Hello there, anyone-who-still-checks-the-alerts-for-this-story. I've finally done it: I've finally written enough of the rewrite to warrant mentioning it here. It is under the title Anathema; I may one day cross-post it to AO3, but for now it is hosted here only. If you've ever wanted to witness growth, please give at least the first chapter a read. I've included a little preview here in the hopes that it will entice you to give this plot line another chance.

Thank you for supporting this story, so many years ago. You did give a very not-confident-at-all teenager the heart to keep writing and improving over the course of half of a decade, and this is my gift to you for doing so.

ASTERISM: ONCE UPON A TIME

phrase, idiom:

1. used at the beginning of children's stories to mean "a long time ago"

2. used when referring to something that happened in the past, especially when showing that you feel sorry that it no longer happens

(taken from the Cambridge dictionary)

[Object: a tattered, hand-bound book, with pages missing towards the end. Corners have been folded, mildew allowed to fester in the binding. The book smells of decay and threatens to fall apart in your hands. You open the cover to find a loose scrap of paper with ink that is still legible, though faint, practically impossible for mortal eyes to read.]

Date: XX-XX-2XXX CE.

By the time you see this, reader, the owners of many of the names recorded will have passed on from this life. Souls wiser than I have always said that histories are written by the winners and are, for that reason among others, flawed. Souls humbler than I have always said to take the histories you read with at least one grain of salt, as for these flaws they are most likely false.

This may be true. I do not profess to be the all-knowing voice of the world, with its complete omniscience and uncaring. I am, however, prideful enough to declare that this work is as impartial as anyone's perspective can be. I strove to dictate a complete and thorough history of those described here, and that is what I will strive to impart to you as you read. I challenge you to find someone who is as close to my subjects as I, and I challenge you to ask that theoretical figure to do what I have done here.

I do not ask you to show sympathy to the figures described here. They have all destroyed and killed with glee, only serving themselves and feeding their own hubris. You either die a hero or live to be a villain, and those who have been recorded here did not die for quite a long time. They are, in the eyes of the rest of the world, monsters, fiends, beasts, demons sent from hell to punish the living; they have amassed countless blood-soaked epithets and relish every one of them. However, they aren't the invulnerable, lifeless forces that they tried their hardest to pretend to be. They laughed, and they loved, and they protected, and they cherished, and they lived their lives to be with each other. I have watched them run into battle unthinking at the mere implication that one of their own was in danger.

Perhaps this all sounds like an exaggeration to you. I don't know how you think, nor do I care. My task has always been simply to dictate what I have been told. Despite others' reassurances, I don't think I am to live forever, and while yes, my memory serves me well, a somewhat skewed record is a better thing to leave behind than nothing at all when I am inevitably turned to ash.

Thank you for listening to my rather long-winded and unnecessary explanation. If you are reading this then you truly are dedicated to learning, and I won't begrudge you my records of the witch siblings, who were never meant to be born and may continue to lurk in the shadows in the corners of your eyes. This story will begin, and then it will end, and we will all move on as we must. There is no true ending to this history, despite what the arbitrary boundaries I set on the words may say.

Is that overdramatic? I'm not sorry if it seems so.