No Spell for Goodbye

I have carried her secrets in my feathers for eighty-six years.

Tonight, on her deathbed, she asked me, with a voice as soft as ash, if I’d fly her home.

But I am selfish, and I do not want goodbye.

The attic room trembles. Not from wind, though every window stands cracked to welcome the Samhain air. The walls themselves grow thin here, where life meets what waits beyond. I feel it in my hollow bones, that terrible softening of boundaries.

Eira lies beneath wool blankets older than most of the villagers below. Her skin has gone translucent. I can see the blue rivers beneath, slowing their course. She weighs nothing now. A collection of breath and memory held together by will alone.

“The ingredients,” she whispers.

I hop closer on the nightstand. My talons click against oak worn smooth by decades of spell work. Four soul-thorns rest in the copper bowl beside her pillow. Black roots twisted into shapes that hurt to look at directly. I’ve gathered the ash of burned sage, the salt from tears shed at midnight, the single strand of silver hair she plucked this morning with fingers that shook like autumn leaves.

Everything for the crossing ritual. Everything to send her beyond.

My claw closes around one thorn. The smallest. I tuck it beneath my wing before she can see, though her eyes stay closed.

“Corvus.” Her hand lifts an inch from the blanket, then falls. “There is no spell for goodbye. Only for release.”

She knows. She always knows.

I was human once. The memory sits crooked in my mind, like looking through water. A failed scholar who bargained for immortality and got this: black feathers, a beak that speaks in croaks, and servitude to a witch who found me half-dead from my own foolish ritual three centuries past. She could have left me to fade. Instead, she bound me, fed me field mice and fragments of power, taught me to fly when I’d forgotten how to walk.

The house settles around us. Every room below holds our history. The kitchen where she mended my broken wing after the hunters. The library where we discovered the cure for white-tongue plague. The garden where she sang to turnips and taught me the names of stars.

“Begin,” she says.

I spread my wings. The ritual demands flight, demands I circle her spirit as it rises, guide it through the veil with the Old Names on my tongue. But that hidden thorn burns against my flesh like ice.

Without it, the circle breaks. Without it, she stays.

---

She sleeps now. The shallow rise and fall of her chest barely disturbs the blanket. I leave her to rest and take flight through our home, though my wings feel heavier than they should.

In the kitchen, moonlight catches the cracked porcelain tub where she once washed blood from my wings after the crow hunters. Three arrows she’d pulled out while I screamed curses in seven dead languages. “You’re mine,” she’d said, wrapping my wing in spider silk. “Nothing takes what’s mine.”

But death takes everything. Even witches. Even the bonds between witch and familiar.

I fly through rooms thick with memory. Past the library where our binding ledger still holds my true name in blood-ink. Through the sitting room where her knitting needles rest mid-stitch in a scarf that will never warm anyone. Each space we built together across centuries, and now I move through them like a ghost haunting my own life.

The memories flood faster. Teaching me to read runes by candlelight. Letting me perch on her shoulder at summer markets. The night she cried when her sister died, and I preened her hair until she smiled through tears. We were not master and servant then. We were family.

But family lets go when the time comes.

The grandfather clock chimes eleven. One hour until midnight. One hour to decide.

I return to find her awake, watching the door like she knew I’d come back. The soul-thorns wait in their bowl. The hidden one still burns beneath my wing.

“Midnight approaches,” she says.

I nod, though no sound will come.

---

Midnight.

The church bells from the village below count out the hour. Each strike vibrates through my bones. The veil grows tissue-thin. I can smell the other side: frost and forgetting, peace and permanence.

I begin.

The copper bowl goes to the north corner. Salt circles her bed in a perfect ring, each grain placed with precision. The sage ash marks symbols on the floorboards older than written language. Three thorns at the cardinal points. East. South. West.

The fourth should go north. My claw stays closed.

“The Old Names, Corvus.” Her voice barely reaches me. “Speak them true.”

I open my beak. The words that emerge sound like grinding stone, like wind through empty churches. “Morrigan of the crossroads. Hecate of the three faces. Baba Yaga of the iron teeth.”

Power stirs. The candles we never lit burst into violet flame.

“Circe of the changing. Morgan of the mists. Ceridwen of the cauldron.”

The air thickens. Eira’s breath rattles once, then stops.

Then starts again, but different. Not breath anymore. Something leaving.

Her spirit rises like steam from her chest. Transparent at first, then gaining substance. She looks young in this form. The way she must have looked before I knew her, before centuries carved lines into her face. Dark hair instead of silver. Straight spine instead of curved. Eyes that hold stars instead of cataracts.

She sees the missing thorn. Sees my claw clenched tight around it.

I should place it now. Complete the circle. Let her go. But my body locks in place. Every instinct screams against release. Three hundred years of purpose about to dissolve into nothing. What am I without her? A bird? A fragment of a man? Nothing at all?

Her spirit hovers, patient. She could command me. Even now, even dead, the binding between us would force my obedience. But she waits.

“Please,” I croak. The word comes out broken. “Not yet.”

She smiles. Not the gentle smile of a grandmother, but the fierce smile of a witch who bent reality to her will for four centuries. Her ghostly hand reaches toward me. Through me. Straight to the part that remembers being human.

Her lips move. Two words that shatter everything:

“Let. Go.”

The command doesn’t compel. It releases. Every chain she ever wrapped around my soul falls away. I am not her familiar in this moment. I am just Corvus, afraid and alone, holding the last piece of a ritual that will end everything I’ve known.

My claw opens.

The thorn falls.

It hits the northern point of the circle with a sound like breaking bells. The circle blazes white. Her spirit spreads into light, into wind, into nothing and everything.

Then silence.

The silence devours.

I fold my wings over her still form and wait for the dissolution that takes untethered familiars. Without a witch, we fade. Return to whatever void we emerged from. Already I feel the edges of myself growing soft.

Good. Let it come.

Dawn finds me still perched beside her. The candles have burned to nothing. The salt circle has scattered. Eira’s body lies peaceful, smaller somehow, as if death has compressed her into her essential self.

I should move. Should do something with her remains. But my feet refuse to leave her side.

A strange warmth touches the air. The cold hearth across the room flickers with impossible light. No wood rests in the grate. No match has been struck. Yet flames dance there, golden and wrong.

Instinct older than thought pulls me from the bed. I fly to the hearth, then past it, to the library. To the baseboard behind the astronomy shelf where we once hid things too dangerous for common sight.

There, in a nest of wool stitched with runes of protection and permanence, sits an egg.

Black as midnight. Smooth as river stone. Warm as fresh bread.

A scroll of parchment wraps around its base. Her handwriting, though steadier than it’s been in years:

“For when you are ready to fly again.”

I stare at the egg. Touch it with one wing tip. Power pulses through the shell. Not her power. Something new. Something waiting.

I see it then. What she’s given me. She knew I would resist. Knew I would fail to let go until she commanded it. And she knew what would come after: the hollow ache, the purposeless drift of a familiar without purpose.

So she gave me this. Not another master. Not another binding. But something to teach. Something to raise. Something to pass on all the secrets I’ve carried in my feathers for eighty-six years.

The egg trembles. A hairline crack appears along its curve.

I think of Eira’s hands washing my bloody wings. Her voice teaching me the Old Names. Her tears when her sister died. Her smile as she dissolved into light.

The crack widens. A tiny beak emerges, black and perfect.

I understand now what she gave me with her final spell. Not just release from our bond, but the memory of how to choose it. How to love something enough to let it grow beyond you. How to be the teacher instead of the taught.

The chick pushes free of its shell, wet and blind and impossible. It opens its mouth in a soundless cry.

I spread my wing over it. Warm it as she once warmed me.

“You’re mine,” I tell the tiny thing. “Nothing takes what’s mine. Until it’s time to let go.”

This time, I will raise the wings. I will teach the sky.