“- And that’s what you gotta do,” says Fresh, patting the healer-spriggan on the head.

“Pakew?”

She nods. “Yeah. For sure,” affirms the terrible witch. “Just apologize.” Fresh rubs her arm, looking out of the window. “Sometimes friends come and go, you know?” she asks, thinking about the fairy, Veli. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. It’s just…” Fresh shrugs. “It’s just that sometimes you’re at a place in life where you don’t fit together anymore.”

“Pakew…”

Fresh smiles, turning back to the healer-spriggan and placing a hand on its head. “Even if you can’t be friends anymore. There are hundreds of spriggans in the dungeon and running around the city,” she says. “Why not try them?” Fresh shrugs.

It looks down to the ground, shuffling with its stubby legs. “…Pakew.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” agrees Fresh. “It’s scary, I bet.” She looks around the room. “But you know? Sometimes you have to do scary things.” She gets up from the table. “If you’re always afraid to do scary things and you just always try to live somewhere safe, you’ll never be happy.”

“Pakew?” asks the spriggan, getting up along with her.

“It’s true,” nods Fresh, scratching her cheek as she looks down at the creature. Bending over, she pulls some of the sprouting leaves on its head away from each other. They had gotten a little tangled up. “We like to think that we’ll be happy if we just stay in a quiet, warm place forever. But that’s just a trick of the bad-thing,” she explains.

“P… pakew?”

“Mm!” nods Fresh, grabbing the spriggan’s hand and pulling it after herself as they go to the library window. She opens it up and points outside of the house, to the world the healer-spriggan has never actually stepped out into. “See? There’s a whole world out there.” She taps her head, looking around the room. “And out of the entire, whole, big world, do you really think that what will make you happy in life is going to really be in here?” she asks. She leans down, covering the side of her mouth with the back of her hand. “It’s a trick. What kind of lucky cosmic coincidence would that be?”

Fresh straightens herself back up, placing her hands by the window and looking out into the world, the kind rays of the sun reaching her face. “I fell for that too, once, you know?”

“Pakew?”

“Mm!” nods Fresh again, turning back to beam at the spriggan. “But then I tried some new stuff and I found out that I wasn’t actually being who I wanted to be the whole time and that I wasn’t really unlucky or cursed.” She shrugs. “I was just lazy and scared and angry and I took it out on myself.” She bends down, pressing a finger against the spriggan’s nose. “Just like you did to someone else.” She crosses her arms, nodding with a proud smile at her own sage wisdom. “Hurt people hurt. Sometimes others, sometimes ourselves.”

“Pakew…” The spriggan lowers its head.

Fresh nods her head towards the farm, where the springan is. “When you’re ready, go apologize and then try taking a walk around town by yourself, okay?”

The spriggan nods and Fresh beams, patting it on the head. She has to go downstairs now, before the others leave without her. She loves their home, of course, but this is just a house. What good is it to be inside of a place like this if you’re all by yourself?

The real thing of value she had found outside of the boundaries that she had once set herself. Those four walls, that dark apartment, those were the barriers of a cage she built by herself, telling herself that the world was horrible and cruel and unjust.

In truth, those things might be true, of course. But that doesn’t mean that wallowing in the misery of it made it better. It’s the obvious, sensible choice, but it doesn’t mean that it’s the right choice.

The wiser minds of the world might disagree and it might be selfish of her to think, but sometimes, a little self-delusion in the other direction, a little less thinking about the world and its problems and a lot of ‘it is what it is’, all combined with a sense of personal responsibility that forces one to actually try to be happy, instead of just wishing that one is, goes a long way towards achieving a goal of personal happiness.

The world might not be perfect and things are going to get even worse.

But at least she’s happy. Her family is happy and in the end, what else should really matter to her?

Why a fountain?

It is late in the evening. The four of them have come back from their outing into the city. In truth, the outing didn’t even take that long. But then, afterwards, they went through the city, looking at the different shops and stores for a while. Business is tight everywhere and they were greeted warmly inside of every open door they entered.

The stuff they had to give away was gone before the first ten minutes had passed and then they had to make a quick escape, because people kept coming to ask for more and they were getting pushy. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.

But anyways, that isn’t the issue. The issue is the fountain.

Fresh stares up towards the top of the tower, to where the stone basin is that she had made for the sunwater. Now, usually a cauldron would be more up her alley, but during the project, she had the inexplicable desire to make a fountain specifically.

- In hindsight, this is mighty suspicious.

Is the fountain messing with her thoughts still? Apparently. That jerk.

Fresh tilts her head, scratching her cheek as she stares at the tower. So the fountain, from what she has found out, wants to make the world quiet. But why?

Something tugs on her arm, the healer-spriggan. She blinks, looking down at it. “Hey, little guy,” she says. “Did you take care of that stuff?”

“Pakew!” replies the spriggan, nodding. She smiles, nodding and patting it on the head as she turns back to the tower.

The fountain is Perchta. The Perchta from ten years ago. She has figured this out by herself. But that opens a whole new can of worms, regarding spiritual logistics.

She herself is supposed to be Perchta, at least the reincarnation of her. So why is Perchta, one, not dead-dead and two, floating in the abyss as a malevolent spirit intent on quieting the world? The answer to the latter question is obvious, sleep. Perchta, like herself in her old life, wants nothing more than to sleep and to never wake up again. But that’s just hard to do when the world is so noisy, she supposes.

Fresh turns her head, looking at Jubilee, at Shamrock. If her suspicions are correct, then both of them had at the very least known Perchta, in their former lives, before they all became friends. But what kind of luck is that, that the four of them would cross paths with her reincarnation?

It’s beyond luck. It’s either fate or it’s been a set-up from the start.

Black-water…

She closes her eyes and thinks. But it’s hard to make clear sense of the whole situation with what she knows and what she doesn’t know.

Perchta had been alive here, in this world, around ten years ago. Then the hero was summoned to combat some great evil and she, the hero and the entire region of the south were all destroyed in the fight.

But why? What was the point? Why did the hero want to go after Perchta? Was it because of the church’s influence over him? Was he really summoned here just to stop her, or was she just in the way of the real hundred-year threat?

Fresh opens her eyes, staring across the room.

Maybe the hero was never even meant to kill the original Perchta to begin with? After all, why would she be a more special target than the other witches, Gauden or Spiraholle? There’s no reason for her to stand out from them. Why would Perchta, who had ‘always’ existed, be worthy of summoning the hero? The hero comes every hundred years, together with some grand, existential threat. But this one, this new hero that has come to meet her, is ninety years too early.

That means, if she, the original Perchta, was never the original threat, that there was always something else in the world… some other threat that has existed for centuries. Something that she got caught in the way of.

Could it be that it was all never really about the witches to start with? That they were just stuck in the middle of something else?

“Are you okay?” asks Basil, setting down a cup in front of her. “You look a little pale,” says the priestess, pulling back her sleeve and feeling Fresh’s forehead with her wrist.

Fresh looks at the spriggan, rubbing its own head against her idle hand which lays down on top of its head and then her eyes wander to her friends.

“Hey, guys?” she asks. “The other heroes. The older ones. What were they summoned here for?” she asks. The others look at each other for a moment, before turning back her way. Jubilee sets down their coughee cup.

“Evil.”

“Evil?” asks Fresh.

“Evil,” nods Jubilee, snapping their fingers. “Basil. This is a chicken question.”

Basil sighs, rolling her eyes, taking her seat at the table.