There were four of them in the clearing.
An old woman who introduced herself only as Vera, whose hands looked like bark and whose eyes were the precise color of wet stone. A teenage boy named Simon with paint-stained fingers and a nervous habit of counting his breaths. A middle-aged woman named Petra who wore a nurse's uniform and had driven three hours to be there.
And Nora.
They stood in the leaf-cold dark at the edge of Caldwell Wood, and they looked at each other — four people who had been carrying secret weights through a world that didn't believe in weight — and something shifted in Nora's chest. Like a key turning. Like a breath released after years of holding.
"You've been reaching without knowing it," Vera said to her, in a voice like an old song. "Witches do, when they're untrained. The energy has no shape, so it takes whatever shape the emotions give it."
"The lights," Nora said.
"Yes. And the plants. And the weather. You're a weather witch — rare. You feel the atmosphere, the pressure, the electrical charge. You carry it in you and it responds to what you feel."
Nora sat down on a fallen log because her knees weren't working properly. "I've been doing this my whole life and I didn't know."
"Most of us don't know," Petra said gently. "There's no school for it. No announcement. You just grow up strange and scared and hoping the world doesn't notice."
"Mine noticed," Nora said.
"So did mine," Simon said quietly. It was the first thing he'd said. "I grew up in a very small town. I left when I was sixteen. Didn't go back." He paused. "It gets better, when you understand what you are. When you can shape it instead of just — having it."
They taught her things that night. Not spells from a movie, not words and hand gestures — real things, quiet things. How to breathe with intention. How to ground the charge in her chest down through her feet into the earth instead of letting it explode sideways. How to sit with the knowing instead of fighting it.
She drove home at two in the morning with her hands steady on the wheel and the storm inside her quieter than it had been in years. Maybe ever.
For three weeks, it was the best thing. She practiced. She felt, for the first time, like she had edges — like she knew where she ended and the world began. Daniel noticed. "You seem different," he said. "Calmer."
"I am," she said. And she nearly told him about the clearing, about Vera and Petra and Simon, about finally having a name and a practice and a people—
Then everything fell apart.
Because Simon, who was only nineteen and too earnest and had not grown up learning caution, had told someone. Just one person. Just his college roommate, who he trusted. And his roommate had told two people. And those two had told others.
And a town with a story ready to believe it doesn't need much.