A picture says a thousand words. Write them.
Mission: Write a story, a description, a poem, a metaphor, a commentary, or a critique about this picture. Write something about this picture.
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Source: christiangerth.deviantart.com
Another writeworld prompt. I was about to fall asleep last night when I just had to write this down.
The Three Witchy Sisters
A long time ago in a land far, far away there lived three women. They were special women because they were all witches. They were also special women because they were all sisters.
They would probably have said that being a sister was nothing special. In fact, they would probably have said that they would much prefer to be alone and that having sisters was annoying and that it was not fair that such people existed who both knew everything about you and perversely understood nothing at all about you. That they all thought the same was more annoying.
The eldest argued that she hadn’t wanted a sister for the longest time, because she had actually been alone for a while before any of them were born even if she was too little to remember it and so there.
The middle sister, like all middle people, tried to keep everyone happy by constantly complaining that she was in the middle and that therefore nobody really understood her except for another middle child and that there couldn’t be one another one of those, because then she wouldn’t be the middle child and so there.
The youngest wondered what it would be like to have no sisters at all, given those she had constantly told her that she did everything wrong because she was the baby and she didn’t know and they always stressed the know in such a way that it made knowledge seem secretive and powerful and that they had it and she didn’t and she knew that she knew what they knew just as much as they knew it and so there.
Proximity was the key to their power. They found this out the hard way when the middle one tried to leave home. The eldest said she couldn’t go, because then who would do everything and the youngest couldn't go because she was just a baby and couldn’t look after herself.
The middle one got very sick and had to come home. When she got better, she left again and well, ... you can see where this is going.
After some experiments and a few upset stomachs, the three sisters worked out exactly how far away they could be from each other before it made them ill. It formed a triangle, of course. If you want to be specific it was an equilateral triangle, because each side was exactly the same length.
And then they decided that they would each build their own home, just inside the point of the triangle. They chose a pretty green valley with a freshwater stream running through it. Water helped their magic, it washed away the grey stuff and it was terrifically useful for a whole lot of other things as well, like filling baths and boiling things in cauldrons.
They each pored over house plans and giant sheets of paper to design their own home. They had to be perfect, with a place for a cauldron to hang - outside - just in case of another green smoke incident. That was a bad day, and not nearly as memorable as the purple smoke incident but perhaps that is a story for another day.
They also needed high access for their owls and special places for their cats because cats rather like to have special places of their own, but often you have no idea what a cat will decide is special to them, because they do rather have minds of their own.
Each sister kept their plans hidden from the others and when they started to build, they kept their construction cloaked and hidden from the others while they built it.The valley was full of the sounds of hammering, banging and sawing and occasional swishes and zooshes and other assorted magic sounds as they all worked away feverishly.
They worked for days.
The construction all had to be finished by the right hour of the right day when all the signs had said it was the best day to finish building your dream house and to open the door to your first guest. First guests were very important.
The local townspeople watched in amazement the goings on in the little valley. To have one witch was useful, but to have three might have been an oversupply. They were a little concerned. You never knew what could happen with too much magic in the one spot.
They watched the three noisy white clouds very carefully.
The auspicious day finally arrived!
The three sisters put on their best dress and brushed their hair until it shone and they tried to brush their cats but they would not be in it and they got most offended that anyone would even think they needed help to clean themselves. The owls just ignored them and pretended to be asleep.
Each sister was utterly certain that her home and her design would be far superior to that of her siblings, because they were not special and different like her.
At the exact right hour, each stood on her threshold and the concealing cloud started to waft away in a zephyr breeze.
The townspeople who were all there and very interested in the cloud contents; every one of them from the eldest to the tiniest baby, held their breath.
The wind blew, the clouds scattered and there was a collective gasp.
Each house was exactly the same as the others.
Silence.
Nobody knew what to do.
And then, there was a tiny snort that expanded into a small giggle and that grew into a laugh that blossomed into a guffaw.
Everybody laughed.
Afterwards, each sister said that she had laughed first and they argued about that for years as sisters do.
When they had all stopped laughing, wiped tears from their cheeks and walked to the centre of the triangle, the three sisters exchanged an enormous hug. They held hands and joined together they magicked up hanging rope bridges to connect the three houses. They all agreed that hanging rope and wooden bridges were cool and neat and that there should be more of them.
That was, perhaps, the first thing that they had all knowingly agreed upon, but it was not to be the last.
Still holding hands they each became the first guests to step over the threshold of the others’ homes.
And the townspeople heaved a sigh of relief and said to each other that you just never knew what would happen with witches and weren't they lucky to have three of them, except for the days when the sisters fought and black, stormy clouds hung over their houses, because all sisters fight sometimes.
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© AM Gray 2013
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