Upon This Rock (Urban Witch) Errand NaNoWriMo

Modern setting, i.e. real world Alternate Universe (AU). The story is set in the 2000s, a specific date might come up at some point. Might include the Twin Towers coming down, but it’s cheap heat so most likely setting in 2004, far enough away from the drama. Changed to 2007 to better fit with the age of the main character.

The setting will take place mostly in Europe, but novel starts off initially in New York, US. Wanna have New Orleans in it too just for obscure Marie Laveau references and voodoo. Notable places coming up will be Paris, might also include Austria Slovakia for main character’s home town, some famed / frequented pagan places of worship, so Germany or Britain, Italy for some flair. Toying with the idea of including Africa and South/Middle America, but my knowledge of both places is lacking. Scratched, too much work.

Main character is our girl (name something with M, German sounding, shouldn’t be Christian, behind the name is my friend. It’s Maja, she’s Maja) who was born in some tiny Austrian Slovakian mountain village. She’s a witch. Witch here applied as broader term for practitioners of magic that believe in nature, the earth, seasons etc ("Earth religion"). They are linked to wicca and druidism (check if that is that a word), mind the distinction to shamanism (principle goal of the shaman is to achieve an ecstatic state of mind to achieve a direct link with the spirit world. Thanks, Miranda Green). They get their magical powers from connection to the world around them. Not worship precisely, though places of worship are important to them. More on that father down. Paganism too, both old and neo: 3 goals. 1. Love for and kinship with nature. 2. “do what thou wilt but harm none”. 3. Acceptance of the polarity of deity (balance between male and female).

Witches exist all around the globe, on all continents – okay, maybe not Antarctica. They are called by different names depending on the region they live in. The English word “witch” is used for convenience. They celebrate certain important days like the summer and winter solstice, have a wide variety of believes. A witch can be agnostic / atheistic. Animism.

Magic system is soft magic by Sanderson’s First Law. Not directly set rules for magic, but equivalent exchange. Trying to go for a somewhat mystical and, well, magical feel here. Witches can work wonders that go from making plants grow to making mountains split, the quality of life stuff being what magic is used for 90% of the time. Someone is sick? Witches helps them heal better. Plants aren’t growing? Let the witch sing to them. It hasn’t been raining in months? Sorry, not really able to do anything about that, but I can try and maybe you’ll get a miracle. Death is the big nono obviously. Witches can’t raise the dead, and they shouldn't intentionally do harm to any living being (animals, humans, you get the drift).

Most of the magic they work is indirect. Bring something along, make it better, help it grow, not create something from nothing, that’s hard work. They do however enchant objects. Both unmovable and movable ones. Enchanted objects are “special”, either in the sense that they are especially pure (e.g. branch from an old, undisturbed tree) or have emotional value. Emotion holds and reinforces magic like nothing else. An object that was made with or given with love will be able to sustain some of the strongest magic.

Magic can also be exist in a place rather than an object. Those are places of worship, where prayers were held, festivals, ceremonies; any place people used to express their adoration of nature in general or an aspect of it in particular. Sacrifices of all kinds made especially potent anchors for natural forces, though only those willingly given will produce the kind of energy that is of interest to witches. The longer and more frequently a place was used, the more magic will have accumulated there. Disuse of a place will diminish its inherent power, but this process of loss will take just as long as it took for a special aura to form around a place.

All witches, are anchored to a place of power. This place is where the witch draws their power from, what they channel to be able to do magic. Witches are therefore by default place-bound. If an ordinary witches moves to far away from their anchor they will gradually lose their ability to perform magic while at the same time feeling a pull back to where they are bound. The farther the distance, the stronger the pull becomes until it can cause the witch physical pain and various symptoms. It’s unknown if they will die if removed too far from their origin, as usually it’s not in a witch’s interest to leave the place that is their own. The distance needed to cause discomfort varies from person to person, with some being able to move away hundreds of kilometers from their anchor without great negative effects.

Witches aren’t born witches, though there is a higher likelihood of the daughter, cousin, niece of a witch to become a witch as well. Witches are female only (playing the trope straight here, wanna do something different from how I usually run). It is their connection to the world around them, or more precisely the location they anchor to, that grants them power. This is a process that usually begins in the late teens, but can however also start years later. There were women who became witches who were well into their forties or fifties. Younger witches are extremely rare. 

There is a different kind of witches, however: travelers. Those witches can feel places of power – which all witches do, to a degree, but a traveler's sensing of them is far superior than that of other witches – and have the ability to choose to anchor themselves to a place voluntarily, compared to normal witches who grow attached to only one place as they become witches. Travelers are regular witches who discover their ability to roam the world without bonds and can settle into a different place and form a new anchor to another place if they want to do so, given up one home for another. They often stay in a place for a while and then move on, always curious to discover new things, on a quest to help people and the earth in general that isn’t bound to one particular place.

Travelers are rare. They say there is one born in a generation, though that was hard to measure in earlier centuries as records were often vague and travel both more difficult and harder to monitor.

And then… then there is Maja. Maja, who is anchored to a tiny, insignificant village somewhere in the Western Carpathians but isn’t bound by any borders and has a curious ability that has so far been unknown.

WC: 1100+ words

Name: Maja Beňová
Age: 24 (born 1983)
Occupation: travel photographer
Residence: a mountain village close to Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia


History:

Maja was born in in 1983 in the then Czechoslovak Socialist Republic as the only child of her parents, Kazimír and Aneta Beňová. Far enough removed form politics by living between the mountains her childhood was largely a happy one. The other village children were her friends, her family had a stable income and there were many adults around who loved to entertain the little girl.

There was always an underlining tension however, the need to comply with the communist government, the knowledge that some topics shouldn't be talked about in public, the growing unrest. The protests started in earnest when she was 5 and lasted until after she had started school in 1998. Then, the social state ceased to exist and their country was renamed. One of her oldest memories is learning the word "Czech and Slovak Federative Republic".

Things were changing. Young as she was it confused Maja, but it also soothed her. Her parents were more happy, her uncle was ecstatic, the tension slowly bled away... then, another name change, another country when she was 9. The education program too was changed around a lot in those years, always new methods and theories, but she had no understanding what it meant for children like her, born to peasants, with no KSC member in the immediate family. She was pushed into a new school, a gymnasium, by her elated family, but Maja herself never liked it as much as the normal school she had gone to before.

She'd wanted to become an apothecary, grandma Hana told her, but they'd have never allowed her to become one. Maja however, Maja could become anything she wanted. That was the first time she started to realize that choice was something not everyone was afforded (not her grandma, born to a deserted German soldier and farmer's daughter, and not her grandpa who'd lost his brothers to a cause he'd never believed in and been shunned because he didn't honor their sacrifice).

School was hard for Maja. Numbers exhausted her, she wasn't interested in reading books and why stay in a classroom when she could be outside, doing better things? The only thing she liked was art class. The painting not so much, but drawing sketches was nice and she had a gift with her hands, carving anything that she got a hold of.

It was her grandfather who'd started it, giving her a piece of leftover wood from the carpentry to keep her busy. Wood, then stone and clay and metal, everything that she could form fascinated Maja, made her touch and investigate and create whatever came to her mind. A bird here, a child there, a tree and a fish and "Look grandpa, this one is a dog!"

Her art teachers were delighted in her talent. Someone knew someone, and they knew someone else, and by the time she finished school everyone urged Maja to apply to university. Her grandparents were farmers and carpenters and bakers, her parents an accountant and a construction worker. Maja wasn't bound as they had been, wasn't held back by not meeting any state requirements.

After graduation in 2001 she applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. High goals, but both invited her to their entrance exams (she still believes one of her teachers managed to get a letter of recommendation for her to Vienna, but she never figured out who exactly). Brastislava declined her application: too uninspired, not modern enough, conservative at best and boring at worst. Vienna accepted her for a scholarship in sculpturing. "Spiritual" they called her sculptures, life-like, full of passion, touching.

She knew German, thankfully, or the basics of it, at least. It had been taught in the gymnasium she'd gone to and her grandma's sister, her favorite aunt Eliška, who was a language teacher and had traveled in her youth, was fluent in it and had helped her study.

During the summer before moving to Vienna Maja spent most of her time either with Eliška or in the surrounding area, hiking through forests, studying animals, talking trips to other villages to look at this or that or visiting landmarks. She wanted to be prepared for university, trying to memorize as much of her home as possible to be able to call it to her mind when she'd have to create art.

It was then that her perception started to change. At first she attributed it to getting more attuned to her environment, but there things that were just a little off, a half-withered bush that grew stronger with every day she visited it, a rabbit with an injured leg that kept following her, her sensing where the best mushrooms for the grandma's stew could be found. Maja grew to be more somehow, less a singular person inside the world around her and more an extension of it.

Eliška was the one she went to, and Eliška was the one who told her not to worry, to go to Vienna and study, that Banská Štiavnica would wait for her and she had time to explore her newfound abilities when her years there were over.

So Maja went. It wasn't easy to communicate with her new classmates at first, but she made do with hands and feet when necessary. And art, of course. For the first time in years she enjoyed school, delighted in the challenge of getting better, of learning more about her craft. People were awed at her skill in carving wood, but she learned more about other materials too. Stone fascinated her the most, far more than metal or ceramics.

She came home for the holidays whenever possible, for Christmas and Easter, and always during the summer break.

Maja had been back at the university for her third year for a month when she got the call that Eliška was sick. It wasn't unexpected: she was old, had lived through the war, spent years without the food she's have needed to grow up healthy. Maja loved her, more than she'd ever loved her education. She returned permanently to Slovakia when it became apparent her great aunt wouldn't be getting better.

The doctor tried to help, but Eliška knew that she was dying. She tried to convince Maja to go back to Vienna to her studies, but she refused, losing her scholarship when she missed the complete rest of the semester. Eliška died in the spring of 2004 at 75, but in the half year that they had left she thought Maja what a witch was, how to be a witch.

After the funeral she left Slovakia and hasn't returned since.


Family:

Mother's side: one uncle, chef, works in Bratislava, one aunt and single mom with her two younger cousins (both boys), living in Banská Bystrica, mother's parents who owned a bakery but now only have their little farm in a village about 1 hour away by car

Father's side: father's sister and her husband who own the carpentry formerly run by Maja's grandfather (they mainly produce souvenirs for tourists), father's parents, both alive, live on the same property as Maja's parents, father works in the local animal park and gives mountain bike tours for tourists, mother is an accountant for the town hall, grandfather's 2 brothers both died in the war, grandmother has a brother and a sister, brother has his own family in a neighboring village, sister (Eliška) is a witch

WC: 1268

Name: Eliška Galova
Age: died at 75 (1928-2004)
Occupation: language teacher / pensioner
Residence: a mountain village close to Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia

Eliška was born as the oldest of three siblings. She was 10 when the Hungarians come and started to claim a big part of their country for themselves and suddenly she lived close to a border, and not soon after there was war. She had nowhere to run. Her mother was a farmer's daughter and her father a deserted German soldier who knew that if they ever caught him he'd either go to a labor camp or be hanged for running away from the force. So his parent stayed where they where, and Eliška and her siblings with them. School stopped at some point, soldiers traveled through Banská Štiavnica to Banská Bystrica, but thankfully they never stopped, never asked questions.

When the war ended, Eliška was 17, had cared for her siblings, gathered food, helped here and there, but otherwise had nothing to her name. The only thing she was good at was picking up languages. They'd studied Russian in school, and some German. She'd listened to the Hungarian soldiers, got and understanding, even if it was only basic. Somebody in the town hall remembered her, had her help translate documents of German citizens and some Hungarian correspondence. It paid poorly, but it did pay, helped get her younger brother and sister some decent food to eat.

Schools were opened again and suddenly Eliška was teaching young children Russian. She wasn't that good at it, at least she thought so, but there was a shortage of teachers and that job actually paid a halfway decent wage. Still, a legitimate teacher needed some kind of qualification, needed to be approved of by the state so they didn't pollute young minds with the wrong ideals. So two years after the war had ended, just shy of 20, they packed her off to Prague to study language. It was supposed to be a 2-year-course, meant more for making sure of her ideology than furthering her skills. Eliška however was wary of politics, had learned to never share her opinions on what mattered.

After her 2 years were up they sent her back to the countryside, back to her tiny town. But people at university remembered her, the professors who'd praised her dedication. A year as a school teacher and she was back in Prague, pushed into studying English. This time they didn't let her get back, didn't waste her skill on an insignificant rural town. Instead Eliška went to other universities, to Budapest, London and Berlin.

The state had great plans for her: a language Professor, teaching communist ideals in Prague, proficient in 4 foreign languages. Their investment in her education was supposed to pay off, even though she was almost 30 by the time she had all the diplomas that would have made her a dean at the university's language department. She owed it to the state who had supported her to be of use to them – or at least Eliška was supposed to feel that way. She didn't, however. She had seen her siblings only a handful of times in a decade, had missed her brother's wedding and her mothers death.

She held no love for the regime, couldn't force the right words past her lips even though she had never defied them before. She excelled at her profession, at teaching, but not in the way she should have. They tried to force her, a hint here and there, a threat about her career, a jab at her family, cold looks and pay-cuts until Eliška went back to where she'd come from Banská Štiavnica, to teach insignificant children strange words, back into obscurity, back to a family who had become almost stranger to her.

At 35 Eliška Galova went back home, at 35 she became a witch. It was ironic how she only realized what she'd lost in her forced exile when when she was back from it. The mountains and forests, and rivers and fields, that was her home.


Name: Joshua Keller
Age: 25 (born 1982)
Occupation: minister / teacher of religion
Residence: Eisenstadt, Burgenland, Austria

Joshua was born as the second child of a couple good, catholic Austrians. His father was an engineer, his mother a housewife, his brother a boy 7 years his elder who had no patience for his young, curious sibling. Lukas never cared much for him, if anything he was unhappy that he'd gotten a younger sibling who'd stolen his parents' attention away. He didn't ever mistreat Jonathan, he was too well-raised for that, but he also never went out of his way to befriend little Jonathan, who idolized his big brother quite a bit.

Joshua lacked spirit compared to his brother. Lukas knew at 12 that he'd become a police officer, was the captain of the local kids football team, had a dozen friends who came by and took him away for some games or adventures. Joshua on the other hand never had more than handful of friends. He was a quiet boy who when he opened his mouth only did so to ask questions. What, why, how? Understanding the world was important to him, he wanted to know things.

Teachers loved him in school, his classmates didn't much care for the bland guy whose only noteworthy feature were his good grades. Joshua wasn't creative, wasn't sporty, didn't get into any fight and never came home late. Children of his own age found the boy to be rather boring. It made him isolated, at least until he started confirmation lessons as a teenager.

Joshua soaked up the teachings of the clerics, studied the bible, books on religious criticism and possible interpretations of the holy book. Here, he had friends, here people accepted him, here few thought him too boring or not daring enough – there was only so much daring left that could be done in the name of the church. God had accepted him, and it made him devoted enough to consider dedicating his life to him.

When he left school he went on to the university of Vienna to study theology, because no matter how old he got, there was still that need in him, the need to understand how the world works.