[Fiction] The Witch Who Became a Midwife
There's a young witch who lives in a city of witches.
She's good at magic.
As a girl she used to cast spells for the joy of it, building elaborate enchantments that served no purpose except that they were beautiful and interesting. She made a spell that could translate birdsong, and yet another spell that could map the shape of a dream.
But the city of witches has its own economy, and in that economy, magic is paid for by other things.
The most coveted witches work in tall towers where they enchant machines which enchant other machines which enchant other machines, and somewhere at the end of the chain, somebody's shop sign glows a little brighter.
One day she realizes she can't describe the last spell she cast that surprised her.
Then her sister has a difficult birth, and the midwife who saves her is the most capable person she has ever watched work.
The witch has spent years around clever hands.
Yet, these hands of the midwife are something else. Despite carrying no magic, it was abundantly clear to the witch that these hands understood things her spells never had.
The witch gives up her tower position, to go train with a midwife in the far villages. Her colleagues think she's lost her mind.
The training takes years.
She doesn't cast spells anymore, not because she's forbidden to, but because there's no time, and her hands are learning a different language.
Years pass. She becomes a good midwife, she delivers hundreds of babies. She sits with hundreds of mothers.
And then one day, maybe she's 40, maybe she's 45, maybe her own children are old enough to not need her every moment, she picks up one of her old spell-books.
She opens it and the spells look foreign at first.
She reads her old spells and sees them differently now.
Like the spell she made years ago to map the shape of a dream. She'd been so proud of its elegance, but she'd built it like a puzzle, something to be solved and admired for its own cleverness, not for the loneliness it might have eased.
Now she reads it and thinks about the mothers who told her about their dreams during labor, the strange, vivid, frightened dreams that came between contractions.
She realizes the spell was missing the thing that would have made it useful was not a better mapping technique, but an understanding of why someone would need their dream mapped to begin with.
She rewrites the spell, simpler now, less technically impressive. But it does something the original couldn't; it lets a mother show her dream to the person sitting beside her.
