Mariya

Mariya knew that she had been an unusual child, but for some reason this had never bothered her. Her mother had taken her and her siblings to bed and told them tales, tales of mythical creatures and beautiful princesses and evil, ugly villains, the triumph of good over evil. While her brothers pretended they were heroic princes rescuing her sisters, playing the damsels in distress, Mariya had always been the evil witch. Her mother had been concerned over the fact that her youngest daughter never got the chance to be a beautiful princess, but what she didn’t know what that Mariya hated the princesses.

From an early age she had known that good did not always prevail over evil. As she grew, she saw more and more evidence of this fact, and she decided that if she was going to survive in such a world, she was going to have keep her wits about her. And so, at the age of seven, Mariya dabbled in magic for the very first time.

Now, twelve years later, Mariya sat on the edge of the small, frozen pond. Around her, trees were weighed down with the snow of the bitter Russian winter. A good inch of snow balanced on top of all of the branches, and even though the forest was dense, she herself sat a few inches deep in the cold white snow.

The white of the snow made her stand out. She was only in a small, thin, black cotton dress and her worn and dirty shoes, but Mariya was warm. She knew ways to keep warm. She knew she could channel her energy in the correct way. At night, it reached forty degrees below zero, but Mariya didn’t ever so much as shiver. She thought back to winters at home, where her mother and father would giggle tipsily by the fire and the children were spoilt as much as children from a poor Russian background could be spoilt. Her father was forever pulling tiny little dolls out of his sleeves for the girls and little wooden cars for the boys. When she was younger, it had fascinated Mariya, but as she grew and got accustomed to the world of magic she realised that her father’s party tricks were just that – tricks of the most simplistic form.

"Do you remember the time we first got ourselves into trouble?" Mariya asked herself. She spoke to herself often – she had always been her own best friend, the only one she would ever truly trust. "That was a bad day. If only we could have kept our powers secret. But then again, we were young. I guess we were not as in control as we are now."

Mariya remembered the day very clearly. She had been in the small playroom at the back of the house with her siblings. She had been listening to them gushing over her father’s tricks and had gotten into a row with one of her brothers when she explained how it was done.

"You’re just jealous, Mariya," he had told her. "You want to be able to do magic just like father!"

Mariya, as most nine year olds are, was indignant at being told she couldn’t do something.

"I’ll prove it to you!" she declared. "I can do magic like father. I can dobetter magic than father!"

Her siblings were naturally sceptical, but Mariya would never forget their faces as she opened the palm of her hand, to reveal a tiny fire burning upon it. It felt like a warm tickle to her, but her siblings were astonished. Mariya concentrated on the little flame, using the negative energy her brother’s comments had given her to keep it aflame. There was a while of silence, and then –

"Of course," Mariya muttered to herself. "Natalya had to be the one to scream for mother, didn’t she?"

Natalya, the second youngest girl, had screamed for their mother as the flame got larger. Upon hearing that their youngest daughter appeared to be on fire, Mariya’s parents had rushed into the room to find the nine year old calmly swapping the flame from one hand to the other.

Mariya, already the strange child of the family, had become even more isolated after that incident. As she sat now, as the nineteen-year-old woman she was, she still felt bitter over the fact she had been ushered into the background. When she had been that age, and especially in her parents’ generation, doing things like that were incredibly taboo. A few clear magical party tricks were fine, but when a child began to show signs of something not quite natural, that was when there was cause for concern.

"They called us a witch," Mariya muttered to herself, and then she gave a high, light laugh. "I guess that’s what we are, isn’t it?"

As Mariya’s powers improved, her family isolated her further. Mariya always thought this was ironic – she had no-one to talk to and no-one to play with, and so she taught herself more magic. Perhaps if her parents had distracted her, she wouldn’t be as powerful as she was now. Not that she was complaining, of course. Her powers had been very strong, and by the time she was thirteen, she was avoided by most people in their area of the city. When she was mad with someone, she wouldn’t think twice about cursing them. Teachers were afraid to give her a bad mark for fear of the young woman muttering strange incantations under her breath. When she was thirteen, Mariya found herself being declared insane.

"They said our powers were delusions," she said angrily, her voice creeping around the silent trees. There was no echo back, and the air was cold and still. Not even a snowflake fell. "We showed them, though, didn’t we?"

Getting out of the depressing, imposing mental asylum had been easy. A bit of concentration, the urge to get out, a few symbol scratched into the floor and Mariya had simply walked out of her room. She had learnt many tricks in her time, and one of these was the trick of becoming invisible. Not invisible as normal people would imagine. She understood that sometimes, if you closed you eyes and kept very still, and allowed yourself to be possessed by the urge to not be seen, you could slip by most people. Since then, she had travelled, preferring to stay in wooded areas, and practised. She couldn’t stop practising.

Of course, her life was not without persecution. She didn’t classify herself as a dark witch, but she knew that what she used her powers for was not exactly good, either. She had taught herself these things to survive, and survive she would. A pretty young woman wandering around the countryside at night would not go unnoticed, and several times Mariya had been bothered by men who had less than innocent intentions. Sometimes she would simply scare them – disguise was an obvious talent of hers and she had worked out that she could twist her face into the most grotesque expressions. She laugh aloud as she remembered the time she had grinned, stretching her grin so wide it had appeared to split her face in half, and laughed like a maniac until she had sent the two fully-grown men running for their lives. Of course, some people were not so easily frightened away. Mariya had had to use more forceful magic on occasion, and she knew that the outcome would have most likely been fatal. However, she knew that when one lived a life such as hers, one had to fight fire with fire. She would do anything to stay alive.

She stood and stretched as the aura she had placed around herself stirred. Someone was near to her, and she didn’t like to be caught off guard. She had been hanging around this area for a while, and she knew that rumours had reached the nearby village about the monstrous human-like creature living in the forest. She laughed to herself again. She liked to be the stuff of urban legends.

Staring into the trees across the frozen pond, she spotted three faces staring back at her. They looked like teenage boys, and their eyes widened as they saw her. Mariya gave a haunting smile. If they wanted a show, she would certainly give them one. Holding her gaze, she stretched her smile just a little past the normal size, watching them take steps away from her.

Stepping a little closer, Mariya used her inner energy to begin to melt the body of water in front of her. As it melted, the small spot of red that Mariya was causing to materialise there grew, mixing into the water exactly like a drop of blood would. Except, when it had thinned out, it didn’t just vanish. It grew, long veins of it spreading through the lake and heading towards the boys, fingers of blood joining together and staining the entire lake a bright red.

Of course, the teenage boys didn’t see the entire lake go red. They were already running.

Mariya sat back down in her spot and laughed to herself. She projected the laugh. She knew it would follow them all the way home.