Witch's Bell Book One

In fact, it happens with just the right bizarre infrequency to categorize it as an incredibly unlikely event. The kind of event, in fact, that could change your world completely. For an ordinary human, a chance meeting with Death in the form of a near-death experience, was usually enough to propel them into changing their lives completely. Fall off a bridge, but somehow survive the icy depths beneath despite the incredible odds, and humans start to think differently about their lives. They rightly see the meaning of such incredible events. Why, they'd probably think to themselves, if it were so incredibly unlikely that I would survive such a fall – and yet I did – then doesn't it make it incredibly meaningful that I'm still alive? Such thinking tends to push the human into a new direction, a new meaning, a new story.
    Which is precisely what Ebony did not want happening here today. As she ran from the crypt, hand now outstretched towards the round, cast metal door-handle – she put all her witchly concentration into solidifying her life as it was – the Ebony she now lived as and the Ebony she intended to keep living through. The last thing she wanted was to go into that crypt, have some horribly powerful experience, and then wind up with a completely different life story. Because unlike a human, who usually benefited from a hearty dose of a near-death experience, it didn't work that way for a witch. Witches were expected to know enough about magic, meaning, and life to never need a kick up the butt from Death to get it all sorted. In fact, if the horrible happened, and Ebony did allow her life to get changed, well... she would become like Flora – a screaming advertisement for a magical buffet. Creatures would descend upon Ebony with the glee and hungry viciousness of a pack of starved wolves. All Ebony's magic, all her life, would lay open to the highest bidder. And if those birds had been anything to go by, then chances were there were already creatures circling this situation, just waiting to swoop.
    Ebony had to play this carefully, she reminded herself as she swelled the magic in her mind. This situation was out of control, and unless Ebony found enough control and purpose, she wouldn't be able t fix it. In fact, she'd probably make things worse. That's why she had to take the time now to remind herself of who she was, what she stood for, and where she wanted to go. With so much magic concentrating on one spot, and with so many creatures waiting to cash in, it was now up to Ebony to find a way to deal with it all.
    'You're a witch,' Ebony said to herself, concentrating half on reminding herself who she was, and half on searching through the door handle for any magical protection spells that might have been cast on it. 'You want to know. You want to understand magic, life, and everything. You want to have fun,' she said with a strong breath, mind finally latching onto the tail end of a mild protection-spell. She instantly tightened her grip on the door handle, her skin pressing into the metal until it almost seemed like she was trying to melt it with the bare warmth still left in her body. 'You want to enjoy this life,' she could see the spell in her mind's eye – see it spiraling around like a snake caught in a wind tunnel. She quickly identified the weak points in it, and drove her mind towards them like a cattle dog towards the floundering sheep at the edge of the herd. 'You want to be in control of your story; you want to write it at every moment.'
    As the protection spell broke under Ebony's effort, her mind suddenly went to the journal she always kept by her bed. It was old, leather bound, and its only decoration was a tattered red ribbon that marked the current page. She wrote in the journal every single night. But she didn't jot down the events of the day for the purpose of memory or nostalgia. No, she wrote down the contents of tomorrow, the next day, and the next. She didn't try to foresee them, or use any type of divination tool to try and know the future before it happened. She simply wrote about what her life would be. She would have a good day, she might write on one page. On another, she might note how much she'd learn. On another she might write about the wonderful news she would receive. And so on. But the trick, the absolute trick, was she did not write in order. She would simply turn to some random page, and write a single wish on it. The pages were in order in the book, of course, but