September really wasn’t a good flash fic month for me, but I’m hoping October will be different. It’s off to a good start at least. I quite like this little piece. It’s based on a prompt from the writing bot on my Discord (which you can find here to add to your own Discord if you’re interested!). Hope you enjoy it!
The Witching Hour
I expected the knock at the door would come eventually, but I didn’t expect it to happen at midnight. In hindsight, I probably should have. Warlocks have a flair for the dramatic, after all, and ever since those silly boys realized they weren’t the only coven in town they had been sending me messages – letters, dream-speech, a single brick through the window of my bakery – telling me to watch out. How I could be encroaching on territory I’ve lived in since before these pups were born, I’ll never know.
I’d gone to bed early to make up for some lost sleep due to some gnome shenanigans the night before, and being woken up just an hour later by thump-thump-thumping was, frankly, not my favorite. I blinked at the darkness of my ceiling, then turned my gaze inward and outward. I knew it was then, of course, but no harm in checking. I saw them standing on my porch, felt them there. They were like sparklers, all brightness and fervor and rush, and blissfully unaware that if nothing changed they’d soon burn out. I considered going back to sleep but if it wasn’t this night it’d be some other night.
When I slipped my feet into my slippers, they pounded on the door again. “All right, all right,” I mumbled, shuffling downstairs. “I’m coming, it’s not like we’re in a hurry with this bullshit territory marking bullshit…” I yawned, and opened the front door.
They thought they looked menacing, standing three men wide, each in a black leather coat and big clunky boots. The one in the center wore a T-shirt with some band I vaguely recognized, the one on the left had rings on every finger. The one on the right didn’t want to be there, and tried extra hard to look like he did.
“Boys,” I said, tightening the belt on my fluffy pink robe and breathing in deeply through my nose. I spoke the words quietly in my mind and felt the runes light up like electricity along my skin, the ink igniting with magic which rushed through my veins and collected at the tips of my fingers. “Don’t you know that the witching hour is 3 a.m.?”
important stuff!