Serafiend: Origins of a Wicked Witch, Chapter One
She paced restlessly across the darkened library, the echoes of her heels clicking on the polished floor boards. The clicks reverberated against the high ceilings, then muffled once they reached the innumerable spines of leather and paper, spanning the walls on three of the four sides of the room.
The fourth side held soaring windows, towering over the room, floor to ceiling, spilling the light of the almost full moon across the velvet couches and sprawling oriental rug in the middle of the room. A small crackle from the stone fireplace flanking the couches on the north side of the room belied its dying warmth, almost gone.
Serafiend paused to watch the last few embers glow defiantly against the encroaching cold and dark already seeping into the rest of the room - waiting patiently to overtake this last vestige of warmth and light in the space.
Thinking of how she could rekindle the fire and allow this ember a chance to burn brightly, her thoughts drifted to the one sole ember within her heart, fighting for a chance to catch fire and spread, if she would only let it.
Hadn’t she once felt an inferno there? Hadn’t that been lovely? Couldn’t she just give in and fan those flames into being? Perhaps it would be different this time. Perhaps this time it would not all end in pain and disaster.
Perhaps this time she would not need to curse anyone and visit terror upon their lineage for ages to come?
But, since as early as she could remember, the fire within always acted as a beacon to others who found it too bright, and who sought to extinguish it all together. And the one time she had let the fire burn and hoped another would share in her warmth, he had run from the heat, in fear of its intensity.
Crumpling to a heap on the soft couch, Serafiend succumbed to the wrenching sobs that had been threatening to overwhelm her all day. All week? Had it been months she had been pacing directionless across this chamber?
She momentarily felt helpless, weak, and rejected. Reminding her of how this all began….
…Forty Years Before…
Seraphine (her given name at birth) was a thin and pale child, prone to anxious thoughts and neglected of parental nurturance. Having been born to parents of eccentricity and low financial means, their home, more of a hovel, sat a couple of miles from a village in the countryside of the province Hythe, what is now modern day Straevium. Seraphine’s father was a leatherman and her mother did sewing repairs for middle-class ladies of the village.
The hovel was surrounded by rolling hills filled with vignettes of wildflowers and bumble bees, gnarled tree roots breaking through the graveled lane, and birds that sang spells to bring about the seasons. What she lacked in companionship, she was rich in wonder and magick.
With little prospects at life without an education, her parents, for all their absence in the majority of matters associated with raising children, ensured that Seraphine and her siblings attended school regularly in hopes that their children would earn grades good enough to be accepted into a program of study that would yield jobs in higher-earning fields.
The village thought them all odd, Seraphine being the middle child of the family and the oddest of the children. Her older brother Sag and her younger sister Sun were odd, too, but not like her.
She dressed as a witch and chased the village cats, trying to convince them to do her bidding. She played musical instruments she carved from wood for the birds in the field, and left her favorite stones in the woods for the faeries to find.
Bright and witty when she felt like she could be herself without fear of reproach from her mother or jeers from the women of the village, Seraphine read voraciously. For the better part of her early childhood, her only friends were books and the characters whose lives played out in their pages. None of her classmates at school read the way she did, as they preferred instead to gossip at the town fountain or play pranks on travelers down the main road.
The books led her to dream. She daydreamed and nightdreamed. She dreamed about far off galaxies she would travel to and become a beloved warrior queen. She dreamed about writing a book so famous she would be known throughout the land and sit upon the court of kings and queens. She dreamed of any other life than the one she had been born into. She dreamed of riches to buy her way out of this hovel in this town. She dreamed of people who would love her and protect her. But most of all, she dreamed that she was accepted and admired. By everyone.
She imagined how wonderful it must feel to be seen by another person and shown love and attention.
She dreamed she would never again feel rejection, for who could not like such a small and curious child? Who would not want her?
The children’s mother, Marose, had not wanted them. She had no choice, for that was her lot in life. Get married, bear children. And she did. She did not hate them, but she wished for a life of freedom away from the demands of a family. Their father, Leonis, spent most of his time outside of his small repair shop in dreamland, nose in a book, much like his middle child, and wandering the countryside in search of creatures with which to converse.
The children were left to their own devices most days, for if they approached their mother for her attention or time, they were swiftly reminded that they were interrupting her life. They were told that they burdened her so. They were called ‘too much’ and ‘pests.’
Seraphine learned never to ask mother for help, for she would be met with the declaration that she was slow-witted, weak, or clumsy. She quickly learned to do everything herself in order to avoid criticism from mother.
This created a spirit of fierce independence in the girl, and drove her to study and learn in order to never be thought slow-witted. She waited and waited for her mother to finally tell her she was smart, but those words never came. They still had not come.
Even though Seraphine was generally a well-behaved child, rarely getting into any trouble for she was too busy reading and gathering frogs from the creek, Marose constantly reminded Seraphine that if she did not behave and live up to her mother’s standards, her mother could simply leave, choosing to go and live her own life away from the children and husband she regretted.
She would keep a traveling bag hidden in a cabinet near the cellar stairs, a constant threat looming, that only she and the children knew about. Once when the children were arguing noisily over a toy in the yard, their mother grabbed her traveling bag and walked out the gate and began to head down the lane toward town.
The children’s cries and tears did not stop her or change her heart - perhaps they reinforced her departure. It was not until they quieted and returned inside in search of their father that Marose returned and stowed her bag back in the cabinet, admonishing the children for making her leave.
From then on, the children lived in fear of their mother’s moods and constant threats to leave, seeking affection and belonging in whatever ways they could externally, for they knew they would not find it in their mother. And their mother knew she could always use the trick of pretending to leave in order to control her children.
Seraphine tried to make friends with other children in the nearby village, but her hand-me-down clothes and worn books for school were a sign of her family’s low means and the other children, whose parents were mostly wealthy merchants and physicians, made sure to remind her and her siblings they were poor.
Her brother took to a group of friends who met at the pub nightly to drink and gamble, eventually earning him a place socially among other boys he could call friends. And her sister withdrew from socializing altogether, preferring the company of her toys and books, and sitting with their father in his workshop while he eked out a meager living repairing leather goods, such as shoes, boots, and horse bridles.
Around the age of seven, Seraphine, however, discovered that another girl, Menette, who was her age, lived across the lane and down a mile, and they frequented the creek that ran through the hills, imagining themselves as fairy princesses or sorceresses with great power and riches. Days spent running up and down the lane and chasing larks along the river bank were some of her happiest memories.
She and Menette were the closest of friends and the fact that both their families were poor never seemed to matter to their friendship. They spent all their spare time together, even sitting next to one another in their school classes in town. They whispered secrets and giggled at their own inside jokes. With Menette by her side, Seraphine felt like she finally had someone in her life she could trust and who felt the same love and friendship she felt. They planned to run off to the nearest big city once they had completed secondary schooling, and start their lives of adventure in the court of some beautiful lady or a powerful high priestess.
Menette’s family belonged to a group of people known to worship the great god, Yvan, while Seraphine’s family followed the old pagan traditions. This was not something the girls considered important, as their time together was spent in imagination and dreams. As they got older, however, and entered secondary schooling, Menette began to make friends with other girls from her temple, and one day when Seraphine went by Menette’s house after school to run down to the creek and tell stories, as they were often like to do, Menette’s temple friends were hanging around.
One girl that Seraphine recognized from school, Tamea, told her she was not welcome at Menette’s house anymore. Looking to Menette for reassurance that surely their friendship transcended these bounds, Seraphine found only sadness in her friend’s eyes as Menette stared at the ground and shifted nervously from one foot to the other, twisting her dress in her hands. Menette promised to meet her at the creek the next day after school, and Seraphine headed home worried about what had just transpired.
The next day after school, Seraphine quietly sat next to the stream, dipping her toes in the cool water and humming to herself while she waited for Menette. She daydreamed lazily until after some time, she realized the sun was setting low to the horizon. She had been at the stream’s edge for a couple of hours, and Menette had not come.
At school the following day, Menette would no longer talk to Seraphine when she approached her in their class and looked right past her when they passed each other in the hall. She felt a deep sorrow, as if her heart had been broken by the rejection of her best friend in the world. Why wasn’t she good enough anymore? What had changed?
She would never get an answer. Only silence.
Seraphine eventually grew into a lovely young woman, barely finishing her secondary schooling in the nearby village, thanks to her headstrong ways and incessant lateness to classes. She developed a bad habit of preferring to sleep in, daydreaming of being rescued by a knight in shining armor who would tell her how beautiful she was and offer her a life filled with magick and adventures.
These daydreams began to overtake her daily life, as she dissociated into a longing for someone who would affirm her existence and make her feel loved and wanted.
At home, she constantly found herself fighting with her mother over not doing chores or missing school. Her mother threatened to kick her out, forcing her to live on the streets as a beggar. As much as the freedom of this may have been appealing, she knew she lacked resources to ensure her own safety. So she found work at a local bakery, assisting the head baker after school most days, in order to save money to eventually buy herself the life she wanted.
She found that others took notice of her loveliness- mostly older, lecherous men who would frequent the bakery and offer her extra coins to meet them in the alley out back. She was repulsed by the reality of her position in the world, yet beginning to understand the type of currency her appearance could grant her. The prospect of spending any amount of time in close proximity to those men was abhorrent, but perhaps, she thought, there were better men who she could find to trade her looks for a better life?
But as lovely as her outward countenance, inside she harbored fears of others hurting or rejecting her, the way her mother had. She believed that at her core, she was really just unlovable. The old men who tried to offer her money for her body - not to love her - reinforced to her that she had nothing else to offer anyone, no value beyond her physical existence. She harbored insecurities that people would befriend her only to abandon her, the way Menette had. She knew even if there were better men that would pay for the life she wanted, she would have to give up something in order to get that- because nobody would do that for her out of love.
She was deeply distrustful of others and found that she could take the power away from anyone by using them and cruelly discarding them first.
And so she did, beginning with a kind boy in the town named Silas.
if you have enjoyed this writing, it is part of a writing exercise I am undergoing in alchemically transforming traumatic memories and experiences through the lens of empowerment and writing them as my lore; if you would like to read more about that, you can read this article I wrote in January 2025. All names, locations, and other details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals and also because its my story and I can write it however I want. Please consider subscribing to support my work and share with others!