[attr="class","lvappbody2"]

[attr="class","lvappbody3"]

Remember,

don't forget a thing

You remember your mothers hands working the wood, shaping it with tools as worn as her hands. Her hands are covered in scars and thick with callouses that sometimes hurt against your own skin still soft with youth. It is only a matter of time before your skin, smooth as varnished wood, begins to bruise and bleed. Once, you mourned the growing callouses as your mother teaches you how to bend wood to your will, but you grow to appreciate them and the lessons you were taught. Her ghost hangs upon your shoulders and lovingly whispers to you the origins of every scar on your hands.[break][break]

You remember your father's hands, gangly and feather light. Frail and sickly, he etches into you the memory of his life and those before him. You can recite your family eight generations back and tell each one's life stories. It feels like you've known them your whole life, these long dead aunts, uncles, and great grand parents. Father doesn't wake up one day, but you feel him with you in the stories he's given to you. When you sleep, you see him as he used to be. His hands are warm and heavy in yours.[break][break]

Your brother frets over your health, hands hotter than your fever as the fire of fear burns just under his skin. He tells you that you mustn't become sick like father. Be strong like mother, but live longer than mother. His grief makes you ache more than any sickness ever has. The ghosts of lost family weigh on him, pulling him far below the surface of the water. They haunt him in all the things they never did and the things he can't take back. He wants the best for you because he can't lose anyone else. He loves so much that it hurts.[break][break]

You keep them alive, the memories of the family you've lost. For years, you work wood instead of magic, because this is what mother did and this what you love. They sell well enough in the market, all the things you make. You peddle the earrings and the pens and decorations you make. As your skill improves, people begin to commission you for bigger and bigger projects. They ask you to carve the wood of their homes and it is there that you begin to hear things. Once you set to work, they forget you are there, but you listen in, because that's what fathered loved. As you carve entire forests into their homes, you etch into your memory all the gossip and shady deals they carelessly let slip like water from the jug. You don't think anything of it at first, but as the talks get more and more dangerous,
you wonder if it's safe to continue working like this. You don't tell your brother anything. He has enough to worry about.[break][break]

A flawless hand pulled ink across impossibly clean paper, bringing to life your name in a way that makes your heart quake. The paper is too fine, the writing too elegant. Your brother smiles and says someone rich must want to commission you, but somehow the unopened letter weighs too heavy in your hands. It remains unread until after your brother leaves to buy food. It feels almost wrong to break the envelope's seal, as if doing so was to ruin the perfection of the envelope itself. Worry and fear fills you as honey eyes follow too-perfect script that steals your breath away.[break][break]

Your familiar urges you to take the offer. They whisper to you that belonging to coven has so many benefits. Imagine how well your carvings would sell if you could enchant them. You tell them that you can already do that, but they scoff as if your current enchantments are nothing. They're not wrong. You don't need their convincing, though. It's now that you realize that you're restless and your hands itch for something more. They call to shape something other than familiar wood and you're pulled in as if you ever had a choice in the matter.[break][break]

Leviathan suits you, you grow to realize, as they pull from you a side you never knew you had. Sly and cunning, you learn to manipulate things other than wood and it excites you in a way your mother's craft doesn't. You hide your newfound coven from your brother, but he watches you with concern as your smiles seem to cast shadows they never did before. Dearest brother takes a step back as frightening things begin to dance behind eyes once sweet as daffodils now burning as mercilessly as the sun.