Last Witch Standing

chapter 8



June, 1975

The Planet Pangea



Katie hovered over the immense planet. Green land masses, with the blue of oceans covering large portions, indicated its habitability. It was nearly twice the size of the Citadel’s world and half again as large as Earth.

This would be her home, her Pangea.

She recalled her first, tentative steps, at flying. Now, she could fly large distances, and travel at will throughout the Cosmos. Instinctively, by feel. This disturbed her; she needed to know how and why she could do so. First, though, she had to find a permanent place to stay.

A shadow cast at her feet. Katie looked up to see a giant condor-like bird overhead. She decided to follow it and see where it went. Anywhere a big bird nested would probably be a pretty neat place.

Over trees, meadows and lakes, the pair flew. Where the largest lake ended, the terrain rose into steep cliffs. At its zenith, the sky radiated a warm, deep blue; at the horizon, cool, light blue. The lakes, pristine and untouched by humankind, reflected deep aquamarine and ultramarine blue hues. Beside the shores, large herds of gazelle-like creatures drank abundantly from the water, apparently oblivious to predators. The air around was clean, absent of all pollution. Katie knew about Africa from her brother’s World Book Encyclopedia set. This is what she imagined Africa would be like. Her Africa! Her Pangea!

Her own planet, named after the supercontinent that once existed on Earth.

When the condor reached the first cliff, it veered to the right, but Katie did not follow. In the distance she counted five more circling. They made their nests here and here was where she would make hers.

If only she could show her brother! But where was he? Something had happened to her before arriving on the Citadel grounds. There was a family. Hers?

The images and memories were fading into nothingness. She was alone now.

Katie expected a trial finding a place to make permanent camp, but this first cliff she landed upon had a cave that could be used as shelter for her precious books. And the view! All around rose majestic cliffs, below, a deep valley filled with wildflowers and trees. Condors were the largest birds she knew of. It was fitting that she, a powerful creature herself, should share a home with them. It was perfect!

Even with the Power, it took Katie most of the remainder of the afternoon to clear out the cave and make it suitable for habitation. In the furthest reaches, stacks of bones lay in the dust. So, there had been other predators here. Well, she was at the top of the food chain now. She left these remains undisturbed – in case she later wished to reconstruct them to see what sort of animals they were, how they were composed, and what had killed them.

Even in such a place, on a remote planet at the edge of the known universe, Katie took precautions. First, she strengthened the walls in the front, using the Gift to compress the molecules into a near diamond hardness, then she created a tunnel from the back of the cave to the start of a trail she intended to clear up the cliff. This she sealed with a boulder. In case the front was blocked, she now had an exit. Tomorrow, she would construct a path down the cliff and into the lake valley. This would take some time as it would need to be hidden and accessible only to her. She wanted no surprises – either by wild creatures from this world, or Citadel Witches come to take her away.

The work done for the day, she arranged a bed of foliage collected from the bushes and small trees that protruded from the cliff’s sides, and set her pack beside it.

Now that she was safe and isolated, it was time to practice her skills. Those visiting Citadel witches had blocked her power during the library battle. How had they done so? Katie produced a ball of plasma in her left palm and tried to recreate, in her mind, the moment it had happened. No, she hadn’t felt the Power being choked off at the source – her collecting of solar power. That meant they must have extinguished the plasma itself.

She tried to destroy the plasma. First, she set up a counter-wave. This caused the ball to become unstable, decomposing from a ball into an amorphous shape in her palm, but it did not extinguish the blue fire.

Then it hit her. They didn’t extinguish it at all. The witches moved it! They interfered with her channeling for an instant, possibly as short a period as a microsecond, and sent the plasma somewhere else – perhaps into deep space. Katie willed the plasma to another area of the cave, behind her. It disappeared from view.

A shield. I need a shield! If she could shield it until the last moment, they would not have time to move it once she hurled it. Leaving it there, as she had that day in the Citadel library, had been an open invitation to a counter.

Katie took out the books from her raid upon the library. In two years on the run from the Citadel, she had mastered the science and mathematics from several of the volumes. A dozen or so books remained. Among them were several non-science books she had mistakenly grabbed in her haste. Before discarding them, she would read them at least once. Perhaps they could help her understand what had happened to her. She picked up the first of them – Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche – and began to read.