“The magic has its benefits.” Sarina said with a heavy sigh.“But so does the other option.The great profit in mastering our magic is not power or life.It’s humanity.”

“But how old are you?” the girl protested.She was young, perhaps too young to really understand, but she was vulnerable.There was no real choice in training her.

“Old enough to know that I will die.” Sarina replied, “and for all the years from this day to that one, pay the price for benefiting vanity.”

“Some price.” The girl replied, “Can we get to the part where I pay it too?”

“You don’t believe me?” Sarina asked, “Ulfr and satyrs live like Jotun do or longer, maybe a few centuries.If you must know, I’ve just made my first.But because I’ve got their span or something like it, I can’t stay around other people.I can’t live a little life in a town.I can’t have a husband, because who would understand?I can’t have children… trust me on that one, all right?I didn’t give those things up for some petty years.I gave them up to stay me.”

The girl stretched.

“You want me to be like you, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Sarina said, “Of course.”

“Then why try to scare me off it?”

Sarina looked away.

“I didn’t understand what my life was going to be.” She said, “I’d rather spare you repeating my mistakes.”

They called Sarina a “wild child”.Ill-omened.Changeling.Sarina didn’t hear it, because she was off doing what earned her such distinctions, playing in the uncharted streams or exploring the verdant tangle of the backwoods.Such places, that no civilized eyes perhaps had ever seen, held countless wonders for the girl.She appreciated discovery, seeing with her child’s eyes, unclouded by hate or fear, the beauty of the world all around her.

They blamed her parents, mostly.They blamed her father the traveling merchant who probably had a wife in every county, though at least if he did he provided something for them all.They blamed him for being away and unattentive.And of course they blamed Sarina’s mother, sickly as she was beautiful.They blamed her for having case after case of “the vapours”, maladies of the mind that kept her bedridden.They blamed her also for being a witch, though the town would have no medicine without her little garden.

They blamed Sarina too, of course.Blamed her for being uncontrollable, for loving what good folk ought not to love.But she did not hear any of these things.Instead, she eagerly awaited the returns of her father, who brought good tidings and trinkets from afar.And she used her play in the deep woods to help her mother, filling a small satchel with willow bark and good herbs for healing.

But, then Sarina came to know how she balanced on the razor’s edge.It was late – later than she had intended, for though Sarina was not easy prey for terror even she preferred to be back among the noise and the light of town when the sun went down, rather than in the backwoods that slowly transformed from verdant paradise to a hell of thorns as light fled the world.

Thus, there was creeping dread in her mind as she threaded her way through the wild paths in the dark, but nothing yet to prepare her for what followed.Red eyes flashed from the night, and a form of great size rushed at her.A clawed hand struck her and carried her back, whelmed her against a tree trunk and held her there, pressing down on her chest.

Then she looked, and looked into the Ulfr’s crimson eyes.

But it did not savage her.It did not devour her.It simply waited.Then, from the shadows, a voice spoke.

“Easy.” The silk-smooth words came, “Can’t you see?”

Sarina looked, and there, beside another ulfr, was a man with the legs and horns of a goat.

“This little one is too young yet.Let her down.”

The ulfr holding Sarina huffed.

“We are patient.” The satyr said, “It will not be long.”

And thus the Ulfr released Sarina, and she ran, blindly, until by happy accident the light from the windows of a farmhouse set her back upon the right roads to home.But the terror did not end then, nor did it cease when the sun once again crested the horizon.No indeed did there ever seem to be the cease of it, for Sarina knew then that she was marked.

She was twelve years old.

Sarina turned back to her pupil.Fifteen years old, the pulse of the wild already driving her heart.The girl did not have much time.If she could not accept Sarina’s lessons, she would become a monster.

“So,” the girl said, “What mistakes would those be?”

“Plenty.” Sarina said, “The biggest one is assuming you have all the time in the world to do this.”

Sarina herself had four years, though no mentor.Most of her students had one at best before they changed, one way or another.Sarina had not assumed she had time, but she would claim it if it got the girls she worked with to dedicate themselves a bit more.

“Then tell me straight up, how long?”

“You can’t know.” Sarina said, “Some who are vulnerable turn when they’re about your age.Others in their thirties, or even never.But it can be provoked in you already, and I’m afraid that if the Wyldcult knows of you, they’ll make a move sooner rather than later.”

Sarina was sixteen years old.For the last four years since her encounter, her life had been spent in fear.Fear of the dark woods.Fear of what she was, or what she might become.But Sarina did not react to fear with resignation, nor did she run blindly from her home to try her luck in other lands.Instead, she had turned all her attention to studies.She learned all her mother new of medicine, all the few wizards in town knew of magic, and when she had done as much she bade her father cease bringing her trinkets and, if he wanted to shower her with gifts, to bring her books instead.

Sarina never told a soul what had happened to her that night when she was twelve, but all could tell that something had, for she loved no longer the wild paths, and was indeed less seen than her mother so often abed.In that time, though, she only learned a little of what scholars knew of the Ulfr.That only adults could be transformed, which Sarina knew all too well.That a wild power seemed to infest their souls, incurable and inescapable.

Sarina refused to accept “inescapable”.Thus, she studied wild powers, the magic that flowed from the woodlands.Good folk did not know much about it.They brought fire and axe to the forest.The powers of the Builders were the powers of the mountains, the seas, and the fields, the ice and snow of the north.

Some, however, did know bits and pieces.There were journals, copied and recirculated in the Heartland that purported the underpinnings of spells to grow crops, that turned wild magic to civil ends.

That was what Sarina felt she needed.When she reached the end of her research material, she began to work herself on deriving further.Everything she had been told said that it might be dangerous, but was Sarina not already in the worst danger?

So Sarina channeled and cast.She remembered her childhood rambles in the woods, their beauty, before they had been filled with terror.She found where those bits of her life lived in her soul, and sought not to purge them, but to control them, to know them utterly.Ages ago, so it was said, all dogs were wolves.You could bleed the wild out of a thing without destroying it.

But nothing Sarina did exactly promised salvation.By the time she was sixteen, she knew the shape of her soul, but not how to bar it to intrusion from more wild power.She had tried and tried, but it all seemed in vain.That power was part of her, it coursed through her.

And in the autumn of her sixteenth year, it found her.

Sarina had not gone into the woods at night four years past, but now she found her reason, one more chance at purifying her soul.But it needed moonlight and roots, and thus Sarina was compelled to face her fears.It was as she knelt in the ritual circle that they appeared.The Ulfr, eyes burning with expectation.

There were three, and they came upon Sarina, and when she raised her hands to resist them, claws cut into her flesh.Then, as she lay crying, snouts prodded her, pushed her, almost like a friendly pet.And Sarina felt, inside herself, the answering stirring.

“No,” she sobbed, “No, I don’t want it.”And yet the power flowed through her soul. “No!I want to stay human!”Ripples spread along her skin, tremors of the transformation to come.Feverish, Sarina turned her focus inward, to the magic seeping into her bones and spirit.

“No!” she cried again, practically howling it to the moon as her wounds sealed in regenerative anticipation“I won’t!I-“

Then Sarina grasped the power she could, and drove it into the earth.Where her hands slammed into stone, waves of flowers blooming in an instant spread like ripples on a pond. The power flowed through Sarina, ravaging and repairing her body a thousand times over… but sparing her soul, that one tiny piece of her so desperate to remain unchanging was worn at like a pebble in a stream.But when the rush of energy passed, Sarina stood up, still Sarina.

That was when the Ulfr knew fear.The clearing where Sarina had made ready to prepare rites by the light of the moon was now a dense tangle of emerald growth and many colored blooms.Though wild power filled the air, it was not the power of the Ulfr, and Sarina met their burning eyes with her own steady gaze.

And the Ulfr fled.

Sarina understood then that she had freed herself of her doom.Only later would she understand her new state’s few glories, and its many sorrows.

Weeks passed working with the new student.The teachings would be necessary, if she was to have any hope of remaining something close to human.Of that much, Sarina was sure.She had learned in past days to tell the difference between the vulnerable, the marked, and the damned.

The idea of how Sarina chose her students occurred to this one more than once.She asked why her.She asked why her rather than someone else.She asked why anyone at all.They were all good questions, ones Sarina had answers prepared for with grace and poise.

Then the student asked a different question.

“Why do you never help the boys?”

Sarina winced as though struck.She had gone over her rationalizations so often.How she couldn’t help everyone, how she never lacked for students enough as it was, how the sisterhood of the Greywitches might be stronger for it.

Sarina muttered these answers halfheartedly, part of herself accusing the rest with the truth.

Because Sarina once made a mistake, and vowed to not repeat it.

No matter the cost.

No matter how little her body had changed in the years since Sarina became what she became, this creature inwardly of both light and shadow, she had seen thirty five winters in the world.Most of them, now, had been passed as this… grey witch… and most of those alone from the people who had begun to shun her when it became clear she was not the same Sarina who had gone into the forest that night at the age of sixteen.

And so she traveled, largely alone, from place to place, not daring to stay more than a year or two lest it be noticed that she was aging, yes, but slower than other folk.Perhaps she could keep up the ruse for far longer than that, but she saw no reason to take risks.

Once, in her twenties, she had found another girl who was like Sarina herself when Sarina was in her youth and human – wild and carefree and with that dangerous flaw inside her that would some day seal her doom.That was the only soul to whom Sarina revealed her nature, to teach the girl how to be a witch rather than an Ulfr.It had taken two and a half years, but in the end it had worked.

And Sarina walked on.She assumed she and the girl would be able to find each other if they really needed to, if the witches neither holy nor base needed to associate in the shadows, but Sarina was already uncomfortable in that younger witch’s home, and ready to move on.Now, she had a purpose.She could find others.She could teach them.She could make a difference in the face of the Ulfr threat.As Sarina learned better how to recognize the vulnerabilities the Ulfr and their masters no doubt saw, she did not lack for students, had trained four young women, counting the first, and bestowed upon the title of “grey witch” as a calling card for their new nature and hers.

It was easier with the girls, for few questioned the motives of a young lady with a younger lady when there was an art and a trade both to what they learned, so that was where Sarina had focused her efforts.Indeed, in this half-sham of teaching medicine and hedge witchery, it seemed Sarina had found her calling.

That was, at least, until she came to Calder’s Mill.

Calder’s Mill was a very small town, built up around the mill that gave the place its name, the mill itself built because Ichabod Calder, its owner eighty years past, could not stand the company of the folk of nearby Gladeford and preferred to have less of their society.In time, others found the land around the mill to their liking, and homesteaded parcels, and those Ichabod did not drive off ether because he did not care to or because they refused to be driven had formed their own society.

It was a good place for Sarina, because it was so out of the way and its people so much more private even long after the death of hateful old Ichabod than most.So they did not go inquiring too much into Sarina’s business, and Sarina little needed to inquire into theirs.She lived there a full year, occasionally making sojourns to Gladeford or some other town at hand, before she really met Nathaniel Calder.

The second son of Braum Calder, who was himself the only child and heir of Ichabod, Nathaniel was a strapping young man of good standing in Calder’s Mill – indeed, it would have been scandalous when he began to frequent Sarina’s haunts if her real age was known, and was still troublesome when she began to find herself irresistibly drawn towards the youth, as though she herself had not changed so much since she was sixteen and fully human.

Nathaniel’s courtship of Sarina, for that was who courted whom and remarkably persistently at that, was brief, for Sarina succumbed when pressed to what she would not have admitted without such provocation that she desired, and while some might have feared being left as swiftly as being won, Sarina did not see Nathaniel as the sort of man to do that, if for no other reason than his standing in Calder’s Mill was dependant not only on family wealth but also on good reputation.

It was in the morning, after she had first relented and let Nathaniel Calder into her home, her life, and her bed that Sarina noticed the flaw in him.

In some people, there was nothing for wildness, for the taint of the Ulfr to grasp on to.In others, like Sarina herself once was, there was a great doom over them, that their transformation was nearly inevitable if they had any congress with the woodlands and far places, away from civilized company.

And then there was Nathaniel Calder, and presumably many others like him.There was in him no certainty of change, but a vulnerability to it, that if some night he were waylaid upon the road, as Sarina at twelve nearly was, he might not return to common company, and not with his death as the cause.

At once, this bred fear in Sarina, for she feared nothing worse than she feared the monsters of the wild.But it also bred hope, that she could share the benefits of her strange condition with her lover, and in so doing mitigate its sorrows.It took her a month to broach the terrible subject, but Nathaniel Calder took matters very well, and sought to learn from her as much as to love her.

For six months they persisted, and then Sarina thought her student well enough along to, if he wished it and he dared it, take the steps to open himself to the power, and let himself be changed as Sarina and her other former students were.

Sarina left him in the dead of night, in the right place, and left because the choice was his to make and his alone.She would not witness it, for with eyes upon him he might be swayed, and Sarina feared that she was at too great an advantage in that.

Some time before dawn, Sarina heard a scratching at her door.She rose to open it, and learn her lover’s fate, but then it was shattered to splinters, and inward stepped an Ulfr.

Inward stepped a man.

Forward stepped an Ulfr.

Nathaniel Calder, in the throes of transformation – beyond help, beyond hope, and come to Sarina.

“Please,” he begged, “Please help me.Let me be human again.”

And then he shifted, fur rippling across his skin.

“Damn you!” he bellowed, “You did this to me!”

Then, softly, he spoke.“You made me.”

And then, accusing.“You made me.”

And Sarina knew it was true, knew how he may never have been exposed if she had left.How he may not have fallen prey to the wild spirit of the wolf, as he only half had, if she had stayed.

Too wracked was he with his faltering resistance against the curse to offer any to Sarina when she cradled his spasming head and forced a mercy of nightshade and hemlock down his throat, and when he died, he died a man at least.

But he was still dead.And in every way conceivable, Sarina was still to blame.

As she packed her few possessions to depart for gods knew where, Sarina made dire oaths in the heat of that moment, ones that she would come to regret but ever hold to.Never would she love another man – she might lay with a charming sort for an evening, but she would not love, for love brought such profound sorrow.Never would she teach another man, for that invited violations of the prior oath, in the closeness, the meeting of minds.And never would she undertake to train one not poised upon the precipice of doom by the state of her soul, for it was not worth the risk.

It was night.Sarina and her apprentice (who unlike many of the Greywitches had decided to retain her former habitation and her name, Dawn) stood in the misty evening at the bald top of a hill.

It was the final night Dawn would spend as an ordinary human.Come morning, she would be an Ulfr and dead by Sarina’s hand, or she would be a Greywitch, which was not exactly human.Sarina smiled at the girl’s nerves, remembering her own dark night of the soul and feeling her apprentice more than prepared for the ritual.She would be fine, and her taking this as one might take the evening of an autumn dance, with trepidation but not terror, was a good sign itself.

Dawn knelt in the circle of small stones they had placed on the hilltop.Sarina did not enter, but only watched.How many times had she seen this before.Dozens, at least.It was familiar, but to see it even a hundred times in as many years, it would still hold marvels.

In this case, Dawn was an eager student, and before even being bidden, began to draw on the mana of the wildlands, channeling it through her, and outward.From the soil, into the soil.Changing, perhaps, but not remaining.The taint would pass through her, and she would remain.

This was the mantra Dawn whispered, as Sarina had taught her.Let the wildness pass over me.Let the feral spirit pass through me.Let it leave me in its wake.I will remain.

The flow of magic built and built, as it always did, and Dawn prepared to render any assistance she could.But, then the chaotic, secret ways of the change overtook the ceremony.Not all sprouted waves of wildflowers as Sarina had.For Dawn, the small stones of the ring erupted into oaken saplings, a wall of wood around the nascent witch.

That, for the first time in the night, worried Sarina greatly, for if anything went wrong she would not know it.

A nerve-wracking hour passed, but then the trunks of the saplings bent, providing a doorway where none was before, and Dawn stepped through, golden hair radiant in the moonlight, smirk of smug satisfaction on her face.

“That wasn’t so hard.” She said, “What’s next?”

“Next,” Sarina replied, “You learn to live with it.”