Woodbine, you arranged for Dorothy to enter House Beavertail. Dorothy, with some protest, agreed to abide by Boarbristle's dress code for scholars which she had been exempt from in her role on staff. Three years later, Dorothy graduated, rent the robes from her body, and resumed her practice of wearing nothing from navel to ankles, and shoes only in the coldest weather or when working with construction, like today. Elbegast and Dorothy must be cooking up some new inspiration, because Dorothy's belly, always big, is no longer soft and spreading but now round and firm. Sophronia, who returned to House Draconis as Head Cook at your request, reports that Dorothy is having tell-tale cravings. So perhaps there will be a three-quarter-wizard and one-quarter giant joining the bouncing babies in Boarbristle's creche.

Nodding to Fifinella, you leave your office and walk down the thickly carpeted staircase to the foyer that opens upon Statuary Garden. The bright, brisk autumn day brings back to you the recollection of that cold winter night when you and Morgan had left House Minerval, under the banishing compulsion of the Tutor, Fiammetta Hawk, devotee of giving and receiving pain, spending the night closeted in the bath attached to the laundry - ha! - your initiative, pulling a few strings for comfort - and in the morning, joining House Beavertail to a joyous welcome.

House Beavertail, which had taught you that love could be the bricks and mortar, the bone and sinew of community.

You no longer owed your love to a single person.

Morgan had been the alchemical midwife and essential key to your own transformation. Her love fueled your self-confidence, your self-confidence let you act with decision, your decisive act severed your **** love for her and let you walk your own path, light and free, and choose your own burden.

Your path, graduate of House Beavertail, lover of, well, a good number of House Beavertail's scholars, largely but not exclusively witches of femme aspect like yourself and Morgan and Tess Lectura, and a few scholars in other Houses. And through Tess, a lover of Miss Caldwell, stern and intense Librarian of Boarbristle, for many years. You cup the little pendant in your hand, Miss Caldwell's heart-stone. Her body slumbers, but her soul wanders through the limitless library of her dreams. Often you share her wanderings. Wake me, if..., Miss Caldwell had charged you. If... has never transpired, and Sandevin, jovial and versatile graduate of House Beavertail, succeeded Miss Caldwell. Sandevin had been a bit of a puzzle for the Minervals, library habitués, who had expected that Sandevin would, following library tradition, choose sexual pets among younger male scholars. But he never had any pets, in the way former Librarians had; rather he had book clubs, and in his typical mercurial fashion, some of his book clubs would be completely literary and stay diligently focused upon the content, while other clubs would alternate in an irregular fashion between earnest literary study and carefully warded, diligently proctored, polymorphously perverse orgies. You suspect Sandevin's grounding in House Beavertail's tradition of tidying up the "oily rags" of magic, of managing, containing, and destroying the loose fragments of magical workbooks and exercises, had served him well. In the Library's sprawling stacks, amid magically charged, half-sentient tomes, whispering to themselves and among each other, Beavertail's care for fit and finish would reduce the risks of that grand repository of restless writings. Indeed, while more than one student had been lost in the stacks or met with dire misfortune under the Librarianship of Miss Caldwell, Sandevin had never lost a student. That lovely library, home to tomes, codices, scrolls, and more than a few tablets, hieroglyphic, petroglyphic, and your favorite, cuneiform, sharing a root word -- wedge-shaped -- with one of your favorite parts of human anatomy, the cunt. Those tablets, full of wedge after wedge after wedge, pressed lovingly into the soft clay, fired to hardness to endure, sharp-edged triangles under your own eyes and fingertips. Tablets covered in cunt.

Ahem.

Your path, that Morgan had started you on, that let you find your own purpose that had caused you to close your heart to her. I hate how much I love you. You had said that so often, so earnestly, but once Morgan helped you find your inner strength, the time had come to let her love go. Yet you admire Morgan more than any witch you know. She has been true in her love, in her trust in love, and in her belief that love, even more than sex, illumines and enlightens the flows of magic. Morgan Woodbine and her daughter Cecily -- fathered on Morgan during the customary orgy at the All Hallows Sabbat, by one of the multiple male celebrants who had, each in turn, covered, thrust, and spent within her -- fostered a lively alternate school of hedge-witchery that served, in some measure, as Boarbristle's Loyal Opposition. Your sincere admiration for Morgan has maintained a friendship that has endured, built upon your differently aligned sense of what magic is good for, who it is good for, and how it attains the good.

You cherish a little victory over "Granny" Woodbine. You coaxed -- well, in plain words, seduced, and it was hard work! -- Praxilla, a talented centauress, to leave Morgan's coven in the Weirding Woods and join Boarbristle as Instructress in Magical Creatures. Praxilla flourished at Boarbristle, and now, as Housemistress of Leontes, carries the banner for magical creatures who feel called to scholarship, as her own mentor, Master Maurippos, had done in his time.

Fergus Firetail, former Housemaster of Leontes, now spends his time on his personal labor of love as Warden of the Garden of Delights, and is pleased to keep the flowers blooming, the bees buzzing, and the entire magical garden thrumming with all manner of invitations to physical pleasure. Invitations frequently accepted by Boarbristle's staff, and, at your urging, by visiting dignitaries. Master Firetail is himself quite the prying old bastard, so he was pleased to accept your suggestion to lace the garden with ethereal gossamer that would enhance visitors' pleasure, and help open their minds to you as they climaxed in the Garden. You've learned so, so much -- both titillating and strategically significant -- while attentively witnessing important guests in sexual climax, their minds blooming open for your regard like joyful blossoms in the Garden of Delights.

Housemistress Praxilla visits the Garden of Delights frequently, her silky blonde tail lifted in erotic anticipation, and Fergus is always ready to grant her joyful fulfillment. You clench your fist, thinking of their most frequent means of connexion. Fergus' member can never rival a centaur stallion, but his hand and forearm are fully equal, and more clever, patient, and reliable in filling Praxilla with pleasure than any centaur's member.

You greet Dorothy as you turn the far corner of Statuary Garden. She gives you an absent wave of her magical staff - not a wand-bearer, she - and turns back to her task directing the animated picks and shovels, leaning forward and incidentally displaying one of her finest aspects. A half-giantess, half-wizard, Dorothy had found a home at Boarbristle at the behest of her wizard father. But her figure was a more compact version of her giantess mother, with an imposing stature, a full arm's length taller than Boarbristle's staff and students, thickly built, strongly muscled, and generous in flesh, with huge, bouncing breasts, jiggling buttocks, and until her recent suspicious firmness, a soft, overhanging belly above her shaggy red bush. At this angle, Dorothy's buttocks are on fine display, the slanting light of the autumn sun throwing them into dramatic relief. You recall with pleasure the occasion you watched Dorothy bent over to receive Master Elbegast, his member amplified by one of his devices to threefold in width and length, pounding into her, her buttocks rippling until her body tensed and arched in the throes of a grand, trumpeting climax.

Your ears had rung for a day after Dorothy's full-throated cry of pleasure. Such a **** of nature, and now, the Grounds Mistress, with the position and power to make her mark on Boarbristle in the best way. To be her best self, with work at hand, honored, rewarded, and pleasured. A feather in Morgan's cap, for asking you for the favor? Or a feather in yours, for nurturing her here?

Reputation, you must admit, is a slippery thing, and you count it only as another of many things to marshal together to make decisions and acts of significance. While under Pernilla Porcinilla, House Draconis' devotion to Significance was manifest in grand displays - though who can afford peacockery, except those commanding resources of significance? - to you, Significance rests in careful discernment, in decisive choice, and in effective action.

Thus the Ritual of Confirmation. Where you and Tess had gone through it haphazardly, facing the facets of yourself thrown up in the person of thought-forms, embracing or dismissing them, Delilah Sidon was entering her trial with preparation, consultation, and a plan. Miss Caldwell had directed you to study the Rite of Ma'at and Isfet, of composing harmony and excluding the inharmonious, and your experience was deeply illumined. You built this illumination into a structure around your own experience, which became the Ritual of Confirmation, your signature contribution to House Draconis.

House Minerval still performed their own version upon occasion, which you had learned about from Tutor Whiplash's lecture and from Orestes de Landevale's incautious and dire application, but you feel you have captured the rite's essential power and purpose while reducing the risks.

You leave Statuary Garden and advance toward House Draconis' baths, where Delilah will be preparing before the ritual. Delilah is a tall and delicious slice of cake, and you look forward to beholding her naked form, but it is not your place to tread upon her integrity on such an important occasion. It's your place to hold space, to witness, as Delilah Sidon decides what parts of herself to embrace, and what parts of herself she will no longer abide. You sigh. Things go wrong. Students cut away too much of themselves, or the wrong parts. Unwelcome fragments refuse to be dismissed. One student had died upon your watch during Confirmation. Two had withdrawn from the Boarbristle Academy. Several had left House Draconis for Beavertail, Minerval, or Leontes, no longer feeling aligned with significance in the sense that you champion. But Delilah was well-prepared, and the Tutor had informed you of her preparation and planning, and you have no reason for concern.

And you would have the rare treat of witnessing her naked in body and in soul, while confronting her inner demons, embracing or banishing them.

You walk decisively toward the baths, with a feeling of eager anticipation.

[END?]

Do please comment if Delilah Sidon's Ritual of Commitment or the Heads of Houses Tea might add to this version of Fay's story.

We've heard about Dorothy, Elbegast, Sandevin, Firetail, Praxilla, Morgan and her daughter Cecily, and Miss Caldwell. Anyone else worth a "where are they now?"