The Witchling’s Last Spell

They called her Tricksy Pye before the accident, before the name stuck like wax to a flame.

She was just a girl then or something close to it a witchling raised in a crooked little cottage nestled between twisted trees and whispering pumpkins. The coven barely noticed her. She was small. Clumsy. Curious in the wrong ways. They said she’d never master a proper hex, never learn the old rhymes. But Tricksy knew how to listen. And the wrong spirits listened back.

One Samhain eve, while the others cackled and danced, Tricksy wandered where she shouldn’t. Past the charm-etched stones. Past the border of the living wood. There, in a hollow stitched between roots, she found a forgotten altar—its stone black with age, its surface etched in runes even the elders feared. In her hand, she clutched a small bat, her familiar-in-training, and in her other: a pumpkin lantern, carved with a crooked grin. She didn’t mean to say the words. Not really. But some magic wants to be spoken.

The ground cracked. The shadows shifted. And Tricksy Pye vanished.

Not gone. Changed.

Now, every Halloween, she returns not quite alive, not quite dead. Her body a puff of ghostly twilight, stitched together with glitter and spell residue. Her eyes twinkle like candlelight. Her pumpkin lantern flickers with an inner life all its own. And her bat, once meek, now watches with a knowing stare.

Children say she floats just above the grass. That if you see her and offer candy, she will spare you. But if you lie to her if you say you’re not afraid her lantern grins wider, and your voice may not return the next morning.

Tricksy is no longer the forgotten witchling. She’s become a spirit of mischief, memory, and unfinished magic. Her presence brings flickering lights to attic windows, curls shadows into animal shapes, and tugs at the edges of curtains where no breeze blows.

Sometimes, if the veil is thin enough, she can be heard repeating the spell still trying to get it right, still hoping to undo the night that made her.

But magic like that leaves marks. And Tricksy Pye is one of them.

They say if you light a candle inside a pumpkin and whisper a wish on Halloween night, she might appear beside it. She’ll listen. She always listens. But the trick is knowing what she’ll hear.

Because some spells aren’t broken. They just wait.