Spell to Summon a Lost Love

Setting up the ritual, she holds fear at bay with her bare hands; focused on their movements, she marks the circle. Placing the rose quartz—big as her restless heart, ragged pink-veined facets thirsty for the light of a fattening barley moon—on the centre sigil. Calling her power to set the fires pirouetting in their bowls of sacred oil at the cardinal points, she draws in her breath and almost brings the fear with it—will he be there, as he promised—until she curls her toes into the moss-bound grass and feels the hum of the words as she passes the incantation over her tongue and between her lips. Words she's waited half a lifetime to speak. Words that can finally call his world back to hers.

Watching the stone recharge, settled on the dew-dampening ground, her body whispers to her: skin pricking with chill, bones aching with the stillness, coaxing her mind toward the past. Hands that had not looked quite so worn as they moved across his skin. First to heal when she’d found him—near-fatally wounded—and then, in other ways: oh, how she’d lain unfurled in his lap that scented summer night of their goodbye. In the meadow behind her small house, drifting on his caress like the opened petals of a water lily. But the shiver that plucks her nape is not the memory or the cold. As the stone glows its fill of moonlight, as the veil between their worlds grows thin and parts, fear is the stubborn shadow beneath her skin: how can a promise so faded stand its ground—let him be there. Let him still love as I love. Let him come back to me.