Chapter 15

Chapter 15 of 48 · 8-minute read

Transiting Uranus Exiting Dragon’s Seventh House of Partnerships

I smile to myself. My releasing ritual isn’t Dragon’s magick. It’s from outside her teachings, and to some degree, outside its original culture practice. I’ve used this ritual many times and customized it to my own spiritual practices. Maybe this is the reason, this night, here with Lady Dragon’s higher self and an extreme need to release any attachments either of us still has to the other and to rid myself of the horse-faced servant pacing outside my property. Lady Dragon may be more expert at her own magickal tools than I will ever be, but this ritual isn’t in her tool belt of magick.

Ugh. I have to stop allowing myself to think of her as Lady Dragon, as I often do when I feel her power as being bigger than my own. She’s just Dragon. Or, just Theresa, if I really want to insult her standing among the Big Witches.

Refusing to let Dragon distract me, I set my sights instead on the memories of my bond with her and what went wrong. Years ago, I rendezvoused with my friend Belinda while traveling on business. Belinda dragged me to a lengthy dinner event that included celebrity witches who are household names in almost any pagan home. Between us, we jokingly called them the “Big Witches,” a moniker that stuck. Several of the then-Elders of the Grand Coven had been there as well, including Donna. This was less than four years before Dragon and the Elders split into two covens after multiple disagreements over how to handle coven business. It was Dragon’s right, of course, as the highest High Priestess, how she ran her coven. If anyone disagreed, they were more than welcome to leave and start their own coven, which is exactly what the Elders did, with some of them being cast out before they could leave. The new Elders’ Coven suffered just as many problems as Dragon’s organization had, and all of them were about control.

I loved meeting everyone at that dinner. I’d been star-struck by some of them, some for their notoriety in literature and music, and others for their auras of power. And some for both. Granted, I was naïve, but I was also ticked off at the Baptist Church I’d grown up in and a steady flux of hypocrites. Despite the failings I’d experienced in childhood in a swamp in Georgia where I’d begged every supernatural being I could name to come and save me, I’d never had a problem with God or Deity or the concept of a Higher Power, only with organized religion and cults of personality. For some reason, I had thought that Wiccans were exempt from all that hypocrisy, but I found in a few short years with the Grand Coven that its members and its leaders could be just as petty as the ones in my hometown church. I’m wiser now, wise enough to know that there is good and bad in all groups of faith.

That dinner took place a decade ago. In the time since, I’ve had my eyes opened, or, to use a witchier term, the veil has been lifted. For the first forty years of my life, I looked at everything through rose-colored glasses, maybe because illusions had to be better than the lies I grew up with in my dysfunctional family. I trusted too easily. I believed the best in people at all times. I was a sensitive soul. The thing is, those are things I don’t want to change about myself. I always want to be able to trust, to believe in others, to love with an open heart. Maybe life and experience take away some of that innocence and the ability to move through the world without being guarded constantly against pain.

Unlike most Initiates into Dragon’s Grand Coven, I had managed to get from Dedication to Initiation to Third-Degree Elevation in a mere three years. It’s entirely possible that my accelerated pace had something to do with Donna and some of the other Elders wanting to secure my highest Elevation before they discreetly ditched Dragon and started their own coven, but I’d had no idea at the time. Other Initiates took five years, six years, longer.

While it’s true that everyone in the Grand Coven moves through the degrees at their own rate, it’s much more violent to the spirit to do it in a shorter period. My first year had been happy, as a First Degree is often meant to be. When I was Elevated to my Second Degree, that’s when my life turned upside down. It’s common for everything that you count on before your Second Degree to be lost or snatched away from you. Marriages often break up. Careers change. In order to lead you to a better place in your life that is more authentic, the spiritual journey shakes loose everything you’re not meant to keep. Some witches get so stuck moving through their Second-Degree phase that they never finish it because it’s too painful to move forward and impossible to go back. It took my entire First- and Second-Degree phases before I was able to see the truth about my marriage and begin the process of ending the lifelong patterns of abuse and starting over.

What I hadn’t expected was to receive my Third-Degree Elevation and immediately come into my own power, with those veils being lifted so that I could, for the first time, see Dragon and who she was: a female version of my controlling ex-husband and my equally controlling father. I watched the way she verbally abused and manipulated other people in the Grand Coven and decided that I had worked too hard to get away from that kind of manipulation not to walk away from her as well. She had been angry, vengeful. She had tried to get back at me, either to punish me or force me back. In the end, it had been a combination of the magickal and the mundane that had kept her at bay.

And now, here I am, six years later, calling her back into my life.

Breathing deeply, I study the dark figure in front of me. She keeps her elbows tucked by her sides, but her hands raised, palms facing me, fingers splayed.

This next part of the ritual is always different. Always. This is the part where I cut the cords between us, where I un-bond us.

At first, I see only wisps of attachments, like faint tendrils of smoke curling between us and latching onto my wrists. I’m surprised that there are no chains clamped onto me or any heavier bindings. When I performed this ritual privately after my divorce from Quent, he had wrapped me in golden chains, pure gold coins dangling from each link. Those attachments represented who he was and what I was to him in our relationship—a loftier lifestyle, a doubled household income. With Dragon, it’s simply smoke and nothing else.

Then I notice the strings around her fingers. Strings like the ones my cords of measure were made of. Her fingers weave through the strings in a cat’s cradle finger game mesh, except the net extends over me and catches me in it. I have no idea how long her attachments have encompassed me, only that they do at this moment.

“Lady Dragon,” I say firmly, intentionally honoring her with the title she expects. “Lady Dragon. I, Lady RavenHart, release you of all the hurts, both real and imagined, intentional and unintentional, seen and unseen, that you have done to me from the beginning of time until the present. I release you from all of these.”

The dark form of Dragon takes a half-step backward into the smoke of the fire. I think it’s a gasp I hear, but since I’ve never heard Dragon gasp before, I don’t know for certain.

I collect Jan’s lighter at my feet, open it, and use both hands to flick a full burst of flame. If Jan could see this, she would laugh at me, but I’m not a smoker, and I can’t do it one-handed.

I hold the flame to the wisps of smoke and wave the lighter through the thin tendrils. The wisps of smoke catch fire and fizzle out between Dragon and me. Tiny pockmarks materialize on my arms and bare skin where the wisps of smoke had touched me. When I look at Dragon, I see the same marks but like bloody wounds all over her body.

I visualize a golden light flowing down to me, bathing my wounds, filling them, healing them. I don’t do the same for Dragon because it’s up to her how she heals both our relationship and the wounds that are left from this detachment. Then I hold the lighter up to the cat’s cradle mesh of string and watch it fizzle quickly into a net of fire. Where Dragon’s net had touched my shoulders now feels raw and wounded, so I bathe myself in more golden light, the light of magick.

The wounds on Dragon’s fingers glow bright red in the pattern of burned string. Again, I can do nothing to heal her wounds. She’s the one who affixed these cords to me, and now that I’ve severed them, she’ll either try to reattach or she’ll move on.

“Lady Dragon,” I continue, “I accept your release of me for all the hurts, both real and imagined, intentional and unintentional, seen and unseen, that I have done to you from the beginning of time to the present. For all of these, I accept your release of me.”

She doesn’t have to forgive me. She doesn’t have to release me of her own free will. These things are not required of her. All I can do is tell her what I accept. Regardless of her action or inaction, I have detached the bonds on my end.

Her form stares at me. I can see her clearly now, no longer merely a dark silhouette against the fire. I can see her eyes, the crow’s feet stretching into her gray hair, the two vertical marks between her brows, deeper than I remember. I read the surprise in her eyes. She turns for only a moment and points to the edge of my property, on the other side of my house, where the thought-form still paces, waiting.

Still pointing, Dragon turns back to me. “It’s not mine. You already know this, but you’re grasping at straws, and that’s why I’m here. That thing is not my brand of magick.” One corner of her mouth curls upward. “I send only avatars of myself, not servitors to do my dirty work. Besides, the avatars I’ve sent you in the past? They’re far prettier.”

She fades in front of me until there is nothing between the fire and me except for chilled air.

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