Seraphina glided to her throne—a throne carved from the petrified heart of a redwood she herself had raised from a seed a century ago. She sat, crossed one leg over the other, and let the silence expand until it hurt.
“Negotiate?” She tasted the word like spoiled fruit. “You misunderstand, Mr. Graves. You are not here to negotiate. You are here to submit .”
Seraphina smiled. It was a predator’s smile—wide, serene, and utterly without mercy. She raised her left hand. Outside, the rain stopped. Not tapered off—stopped, mid-fall, hanging in the air like a billion frozen tears. Then, with a casual turn of her palm, she sent it blasting back into the clouds, which shredded apart to reveal a sky of violent, peaceful stars.
The age of dominance had only just begun. Dominant Witches
“They’re here, High Witch,” a novice whispered, her voice trembling not from cold, but from the sheer gravity of the woman before her.
She stood, turned her back on them, and ascended the spiral staircase toward her private sanctum. At the top, she paused.
Tonight’s supplicants were a delegation from the United Nations. Climate collapse had outrun technology. Rising seas swallowed coastlines; the sun scorched the breadbaskets dry. The world’s last hope wasn’t a missile or a vaccine. It was a coven of women who could command the wind, seed the clouds, and stitch the torn fabric of weather itself. Seraphina glided to her throne—a throne carved from
The rain over Salem’s End had a memory. It remembered the fires, the stones, the whispered names. Tonight, it fell in sheets, drumming a frantic rhythm against the stained glass of the Ivory Tower—the last covenstead in the Northeast.
The younger man, mouth still sealed, made a muffled, desperate sound.
She stood. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and wet clay—the smell of creation being unmade and remade. “You misunderstand, Mr
“Let them wait,” Seraphina said, not turning. She watched her reflection in the rain-smeared glass. At forty-seven, she looked thirty. Magic was a magnificent cosmetician. “Fear is the only currency they understand.”
“He’ll breathe,” Seraphina said calmly. “But he won’t interrupt. That’s the first lesson. The old world was run by your kind—with your wars, your boardrooms, your desperate little hierarchies. You broke the planet. Now, you need us to fix it. But we are not repairwomen. We are dominant .”
The men exchanged glances. One of them, younger, bristled. “Now, see here—”
But Seraphina had no intention of simply helping .
“You have until dawn,” she said without looking down. “The novice at the door will give you tea and a blanket. My answer will not change.”