You remember Grandma and Grandpa's summer cabin upstate, where Mom and Mama would haul us for two weeks every summer for some "fresh air". I know you remember it, because you saved me from drowning in the lake it sat on. That murky dark lake, full of sunken snags and weird aquatic plants growing in tangles. I was eight-ish that one summer, I wanted to not be scared of it any more, and Mama always told me to face my fears. Hard to face something you can't see, down there in the disorienting dark, especially as I panicked and the muck started swirling up. Harder still to extricate myself once I got one foot stuck inside a rotting log. If you hadn't seen me thrashing…
Thank you, big brother. Again. It seems inadequate, against the gift of my life, but it can't hurt to repeat. Maybe this is better:
I went back, a few weeks ago. I never told you, but I still have nightmares about the lake. So I was facing my fears. But given what I can do now (with a tiny cost, you wouldn't miss it) there was no fear to face, not really. I walked into the lake and with my new senses it was clear as day down there. Clear as glass. Clearer. Like a museum of lake, every waterlogged branch and sharp rock isolated and curated, displayed in well-lit glass cases annotated with little explanatory placards. The murk was still there, if I wanted to see it, but the threat was gone. It didn't feel like the lake any more.
Maybe that's why I still have nightmares. Where is the true lake, if that is what the lake is now? Perhaps it's hiding in my head, in residence, still waiting to flood me, drown me, claim me.
My mentor's further along the usual path than I am. It no longer has a name, a gender; it's a titled witch now, acknowledged by its peers as the Witch of Spiral Smoke, and at the rate it and I are progressing with its work, it may well be a Function before long. But it's still something I can talk to, or at least communicate with. I talked to it about the lake.
It told me that it had been badly burned at one point in its life. That it had tried to face its own fear after learning the ways of power, and done so in the largest fire it could find nearby: the Sun. It also had not gotten what it expected out of that showdown. It hinted at a desire to find something in this universe that actually scared it, a fire it could stare down and walk into and come away tempered. Maybe not that very day, but soon. It hinted at its own mentor once voicing a similar goal.
To answer your question, live well, brother. Marry whomever you like, take that job you were talking about when we last spoke, raise guinea pigs if that makes you happy. Because there are witches all around you, looking for things that give even witches pause, and someday, given how many of us there are now, one of them is going to find something it can't handle.
It could even be me. I might let the lake slip from my head someday, make it deep enough to cover the planet, dark enough to quench the sun. Perhaps you should have left me in it after all.
