A bit of fanfic for the Discworld, specifically the witch books, and even more specifically, the Tiffany Aching books. Consider a slightly bitter trans girl indie game dev. She spends a lot of her nights enraptured in weird dreams. Some mornings, she remembers them. Some days, she turns them into game ideas. Once in a while, she sells one. This morning, she's contacted by two witches from another world, which is once again about to have some weird dreams of its own, come circle time.
A sunbeam pierced the redwood canopy, highlighting a single spot at the base of a redwood. Sit here, it invited. Had it been one of the young witch's dream worlds, she couldn't have placed it better herself. Maybe it was one of her dream worlds, or someone else's; since the Incursion, everything was a bit twisted up. But she'd been looking for a good place to park her butt all day, the clearing held nothing more dangerous to body or soul than a couple of spiderwebs, and she had a few thoughts that she needed to put on paper, if for no other purpose than to get them out of her head. She sat, extracted her notebook from her backpack, and began to write.
She hadn't been a young witch very long. Most witches start as girls or young women, and then become young witches, and then witches, and if they are cautious about mushrooms and lightning and clever about things like the Incursion, they become old witches. This young witch hadn't. She'd grown up very far away, and hadn't started as a girl, but as something else that she didn't much like to think about.
Nor had she become a witch there. She'd been born to two parents that did things that this world didn't have names for, and she'd been a failure at picking up either of their professions, but had discovered within herself a facility for another thing that this world didn't have a name for, as far as she knew. In due course, she'd been packed off thousands of miles away to study that subject further, and discovered that while she was quite good at it, there were others far better.
She'd gone on to discover quite a bit of unhappiness within herself, some of which (the thought left a small smile on her face as it passed) she'd managed to rectify, other parts of which she still carried like a bag of slowly melting ice.
And then, one morning, her mirror had spoken to her.
"Her?" one voice had said. "She's not a witch. Look at this place. Far too posh. In fact, she's not even a—"
"Hush yourself right now. 'Least said, soonest mended,' someone told me, and they weren't wrong. 'Hair like a flower,' that's Point One."
"Have you ever seen a flower like that?"
"I've seen pictures! Run and get Flowers of the Downlands if you don't believe me. Now on to Point Two: excuse me, miss, can you hear me?"
"What the shit?" the not-young not-witch muttered. Had someone left the TV on? Wait a sec, had the bathroom mirror just clouded with static? If her roommate had slipped some new smart device into her bathroom without asking, she was going to eviscerate him. She swung the mirror aside, revealing nothing but razors, cotton swabs and soap. She pushed it back with a puzzled expression. There was another burst of static. "Eff me, this isn't normal…"
"'Voice like a toad,'" the two voices said in unison. "'A spinner of dreams'… now how are we supposed to work that one out?" said one.
"We could ask."
"That's not very magical."
"Yes, but it's practical. Excuse me, we're pretty sure you can hear us, and it's rude to ignore someone who's speaking to you. Are you a spinner of dreams, miss?"
"Am I a what now. How are you talking to me? Where's the mic?"
"There's nobody here name of Michael, miss, just us. Please answer the question?"
"I've had some pretty weird ones the last few nights, yeah. Usually I don't remember enough to write down, but Saturday's was so fucked up I spent all of Sunday turning it into a PICO-8 cart. Now who are you and how did you get into my bathroom?"
"That has to be good enough. See what I mean about asking?"
"You don't have to be so smug about it. Okay, here's the hard bit. 'She'll help carry the load.' Except that I think we're going to have to shift the load to start with. Help me now. One, two, three—"
And two pairs of small hands reached out and hauled the not-witch through the mirror.
A millisecond between this world and that. It's as well Eskarina Smith had as flexible a relationship with sleep as she did with time, because otherwise this was going to be a far worse mess than most of the messes she'd seen. She'd borrowed a cup of Klatchian coffee from where an artist, distracted by the play of light on two dogs fighting outside his window, was going to forget about it anyway. She chugged it and then looped back for another one; she'd recently worked out how to drink the same coffee up to six times without an explosion, and was keen on going for a seventh, but this one was, in fact, for her guest. Who'd just been tugged through a mirror and up through a cauldron by two young witches, but hadn't landed yet.
The woman with the pink hair wore a long shirt that said "DON'T TALK TO ME BEFORE I'VE HAD MY COFFEE" in block letters, white on black. Esk pressed the cup into her hand and folded her fingers around the handle; the woman drank it with the reflex action of a striking snake. Still clutching the empty mug, she stared Esk down and asked, in a somewhat throaty voice, "Where the hell am I?"
"Nowhere you can get home by yourself, that's the short version. The long version you wouldn't understand — yet. You may call me Miss Smith."
"Okay. You can call me Miss Morninglight. Thanks for the coffee. I'm going now." She walked away into the tall grass of the traveling now. The wind blew. The grass rustled. Esk smiled, waiting. Morninglight reappeared, facing the other direction, still holding the empty cup of coffee.
"Thank you, I'll take that." Esk flipped it into a sink that hadn't happened yet, quite a long way off.
"This place isn't very big. Got a medium version for me, Miss Smith?"
"You were summoned from your world by two young witches who will, in some time, be in desperate need of a third young witch with your particular set of talents. They're clever girls and they're doing their best to think ahead, but they're working off a prophecy. Do you know the tricky bit about prophecies, Miss Morninglight?"
"I don't know the first fucking thing about prophecies, Miss Smith, because I'm not a fucking witch. I may in fact be the only queer girl on the planet who doesn't have a boner for tarot and crystals and astrology and shit." She paused. "I'm sorry. That came out a bit assholish. My meds haven't kicked in yet and I feel like shit. Can I try again?"
"Ah, so you do have some manners," Esk said knowingly. "Be glad I grew up around wizards; Granny would have given you a good slap or a good stare by now, and believe me, you'd prefer the slap. The tricky bit about prophecies, Miss Morninglight, is that they are a sort of proof, but not a proof by construction. If the two of them can get a young witch with pink hair, an odd voice, and a talent for making dreams real, or at least a sort of real, to the right place, which is here, or where here would be if we weren't here ourselves, then the prophecy is fulfilled, no trouble, no fuss. Except the prophecy doesn't mean such a witch exists! So they got you instead. And you've got, at a guess, about fifteen years on them, and the wrong kind of years at that." Esk shook her head.
"Believe me," Morninglight said, "if I could do the past fifteen years over again, I would."
Esk immediately brightened at this. She'd been running some calculations in her head. One of the terms, a tricky one, had just become the opposite sign. "My word, would you? That'd make untangling this considerably simpler. Of course, managing two sets of memories, two sets of skills, that's not trivial. But it can be done…"
"Wait, are you saying I could grow up again? Differently? Here?" Morninglight was almost frantic. "Do you know what that would mean to me? Do you know… do you know what kind of girl I am?"
"I know what you've got in your head isn't quite wizard magic, but it's as close to as makes hardly any difference. And I know that doesn't happen easily. But how about I tell you a story, and then you tell me one?"
"…and then I'm here. So we both got a wizard's staff we didn't ask for, we went to university and learned more than we came for, we both ran up against a whole bunch of gender shit. Except my 'wizard's staff' is built in. And I never had a Mistress Weatherwax to help me try to figure shit out." Morninglight laughed bitterly. "Twinsies!"
"I mean it. Fifteen years. And the Incursion. It won't be easy."
"What's the alternative?"
"You're not trained, and I don't think I can send you home. Incursion happens in five years time anyway, probably a number of people die trying to stop it… and later, they'll consider themselves lucky to have gotten ahead of the queue to the Door."
"You swear I won't grow up a boy."
Esk held up an amulet. The shapes and runes and colors of the cut glass were gibberish to her but grimly familiar to Morninglight; the witch had taken a bit of her blood, and rewound it into a transcendent version of the pills that gave her what her body couldn't make itself. "Don't lose it. It'll find you if you do, but try not to lose it anyway."
Morninglight sighed. "Did it have to be shaped like a butterfly? Bit of a cliche back home… but never mind, you couldn't have known." She clasped it around her neck. It was on a simple leather cord, and all anyone would be able to see of it would be the cord. "I guess I'm ready. You better not be fuckin' with me, Miss Smith."
There was a sort of inverse bang.
Leah Morninglight did the same thing every morning at the approach of her family namesake. She opened her eyes. She checked her neck for her amulet. It was there. She checked down the front of her nightie for her breasts: they were gone, or from another perspective, they mostly hadn't happened yet. She missed them. They were comforting and they took a while to grow. Then she checked her underwear. It was still there. Finally, she greeted the day with her habitual complaint, in a voice that (to her) is so high and pure that it freaked her out: "Godsdammit, she couldn't have fixed that too?"
And then she went about her chores, because the water wasn't going to pump itself. Not here, anyway. Her memories from sideways told her that was ridiculous and that you just turned a tap and it came out, at least anywhere worth living. Her muscle memory ignored those memories completely and moved the pump handle up and down, up and down…
"You were talking in your sleep again," a cheerful voice came from behind her.
Leah turned to match the cheerful voice to a cheerful girl, a bit taller than her, freckled, with practical short auburn hair.
"Oh, good morning, Octa."
"Something about green crystals growing everywhere, a brotherhood, and a nodding man? Sounded exciting. Do you want me to ask Mum for another piece of paper for the dream journal?"
Octophobia Dawson was the third child and only daughter of a pair of merchants in Scallion Crossing. Her parents had been oddly happy to take Leah in after the Incident, a foundling from the big city (although no one was exactly sure which city), reckoning their food costs against the chance that some civilization or even femininity would rub off on their boisterous daughter.
"No, that's fine, thanks. I've had that dream before. It's not important. It's just an old game."
"I know you're from foreign parts and all, Leah, but that's not the first time you've had a dream about a game, not even this month. Only last week, you were mumbling about diamonds and pinwheels and a glowing griddle. And here I am, and I don't think I've ever had a dream about, say, hopscotch. You've got to teach me some of these games of yours."
Octa, like most witches, had a mind that couldn't help looking for the corners and seams of things, so she could pry them up and have a look. Leah wasn't sure she wanted this particular corner pried up.
"We're too old for games," Leah said. "You don't play hopscotch any more, right?"
And that's not right either, said her memories of sideways, you can't be too old for games: you personally own six game consoles, two desktops, a laptop, a phone, a tablet, and a headset, at least one of which gets used every day, and you're twenty-eight.
"Sure I do. When I watch the little ones and show them how. If it wasn't for hopscotch and crows-and-cranes and the like, they'd get bored and wander off into the woods, where there's wolves and worse. So show me how to play your games, and we'll teach the kiddies together. Then when they get bored of hopscotch, they'll play your games, and the wolves will go hungry."
"We can't play them here," Leah said curtly. "They're city games and we can't afford the pieces." Close enough to true. "Help me with the buckets, Octa?"
Octa raised an eyebrow — this line of investigation was clearly not over; suspended at best — but there were chickens and goats and pigs to water. Autumn was half through, winter was on its way, and the cellar needed to be filled. (While winters in Scallion Crossing were mild, they were only mild by Ramtops standards, which meant that what they lacked in snow, they more than made up for in wolves and bears.)
the file ends here. so does the paper notebook it was copied from. it rarely tries to write fanfic. it supposes this will not be an exception any time soon.