Witch Side Story

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Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Marrowmont, where we lay our scene,
From recent grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

Yet what brings us to this pass? No star-crossed lovers here. Not as the Bard writ. Though, grudge indeed.

But come, let us out from under the yoke of sonnet and measured metre ourselves remove. Let us look together instead, narrator to audience for but a moment, to a concomitance cracked: a clash of philosophic leanings, though in service of similar goal.

In this town in which we tarry we find two covens. And we have seen, in prior presentation, the … approaches, let us say, of both Harrow House and, more recent still, the Bell and Candle Book Club. One seeking in service of guiding, loathsome spirit to corrupt – to bend flesh to their will. While in opposition rests belief in unity, and through it service to a greater good: the feeding of a power ever hungry. Two houses assured in both potency and their rectitude. And therein lies the problem.

For even in so large a place as Marrowmont, sprawling in its spread and grown by necessity over centuries long indeed, territory is a living, shifting thing. Whether carved by loving or callous hands, it cannot be given nor taken lightly. And here we find, in interlude unseen while our sights lingered on most pleasurable pursuits elsewhere, a theft. An encroachment, if you will, gradual and grating: the witches of Harrow House discontent with slow return to power after so long broken and slumbering – long purged in past for trespass upon Marrowmont’s most sacred duties. They desiring to subsume what little real estate of street and soul lies not already claimed by greater powers.

Ah, but only so long can our glimpse behind the curtain be. For the play’s the thing, and its unfolding the thing for which you’ve come. So, forgive us our duration of direct address, and let us move instead into the musical portion of our evening.

In which one witch with a sense of humour – perverse, perhaps, yet certainly playful – has for us set our stage through spell most devious, if also dapper. Turning a war council called between two covens rarely seeing eye to eye into something rather different. And into that in media res let us now enter, in that grandest of anthology series tradition, the musical episode, as the curtain draws up, and:

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 The lights come up on an empty high school gymnasium as an unseen orchestra tunes up. Woodwinds dance up scales, while the string and brass sections roll through their warmups. Centre stage, a banner for the Hellebore High spring dance hangs overhead, a whispered echo of a different number, a different performance.

The story continues in Witch Side Story.